JAY KELLY

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

There was a time, thirty-odd years ago, when there was a recognizable element of a “made for TV” movie. Later, twenty-odd years ago, we got a higher level of movie on TV, usually originals made for premium cable channels. Still later yet, maybe ten years ago, we moved into a recognizable original movie made for streaming platforms—largely but not limited to Netflix. There are slight variances in all of these examples, but what they all have in common is a certain tone, a certain level of production value, a certain quality of the writing. All of it was at least one step down, sometimes more, from the level of quality you might expect in a theatrical release.

Enter Jay Kelly, which feels very much like a prototypical “Netflix Original” of the 2020s era. And don’t get me wrong, there are always exceptions—indeed, in their days, there were also exceptional made-for-TV movies and premium-channel originals. But when enough of these things get made, they kind of fall into a recognizable average, and that’s the space Jay Kelly exists in. It’s a decent enough movie, but just not quite good enough to feel like it would have been worth seeing in a theater.

I realize I’m speaking like a person out of time, given the wildly changing movie landscape, the siloed nature of audience interests, and even how many truly terrible movies you can actually still see in theaters. But Jay Kelly is trying to provide the kind of “movie for adults” that used to be moderately successful in cinemas and just don’t exist there anymore. But it also falls short of what the best of those sorts of movies used to provide when they were given a chance to thrive.

And there is an unforeseen downside to the touted tendency of Netflix to give filmmakers total freedom to make whatever they want, to create a “pure vision.” It turns out, sometimes studio notes are actually good, and unchecked indulgence isn’t always all that great. In this case, it’s director and co-writer Noah Baumbach, who previously brought many Oscar nominations to a Netflix Original with Marriage Story (2019), a much better film than Jay Kelly. There was a couple of years there where Netflix was helping shepherd filmmakers to near-masterpieces.

It’s too bad, because Jay Kelly had a lot of potential, starring George Clooney in the title role as a movie star in the twilight years of his career, looking back on his life with melancholy, loneliness and regret. His manager, Ron (Adam Sandler), is a long-suffering and thankless friend who Jay rarely sees as anything other than someone he pays. The same goes for his publicist, Liz (Laura Dean), and to a bit of a lesser degree, his hairstylist, Candy (Emily Mortimer, who co-wrote the script with Baumbach). A bunch of other recognizable faces show up: Jim Broadbent as Jay’s longtime professional mentor; Billy Crudup as Jay’s old acting school buddy; Patrick Wilson as another actor managed by Ron; even Greta Gerwig as Ron’s wife—and it’s lovely to see Gerwig in front of the camera again, even if relatively briefly.

The trouble is, the script for Jay Kelly is often unnecessarily obvious, garnished with some clunky exposition, as when Ron and Liz talk about the night 19 years ago when she left him at the Eiffel Tower. They tell each other things that fill us in on the story but would never be the level of detail people would actually say to each other when recalling a shared memory.

I feel like I understand what Jay Kelly is going for, about a man both running from himself and afraid to actually be himself (it’s mentioned more than once how hard that is to do). It just misses the mark a bit. The performances are decent across the board, and Clooney is well cast in this role, even if it’s a very odd choice for a tribute event for Jay to feature retrospective clips from his film career that are all clips from George Clooney’s actual film career. What exactly are we doing here? One might assume this is a meta commentary on Clooney’s own life—right down to the first-consonant sounds of both first and last names—except for how clearly and fully fictionalized Jay Kelly and his life are. Not enough of Jay Kelly makes us think about the real-life George Clooney until this moment, and this retrospective of his career makes us think only about George Clooney and not enough about Jay.

Baumbach also makes a consistent choice regarding Jay’s reminiscences, where he will walk through a doorway into another room that turns out to be one of his memories. I always found these moments awkward and not especially well executed. In one scene, he calls one of his two grown daughters on the phone, and suddenly the daughter is walking with him through the woods—an unnecessarily foggy woods, mind you—and speaking to him face to face, even though we are to understand they are actually on the phone. I just felt Jay Kelly would have worked better without all these odd transitional flourishes.

It took a bit of time, but Jay Kelly did ultimately hold my interest; there are too many really good actors in it for it not to. That said, I have long far preferred Adam Sandler as a dramatic actor to his mostly-awful comedies, but while he is decent in Jay Kelly, his performance here falls far short of the incredibly dynamic screen presence he had in films like Punch-Drunk Love (2002) or Uncut Gems (2019).

Again, this all comes back to the unchecked freedom now characteristic of, particularly Netflix Original films. It increasingly brings with it a kind of looseness that does not necessarily serve the movie. Jay Kelly has a very compelling premise and pretty solid performances, but it also would have benefitted from polishing, maybe even a bit of trimming. It has a satisfying trajectory of story beats, but this is not a movie that needed to be 132 minutes long. It features no dramatic catharsis that makes it feel worth the time investment.

Or: maybe it’s worth having on at home, and that’s exactly the point. My counterpoint, I suppose, is that this approach has done nothing over time but lower our standards. It was fine, I guess. Okay let’s watch another blandly effective entertainment that’s Up Next!

Jay Kelly, George Clooney, then and now: an actor reflects.

Overall: B

RENTAL FAMILY

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

There’s something about Brandan Fraser’s performance in Rental Family, a kind of forced “aw-shucks” quality I found slightly off putting. He also keeps doing this thing with his mouth, where he sort of scrunches his lips to one side. To be fair, it’s very different from anything he’s done in other roles, but all I could think about was how he was simply making specific acting choices for this character. But isn’t that the kicker—that I should not be conscious of acting choices? I should readily suspend disbelief, and accept Phillip Vanderploeg as an individual.

I feel bad dumping on Brendan Fraser like this; I do like him as an actor, generally speaking—his performance in The Whale was incredible, and was the only thing that kept me from dismissing that wildly problematic film completely. Considering these respective performances, I suppose the next step is toward the director, in this case a Japanese director named Hikari, who apparently goes professionally by one name, like Madonna or Beyoncé. She most recently directed three episodes of the excellent Netflix series Beef, and has one other feature film on her resume, about a young Japanese woman with cerebral palsy called 37 Seconds and which ironically had a runtime of 6,900 seconds (115 minutes). Anyway, I can only imagine that either Hikari was happy with the performance Brendan Fraser gave her, or this was what she coaxed out of him. Either way, I found it a little cloying.

The performances of everyone else in the cast ranges between pretty good to great—the latter applying to the very impressive 11-year-old Shannon Mahina Gorman, whose very presence improved Rental Family any time she was onscreen. Finding a child actor who is both talented and natural is a difficult feat. Gorman is biracial, as is the young character she plays, Mia, whose single mother hires the “Rental Family” agency to provide a stand-in American dad for her. Mia’s mom is trying to get her accepted into a good school, which she believes previously rejected her because of the absent dad. Enter Phillip, here playing another person as provided by the Rental Family agency.

Rental Family follows dual plot threads, one where Phillip bonds with Mia, and another where Phillip pretends to be a journalist interviewing an elderly actor named Kikuo (Akira Emote) who is afraid the country is forgetting his life’s work—his daughter hires the agency in an effort to make him feel better. The story moves into these other two plot threads after we see Phillip’s first job, as a hired groom at a wedding, staged for the benefit of the bride’s parents. This sequence ends with a particular reveal that I won’t spoil, except that it seems to serve as a justification for the agency’s existence, and is fairly moving.

But, thanks to an occasionally muddled script, cowritten by Hikari and American writer and executive producer Stephen Blahut, there are times when even Rental Family seems ambivalent about a service like this, which is apparently quite prevalent in Japan. Is Hikari making a statement, or a judgment, about them? I can’t quite tell. This film seems to support some of their services, such as what is revealed to be the reason for the wedding, but not some other services, such as “apology services” where cheating husbands hire a fake mistress to apologize to their wives. Do none of these husbands think of apologizing themselves?

Multiple times in Rental Family, a character will comment on how people outside of Japanese culture will never fully understand it. This is coincidentally in keeping with my experience of this film, which I could never fully connect with. I wanted more dimension to the characters, and particularly to Phillip, who spends far more time onscreen pretending to be someone he’s not. The only thing we know about why this “big American guy” has been living in Japan for the past seven years is that a widely seen toothpaste commercial was what brought him there to begin with. Do actors really move to Japan just for one commercial gig? I want to know more about his family back home, and why he had such an apparently absent dad. But, evidently the only reason we know even that much is so he can express reservations about playing a parent himself.

We lean early on that Phillip is lonely in Japan, no friends to speak of, no romantic partner, just a woman who is evidently a sex worker—also a very undeveloped character, although I can appreciate that at least in this movie she’s much more than just a sex object, a thoughtful woman who also provides Phillip companionship. Really, all the characters around Phillip are far more interesting than he is, not just because they are all have a fair amount more dimension to them, but because Phillip’s only mode seems to be uncomfortable awkwardness.

There’s nothing egregiously wrong with Rental Family, I just found it somewhat lacking. It’s a blandly pleasant entertainment, and I tend to want more than that. Others may locate more insight in it than I did. It won’t elicit much passion: it’s fine for what it is, and it won’t be long remembered.

I kind of wish the movie were about her instead.

Overall: B-

HAMNET

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

The final sequence in Hamnet involves the staging of William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, with Shakespeare himself (Paul Mescal) playing the part of the Ghost, and Shakespeare’s wife, Agnes (Jessie Buckley), at the front of the floor crowd crunched right up against the stage, having made an unannounced visit to view the play. This is a scene with a lot of extras, thankfully none of them computer-generated, and the staging—if you’ll pardon the pun—is superb. It’s not often that even the performances of the extras in a scene is impressive, and this is a testament to the directing skill of Chloé Zhao (who also directed and co-wrote the Best Picture-winning 2020 film Nomadland). Agnes becomes deeply invested in the story unfolding onstage in front of her, but so does this entire crowd, who at one point take a subtle collective action as led by Agnes, which is one of the most moving moments in the film. We do not see any of William Shakespeare’s productions up until this point, and this sequence alone makes Hamnet worth seeing, and it’s worth waiting for.

It’s also worth noting that Zhao also co-wrote Hamnet, along with Maggie O’Farrell, author of the 2020 novel of the same name—and that this story runs with a lot of historical conjecture, such as the idea that Hamlet is at all directly tied to the death of Shakespeare’s one son: Hamnet. Indeed, we are told with an opening title card that in their time, the names “Hamnet” and “Hamlet” were virtually interchangeable. This film literalizes this notion when, upon first seeing the play start, Agnes shouts at the actors “Don’t you dare say my son’s name!”

As O’Farrell and Zhao tell it, The Tragedy of Hamlet ultimately served as a way for William and Agnes to come to an understanding regarding the grieving of their son. This is reportedly the product of speculation, but in the film, it is very effective. I cam to this film armed with tissues, and it did not disappoint on that front—although I will admit to expecting to weep a bit more than I did. I still wept plenty.

The focus of Hamnet is never truly on the title character, but on how his life and death of his parents, one of whom is arguably the most famous artist ever to live in the Western World. Long before any of the children are born—and there are three; an older daughter, Susanna (Bodhi Rae Breathnach), and a pair of fraternal twins, Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe) and Judith (Olivia Lynes)—the story focuses on the love story between William, and Agnes, the local orphaned child with a reputation for being a witch. Hamnet only leans slightly into the witchiness of Agnes, with her insistence that she can see visions by touching people’s hands, or her deep, generational connection to the forest. She even gives birth to Susanna by herself in the woods. This, of course, is well after William and Agnes secure their betrothal, in the face of certain lack of permission by either William’s parents or Agnes’s guardian, by simply getting pregnant.

I find myself wondering how these plot threads play out in the novel, as although the film clocks in at a quite-reasonable 125 minutes, some of these details felt a little bit rushed to me. Most notably, the contempt this couple’s parents or guardian have for their beloved, which seems to have dissipated on the part of William’s mother, Mary (Emily Watson), within a couple of scenes—as soon as the narrative jumps forward to the birth of Susanna. As for Agne’s stepmother, Joan (Justine Mitchell), we see her very briefly in only a few scenes, and when Agnes much later says to her very coldly, “You are not my mother, and you never were,” we have seen so little of Joan that the nastiness feels unearned.

The narrative also jumps forward from the twins’ infancy to their age at around ten, and we do not get a lot of time getting to know any of them, either—though we do get to know Hamnet himself slightly better than the others. Just enough, indeed, to get a sense of how much these children mean to their parents. Jessie Buckley’s performance of maternal grief is so stunningly visceral that I found myself wondering if she has children of her own (she has one), and Paul Mescal has kind of already made a career out of tortured interiority. These two do not express grief in the same way, and in this telling at least, it takes the writing of Hamlet to bring them back around to each other

Hamnet is more than anything a love story, and that is indeed where it shines. The performances are phenomenal, especially those of Buckley and Mescal, but really across the board—right down to the aforementioned extras in the theater watching Hamlet in the final sequence of the film. And although I’m sure it would help deepen the appreciation, you need not have a detailed knowledge of Shakespeare’s work to appreciate this story, or indeed even how Hamlet is used therein. Shakespeare himself was well known for writing “a play within a play,” which is effectively what is happening here—quite similarly using the play as subtext. By the end, though, it becomes the text, in a way deftly executed, so that even with the quibbles I had with the plotting, I felt emotionally cleansed.

Agnes is deeply moved, and so are we.

Overall: A-

SENTIMENTAL VALUE

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

Anyone with a thing for juicy family dramas should look no further than Sentimental Value, Norwegian director Joachim Trier’s follow-up to his similarly excellent The Worst Person in the World (2021). The person he cast in the starring role is also the same in both films: the wonderful Renate Reinsve, here playing Nora Borg, an accomplished stage actress in Oslo, where she lives in a home that has been in her family for generations.

If I had any minor nitpick about Sentimental Value, it would be how no one ever talks about the hugeness of this house, which appears to have three stories and an unspecified but certainly large number of rooms. The generational history is discussed as far back as Nora’s great great grandparents, but I don’t recall any family iteration being larger than a family of four: two parents and two kids. Clearly more recent generations aquired the house through inheritance; maybe earlier generations actually made it a multi-generational home? I kept wondering how the hell any of them kept it clean. None of these generations are shown with a housekeeper.

Surely it would make sense that such a house would be easier to afford in the era of World War II—today, in the United States at least, this house would have been converted into an apartment complex long ago. Granted, this is Norway, and a lot of things work differently there—although the simple tenets of capitalism infect every corner of the globe. And, to be sure: this house figures prominently in the plot of Sentimental Value, a beautiful repository for collective memory and generational trauma, from Nora’s grandmother’s Nazi imprisonment and subsequent suicide inside the house, to Nora and her sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, also excellent) witnessing the volatility of their parents’ marriage until their father, Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård), leaves and spends the better part of the rest of their lives estranged from them.

Sentimental Value opens shortly after the death of Nora and Agnes’s mother, a character we really never get to know. This is about their relationship with their father, a once-famous director who has not made a film in 15 years. But, he has now written an incredible script, with the lead part tailor made for Nora, who wants nothing to do with it. Searching for other options, Gustav turns to an American actress he meets at a local film festival: Rachel Kemp, played by Elle Fanning in a really tricky part that she nails. Rachel is curious about the deep sadness of the suicidal character she’s playing, and Gustave has to tell her more than once that it’s not about his mother. Meanwhile, he asks Rachel to dye her hair the same color as Nora. (And incidentally, Elle Fanning and Renate Reinsve bear an uncanny resemblance. If not for the different accents, they could more believably play sisters than the sisters we actually see onscreen here.)

What Gustav has written is highly fictionalized but still has clear similarities to his own life and family—and this is where we return, yet again, to the house. Gustav wants to shoot the film in the family home. He also wants to use his young grandson, Erik (Øyvind Hesjedal Loven, the only cast member who is clearly not a practiced actor, just like the character), in the production—just like he once did Agnes, in a previous World War II-era film. Agnes was a great screen presence at the time, but did not pursue acting as a career as Nora did. Gustav, ever the undependable dad, complains of his dislike for live theater, and so never comes to Nora’s plays.

All of this comes together in a plot that is complex but never difficult to follow, and perhaps may even be a bit slowly paced for some viewers. It’s worth noting that although this is a family drama about two sisters with deep resentment toward their father, there are no histrionics here, no scene made for an Oscar clip. Where other movies of this sort go for familial cruelty, this one leans more heavily into a kind of benign neglect. There’s something about Stellan Skarsgård’s performance, though, that still elicits empathy. Few people can convey subtly tortured interiority like Stellan Skarsgård.

Gustav is a man who can’t help who he is, and doesn’t really know how to change—certainly not now at the age of 70. But, over time he uses this new script of his to convey how he has an uncanny understanding of Nora in particular, the daughter he wrote it for. In the end, it is through their art that they finally find a way to connect, and this is the subtle but very sweet note on which the story ends. Sentimental Value takes a sort of scenic route through its themes, never exactly a thrill of an experience but one with a finesse that stays with you.

A father-daughter relationship not quite like others you’ve seen.

Overall: A-

TRAIN DREAMS

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

Who knew that Train Dreams had such a connection to Spokane, Washington—the city where I grew up? Set mostly in the Idaho panhandle over decades starting in 1917, Robert Granier (Joel Edgerton) works mostly in the logging industry, but spends a short time on the Spokane International Railway, and he later takes the train for visits into Spokane. There is a brief sequence, very late in the film, of Robert walking the streets of downtown Spokane, passing old buildings I remember vividly from my teenage years. There’s a glimpse of the clocktower on the Review building, which has stood since 1891—somewhere in the vicinity of when Robert was born. The sequence is set in the 1960s, and Robert has a brief exchange with a woman on the street as they watch live footage of the Earth from outer space on a TV in a store window. The sequence also features a barely-seen glimpse of the 16-story Washington Trust Financial Center, which was not built until 1973, but I guess I’ll forgive the movie for that.

As is typical of film productions, most of the filming of Train Dreams was not quite where it was actually set. Aside from the brief excursion to Spokane, which is located about 22 miles from the state line with Idaho, all the scenes with Robert and his wife Gladys (Felicity Jones) are set in Idaho. There are many scenes of Robert working industry logging jobs far from home, but this still must be mostly in Idaho; we are told very early on that Robert never makes it further east than a few miles into Montana. These sequences feature deeply lush greenery that is very believable as Northern Idaho, where I have spent a lot of time. Nearly all of this film, however, was shot in Eastern Washington. The Inland Northwest is the Inland Northwest, I guess.

We get seldom enough film production oner here where I now live in Seattle; Spokane’s history with mainstream film is even spottier, with truly great films set there being rare indeed. Train Dreams represents a truly unusual circumstance in which I am jealous of their access to theatrical release: Train Dreams was just released today on Netflix, which was the only way I was able to watch it. As far as I can find, this film got no theatrical release in my local market at all. Netflix did their eternally frustrating thing with Oscar-worthy productions, giving it a limited release in order for it to qualify. I guess they took pity on Spokane, allowing locals to see it as it is best experienced: it’s currently playing there at the Magic Lantern Theatre.

And I do wish I could have seen this in a theater, it is so beautifully shot. Robert Grainier spends a lot of time onscreen doing timber industry jobs, mostly chopping down trees, and sometimes barely avoiding tragic ends from falling limbs or sometimes entire trees. Indeed he witnesses the deaths of other workers several times. The train of the title is somewhat misleading, given how much more time is spent with timber. But, during a job on the railroad, he witnesses the casual killing of a Chinese railroad worker, and this haunts him for the rest of his life, often in his dreams.

It should be noted that Train Dreams is very quiet, meditative, and a kind of gradual easing into sorrow. One might even spend some of the first half of the film wondering what the point is, as we simply see scenes from Robert’s younger days, the way he happens upon the woman he falls in love with without actively searching for her. They build a house together, Gladys raises chickens, and has their baby. I knew going in that Train Dreams is largely about grief—this seems to be a very popular motif in film of recent years—and that had to mean Robert was destined to lose his family. I kept wondering how it would happen and what level of horror would accompany it. This is, indeed, a turning point in the story with true horror from Robert’s point of view, especially with no definitive closure as to the specifics. I’ll just say that, at the very least, from the audience perspective, at least this particular loss is not the result of any human cruelty. It’s closer to the indifference of nature.

In any event, Robert is left alone, and director and co-writer Clint Bentley—who also directed and co-wrote last year’s spectacular Sing Sing—very effectively conveys a potent loneliness in this man, for basically the rest of the film. That is, until, for one brief moment, he experience a genuine moment of connection. It is brief indeed, but also spectacularly executed: it’s a deeply moving moment, and one that brought tears to my eyes without employing any of the typical “sad movie” tricks.

Train Dreams is the odd kind of movie that has a melancholic tone that somehow also has a comfort to it. In the wake of the horrid scene with the Chinese railroad worker, Robert regularly encounters people who offer him understanding and kindness. There are three such key characters as the story unfolds: an annoyingly talkative shirking but kind old man played by William H. Macy; a local Native shopkeeper who looks after Robert in his deepest throes of grief, played by Nathaniel Arcand; and a kind of hermit kindred spirit in a forestry worker played by Kerry Condon. In a scene where they share some tea and have an unusually heartfelt conversation, the forestry worker reveals she also recently lost her husband, and when Robert asks if he sounds crazy, she astutely notes that when something like this happens, nothing you do is crazy. At the end of this exchange, she observes that they are “just waiting to see what we’ve been left here for,” and that line has really stuck with me.

Robert does also encounter other people who treat him with callousness, particularly younger colleagues as he begins to realize he is aging out of the manual work of timber. Still, he lives his entire life as a quiet, stoic man who really never changes, except perhaps in that brief moment near the end. But sometimes it’s only a brief moment that can make all the difference, and it was indeed the moment that opened up my love for this quietly beautiful movie.

Robert keeps walking the path set out before him.

Overall: A-

DIE MY LOVE

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

Die My Love is very much in conversation with If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. The key difference is that If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is much more straightforwardly about motherhood; Die My Love is about a mentally ill woman who also happens to be a mother.

Granted, in what is arguably Die My Love’s best scene, Jennifer Lawrence’s Grace character chats with another mother at the party who specifically mentions post-natal depression, which would suggest that is specifically what this film is about. What’s curious about this is how Grace, for the most part, seems to have no problem with motherhood itself, or her baby. Indeed, at one point she says of her baby, “He’s perfect. It’s everything else that’s fucked.” But, perhaps that is the point: depression is not marked by logic. Furthermore, many of Grace’s frustrations actually make sense: her husband, Jackson (Robert Pattinson) has suddenly lost his sexual appetite for Grace, even though Grace’s sex drive has not waned. And Jackson travels for work, leaving Grace to feel crushing boredom as a stay-at-home mom.

It’s worth noting that Die My Love is directed by a woman (We Need to Talk About Kevin’s Lynne Ramsay), and co-written by two women (Lynne Ramsay and Lady Macbeth’s Alice Birch, along with Small Things Like These’s Enda Walsh, who curiously gets top billing among the writers). Maybe there is something about Die My Love that is just impossible to understand if you have never been pregnant or given birth to a child. Except, I must admit, I found If I Had Legs I’d Kick You to be much more coherent, even with its sometimes abstract style, and certainly more substantive in content.

Die My Love takes a far less linear approach, jumping back and forth in time, from the beginnings of Grace and Jackson’s relationship, to the period shortly after the birth of their child. The film leans so far into its nonlinear structure that, when it moves to a wedding sequence, I assumed it was a flashback to before the child was born. But, then you see the baby at the wedding. And this occurs well after many things happen that any reasonable person would think maybe these two should break up.

To be clear, Die My Love is very much about Grace’s mental illness—but within the context of her relationship with Jackson. Jackson is understandably befuddled by Grace’s crazy behaviors, but he’s also kind of an asshole. Shortly after the birth of the child, he’s not very locked into parenthood, and seems to operate under the assumption that Grace will assume all such responsibilities. And any guy who brings a dog home as a surprise to a spouse already dealing with a toddler is an asshole in my book. That dog, who is immediately quite literally an incessantly whiny bitch, becomes a significant plot point. Usually the audience wants to side with the dog in any movie, but I’m not so sure in this case. The dog can’t really be blamed. I blame Jackson, who expects Grace to take care of it, and certainly never bothers to train it.

It’s a bit difficult to parse, with Grace, how much of her erratic behavior can be attributed to innate mental illness and how much is a result of her crushing boredom spending all of her days with no one but a toddler—with the exception of a mysterious figure she has an affair with, played by LaKeith Standfield. Stanfield is an incredibly gifted actor and he keeps getting cast in parts that waste his talents, including this one. There is a single scene that reveals Stanfield’s character’s own life, and although it gives him some dimension, it does nothing to broaden his context or purpose in Grace’s life beyond sexual release.

Grace, for her part, does some wild shit—not least of which is approaching Stanfield’s character when she sees him with his wife and their wheelchair user daughter in a store parking lot. She has a propensity for injuring herself in truly startling ways, such as hurling herself through a sliding glass door, in a desperate attempt for attention from her husband. Grace’s mental illness is quite apparent far earlier than anyone does anything about it. You’d think smashing through a sliding glass door would be a pretty big red flag, but Grace does at least two more things at least as dangerous, if not more so, before she is taken to get any professional help.

To be fair, I suppose, not everyone understands when things are truly critical under these sorts of circumstances. And god knows, Jackson isn’t the most understanding person in Grace’s life. In fact, it’s Jackson’s mother, Pam (an always-wonderful Sissy Spacek), who is the only person who grants Grace any true empathy or understanding. Even she tells Grace, “Everyone goes a little loopy in the first year.” Grace doesn’t understand at first that Pam is talking about motherhood, and even when it becomes clear she avoids the issue by cutting her visit short.

The performances are excellent all around, but there is something about Ramsay’s style that leaves me a bit ambivalent about Die My Love, which falls a bit short on coherence and is long on metaphor that lacks full clarity. Again, perhaps people who have actually given birth will see some clarity here, but this was the sort of thing that If I Had Legs I’d Kick You did far better. I understood the frustration and desperation in that film thanks to Rose Byrne’s breathtaking performance. Jennifer Lawrence is also excellent, but I also kind of didn’t get it. I suppose that may be the point. With metal illness, there isn’t a lot to “get.” Die My Love, then, is a film that spends more time demonstrating that fact than giving us reason to empathize with Grace.

Die My Love is also pretty grim and hopeless, especially as it pertains to Grace, even after she has gone in and out of a mental health facility. Ramsay gives us no clean answers, no neatly tied bows to the story, and I respect that. There is even a dark beauty to the metaphorical forest fire that ends the film. There’s a peculiar dissonance to an artistic beauty that also conveys a deep sense of despair, and that might just be what you leave this film feeling.

It looks like the baby is trying as hard as we are to make sense of his mother’s behavior.

Overall: B

IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT

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

I wonder if I’m over here on Weirdo Island, thinking about Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho while watching Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident? There is almost no thematic connection between these two films, although Psycho features a serial killer and It Was Just an Accident features a near-murder. What the two films have in common are their unusual narrative structure, particularly an opening, extended sequence leading us to think one person is the main character, only to find out it’s actually another person. Indeed, the first character is even attacked by the second.

We are first introduced to a nuclear family, driving through the night: a seemingly loving husband and father (Ebrahim Azizi) with his wife in the passenger seat and pop music-loving young daughter in the back seat. The cinematography is fascinating here, as it appears to be a simple mounting of the camera on the dashboard, and a lot happens in a single shot—including other cars passing, in one case with several barking dogs chasing in the other direction. Within moments, we hear the bump of an animal being hit, and the man stops the car, gets out, and investigates. The camera never shows the animal—this technique is repeated later in the film in a pointed way—but we do see bits of the man’s shadow, a view of city lights on the hills in the distance behind him, as he drags the animal out of the street. He returns to the car, and the little girl’s chipper attitude has soured. “You killed it,” she says. And the mother tries to console her. It was just an accident.

Shortly thereafter, this family’s car breaks down, and the man asks for help from men in a nearby home. This is where the perspective suddenly shifts, to another man, Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), who is hiding on the second level of the home, out of sight. Panache’s camera only ever sticks with Vahid for the rest of the film, and it’s quite a lot time before we have any idea why. This includes Vahid following the man back to his home, and following him the next day to the place his car is towed to for repair. In his own van, Vahid creeps up on him in the street, opens the passenger door hard against him, and then knocks him out with a shovel.

All of this is essentially the first act. What follows is an unsettling sort of road trip story, Vahid eventually gathering several more characters: Shiva (Mariam Afshari), a woman working as a wedding photographer; Goli and Ali (Hadis Pakbaten and Majid Panahi), the engaged couple getting their pictures taken; and Hamid (Mohamad Ali Elyashmehr), Shiva’s former partner. what is gradually revealed is that nearly all of these people, with the one exception of Ali, were once arrested by the Iranian regime, and tortured for months by a man with an identifiable limp due to a prosthetic leg named Eghbal—and they are all varying levels of convinced that the man we met at the start of the film is this man.

It may seem that I have revealed a lot of detail about this film, but believe it or not, that is all mostly the setup. It does take a good deal of time to get through, but it’s how we get here: the way Panahi, who also wrote the script, explores the psychological effects of a deeply oppressive and authoritarian regime. The man who might be Eghbal easily plants a seed of doubt in Vahid’s mind as to whether he’s got the right guy, which is why he goes on an odyssey of sorts, gathering acquaintances who had also been arrested in the hopes that they can confirm the man’s identity, even though they were all blindfolded the entire time they were held captive and never actually saw him. They heard him, they felt him, they smelled him. For some, the familiarity they find is not quite convincing enough. For others, it’s triggering to the point of instantaneous rage. For all of them, it’s maddening.

Eventually all of them are traveling the city in Vahid’s van, maybe-Eghbal’s drugged, bound and unconscious body locked in a trunk that is curiously the perfect size for a grown man. There’s a number of exterior, urban shots of this cast with said van, and I often wondered how this film was made. Much like the similarly excellent The Seed of the Sacred Fig, directed and written by Mohammad Rasoulof and opened earlier this year, this was filmed in secret in Iran. Indeed, Panahi and Rasoulof are just two of many artists who have been arrested in the past for speaking out against Iran’s authoritarian regime.

And the roving band of characters in It Was Just an Accident have many of their own conversations about it. They talk and they argue, they debate and they yell—often about the tension between desire for vengeance and what it means to become just as violent and cruel as your oppressors. Many of their exchanges bring to mind parallel points of view here at home in the United States. This is less a reflection of cross-cultural commentary than of universal tensions among different societies. We eventually find nearly all these characters pushed to the emotional brink in one way or another, and It Was Just an Accident proves sneakily unsettling in the end. Panahi often holds a shot for a very long time, always with purpose, and especially in the very last shot of the film, which calls into question whether Vahid did the right thing in the end, or indeed what the point of any of it was. This makes It Was Just an Accident sound pretty bleak, and I suppose it is. It also paints a vivid picture of what authoritarianism does to the regular people subjected to it.

Overall: A-

A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE

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

All my life, I had this vision the thirty minutes or so it might take for a nuclear missile to reach the United States, and how I would spend those last moments, counting down the clock to obliteration. This vision always presupposed knowledge of the oncoming missile at the moment of its launch, giving time for us to . . . what? Prepare? Well, A House of Dynamite, directed by Kathryn Bigelow (Zero Dark Thirty) and written by Noah Oppenheim (Jackie), and streaming on Netflix now, has completely disabused me of this notion.

Once people even realize a missile is on its way, the countdown has already begun. And these are government and military employees with high security clearance, far removed from average citizens. These people have to spend precious minutes ascertaining whether the threat is even real. It occurred to me, while watching A House of Dynamite, that I really should have considered this long ago: the people spending all that time making decisions first on what's real and then on the select few who get whisked to some version of safety—they're not spending any time sending credible warnings to the masses. Hell, in this movie they spend several of those crucial minutes just ascertaining what the target is. In all likelihood, as is what happens in this movie, anyone just living their lives in a target city would simply be obliterated before they had any idea what hit them.

Is there a strange comfort in that? Maybe there is. One could argue it's not the worst way to go, with no fear or panic preceding it.

And that's a ton of what we see in A House of Dynamite: a huge, ensemble cast of characters having the reality of impending cataclysm settle in. A missile launch is detected, and in the first moments, everyone is blasé about it. They keep track of the trajectory, and realize it's not slowing down and it's headed for us. It soon enough becomes clear that in the best case scenario, ten million Americans are killed instantly and global destabilization ensues—and that is if we don’t fire any retaliatory shots.

There’s a fascinating angle to this film, in that the aforementioned 30 minutes are not enough to ascertain who fired the shot and thus who we should even fire against. Quick discussions are had about preemptive strikes against we could reasonably expect to take advantage of the situation. But Bigelow and Oppenheim never provide us with any of those answers—not what country the missile is coming from; not whether the bomb even detonates (sometimes the don’t, we’re told); not what the President decides about whether to launch our own strikes. This is the Cath-22 of the modern age, not quite as good as that classic film but with much to recommend on its own—because this is about the questions themselves, not the answers. This is about moral dilemmas under the deepest of pressures.

The three-part stucture of A House of Dynamite is arguably a bit of a gimmick: it’s told in real-time, from the moment of detection to the moment of impact, three times over: first in the Situation Room in communication with The Pentagon and Fort Greely, where attempts at ground-based interceptors will be lauched; then at United States Strategic Command (STRATCOM) in Nebraska; and then, inevitably, from the White House. Each of these chapters showcases separate groups of the ensemble cast, all of them interacting with each other: among the many familiar faces are Rebecca Ferguson as a Situation Room senior officer; Anthony Ramos as the commander at Fort Greely; Tracy Letts as the warmongering commander at STRATCOM; Jarred Harris as the Secretary of Defense; and Idris Elba as the President. In many cases, we first see important characters as only a face in one among many screens like an emergency Zoom meeting, then shift to the perspective of the room they are in, in another chapter.

Kathryn Bigelow unfolds this story in a very straightforward, procedural style, much like her multiple previous films set in wartime, but even more procedural in this case. The few moments that characters pause to show emotion are all the more effective. All of this doesn’t allow for a great deal of character development, but that is entirely beside the point: this is about making choices in the face of urgency. And side note, this is maybe not the best movie to watch about such a scenario with the current people actually in charge in Washington, D.C. This is unsettling shit, not the least because it quite pointedly reminds us that while things like climate change have long rivaled it as an existential threat, the nuclear threat to the world is very real and still goes on.

There are precious few genuinely amusing moments in A House of Dynamite, but one of them is when the President himself says how this phrase, “a house full of dyanmite,” was something he “heard on a podcast.” It’s something that feels both on the nose and very plausible. For the most part, these are just a whole bunch of regular people caught up in extraordinary circumstances. Even those who are on evacuation lists among all connected staff across these agencies can feel arbitrary. One character is extracted even though she’s only been in the position for a few months. “Why does she get to go and we don’t?” another woman asks. A fair question. Who in their right mind could expect things to be fair in these moments? But who in these moments would be in their right mind?

I feel a little ambivalent about what purpose this film serves, exactly—I found it to be riveting and unsettling, but to what end? It opened my eyes to at least one stark reality, I guess: not only would I not have any hope of escape from this sort of attack, but in a targeted city I wouldn’t even know it was coming. Surely Seattle would be on the list of targets. Whew! What a relief!

Yeah, you heard that right. It’s time to put you head between your knees and kiss your ass goodbye.

Overall: B+

IF I HAD LEGS I'D KICK YOU

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

You don’t want to know what a childless man thinks about If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. Not even an empathetic girly-man has thoughts of any true relevance, although that’s less because of the “girly” than still because of being childless. It’s possible no one of any gender who does not have children can truly relate to what’s going on in this movie. So why are you reading this, then? Go find a review by someone who actually knows what they’re talking about!

. . . Okay. Are they gone? It’s just us now. We can still talk about movie making, right? Maybe skip the wondering questions about how easily some people might be triggered by this movie, or how anyone who is easily triggered might want to steer clear of this movie? After all—trigger warning!—this movie features themes of both suicide and child abandonment (by multiple characters, no less). Oh, wait. I just put those questions right here. Crap!

Here’s what I can tell you with actual authority: If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is deeply stressful, from beginning to end. There have been many comparisons to Uncut Gems because they are apt: the main character is in every frame, and the camera’s point of view leads our desire, with increasing desperation, for this character to make anything but the bad, worst choice. In this case, it’s Linda, a married mother who is at the end of her rope as she cares for a sick child while her husband is away for work for weeks at a time.

Here is the most important thing you should know about this: Linda is played by Rose Byrne, who gives a breathtaking performance. She absolutely should be in the Best Actress Oscar conversation—and reportedly, thankfully, she is, for now at least. The challenge, maybe, is getting enough people to see this incredible film with its stunningly versatile lead actor. I think writer-director Mary Bronstein should also be in the Oscar conversation, but she is, alas, a lot less so.

I knew I was going to be into this movie from its opening sequence, in which Linda brings her child home, the child is first to notice flooding on the bathroom floor, and when Linda moves into another room to investigate, she sees water leaking through the ceiling—and then a giant hole suddenly bursts through, gushing water all over the room. The camera pulls into the darkness of the hole, until the screen goes black, except for some curved streaks of light that suggest an ultrasound. It’s very unclear whether this is actually a dream or not, and this is when the opening titles appear. And this was where I was immediately locked in: This is my kind of movie.

Bronstein makes a lot of stylistic choices that are both very unusual and work almost shockingly well. The child is never named, and until the very end, we never even see her, even though she is often in the scene, and we hear her. Like any normal child, she talks a great deal and nags her bedraggled mom about trivial things. It’s just that they also have conversations about when and how a tube will be removed, and how much food she needs to eat so she can gain enough weight for doctors to allow it to happen. We never learn the exact nature of the child’s health condition, except that it requires a great deal of maintenance by her mother, refilling bags of liquid and making sure machinery is beeping in ways that are not alarming.

Bronstein is on record about her choice to keep the child out of frame at all times: because this is Linda’s story and not the child’s, and because the natural instinct is always for the viewer to empathize with the child first, Bronstein doesn’t even give us that opportunity. Not only is the focus exclusively on Linda, but Byrne is shot frequently in uncomfortable close-ups. I have seen this technique many times in film, and I often kind of hate it. Here it works, because it underlines the claustrophobic feeling of Linda’s entire life. And this is one of the many amazing things about If I Had Legs I’d Kick You: not one other character is shown being empathetic toward her—not her husband (Christian Slater, the one casting choice that’s somewhat distracting, because after hearing him on several hostile phone calls you don’t actually see him until the end); not her doctor (played by Bronstein herself); not even her own therapist (a part Bronstein write specifically for Conan O’Brien, who accepted and gives a solid performance in his first-ever serious role). For the most part, they actually have good reason to be exasperated rather than empathetic with her. And yet, Bronstein has crafted a story with such delicate skill that we, as the viewer, cannot help but empathize with her.

And Linda does some very bad things. She makes bad choices, mostly because she can’t take the pressure anymore. That hole in her ceiling turns out not to be a dream, but a real incident that results in her having to live in a hotel with her daughter—in a unit with a thanklessly nice neighbor played by A$AP Rocky. Linda is herself a therapist, making the very odd choice of getting therapy treatment from a colleague at her own practice, and we see three different clients who all have problems that seem trivial compared to Linda’s. Or, maybe they aren’t—but this is how Linda is seeing them, which is not the best professional position to be in. One particular client (Danielle Macdonald) becomes the source of one of the many things that go terribly wrong for Linda.

It would seem the central theme of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is the inherent guilt of being a mother, particularly one who can never feel like she’s not underwater. Linda even says at one point, “I’m not supposed to be a mom!” We can tell she loves her daughter, but she also feels overwhelmed, and has no support network, although it’s hard to tell whether there might have been a network that she just sabotaged with her own behavior. The question is whether she’ll ultimately just give up, and there is a sequence in this film where that is harrowingly unclear. “I’ll be better” is something daughter and mother say to each other at different times, and it’s perhaps not an accident that they don’t say “I’ll get better.”

This is a film that ends on the kind of hopeful note that comes with a ton of baggage. I’ll be thinking about this one for a long time, and that’s a good thing. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is constantly harrowing, sometimes darkly funny, heartbreaking and uniquely humane.

Rose Byrne gives arguably the best performance of her career.

Overall: A-

SPRINGSTEEN: DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE

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

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere is an unconventional biopic in a multitude of ways, not least of which is it’s definitively, pointedly unexciting. This is a movie about three things: the making of Bruce Springsteen’s 1982 album, Nebraska, one of the lesser-known albums of his 53-year career; depression; and childhood trauma.

This film really leans into the childhood trauma part, opening with a flashback to Bruce at 8 years old, with his parents played by Stephen Graham and Gabby Hoffman. This era of his life, always presented in black and white, is returned to consistently throughout the film. As we return to Bruce as an adult, dating a composite-character woman (Odessa Young) we never particularly care about, Springsteen is working on this album we are clearly meant to understand is informed by these childhood memories. It’s a bunch of acoustic songs, a major departure from his previous rock albums, and Springsteen is very particular about how it’s recorded, how it’s released, and how it’s marketed—which is to say, not at all.

At the end of the film, we get title cards informing us that even with no tour and no singles to support it, Nebraska still reached #3 on the album charts. It doesn’t bother to say that the album sold a million copies—an impressive number out of context to be sure, but his previous album, The River, sold five times that much; and his next album, Born in the U.S.A., sold 17 million, by far his greatest success and the 7th-best selling album of the eighties. To say that Nebraska was overshadowed by these other albums is an understatement, and it never would have sold nearly what it did without Springsteen’s other massive successes.

I had never listened to Nebraska myself. I’m listening to it literally as I write this. I have never been a Springsteen guy—I think he’s fine; he’s just not my thing—but, knowing I tend to like it when an artist does what a record executive in this film (played by David Krumholtz) calls “a folk album,” I expected to be into it. Well—it’s okay. My response to this album is about the same as my response to this film. Somewhat similarly, I noted with last year’s Bob Dylan Biopic—a far better film than this one—A Complete Unknown that I was never a Dylan guy either. I did like Timothée Chalamet’s singing performance as Bob Dylan, though; in fact I preferred that to the real Dylan. Jeremy Allen White does a pretty spot-on performance as Bruce Springsteen, including performance. But I also prefer Timothée Chalamet-as-Bob-Dylan to this.

At least A Complete Unknown, and several other music biopics before it, had moments of thrilling musical electricity. Such things are beside the point with Deliver Me From Nowhere, which is about a deeply personal album that clearly was, and clearly still is, very important to Springsteen. He was reportedly on set every day, which indicates that this film is similarly important to him. This is probably not the story most of his diehard fans would be interested in, but it’s the story he wants them to know. It’s also very drab and melancholy.

If you approach Deliver Me From Nowhere from the perspective of childhood trauma and adult depression, it becomes quite unconventional for a biopic and a fascinating examination of something rarely discussed in this context. On the other hand, the extent of this relationship with Bruce’s alcoholic father, and especially with his protective mother, is never given a great deal of depth, even with the large number of flashbacks. Most of this movie is just Bruce quietly moving through his life, recording a studio album that baffles his record label, and dwelling on these memories.

Jeremy Allen White does a very good job in the part, and Jeremy Strong gives a fine performance as his manager and friend Jon Landau, if not necessarily one that seems to justify his notorious method acting approach. Paul Walter Hauser appears as a guy helping Bruce with the recording, and Marc Maron as a studio engineer is so underused that in the first several scenes in which he appears he doesn’t even speak. At least he got to hang out and chat with Springsteen on set, seven years after Springsteen opened up about his struggles with depression on Maron’s WTF with Marc Maron podcast.

I’m all for cinematic examinations of trauma and depression, if they’re done well. They just don’t make for a very exciting music biopic, which, a bit ironically, the marketers of Bruce Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere basically promised. I find myself wondering if studio executives responded to the final product of this film the way executives did to the Nebraska albums: what are we supposed to do with this? Throw it to the wall and see if it sticks, I guess.

Deliver me to something more exciting.

Overall: B-