THE DIG

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

The Dig is pleasant enough. Certainly more so than the title might suggest, but that’s a direct reference to the literal story at hand, a “reimagining” of the 1939 archeological excavation at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk, England. It’s based on the 2007 novel of the same name by John Preston, which reportedly takes plenty of historical license on its own.

I’m a little mystified as to how or why “reimagining” this story would be necessary. Is the true story itself not interesting enough? We’re talking about the discovery of early medieval burials dating back to the 6th and 7th centuries. Maybe the real-life discovery did not feature enough drama? (Or romance, as a subplot of this film might needlessly suggest.) Something tells me a straight-up documentary about this subject might be more sustainably compelling.

Instead, in The Dig, we get a film with a fair amount in common with Ammonite—a better film—in that it takes a historical event and then throws in inexplicably fictionalized details. To be somewhat fair to The Dig, Nicole Kidman was first cast as Edith Pretty, the woman on whose land the discovery was made, and Kidman was a far more age-appopriate choice, being 53 years old, and Pretty was 56 at the time of the discovery. Kidman had to bow out due to scheduling conflicts, and was replaced by the always-reliable Carey Mulligan—except, of course, Mulligan is 34 here.

One could argue I am nitpicking, but things get muddled when we’re meant to feel we’re being told a true story—which The Dig never claims to be. In which case, I have the same question I had with Ammonite: why do it this way then? Feature real-life historical figures as fictionalized characters? Would it not work better just to tell a fully fictionalized story “inspired by” the thing that actually happened? Otherwise there is an effect that is ultimately bemusing at best.

Setting all that aside, The Dig is well-acted, with some memorably pretty cinematography by Mike Eley, although its excessive use of handheld cameras and bright beams of sunlight are very reminiscent of Terrence Malick films. As a result it has an almost ethereal aesthetic quality, which makes for a pleasant viewing experience but I’m not certain quite fits the story.

Edith Pretty hires an excavator (Ralph Fiennes) to uncovver the mysteries under large mounds of dirt discovered on her land; ultimately a huge ship full of artifacts, having been dragged inland from a nearby river, is discovered under one of them. It is nice that Pretty and Basil Brown’s relationship, being the central relationship in the story, always remains platonic, serving somewhat more as an example of people connecting across class divides. What doesn’t work as well is the choice to include a romantic sub-plot, almost to make up for it. Pretty’s cousin Rory (Johnny Flynn) is invited over to assist Basil with the excavation, and in turn Rory discovers an attraction to Peggy (Lily James), the married wife of one of the Cambridge archeology team who arrives to take over once they realize the national significance of the find.

And, here we go again: Peggy Piggott was a real person; Rory Lomax was not. Focusing on their romance with the archeological find as the backdrop, but with Peggy also fictionalized, might have also made The Dig a better movie. Not to say that there has to be any romance for the story to be compelling, but with it relegated to an ultimately irrelevant subplot, The Dig is left unable to figure out exactly what genre of movie it wants to be.

The story is otherwise entirely plausible, at least, and it is interesting to learn of the historical context of this particular excavation in British history. Carey Mulligan and Ralph Fiennes are both consummate performers and as such keep the story from ever sagging under any dullness the film might have had otherwise. They both have a comforting, familiar screen presence, playing decent people doing decent things. You could certainly do worse.

Ralph Fiennes waits for his ship to come in.

Overall: B

THE LITTLE THINGS

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

The Little Things is the kind of crime drama that’s compelling enough while you watch it, but once it’s done, there’s not much reason to give it more thought. I can’t imagine ever watching it again. Ironically, I should make a note of it. What if I forget, and somehow wind up watching it again sometime in the future? One time was okay, but watching this movie twice—what a waste of time that would be. I sure am glad I never had to pay for this one in a movie theater. Of course, were theaters open and release schedules normal, I almost certainly never would have gone to see this movie in the first place. Or would I? It is January, after all. I sat at home and watched a movie that felt like the crap that gets dumped in theaters in January with nothing better to see.

Why did I watch it, then? Certainly there are plenty of other films I could watch and expect to be better. Maybe I thought writing a bad review would be fun. Problem is, The Little Things isn’t any fun. It’s just . . . blah. Use that as your pull quote.

Odd things about this movie abound. It stars three Oscar winners: Denzel Washington as a detective who left the LAPD for a smaller force out of town after a botched investigation five years earlier; Rami Malek as the detective who has effectively replaced him; and Jared Leto as the probably-serial-killer they wind up tracking together. Three very talented actors, starring together in a dud. Washington perhaps elevates the material slightly with his performance. Malek spends a lot of time looking like he’s making an effort to be stoic. Leto’s delivery reminded me a lot of his performance in Blade Runner 2049., a very different character speaking with the same cadences. To be fair, Leto plays a sunken-eyed, paunch-bellied creep incredibly well. He also kind of looks like he just stuck a pillow under his shirt.

The story is set in Los Angeles in the nineties, and the only reason I can see for that is simply that writer-director John Lee Hancock’s script is thirty years old, and he just decided not to update the setting. I’m just astonished that after all this time he didn’t find the time to rewrite his preposterous script.

To be fair, the story, and particularly the pacing and tone, are compelling enough for some time. But The Little Things completely lost me about three quarters of the way through, with Malek’s detective making choices that make no sense whatsoever, except to serve as consequential plot turns. Problem is, there is no universe in which any cop as good at his job as this one is supposed to be would make such astonishingly idiotic moves. One or two more plot twists follow, but the are rendered meaningless by this character behaving like . . . well, like a cop in a bad movie script. In other words, suspension of disbelief only works if there is even a sliver of plausibility.

How did three actors of this caliber read this script and think it was a good idea? To me, that will forever be the central mystery to The Little Things. Never mind who the killer really is. Denzel Washington utters the phrase, more than once: “It’s the little things, that’ll get you caught.” We’re meant to take that line in as particularly meaningful, except it never pays off, in any sense. This is a movie that feels unpolished, unfinished, and still easily forgotten.

It appears they have him cornered.

Overall: C+

THE WHITE TIGER

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

How might The White Tiger have done at the box office under normal circumstances, I wonder? “Normal” is relative, of course, and no more so than right now. Still, consider Slumdog Millionaire, a very good movie which still rode the wave of being over-hyped all the way to winning an undeserved Best Picture Oscar in 2009. The White Tiger could be today’s version of that movie, but it could never enjoy the same success. The key difference is that the earlier film is ultimately a fantasy about someone’s dreams coming true on a gameshow, whereas this film is not just about someone rising to the top in India, but what it truly costs to get there. It’s not a sunny picture.

Writer-director Ramin Bahrani, adapting from the best-selling 2008 novel by Aravind Adiga, still manages to make The White Tiger very entertaining much of the time. It’s a slightly deceptive move. Spoiler alert! This is not a “feel-good movie.” It’s a compelling one though, and by degrees provocative, in its examinations of rigid class structures in India and how those barriers are broken or crossed.

Told in voice-over narration by the protagonist, Balram (Adarsh Gourav), we start in his childhood in a village barely scraping by as the villagers have to hand over their earnings to a family that lords power over them. Balram loses his dad, and in young adulthood faces the same fate as his older brother, a marriage that also traps him there for the rest of his life. One of the best lines in this movie is when Balram says, “Rich men are born with opportunities they can waste.” Belram demonstrates well before this line is uttered that the poor have no such luxury, and he bullshits his way into becoming the driver for Ashok (Rajkummar Rao), the grown son of the family who takes most of the village’s money.

What follows is an incisive examination of how society runs in India, the rick and the poor alike referring to the country’s self-image as a “democracy” with contempt. Balram notes early on how he’s learned the importance of not being “a poor man in a free democracy.” A large amount of American influence is woven into the story, with Ahok’s fiance, Pinky (Priyanka Chopra), having returned with him after growing up in the U.S. Ashok has also spent a lot of time there—it’s where they met—but Pinky is the only character in this movie who speaks with an American accent. She’s still as fluent in Hindi as any of the others, though. (Both Hindi and English are spoken about the same amount.)

Pinky brings with her a lot of idealism, as well as some naivete about how entrenched India’s classist and misogynist attitudes remain. She reacts with horror when others treat Balram, a servant, as sub-human. Then, when an accident involving all three of them happens—which we see a glimpse of in the film’s opening sequence and then is returned to halfway through—things get very complicated. The White Tiger has a lot to say about the kinds of power money has over people, and how the power differs depending on the direction from which it’s being approached. Ashok seems unusually decent at first, but in the end his behavior betrays how wealth affords such privilege that certain things considered vital by others can be blithely ignored. Not even ignored, necessarily: it doesn’t even occur to them to consider.

In stark contrast to Slumdog Millionaire, The White Tiger is not about the poor man finding success thanks to a heart of gold. This is a much more realistic story—although even that is still relative. The voiceover narration by Balram also serves as an email—quite a long email at that—he is writing to the Premier of China, who is headed to India for a visit. Balram wants to impress him with his “entrepreneurial spirit.” The conceit is a little corny, but at least it’s the only part of the film that goes solidly in that direction.

It could be said that Balram is an anti-hero, and honestly he’s never truly presented as an actual hero, so I hesitate to call that a spoiler. Bahrani his pulled a sly trick in knowing we assume this character is meant to be someone for us to root for. But The White Tiger is about much more than him: it’s a subtle takedown of class divides, and capitalism itself. Not just that, but national competition on a global scale. There are no white characters in this movie (nor are there any Black ones, for that matter), but white people get mentioned a couple of times, only in the context of getting left behind by the people of both India and China, beating America at its own corrosive, toxic economic games. This movie kind of has a point.

One could also argue that The White Tiger is Darwinist at heart. Survival of the fittest is not a moral phrase. This is a movie that reflects a changing world while illustrating that human nature, or just nature itself, remains constant. It’s a rich and complex story of what happens when a taste of ambition gets results and then becomes a cycle of its own. It’s a pretty cynical worldview on display here, but it’s still worth a look. It’s always the aberrations that get their stories told, but it’s useful to be reminded how success can be redefined by context, as well as how the idea of success being inherently honorable is a myth.

Who’s driving who here?

Overall: B+

MLK/FBI

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

Sam Pollard’s MLK/FBI is a fascinating specimen of documentary filmmaking, in terms of its own inevitable biases, and the myth of objectivity. These are ideas that can be applied to any documentary film, of course, but it seems a surprise to me how much it could be argued that the FBI is let off the hook here.

He is only heard a few times, but one of the interview subjects is former Director of the FBI James Comey, who is heard multiple times referring to the period of the FBI’s well-documented surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr. as '“the darkest period” of the FBI’s history. Never mind that this is the man who arguably cost Hillary Clinton the 2016 presidential election by pointlessly announcing the reopening of the email investigation only two weeks before the election—a detail understandably left out of this film for lack of relevance there, but it still undermines his credibility as any spokesman for when the FBI’s history might be tainted. In the long history of the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation, both that and the surveillance of King are but two examples among countless examples of the FBI’s “dark history.” This isn’t even a matter much up for debate, and yet MLK/FBI entirely sidesteps the other historical atrocities the FBI has committed, thus barely falling short of making the case on its own, that the 1950s and 1960s were the worst times for the FBI.

We also get multiple instances of interview subjects referring to how differently Martin Luther King looked “from the FBI’s point of view.” It skirts very oddly close to empathy for this organization, although to be fair the film is far more interested in the point of view of King himself. It’s just that the pains the film takes to view the FBI itself objectively are strained, and fruitless: the FBI was (and possibly still is) very much the bad guy here, and this film would have been improved by characterizing it as such.

That is really my only true criticism of MLK/FBI, though I would contend it to be a notable one. This film is otherwise a deeply compelling and provocative look at one of the most significant American leaders of the past century, aided in large part by certain cinematic choices and subtle artistic flourishes. The entire film is presented in black and white, almost exclusively of archival footage as the interview subjects’ commentary runs over it. The names of the people speaking appear onscreen to identify them, but none of the subjects are seen until the end credits begin, and even then only briefly. Even those clips are in black and white, a choice that makes sense given that the vast majority of the imagery we are used to from King’s time is in black and white.

A great deal of attention is paid to what here the film refers to benignly as King’s “non-monogamy.” One thing MLK/FBI is very successful at is re-contextualizing this well-documented element of Martin Luther Ling Jr.’s personal and private life, which was quite literally recorded by the FBI via wiretaps and bugs in his home and in hotel rooms. The lengths to which the FBI went, the amount of time it spent in efforts to discredit him as this amoral hypocrite, is not a matter of rumor but of documented historical fact. What is less clear is how his wife, Coretta Scott King, felt about it. It’s notable that this film looks upon King’s many sexual dalliances—a host of which was edited together onto a tape and sent to King, his wife. and others close to him—with a completely neutral eye; even I can remember being told years ago about how Martin Luther King wasn’t a complete saint, “he was a womanizer.” But viewed from the lens of the 2020s, how much do we know about whether that couple simply had some kind of understanding? More importantly, how is it anyone’s business but there’s?

In hindsight, J. Edgar Hoover’s obsession with “revealing” Martin Luther King as “the most notorious liar in the country” (a direct quote which made many headlines) is just another example of misplaced moral superiority, never mind the clear racism that motivated all fervent opposition to King. But this opposition bled over into those who would otherwise be his allies, as even other civil rights leaders spoke out against him when, only a year before his death, King dared to speak out against the Vietnam War as a clear double standard in American foreign policy. His work at the end of his life focusing on poverty in America is unfortunately not what he is most remembered for, but perhaps it should be.

Near the end of MLK/FBI, which is available to stream on VOD for $6.99 (well worth the price), the original footage is shown of Martin Luther King saying, “When white Americans tell the Negro to lift himself up by his bootstraps, they don’t look over the legacy of slavery and segregation. Now, I believe we ought to do all we can and seek to lift ourselves by our own bootstraps. It’s all right to tell a man to lift himself up by his bootstraps, but it is cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself up by his bootstraps.” This cuts to the heart of King’s aim to end poverty, and how deeply racism, white supremacy, and Black poverty are linked. This is what the U.S. government did not want to be held accountable for then—nor does it now, fully half a century later—and is the very reason the FBI sought to vilify him. MLK/FBI illustrates how successful they were in that endeavor in his time, making him far more controversial than current depictions would make him seem. But, at least, in the long run it was a PR battle that the FBI lost.

Nothing can make even a complicated man less of an icon once he is an icon.

Overall: B+

SYVLIE'S LOVE

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

Syvlie’s Love is very much an old-school, standard love story, right down to its mid-twentieth century period setting. And, ironically, that’s what makes it special. How often do you see fairly standardized romances in which the primary characters happen to be Black, particularly set in the fifties and sixties? Honestly, this type of movie isn’t typically what I immediately go for, but I’m sure glad it exists. I can only presume plenty of others are as well.

Inevitably plenty of others aren’t, for varyingly stupid reasons. It’s no surprise that the user scores on sites like MetaCritic.com and RottenTomatoes.com are notably lower than their aggregate review scores, although the difference is still narrower than it might have been just a few years ago. And this gets into my favorite thing about Sylvie’s Love: this is not a fantasy in which history worked differently and in Black people’s favor, as in the Netflix series Bridgerton (which gets no hate from me, for the record; I very much enjoy it). Instead, even though the characters acknowledge its existence, this is a movie in which marginalization has nothing to do with the story it’s telling.

In fact, Sylvie’s Love allows its characters to enjoy successes in historical context, which were unusual but still plausible. Furthermore, it is surprisingly feminist, as one of the road blocks for the central couple is Sylvie’s ambition as a TV producer, and Robert—gasp!—not wanting their relationship to get in the way of her success. In fact, both characters make choices that postpone their inevitable union not with selfishness as in so many other movies, but with selflessness.

Nnamdi Asomugha plays Robert, and pulls double duty as one of the movie’s many producers. Tessa Thompson steps into the role of Sylvie, as we first meet her briefly in 1963 and then the story flashes back to her young adulthood five years earlier, in 1953. She has a fiancé who is away traveling; Robert is part of a jazz band soon set to leave for a gig in Paris. And so it goes with these sorts of romances: multiple barriers to these two people getting together even though they are in love with each other, until one day they get past those barriers. For Sylvie and Robert, it takes many years, which only adds to the romance, to which writer-director Eugene Ashe lends a subtly sweet, comfortingly mellow tone.

We return to that opening scene from 1963 about halfway through the film, at which point the two lovebirds find themselves facing an all new set of barriers. It’s all pretty contrived, honestly, but it’ll still work just as well as any other romance for the type of viewer who is interested in such things.

I keep thinking of the oft-repeated notion of Black people having to work twice as hard, or be twice as excellent, as their white counterparts in order to achieve the same success. And while I hesitate to call Sylvie’s Love “mediocre”—it’s a step above mediocre—it still follows the same formulaic story beats as countless movies that came before it. I certainly can’t speak to how difficult it might have been to get made, but it’s here, it exists, and it offers a kind of representation not seen before. This movie in particular is no more “excellent” than any other romance, but its existence still means something. It seems a step in the right direction when plenty of viewers might react with an “Eh” (I lean closer to that), and yet plenty of others might still be into it. We’re slowly getting to a point where a variety of films can get made with diverse casts without it having to be either exploitation or tragedy porn.

Granted, a lot is more difficult to gauge in a world with no actual box office revenue to speak of. There’s no real way to decide whether this movies is a “success,” and that’s the case with virtually any movie in 2020 or 2021, unless it miraculously generates a ton of buzz on social media. All I can say is, this movie is right there, on Prime Video, and if you love romances, it’s well worth watching. Its characters are just regular people, who exist in a regular movie, living and loving. I can’t call it a romance for the ages, but it’s certainly a romance for our time.

Isn’t it romantic?

Overall: B

DEREK DELGAUDIO'S IN & OF ITSELF

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

“We are al the unreliable narrators of each other’s stories,” says magician Derek DelGaudio, in his stage show In & of Itself, previously seen in 560 live performances Off Broadway, and seen in a skillfully edited recording of these shows on Hulu as of this weekend. This line had an immediately profound impact on me, and I suspect I will remember it for a long time to come, if not for the rest of my life.

And that is the greatest trick of this show, really, in that being a magician, Delgaudio’s entire presentation hinges on illusion, in the literal sense: one might even call it deception. And yet, he uses these tricks to elicit some of the most emotionally honest reactions I have ever seen on film, or in live theater for that matter. What a strange dichotomy. In retrospect, it leaves one to wonder about the degree our emotions have been entirely manipulated. But I would be lying if I said I was not deeply moved by this show.

It’s easy to be suspicious. I spent a significant amount of time watching this and thinking, How the fuck is he doing that? And the same thought is clearly moving through the minds in the audience. When I say people are quite justifiably awestruck by what Delgaudio is doing, I don’t mean that in the typical sense of illusionist or magic shows. This isn’t just straightforward magic tricks. DelGaudio’s entire show is flexing under the weight of its many heavy metaphors, challenging viewers to reexamine the very definition of identity, how they see themselves, and how they see others.

Honestly, the less you know about this show going in, the better. I have never seen any show, or movie, with a more apropos title, it is so very much its own thing. (Side note: if you go searching for it on Hulu, his name is included in the full title, so it’s best searched first with a D rather than an I: Derek DelGaudio’s In & of Itself.) Regardless, how well it works will be entirely dependent on how open you are to what DelGaudio is offering. I must admit, after seeing many people in the audience get very emotional, some of them crying, at one point even DelGaudio cries a little. And in that particular moment, I found myself thinking about those 560 performances, many of which are partially featured in this film. Did he cry every single time? To what degree is that just another performance?

Might it have been DelGaudio’s very intention to have some of us asking ourselves such questions?

And trust me when I say, some of the stuff in In & of Itself is literally jaw-dropping. It’s hard to imagine the emotional intensity that must have filled the room for the people there in person. This filmed version is directed by the legendary Frank Oz, who chooses to include brief but quite memorable clips of famous people who happened to be in the audience, also deeply emotionally affected, like Tim Gunn or Bill Gates. The makeup of the audience is a key part of this documentary filmed version of the show, with a succession of different people from different nights chosen for the same task, edited together. This provides an unforgettable picture of DelGaudio’s uniformity of effect.

It’s hard to recommend a film like this without giving too much away. But, the less detail revealed, the more it sounds like just another magic show. It really couldn’t be further from that. Or could it? Perhaps this is just another magician after all, and the degree to which we convince ourselves otherwise is the greatest illusion of all. To that I say: so what? It’s stunningly impressive either way.

Nothing you see here prepares you in any way for what you are in for.

Overall: A-

AMMONITE

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

I wonder if there’s a more overtly lesbian-themed title that could have been given to Ammonite. The term refers to a group of extinct molluscs closely related to today’s octopi, squids and cuttlefish. So, maybe . . . Cuttlepussy? Okay, I admit that’s a little much. That sounds a little like a James Bond movie, and this is about as far from that as it gets. Except of course that it’s a British film.

Ammonite is much more romantic, and thus befitting this memorable love story written and directed by Francis Lee, who also wrote and directed the wonderful gay farm worker love story God’s Own Country in 2017. Evidently after gaining such critical acclaim for the earlier film, Lee wanted to give the ladies a crack at a same-sex love story. This time around features much more famous movie stars: Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan. They are also two consummate performers, and they ground the story, which ultimately becomes very erotic, with palpable chemistry.

Ammonite is mostly Winslet’s movie, however. This is Mary Anning’s story, which Ronan’s Charlotte Merchison moves in and out of. Mary is older, well established in her life as an paleontologist who, in nineteenth century England, made seminal discoveries ultimately credited to men. She lives in the south coast of England in a place called Lyme, barely scraping by selling cleaned-up fossils from the nearby beach to tourists and occasionally much larger discoveries to scientists who take her work back to London. It’s when a man interested in learning from her arrives with Charlotte, his wife, that the two women meet. Charlotte falls ill and then Mary finds herself nursing her in recovery.

Francis Lee makes a lot of curious decisions here, as both Mary Anning and Charlotte Murchison were both real, historical figures, known to be friends but with no evidence of them having been lovers. Also, the real Murchison was eleven years older than Anning, whereas Kate Winslet is 19 years older than Saoirse Ronan. It seems to me this story would have been just as effective, and perhaps even more so, had these characters been fully fictionalized but in the same era and respective circumstances. Why use real women from history and then apply such radical fictionalizations of their actual lives?

All that aside, Ammonite is well worth watching. You might call it this year’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire, albeit not quite as close to a masterful work of art. Ammonite is much grittier, about a single working class woman who never married and lives with her mother (Gemma Jones), and gets a visit from a much younger and more well-to do woman. Mary spends a lot of time getting very dirty on wet beaches, and Winslet plays her with the gruffness of a hermit with few social skills. The opening scenes are devoid of dialogue, following her around as she rolls up her sleeves and dives into her work. Once people start talking, Mary immediately proves to be an unusually direct woman indeed. Particularly for the 1840s, this is rather fun to watch.

Even once Charlotte arrives, she is even quieter than Mary for quite some time, as at first she feels abandoned there, prescribed rest by a doctor while her husband must travel abroad. This allows the relationship between the two women to develop at a gradual but fully organic pace, romance not sparking until about halfway through the movie. Then, Ammonite features at least two sex scenes between them that are fairly graphic. Knowing neither of these actors are actually lesbians, I do find myself curious as to how lesbian viewers might take in those sex scenes. Do they seem authentic? I’ve never had lesbian sex so I couldn’t say for sure. At least there’s no “scissoring.” And to Ammonite’s credit, even though it has a male director, its sex scenes were reportedly choreographed by the stars themselves, and shot with an all-female crew in the room.

The sex scenes are indeed pretty steamy, and the one place in the film where the slightly shaky, hand-held cinematography works best. Its unconventionally ambiguous ending, which takes us to places we don’t expect—both figuratively and literally—sticks with you. Ammonite has a certain lack of polish, but it stands firm on the strength of its writing and particularly its performances. This is a period piece with production design that feels lived-in rather than overdressed, a uniquely transporting romantic love story in spite of what’s easy to nitpick..

Let’s see what latent homosexual tendencies we can dig up.

Overall: B+

ONE NIGHT IN MIAMI

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

One Night in Miami has shifted my thinking about the phrase “Black Power.” Not that I had any negative thoughts about it before, but this film has shown me that my conceptualization of it was . . . limited. Until now, I always thought of it as symbolic, aspirational, a unifying but abstract concept, a thoroughly justifiable goal but still a rallying cry. I never thought to think of it as literally power given to Black people, or perhaps more to the point, power that Black people have, and use. Which was pretty doofy of me.

This is a film about four Black legends, inspired by a night they actually did spend together in Miami (hence the title): Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir), Cassius Clay (Eli Goree), NFL fullback Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge), and singer Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.). The through line seems to be the idea of them as towering American figures, and how that brings to them obligation to fight for all Black people, as the Civil Rights Movement rages on. Malcolm is especially concerned with Sam writing songs for more than just selling records to white buyers, and in the face of Sam’s defensiveness, Jim refers to all the other Black people in the country as compared to “what you have but take for granted.” Sam replies, “What’s that?” and Jim says, “Power.” After a beat, Sam says: “Black power.”

Fundamentally, that’s what One Night in Miami is about: not just the existence of powerful Black people, but what they should be doing with it. It’s a conversation they’re having with each other, something no well-meaning white person has anything to contribute to, but it’s still an insightful conversation to overhear.

And don’t get me wrong—it’s not a lecture either. This film is adapted from a stage play by its original author, Kemp Powers, and as directed by Regina King—the most famous name attached to this film—it’s easily one of the best film adaptations of a play I have ever seen. Unlike, for instance, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, I never felt like I was just watching a play onscreen. I heard some people on a podcast recently talking about how easy it usually is to identify a film adaptation of a play: “No more than four locations, and a whole lot of talking.” Well, this film has plenty of locations, and even when the second half of the film essentially does take place in one hotel room, King makes it easy to forget that by moving the characters to many locations outside the room but nearby: on the hotel roof; at the hotel bar; even a brief scene inside a car in the parking lot. It never feels like the location is stationery, even though it essentially is.

There is indeed a whole lot of talking, but Powers’s dialogue is so well crafted, the talking alone propels the story forward on its own strength, with a density that provides a kind of inertia. There’s a lot of provocative food for thought here, no matter who the audience is. Regina King and Kemp Powers are both finding subversive ways to challenge, as with the scene early on when Jim visits a white man initially presented as “ a family friend” in a huge house that looks very much like a plantation. They have a very friendly conversation on the front porch, until the man (played by Beau Bridges) ends the conversation with a kind of casual bigotry that is no doubt as shocking to most white viewers as it is entirely expected by most Black viewers.

This is an important establishment of tone, a single example of what these characters—indeed, the actual people they are playing, and by extension the actors themselves—are up against. This is what they are talking about, sometimes arguing about, certainly engaged in spirited debate about: not the struggle itself, but what needs to be done about it, and how. Consider that this is set in 1964, and every single part of these discussions are as relevant today as they were half a century ago.

The way that One Night in Miami is edited is almost a bait and switch, in terms of it ultimately being a movie about an extended discussion. The many locations of scenes are concentrated in the first half, and particularly the first half hour: the four friends do not actually meet each other at the hotel until thirty minutes in. Prior to that, we meet most of them in their respective elements: Cassius Clay in the boxing ring; Sam Cooke onstage performing. We don’t get to see Jim playing football, but we do see a man bragging about Jim being the pride of the entire state of Georgia before dismissing him. As for Malcolm X, he is presented here as far more mannered, almost geeky as played by Kingsley Ben-Adir, than the iconic imagery made indelible by Denzel Washington in 1992. Perhaps that contrast is the point: Malcolm X was a depiction of the struggle itself; One Night in Miami is an exploration of how best to fight it.

And a great exploration it is. This film features four legendary figures looking deep into their souls and then baring them, in so doing inspiring anyone witness to it to do the same.

A singer, a boxer, a civil rights leader, and a football player walk into a hotel.

Overall: A-

Advance: PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN

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

Promising Young Woman isn’t quite the feminist revenge fantasy you think it is, but it’s close. One could argue it’s something better.

It’s certainly a fantastic showcase for Carey Mulligan, as Cassandra, the “young woman” of the title who is hell bent on avenging the death of her best friend, Nina. We never see or meet Nina in any way, as this is a story about Cassandra, and her obsession with what happened. Nina was also a classmate of Cassandra’s in college, when a man, with several witnesses, had sex with her while she was blackout drunk at a party. So now, Cassandra spends her weekends terrorizing random men as she pretends to be wasted at clubs until a man inevitably approaches her, then takes her home in the guise of helping her, and then attempts to take advantage of her. She then drops the drunken act at the last second, scaring the shit out of these men.

It’s easy not to feel bad for any of these men, of course. In the opening sequence, three men in a group are noticing Cassandra, hunched over over on a bench, making observations about her in generally douchey ways. Honestly, writer-director Emerald Fennell has them dial up that douchiness to 11, and more than once in Promising Young Woman it’s a little over the top. On the other hand, maybe it only comes across that way to me because I am a man who has never experienced a man’s world from a woman’s perspective. It’s easy to imagine women taking in this film in a very different way from many women, and that might just be subtly part of Fennell’s point.

Still, at times Fennell’s direction is less assured than it could be, though much of that can be forgiven in light of this being her directorial feature debut. (Fun fact: looking up Emerald Fennell, I was slightly thrown for a loop to discover she is the actor most recently seen as Camilla Parker Bowles in season four of The Crown.) Promising Young Woman starts off with its editing and many of its performances on slightly shaking ground, feeling a little off. It does not feel like something crafted with an expert hand—although very much to Carey Mulligan’s credit, the performances alone make this worth watching from the start.

Also, Promising Young Woman eventually finds its footing, in somewhat surprising ways. And its casting choices are fantastic, particularly with Bo Burnham as Ryan, her pediatrician love interest who serves as a charming distraction in the middle section of the story. Burnham is truly perfect as a guy who stands in as an exception to all the creeps. Or is he? The entire arc of the plot is elevated, in the end, by the surprising revelations about him and his place in the story, which make such questions less simple than they sound.

I was somewhat skeptical of the writing, for much longer than it took for the performances to win me over—a good portion of this movie plays like a surprisingly unique romantic comedy, complete with some great humor—until the final scenes, which tied the story together in ways that were impossible to see coming. And that’s even accounting for a genuinely shocking twist in the fate of Cassandra herself.

Promising Young Woman manages to seem at first unable to live up to its promise, before actually exceeding its potential in the end. It’s not quite finely tuned, but it certainly sticks the landing. Honestly the less known about what happens in this movie, the better. It’s a fascinating exploration of defiance in the face of toxic masculinity, especially given that no character actually utters the words “sexual assault” or “rape,” even though these are clearly the things Cassandra is avenging—on men in general, not just the one who assaulted Nina.

I kept thinking about how vulnerable Cassandra was in these situations she puts herself in, sober or not: any average man could easily overpower her, and she always ends these nights alone with them. It’s the shock of her manipulation that gives her power over them, though I’m not sure that realistically this practice could go on without violent incident for as long as her journal of dozens upon dozens of hash marks would suggest. She never physically harms any of these men herself, either; it’s all just an exercise in emotional terror. Until, of course, it isn’t.

What this all means is that Promising Young Woman surprises in all the right ways, at nearly every turn. And the parade of men Cassandra comes across are played by actors perfect for the parts: Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Adam Brody, New Girl’s Max Greenfield, GLOW’s Chris Lowell, Veep’s Sam Richardson (his being a Black man playing one of the creeps being . . . tricky), and more. These are on top of more prominent supporting parts played by the likes of Clancy Brown and Jennifer Coolidge (practically unrecognizable in brown hair) as Cassandra’s parents; Laverne Cox as her boss at the coffee shop where she works; Connie Britton as the Dean of her medical school (a great scene); and Alfred Molina as the lawyer who once defended rapists and is now racked with guilt. The casting choices are nearly perfect fits across the board.

None of them shines brighter than Carey Mulligan, however, as she truly grounds what might otherwise have been a shaky narrative with her performance. Promising Young Woman works as straight up entertainment, and could easily have been trite. But it has nuances not easily seen at first glance, many of them thanks to Mulligan’s confident portrayal of a woman who is, ultimately, mentally unstable. But she is also clever, as is Emerald Fennell, bringing it home in a way that offers real satisfaction.

This is a story ripe for examination.

Overall: B+

TENƎꓕ

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

What a long and strange journey this film has had, filled with unexpected twists and turns, and drama all its own. Someone could make a compelling movie just about the process of Tenet’s release. They could also start it at the end of the story and work their way back, so that it would be roughly as comprehensible as writer-director Christopher Nolan’s story.

I suppose I could do that, in a way, myself: I only just this week noticed the VOD cost of this movie had finally gone down to $5.99, which is the only reason I am reviewing it now, five months after its initial theatrical release—by far a record for my reviews. In the old world, I would regard a film that I had not reviewed when it was released five months ago something that had simply passed me by. In the present, I waited for its insane starting VOD price of $19.99, which happened a month ago, to go down. I’d never pay that much for a movie even in a theater, let alone to watch one at home, not even the one that is arguably the biggest cinema-related cultural flashpoint of the year 2020. By that measure it’s rivaled only by Wonder Woman 1984. By some measures, Tenet is a better movie. I suppose it depends on whether you’re approaching it head-on or in hindsight. Does that make sense?

Whether it makes sense is beside the point. In a way, for Christopher Nolan, senselessness seems to be the point. At least, with a dash of meta subtlety: the protagonist, played by John David Washington, is literally only ever called “Protagonist.” Early on, a woman we only ever see in this one scene is explaining how things work in this world, serving only as exposition, really: “Don’t try to understand it,” she says. “Feel it.” This line has been quoted in virtually every review already written about Tenet, but what else is there to say? For the viewer, taking that advice is a good idea.

I can say this much: Tenet flies by for a movie with a run time of two and a half hours, and that in spite of countless sequences (including the opening one) in which I found myself thinking, I have no idea what the fuck is going on. I’d call that an accomplishment, of sorts. Tenet is also improved by the mere presence of second-billed Robert Pattinson as Neil, in a rare case of speaking in his native British accent. I got several good laughs out of his performance, with its nice sprinkling of dry humor.

Tenet is also packed wall to wall with clever visual trickery, as its plotting plays with time just as extensively as Inception played with dream states. That said, Nolan seems convinced his being impressive with the “depth” of his ideas, and yet Tenet, when closely examined, turns out to be surprisingly lacking in substance. Instead, it’s packed with “temporal” mumbo jumbo, and in ways that are also surprisingly predictable. Granted, Nolan is an expert at execution, as his manner is novel, but he’s still playing with time travel, examining the very same “paradoxes” we’ve been considering for decades. Not once, but multiple times, the playing around with time results in later scenes moving once again through scenes we already went through earlier, just in an opposite direction. Nolan is either closing loops or demonstrating how they perpetuate, and in the end he just proves that Tenet really has nothing new to say.

There’s a moment when Neil offers a simple explanation of a complex idea in a ridiculously oversimplified way, and then he says, “Does your head hurt yet?” Um, if it does, then Protagonist should not be the one tasked with saving the universe. Speaking of which, Protagonist also guesses at one point that what the threat they are facing is nuclear holocaust, and he’s told it’s “something much worse.” What the hell could be much worse? Well, the threat to the existence of all humanity throughout time. Okay, I guess you could argue that’s worse—not that it matters to anyone now if it comes to that. I mean, if we’re all dead anyway, then who cares?

Which is all to say, the premise of Tenet is far from any reason to watch it. It’ll just come in one ear and out the other, or I guess in from a superficially thrilling present and out into a forgettable past. But, it has incredibly well shot action sequences, all of them with certain people and certain objects moving backward through time while others are simultaneously going forward. One great sequence involves the crashing of an airliner without it ever even taking flight; another features a freeway car chase with some cars going forward while others drive backward (through time!); the climactic sequence presents an elaborate gun battle made compelling only because of the “inverted time” elements.

I’ll tell you my personal favorite thing about Tenet. In a smaller but crucial supporting part, Dimple Kapadia, once a teen sex symbol of sorts in Bollywood in the seventies, plays a powerful woman who is an arms dealer in Mumbai. “Protagonist” must cross her path multiple times, in varying moments in time through which he moves. Only briefly are we introduced to her husband as the initially presumed arms dealer: “A masculine front in a man’s world has its uses,” she says, and her existence in this movie is a great subversion of gender expectations. (As a side note, it shouldn’t be significant that the Protagonist is a Black man whose race is never noted in any way, but it is. Another one of Tenet’s accomplishments is that, unlike in many period films, its “color blind” casting is not a distraction.)

By and large, Tenet is exciting but hollow: I am no scientist, but I can tell Christopher Nolan is a bit of a pretender when he plays with these complex concepts, and often kind of cops out: at the end of one scene, Neil begins to explain to the Protagonist’s quasi-love interest (Elizabeth Debicki), “All the laws of physics—” and then it abruptly cuts to the next scene. Tenet is filled with lines like this, which serve more as wild plot contrivances than anything remotely close to actual scientific insights.

To be fair, insights are not Tenet’s purpose anyway. Its purpose is simply to entertain, and that it absolutely achieves. It’s just occasionally distracting when you have to look away in order to roll your eyes.

Relax, it’s not as twisted as it looks.

Overall: B