I.S.S.

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

I.S.S. isn’t smart enough to be a clever thriller, and it isn’t dumb enough to be “dumb fun.” Didn’t these astronauts ever learn about the “Goldilocks Zone”?

At least The Beekeeper has the decency to feature exciting fight choreography, fun explosions, innovative death scenes, and groan-worthy “protect the hive” metaphors. I.S.S. seems to think it can skate on the supposed novelty of its premise, with all of six characters—three of them American, three of them Russian—directed to “take control” of the International Space Station after nuclear armageddon occurs on the Earth below.

Here’s the question I couldn’t let go of. What’s the fucking point? Writer Nick Shafir and director Gabriela Cowperthwaite would have us believe it’s a sensible expectation that some of these characters have hope of returning home. They want to see their kids again!

Earth to I.S.S. crew! Your kids have been incinerated! Not once does any one of these characters even entertain this as a possibility. The nuclear flashes seen on the planet’s surface below are in the dozens, do they think all that radiation is just going to mind its own business on one side of the Earth?

Cowperthwaite once directed the very good 2013 documentary Blackfish, about the tragic consequences of keeping orcas in captivity. What the hell is she doing here? I’d say this is the cinematic equivalent of a corporate CEO winding up living in a ditch, but I should be fair, that’s a little harsh. It’s more like a corporate CEO winding up the manager of a regional Sizzler.

I suppose these metaphors are a little random. They’re definitely more creative than any of the boilerplate ideas presented in I.S.S., which seems on the surface like it’s . . . fine. If you’re at or below average intelligence, this movie might work for you. If you think about it for a minute, you might realize this movie is insulting your intelligence. You might be forgiven for missing that, given all the actors have a charismatic and competent screen presence. They’re kind of fun to hang out with, even if nothing they do or say ultimately makes a great amount of sense.

The story begins with two American astronauts in transport to the I.S.S.: John Gallagher Jr. as Christian Campbell and Ariana DeBose as newcomer bioengineer Dr. Kira Foster. I was skeptical of this film’s logic from the start, given a book I read recently that covered how strict NASA is about bringing personal effects into space, as the slightest added weight comes at exorbitant cost. But, Campbell rides the rocket with one of his kids’ squeeze toys in his hand.

Sure, I came in hot with the nitpicking: it’s just a movie, right? So, these two join the four others already on the station: Gordon Barrett (Chris Messina), evidently the highest ranking American astronaut; and the three Russians cosmonauts: Weronika Vetrov (Masha Mashkova); and brothers Nichoai Pulov (Costa Ronin) and Alexey Pulov (Pilov Asbæk). I guess I’ll give I.S.S. points for casting actual Russian actors.

We see them all settle in; Foster has brought some mice with her. We see the six of them pal around, exchange Christmas gifts. None of this is particularly interesting. The script neatly sidesteps any details about what might have prompted the assured mutual destruction: “We don’t ever talk politics,” they say. “And we definitely don’t talk about what’s going on down there.” What is going on down there, anyway? People gettin trigger happy, apparently.

To me, the most astounding thing about I.S.S. is that no one responds to the unfolding events with any kind of existential crisis. Somehow being stranded on a space station during a nuclear annihilation makes them all safe? Oh wait, one of the scientists on board was working on a radiation treatment! Okay, but why the hell would that research need to be done in space? No matter, we have four or five vials of it to return to the surface and save humanity!

This treatment is just used as a minor plot turn somewhere in the second half of the movie. What Cowperthwaite wants us to focus on is the idea of global conflict distilled down to these six characters, three on each side, with shifting allegiances. In more capable hands, this actually could have been a taut, gripping thriller, an exploration of the human psyche under extraordinary and desperate circumstances. Instead we’ve just got an entire film crew phoning it in.

I.S.S. could have been much, much worse. The script could have been utter garbage instead of just blandly ridiculous. They could have cast bad actors instead of the clearly talented ones here, evidently just getting a paycheck. Good for them, get that cash! If anything were to save this movie, it would be this cast. Unfortunately, once I finish writing this review, I’m going to forget this movie completely and just move on with my life.

Hang in there! This movie might get better. JKJK

Overall: C+

ORIGIN

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

Origin isn’t so much an adaptation of the 2020 book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, by Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist Isabel Wilkerson, as a telling of the story of Wilkerson, clarifying the ideas for and then writing that book.

It’s a clever conceit, which works surprisingly well, as it then works as Wilkerson herself, portrayed wonderfully here by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, presenting her thesis and arguments, both to her family, friends and colleagues—many of whom take some time to understand what she’s getting at—and to us as the audience. The basic premise is that American racism does not exist in a vacuum in the world, but is rather an aspect of caste systems with common pillars in many societies.

Specifically, though, she finds “connective tissue” (her words, or at least her character’s words in this film) between the legacy of American racism dating back centuries to enslavement; the Nazi demonization of Jewish people; and the persecution of the Dalit caste, historically regarded as “Untouchables” in India. And there are some mind-blowing revelations in there, which present irrefutable evidence of that connective tissue. Documented evidence of the Nazi Party in Germany using American Jim Crow laws as a blueprint for what they did, via legal processes, to the Jewish people. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s visit to India informing the commonality between “Untouchables” there and the dehumanized status of Black people in America.

Origin features a minor flaw overall, one that informs a separate discussion about the nature of adaptation. It may very well be that writer-director Ava DuVernay has presented us with the best film version of this story, and these ideas, there could possibly be. That doesn’t change the fact that reading a book about all these things is far more likely to dig deeper, more permanently into our brains. I have not read the book, and it seems clear that I should. On the other hand, I am also, like many other people, getting the most immediate, and possibly the only, direct exposure to these concepts via watching this film.

And this film, while arguably a little slight on plot, is packed with scenes that are likely to stay with you a long time. Consider the conversation Wilkerson has with a couple over dinner during a visit to Germany. This German, White woman argues to the American Black woman that the Holocaust and the American legacy of slavery are too different to be compared, that they are not based on the same underlying precepts. She clarifies that slavery is about subjugation, and the Holocaust was about extermination. This conversation could perhaps have been better informed with more direct reference to the American genocide of Indigenous people, which absolutely was also about extermination.

What Wilkerson argues is that, whether it’s subjugation or extermination, it’s the pillars of caste ideology that gets used to justify the action. One of the great things about this film is how it lays out this argument, but allows us to spend some time pondering them. This is not a film spending time insisting on its rightness, but making its case. I even left the screening I attended not having taking it in quite the same way as the person I saw it with.

Origin has a fairly lengthy, 141-minute run time, with an even pacing that justifies it. It opens on Trayvon Martin (Myles Frost) walking the neighborhood after visiting a convenience store. It explores the concept of “endogamy,” the practice or romance or marriage as limited only to within one’s own defined clan or tribe, partly through Wilkerson’s own interracial marriage to the late Brett Hamilton (Jon Bernthal). Wilkerson is encouraged by her editors (one of whom is played by Vera Farmiga) to write something about the Trayvon Martin case, while she is considering a hiatus to take care of her elderly mother (Emily Yancy).

There’s a particularly memorable scene, of Wilkerson with her husband and her mother, discussing the Trayvon Martin case. Isabel and Brett argue that Martin should never have had to answer to another man questioning his presence walking through a neighborhood, a sensible argument. Isabel’s mother argues that if Martin had just answered the question, he might well still be alive, also a sensible argument. In a later scene, we see an interaction between Isabel and a plumber (played by Nick Offerman), investigating a flood in a basement. The plumber is wearing a red MAGA hat, and Isabel quite understandably looks upon him with unease. Still, she connects with him by mentioning her late mother, and asking about his parents. The scene seems simple on the surface, but it presents the same question: Isabel diffuses tension by taking the initiative to connect, but should she have to?

Origin spends a significant amount of time on the three societies Isabel Wilkerson explores, with conversations with “real people” in her personal life at home (including her cousin, played by Abbott Elementary’s Niecy Nash, and a close friend pointedly named Miss Hale, played by Audra McDonald), as well as extended visits in both Germany and India, wildly different societies with commonalities of oppression that are all too easy not to see.

It would be a fascinating exercise to see particularly how this film plays with German, Indian, or Jewish audiences, as it explores very disparate histories, and then connects dots, between them. These are issues very personal to people, as with the White German woman who is unable to see the similarities—something Isabel’s cousin also struggles with. This all just provides Isabel Wilkerson multiple opportunities to clarify her thesis, which the film Origin then imparts to its audience very successfully. It provides a huge amount of provocative food for thought, and I left the theater feeling very grateful to have been presented with it.

When different underclasses are not so different: Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor as Isabel Wilkerson, visiting the site of the oldest example of it.

THE COLOR PURPLE

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

Here I’ve spent many a year insisting any given film should be judged on its own merits, and then I go and watch this current iteration of The Color Purple directly after watching Steven Spielberg’s original 1985 adaptation.

I do not recommend doing this. It colors everything about how Blitz Bazawule’s current adaptation gets received, and it is unfair to this newer film. It can become difficult to draw the line between whether I’m not responding to it quite as well as I’d hoped, either because it is genuinely a weaker adaptation, or I simply like the earlier film better. And there is no question, I like the earlier film better.

A key difference between the two films is that the new one is a musical—not that you’d know that from its promotional campaign. Fans of Broadway will surely know it, as it may be a surprise to discover the Broadway musical adaptation is itself pretty old now: it debuted in December 2005, nearly two decades ago; ran through 2008; and then had a highly acclaimed revival run from 2015 to 2017. The latter would clearly be what then promoted this film adaptation of the stage musical, which I never had a chance to see but can easily imagine it being a fantastic, powerful experience.

The sticking point for me here is that storytelling works differently in different mediums. This is something too many directors forget when adapting books into films, and the same goes for adapting stage plays into films. Spielberg’s movie covers a great many years, and really lets the story simmer within each phase of Celie’s life, making each key occurrence all the more poignant. The Color Purple, the movie musical, covers just as much ground, but has a run time thirteen minutes shorter than the previous film, and it makes so much time for music sequences that the rest of the story, simply by definition, gets truncated and rushed through.

The actors portraying Celie and her sister Nettie as children (Phylicia Pearl Mpasi and Halle Bailey, respectively) don’t even look that young, thereby undermining the very point of their portrayals. Nettie then does not get near enough screen time, regardless of who is portraying her, which undercuts the intended emotion of the sisters’ eventual reunion after many years of separation. We hardly get to know Nettie here, and so have less reason to care.

All that said, there remains a lot to like about this Color Purple—particularly, somewhat ironically, the music. Your mileage may vary as to whether it’s worth trading effective storytelling for really good music, but at least when the music numbers are being performed, you’re happy to be there. We’ll just set aside how incongruous it feels to have characters breaking out into rapturous song in the middle of a story like this, which features fairly regular domestic abuse.

Furthermore, the actors can’t be blamed for what they’ve been given to work with, and The Color Purple is objectively well cast: Fantasia Barrino is effective as the older Celie (even if her incredibly distinctive voice bears no resemblance to Phylicia Pearl Mpasi’s). Colman Domingo is uniquely sinister as Mister, the man Celie is forced to marry; Taraji P. Henson is electric as Shug Avery, the blues singer with whom both Mister and Celie are enamored; H.E.R. is arguably underused as Squeak; and Danielle Brooks absolutely justifies her Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for her portrayal of Sofia, belligerent wife of Mister’s son, Harpo (Corey Hawkins).

Of course, here is where a generational divide creeps in again: none of these current actors can’t really compete with the indelible 1985 performances by then-newcomer Whoopi Goldberg as Celie; Danny Glover as Mister; or Oprah Winfrey as Sofia. The more relevant question might be how many people among 2023 audiences know or care about the 1985 film—they’ll certainly know who both Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey are, if not Danny Glover. The one performer who truly improves on the character in the current iteration is Taraji P. Henson, who truly lights up the screen.

There’s also the valid argument that Steven Spielberg, a rich White guy, was an inappropriate choice for directing this particular story—something he was actually insecure about even in 1985, only taking the gig once Quincy Jones convinced him to. Production of films about Black people plays out in this way less and less anymore, and it’s only right that a Black director should take on this film. It’s somewhat of a bummer, then, that a Black director could not have been given the chance to make just as good a film in 1985, and that the Black director who did direct the film in 2023 did a fine job but still not quite as good.

I do rather wish now that I could have watched 2023 The Color Purple in a bit more of a vacuum, without the 1985 film so fresh in my memory, from literally minutes before. I might not be quite as hard on it, although I feel pretty strongly I still would have given it the same rating, given its strong performances among tonal inconsistencies.

It’s hard to be as timid as the story really calls for when you’re regularly bursting into song.

Overall: B

THE BEEKEEPER

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

There are countless legitimate reasons to shit on The Beekeeper, to bury it in a . . . a swarm of criticism—but I have to be honest: my heart isn’t in it. I had too good a time watching this objectively idiotic movie.

So, well, why not judge a film on its own terms? The Beekeeper knows exactly what it is, which is both a b-movie and a bee movie (get it?), with its own rules of logic, which it basically follows to the letter. It may be a by-the-numbers revenge action movie, naturally starring Jason Statham, but somehow, it still manages to be way better than what it could have been.

I’ve seen some disappointment that this movie doesn’t lean into the “so bad it’s good” genre, but being disappointed on that level entirely misses the point. Have we learned nothing from Snakes on a Plane? When a movie self-consciously tries too hard to be “bad,” it tends to land with a thud. The “so bad it’s good” vibe only really works when the people making the movie were genuinely convinced they were making something good.

The Beekeeper is something different, ironically by being exactly the kind of movie it’s designed to be: it’s pretty stupid, but not too stupid. The actors are all kind of phoning it in, but none of them are being lazy. The action is well choreographed, just clever enough, and consistently entertaining.

Admittedly, even I went into this movie, about a literal beekeeper (Statham) who turns out to be retired from a nebulously defined, top secret program of people also codenamed “beekeepers,” kind of hoping it would be relentlessly stupid. That can be fun, right? And it is stupid, just not relentlessly so. It’s also got a healthy dose of onscreen charisma, a modicum of wit, and a subtle self-awareness as a film that refuses to take itself too seriously.

I sometimes wonder what a stacked cast was thinking when they read the script for a movie that clearly doesn’t work. And no one here is exactly turning in Oscar-worthy work here, in a cast including Josh Hutcherson as the misguided “brains” behind a company that scams elderly people via their computers, Jeremy Irons as the company’s head of security, Phylicia Rashad as one of the company’s victims, and Minni Driver, getting disappointingly little screen time as the director of the CIA. One thing they all have in common, though: they’re having a good time. And so is the viewer.

The Beekeeper does lay it on a little thick with all of its many “hive” metaphors, not always with full coherence (Statham’s Adam Clay is somehow just “protecting the hive” with all the countless people he dispatches), which ultimately is part of its charm. No one set out to make a “smart” movie here, and no one watching it expects one. This is a rare instance of movie marketers being full forthcoming with the kind of movie they’re offering, likely because anyone going to see it only wants exactly that.

In a way, The Beekeeper is just a Fast and Furious movie without any racing cars. You might expect that to make it less exciting, and I suppose arguably it is—but not by much. It’s still got plenty of violence, well staged combat scenes, and at least relatively inventive scenes of either dismemberment or death. What more could you ask for? If you want Oscar bait, there’s still more than plenty of that to go around. If you want heightened action ridiculousness, with an inexplicably indestructable hero bent on avenging the victims of elaborate phishing schemes, there’s The Beekeeper.

It should also be noted: January and February are historically notorious dumping grounds for cinema garbage. What the makers of The Beekeeper seem to understand is that, they can make something in keeping with the vibe of this time of year that’s actually worth the time, if all you’re looking for is knowingly mindless but well-executed entertainment.

If you leave your intellect at home, you’ll have a blast.

Overall: B

THE ZONE OF INTEREST

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

The Zone of Interest is a film that challenges you to pay attention, then makes you uncomfortable, forces you to sit in that discomfort, and regularly reminds you of the ease of complacency. It is within this context that I found how it ended to be one of the greatest endings of a film, perhaps ever.

Jonathan Glazer, who co-wrote the script and directed this film, previously gave us such wildly disparate films as Under the Skin (2014), Birth (2004) and Sexy Beast (2000), certainly takes his time between feature films, and has evidently honed his craft over time. Under the Skin in particular, a film now a decade old, is similarly subtle in both its profundity and provocative themes; it definitely has something to say. And, while it is imperfect, its ideas, its visuals, and especially its tone has me returning to it every few years.

The Zone of Interest is a bit more direct in its challenge, a slight irony given how it shifts nearly all the horrors of the Holocaust outside the borders of the frame. This is a story focused on Rudolf and Hedwig Höss (Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller), and their children, living their seemingly ordinary, every day lives in a home literally on the other side of the fence surrounding the Auschwitz concentration camp. Rudolf is the commandant of the camp, Hedwig is his wife, and in their minds, they are living the dream: everything they want in a home, with an elaborate garden, and a loving family.

The Jewish people loom large in this film, in that to the German family we are following—as well as the rest of their family, friends and colleagues—Jewish people are entirely incidental, no more or less worth considering than generic cargo. Their conscious thought about Jewish people is limited to questions of whether the few of them being used as slave labor on the grounds should be allowed inside the house. Occasionally an unusual consideration punctures their idyllic existence, such as when the ashes of human remains float down a nearly river and reach them while obliviously fishing or swimming. (That image of the ash flowing down the river toward them is not one I will soon forget.)

Glazer is a master of tone, particularly of the deeply creepy sort, but in The Zone of Interest, he quite intentionally does away with tone altogether. The proceedings are generally very matter-of-fact, the same approach the Höss family has toward Rudolf’s work. This only changes in sporadic fits, with Mica Levi’s truly nightmarish score, which reaches occasional crescendos over seemingly mundane images, like flowers growing in the garden. But, there is always something insidious under the surface of any particularly domestic image: those flowers are grown with human remains in the soil.

I might be tempted to call The Zone of Interest the 21st-century answer to Schndler’s List, except Jonathan Glazer is far removed from the kind of populist director that Steven Spielberg is. Even a film like Schindler’s List, which I would still regard as essential viewing, is similarly pointed in how it challenges its audience, but would never have reached the same number of people without the Spielberg name attached to it. Glazer, by contrast, is a longtime critical darling whose films just don’t get widely seen. Even with The Zone of Interest fairly likely to become his most-seen film, it’s never going to get genuinely mainstream exposure.

It’s too bad. The Zone of Interest is the kind of film you don’t particularly want to watch, but which you’ll be glad to have seen. I would hesitate to call it “homework,” but plenty of people would likely see it that way. For those who actively seek it out, and you absolutely should, it is likely to be seen as a profound work of art.

Is it a masterpiece? It’s too soon to tell. I was deeply impressed by almost everything about it—including Sandra Hüller, who also gave a spectacular performance recently in Anatomy of a Fall—but was left with mixed feelings about that jarringly severe score. I could feel differently after some time. And that is a specific thing The Zone of Interest plays with, time: nearly all of it is set in the last couple years of World War II, and that changes briefly only once, in a way that is incredibly effective.

I left this film thinking a lot about “the banality of evil,” and how easily it become part of our day to day existence. Rudolf recounts to Hedwig over the phone how he spent a party thinking mostly how he would gas everyone in the high ceilinged banquet room, and those were all people ostensibly on his side. This is a portrait of people far more concerned with logistics than humanity, and the casual way it invites us into their world is the most frightening of all.

The Banality of Evil: The Movie

ORLANDO: MY POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY

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

Within the first few minutes of Orlando: My Political Biography, one of the young people sitting in the row behind my said, “This movie is so French.” Indeed,

The person who said it seemed mildly amused, not particularly irritated. I’ll say that this film reached me a bit more successfully as it went on, but also that it regularly lost me, then pulled me back in, then lost me again, then pulled me back in again. Some of this was, perhaps, indeed its very French-ness. I suspect some of it was that I was almost certainly the oldest person in that audience, a gender-nonconforming elder receiving an interpretive lesson on how today’s trans and nonbinary youth approach gender identity.

To call Orlando: My Political Biography “high concept” would be an understatement. Writer-director Paul B. Preciado, who is himself 53 years old (and, importantly, a trans man) assembled 26 trans and nonbinary people to introduce themselves by name on camera, declare that they are “playing Virginia Woolf’s Orlando,” and wear a ruffled collar while doing so. This is all a riff on Woolf’s 1928 novel Orlando: A Biography, which might work better should you have read the novel recently, or at all. I have never read it, but the film makes many references to how the novel’s namesake protagonist famously suddenly switches genders midway through the story. It does not, however, make any reference to Tilda Swinton playing the role in a 1992 film adaptation.

It should be noted that the 26 subjects featured in the film range from 8 to 70 years old, which would suggest a broad range of ages, but there are only a group of three kids, and one 70-year-old. There’s a couple of clearly middle-aged people, but the majority of them are clearly young, ranging from their teens to their twenties. But there is intention to this as well: the subjects on the edges of this spectrum serve as both contrasts and anchors for the others, who become a collective portrait of contemporary trans and nonbinary experience, of a kind of defiant joy, in the face of persistent societal pressures.

In a sort of parallel to blurring gender lines, Preciado blurs the line between subject and performer, having his subjects recite lines—sometimes directly from the novel; sometimes other written material—as well as having his subjects simply share their thoughts and experiences. The early scenes are perhaps the most avant-garde, which unfortunately makes them the least inviting. At one point, a subject essentially makes out with the trunk of a tree.

This film is garnering rave reviews, but I can’t help but wonder who will be that into it, outside those who are both extensively literate and academically interested in gender. This Orlando features a few funny moments for levity, but is for the most part a very highbrow exercise. I find myself imagining college students in a Gender Studies class patting themselves on the back for how brilliant they think it is, while neglecting more effectively straightforward documentaries about trans history, like Disclosure (2020) or Paris Is Burning (1990).

Don’t get me wrong: I can easily see why some people love Orlando: My Political Biograph, which is genuinely unusual in what it captures in trans pride and trans joy, as well as its cross section of individuals whose very existence transcends the binary, the assumption of shame regarding certain body parts, or the historic insistence that transness necessitates surgery. For all I know, this film is something for contemporary trans and nonbinary people to connect to; I cannot speak for them. All I can say is whether I managed to connect with it, and at its most experimental, I could not.

The film does feature some clips of the earliest post-operation transgender women to speak to the media, and when Orlando connects that history to the present day, and then features a few young trans and nonbinary children as beacons of the future, then it connects with me. For viewers with just the right amount of patience, this film does have its rewards.

A bit esoteric on the approach.

Overall: B

MEAN GIRLS

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

When I saw the original Mean Girls in 2004, I felt even then that it was overrated, an ultimately unsuccessful attempt at being the 21st-century contemporary answer to the 1988 cult classic Heathers. I felt at the time that Heathers was a far superior comedy, with biting humor that Mean Girls lacked. Ironically, not even Heathers has aged especially well from a 2024 vantage point—and it should be noted that Mean Girls was released 16 years after it; this new iteration of Mean Girls is coming out a solid twenty years after the first one. (The Broadway musical adaptation of the 2004 film, on which this new film is based, had its first production in 2017—thirteen years after the movie. Are you following all of this?) These days, surely far fewer viewers of Mean Girls have any idea what Heathers even was than viewers in 2004 did, making Heathers far less relevant to this movie than it was to the 2004 movie.

It’s been so long since even the 2004 film, all that truly matters now is how well the current film works, within a 2024 framework. And I’d say it works . . . fine. I enjoyed this one more than I seemed to enjoy the first film twenty years ago, but not by a wide margin.

I was relieved to find the music catchy, if relatively forgettable. There has been a bit of press about the promotion of all the musicals released in the past couple of months, most notably Wonka, The Color Purple, and Mean Girls: the trailers for all of them were edited so that it was not clear in any of their cases that they are actually musicals. Are promoters afraid audiences aren’t interested in musicals? If so, why they hell are they making them at all? And god knows, Wonka was a genuine hit—with utterly forgettable music throughout—and the 1 p.m. Saturday screening of Mean Girls I went to was far from sold out, but still had a surprisingly robust crowd at it.

I’ll say this: I had a good time, and I can’t imagine ever going out of my way to see Mean Girls, the musical adaptation of a Broadway adaptation of a movie adaptation of a novel originally called Queen Bees and the Wannabees, again. The 2004 film was famously co-written by, and co-starred, Tina Fey, whose profile was much higher at the time than it is today; she also wrote the book (though not the lyrics) for the Broadway musical, and gets sole writing credit for this new film adaptation, while appearing, yet again, as one of the teachers at North Shore High School. To Fey’s credit, the script is updated well to 2020s sensibilities, if possibly a little off the mark when it comes to how high school teenagers actually behave toward each other anymore.

Last year’s Jennifer Lawrence comedy No Hard Feelings felt a little closer to the mark with this, with high school kids much more sophisticated than they used to be, and far less tolerant of bigoted or sexist behavior—granted, these things can easily still be very regional, and bear in mind I have not personally spent any real time inside a high school myself in a solid thirty years. Nevertheless, there is a thematic undercurrent to this Mean Girls which, being based on something twenty years old, feels a bit dated.

I still have a basic complaint about it: Mean Girls doesn’t have mean enough girls in it. It might be more appropriately called Girls Who Hurt Each Other’s Feelings, which is, just as before, the basic, simplistic lesson: girls can be uniquely catty with each other, they fight, and the ones with a genuine conscience ultimately make up.

Fair enough, I suppose, especially for audiences who are, let’s say, adolescents. On the upside, Mean Girls is cast with exceptional performers, with Angourie Rice (first seen as the 13-year-old in The Nice Guys; later the young-adult daughter in the HBO limited series Mare of Easttown) in the part of Cady Heron. Rice fits comfortably in the role of both awkward newcomer and one of the so-called “Plastics,” the clique of vapid popular girls. Reneé Rapp is especially effective as Regina George, the thoughtless leader of the Plastics, her musical numbers consistently the best vocal performances in the film.

Among Regina’s two main acolytes, I have more mixed feelings about casting a brown woman (Avantika) as the pointedly dumb one. In fact, the supporting cast is fairly diverse, including Auli’i Cravalho (who had voiced the title character in the Disney film Moana) and Jaquel Spivey as the queer kids who first befriend Cady at her new school. But, there’s no getting around the fact that casting the two leads as White girls was no accident, and thus centers Whiteness with all this array of other, diverse characters revolving around them. I love Tina Fey, but this does seem to be a lasting blind spot with her. (One might argue that this particular story doesn’t work the same way if the leads aren’t White, but I would not accept that argument.) Taken in isolation, Mean Girls could be given a pass on this front; the issue is that it’s part of a long established pattern, which not enough people talk about.

Casting considerations aside, Mean Girls is relatively harmless, a pleasant enough time at the movies, a fairly successful capitalization on nostalgia for something that was never that special in the first place. As with its predecessor, Mean Girls comfortably sidesteps a whole lot of potential, leaving us with both a sense of what it could have been, and a satisfying experience of something hovering just one or two steps above mediocrity.

I want to see the movie about the supporting players.

Overall: B

THE BOOK OF CLARENCE

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

LaKeith Stanfield is great. David Oyelowo is great. Tayana Taylor is great. Omar Sy is great. RJ Cyler is great. Alfre Woodard is great. Anna Diop is great. James McAvoy is fun and Benedict Cumberbatch is a delight. Basically, everyone in this movie is great—jarringly, incongruously. Would that The Book of Clarence were great. Alas.

It begins with great promise, for about five minutes coming in hot with verve and excitement: a chariot race, through “Old Jerusalem”—one that’s just between two racers settling a bet. It’s shot with a knowing urgency, but with a light touch. Drivers get knocked out of their chariot and onto the ground, the camera offering POV shots of them crashing and rolling, an immediately clever and well-executed conceit. The opening titles appear, and they are in an old-school font in an overlay style that evokes old sword-and-sandal epics like Ben-Hur, a knowing reference that will be lost on any of this movie’s younger viewers.

And then . . . within the first ten minutes, The Book of Clarence lost me. It has production value as great as the best that Hollywood has to offer, which writer-director Jeymes Samuel (The Harder They Fall) then uses to spend too much time on characters we struggle to care about, doing little of interest. At a runtime of 129 minutes, this might have been at least slighty improved by shaving off about twenty minutes.

Maybe. The thing is, it’s the story itself that’s the problem. It can’t decide what it wants to be, while performed by exceptional actors who are taking no part in that decision. It starts off irreverent, like it might be sending up the story of Christ, perhaps in the vein of Life of Brian. It then morphs into something surprisingly earnest, about the power of faith, I guess, except it can’t convey its themes coherently. We literally get a crucifixion, complete with blood and whips and dramatic, wailing tears. I found myself imagining Mel Gibson patting himself on the back for liking this movie.

Admittedly, my position here is arguably a little tricky: I am an atheist, just as the titular Clarence (Stanfield) professes to be. It’s easy to see people of faith—who make up the majority of this movie’s potential audience—getting on board with this movie, and staying there, going along with Clarence’s arc of mildly comic selfishness, cynicism, and redemption through genuine miracles. I might become a believer too if I witnessed a miracle, at least one that could be proven not to be a figment of my imagination. So, where’s my miracle? Judging by this film, that’s what it takes to turn a person around. It’s going to take a miracle to turn this mess of a movie into something worth taking seriously. Unfortunately, it shifts from jest to taking itself way too seriously.

Jesus Christ is also a character in this movie, played by Nicholas Pinnock. He spends much of his screen time a faceless shadow under a red hood, like the Ghost of Christmas A.D. Jeymes Samuel gives him far more magical powers than even the Bible ever ascribed to him, making the character the very definition of “extra.” He coexists with Clarence—just as Jesus coexisted with Brian in Life of Brian, incidentally—and as time goes on, it becomes increasingly predictable that he will become a critical factor in Clarence’s story.

The Book of Clarence is an unusual idea conveyed through a majority-Black cast, including Jesus himself, a detail that is rightly incidental. There are some clear racial dynamics at play, with all but one of the White characters being the Roman oppressors. The one exception is the character of a beggar, who is so filthy at the start of the film I didn’t even realize he was White—a visual choice that I suppose skirts the edges of blackface, though that’s not an idea this movie toys with at all, at least not with any clarity.

Clarence decides he wants to try being one of Christ’s apostles, one of which is his own twin brother (also played by Stanfield, except in that case in a very unconvincing beard). When that proves unsuccessful, he decides he’ll just be a Messiah himself. This proves perilous for him when Rome decrees that “all Messiahs” must be crucified. By the time LaKeith Stanfield was being strung up and nailed to a cross, I found myself thinking: What are we doing? Why are we here? I could not come up with a clear answer.

One could argue that The Book of Clarence just isn’t for me, a White guy without any miracles to convince him God exists. My argument is that not even this movie truly knows who it’s for, in spite of a stacked cast who are all deeply committed to the bit—whatever that bit is. There is far smarter, more clever and more authentically expressed emotional arcs out there. Try American Fiction.

Not even LaKeith Stanfield can save this movie.

Overall: C+

ALL OF US STRANGERS

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

How do I adequately convey how much I loved All of Us Strangers? How do I even explain what it’s about? Except, perhaps, to say it’s a beautifully melancholy, queer love story with an emotional through line that cuts deep?

Mind you, I say this as a gay viewer, and this is incredibly relevant. I can’t help but wonder how the response to it might be different among audiences that are not gay men. I am certain anyone open to the experience of this film can be deeply moved by it, and even have an intricate, nuanced understanding of what the characters are feeling. But for me, in a way few other movies ever have, this story wrapped my very soul into a warm embrace.

Will I love this movie as much upon rewatch, I wonder? There’s only one way to find out.

In the meantime, I must say there is plenty of All of Us Strangers that evades straightforward understanding. That is beside the point. You need only to feel it. And boy, did I.

Adam (Andrew Scott) and Harry (Aftersun’s Paul Mescal) are two gay men, living in the same London high-rise apartment building. It must be a new building, very few other people living in it, as they discuss how distractingly quiet it is living there. We really never see them interact with anyone else in the building, only each other. When a fire alarm has Adam exiting the building, he sees Harry’s silhouette in his sixth-story window, looking down at him. After Adam returns to his unit on a much higher floor—with spectacular, panoramic London views—Harry knocks on his door, drunk, and introduces himself.

Adam and Harry’s steadily blossoming relationship expands beyond that first meeting, which is tentative, cautious, a bit shy. They don’t hook up immediately. They do a bit later, though, and it’s some of the most beautifully shot and tender, gay sexuality I’ve seen onscreen since Moonlight (2016). It’s both highly erotic and genuinely moving—a feat of narrative execution that has me tempted to call director and co-writer Andrew Haigh a cinematic magician.

And All of Us Strangers is indeed magical, even when it defies logic, and quite deliberately so. The story of Adam and Harry runs parallel to the story of Adam and his late parents, who died in a car crash when he was twelve years old. And yet, he takes a train across town to his childhood home—and finds his father (Jamie Bell) and his mother (Claire Foy) there, the same age they were when they died, somehow unsurprised to find their son coming home, now a grown man they had never actually gotten to see grow up.

Mum and Dad have an understanding that about 35 years have passed, but have no knowledge of what has transpired in that time. Their knowledge and relative ignorance remains stuck in, we can only estimate, about 1988. And as premises go, this is a little out there, because All of Us Strangers never makes explicit exactly what’s going on, and there’s a physicality between Adam and his still-young parents during their visits that negates any idea of them as conventional ghosts. It’s a little more like they exist as flesh and blood, but in a different dimension.

What it does allow for, however, are conversations Adam never had a chance to have with his parents otherwise. He comes out to them both, in separate conversations. It’s notable that his mom has a more complicated, slightly more negative reaction than his father, who is much more quickly accepting—a scenario that defies the stereotype of gay experience, and is likely more common than many realize. This, among many other conversations Adam has with his parents, packed a unique emotional punch for me, and so far as I could tell, I was crying before most of the rest of the people in the theater.

All of Us Strangers features gorgeous cinematography, and is edited with unparalleled finesse, transitioning between Adam with Harry, and Adam with his parents, with seamless grace. There’s a sequence in which Adam and Harry go out dancing, do some drugs, and then proceed into a sort of montage of domesticity, with the club music continuing uninterrupted through it all. It’s beautifully executed.

There is a bit of a twist at the end, very directly related to Harry, which ultimately had me baffled. It calls into question a great deal of what has been seen beforehand, but then, there is even a moment when Adam asks his mother, “Is this real?” The answer, evidently, is that if it feels real, then it is. And All of Us Strangers is all feeling, which therefore makes it real. Adam tries to introduce Harry to his parents, and for most of this sequence, Harry seems to be the only one existing in a grounded reality. This is now a film that will allow things to be that simple.

This is a movie I will be thinking about for a very long time, maybe for years to come. I haven’t been this in love with a mood-piece queer love story since Moonlight. Indeed, that film and All of Us Strangers would make for a spectacular double feature. From end to end, it is beautiful and sad and cozy and charming and erotic and mysterious and bewildering. It would seem there is no end to the riches it has to offer.

Nowhere to go but up: together,

Overall: A

SOCIETY OF THE SNOW

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

Fifty-one years ago, in 1972, a chartered Uruguayan Air Force flight, carrying a rugby team alomg with many of their family and friends, crashed in the Andes mountains on its way from Montevideo, Uruguay to Santiago, Chile. There were twelve initial fatalities among the forty passengers and five crew onboard, a number that steadily grew larger during the seventy-two days the survivors spent stranded in the mountains.

This has long been a story widely known around the globe, and I haven’t even yet mentioned the most notorious aspect of it, the very thing that made those who ultimately survived able to do so.

I’m old enough to remember the 1993 film Alive, starring Ethan Hawke, and how riveting and harrowing the crash sequence was near the beginning. It was long ago when I saw this film, and I don’t remember much of it—although I certainly remember the passengers flying out the back of the torn-open plane after it hit the mountain ridge. I also remember the dramatic drop to the knees after the first time one of the survivors takes a bite of human flesh.

This might be the key difference between Alive and Society of the Snow, which does employ some fairly typical cinematic emotional beats, but doesn’t lean much into those kinds of rote dramatic moments. Curiously, the two films were based on different books: Alive was adapted from Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors, which was published in 1974, only a couple of years after the actual events, but was written by British historian Piers Paul Read. Society of the Snow (La Sociedad de la Nieve) was written far more recently (2008) and thus without the event as fresh in anyone’s memory, but it was by Uruguayan writer Pablo Vierci.

It’s easy to see the potential pros and cons of these two literary accounts, but the disparity becomes wider when we look at the adaptations, with Alive coming straight out of Hollywood, and Socity of the Snow being directed and co-written by Spanish-born J.A. Bayona. Ideally, of course, Society of the Snow would have been made by an actual Uruguayan director. And there is some irony in the fact that Bayona also directed the 2012 film The Impossible, about the 2004 tsunami in Thailand—which cast Naomi Watts, Ewan McGregor and Tom Holland to tell a story based on a Spanish family’s real-life experience.

Socity of the Snow, at least, is a Spanish-U.S. coproduction, told in Spanish, based on source material that came from a Uruguayan voice. By all accounts, although there have been many adaptations of the 1972 Andes flight disaster, this one is the most accurate and the most realistic. In fact, there is a sequence well into the film in which one of the survivors takes out a camera and starts taking photos. It made me think: surely there are real life photos that were taken, then, of survivors posing around the wreckage? Indeed, there are—and Society of the Snow recreates them with impressive accuracy.

This is, indeed, a very harrowing film to watch. Thirty years makes a big difference in filmmaking capabilities, and the plane crash sequence in this film is rendered in far greater detail, on a comparable budget (in adjusted dollars). There is clear CGI at work in this movie, but it is put to good use, as the scene is no less jaw dropping for it. In just a few moments, what we see is very violent and horrifying.

The thing to remember about this whole experience, though, is that the crash was only the beginning. It happens about 12 minutes into the film, and the notorious cannibalism doesn’t even start until about 45 minutes in. Another major incident occurs well after that, which is just as harrowing as the initial crash itself. Even though I should have seen it coming, I was so absorbed by the film, it scared the shit out of me. Beyond that, many attempts are made at finding help, a nearly impossible task in the middle of the Andes mountains, unknown miles and miles from civilization.

This entire ordeal is a stunning story, and one could argue that, in motion picture form at least, Society of the Snow has done the best job of it. Everything about it is amazing, even how long many of the people who survived the initial crash lasted before later dying for various reasons. Only 16 of the 45 onboard that plane made it in the end, and this is the story of how those few made it—and many of those nearly didn’t. The film’s runtime is two hours and 24 minutes, but a solid 15 of those minutes are the end credits, which makes this film a solid, standard length, all of which is impossible to look away from. If you have even cursory survivalist interests, this movie, currently available streaming on Netflix, is definitely one to watch.

It wasn’t as much of a party as it looked.

Overall: B+