ANOTHER ROUND

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

Talk about ethical gray areas. It’s nearly impossible to imagine Another Round being made as the same movie by an American director, about American characters. Every culture has its own rather specific history with alcohol, after all, and this film’s original title in Danish was Druk, which essentially translates to Drunk, or if you plug it into Google Translate, it comes up as Binge Drinking. And here in the States, changing the title to Another Round feels a little like sanitizing the subject matter.

The basic concept is this: four middle aged men, all friends who are teachers at a high school, take it upon themselves to become both researchers and subjects in an alcohol-related “experiment”: Norwegian psychiatrist Finn Skårderud theorized that having a constant level of alcohol in your system—specifically, a Blood Alcohol Concentration of 0.05%—leaves you more creative and relaxed. These four men, discussing it over a 40th birthday dinner, decide they will put the theory to the test. Martin (Mads Mikkelsen), the primary protagonist of the film, is hesitant at first, but realizing his life is very much in a rut, ultimately decides to go along.

They create certain rules. Perhaps most amazingly, they drink only during the day, leaving themselves time in the evenings to sober up in order to be “refreshed” the next day—which means starting in the mornings and maintaining their 0.05% BAC right through their work days. At a high school.

This being an international feature, one of the many interesting things to consider here is the differing attitude toward alcohol consumption from one society to another. In Demmark the legal BAC limit for drinking and driving is 0.05%, as compared to 0.08% in the United States—and yet, in Denmark the legal drinking age is 16. (This does get nuanced; they can purchase beer or wine at 16, but must be 18 to drink in restaurants and bars, or to purchase liquor—still lower than the U.S. age of 21.) Another Round doesn’t get into the weeds about this stuff, given it’s made for a Danish audience already well familiar. But these are important distinctions for international audiences, particularly those from the United States, as is the average overall alcohol consumption in Denmark, which does get some reference in the script. Martin’s wife, at one point, says to him, “I couldn’t care less if you drink with your friends. This entire country drinks like maniacs anyway.”

And this seems to be essentially what director and co-writer Thomas Vinterberg seems to be getting at, although his film is never particularly judgmental about alcohol consumption. The basic message seems to be “everything in moderation,” and the idea of moderation is where this “social experiment” goes off the rails. It takes some time to get there, though, and curiously, Another Round is bookended by opening and ending sequences that feature excessive public drinking, in both cases presented as joyous, jubilant occasions.

Granted, the opening sequence features a minor incident of drinking school kids going a bit too far, raising concerns among the high school faculty. The immediate consensus among the staff, in response to any ideas of limiting the binge drinking, much of which is tied very deeply with local tradition, basically amounts to “good luck with that.” And shortly thereafter, the aforementioned four friends make their decision to conduct this social experiment. What effects might there be on their professional and social lives? We get occasional title cards with short notes from a prospective “research paper,” along with regular updates on where exactly their BAC level is. They are so mindful of the details and control of this experiment—which inevitably gets sloppy, whether they want it to or not—that they buy home breathalizer gadgets, so they can take regular readings on themselves.

Where a story like this goes is very much dependent on context, however, and the fact that these characters are all written as high school teachers is likely no accident. This creates a kind of risk that would not be present at other jobs, such as the possibility of students getting their hands on their teachers’ alcohol, in some cases by accident, in others on purpose. One of the teachers not only suggests a stressed out kid take a couple of shots to calm himself before a test, but he even provides it. Another Round never depicts any consequences for this, or even makes any kind of judgment call about it. There’s something you won’t see in American films.

That said, Another Round absolutely does take all four of these characters into a space of consequences, just as a result of indefinite day drinking, with varying degrees of severity. “Professional and social negative effects,” as the verbiage in the ongoing “paper” puts it. Marriages are put to the test, and one of them slips over the threshold into alcoholism. What I like about this movie’s approach is that it doesn’t bother being declarative in any way that applies to all people: this doesn’t turn everyone into an alcoholic, but rather, perhaps, unveils those who are more susceptible to that path.

The pacing of Another Round is slower than we are generally used to in the U.S., but I found the editing to be exactly as it should be; the only technical aspect I found occasionally distracting was the exclusively handheld cinematography. If you find the concept itself compelling, then I would consider it worth watching—the complicating factor there being that it’s not on any streaming service but only available at the moment to purchase on VOD; I paid $6.99 to watch it on Prime Video, and although I would not have considered it worth any more than that, I think it’s a fair price. It’s easy to imagine that other opinions on that will vary.

From an American perspective, it’s the cultural differences, as well as where cultural norms parallel, that make this movie more compelling. There’s also the ever-present contextualization of the pandemic: Another Round proved to be a cinema sensation in its native Denmark, even with theaters at 50% capacity. It had its biggest domestic box office its opening weekend in seven years, but how much of that was just because of how few other new movies there were to choose from at the time? I was very impressed by this film, but there is no universe in which it would be a runaway success in the States. This is why recommending it in the U.S. feels like it might need certain caveats. If you’re someone who enjoys foreign films, who doesn’t mind reading subtitles, who doesn’t need the plot to unfold at breakneck speed, then it’s worth a look.

Mads and friends: about to get maintenance drunk.

Overall: B+

THE UNITED STATES VS. BILLIE HOLIDAY

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

There’s a moment in The United States vs. Billie Holiday, maybe two thirds of the way through, in which the camera closes in on the face of star Andra Day, playing the title character, singing her signature song “Strange Fruit.” We see her perform the entire song—three haunting verses about the lynching of Black people in 1930s America—while she never breaks eye contact with us, the viewers. The scene has an unforgettably confrontational power to it, much as Billie Holiday herself had in the era, as she insisted on singing the song live in spite of government pressure not to do so.

If only the rest of the movie had that kind of power. This latest offering by director Lee Daniels is a little too preoccupied with sporadic artistic flourishes that make little sense, editing meant to resemble really old stock footage at distractingly inconsistent moments, and cinematography that briefly slips into black and white for only a few seconds at a time. Almost as if it’s a trick to fit more into the film’s already-long 130 minutes, in the second half we get several montage sequences that seem only to serve as narrative shortcuts.

A biopic is always better when it focuses on one specific time or one specific element of a person’s life—this was precisely what kept Lee Daniels’s 2013 film The Butler from quite achieving greatness. The United States vs. Billie Holiday, however, attempts to have it both ways, narrowing focus on that song “Strange Fruit,” but still covering her life through two different decades.

The end result is something that lacks focus or narrative cohesion, with Daniels’s gaze into Holiday’s life often turning away from the specificity of that song. The U.S. government is obsessed with silencing her by any means necessary—a frequent theme in films of the past year or so, reflecting an unfortunately frequent theme of the U.S. government for decades—and they often use Holiday’s heroine addiction against her. In some cases they literally framed her, couching their actions in the “war on drugs,” illustrating how very old that naive and misguided notion really is. This might have made a better film if it were more explicitly about that exploitation, but instead it’s a film that doesn’t quite know what it wants to be about. All of these things are worthy of attention in film, but they also need a dramatic center.

If anything makes The United States vs. Billie Holiday worth the time, though, it’s Andra Day, in her first starring role, in which she also songs a bunch of Billie Holiday songs incredibly well. The film would be truly dull affair without her in it, as she’s the only character given much in the way of nuance, all the other parts being too small to allow for performance to rise above Suzan Lori-Parks’s relatively aimless script. Holiday moves from one relationship with an abusive man to another, the most complicated being that with FBI agent Jimmy Fletcher (Moonlight’s Trevante Rhodes), the one you could argue was the least directly abusive but still doesn’t treat her right.

Fletcher, as it happens, is one of multiple supporting characters who are fictionalized. There’s nothing inherently bad about that, as it depends on how it’s done. For instance, The United States vs. Billie Holiday is also given a loose structure that barely holds together, wherein the story is told in flashback from a radio interview Holiday is giving to “Reginald Lord Devine,” also fictional, played by Leslie Jordan with a wig of curly white hair with so much body that at first I thought the character was supposed to be an old lady. The movie only returns to this interview so infrequently that you nearly forget that’s where we started, and it leaves you wondering why they bothered with the conceit at all.

The great Natasha Lyonne also appears as Tallulah Bankhead, with whom Holiday was romantically involved. Lyonne is only in a few scenes, and although I would not suggest that more white people need to be included in a Black person’s story, it seems odd to cast Lyonne in this part if her talents are just going to be underused. Someone else needs to give Natasha Lyonne better roles, in other movies. If nothing else, Daniels could have delved deeper into Holiday’s open bisexuality, as it exists here exclusively as yet another thing for the government to attempt using against her.

That said, The United States vs. Billie Holiday had every chance to be better, and it just overall slightly misses the mark. It tells a story that is too broad when so much of Billie Holiday’s story requires pointed focus, but at least it has a memorable performance at its center. Here’s hoping this jump starts Andra Day’s career, and she gets starring roles in better movies herself.

Just hearing her sing is the best thing.

Overall: B-

THE MAURITANIAN

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

The Mauritanian has the potential to enrage, for all the right reasons, and for some reason it refuses to go the distance, unfolding with a kind of caution that seems designed to placate viewers who might otherwise think it goes “too far.” And who needs that kind of blandness? There’s a lot of talent at play here, particularly onscreen, and somehow director Kevin Macdonald turns it into something that might be moderately impressive for a standard cable original movie, but falls short of meeting the standards of cinema.

Oh sure, I’m being a bit of a film snob about this. That doesn’t change how much better this movie could have been, yet doesn’t bother to be. It’s the true story of Mohamedou Ould Salahi, a Mauritanian man who was detained in his home country on suspicion of involvement in the 9/11 terrorist plots, and then held at Guantanamo Bay without charge for 14 years.

And this man’s story should infuriate anyone who claims to hold what are supposedly American ideals. Part of my disappointment with The Mauritanian is how little it actually leans into the outrageousness of his treatment—and, by extension, the treatment of countless other detainees in that facility. This film leans hard on this injustice, and offers a window into the unbelievable inhumanity of it. But, offering a window also counts as holding back, lest it make viewers too uncomfortable. I’m not saying a movie like this should subject us to overlong sequences of explicit torture, but it certainly shouldn’t coddle its audience with kid gloves either.

I spent most of my time watching this movie thinking one of two things. First, the dialogue and plotting are trite and contrived enough to be borderline insulting to its subjects, especially given the story it’s telling. Second, the horrors it touches on are widely known to be the tip of the iceberg, eliciting flashbacks to the fury unleashed by the George W. Bush administration. These are the things conveniently forgotten by those who blithely said “Bush doesn’t seem so bad now” after a Trump presidency. Specifically military policies under Bush were every bit as horrible as the worst things perpetrated by those working for Trump. And, by the way: it should not be ignored that Mohamedou was kept detained for another seven years after he won his case, thanks to appeal by the Obama administration.

The Mauritanian barely touches on these things, opting instead to focus on Mohamedou’s legal defense and telling one man’s story. That’s a respectable enough approach, when the movie isn’t too scared of truly challenging its viewers. The very subject here is challenging, so why be so tentative about getting to the heart of the matter?

If anything elevates The Mauritanian, it’s the performances. Tahar Rahim is excellent in the title role, making it almost possible to ignore the transparently formulaic nature of his lines. Jodie Foster is a welcome presence as his activist lawyer Nancy Hollander (also a real person); Benedict Cumberbatch is impressively Southern as prosecutor Stuart Couch; and Shailene Woodley is honestly somewhat wasted as Hollander’s assistant on the case. But, Rahim is easily the best thing in this movie, indicating a capacity for joy and passion even in the face of nearly hopeless circumstances—that being one thing the film has not contrived, as evidenced by footage of the real Mohamedou during the end credits.

I just wish the movie overall had more guts. It’s a strange irony for a movie whose characters are profiles in courage to have virtually none of its own. Mohamedou Ould Slahi published a best-selling memoir about his time at Guantanamo Bay, and there is little doubt that his own account was far more memorable to its audience than this movie could ever hope to be.

Get ready for moderate disappointment.

Overall: B-

FREAKY

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

Slasher movies and body-swap movies are both as old as time, it seems, at this point . . . or at least forty to fifty years. Psycho , arguably the grandfather to all slasher films, goes back to 1960 and has been imitated ad nauseam. The original Freaky Friday was released in 1976, was remade in 2003, has had a couple of TV iterations, and featured a concept either ripped off or cleverly tweaked in countless other movies. It would seem there’s nothing left to do with either of these genres.

Think again! Enter Freaky, which drops the second word of that original body-swap title and conveniently makes for a perfect slasher movie title mashup with the body swap concept. It’s almost surprising nobody thought of this sooner. And to be honest, that clever conceptual twist almost makes the movie worth watching on its own.

Even better are the two bodies that get swapped: a serial killer and a teenage girl in high school. To be frank, the script, by Michael Kennedy and Christopher Landon, leaves a lot to be desired. The opening sequence features shades of the original Scream, only without any of that movie’s satirical wit—we just see several teenagers get dispatched in semi-innovative ways by a giant brute in a mask. Here is villain name is coined “The Butcher,” and Christopher Landon, who also directs, goes out of his way to establish long-worn slasher movie tropes. It would work better if it had any satirical edge of its own, rather than playing as just as corny as any other subpar slasher movie.

What absolutely saves Freaky, then, is the inspired casting: Vince Vaughn, a truly giant and imposing man, as The Butcher—this guy may have an established record in comedy, but he easily slips into the role of the creep. (He played Norman Bates in the 1998 remake of Psycho, after all.) The thing is, if Vaughn stayed “The Butcher” for the entirety of this movie, it would be absolutely forgettable and easily written off. It’s when The Butcher stabs a high school girl with a cursed antique dagger and swaps bodies with her that he truly shines, with a flair of empathy for teenagers, never playing it campy, the ample humor all coming from the fish-out-of-water context.

Vaughn isn’t even the first grown man to play a teenage girl surprisingly well: Jack Black did it first in Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017). These are two very different teeange girls, though: like any category of human, they contain multitudes. Millie, for her part, is reserved and meek, still grieving the loss of her dad a year before—a plot device a little too heavy for a movie so otherwise enamored with ridiculously gruesome murders and gallows humor, but it serves as some approximation of a launching pad for Millie’s character development.

Millie, by the way, is played by Pokémon: Detective Pikachu’s Kathryn Newton, and I don’t want her to be completely overshadowed by Vince Vaughn (both literally and figuratively), as when she plays The Butcher, she is rather delightful in her own right. Millie is far less interesting when playing herself—the same being the case, of course, when Vaugh is The Butcher, who is just a raving psychopath who doesn’t get even a shred of his own backstory. That would detract from the novelty of the film’s concept, I guess? In any case, it’s when Vaughn plays Millie, and Newton plays The Butcher, that Freaky is fun as hell. Even the dialogue gets much better.

We’re also treated with a delicious supporting appearance by Alan Ruck, who plays a hardass teacher who is an asshole for no good reason (honestly, his behavior towards Millie strains believability). He really exists only to be a sacrifice to one of the film’s more entertainingly gruesome turns, and on that front he does not disappoint.

Millie also has two best friends, a Black girl and a gay white boy, Nyla and Josh (Misha Osherovich and Celeste O’conner), whose respective race and sexuality evidently only exist for Josh utter the honestly kind of hacky line, “You’re Black and I’m gay: we’re dead!” Still, they wind up sharing more screen time with Vince Vaughn than they do Kathryn Newton, and the juxtaposition never really gets old. In fact, Freaky doesn’t wast too much time before Millie convinces Nyla and Josh that it’s her inside that huge man’s body, albeit after a pretty funny scene where they quite understandably think he’s the town killer. The somewhat lame twist at the end is slightly closer to a waste of time, but still offers a satisfying conclusion for Millie.

The truth is, even though Freaky has a ton of potential it’s frankly just too lazy to realize, I still had a great time watching it. This movie still offers everything you’d want from either a slasher movie or a body swap movie, creating something novel and entertaining just by mashing them together. Both Vince Vaughn and Kathryn Newton give performances that are better than the movie deserves, and in so doing make it a fun couple of hours.

Some teenage girls, you have to watch your back.

Oerall: B

SUPERNOVA

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

There’s something pleasantly naturalistic about writer-director Harry Macqueen’s dialogue in Supernova—at least, until it turns inevitably heartbreaking. He immerses us into the decades-long relationship between Sam and Tusker (Colin Firth and Stalney Tucci), introducing us to them as they drive an RV through the beautiful English countryside, embarking on a sort of last-hurrah road trip. The first thing we see is them bickering like an old married couple—instantly reminding me of my own grandparents, who spent nearly two decades of their retirement traveling full-time with a travel trailer—because that is essentially what they are. And the things they talk about are very typical and trivial, but it’s so well written, and instantly gives us a sense of them as individuals, that it is both compelling and a kick to listen to. Again, just like it had been with my own grandparents.

Sam and Tusker do not have children, though, and thus no grandchildren either; they do have a preteen niece, who clearly looks up to them, whom we meet when they briefly visit the house of Sam’s sister (Pippa Haywood). They have a dog, who travels with them, and also a bit of am emotional albatross: they are taking this trip with the full knowledge that it will be their last while Tusker is fully lucid. Tusker has been diagnosed with early-onset dementia.

So yes, this is another one of those movies about an older couple dealing with memory loss. The key difference here is that the couple in question is gay, although that fact is almost entirely incidental to this story. And it is indeed heartening to see more movies about topics that are not inherently related to sexuality but the main characters just happen to be gay. It also helps that Firth and Tucci are very close friends, and though the actors are straight, their closeness almost certainly informs their performances.

The more pertinent difference between Supernova and other movies like it is how the entire story stays within the framework of the person losing his memory still having most of his memory. This is the story of a man who knows full well that his memory is slipping, and is tortured by it.

And Macqueen allows us to spend a lot of time with them before the the emotional turmoil becomes fully clear. This is an effective storytelling strategy, given how much fun it is to hang out with Sam and Tusker. Anyone would be so lucky to have them as their uncles—or brother and brother-in-law, or whatever. Supernova gives us a sense of what is getting lost, before the loss has fully occurred. This is very much a drama, and even a bit of a tearjerker by the end, but you’ll also get several good chuckles out of just hanging out with them for a while first.

A whole lot of the narrative follows them as they drive along English country roads, offering some beautiful cinematography, wide open spaces to contrast with the intimacy between Sam and Tusker. Not much in the way of sex per se, but with the exception of a surprise party sequence, the vast majority of Supernova is just these two main actors. And they carry the film with exemplary strength and sensitivity.

Things do take a slightly more dramatic turn in the end, but not enough to keep this film from succeeding as a quiet and moving meditation on love and loss, and particularly grieving someone who is not quite gone yet. Anyone who has dealt with dementia of any kind in their family can relate. Supernova might feel a bit to slight for some, but it had more than enough depth to keep me moved.

There but for the grace of stardust go I.

Overall: B+

I CARE A LOT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Overall: B

NOMADLAND

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

Why do I love Nomadland so much? It’s hard to say . . . and maybe it being hard to say is why I love it so much.

It’s hard not to love a movie that pushes the form into new territory, does something few, if any, other movies have done. The Harry Potter series followed along as a bunch of kids grew up, and also a bunch of adults got older, over some eleven years. Boyhood took the concept to a further extreme by having the cast meet a few days each year for twelve years, then edited the footage together to create a story for a single movie, in which we watch the characters age in real time. We could even bring in the MCU here, noting that Marvel managed to produce over twenty movies over just over a decade, which collectively tell a single, overall story.

Nomadland pushes the medium of film into new territory in both smaller and newer ways. Granted, it’s not unprecedented to blend real-life people into a fictionalized narrative (consider the excellent 2011 film Bernie, which tells a true story through interviews with real people who were there, but actors depicting the story they tell). Nomadland blends them in a uniquely seamless way, though, with the vast majority of the supporting characters being real-life nomads, essentially playing themselves: they all use their real first names in the film.

There’s an immersive element to Nomadland that is hard to shake, the fact that director Chloé Zhao and stars Frances McDormand and David Strathairn actually living in vans themselves during production. This approach clearly elevates the final product, in which it is impossible to tell how much is actually scripted. This is based on the 2017 book by Jessica Bruder, but the film’s production inserts itself into the lives of these so-called nomads as they actually exist. Many of them take periodic seasonal jobs in order to fund an otherwise incredibly minimalist life, including work at Amazon fulfillment centers. (Interesting that the film is not streaming on Prime Video, but rather on Hulu.)

There’s not much plot to speak of; Nomadland is instead much more of a portrait: of both an alternative way of life, and of a particular character. The woman Frances McDormand plays, Fern, is a childless widow who is from Empire, Nevada, a town which emptied after its lifeblood and main employer United States Gypsum closed down its mine in the wake of the Great Recession in 2011. This is the year in which Nomadland is set, with Zhao filming McDorman’s travels through seven states over several months.

I can’t help but wonder how much total footage Zhao got. The final result it superbly edited, beautifully shot, creating a portrait that is ultimately quite moving, offering an understanding of how people might choose to live this way. There is an anti-capitalist undertone to some of it, but mostly it’s just people living their lives with a kind of freedom most of us only dream of. McDormand embodies the role of Fern as well as any she’s ever done. Strathairn plays Dave as a man whose interest in Fern never quite moves into romantic territory—the only romance here is with the open road—and whose prioritization of nomadic life shifts along with his own familial relationships.

Zhao subtly illustrates how this life is not for everyone, but for some, it’s everything. For several, it’s a fitting last act to their life. Fern is a bit younger than a lot of them, and when she runs into certain people from Empire, they worry about her far more than they necessarily need to, thinking of her as “homeless” when that is not technically true. In the meantime, Fern learns many lessons in the ways of her new life, some as trial by fire, some as favors from the people she meets along the way.

There’s a hint of sweetness to the overall arc of Nomadland, as Zhao finds to need to find any of the nomads to be sinister or predatory. Instead, she finds a very cooperative society of travelers, each of them with their own story, none of them boring. The fact that almost all of them appear just as themselves means that there is no element of “Hollywood glamor” in any of these depictions, and McDormand fits right in among them. This is a woman who is the epitome of aging gracefully, a beacon of naturalistic beauty with no obsession over youth. Fern is just a woman who wants to move on, to keep moving on.

“See you down the road,” they say, as a means of never saying a final goodbye. It’s the basic vibe of Nomadland, and it’s the perfect sentiment with which to leave us.

It’s the journey . . . there is no destination.

Overall: A-

THE KID DETECTIVE

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

I suppose The Kid Detective is a textbook case of under-promising and over-delivering, conceptually speaking. Who’s going to have high expectations of a movie about a washed up thirtysomething private detective who used to charm his entire town with his mystery-solving as a kid? That gives it a relatively low bar from which to exceed expectations, but the competence with which this movie is written, directed and performed is objectively impressive.

Writer-director Evan Morgan, in his feature directorial debut, establishes a fairly quiet, mellow tone early on, which somehow makes the humor work perfectly. Morgan has his actors deliver their lines with a certain stoicism, which in someone else’s hands might give the film an air of self-conscious “quirkiness.” Maybe it’s that The Kid Detective is a Canadian film, but the tonal sensibility here is both incredibly endearing and almost relaxing. It got several good laughs out of me, particularly with surprisingly clever callbacks.

You could call this movie a “dark comedy,” but it has more depth and more heart than that might insinuate. Adam Brody is well cast in the title role, Abe Applebaum, a guy with a private investigator practice whose life seems to be going nowhere. He has a goth girl for a receptionist (Veep’s Sarah Sutherland) who answers an old-school telephone, even while everyone else uses smartphones. How the hell Abe can afford to pay her is anybody’s guess, but we’ll just let that one go.

When a teenage girl named Caroline (Sophie Nélisse) comes to him to help her solve the murder of her boyfriend, Abe sees it as a chance to both prove himself and redeem himself in the eyes of a town that lost faith in him. His childhood charms faded in their eyes after the still-unsolved kidnapping of a young girl devastated the town a couple decades before.

And this is what I love about The Kid Detective: none of the details are insignificant, and they always prove important, worthy of attention, because something about them will always resurface in relevance. This movie brings to mind the much flashier 2019 whodunnit Knives Out, where the mystery is the central aspect of the fun. To be fair, Knives Out is a much snappier affair, a slightly better film, albeit one with its own, very different sensibility. But Evan Morgan makes The Kid Detective very much its own film as well, the crime a bit darker but the humor a bit more subversive. And this movie has its own dramatic flairs as well, with a genuinely shocking turn near the end. The Kid Detective isn’t concerned so much with multiple suspects, so much as with Abe’s journey on a path to redemption. It even gets so serious in its final shot, with a sudden outpouring of emotion, I wasn’t quite sure what to do with it, and I can’t decide if it even fits with the tone of the rest of the film.

When taken as a whole, however, The Kid Detective has a subtly seductive power to it, with a unique skill in narrative plotting. The editing particularly impresses, with not a single moment wasted, and scenes ending in places that leave certain events to the imagination when other films would indulge needlessly. It has a unique economy of storytelling, where what gets left unseen is nevertheless crystal clear in our minds thanks to what we did see. The pacing is only deceptively measured, where there is very little action onscreen but the story still seems to zip right along.

As if it’s not enough that the well polished script brings all the story threads neatly together, The Kid Detective’s central mystery is its most satisfying part. Abe may have a knack for solving mysteries, and particularly predicting the end of mystery movies, but The Kid Detective offers us resolutions that make perfect sense but were impossible to see coming. It’s a dark journey that doubles as a chill ride.

It’s so much better than you might guess.

Overall: B+

JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH

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

It’s a rare thing when you can tell a film is of superior quality from the first frame, and Judas and the Black Messiah is one such example. I was unaware of director Shaka King before this, but you can bet I’ll be remembering that name, seeking out his other work, and looking forward to what he does in the future. That this is only his second feature film is a stunning accomplishment.

That it’s based on an incredible true story is just the jumping-off point. As with any mainstream American movie, certain artistic license is taken, such as characterizing FBI informant Bill O’Neal’s position in the Chicago chapter of the Black Panther Party as much more significant than it really was, or depicting his relationship with chapter Chairman Fred Hampton as much closer than it really was. These details are beside the point; a film’s purpose is to offer a narrative, and this one is a whopper. What remains a matter of historical record, and depicted accurately, is that O’Neal sold out Hampton to the feds, and it was ultimately tragic for everyone involved.

Which is to say, Judas and the Black Messiah is not a fun story. In fact, by the time it reaches its conclusion, the emotions it stirs are difficult to characterize. Shaka King is using this specific story to allude to a far bigger picture, a point in a vast history of a nation built on oppression. Some of the opening shots feature activist audio recordings offering a distinction between rioting and rebellion, which themselves offer some context to several scenes that come later in which Black Panther Party members find themselves in shootouts with police, where police and Black civilians alike are shown getting shot and in many cases killed. It would be a mistake to say this film is offering any defense of any of the violence shown—which, by the way, is uniformly, expertly staged—but rather, what inevitably happens in our communities when injustice is not just allowed to flourish, but actively tended.

And all that is merely the backdrop to a story in which the protagonist is arguably the villain. Shaka King won’t let us off quite that easily; there is too much nuance to any of these characters to put them in tidy slots like “bad guy” or “good guy.” The villain here, really, is white supremacy itself, and that’s what anyone paying any attention at all should take from this film. Bill O’Neal, played with career-best sensitivity by LaKeith Stanfield, is a man whose motives we can understand, if not condone. After being caught impersonating an FBI agent as a ruse to steal cars, the FBI itself recruits him to volunteer with the Black Panthers, and get close to Fred Hampton. His FBI contact is played by Jesse Plemons, who is proving time and time again that he fits perfectly not so much as a leading man, but as the kind of richly reliable character actor whose career will almost certain span decades.

Plemons is one of only two white supporting characters of particular note in this movie, the other being FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover himself, with Martin Sheen nearly disappearing into the small but memorable role. This is a pretty impressive feat given Sheen’s fame, and an incredible hair and makeup job.

Indeed, everything about the production of Judas and the Black Messiah is top-notch, and it’s easy to imagine Academy Award nominations in nearly every category. Daniel Kaluuya is incredible as Fred Hampton, aided in large part, as with every actor, by wonderful costume design and production design. Cinematography by Sean Bobbitt (The Place Beyond the Pines, 12 Years a Slave) is subtle and sleek. Kristan Sprague’s editing forms a polish of the narrative which is perfectly augmented by an original score with an uobtrustive yet infectious groove by Craig Harris and Mark Isham.

Miraculously, none of this gives the film any air of pretension. This is just storytelling at its finest, plain and simple: it offers endless fodder for discussion, perhaps even debate, but the history and politics are not what make it a great movie. It’s the drama itself, the journey of these two men, one who fatally betrayed the trust of the other. (Even the film’s title could not be more perfect.) Certainly the details create a rich tapestry that elevates the film, but it’s the simplicity of the central relationship that draws you in. Crucially, we are never given an easy answer as to whether O’Neal’s clear emotional turmoil has more to do with any feelings of guilt about his betrayal, or merely the increasingly hazardous position he’s put himself in.

To say that the struggles depicted here, and the endless conflicts between Black Americans and the police, are as relevant now as they ever were is an obvious understatement. Judas and the Black Messiah commands attention, not just because of its vital historical context, but because it is every bit as great an artistic achievement. It’s a triumph of cinema.

An incisive study of real-world betrayal.

Overall: A

GREENLAND

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

Strange direction I’m going in this week, moving from Little Fish to Greenland—in the world of cinema, moving from a disastrous global virus to a global cataclysm. At least in Little Fish everyone just loses their memory; in Greenland most of the world dies.

That’s no a spoiler, as it’s beside the point of Greenland—the title referring to the location of a deep-underground bunker used to save select humans from an extinction-level event. Shades of the 2009 movie 2012 there. The event here is a comet, a hunk of mass several miles wide headed straight for Earth, preceded by other meteorites of varying size, causing varying degrees of damage, including the wiping out of cities. In that sense, it’s an update on the 1998 film Armageddon. It’s just not dumb as shit.

Greenland might not quite qualify as “fun,” the way the similar blockbusters of two decades ago like Armageddon or Deep Impact (also 1998) were intended to be. This movie is much more unsettling in tone, a few steps closer to realism, the fiery hellscape falling from the sky more often in the background, a backdrop for the story of a couple and their young son trying to survive as the natural world is torn apart around them. Some of these scenes, as staged by director Ric Roman Waugh, brought to mind the panicked crowds featured in Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds (2005). Both films have a particular interest in the human effects of disaster, rather than in the shock and awe of the disaster itself.

And this means the actual imagery of meteorites hitting the earth, in Greenland, is used sparingly, and it is an effective tactic. This is clearly a film with a fraction of the budget of those earlier blockbusters; it was made with $35 million. But Waugh makes all of those dollars count, and when we do get brief shots of a fiery sky, or of molten meteorites raining down on a highway, it makes a longer lasting impact (no pun intended).

It’s a good thing, too, because to be frank, the Garrity family—John, Allison, and young Nathan—just isn’t that interesting. The “plot,” such as it is, still suffers in the same way plots in these movies always do: details shoehorned in to give us a select few characters to care about, who somehow beat the kind of odds that would never be beaten in a similar real-life scenario. John and Allison are estranged, with the most basic marital problems imaginable. Will disaster bring them closer together again? I’m on the edge of my seat! Young Nathan is a diabetic kid, and his need for regular medication is the inciting event that creates extra challenges, without which we would not have the slightest interest in following these characters through such extraordinary circumstances.

Now I’m going to bring up something that might put off some readers with its “wokeness,” and I don’t care! The couple is played by Gerard Butler and Morena Baccarin—both white. How is that relevant, you ask? Well, they live in Atlanta—a city that is 54% Black. If the main characters here were from, say, Seattle or Portland, then their being white would be pretty much expected, just in terms of odds. No doubt Greenland is largely set in Georgia because Atlanta is such a huge epicenter of movie and television production, but if the couple has to be white, the least writer Chris Sparling could do is make them interesting. I guarantee you that there are countless other Black couples in Atlanta whose stories moving through this landscape would be far more compelling. (To be fair, countless other white couples would also be far more interesting.) And it’s not just that the principal characters are white; it’s that combined with the fact that Black people even among supporting characters barely exist, and of course one of the two with speaking parts winds up dead. These are details that reveal the subtle effects of white supremacy, something the filmmakers probably didn’t even realize was at play, but they should be paying more deliberate attention. In Atlanta, of all places.

So, in short, Greenland is far from perfect. When is any disaster movie going to be? Flaws aside, there’s still something to be said for its tone and approach, almost procedural in its observance of people struggling to survive in lethal circumstances. I suppose whether that’s better or if it’s better for a disaster movie to be just fun, escapist entertainment is up for debate. I also gave 2012 a solid B, after all, and that movie was straight-up preposterous on every level. But, the movie still succeeded on its own terms, terms which were different than those at play here. Greenland may still be just another disaster movie, but it’s going for something different. In certain ways it succeeds within those parameters, and it certain ways it doesn’t. If you love the thrill of disaster onscreen, it does offer several effective doses of that particular fix.

Nice job dodging those plot holes!

Overall: B