PROBLEMISTA

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

Problemista is a kind of movie that takes some time to win you over. I spent the first several scenes unable to decide how I felt about it, as a young El Salvadorian immigrant named Alejandro (Julio Torres) found himself in the tentative employ of a manically eccentric art dealer named Elizabeth (Tilda Swinton), in the desperate hope of getting a work sponsorship so he won’t be deported.

If Tilda Swinton can be relied on for anything, it’s that she’ll play a part wildly different from any other part she’s ever played. She practically invented “disappearing into a role,” and it’s almost like magic how you instantly forget it’s her you’re even looking at. Here, she wholly embodies Elizabeth and her high strung emotional distractions, to a degree that she is genuinely annoying, and when another character says to Alejandro, “I don’t know how you put up with her,” you’re already wondering the same thing. The even more impressive magic trick is how, by the end of Problemista, you are emotionally invested in Elizabeth in spite of all this.

Swinton is the perfectly cast actor who is just the right size star for this size of a movie, but it’s even more important that we discuss Julio Torres, who not only plays the lead part in this movie, but he also wrote and directed it. I was not very familiar with Torres before seeing this movie, but have heard of some of his other projects: Los Espookys, the Spanish-language comedy on HBO; My Favorite Shapes, his comedy special on the same channel. This guy has been around a few years—and he is nothing at all like Alejandro in Problemista.

It would seem that Julio Torres and Tilda Swinton are a match made in oddball heaven. They have wildly different energies, and yet they have chemistry. Alejandro is very mild-mannered and struggles to assert himself; Elizabeth is oppressively assertive. She never quite crosses over into bitch territory, though; all it takes to rein her in is someone who knows how to speak to her in just the right way.

Here’s my one major note for Torres. The way Alejandro walks is . . . a choice. A rather baffling one, honestly: he moseys forward with something between a shuffle and a hop, little tiny almost-bounces with each step. What the hell is that about? Torres’s performance is stellar otherwise, but having Alejandro walk everywhere in this manner was legitimately distracting.

Problemista is clearly intended as both a charmer and a comedy. and although I got a few legitimate chuckles out of it, it’s much more the former than the latter. There are production design choices that contribute to this, little fantasy vignettes casting Elizabeth as a monster and Alejandro as a hero in a fairy tale for him to conquer, both of them wearing decidedly low-rent costumes. It’s like Problemista is actively trying to charm us by calling out its own low budget—and somehow, it succeeds.

Granted, some things in Problemista work better than others. Rza as Bobby, Elizabeth’s cryogenically frozen artist husband whose painting subjects are exclusively eggs draped with different colored cloths (depending on the painting), isn’t quite as indelible a performance. In fact, I wasn’t super keen on the whole “FreezeCorp” thing where that’s how Elizabeth and Alejandro meet, where Alejandro loses his latest desperate attempt at employment. On the other hand, it does create a setup for the swing at the very end that pays off rather amusingly.

I suppose that’s the best phrase for this movie: rather amusing. Not hilarious, not dramatic (Elizabeth’s theatrics notwithstanding), not particularly moving—but rather amusing. It’s also a singular vision, I’ll give it that much. And sometimes a rather amusing, singular vision is all we need.

A diaspora of people exceeding the expectations of the small world they inhabit.

Overall: B

LOVE LIES BLEEDING

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

As 21st-century noirs go, Love Lies Bleeding is pretty great—until it takes an inexplicably wild swing at the end. I would recommend this film, but I would have to warn you about that at the same time. I won’t spoil what happens, except to say it’s somewhat debatable whether what happens is something we are meant to believe is actually happening, or if it’s a character fantasy. I am not averse to wild swings as a concept, mind you; I just want them to be clear in their purpose or what they represent, which is really lacking here—in spite of several allusions to it earlier in the film, which only make at least that much sense in retrospect. Without the wild turn at the end, I might have felt confident that this could be one of the year’s best movies.

It could be argued that, so far at least, it still is. There’s a lot of far worse stuff out there, after all. It’s just that there’s a sequence of maybe five minutes in this movie that really straddles the line between subversive and bafflingly weird.

All that aside, Love Lies Bleeding is a dark, twisted, violent, lesbian romance thriller that is absolutely worth a look. It’s beautifully shot in New Mexico, starting with an opening shot that we only realize well into the story later was the camera lifting out of a ravine that plays into the plot. And it’s edited with a unique sort of precision, moving the plot forward without any excess bloat while keeping the pace at a steady clip. Best of all, it’s exceptionally well cast, with Kristen Stewart as gym manager Lou, who falls for mysterious body builder Jackie, played actual body builder Katy O'Brian, wandering in from out of town. They both get increasingly mixed up with Lou’s gun range owner and insect enthusiast dad Lou Sr (Ed Harris, with both his telltale bald head and a ring of hair that is nuts-long, and somehow it fits the character.)

We learn early on that Lou doesn’t speak to her father, and one of many refreshing elements of Love Lies Bleeding is that this estrangement has nothing to do with Lou’s sexuality—evidently he couldn’t give half a shit about that. I expected some kind of cathartic confrontation between Lou and her father by the end, but much of the story goes by without giving a sense of any catharsis coming with an earned payoff. This is where director and co-writer Rose Glass’s expert construction of the story comes in, because eventually we get just enough revealed about Lou’s dark history with her father, and we understand perfectly why she doesn’t speak to him.

In the meantime, both Lou and Jackie find themselves suffering the consequences of impulsive, violent mistakes. It should be noted that, in at least two scenes, something pretty gruesome occurs. In the first, we see the same shockingly horrid wound so many times, it begins to feel like Rose Glass is toying with us. She’s certainly having fun with this movie: the comic moments are few and far between, but when they do come, they are pretty hilarious.

And that’s the bottom line with Love Lies Bleeding: this is a postmodern take on film noir, with its own sensibility, in a world that is dark and dangerous and yet you love being witness to it. It takes a brief detour into “Wait, what?” territory that I could have lived without—but then immediately reeled me right back in with one final bit of humor, and then a bit of interpretive dance over the end credits. You kind of have to be there. Just because it isn’t perfect doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go there.

I don’t know if you’ll root for them exactly but you’ll still want to know where they’re going.

Overall: B+

ONE LIFE

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

More than eighty years on, with a seemingly infinite amount of books and movies and television shows produced about the Second World War, it’s easy to forget the stunning breadth of that global conflict. The holocaust, Hiroshima, Nagasaki—these are the most enduring symbols of World War, and they are really just the tip of the iceberg. Will we ever run out of new stories to tell about that period of history? Just last year, Oppenheimer asked us to consider the horrors we unleashed upon the Japanese, while also imagining where we would be had the Nazis managed to split the atom first.

And yet, there remain countless, only seemingly smaller stories left untold, a whole lot of them coming from places outside the locations that dominate typical World War II narratives, such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, or Japan. The many places affected by both Japanese and German expansionism of the time are just as worth considering.

And that brings us, now, to One Life, a new film based on the amazing accomplishments of Sir Nicholas Winton (a wonderful Anthony Hopkins). Winton, a man of Jewish descent and son of immigrant parents who fled the Germany of World War I, traveled to Prague in late 1938 with the intent of assisting humanitarian efforts with refugees there. He led the impossible task of compiling lists of refugee children, most of them Jewish, getting them British visas with the help of his mother (played by Helena Bonham-Carter), lining up British foster parents to take the children in, and transporting them from Prague to London by train.

One Life focuses largely on Winton’s humility, cutting back and forth between Hopkins’s version in the late eighties, and the younger version working tirelessly on this project in 1938 and 1939, much of it later focused on logistics and paperwork back in the UK. The younger Winton is played by Johnny Flynn, exceptionally well cast as a man you could easily believe as a younger Anthony Hopkins. Hopkins, for his part, spends the first half or so of the film milling about his home, cleaning out his clutter, trying to come up with a use for a decades-old scrapbook of all these children, and otherwise just contemplating his past.

Winton’s stunning feat was saving 669 children from almost certain death; Germany invaded Czechoslovakia as expected, and rounded up virtually all of the parents of these children and sent them to concentration camps—the small number of survivors amounted to about a third the number of children Winton and his cohorts saved. This all went mostly unknown until Winton went looking for a place to conserve his scrapbook, and then a usually-silly British television program called That’s Life! picked up the story in the late eighties, reintroduced him to dozens of the former children he saved, and had the British press celebrating him as the “British Schindler.”

That phrase never actually gets used in One Life, somewhat wisely, despite the obvious parallels. The key difference is that Winton was among people who saw what was coming very early on, and took action immediately. All these children boarded trains, saying goodbye to their parents with the idea that they would return to them once it was safe to do so. There are many scenes of goodbyes on departing trains, and it’s impossible not to think about how this was actually the last time these kids ever saw their families. One Life is a somewhat unusual World War II movie in that it shows very little in the way of the grotesque violence of war—but is steeped in the widely understood expectation that it is coming. This was a time of panic, which those who kept their heads had to leverage into organized action.

The trailer to One Life gives way too much of it away, but doesn’t take away the effects of those later scenes that are sure to get the tears flowing. Anthony Hopkins is 86 years old, still working, and I watched this movie thinking about what a treasure he is—he was already 53 when he became truly famous as a deliciously wicked cannibal in The Silence of the Lambs, as iconic a role as there could ever be, and still has since embodied a stunning array of characters since. More often than not anymore, he plays a sweet old man, and Nicholas Winton would have to be in the hall of fame of such characters. Hopkins evidently really loves to work, because he’s been in plenty of films that aren’t as great as others, but he offers a performance here that is really worth a look, especially in the second half, when Winton shifts from silent rumination to getting caught up in the world’s discovery of his stunningly accomplished past.

As with any story like this, there is always the reminder of the far larger number of people who could not be saved than the number who could. In this case, just as the Nazis were arriving in Czechoslovakia, the last train was stopped, and more than a hundred children who were loaded on it did not get to leave. Winton never knew what became of them, but it’s easy to imagine. This is how we keep hope alive, however, by focusing on the 669 children he did help save, and the large number of them reunited with him 40 years later. It’s very difficult to watch those reunion scenes without weeping, and taking away from this movie the notion of hope and perseverance in the face of unimaginable horrors. Some people break through, and so does this movie.

Anthony Hopkins is a the top of his game leading yet another untold story deserving of remembrance.

Overall: B+

ARTHUR THE KING

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

I’m just going to level with you right out of the gate: if you love dogs and you like movies about dogs, regardless of the countless number of them already made, then you are going to love Arthur the King. That’s really all you need to know.

Well, except perhaps that the titular dog does not factor much into the story here, until maybe a third of the way in. That said, this is actually one of several elements that made Arthur the King a better moviegoing experience than I was necessarily expecting—full disclosure, this isn’t usually my kind of movie, but I agreed to see it with a friend precisely because I knew how much she loves dogs. As long as the reviews did not indicate it was terrible, I would go. In the end the reviews are decidedly mixed, and yet I would argue the movie is better than that might seen to suggest.

Based on a true story, this is the tale of a stray dog who bonds with Michael (Mark Wahlberg), well into his final stint captaining an adventure racing team through The Dominican Republic in 2018. The man Michael is based on is Swedish athlete Mikael Lindnord, but for the purposes of this film they made the protagonist an American. I guess Wahlberg isn’t exactly known for his accent work. Still, they pretty effectively diversified the rest of Michael’s four-person racing team: Simu Liu as Leo, an Instagram-star athlete who posted a viral photo of his and Michael’s failure at the 2015 race; Palestinian actor Ali Suliman as Chik, the team navigator who actually does speak with an accent; and Nathalie Emmanuel as Olivia, an expert climber. In addition to this team, and sporadic appearances by other team competitors, the narrative occasionally cuts back to Juliet Rylance as Helen, Michael’s wife back home in Colorado, showing their little girl his racing progress online.

Maybe just slightly less often, the narrative cuts back to the dog who will be later named Arthur, struggling as a stray on the streets of Santo Domingo. Michael and his team are resting at one of the race’s transfer points when Michael notices the dog, sitting quietly a few feet away. Michael feeds him one of the meatballs from a meal pack, and they move on. The story of the race moves on as well, and the dog catches up with them again 3 days and 200 miles later. From then on, Arthur the King becomes the movie about an adventure racing team and the dog who basically invited himself to become their fifth member.

Naturally we wonder how much of what happened in this movie actually happened in real life, but I’m not sure how much that matters. Only occasionally do director Simon Cellan Jones and adapting writer Michael Brandt (based on Mikael Lindnord’s book, Arthur - The Dog Who Crossed the Jungle to Find a Home) into obvious Hollywood-movie territory, amping up the herorics or the plight of that dog we can’t help but root for.

But here’s where Arthur the King actually won me over: the production values are much higher than we usually get with a movie like this. There’s a great sequence, before Arthur even becomes a significant part of the narrative, with the team crossing a ravine on a zipline with bikes hung off their backs, and one of them gets stuck in the middle. The sequence is exceptionally well shot, offering just the right amount of suspense, and is a big part of giving us reason to be invested in all the human characters as opposed to just the dog. Wahlberg, for his part, gives a pretty basic, serviceable performance, and the actors around him—including the dog—help elevate how they play as a group.

It would seem that “adventure racing” involves many different types of racing activity, from hiking to cycling to kayaking, and between how well the diverse terrain they’re crossing is shot, and how well the parallel narratives of the racers and the dog are edited, until their stories become one, Arthur the King actually works out to a pretty solid entertainment.

You’ll be on the edge of your seat, you’ll cry, you’ll be emotionally manipulated and you’ll love it.

Overall: B+

BAD RIVER

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

When you hear the name “Bad River Band,” if you have no association or history with Native Americans (like me), you might easily mistake it for a classic rock band. Except this is Bad, not Little River Band, and it’s “Bad River” as in Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. Today I learned that a “band” is a smaller group, of varying size, within a tribe—and, there seems to be a whole lot of nuance to this, and how it is defined, that requires a breadth of understanding that certainly surpasses the parameters of a movie review.

Suffice it to say that Bad River Band is a very organized group in Wisconsin, with their own U.S. government website, detailing both their status as a federally recognized tribe of the Ojibwe (as they are mostly known in Canada) or Chippewa (as they are mostly known in the U.S.), and their long fight against “Line 5,” an oil pipeline by Canadian company Enbridge, which runs oil through much of the U.S. around the Great Lakes. This includes Minnesota, both the Lower and Upper Peninsulas of Michigan, and Wisconsin, although “Line 5” specifically refers to its route from Superior, Wisconsin (at the westernmost point of Lake Superior), under the Straits of Mackinac (the narrow waterway separating Lake Michigan and Lake Huron), then through Michigan’s Lower Peninsula to oil refineries in Sarnia, Ontario. Specifically for the purposes of this documentary feature film, Bad River, it runs straight through the Bad River Reservation, which is located in Northern Wisconsin on the southwestern shores of Lake Superior.

There is indeed a literal river of the same name in this location, through which Line 5 runs, threatening an inevitable oil spill, the alteration of the river’s route, and then spilling its contamination into Lake Superior. You can read a three-page handout online about Bad River’s lawsuit against Enbridge over Line 5, which, honestly, might do a better job at spreading awareness of this clearly vital issue, than this serviceable documentary feature about it will. It can be argued that documentaries have greater reach than, say, printed materials, but how many of you have even heard of this film? Well, all of you reading this have now, but that’s not going to put much of a bump in the number of people who watch the movie. It helps spread awareness, at least.

And sometimes there’s just an unfortunate difference in the presentation of urgent information in print versus a visual medium. For much of Bad River the film, I failed to connect, not because of the content but because of its presentation: rapid-fire editing meant to seem “snappy” but coming across as rushed; drone shots of Bad River with quick fast-forward zooms. It felt a little too much like I was watching a standard-issue reality show like The Bachelor or Below Deck, which felt a little incongruous.

Much of Bad River quite rightly focuses on centuries of Native American resistance, but specifically contextualized in the history of Bad River Band, including the all-too common stories of genocide and forced assimilation into Christian culture, including literally stealing children and placing them into Catholic schools, where they were often horribly abused. I’m not proud to admit that I found myself thinking: we know this history already, have been told about it many times, what’s different about this story? But, then I caught myself: the fact that these shameful histories bear repeating never diminishes, and serves as a reminder of the generational trauma that undergirds their resistance today. Side note: this is a great example of how Canada, often lionized as the country with a greater moral compass than the U.S., has a history no better than ours when it comes to this stuff—and they are just a callous in their treatment of Indigenous peoples today, if it serves such interests as a corporation’s bottom line.

A very large number of Bad River Band people are interviewed for this film, which greatly personalizes it, on both a collective and individual level. By the end, I did find myself deeply moved, with this film’s novel approach to closing scenes: we see each person’s answer to the question of what they would say to their descendants, many generations from now. The answers vary greatly but have a common through line of love and hope, and if you look at it from the point of view of those descendants they’re speaking to, it’s a literalization of being spoken to by your ancestors. I can’t deny a pretty cynical outlook, myself—both the U.S. and Canada’s histories of relations with Indigenous people, clear to the present day, doesn’t exactly bode well. But that doesn’t lessen the need for resistance, and if nothing else, this film is but one example of a multi-pronged, years-long strategy.

There’s a lot here worth protecting.

Overall: B

THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF MAGICAL NEGROES

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

There were multiple ironies to my experience watching The American Society of Magical Negroes, starting with the fact that the theater I went to see it at started to show the wrong film at first. After deeply confusing those of us in the audience with this very film’s trailer playing amongst all the others before the feature started, they then played American Fiction—a vastly superior film in every way imaginable.

Eventually, once the correct film was playing, after some time I registered another irony. This is a film about Black people whose literally magical job is to ease the discomfort of White people. And this film is so blandly inoffensive, with a premise with great potential to be effectively biting, it plays as though the movie itself exists to ease the discomfort of White viewers.

On the one hand, The American Society of Magical Negroes just can’t win. It triggers the Fox News set by quite directly suggesting the most dangerous animal on the planet is “White people.” Then it rankles leftists by having its Black protagonist risk everything by falling in love with a White woman. (Sort of. We’ll get back to that.)

And here is where we get into the fundamental difference between The American Society of Magical Negroes and American Fiction. American Fiction didn’t give any of its White characters a pass. This movie, by contrast, wants us to think it’s highlighting the absurdity of the myth of the “Magical Negro,” and then gives its White characters a pass at every turn. There’s an impassioned speech near the end, delivered by Justice Smith as Aren, a new recruit for the Society of the film’s title, explaining to his coworker Jason (Drew Tarver) what it’s like for him to live in this country as a Black person. And—spoiler alert!—a minor light goes on in Jason’s head, showing a definitively contrived, if small, step toward White understanding. Except to present all this in the context of literal fantasy genre filmmaking rather undermines the message we’re meant to get from this movie.

This is a film of endlessly missed opportunities. It doesn’t even play with the concept of a “Magical Negro” as a historic stereotype specifically in literature, cinema, and television, where Black supporting characters reliably come to the aid of White main characters. Instead, while trying to convince us it’s using the concept subversively, it’s just continuing the tradition of its use. The only difference is that now, the protagonist of the film is the Black supporting character, and the White main characters are its target audience. The oddest thing about this movie is that it’s like a low-rent Harry Potter but with an undercooked premise and a lead actor who is actually more charismatic and talented than Daniel Radcliffe.

Because this is the one major strength of The American Society of Magical Negroes: the winning cast. Justice Smith embodies his character wonderfully, playing both awkward and increasingly confident with equal skill. David Alan Grier exudes warmth as Aren’s mentor, and Michaela Watkins is a welcome presence, if relatively inconsequential, as his boss. An-Li Bogan has great chemistry with Smith as the love interest for whom Aren ultimately risks everything. The story here rather lacks focus and suffers from uneven tonality, but the cast alone makes up for a lot, and together make this movie watchable, if ultimately forgettable.

A particularly curious element of this film is the multiracial ethnicities of both its protagonist and his love interest. Aren even mentions at one point that his mother was White, yet never offers any clarity on what must be unique to that experience, distinct from either being White or having two Black parents. Lizzie is briefly referred to as “ethnic” but never clarified beyond that—evidently we are to understand that, as a matter of fact, she is not a White woman. At least not fully: she’s Asian and White. But, given that Jason makes a comment about not realizing she’s “ethnic,” it would seem she’s “White enough.”

It may be that I’m splitting hairs here, and overdoing the parsing of ethnic heritage in characters—except that this movie is quite literally asking for it. It seems to give White women a pass in particular, in the end offering Lizzie a last-minute “twist” that underlines the role of women in society as “supportive wives and girlfriends.” This is incongruously problematic on its own, as it creates a a false equivalency between the otherwise very real struggles of women, including White women—something that has its place in film for sure, just not this one and not in this way—and Black people experiencing racism.

The American Society of Magical Negroes has some genuine charms (including Nicole Byer as the Society’s president), but it ultimately fails at what it aims to be, and struggles to clarify its point of view. Everything it aspires to, American Fiction achieves with ingenious finesse. I recommend you just watch that movie instead.

We’re meant to learn how White people are more dangerous than sharks, except this movie has no bite.

Overall: B-

ANSELM

Directing: C+
Cinematography: B+
Editing: C+
Music: B

It’s not often that the experience of a film so closely resembles getting a dose of chloroform. I suppose that’s hyperbole, but I was certainly sedated. I truly could not keep myself awake during Anselm.

Art is subjective, right? I hesitate to say this makes Anselm a bad movie. And there were moments, when I managed to stay awake, that I was genuinely astonished and amazed. Anselm Kiefer, a German painter and sculptor who is now 79 years old, is seen in this film working on many of his countless works of art—this guy is incredibly prolific. And makes tactile, three-dimensional pieces on canvases so huge, often twice his height and double again the width, that countless of his pieces are seen, both stored and in progress, in a gigantic warehouse. He gets around the space riding on a bicycle.

In one sequence, Kiefer is seen melting metals down into liquids, then pouring it from a bucket—using a pulley system operated from a safe distance—directly onto a canvas lying flat on the floor. It’s genuinely fascinating, and makes you yearn to find the finished piece, wherever it is now, and touch it. In fact, Kiefer evidently has so many pieces in a quasi-abstract style that is very much my jam, I would be first in line to an exhibit were I to find out there was one near me. Seeing the art in person, I am sure, would be very stimulating indeed, on both visual and tactile levels.

Which is all to say, I don’t think my response to the film Ansel has anything to do with Ansel Kiefer at all. Rather, it has to do with the film’s director Wim Wenders, who once made a name for himself with eighties films like Paris, Texas and Wings of Desire. And, to be fair, the critical consensus with Anselm is very high praise indeed—and I don’t begrudge anyone responding to this film in such a way. Still, I have to speak my truth, and my truth is that this movie literally sedated me.

It’s not like I was operating on lack of sleep or anything. I was perfectly alert before going into the theater, and woke right up when the movie ended (when I was also relieved it was over). There’s something about the smooth, gliding movements of the camera as it passes through Kiefer’s works of art, alternating between a soothing, quiet score, and much longer shots of total silence. It’s the visual equivalent of being rocked to sleep.

The theater where I saw this movie, at 7:30 on a Friday night, was surprisingly full, and I found myself looking around to see if I could get any sense of how the rest of the audience was reacting to it. I couldn’t tell if anyone else was nodding off, but it did strike me that I could not hear anyone eating popcorn. It did feel like, in one way or another, the rest of the audience was also being put under some kind of spell.

It should be noted, also, that Anselm is being presented in 3D. I feel compelled to mention the 2012 documentary Pina, featuring dance tributes to German choreographer Pina Bausch. That film was also presented in 3D, the first documentary feature I had ever seen in that format, and I was truly blown away by it, completely held in its thrall. I actually came to Anselm with Pina very much in mind, thinking: if a documentary must be presented in 3D, an examination of art is the way to do it. How much closer can you get to feeling like you’re in the same room with it, without actually being there?

The stark difference really comes down to tone. Pina was a film of action, a kind of documented series of interpretive dances. Anselm, by contrast, is a visual catalog of stationery objects. I don’t dislike museums, but they do have a tendency to tire me out surprisingly quickly; I get fatigued, as though all that art has tested the limits of my brain function. This was essentially my response to Anselm, just much more severe. I hadn’t been this powerless to sleep since I was anesthetized for a colonoscopy.

My best theory is that it simply had to do with the environmental context: a movie that lulled me to sleep, the 3D format giving it a heightened realism, in a very dark movie theater. I suspect this film, ironically, might be more effective seen in 2D at home. If nothing else, it introduced me to an artist I had never heard of, whose art itself I actually love.

I didn’t actually want to take a nap, I swear!

Overall, what I actually saw: B-