MONOS

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

Do a Google Image search of the word monos, and you’ll get mostly a bunch of pictures of monkeys. It is the Spanish word for monkey, after all. It is also apparently slang for “cute,” often applied to kids — the way English speakers might affectionately call children “little monkeys.” One could argue, then, that the Colombian film Monos has a title that translate not so much to “monkeys” as to “cute kids.” This is a clear irony, as the kids in question are all teenagers on some unnamed Latin American mountaintop, holding an American prisoner of war (Julianne Nicholson, the only American actor in the cast, previously seen as Tonya Harding’s skating coach in I, Tonya).

Director and co-writer Alejandro Landes here presents a movie highly stylized, not so much in affect but in editing and cinematography. To my eyes it has shades of Terrence Malick, all visuals at the expense of a fully fleshed-out story, and yet, what a feast for the eyes it is. In the opening shot, this group of teenagers on a lush green mountaintop higher than the clouds, are playing a game of soccer with blindfolds on. There is a palpable sense of camaraderie among them, these teenage kids bound to each other through circumstances, overt military training, and other mysterious means. We never learn anything of their parents, where they come from, how they came to this place or this circumstance in their lives.

Several other critics have likened Monos to Apocalypse Now, and honestly, I don’t quite see it. I actually rewatched Apocalypse Now not long ago, and was stunned by the scope of its production, particularly for a film made in 1979. It is a vast, mesmerizing account of characters traversing the landscape of the Vietnam conflict. That is a film with a very specific point of view, which comes across with real clarity. I’m not sure the same could be said of Monos, which is almost pointedly coy about its point. And although it’s certainly impressive that Monos apparently found remote regions of Latin America that had never before been captured on film for a motion picture, that alone does not mean it matches a film like Apocalypse Now in terms of scope.

Others have compared Monos to Lord of the Flies, and that comparison makes much more sense to me, and was the only other work I thought about while watching this film. This is less a story about the hell of war than it is a story of adolescents embracing circumstantial independence to the point of abandoning any sense of morality. This is something Landes presents particularly well, getting well over half the movie before depicting behaviors that are jarringly callous.

The kids in this story are not given regular names, only the nicknames they all give each other: Rambo, Bigfoot, Swede, Smurf, Dog, Lady, Wolf, Boom Boom. Even the lady prisoner is only ever referred to as “Doctora” by the aforementioned hardened teen soldiers. By and large, they give solid performances, with the notable exception of “The Messenger,” the curiously short yet incredibly buff man who is apparently a sort of ambassador between these kids and an unnamed army fighting in an unclarified conflict. He is played by Wilson Salazar with consistently wooden indifference, even when he’s shouting. He plays a key role, though, as he “loans” a milk cow to this crew of kids, and the cow’s accidental death due to reckless shooting of machine guns into the fog is what sets the majority of this story in motion.

The doctor prisoner makes multiple attempts at escape from the group, as does one of the kids in the group, in both cases resulting in plot detours that get into the fatal senselessness of armed conflict. The kids’ base on the mountaintop is attacked at one point by unnamed soldiers, and the kids make it away alive; this is how the setting of Monos moves from the mountaintop, for maybe half the story, to a thick jungle area along a river. In both cases the landscape is always stunning, making for reliably gorgeous settings for occasional horrors. There is a helicopter ride at the end over a massive city we can only assume is Bogotá, the fifth-largest megacity in South America.

I’m not really sure what Monos actually has to say, what its definitive point of view is, beyond perhaps the tragedy of ease in corruptibility, particularly of youth. Landes leaves out a lot of pertinent information, presumably with the intent of the viewer grappling with questions on their own. This approach sometimes works, and sometimes it doesn’t. Here, I guess, it sort of works. I was engaged in the film from start to finish, and found it intellectually stimulating in the moment. Aside from now well shot it is, however, I’m not sure it will stay with me for a particularly long time. That, if nothing else, certainly separates it from a class of movie like Apocalypse Now, or a class of literature like Lord of the Flies. This movie borrows ideas from both, yet lacks the precision of theme and clarity of either.

They all do bad things, even the doctor prisoner.

JUDY

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

When I first saw Bradley Cooper’s A Star Is Born nearly a year ago, I expressed appreciation for how pleasantly surprised I was by how it made me feel seen, as a gay man. The film featured drag queens and gay characters fairly prominently, and it felt very much like a nod to the gay fans of the woman who first made the title role so famous: Judy Garland. She didn’t originate the role, nor was she anywhere near the last one to play it, but she certainly made it hers: if Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz were not her most iconic role, her role in the musical version of A Star Is Born would be.

It’s odd, then, that Judy, the new biopic directed by Rupert Goold and starring Renée Zellweger, never once mentions it. There are several references to The Wizard of Oz, and it ends with a wrenchingly emotional rendition of “Over the Rainbow.” Judy is a bit uneven overall, but one thing it does quite memorably well is the same thing last year’s A Star Is Born did: it goes out of its way to acknowledge how much Judy Garland meant to gay people.

This is not something biopics of this sort did much of fifteen or twenty years ago, and it’s a nice change. A Beautiful Mind making no reference to John Nash’s homosexuality is just one example. Filmmakers at the time stated they opted not to mention it because they feared viewers would make the wrong connection between Nash’s sexuality and his schizophrenia, but it feels likely that if the film were made today, they would have found a respectful way to fully represent the man. And here, with Judy, Garland isn’t presented as at all queer. But her decades-long status as a gay icon is certainly recognized.

It’s not just a passing reference, either. Judy is set during the last year or two of Judy Garland’s life, with occasional flashbacks to her teenage years as a budding superstar treated so horribly by the studio that they are essentially blamed for her addiction to pills. In this final stage of her shortened life and career, she is desperate to make a living, has a terrible reputation as an unreliable performer, and she moves temporarily to London for an extended residency. Her star has faded enough by this point that she only has two fans waiting for her out the side stage door, and they are a middle-aged late-sixties gay couple, who have been buying tickets to every night’s performance — something Judy notices. In one extended sequence, she invites them out to dinner, and, being too late for anything to be open, they invite her for eggs at their place. They bond over being lonely, misunderstood, emotionally isolated people. It sounds like something so easily corny, but I was deeply moved by it.

In fact, I was so moved by Zelleger’s career-high performance — if she’s not nominated for an Academy Award it will be a miscarriage of justice — it was relatively easy for me to overlook the fact that her singing, while perfectly decent, does nothing to illustrate what a uniquely powerhouse voice Judy Garland had. Granted, this is at the end of her life, she’s two years past a suicide attempt that damaged her voice, and she refuses even to rehearse; it would make sense her voice is not at its peak ability.

That said, it’s a curiously long time before any singing is heard at all, and it’s only ever heard by the elder version of Judy. The teen Judy, played otherwise competently by newcomer Darci Shaw, is never heard or seen singing at all, and her youth is the period in which he voice catapulted her to stardom. Although no modern singer could ever match the unparalleled cadence of Judy Garland’s voice, this still feels like a bit of a travesty. How is anyone watching this film supposed to understand and properly contextualize this woman’s life story without ever hearing her voice at its peak? With the right skill and finesse, even lip syncing to Judy’s real voice could have worked. It certainly would have lent this film greater weight. As it is, her enduring status as an icon as presented here feels a tad too abstract, and that’s a pity. This is a woman whose voice made her, and in a biopic about her, we never actually hear it.

So really, Judy relies heavily on aging movie-goers who still have a working memory of when Judy Garland was still alive, or at least have working memories of when her movies and music outlasted her for decades in cultural impact. In that context, the movie still works surprisingly well, avoiding the typical trap of trying to cram a person’s life into two hours and instead mostly focusing on just a couple of years. The editing keeps it at a brisk pace without ever feeling rushed, because this story is focused on the end of a fading megastar.

And most importantly, Renée Zellweger sells it. Some have called her performance “a gimmick,” but that’s now how I saw it at all. This is a woman with a distinctive look, easily recognizable in nearly all her roles, and she disappears completely in this movie, totally transforming into Judy Garland. Seeing clips taken out of context may make it seem odd or idiosyncratic, but Zellweger embodies her wholly as a character, giving her wide ranging dimension. I totally forgot the actor I was looking at, and completely bought her as Judy. How else could the moment where it reaches “Over the Rainbow” be so emotionally affecting? I was nearly as moved by that as I was by the earlier scene with the gay couple, and all she was doing was singing a song. I made a mistake not bringing tissues.

Judy is an imperfect but effectively respectful portrait of an icon, without ever even representing when she was at the top. All we ever see is the beginning of her rise, or the end of her wane, and still it paints a complete picture, and it’s one worth considering.

No, we won’t forget you, Judy.

Overall: B+

OFFICIAL SECRETS

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

“Official Secrets” might seem like a rather bland and generic title for a movie, but as it turns out there is a good reason for it: the United Kingdom’s Official Secrets Act of 1989, which one Katharine Gun was nearly charged of violating in 2004. She leaked a memo that proved the United States and British governments were lying about the legality of the Iraq War.

Gun is played here by Keira Knightley, in a rather unusual role for her: relatively contemporary (okay, fifteen years ago), playing a government agent, by some measures a spy. It’s a story, as directed by Gavin Hood — who brought us the surprisingly gripping and provocative Eye in the Sky in 2016 — filled with international intrigue, and, as they say, “based on true events.”

As a fictionalized account of a true story, however, Official Secrets transparently traffics in embellishments, relying on dramatization that feels suspect when considering whether things really played out the way they’re depicted. A near-miss with the government’s attempt to deport Gun’s Muslim immigrant husband Yasar (Adam Bakri), for example, where Katharine intercepts him just in time at the airport. It’s those kinds of shameless “Hollywood-izing” of the story that temps one to roll the eyes.

Storytelling contrivances notwithstanding, Official Secrets is strikingly engrossing for a movie that’s ultimately just about a leaked memo. With shades of All The President’s Men — complete with a character actually referencing “Deep Throat” — a copy of the document exchanges hands in an underground parking garage. Once the press runs with the information, Gavin Hood’s direction very effectively conveys the weight of risk Gun put herself in. Based on nothing more than her own integrity and principles, she put her own livelihood, her own marriage, ultimately the fate of her entire life on the line.

The gravity of her choices are easily felt, particularly at simple but fateful moments when Gun chooses to confess at her office rather than subject her colleagues to intimidating interrogations, or when she risks prison by deciding she’ll plead Not Guilty because she simply feels it’s the right thing to do.

Official Secrets features several other well-known British actors, almost to the point of distraction: Matt Smith as reporter Martin Bright; Matthew Goode and Rhys Ifans as newsroom colleagues of wildly different demeanor; Ralph Fiennes as Katharine’s defense lawyer — who spends a little too much time just giving her admiring looks from opposite ends of tables. Fiennes is capable of both great acting and phoned-in acting, and here it’s the latter.

Luckily the same could not be said of the rest of the cast, who are generally convincing and engaging, especially Knightley, who usually feels much more at home in period costume dramas. And although she and her gorgeous husband are typical examples of regular people being played in movies by impossibly beautiful people, Knightley remains convincing as an otherwise average citizen who finds herself in extraordinary circumstances and still makes the difficult choice to do what’s right. This movie is quite clearly on her side, and rightly so.

It’s a fascinating exercise to observe the stories contextualized in world events of two decades past, and consider how they inform how the world got to where it is today. Official Secrets simultaneously references broadly dubious government lawmaking (and lawbreaking) and narrows it down to an individual level in a satisfyingly effective, if moderately contrived, way. Honestly, most people with any interest in being both illuminated and entertained by a movie about the consequences of government whistleblowing will not likely be compelled to nitpick about such things as plot contrivances. They’ll just plain enjoy this movie.

Some things are quite literally on the nose.

Overall: B+

AD ASTRA

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

I kind of lost my patience with the pretensions Ad Astra from the very start. That very title, in Latin, translates in English to To the Stars. There is no reason to use the Latin title other than to put on airs that it’s a higher-minded movie than it really is.

And even before that title card appears, we are informed this is the “near future.” in a “time of hope and conflict.” In other words, the story begins by oversimplifying global complexities with overused science fiction buzz words and platitudes. What follows is set in a universe that features lived-in settlements and stations by multiple nations on both the moon and Mars. There is no universe in which such things are in the “near future,” unless we’re considering what will be decades away, at best, the “near future.”

Okay, so I’m nitpicking. It’s just a movie. Except it never feels like Ad Astra regards itself as “just a movie.” It is technically very well executed, beautifully shot, with universally convincing special effects which serve the story rather than the other way around. It’s all done, though, as a sort of meditative exercise, Brad Pitt as the astronaut Roy McBride on a classified mission to save the world from mysterious power surges wreaking havoc around the globe. His destination is an outpost at the edge of the solar system, where Roy’s revered astronaut father H. Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones) has long been thought to have died.

And in the end, Ad Astra is far more concerned with this father-son relationship than it is with any clarity regarding these “surges” being traced from that outpost. I spent a lot of time wanting more information about that, and the final cut of the film is even less forthcoming than the trailer was. The trailer features a clip not actually in the movie, of Liv Tyler as Eve, talking to Roy in a hospital bed, about “the surge” and how crazy things are everywhere. Director and co-writer James Gray (The Lost City of Z) can’t be bothered to give any tangible sense of that apparent chaos, save for a couple brief news clips detailing the tens of thousands dead as a result.

Instead, the focus stays exclusively on Roy, and his unique ability to remain calm in any and all situations, and the shock of discovering his father is thought to be alive after all. Ad Astra then becomes a relatively quiet account of his journey, making his way from Earth to the moon, then on to Mars, then on to the research outpost by Jupiter. Nearly every other character exists only on part of his journey, such as Donald Sutherland as his escort to the moon, or Ruth Negga as the woman who assists him on Mars. Even Tommy Lee Jones’s screen time is surprisingly limited in the end, with very little opportunity for much in the way of acting. Liv Tyler is particularly underused, almost to the point of being wasted, existing almost exclusively in fleeting moments on things like saved video clips Eve once sent to Roy on his missions.

Broadly speaking, Ad Astra has nothing new to say, and not a whole lot new to show us. It does have a couple of memorable action set pieces for a movie in which not much else actually happens, including a dangerous chase scene on the surface of the moon, and another fairly frightening sequence with escaped lab monkeys. In the end, though, this movie is short of substance.

Damn is it beautiful to look at, though. If you can appreciate such things as well-executed visual effects and cinematography on their own merits, then those things will make up for a lot. In other words, I can only imagine recommending this movie to others based on conditional criteria. That would include perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of the movie: Brad Pitt. As an actor, Pitt has never turned in a more affecting, nuanced performance, and an Academy Award nomination would be well deserved. It is a tragedy that his personal towering achievement should get lost in something otherwise so forgettable and thematically muddled.

Ad Astra is all over the place, in terms of quality. Some viewers may find some of it dull, but I did not — I was engaged from start to finish, albeit with several moments that encourage a bit of eye-rolling. I did not find this movie particularly believable on the science fiction side of it, none of which is necessary for a story about an abandoned son searching for his father. Unless, I suppose, the expanse of the solar system is needed as a metaphor for the emotional distance between them.

Hey did anybody see Stanley Kubrick walk through here?

Overall: B

RAISE HELL: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF MOLLY IVINS

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

I spent much of my time watching this documentary film Raise Hell wondering how the hell I got this far not having any idea who apparently legendary journalist Molly Ivins was. But then I figured it out: I was near and into my forties before I even started paying much attention to national figures of her sort, much less ones from and so intrinsically tied to places like Texas. Sure, I spent the Bush years actively loathing him and his administration, but not only did I not have any idea who he was when he was governor of Texas (which was during my early twenties, blissfully ignorant of local politics across the nation), but I certainly had no working knowledge of any journalists making a name for themselves covering him.

I merely turned 30 in 2006; Molly Ivins died after a seven-year battle with breast cancer in early 2007, at the age of 62. Thirteen years later, this film by Janice Engel (director and co-writer) so effectively illustrates Ivins’s trailblazing legacy, stretching all the way from the seventies to the 2000s, it makes you wish you could have known her. Or in my case, at least have known of her. Ivins was the best kind of liberal: the kind that blossomed out of a deeply conservative region, only to stay there and challenge establishment politics. Also she was hilarious.

Something Ivins is shown saying several times in the mass of archival footage in this film: there is actually no such thing as “journalistic objectivity,” so why put on airs that it exists? This notion really hit me where I live, even just as an amateur movie reviewer. I don’t particularly think of myself as a journalist, and Raise Hell has no part of it that even makes reference to the entertainment industry. Still it brought to mind the great Roger Ebert, whose movie reviews I grew to love, whose reviews I still regularly look up, and whose opinions of current movies I often wish I could have known. I used to struggle to present “objective” observations (a preposterous notion for the likes of reviews which are by definition opinions), painstakingly avoiding “I statements” — until I noticed Roger Ebert using “I” a lot in his reviews. I finally decided, fuck it, I’m just going to write out what I think, how I feel most comfortable doing it. It’s safe to say now his writing influenced me far more than that of any other writer.

I get the feeling Molly Ivins’s writing would have had a similar impact, had I ever known about it and spent any time reading it. I may yet seek out some of her books, although their of-the-moment subject matter is bound to be dated. To be fair, she hit her stride in the eighties and nineties, when I was but a child and a teenager, at a time when only the most ambitious of young people were paying attention to national, let alone regional affairs. Still, Raise Hell: The Life and Times of Molly Ivins left a sense that I really missed out on something.

Besides that, Engel gets deeper into Ivins’s story than just her career and professional legacy, which certainly still deserves examination. Unlike the otherwise wonderful documentary about Linda Ronstadt I saw the other day, which keeps its focus almost entirely on her career, Raise Hell gets at least a little personal: her fraught relationship growing up with her far-right dad; her surprising shyness in the face of increasing national fame; her dual fights with cancer and with alcoholism.

Most importantly, Ivins was funny, and she used her humor as a clever, subversive weapon, first skewering the Texas State Legislature and later politicians nationwide — Republican and Democrat alike. Clearly beloved by other journalists, we are treated to fairly fawning interviews with the likes of Dan Rather and Rachel Maddow, among others. Raise Hell is also replete with fantastic archival footage of interviews with Ivans and of speeches she gave to various audiences over the years, some of them with very degraded video quality but all of them packed with often hysterical witticisms. It’s not often a biographical documentary makes you laugh this much.

I do also love it when presented with an example of someone who defies stereotypes, and that certainly includes a Southern intellectual who wears her East Texas accent proudly. Ivins spent a few years in other areas of the country, including an education in Massachusetts at Smith College, where people heard her speak and immediately assumed she was not quite as smart as everyone around her. Anyone underestimating this woman did so at their peril, however, and it was not long before her intellect proved itself within moments of her opening her mouth — or running her fingers along a keyboard. Suffice it to say, Molly Ivins was a delight ended far too soon, as is this movie.

If you have to be around anyone raising hell, make sure it’s someone like this woman.

Overall: B+

Advance: DOWNTON ABBEY

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

If you’ve never bothered with the original PBS series Downton Abbey that aired six seasons between 2011 and 2016, is there much to interest you in the 2019 motion picture Downton Abbey? Honestly, probably not. It’s difficult to imagine diving headfirst into this film without the context of the show’s history, although presumably it would still be amusing enough. It could not possibly, however, have the lasting power of films like Robert Altman’s self-contained Gosford Park, which was not beholden to any preexisting intellectual property.

Both films do star Maggie Smith, though, and when is she not a delight to see? Never! And if you might wonder then if you have bothered with the series, and loved it, is there any reason to see this movie, the best response to that might be . . . “duh.” The film, directed by series director Michael Engler and written by series creator and writer Julian Fellowes (who, incidentally, also wrote 2001’s Gosford Park), hardly stands as a towering cinematic achievement. What it does is offer fans a familiar and beloved world in which to wrap themselves once again, a blanket of cozy, idealized nostalgia.

The entire cast returns for the film, too numerous to name in full, no particular one a standout because they are uniformly lovely, each with their own distinct personalities. The one particularly notable addition to the cast is the wonderful Imelda Staunton, as Violet Crawley’s cousin returned for a sort of showdown regarding family inheritance. The slight surprise is that, as performers, there’s not a lot in the way of delicious tension between these two, or at least nothing that can compare to the continued “frenemy” dynamic between Lady Crawley and Penelope Wilton’s Isobel Merton. The other notable new character is Tuppence Middleton as Lucy, cousin Maud’s maid, and she is . . . fine.

So what of the plot, then? The trailer made it abundantly clear that this return to the Crawley’s world centers around an overnight visit by England’s King and Queen in 1927, but otherwise it’s basically the same wonderful, upper-crust soap opera Downton Abbey always was. There is an amusing, if somewhat corny, subplot regarding a rivalry between Downton’s servant staff and the snobby royal staff insisting they’ll be taking over completely for the duration of their stay. And there are the requisite indicators of a changing world, such as the sudden but brief discovery by Thomas Barrow (Robert James-Collier) of an underground gay club.

There are numerous other subplots involving plenty of characters both upstairs and downstairs, some of which work better than others, and some that feel only slightly shoehorned into the film’s efficiently packed 122-minute run time. The tidy resolution of pretty much all of them by the end of the film makes it feel a lot like an extended episode of TV you just happen to be watching in a movie theatre, but who cares?

At least the producers of the movie are given the chance to show off with a budget far higher than they were ever afforded for television, although cinematographer Ben Smithard is a tad enamored with his crane shots and drone shots, particularly of the exterior of the castle. In other words, Downtown Abbey the film is basically precisely more of the very same as the TV show that preceded it, just slightly more grand. It will be a predictable delight to those who already love it, and perhaps pleasantly bemuse those who don’t.

Pointed cattiness disguised in polite society is exactly what you came for, isn’t it?

Overall: B

LINDA RONSTADT: THE SOUND OF MY VOICE

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

Linda Ronstadt is one of my few gaping cultural blind spots. I was born in 1976, in the middle of her initial run of five consecutive platinum albums, a first ever for a female singer. But, most the first decade or so of my life, I was not allowed to watch TV or listen to anything but Christian music. My first-ever exposure to Ronstadt was her operatic performance in the filmed version of The Pirates of Penzance — probably a decade after it was first released in 1983. I certainly had no idea she had been such a huge pop star immediately preceding that venture, much less that it was her first major musical departure after massive success.

The documentary Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice very effectively fills in all those gaps. It’s the kind of film that is illuminating to younger people not as familiar with the singer and her body of work, and is a pretty fantastic nostalgia trip for those who are. God knows she is clearly beloved in the music industry, given the head-spinning list of huge names and stars procured by co-directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman for interviews: Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, Don Henley, Aaron Neville, David Geffen.

This film does little in the way of plumbing the depths of who Linda Ronstadt really was and is as a person, but with a subtitle like The Sound of My Voice, it could hardly be accused of false advertising. Even if you aren’t that familiar with Ronstadt, if you have any musical ability or interest, you’ll want to be after seeing this. This woman was far removed from the stereotypically vapid pop star. She churned out eight hit albums over a decade, got tired of playing arenas with terrible acoustics, and then managed surprise hits with different genres at every turn. Three consecutive albums of traditional and jazz standards arranged by Nelson Riddle. Two country album collaborations as a trio with Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris. Three collections of old Mexican standards her father used to sing, the first of which, Canciones de Mi Padre (1987), remains the best-selling non-English language album in American history. The list goes on.

And, much like discovering the incomparable voice of Judy Garland for the first time, The Sound of My Voice illustrates what a vocal powerhouse Linda Ronstadt was. Her talents were eclectic in a way never really seen in anyone else, certainly not to the same level of success in every seemingly left-turn venture. She also comes across as incredibly intelligent, a woman who knows herself, if strangely insecure about her own voice in the earliest years of her career.

Be warned, however: this movie has a truly bittersweet element to it. Ronstadt has not performed a concert since 2009, because so much of her former vocal ability has been lost as she lives with Parkinson’s Disease. Although tons of archival footage and recordings are included, only a few minutes of present-day footage of Ronstadt is included here, although her current-day voice narrates much of the film. Her clearly significant involvement, or at least cooperation, makes for an “authorized biography” feel that rarely makes the film anything less than fawning, and that does strip it a little of what feels like potential substance. One wonders if how little present-day footage is included has to do with some embarrassment or vanity on her part.

It certainly needn’t be that way. At the very end is a bit of a treat, although it is both moving and heartbreaking: what might very well be the last-ever recording of Linda Ronstadt singing. She’s in her Mexican living room, harmonizing with her cousin and her nephew. The powerhouse strength of her voice is completely gone, but it’s a lovely thing to see and to hear all the same.

Ronstadt was never a songwriter, but she amassed a history of taking other people’s songs, by artists more than willing to lend them to her, making them her own, and turning them into much bigger hits. What Whitney Houston did for Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You” is what Linda Ronstadt did for countless other people’s songs. She has an unparalleled, earnest and pure talent, leaving a legacy worth examining, which this movie does with finesse.

You’ll love hearing it.

Overall: B+

HUSTLERS

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

Husters isn’t going to change the world, but it is a product of a changing world, in all the best ways. Never before has there been a movie about strippers that treats those women with such respect, or given them this much agency, or certainly afforded them this many dimensions. In the end this is a story about otherwise good people getting sucked into doing very bad things, and those things don’t particularly have anything to do with them being strippers. The stripper part is incidental, and just happens to have also been the case with the real life women whose story this film was inspired by.

It can’t be overstated how significant this is, a total lack of shame when it comes to stripping as a profession, and that is meant in the best sense. Not one character in this film berates or belittles any of these women for what they do for a living. This is a profession about which these women have a great deal of pride, and rightfully so, as they have the skill to match. Ditto all the women who play them. Jennifer Lopez gets an entrance, an actor who is fifty years old playing presumably slightly younger, in which she does a pole dance. The whole sequence is spectacular, incredibly well shot, and a jaw dropping performance by Lopez.

Lopez’s character, Romana, is raising a daughter. The father is evidently out of the picture, and we never learn anything about him. We don’t need to. This isn’t his story. The central character, Destiny (Constance Wu, holding her own), also has a child, and that baby’s father gets a bit of screen time, until Destiny is single again. Destiny takes care of her grandmother (Wai Ching Ho), and although it is never made explicitly clear that Grandma knows how Destiny makes her living, neither does it seem to be a secret. There is one scene in which Destiny has left stripping for a while to raise her little girl, and when she’s in an interview discussing her resume, I really expected this to be the predictable moment when some other character — also a woman — looks down her nose at her. Granted, Destiny says twice that what she did at these establishments was “Bar tending, mostly,” but it’s still clear what kind of places they are. But the issue that holds Destiny back is not judgment but something a lot more boring: a lack of retail experience.

And for the record, if there is any one thing that Hustlers is not, it’s not boring. These are empowered women in an ensemble cast telling a seamless story that has no need to point out or underscore how empowered they are. “Show don’t tell,” as they say, and writer-director Lorene Scafaria has it down. We even get delightful bit parts by the likes of Cardi B. and Lizzo among the strippers, and a maternal figure among club staff (they literally all call her “Mom”) played by Mercedes Ruehl. These are all confident women who know who they are and are great at what they do.

If anything is a little bit disappointing, it is the muted use of the great Julia Stiles, her third billing a surprise given how small her part is, as the journalist interviewing Destiny as Destiny tells their story. Sure, her part is essential and it may simply be that Stiles wanted to be part of a movie this great, but she still deserves better. She gets no scenery to chew.

That is left mostly to Jennifer Lopez, and it must be said: the buzz is justified, as is the talk of an Oscar nomination. Scafaria has crafted a film, in fact, worthy of nominations in several categories, particularly — and this is an unusual thing for me to notice — sound editing. Those sorts of nominations tend to go to flashier films with lots of explosions, but effectively subtle work can be just as important.

And Lopez pulls off a neat trick here, being a character who is anything but subtle, but giving a fairly restrained performance, all things considered. Ramona is basically the ring leader of a group of criminals, who spent several years effectively roofie-ing filthy rich Wall Street guys and then robbing them blind. This is their story, and it’s a lot more nuanced than it would be in many other hands, particularly those of a lot of male directors. It’s notable that Hustlers is infused with sexuality yet has not one actual sex scene, and while it’s wall to wall with female sexiness, there isn’t much female nudity either. The most gratuitous nude scene involves a man given too much of their amateur blend of drugs and has to be rushed to a hospital. It’s not especially sexy. Parts of it, in fact, are funny, as is the case with the movie overall.

And Stiles, as the reporter, kind of serves as an expected audience stand-in when she assures Destiny in the middle of their interview, “I don’t feel sorry for these guys.” Destiny replies immediately, “I do feel sorry for them,” and understanding why is Lorene Scafaria’s achievement. This is a group of women impossible to see as villains, even as though do objectively villainous things. Just because Wall Street players got away with vast financial crimes in the wake of (and which largely caused) the Great Recession of the late 2000s doesn’t mean these women should get away with something like this. Destiny’s guilt about it is appropriate, as is her guilt about how things went down in the end between her and Ramona, who offered her a kind of sincere support she never found anywhere else.

None of this is simple, except perhaps for a few of Scafaria’s plot contrivances. But even those contrivances make for a better movie — this is not a documentary, after all. You won’t leave Hustlers feeling like you witnessed perfection, but you will feel you witnessed something different and great, the best version of what it can be.

They’re sexy and they know it and that’s beside the point.

Overall: B+

TIGERS ARE NOT AFRAID

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

The original, Spanish title for the Mexican film Tigers Are Not Afraid was Vuelven, which translates to They Come Back. This feels a bit like an American marketing tactic to obscure how grim this story really is, and instead focus on fierce bravery. Never mind the fact that said bravery is among children orphaned by Mexican drug cartels and living on the streets of city neighborhoods turned into ghost towns.

To call this movie “haunting” is an understatement, and I mean that as a compliment. It didn’t even occur to me until it was over that this can fit comfortably within the horror genre, albeit a sort of fantastical version of it. This is the kind of movie Guillermo del Toro should be aspiring to. But instead of a twisted love story set in a dark fantasy world, this is a dark fantasy that reflects a profoundly bleak reality.

Clocking in at a brisk 83 minutes, writer-director Issa López gets right to the point, opening in a classroom where the children are tasked with writing a fairy tale — which Tigers Are Not Afraid then becomes. Gunfire is heard outside and the students and the teacher all get on the floor. The teacher hands Estrella (Paola Lara) three pieces of chalk and declares them three wishes. When Estrella’s mother later disappears at the hands of local drug lords and she makes a wish for her mother to come back, the wish comes true, but not quite in the way she wanted.

There are shades of the W.W. Jacobs short story The Monkey’s Paw here, although it remains to be seen whether Issa López is even familiar with it. López isn’t offering any lesson about interfering with fate. There is an altogether different purpose to the dead returning to 10-year-old Estrella (hence the Spanish title). Some viewers may want to brace themselves for the stark turns this story takes, with death being a constant reality for all involved, including the gang of children at the center of the proceedings. In one case, a child’s stuffed tiger returns along with him, now alive and apparently here to help, a strangely comforting presence with its regular purring under perilous circumstances.

The apparently supernatural elements of Tigers Are Not Afraid are used with subtlety and sparingly, which is a big part of what gives it a uniquely hypnotic power. These kids are on their own in mostly empty neighborhoods, scavenging for food and hiding from unscrupulous murderers, much of the time in once-grand abandoned buildings. And then wall graffiti of a tiger might suddenly be animated, or a bat-sized dragon might fly out of a cell phone. A thin line of blood slowly flows in straight lines around indoor spaces toward characters in fatal danger. In any case, it is all shot with stark, often beautiful precision. The kids, all of them amateurs with no prior acting experience, have a peculiarly raw screen presence.

The drug lords who are after them are given no real story of their own, beyond them looking for the cell phone stolen by the kid gang’s de facto leader, Shine (Juan Ramón López). There is no background there, and otherwise no real backstory for the kids either, except that they have all been orphaned by the drug war. All of that is besides the point, given how present these kids always have to be in the here and now. It was hard not to think about this when the gang buries one of their own, how as far as the rest of the world is concerned, that kid may as well have never existed. Who will remember him now? These kids live in functionally post-apocalyptic circumstances. Consider the many kids in other parts of the world for whom that is their lived reality.

Spoiler alert, there are no happy endings here, not really. Tigers Are Not Afraid offers a fantasy world in which a few select villains reap what they sow, but at a terrible cost, and if you think about it, the world they leave behind remains unchanged. The upside is merely the power of storytelling, giving lost children a voice. Issa López is certainly a distinctive voice in cinema, someone whose work I hope we see more of. It’s not often someone can lure me in with what essentially amounts to ghosts and zombies, but they feel different because their use and function are so imbued with meaning, however despairing it may be,

Benevolent undead stuffed tigers are certainly not afraid.

BRITTANY RUNS A MARATHON

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

Brittany Runs a Marathon has something to say, and it might be better than anything said in any other movie I’ve seen this year. At the very least, it has something new to say, something far too many people still need to learn. You don’t just have to learn how to be nice to people. You should also learn how to let people be nice to you. As Brittany’s brother-in-law who also doubled as a father figure tells her, if someone offers you support, you should accept it.

That might seem like an oversimplified platitude, but it’s astonishing how many people actively reject such a notion. It’s a sinister form of insecurity, where it’s an easy conviction to care for others, but impossible to accept the care of others. That would require a fully realized self-worth, to recognize that you deserve it, just as much as anyone you care about does.

That is, essentially, the journey Brittany (Jillian Bell) takes, in the process of getting her unraveling late-twenties life together. Given the wise advice of starting with “small steps,” Brittany gets into running by first achieving the goal of running to the end of the block. This blossoms into a borderline obsession with training well enough to run the New York City Marathon.

She meets people and develops relationships along the way, dismissing their gestures of kindness at every turn, always convinced she is being pitied or judged or both. Her upstairs neighbor (Michaela Watkins). The similarly struggling runner she connects with (Micah Stock). The “nighttime” guy at the house where she’s dog sitting (Utkarsh Ambudkar), with whom she has immediate sexual chemistry. Brittany even makes misguided assumptions about her roommate (Alice Lee), who actually has very similar insecurities of her own, just borne of different sources. These are all people with their own problems.

In other words, everyone is fucked up; Brittany is just too self-involved to see it — an ironic element typical of insecurity. As the whole of the story in Brittany Runs a Marathon unfolded, I found myself increasingly thinking it should be required viewing, for everyone really, but especially for those suffering debilitating insecurities — this movie could be their Bible. It could have been my Bible, twenty years ago. Would it have opened my mind at all about such things had I seen it then, I wonder?

I rather wish writer-director Paul Downs Colaizzo better fleshed out Brittany’s relationships with all these friends she makes, especially with Seth the gay running buddy. Still, the more I think about this movie, the more I decide I love it, and it’s uniquely inspired message. I love the idea of saying “You’re worth it!” as opposed to just “You should be better!”, which is the message of most “feel-good” movies. This is a feel-good movie unlike any other, with plenty of painfully awkward moments, such as when a self-loathing Brittany at a particularly low point manages to shame an overweight woman at a family birthday party.

That particular scene is inspired in its own way too, as it keeps Brittany Runs a Marathon from just being about a young woman who “sees the light” and loses fifty pounds. Colaizzo also takes care to show us another woman who, while freely admitting to her own pain and struggles, also happens to have worked to overcome such challenges and finding happiness without it hinging on weight loss. Because the “power of weight loss” is not what this movie is about; it’s simply about getting your shit together. And, of course, seeing your own value.

And in the end, once Brittany actually runs the New York City Marathon (which was shot during the real race in 2017, itself a uniquely impressive technical achievement), Colaizzo’s film, inspired by a similar real-life story of his roommate of the same name, proves to be so moving, you’re going to want to have plenty of tissues handy. The trailers for Brittany Runs a Marathon are slightly misleading in their characterization of the film as a straight-up comedy; Brittany is a very funny woman, to be sure — something she often uses as a defense mechanism. But this movie is more of a dramedy, and one that very much succeeds on its own terms. Anyone quickly dismissive of it needs to check their own cynicism, because this movie has no time for it, which makes it a breath of fresh air.

Finding your self worth is worth the effort!

Overall: A-