HOUSE OF GUCCI

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

There’s a lot to say about House of Gucci, but why don’t we start with the accents? Director Ridley Scott casting American actors to play real-life Italian characters who speak English but with a thick “Italian” accent is . . . a choice. There’s a reason many people discussing this film make reference to Chef Boyardee: because it isn’t far off the mark.

That said, for the most part, somehow, I felt it worked. With one notable exception, the principal parts are well cast, particularly Lady Gaga as Patrizia Gucci. Lady Gaga is the biggest surprise of the movie in that she’s not only the central character, but she’s the best thing in it. Furthermore, even with their adopted Italian accents, neither she nor Adam Driver as Maurizio Gucci are over the top about it.

The thing is, the trailers for House of Gucci made it look rather like a lot of this story is played for laughs, and when you watch the movie, you see that was clearly not Ridley Scott’s intention. This is a straight up drama, with just a couple of mildly amusing moments, none of them tied to over the top performances.

Misleading marketing aside, Scott’s problem isn’t tone so much as it’s overindulgence. Now, I don’t mind a long movie so long as it can justify its own length—Ridley Scott’s other movie this year, The Last Duel, released only a month and a half ago, managed it. (It was also a massive flop at the box office, but that’s a separate conversation.) House of Gucci dwells far too long on the early stages of Patrizia and Maurizio’s relationship, as Patrizia quite pointedly inserts herself into his life. Very little of it is necessary to the motion picture version of this story; half an hour could have been cut and it would still be 128 minutes long—still too long.

So now let’s talk about Jared Leto, who plays Maurizio’s cousin Paolo. Everything about his part in this movie is mystifying to me. He’s under a ton of makeup and prosthetics, to make him look like a frumpy middle-aged man. Note to Hollywood: there are plenty of talented actors who are already frumpy and middle-aged, famous ones even! Leto’s presence is one of the most pointless examples of stunt casting I have ever seen, and to top it off, his performance is the worst in the film. He really takes that “Chef Boyardee” accent and runs with it—to the point that it’s like he’s in a different movie. There’s a point of consistency to be made as well, as both Jeremy Irons as Maurizio’s father Rodolpho Gucci, and Al Pacino as Paolo’s father Aldo Gucci, occasionally drop their accents altogether. That’s far less distracting than Leto’s mystifyingly exaggerated performance.

In spite of all this, I found myself surprisingly engaged by the story in House of Gucci, which is based on true events I knew nothing about. So, even though I knew Patrizia arranged to have Maurizio murdered, I had no idea whether she succeeded. I became invested in what the outcome would be, even though the central character is a manipulative and overbearing woman, which, let’s be honest, isn’t the best. I may not be that pleased with how Patrizia is written, but that doesn’t lessen Lady Gaga’s embodiment of the role, which does a better job of showcasing her acting talents than A Star Is Born did (even though that movie was far better).

I just wish the movie weren’t so long, or that Ridley Scott had his actors deliver the lines straight, in their native accents. We see plenty movies about characters in other countries who speak English with American accents and we accept it just fine; in fact it feels far more natural than this. Truth be told, this story would have been far better served as told by an Italian director, using Italian actors, speaking in their native language, and Americans can just read subtitles. The final product given to us by Scott winds up coming across as less authentic than just about any other choice that could have been made.

House of Gucci is still fairly entertaining, mind you. It just would have been a lot more so with some major tightening up and a few more sensible choices in its execution. I would suggest that someone should reign in Ridley Scott’s worst impulses, but the man is 84 years old. On the one hand, that makes it incredible what kind of work he’s still doing. It also means it’s more impressive than it would be if he were half his age, and not riding on the legacy of several earlier masterworks to which this movie can’t even compare.

Overall: B-

KING RICHARD

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

This year’s movie for everyone has arrived. King Richard has no particular niche audience, unless you want to include antiracists—and there are some strong elements of such struggles in the story of Serena and Venus Williams, their father Richard, and their family. The key difference with this movie, though, is that unlike movies like Radio or The Blnd Side, King Richard not only doesn’t centralize its white characters, it was also directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green, who is Black.

Full disclosure: the script was written by Zach Baylin, a white guy who is also, oddly, working on the script for Creed III. That one he is evidently co-writing with a Black man (Keenan Coogler), and even in the case of King Richard films are always a collaborative effort and Green would have been the boss, but still. In cases like this I always wonder, could they not have found a qualified Black writer to tell a story from their own community? This all feels like King Richard as an example of Hollywood moving in the right direction, but still in the middle of many steps needed to be taken.

All that said, when it comes to the finished product, and its potential to reach wide-ranging audiences, King Richard is wildly successful. It’s a story easy to lose yourself in, from the very start, about parents Richard and Brandy Williams raising five girls and cultivating master tennis players in two of them, Serena and Venus. I don’t even think of “sports movies” as a go-to genre for me, and even I was powerless to its infectious spirit. This will be the perfect movie for the whole family to sit down and watch over Thanksgiving—I saw it in the theater, but it’s also currently streaming on HBO Max.

There’s a lot of talk about an Oscar nomination for Will Smith as the title character, and rightfully so. It would be his third nomination, and it’s easy to imagine it becoming his first win, barring another performance coming out of left field int he Oscar race (always a possibility). If he won this award, I would be happy for him. If he doesn’t get nominated, it will be a genuine shock.

No other performance here is likely to get a nomination, unless perhaps if it sweeps a bunch of categories, in which case there’s a slight possibility for Aunjanue Ellis, as Richard’s wife, Brandy. Ellis is very understated in the role but no less skilled, and her performance has a lot more time to stew on the margins of the first half of the film, while the focus is so much more on Richard. Still, Ellis does get a speech that would be perfect for an Oscars clip.

Most importantly, Saniyya Sidney is excellent as tennis prodigy Venus Williams, as is Demi Singleton as her sister Serena. The historical record already shows that Serena ultimately became the greatest tennis player ever, but King Richard focuses a bit more on Venus, largely because she was a year older, broke through critical barriers first, and the story of this film in particular is about Richard as their father most of all (hence the title). One might wonder why the movie is more about their dad than about the tennis players themselves, but the movie itself answers that question: they got to where they are because of him.

And Richard Williams was clearly a complex man, something Will Smith plays with careful precision. He’s imperfect, sometimes overbearing, and even as a parent incredibly supportive of his daughters’ sport interests, insisted that their education and well-being come first. He ruffled feathers by saying other kids’ parents should be shot, but we all know what kind of parents of kids in sports he’s talking about, and it’s hard to disagree. The man took big swings and big risks which, in the context of this film anyway, we always part of his grand, master plan. And, it would seem, his calculated risks paid off.

That, really, is the arc of the story in King Richard: seeing his risks pay off. And these are not risks that put his daughters in danger, quite the opposite: while “experts” tell him he’s likely throwing his daughters’ future away by refusing to allow them to go pro until he feels they are ready, he holds them back from that until he’s confident they won’t break under pressure or burn out, while still keeping their grades up. And after a somewhat forced break from competition, we get a climactic tennis match that does not go quite the way most such climaxes of sports movies go, and yet it’s still as riveting as the best of them, and it still ends with the expected emotional triumph.

King Richard is at once a very conventionally made sports movie, and an example of a unique kind of cinematic uplift. The only thing that seemed to be missing, for me, was exactly how Richard got to be so obsessive about cultivating greatness in his daughters as tennis players. We hear a brief reference to him and Brandy having been athletes themselves, but by the start of this story—the opening sequence, in fact—Richard is already hustling for sponsorships, and working his kids so hard that he and his wife get grief about it from their neighbor across the street.

What still sticks in the memory, though, is the love Richard has for his daughters, and the care with which he prepares them for the challenges of being both truly great at something and young Black women in America. We already know that these women have borne the brunt of a lot of stupid shit in our culture, and what King Richard provides is a backdrop, a blueprint for how they weathered what came to them with humility and grace. (There’s even a lesson learned from Disney’s Cinderella, according to Richard anyway.) The end of this movie is just the beginning of Venus and Serena’s stories, and you’ll be helpless to the call for cheering them on, just as I cheer for this movie.

A king and his princesses arrive declaring themselves to be reckoned with.

Overall: B+

EAST OF THE MOUNTAINS

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

It’s always fun for us Washingtonians when we get a local celebrity in a film actually set in our state. Tom Skerritt has done it more than once: in the 1992 movie Singles, he played the Mayor of Seattle—a guy who rejects one of the main characters’ plan for rapid rail transit because “people love their cars.” Shows what he knew!

I was just shocked to discover Skerritt is 88 years old. Even in the 1979 film Alien, he was 45. His earliest credit on IMDb.com is from when he was 29, in 1962. My point is, the man is old. Only recently has he begun to play parts about being old, though. We don’t ever learn exactly how old his character in East of the Mountains is, but it’s clear that terminally ill Ben Givens has lived a long life. He is preoccupied by memories of his early days with the wife who just died a year ago, in the Eastern Washington town where they met. Again, the movie never explicitly states what the town is that he returns to, but given the number of Mexican American characters and the apple orchards, presumably it’s around Yakima or Wenatchee.

As opposed to Mayor Weber, Ben is far past loving his car. He takes his dog on a road trip from his Seattle home to the other side of the mountains, and when it breaks down on the side of the highway, he just abandons it. He takes his family heirloom rifle, the dog in tow, and walks out into the Eastern Washington desert to do some bird hunting. And, to fulfill his plan to end his life.

Director S.J. Chiro waits quite some time into this story before telling us exactly why Ben has made this decision. Eventually, while Ben is talking to the local veterinarian he meets after his dog is attacked in the desert by a coyote hunting dog, he gets surprisingly explicit. Ben spent fifty years as a surgeon, so he knows what horrors to expect at the end of his life in his condition. I still thought about that after the film’s deceptively pleasant ending.

That said, I also wondered why Ben doesn’t consider assisted suicide. He’s a smart man; surely he knows Washington is relatively well known as a state with a Death with Dignity law, enacted in 2009. That no one in the movie even mentions it feels a little bit like a plot hole. Presumably it can be done a lot more pleasantly than pointing a rifle under your chin, something we see Ben do several times during the course of the film.

But, I guess, in that case we wouldn’t get to witness his comfortably melancholy hero’s journey. After he leaves his concerned daughter behind (Mira Sorvino, the only notable character not played by a local actor), we spend a lot of time alone with Ben, and Skerritt carries these scenes very well on his own. But, we also see him cross paths with a string of other characters along the way. Among these characters, there is a casual diversity I quite liked: a young interracial couple who picks up Ben along the highway; a Spanish-speaking man who helps him with his dog and ultimately brings him to the aforementioned veterinarian, Anita (Annie Gonzalez). Anita invites him for dinner while the dog has to stay two nights at the vet hospital, and she casually mentions how many more brown people there must be in the area than when Ben was young. It’s a passing moment, and they bond over something that has nothing to do with it: their respective histories as military vets.

I was a bit struck by how flatteringly Eastern Washington is depicted in East of the Mountains. Western Washingtonians have a tendency to be dismissive or contemptuous of the far more conservative Eastern Washington, but this movie has nothing but love for it. Even as someone who fled Eastern Washington the moment I could, I found this refreshing. Cinematographer Sebastien Scandiuzzi finds the beauty in all of the landscapes, creating indelible images of such beauty they arguably make the movie worth seeing on their own. Many movies are made in which their setting is described as “a character” in the film, but never have I seen that specifically with Central Washington. Some of the shots, of apple orchards or of low clouds passing over Evergreens of the Cascade Mountains, could be used in tourism commercials.

The entire cast is quite lovely, but Tom Skerritt makes the movie, combined with its beautiful imagery. Plenty of films have been made about people getting old and facing existential considerations, but context is key, and East of the Mountains has a unique context. This is a leisurely paced, meditative examination of how an elderly, terminal person might end their life on their own terms. It’s not nearly as sad as it sounds; in fact it’s a fairly pleasant ride. Strangely, it reminds us of how little more time we’ll get Skerritt onscreen and how much he will be missed when he’s gone.

A brief Odyssey for Pacific Northwesterners.

B+

BELFAST

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

There’s a lot to love about Belfast, perhaps most significantly its beautiful black and white cinematography, which wonderfully complements its warm and wistful tone. It should be noted that there are moments of color, used in two very specific ways: the opening shots are of modern-day Belfast, in color, so if you go knowing to expect a black and white movie, don’t get confused. You’re in the right movie.

And this is one worth seeing on the big screen, if you can. I was certainly glad I did. This movie is already very much in the Oscar conversation, and although I do think it deserves to be, I am also already wary of it becoming overrated. This is a movie pulled off with unique skill, but I would hesitate to call it a masterpiece—a word I’ve already seen thrown out about it.

The thing is, Belfast is slightly wanting, when it comes to the performances. This is a film by Kenneth Branagh, inspired by his own childhood in the titular city in Ireland, and it centers around a young boy nicknamed Buddy, played by the achingly adorable, 9-year-old Jude Hill. This little boy has talent, extracted by Branagh with surprising finesse—there’s one scene early on in which the camera lingers on his face for so long, the kid acting through it, I was astonished. But, he is still a kid, and there are moments when one wonders whether Branagh just happened to get lucky catching him just naturally being a kid.

Still, the kid carries the movie well. My real issue is with his dad, played by Jamie Dornan, who frankly isn’t any better here than he was in Fifty Shades of Grey. He has the look and demeanor to match that of his character, an unassuming working class husband and father doing his best to keep his family safe in dangerous times. He also appears in a number of scenes looking like little more than a deer caught in headlights. I’m a little mystified by the casting choice, honestly.

Buddy’s mom is played by the regal Caitriona Balfe. Best of all, we get both Ciarán Hinds and Judi Dench as Buddy’s grandparents. Dench in particular is more unrecognizable in this part than I think I have ever seen her, and both she and Hinds disappear into their parts with ease. I’d be interest in a movie focused on their characters.

But, this is more about Branagh’s recollection of his own childhood in late sixties Ireland, when clashes between Catholics and Protestants were consistently violent. The very idea of this is hard for me to wrap my head around—I mean, they’re all Christians, right?—but then, it’s not that different from warring sects of Muslims, I suppose. In neither case is it objectively rational, but, whatever. It’s also strange to consider from the vantage point of the 2020s, but it’s useful to note that people are still alive today who remember a time and place like this.

Belfast barely even has Catholic characters, as Buddy’s family are Protestant themselves—but, they are also caught in the crossfire, both metaphorically and literally, as a family uninterested in the militant beliefs of others of their same denomination. Very close to the start of the movie, we see Protestant rioters vandalizing the homes of many on their street, just because there are some Catholics still living there. The broad arc of the story involves Buddy coming to terms with the idea that their family will have to move away from their home in order to maintain their safety.

I left the movie thinking about what a mistake it can be to take for granted that it could never get like that where I live. That said, in spite of such heavy considerations, what really makes Belfast a success is its wealth of humor, particularly through the prism of Buddy’s innocence. Belfast has a lot in common with Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma (2018)—a film that gets a lot closer to being a masterpiece, and yet is far less accessible to general audiences, being a far more meditative and intellectual pursuit. Belfast is certainly comprised of layers and nuance of its own, but Branagh is also much more interested in making space for fun. Through the eyes of Buddy, the story has an irresistible sweetness to it.

Buddy also loves movies, and this is the other place where Branagh brings color into what he puts onscreen: every clip we see of movies they go to see is in color, and when the camera cuts to the family in the audience, they are in black and white. The movie reflected in color in Granny’s black and white glasses is a clever little detail. It also underscores the technicolor fantasies into which they can escape from the stresses of their lives.

It’s nice to see a movie about such kind, uncomplicated but still world-weary people. This is a family—including Lewis McAskie as Buddy’s older brother, Will, who gets the least screen time out of all of them—just trying to get by in trying times. It’s no spoiler to say that they wind up having to move away, as Branagh himself did at the age of nine, and this film serves to honor his memory of the home he had to leave. It has its seams visible here and there, but it still achieves its goal and as such is worth attention.

It was a good childhood for at least one kid.

Overall: B+

THE HAND OF GOD

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

The Hand of God is surprisingly straightforward for a Paolo Sorrentino film, especially compared to his other works in recent years, from The Great Beauty (2013) to Youth (2015) to the HBO miniseries The Young Pope. Sorrentino’s work tends to veer into the realm of fever dream, with widely varying effect. I have a tendency to be drawn to his stylistic flourishes, but to be a bit mystified by the resulting elusive narratives.

This movie, however, if not an outright recreation of Sorrentino’s youth, was reportedly “inspired” by it. His young protagonist, Fabietto (Filippo Scotti), does not share his name, but clearly represents him. It is a matter of public record that Sorrentino’s own parents died in a tragic carbon monoxide poisoning accident when he was seventeen, and this is the pivotal moment for Fabietto in The Hand of God as well.

Both before and after this incident, rather than the more typical stylization—although Sorrentino still takes a few brief stylistic detours, as he evidently can’t help himself—The Hand of God is an exercise in immersion, mostly into Fabietto’s daily life. In the first half or so of the movie, it’s just a pleasantly relaxed immersion into the close-knit world of his extended family. There’s a wide array of characters just as there are in any family, and we see how Fabietto’s parents love each other even in spite of some intermittent marital problems.

Fabietto also has a warm and supportive older brother, Marchino (Marlon Joubert), and they share a room together Marchino is an aspiring actor, and Fabietto an aspiring filmmaker—another of many clear parallels to Sorrentino himself. They have an uncle with a wife named Patrizia (Luisa Ranieri) they both have the hots for, she’s young and beautiful and is the first character we see when the film opens, waiting for a bus in a rather revealing dress. Here is where Sorrentino is characteristically oblique in his approach, as we do not meet Fabietto until he happens to be tagging along with his parents as they come over at Patrizia’s request because her husband is irate irrationally convinced she has been turning tricks as a whore.

This is our entry into Fabietto’s life and family, the opening sequence the closest to the fever-dream quality of Sorrentino’s other work. It has some deeply memorable imagery, such as Patrizia’s tour through a crumbling mansion to see a “little monk,” passing though a huge room with a gigantic, working chandelier standing tilted on the floor rather than hanging from the ceiling.

This is where I struggle with Sorrentino, who has a knack for memorably beautiful visuals but too much of the time I don’t necessarily know what the hell it means, or if I should take it at face value. Such elements are few in The Hand of God—the title a reference to the late, famous Argentinian soccer player Diego Maradona’s goal in the 1986 World Cup. Maradona plays for the team in Fabietto’s hometown of Naples, and he felt he had to be at the game—thought to be the reason he escaped the same fate as his parents.

I did find myself wondering how many of the notable things that happen to Fabietto actually happened to Sorrentino in his youth. There is one particularly bizarre sequence near the end of the film involving his loss of virginity to the old lady “baroness” who lives in the apartment upstairs. This is clearly a callback to an earlier scene in which Fabietto’s father advises him to “take whatever comes" and lose his virginity at the first opportunity, no matter how ugly the girl may be. And then, the one genuine sex scene in this film is between a teenage boy and an elderly woman. Curiously, the way the scene plays out, it’s less gross than it is just plain bizarre. But, on brand for Sorrentino, I suppose.

The Hand of God is available streaming on Netflix on December 15. Maybe you can watch it then and judge for yourself. I saw it as part of an Italian film series by SIFF Cinema, and more than anything I was just thrilled I was finally able to see a movie at The Egyptian again, finally, post-pandemic. The movie itself has its merits, and is more accessible than Sorrentino’s other work tends to be, but that still leaves it more impenetrable than most movies.

A pleasant life careening toward a tragic turn.

Overall: B

PASSING

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

I’m dying to know what Black people think of Passing, the stunning directorial debut by Rebecca Hall, available on Netflix today. Even to say that seems a little delicate, from me, a white person, who knows full well that Black people are not a monolith: surely reactions and opinions are as widely varied as the Black community itself. Still, reactions from Black audiences are going to hold more weight, for obvious reasons: this is a movie about a light-skinned Black woman “passing” as white in New York City in the 1920s.

And what of Black critics? I need to seek out movie reviewers of color. The ones I tend to recognize and gravitate toward are too uniformly white. This film has an incredibly high rating of 83 on MetaCritic—”must-see,” by their metrics—but the majority of the critics making up that average are going to be white. Whenever there is a movie about Black people or the Black experience, I rather wish there were a “Black Metacritic,” so I could see how they feel about their own representation on film, at least on average. Granted, it can be argued that this “on average” angle is itself problematic. I need to seek out individual movie critics of color, find the ones whose writing speaks to me, and keep up with their content.

As things stand now, I can only go by my own reaction, which is to be truly, deeply impressed with this film—especially knowing Rebecca Hall, an actor from films like Vicky Cristina Barcelona and the 2016 indie Christine in which she played the real-life news anchor who shot herself on camera, has never directed a feature film before. These movies she’s acted in, have been largely fine but far from masterpieces (she was most recently in Godzilla vs. Kong earlier this year), and would certainly not make anyone think her career was headed toward the creation of a near masterpiece. Maybe she got tired of assisting others in the production of mediocrity, and concluded she could do better herself.

If that’s the case, then she was more right than can hardly be believed. Still, I can’t help but be skeptical of her position as a white woman directing and writing a movie about Black people. Is she truly credible as the storyteller here? Hall is the daughter of opera singer Maria Ewing, whose father was African American, Native American and Scottish. This lineage is reportedly what makes Passing “deeply personal” to Hall, which on the surface is perfectly understandable. On the other hand, I can’t help but think about the embarrassing history of clearly white people adorning themselves with dream catchers because they are “one-eighth Native American.” To be fair, I have seen no evidence of Hall personally appropriating Black culture.

The flip side of this is how the white majority in 1920s America would have regarded Rebecca Hall’s mother—or, arguably, Hall herself, were her ancestry known. The idea of “passing” was not likely lost on Hall’s grandfather, or on her mother. This may make Hall uniquely suited to telling this story—or at least, as was actually the case, adapting the 1929 novel of the same name by Nella Larsen, a multiracial woman with an Afro-Caribbean father. I had never heard of this novel before this film, but it must be a fascinating read, especially from someone actually living in the time it was set.

I haven’t even gotten to the many layers and deep nuances of the film adaptation of Passing itself, which has a tone, a vibe if you will, I have not felt since the phenomenal 2002 Todd Haynes film Far From Heaven, one of my all-time favorite films. That film also examined race, this time in the context of the 1950s, but it was still from a white viewpoint. Passing is very much a Black story—in fact, it’s not even directly about the woman “passing” as white, Clare (Ruth Negga). It’s much more about her childhood friend Irene (Tessa Thimpson), and how she struggles with all the implications of Clare living her everyday life as a white woman—right down to marrying an unsuspecting and comfortably racist white man (Alexander Skarsgård) and having a child with him.

Irene is the protagonist, a woman who, in the subtly attention-grabbing opening scene, finds herself “passing” almost by accident while shopping in higher-end stores of New York, tilting her large hat to obscure her face just enough. From the start, the dialogue is highly stylized, meticulously crafted, exquisitely written. Combine that with incredible performances nearly across the board and stunning black and white cinematography by Eduard Grau (A Single Man), and Passing is practically impossible for any cinephile, anyone with an appreciation for film as art, to resist.

And then there’s the unusual privilege enjoyed by Irene, and her doctor husband Brian (André Holland), and the added layers of classism seen just within the Black community here. There is clear allusion to colorism here, a topic I will leave to the Black community as I have no relevant “takes” on that from my position; suffice it to say, Irene and Brian have a housekeeper of their own, and how much darker her skin is, is clearly not an accident.

Passing ultimately tracks the rekindled friendship between Irene and Clare, and how shaken Irene is by the direction Clare’s life has taken. This all leads to a truly unexpected and deliberately ambiguous ending. This movie was so gorgeously shot I truly wish I could have seen it in a theater (it did get an Oscar-qualifying limited release ion October 27), but at this moment I was rather glad I was seeing it on Netflix: I had to rewind it two or three times in an attempt to figure out what I was seeing. I’m not convinced that particular ambiguity was essential, but, when it comes to how fantastic I found the movie otherwise, it was also immaterial.

I could not pretend to know what the average viewer will feel about Passing, although its high critical acclaim is unsurprising. Either way, this is a movie that must be seen.

A beautiful portrait of emotional and moral ambivalence.

Ovrall: A

LAST NIGHT IN SOHO

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

Thomasin McKenzie still needs a truly high profile role that spreads far and wide her astounding talent. She first impressed with her incredible performance as a teenager living off the grid with her dad in Portland, Oregon in Leave No Trace (2018), a very good movie that not enough people saw. She’s impressive enough as a young British woman headed off to fashion school in London in Last Night in Soho that she is quite convincingly just a mousy English girl—she doesn’t turn any heads, which is precisely what the role calls for. If only people knew, in the case of both these films, that she is neither American nor British; McKenzie was actually born in, and started her acting career in, New Zealand. You would just never know it in these other roles because she’s simply that good—and she’s still all of twenty-one years old.

Her performance is easily the best thing about Last Night in Soho, which is, to its credit I guess, as entertaining as it is confusing. Director Edgar Wright is famous for his delightfully cheeky comedies like Shaun of the Dead (2004) and Hot Fuzz (2007), but although Last Night in Soho tracks with his affection for tweaking genres, it’s also much more straightforward than his usual work. There is no satire, or comedy of any kind, here. Instead, he mixes a heavy sense of sixties nostalgia, arguably misplaced as nostalgia often tends to be, with straight up horror. This movie does offer a pretty significant twist within its last half an hour or so, although I can’t quite decide whether I like it. It’s clever, but maybe too much so.

Furthermore, the conceit lacks clarity. Thomasin McKenzie plays Eloise, the young woman overwhelmed by her new arrival to London, which this movie literally calls “a bad place.” There’s no romanticizing the big city here. After she finds student housing untenable, she moves into a room for rent in a large old house in the old red light district. As soon as she moved into this house, and meets its old lady landlord (Diana Rigg, whom you may recognize as Olenna “Tell Cersei it was me” Tyrell from Game of Thrones), I kind of wished the movie had just started at that point. Edgar Wright spends quite a bit of time on Ellie and her grandmother (Rita Tushingham), then on Ellie and her classmates, spending far more energy than necessary on the establishment of their characters.

And then, we discover, this house Ellie has moved into is haunted—in a sense. Each time Ellie falls asleep, she is transported to 1960s Soho, and she follows the story of a young aspiring performer named Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy, her talents honestly fairly wasted in this part, aside from her looking stunning most of the time). How her story unfolds in such a linear fashion, picking up where it left off each time Ellie goes back to bed, makes little sense. And when we first meet Sandie, Ellie sees her reflection in a mirror, suggesting she is playing the part of Sandie in these visions. Except that she ultimately exists in these visions as separate from her, sometimes as another reflection in a mirror—sometimes actually mirroring Sandie’s movements, sometimes not—and other times just standing in the same room. Whatever the rules are to how these “visions of the past” work have no consistency, and I found it distracting.

There’s plenty I still liked about Last Night in Soho, though. It looks fantastic. It has very impressive editing, when sometimes we see Taylor-Joy onscreen and sometimes we see McKenzie, within the same scene in which they are embodying the same person. The issue I have there is the complete absence of explanation for what’s happening to Ellie. Is she being possessed? It doesn’t seem so. Then what is happening to her, exactly? It’s not even like it’s just a haunted house, as these visions follow Ellie to other parts of London (or at least Soho). It’s a lot easier for me to appreciate a film when it has a through line of logic.

We do get a key supporting part by Terence Stamp, always a welcome presence. That man is 83 years old now and I’m beginning to wonder how many more good movie roles we’ll get out of him. His exit from the movie is disappointingly unceremonious, and the story would have benefited from at least a brief follow-up.

Last Night In Soho is like a minor emotional roller coaster, in that it skates close to tediousness, and then becomes compelling, and then offers a climactic twist that gets you thinking it was worth the wait. Once the twist settles into its own clarity, though, it leaves a bit to be desired. I do love that this is ultimately a story about women, and women make up all but just a couple of notable speaking parts. That alone makes it worth supporting, especially considering the movie isn’t bad; it just falls short of its potential. If nothing else, it should easily satisfy horror fans without a penchant for critical thinking.

Sandie reflects on her life choices.

Overall: B

ETERNALS

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

Is Eternals any good? Reviews are decidedly mixed, with instant detractors calling it a misfire or a dud . . . I wouldn’t go that far. It’s not great either, but it’s better than that. I suppose one thing the movie has going for it is low expectations, because for me the movie thus exceeded them.

Bear in mind, this is an entirely new story in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with a concept particularly vast in scope, downright Biblical—it begins with title cards that essentially reference the beginning of time, like an alternate version of Genesis. No need for me to explain it; it’s just a bunch of made-up jargon. Suffice it to say that these ten entities are the titular “Eternals,” immortal except apparently not as we discover in this story, tasked with helping humanity along in their grand plan of evolution.

Tasked by whom? Hell, I don’t remember the name of the being, nor do I know whether he’s supposed to be a god. One of the “celestials,” I think? Trust me on this one: if you go into Eternals with no working knowledge of the Marvel Comics source material, the backstory here is very complicated. I mean, the Eternals themselves are effectively gods, and they answer to what are effectively gods, and they apparently have more power than the superheroes who make up the Avengers who are also effectively (and a few of them are literally) gods. How does this hierarchy get decided, anyway?

The Avengers get one mention in this movie. Bizarrely, two DC comics superheroes—Superman and Batman—get more mentions, which I found confusing. And even though they clearly exist in the same universe, there is no interaction between Eternals and any of the standard Marvel superheroes. How would they reconcile that, anyway? Thor and Loki are gods, right? Eternals—spoiler alert!—are ultimately revealed not to be gods, but they might as well be. They hold sway over the literal destiny of the entire planet, and have been actively involved for thousands of years. We see several flashbacks to key points in Eternals history contextualized within ancient human history.

When “deviants” were mentioned in the trailer to Eternals, I thought I knew what they were talking about. There are also “deviants” in the Marvel series on Disney+, Loki. I was sure they must be one and the same—they’re all within the MCU, right? Well, apparently not. The “deviants” are these grotesque monster-creatures in Eternals, one of whom quickly evolves into a verbal humanoid as he absorbs the powers of the couple of Eternals he (it?) defeats. They exist exclusively as part of the backstory in just this movie, related to the birth and rebirth of “celestials,” the process of which leaves the fate of humanity in the balance. For most of Eternals, these are the villains the Eternals are battling.

Until their team fractures, and they begin battling each other, and that is when Eternals actually starts to get interesting. Until then, unfortunately, the previously exciting choice of Chloé Zhao as director proves fundamentally inconsequential. Nomadland, this is not. Zhao is the latest in a string of small movie directors who, after only one or two projects, gets thrust upon a gargantuan blockbuster project. At least with someone like Gareth Edwards, whose 2010 indie Monsters had a sense of scale and wonder well translated to Godzilla (2014), subpar as that movie was—in fact, Eternals is a better movie than Godzilla. That still doesn’t mean Zhao was the best choice, or that her talents are allowed to reach their full potential there.

There are moments within the first half hour or so of Eternals that feel almost like a bad omen, particularly with some of the actors’ delivery. These are ten great actors portraying the ten Eternals, and there’s no reason for any of their line readings to feel unrehearsed. This may be less the fault of the actors themselves than of the director and the editor.

Once the story gets going, though, so long as you can ignore the nitpicky details with which I started this review, Eternals becomes surprisingly entertaining—and it features a lot of well written humor, which lands well. This is especially the case with the storyline of Kingo, played by Kumail Nanjiani, who is re-introduced in the present day as a huge Bollywood star for over a century. (Kingo has a clever explanation for this which I won’t spoil.) There are much bigger movie stars in Eternals than Nanjiani, but his physical transformation into superhero buffness for the film granted him arguably the most shared press. An extra fun detail is veteran comic Indian actor Harish Patel, who gets a significant supporting role as Kingo’s longtime “valet.”

The other nine Eternals are played by the likes of Angelina Jolie; Salma Hayek (who plays the leader of the ten); Brian Tyree Henry; British Asian actor Gemma Chan; Richard Madden; South Korean actor Ma Dong-seok; The Walking Dead’s Lauren Ridloff; The Killing of a Sacred Deer’s Barry Keoghan (after roles like that, it’s impressive that guy manages not to be creepy here); and 15-year-old Lia McHugh, who plays an Eternal stuck for eternity as a teenager—something that gets a sort of clever fix by the end of this film, in the event of any sequels in which she would be noticeably older.

That list of actors does elicit the question: is Eternals the most broadly diverse Marvel movie made to date? Or even superhero movie, for that matter? One might want to mention Black Panther, except that has (completely appropriate) focus on Black characters as the majority of its cast, with a couple white people in principal supporting parts. The ten principals in Eternals represent people, or at least ancestry, from five of the six populated continents; I don’t believe any are from or have heritage from South America, but Salma Hayek is, of course, Mexican, so there is Latin representation. Of the ten principals, only four are unambiguously white, which is arguably still over-representative in a global context, but is certainly unusual in a U.S. context. If nothing else, it should help with the worldwide box office, particularly when it comes to actors actually from places like South Korea or India or Mexico.

This sort of both organic and careful curating of actors for the film can perhaps be at least party attributed to Zhao, in which case her involvement certainly made the movie better than it might otherwise have been. It just doesn’t have any identifying features that make the broad arc of the story feel like it couldn’t have been directed by anyone, who just happened to be competent. I want Zhao to be able to make movies that clearly have a singular touch. And at the end of the day, its many redeeming qualities notwithstanding, Eternals is just another, overlong, comic book movie. At least it’s engaging and entertaining, a fun time at the movies. I just wanted it to be more special than it is, that’s all.

Alright everybody hold that pose!

SPENCER

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

Finally, true cinema in 2021 has arrived. I’m not talking about giant, blockbuster epics—who do have their place—but about dramatic works of art, of the sort that, even as a drama, demands to be seen on the big screen.

I fully lost myself in Spencer, the latest by Jackie director Pablo Larraín. I thoroughly loved that movie as well, and the two films make great companion pieces, showcasing astonishing performances by its lead actresses. Arguably more so in the case of Kristen Stewart, who has come such a long way from her Twilight days, and completely disappears into the role of Princess Diana. Natalie Portman’s depiction of Jaqueline Kennedy was somewhat maligned, which I never really agreed with, but I cannot see any room for such nitpicking in the case of Stewart. To accept her completely as Diana onscreen is completely effortless.

Furthermore, the two films have similar tones and styles, yet retain a uniqueness that makes them each their own entity. Spencer, for one, is an immersion into the lives of British royalty—over the course of a three-day Christmas family gathering. This is always the strength of the best biographical films, wherein the focus is on a brief period, or even a particular moment, in a historical figure’s life, rather than an attempt to encompass their entire lifetime.

And the script, by Steven Knight, is an exquisite piece of work, taking a snapshot of a weekend in Diana’s life, ten years into her relationship with Prince Charles—that puts them in about 1991—and still somehow reflecting the vast universe of obsession and scandal surrounding them. This is rarely done overtly, and when it is, it’s done briefly, as in the moment Diana steps outside for a mass of paparazzi cameras.

Larraín’s camera consistently follows Diana in gliding tracking shots, by turns capturing the expanse of the grounds and the opulence of the country house where they are staying for the holiday. Every frame is gorgeous, most of them prominently featuring Kristen Stewart as Diana, perfectly lit. It’s funny how screen depictions of certain events or concepts often come in twos, and the pretty high-profile depiction of Princes Diana by Emma Corrin in season four of Netflix’s The Crown just happened in the fall of 2020, all of one year ago. Corrin’s performance was excellent in its own right, and she has a closer facial resemblance to the actual Princess Di, but something about Stewart’s Performance thoroughly transcends and surface dissimilarities. Her performance is so amazing, so beyond all expectations, if she does not get nominated for an Oscar, there is no justice in this world. She could easily win the award.

All of the character parts surrounding Stewart are comparatively minor, with just a few family members getting one or two key scenes—Stella Gonet, as Queen Elizabeth, gets all of two scenes with any real dialogue, one of them just featuring her on the television delivering her annual Christmas address. In the other, though, she offers Diana a surprising bit of empathy, before pivoting to a reminder of the cold realities of each of their positions in this family. The most significant supporting role goes to Timothy Spall, here looking aged and almost shockingly thin after his years as Peter Pettigrew in the Harry Potter series, playing a key person in the house staff struggling with the mandate to rein Diana in. Indeed, most of the people around Diana in Spencer (that title referencing her maiden name, a symbol of a past she pines for) seem genuinely to care about her. It’s just that how much they can empathize is stymied by their sense of duty to the cultural strictures that keep any of them from really finding any happiness. They are inured to it, however, having grown up with it; Diana, even ten years in, cannot reconcile these challenges with the comparative freedoms she knew in her youth.

A fair amount of media representation has existed in recent years regarding Diana’s bulimia, but never before has anyone so carefully depicted her depression, and by extension, her mental illness. Diana’s often erratic behavior is difficult to control, made doubly frustrating by the strict expectations of protocol and tradition. We can find ways to dismiss her struggles within the context of objectively insane amounts of privilege, but Spencer refuses to let us forget how any existence in that exclusive world can be a genuine prison all its own. Larraín is brilliantly capturing Diana’s desperate feelings of loneliness and emotional isolation. There is a sad poetry to the overall presentation in Spencer, which features such beauty, including on the part of Diana herself, her face, her exquisite outfits, every detail of that beauty just being another link in the fencing of her cage.

Spencer reminds me a bit of another movie I love, The Hours, with its utter watchability in spite of its overall tone of melancholy. I could probably watch this movie again and again. The same won’t be the same for others, but this is one of those movies that feels like it was custom made just for me. I just plain loved it.

She’s a complicated woman who will win you over.

Overall: A