SALTBURN

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

Saltburn is a beautifully shot narrative with inconsistencies to the point of distraction. It’s fun to watch while it’s happening, then a twist comes at the end that forces a re-examination of everything that came before, with the inevitable conclusion that the twist is unearned.

I came into this movie expecting something fun, sexy, borderline scandalous. I already knew about the infamous bathtub drain and gravesite scenes. Neither of them really lived up to the hype, failed to offer much in the way of shock value, although the bathtub drain was still pretty effectively gross (more because of dirty bathwater than bodily fluids).

The film really kicks into high gear when Oliver (Barry Keoghan) finally arrives at the Saltburn estate of the film’s title, home of the filthy rich college classmate, Felix (Jacob Elordi), who has invited him to stay. Felix’s parents are wonderfully cast with Rosamund Pike and Richard E. Grant, as vaguely oblivious characters whose wealth has made them entertainingly detached, superficial, and catty. The moment Oliver meets them, the dialogue crackles, and you want to watch a whole movie just about this family.

Instead, Saltburn seems to fancy itself a lite version of class satire, except it never has any real bite. Rounding the cast are Alison Oliver as Venetia, Felix’s sister with an eating disorder; Archie Madekwe as Farleigh, Felix’s multiracial cousin visiting from America (details that could be a goldmine for exploration that never happens); and Carey Mulligan as Pamela, a friend of Felix’s parents who is also staying and on the cusp of overstaying her welcome. Mulligan in particular gets surprisingly short screen time and nothing of real substance to work with, even though she gets top billing with the rest of the cast—evidently she just wanted to work with writer-director Emerald Fennel again after starring in Promising Young Woman.

Saltburn is thus Emerald Fennell’s second feature film as writer-director, and a pattern is already emerging, in which a clearly talented filmmaker has some deeply compelling ideas, and then squanders them in various ways with a truly unnecessary twist ending. In the case of Saltburn, the ending practically negates everything that came before it, calling into question the idea that Oliver was ever truly obsessed with Felix, or possibly in love with him, as we were led all the while to believe. Ultimately, during an extended scene in which we see Oliver dancing naked through the estate house for so long we are struck by a body so hot it shockingly nearly rival’s Jacob Elordi’s, we are left to wonder if all he ever wanted was the house itself. And: why? That part is a mystery.

And on the road to this inexplicable ending, there are shifts of power between characters that never get explained. One moment the cousin, Farleigh, is acting pointedly superior to Oliver. In a later scene Oliver gains an upper hand, I guess, by going into Farleigh’s room and, one could argue, sexually assaults him. Why Farleigh would act frightened and intimidated in that scene and then turn around and behave the next day with the same superiority as though the nighttime intrusion never happened, is anyone’s guess. Similar shifts happen between Oliver and Felix’s sister, Venetia.

No such shift ever happens with Felix himself, who seems to remain in Oliver’s thrall throughout—until the end. I won’t spoil what ultimately happens to Felix, except to say that Fennell taks her time to make that specifically clear, during which time I could not stop thinking about it as I was utterly baffled.

Saltburn is a rare breed of film in its quality of visual execution, and great performances, making you feel for most of its runtime that you’re watching something good. Honestly, I wouldn’t mind watching it again just for the georgeous cinematography, of both the sprawling estate and the captured beauty of Keoghan’s and Elordi’s bodies (and, emphatically: both of them). Ditto the eccentric chemistry between everyone in Felix’s filthy rich family, who dress up for dinner, are woken every morning by servants, and are served breakfast as a family in the mornings.

Oliver is subtly manipulating Felix, and then the rest of his family, throughout, which we are meant to understand going in. And then that ending comes, and there’s nothing subtle about it whatsoever, nor was anything that came before it, apparently. Oliver becomes a cartoon, essentially. I left the theater wondering what the point of it all was.

I thought it would burn a little more.

Overall: B-

NAPOLEON

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

There’s a battle sequence in Napoleon, one among countless, in which Napoleon tricks an enemy onto a snow-covered, frozen lake, and then pummels the shit out of them, breaking the ice and sending many faceless and nameless soldiers into an icy grave. With a bunch of incredibly rendered shots from beneath the surface, the sequence is as spectacular and thrilling to watch as any in this film, and arguably in any other film this year. 

When it comes to Napoleon as a complete film, however, you could go out of your way to watch just this one sequence, and get just as much out of it. Who needs two hours and 38 minutes covering decades of broad historical events, without any character dimension to speak of? 

Joaquin Phoenix’s performance in the title role is so understated as to be to its detriment. Where is the notorious megalomania? Perhaps we are meant to take this as what distinguishes this Napoleon from any other film about the man. Honestly, it didn’t take long for me to get bored. 

Ridley Scott is now 86 years old. His poliferous output in such later years is astonishing—he’s directed seven feature films in the past ten years alone. But have any of them been great? Maybe one. It’s starting to feel like Ridley Scott is just hell bent on proving he can keep doing the job until he finally keels over. 

Napoleon is getting reviews that are mixed to positive, and I’m clearly leaning toward the mixed side. I kept hearing how funny the movie is. I didn’t laugh once. They say the film is flawed but incredibly entertaining. I nodded off more than once. Even incredibly well executed battle sequences start to get dull when they are virtually all that’s on offer. 

Okay, so the film also explores Napoleon’s relationship, marriage, and ultimate divorce from Joséphine, here played by Vanessa Kirby. She and Phoenix have fair chemistry, but again, virtually everything this film covers is never explored with any depth. Even in a movie this long, that goes with the territory when a single film attempts to cover decades of people’s lives. Napoleon and Joséphine’s relationship proves to be no exception.

I was looking forward to seeing this movie. I thoroughly enjoyed . . . some of it. When it finished, I was glad it was over. 

You’ll see a shot just like this a couple dozen times. Fun!

Overall: B-

DREAM SCENARIO

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

Nicolas Cage now has over 110 acting credits to his name, which is an average of over 2.5 roles each year since his career started in 1981. I only mention this because it is now well documented that Cage loves to work as an actor so much that he is hardly discerning as to which parts he’ll take. This means he’s in a lot of very bad movies. It also means that, when some of his parts end up actually being really good, it’s the career equivalent of a broken clock being right twice a day.

A recent example: Pig (2021), which impressed me a great deal more than I expected—both the film overall but especially Nicolas Cage’s performance. Even now I would call it his best starring role in at least twenty years—and I said as much in 2021.

In the meantime, in between many other roles that hold no interest, Cage has started taking roles that make it seem like maybe he’s in on the joke, but with spotty results: last year’s The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, in which Cage played himself, fell far short of meeting its vast potential; and earlier this year Renfield, a comedy in which Cage played Dracula, legitimately disappointed.

So this is the strange expectation any new Nicolas Cage film has come to: the man actually does have massive talent, but he also has a deeply unreliable track record of having it effectively harnessed. Enter Dream Scenario, a slightly surreal blurring of the line between reality and dreaming, which, as presented by writer-director Kristoffer Borgli, might be called “Charlie Kaufman-esque.” Honestly I’d have been far more interested in what Charlie Kaufman might have done with this premise, in which, inexplicably, one very average middle-aged man suddently starts appearing in the dreams of people around the world.

Dream Scenario is getting very good reviews, and I get it, I suppose. But here’s my issue with it: Nicolas Cage’s college professor, Paul Matthews, is not just a totally average, balding Boomer. He’s also a guy who makes consistently bad decisions, and is a straight up annoying guy. This isn’t a peformance decision, either: Paul is written this way, and it’s very much a part of the point of the story. From where I was sitting, though, spending a very well-edited 100 minutes with him was more than enough.

What’s odd is that I still can’t say I din’t like the movie. It’s a competently constructed, subtly provocative exercise. There’s a compelling notion in Paul’s benign behavior in nearly every dream—his total lack of inaction becoming a sticking point for the Paul who lives in reality—shifting in response to a particular instance of aberrant, furtive behavior. When a young woman asks Paul to re-enact her unusual dream in which they have passionate sex, things go wrong, but in a predictably pathetic way. Paul doesn’t actually harm the woman, but something about how wrong the entire scenario is shifts the tone of everyone’s dreams, and suddenly Dream Paul is brutally attacking everyone.

Dream Scenario then touches on things like “cancel culture,” but without ever having anything substantive to say about it. It is an interesting question, whether someone in reality has any obligation to apologize for their behavior in anyone else’s dreams (it also has an easy answer: they don’t—but when this applies to a mass audience, that answer gets complicated). Surely many viewers of this film will deeply relate, after a dream colors their perception of someone, however unfairly.

Dream Scenario is surprisingly grounded, for a film in which so much of the story takes place in dreams. And making dreams legitimately interesting is tricky business, not often pulled off well. The concept of infiltrating other people’s dreams has been done before, of course—Christopher Nolan’s 2010 film Inception might be the best example—but to Kristoffer Borgli’s credit, Dream Scenario gives it a new twist. I just wish that twist had turned in a less cringey character. You could make the argument that cringe is the point here, but I would argue that this premise could be explored just as well, if not better, without it.

I guess I don’t regret spending a hundred minutes with this loser, but I can’t very enthusiastically recommend it.

Overall: B

NEXT GOAL WINS

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

We’ve been told for centuries never to judge a book by its cover, so maybe don’t judge Next Goal Wins by its opening shot, which features director Taika Waititi as an American Samoan priest, dressed in a campy robe, and donning what might be the most ridiculous fake mustache ever put onscreen. Waititi as the priest also narrates, very briefly, but effectively sets the tone when he says this is a true story, “with a couple of embellishments.” It’s an amusing acknowledgement of artistic license, and cuts down any sense that this movie is going to be way over the top.

On the contrary, Next Goal Wins is packed to the gills with a winning, goofy sweetness which, somewhat surprisingly, really works. I laughed a lot, and the laughs are consistently borne of a uniquely innocent comic sensibility.

I’d really be interested in what the citizens of American Samoa think of this movie. One could argue that this film grossly oversimplifies their people and culture. On top of that, I’m not sure how to unpack exactly where the “white savior” concept plays into this, what with a White an coming to guide a soccer team of Brown people to victory, which is based on an actual White man who did just that—and the film is directed and co-written by a Brown man (co-witten with Iain Morris, a White man).

There’s also a trans woman on the American Samoan soccer team in this film, which was also the case in real life—the first openly trans athlete to compete in a FIFA World Cup qualifier—played by nonbinary Samoan actor Kaimana. There was a curious thing to realize watching this, seeing how beautiful Kaimana is. Even when trans actors are cast in trans roles, they get the Hollywood glow-up. That’s . . . progress? Side note: the actual trans athlete in question, Jaiyah Saelua, apparently has complicated feelings about this film, which tells part of her story—and the stories of a few of the other team members—while placing the narrative focus on the coach, Thomas Rongen (Michael Fassbender, here bleached blond). You know . . . the White guy. There it is!

We seem to be still in an era where we take what we can get, and I still have to say, it’s deeply refreshing to see a story like this, in which a trans person exists in a traditional cisgender, particularly male space, and is widely accepted. In fact, “trans” isn’t even quite accurate here, as Jaiyah makes multiple references to fa’afafine, a third gender that is unique to Samoa and widely accepted there. Well, this film is clearly made for American audiences, where that is definitively not the case, and yet here we get a movie that shows how easily these things can work.

I suppose it does complicate some of the narrative choices in Next Goal Wins, particularly when Rongen deliberately deadnames Jaiyah (a sincere apology and reconcilation occurs shortly thereafter), and Jaiyah’s decision to go off hormones so she can continue qualifying to be on the team.

This gets into some sticky stuff when you drill deep below the surface of Next Goal Wins, which Waititi clearly wants us to take in on a fairly surface level. And to Waititi’s credit, he establishes and maintains a precariously sweet and goofy tone in this film, which almost never steps into outright stupid (the aforementioned mustache being a notable exception). He cast a whole bunch of Samoan actors who are collectively full of charisma and charm, while bringing in marquee names for the FIFA staff characters, including Elisabeth Moss (her character also being Rongen’s separated wife) and Will Arnett. Waititi also throws a bone to fans of Our Flag Means Death with a small part given to Rhys Darby.

In terms of plot arc, Next Goal Wins could not be more of a standard underdog sports movie. These may be the biggest underdogs in history, having suffered the biggest loss of any FIFA World Cup qualifying game. But it’s hardly a spoiler to say that, eventually, they get a win, and the movie cuts to several different groups of characters in different locations jumping for joy at their TV sets. I’d say we’ve seen all this before, except we’ve never seen it dressed in lavalavas.

Match that with the Taika Waititi sensibility, and you’ve just got an incredibly winning, feel-good movie. I was giggling early on, and continued to consistently through the end. This film is getting somewhat mixed reactions, but it honestly exceeded my expectations. I really enjoyed it. Then, of course, I came home and thought about how to pick apart its narrative choices.

Okay let’s talk about optics.

Overall: B+

THE HUNGER GAMES: THE BALLAD OF SONGBIRDS & SNAKES

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

Watching The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, eleven years after the first film in the Hunger Games franchise and eight years after the last one, is a little like getting offered one more drink while you’re barely buzzed at a party that’s not very exciting. Okay, sure, why not. I’ll have another.

In the moment, this film is engaging enough, with several charismatic performers. Tom Blyth charms in bleached blond hair as young Coriolanus Snow, assigned as “mentor” to one of the District 12 tributes, a stunning songstress (hence the film’s subtitle) named Lucy Gray. Rachel Zegler makes the most of the part, particularly with an incredible singing vioce, but Lucy isn’t given a whole lot of agency. She doesn’t ever even use any weapons in the arena.

After three novels and four movies that made Jennifer Lawrence a superstar, The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes feels a little regressive. Even as a clear nostalgia play and franchise cash grab, here we are given the early life story of the authoritarian President Snow of the previous films, now with a young man as the hero, saving a helpless little lady. At least Katniss was a badass.

Oh sure, this is presented with characters facing all the expected moral dilemmas, and we already know what eventually happens to Snow, which makes this movie this franchise’s equivalent of the Star Wars prequels. A burning question might still be: did we really need this?

In the original Hunger Games, the games—in which, in case you’re one of the five people in the world who don’t already know, a group of teenagers are thrown into an arena to fight to the death—are in their 74th year. In The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, they are in their 10th year, which takes us back in time 64 years. Cornelius Snow is now supposed to be 18 years old, so I guess he was 82 the last time we saw him. The production design here is vaguely evocative of a society not quite as “perfected” as we saw it became later.

The story is presented in three parts, and the story beats are the only memorably unusual thing about it. This movie is two hours an 37 minutes long, pointlessly the longest film in the franchise. This is an average of 52 minutes per part, and we see the actual Hunger Games in “Part Two”—which end in such a way that the movie itself feels very much like it’s ending. By that point, we are indeed already a standard feature film’s length in. A group of seven very young adults sat in a line of seats two rows ahead of me, clearly big fans of the franchise, regularly raising the three finger salute from the previous films at the screen. And when Part III appeared onscreen, even one of those kids said, out loud, “There’s a whole other part”?

Indeed, Part III feels almost exclusively extraneous, although it is in this part when we finally see Lucy Gray take some real control. To be fair, she is defiant from the start, even belting out a song the very moment she is chosen at the Reaping Ceremony—a scene that would have come across as a lot more stupid if not for Zegler’s beautiful voice. This never makes her any less helpless and dependent on Snow any time she’s in the arena. And by the time this movie all but declares Lucy’s ultimate fate a total mystery, it’s too late for it to matter much.

If anything makes The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes watchable, it’s the cast. This includes Jason Schwartzman, amusingly smarmy as the Hunger Games’s first televised host; Peter Dinklage as the slightly drunken Dean of the Academy; Viola Davis as the deliciously nefarious head gamemaker; and even Euphoria’s Hunter Schafer as Coriolanus’s cousin. (The casting of a trans actor in a part never identified as such is maybe the one truly progressive part of this production, and it was really great to see her here.)

In other words, due in no small part to the performances, I found myself entertained by this, the fifth film in the Hunger Games franchise. I’m tempted to say I enjoyed even more than The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2, but that may be just because this time it’s been so long since I’ve seen one of these movies. The truth is, it’s more of the same but with different characters and actors. Which is . . . fine. Like that last drink you didn’t need but won’t hurt.

Try watching through rose colored glasses.

Overall: B-

THE PERSIAN VERSION

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

The Persian Version had me at the start, and then it lost me almost completely, and then it pulled me back in again. It was kind of an emotional roller coaster, from fun to total confusion to moving warmth.

I’m not sure this movie intended to take me on this particular journey. It seems much more intent on telling the lighthearted story of how an estranged mother and daughter found a way to connect, with mixed results. It can’t seem to decide what character’s point of view it’s taking, being mostly narrated by the young but grown daughter, one of nine children, until suddenly, in a flashback to the mother’s youth, the young Shireen (Kamand Shafieisabet) suddenly yells out that she wants to be the narrator of her own story.

This is maybe halfway through the movie, and Shireen proceeds to tell (and show) us how she and her husband made their way from an incredibly remote village in Iran to the United States in the late sixties. This goes on for quite some time, during which I realized I had no clue where this movie was going. It does eventually come to a pivotal point, which connects to Shireen’s relationship with her now-grown daughter, Leila (Layla Mohammadi).

This involves a pretty major revelation, but when the narrative cuts back to Leila’s point of view, there is no indication whatsoever as to whether they have any subsantive discussion about it. A bit later, at the wedding of one of her countless brothers, Leila makes a reference to it to Shireen, and it’s clear Shireen knows she knows. It feels like there was a lot of important stuff there in the middle that just got skipped over. What’s more, Leila is an aspiring writer and filmmaker, and the flashback to Shireen’s childhood is presented as an account written by Leila, until Shireen takes over the narration. Who is actually telling this story is frustratingly never made clear.

On the upside, the undeniable onscreen charisma of both of these women makes up for a lot. And to be clear, it does have to make up for a lot—Shafieisabet and Mohammadi are both great, but the acting of some of the supporting characters is at times abysmal. Most of the young men playing Leila’s brothers, who are so numerous that none of them get very many lines, are wooden at best. I found myself wondering where the hell writer-director Maryam Keshavarz even found the woman who plays Leila’s father’s doctor. She sounds like she’s barely even sure she knows her lines.

We also get flashbacks to Leila’s own childhood, and both that actor (Chiara Stella) and the young Shireen (Kamand Shafieisabet) are charming enough—although the young Shireen has little time for charming as she carries multiple babies before she’s even fifteen. The fact that Shireen is married off to a young man of 22 when she was 13 is presented with neutrality, and cultural differences notwithstanding, I don’t know how I feel about that. Being told that “we were intellectual equals” does little to mitigate it. The background does, however, inform the nature of Shireen as a hard working, crazily tenacious middle-aged mother.

And it’s very easy to engage with both the adult Shireen and the adult Leila whenever they are onscreen. Leila’s sexuality is handled with awkwardness at best, a big part of her estrangement with her mother, but we learn that Leila’s selfishness played a part in her marriage to and then divorce from another woman. (A scene in which they have a conversation in a department store while Leila has a gorilla mask on really doesn’t work.) Leila consistently self-identifies as a lesbian, but then has a one night stand with an apparently mostly-straight man who happens to be playing the lead in Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and ax (Tom Byrne) declares, upon learning of Leila’s pregnancy, that he wants to try making a go of a relationship. Leila seems oddly open to this. I thought she was supposed to be a lesbian? Sure, yes, sexuality is fluid—except The Persian Version never gets even cose to interrogating such ideas. Like so many other things in this movie, I could not figure out what to make of it.

And still: even in the midst of all this mess, the two leads deliver winning performances, which broadly won me over. I was moved and cried a little at the end. There’s a lot about being children of immigrant parents here that I’m sure many can relate to, and I can only guess how nice it must be for Muslim or Iranian audiences to get this kind of fun representation. I don’t want to conflate Iranians with Palestinians, but Americans are unfortunately prone to such things, and right now more than ever, anything that humanizes Muslims as nuanced individuals can only be a good thing.

I just wish the execution had been a bit cleaner. This movie has some bad editing, in one instance cutting right when one of Leila’s brothers appears to start saying something to someone in a direction that makes no sense. Was the actor about to say something to a key grip or what?The more I write this very review, the more I wonder why I think I liked it even as much as I did. How did it win me over? Well, it won me over with two standout performances in a sea of confused ineptitude, captured with incongruously competent cinematography.

These two might win you over. Maybe. We’ll see.

Overall: B-

THE KILLER

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

The Killer could also have been called The Assassin’s Odyssey. It’s presented in a series of “Chapters,” each in a different location where the title character (Michael Fassbender) makes a kill. Or, as in the case of the deliberately tedious opening sequence, attempts to make a kill. His botched hit makes for the entire premise of the film: he stupidly heads home, stupidly waits an extra night, discovers his girlfriend severely injured in Santo Domingo, and spends the rest of the film hunting down all of those responsible for harming her.

I’m hard pressed to find this plot to be exceptional or memorable, except that, ironically, it is exceptionally and memorably executed. In spite of it veering on being self-satisfied, the editing, and particularly the sound editing are consistently clever. This is a David Fincher film released as a Netflix movie on November 10, after a theatrical release limited enough that I was not able to see it theatrically—and I found myself, watching it at home, rather wishing I had seen it in a theater. The sound editing alone would have made it a much better, certainly more immersive experience.

It’s an objectively fun watch even at home, at least once it gets past that opening scene, hanging out with The Killer in an abandoned WeWork office, waiting out the right time to shoot a mark in a building across the street, and truly overwhelming us with voiceover narration. Voiceover is often pointless and lazy, but it proves to have a point here, coming from an unreliable narrator with a penchant for self-delusion. I was bracing myself for the voiceover to overwhelm the entire film, but mercifully, it’s used comparatively sparingly once that first shot is missed. It’s the inciting incident, and it comes roughly 15 minutes into the film.

The locations of each “Chapter” span the globe and virtually every corner of the States: Paris, Santo Domingo, New Orleans, Florida, New York, Chicago. Each has a vibe distinct from all the others. Only one—Florida—proves to feature a legitimate action sequence, with his mark getting the job on The Killer after he’s crept into his house in the middle of the night. And to be clear, the sequence is tense, and thrilling to watch, with excellent fight choreography.

This is what I like most about The Killer: each change of scenery is given room to breathe, all the while with The Killer not so much getting character development, as gradually revealing his subtle ineptitude. This is a guy who exudes confidence, and then regularly makes preventable mistakes. Much as I lapped up the crackling energy of the Floridian house fight, my favorite of all the hits we follow The Killer on is the one in New York, where he catches up with the one woman on his list. Even when the movie is already quite good, Tilda Swinton manages to elevate anything she’s in. Her sequence is the one with real dialogue, a verbal sparring partner with Michael Fassbender who not only matches his talents but exceeds them.

It seems a lot more common for a film to run out of steam, its second half being the weaker half. The Killer achieves the inverse of this, in fact with each scene being better than the last. That opening scene left me skeptical, but by the time The Killer meets up with “The Lawyer” (Charles Parnell) and fatally ropes in his secretary (Kerry O’Malley), revealing to us some bullshit about empathy in his inner monologue, it becomes clear that The Killer is not your standard hitman movie.

I wasn’t quite as satisfied as I wanted to be by the end of this movie, essentially a series of creatively violent vignettes. So many of the preceding scenes so far exceeded my expectations, though, I’m willing to let it go. Everything builds effectively on what came before it, and the destination being a bit hollow means less when the journey is the point.

You want your sociopaths to be at least competent.

Overall: B+

THE MARVELS

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

The Marvels has all the same old bullshit I tired of eons ago in these superhero “universes”—the supposed stakes of saving the world; the CGI-laden action climax; the same broad story arc as dozens of other superhero movies just like it. Even worse, it relies too heavily on “MCU world building” that connects all these movies, the onetime novelty where the collective audience consensus finally seems to be: we’re over it.

And yet: there are things that set The Marvels apart. Like Captain Marvel (2019) before it, this is the exceptionally rare movie about a woman superhero. Indeed, this time, it’s about three women superheroes—one of whom is a woman of color. I am all about supporting movies like this, just to keep the studios keyed into the idea that they clearly have an audience. But, it also helps if the movie is actually good.

One of the unfortunate things for viewers who haven’t consumed all of the MCU content is that The Marvels, like most MCU movies anymore, relies on shorthand assumed to be understood by viewers who have. I’ve heard moderately good things about the Disney+ series Ms Marvel, but haven’t gotten around to seeing it, so this film is my introduction to her—otherwise known as Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani)—as a character. Incidentally, I did watch WandaVision on Disney+, but even two years ago is long enough for all the MCU mediocrity I’ve viewed to simply blend together in my memory. I know I liked Teyonah Parris’s screen presence as Monica Rambeau then, and I still do now.

How it comes to pass that Kamala, Monica, and Carol Danvers (Brie Larson), Captain Marvel herself, have found themselves in a predicament wherein every time they use their power at the same time, they teleport to swtich locations, I could not pretend to explain. The Marvels is packed with science fiction techno babble that is utterly meaningless, and all you can do is let it go. If you keep an open mind to the objective stupidness, The Marvels is actually pretty fun.

It’s the scenes where it goes gonzo-bonkers that I wish it had more of. Goose, the “flerkin” who looks like a regular domesticated house cat but is actually an alien that can swallow things exponentially larger with giant tentacles coming out of his mouth, was easily my favorite thing about Captain Marvel in 2019, and that remains true now. And director Nia DaCosta, along with her team of writers, really ups the ante with Goose this time around: Goose’s ability to swallow giant things whole, and then cough it up like a hairball later, slimy but otherwise completely unharmed, becomes a pivotal plot point. I didn’t know I needed to hear an overhead intercom voice say in a deadpan tone, “Don’t run from the flerkins. Let them eat you.” But it arguably made my week.

In other words: I came for the cats. Or the flerkins, to be more specific. Not to get too far into spoiler territory here, but this time we get more than just goose, but in a way you may not be able to predict, and it’s bizarre, fun, and hilarious.

I just wish flerkins weren’t the only area in which The Maevels leans into getting super weird. Weird is good! The rest of it, really, is just rote. The villain, Dar-Benn, is just dull (through no fault of Zawe Ashton, who does the best with what she has to work with), and represents otherworldly aspects of the Carol Danvers / Captain Marvel story that come across like a cross between Superman and Star Trek, with dying suns and generations of alien-ethnic rivalries. The stuff Captain Marvel has to condend with is rarely earthbound, and within the MCU context—Guardians of the Galaxy notwithstanding—it makes her less interesting. The most interesting superheroes are specimens of flawed humanity contenting with awesome responsibilities, who are dealing with other human beings.

All that said, Larson, Parris and Vellani have an undeniable chemistry as a trio, and the addition of Khan is particularly welcome, with her South Asian family getting the kind of representation seldom seen in films like this. Her parents, played by Mohan Kapur and Zenobia Shroff, make the most of the screen time they are given—even as a fight takes place in their house that destroys a bunch of their stuff, and even blows a hole in their ceiling. This is the kind of stuff that annoys me, the massive collateral damage that barely gets acknowledged, or might just get a sigh or an eye roll. Sure, these movies are utter fantasies, but if you are going to set any part of them on our version of Earth, there should be some modicum of groundnedness.

But, yet again, I nitpick. I guess you could say this is my passion. After Goose the flerkin, my second favorite thing about The Marvels is the run time: one hour and forty-five minutes. I saw that and thought I must be dreaming, it was so shockingly reasonable. Did someone get fired so another person could finally come in and say it’s okay to stop making these movies as though we are pretending they’re epics? There are many complaints one can have about The Marvels, but at the very least it’s not bloated.

Instead, it’s a breezy hang with three very different women with great chemistry, and a mouth-tentacled alien cat. If we could just get more weirdness on the level of kitty tentacles and less in the way of tired plot tropes, we’d really be getting somewhere. On the other hand, even a meaningless good time is still a good time.

People aren’t talking enough about how Tango is the real star of the movie.

Overall: B

NYAD

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

I’ve held a longstanding opinion that movies should be judged on their own merits, and not by comparison to source material. But Nyad, which was written by Julia Cox and based on Diana Nyad’s 2015 memoir Find a Way, complicates this notion due to Diana Nyad’s well-documented penchant for embellishment. Taking creative license is one thing, and being outright misleading is quite another—and Nyad the film depicts notable events that never happened. Most crucially, the claim that Diana Nyad was the first person to swim “unassisted” from Cuba to Florida is so dubious, that Guinness World Records rescinded their recognition of the crossing as an unprecedented achievement.

I must admit, I watched multiple scenes in Nyad wondering how accurate it was. To be fair, no one is labeling Nyad strictly as “a true story”—neither co-directors Jimmy Chin or Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi—but, come on: we are meant to understand, and take it in, as such. There are some sequences in the film that are obvious inventions for dramatic effect, such as a near-miss shark attack (Nyad did really bring a crew who used shark repelling electronic pulses) or two different hallucination sequences. When Nyad hallucinates, it’s pretty to look at, although for me it brought to mind how the entire film Life of Pi employs scenes of that sort far more successfully.

Does all this mean I didn’t like Nyad? Far from it—this is a film that succeeds remarkably well at what it sets out to do, which is to entertain, inspire, pull at the heartstrings. I only mention all of the above because what it does do is mitigate how impressed you can really be with the film, and with Diana Nyad herself. This is a really compelling film, which also could have been better.

Nyad does go out of its way to illustrate its title character’s ego, and even her penchant for embellishment, and eagerness to talk about herself. Annette Bening is perfectly cast in the role, and although Jodie Foster is also great as Bonnie, Diane’s best friend and coach, it’s honestly surprising to see Foster getting so much more Oscar buzz than Bening, as Bening impresses more memorably here. I can only theorize that Bening’s four nominations with no wins is an ironically contributing factor, whereas Foster, in spite of also having four nominations and two wins under her belt, is catching more attention in a “comeback” role in her first lead part since the poorly reviewed Hotel Artemis in 2018, and only her second since Elysium in 2013. The woman has not exactly been prolific in the past ten years, and people pay attention when she turns up again.

The question of whether Foster is playing a lesbian for the first time in Nyad is also a complicated one. The film never directly addresses Bonnie’s sexuality, nor can I find anything online even referencing it—everything only covers their relationship as longtime best friends, and that Nyad herself is an out lesbian. This movie does acknowledge that, in one single, brief reference to a woman she once dated, but it still establishes the fact, makes it clear, and then renders it completely incidental. The natural assumption is that Bonnie is also a lesbian, especially given the degree to which Foster leans into a clearly “lesbian vibe” in her performance. If nothing else, it’s quite nice to see a story about close friends who are lesbians (?) but not in any way romantic with each other.

Indeed, romance never factors into the story of Nyad, a departure from traditional approaches to movies like this. Instead, this is about a single-minded woman stunningly obsessed with gaining the achievement that eluded her upon her first attempt at the age of 28, and then she finally—spoiler alert!—achieves it after her fifth attempt at the age of sixty-four. And if we want to give Diana Nyad the benefit of the doubt, her achievement is stunning regardless of the technicalities of “independent observers.” She has every right to be proud, although given the characterization of her ego, being stripped of official accomplishment—a fact this film never actually acknowledges—must be driving her bonkers.

In spite of the issues swirling around Nyad, I really enjoyed watching this film. Whether I truly rooted for the woman is kind of another story—she strikes me as kind of psychotic. She drives her friends crazy, and Diana’s self-absorbed obsession with accomplishment is not something I could tolerate the way Bonnie does. It may be apparently platonic, but how much these two women love and care for each other cuts through all the bullshit, and might just be the biggest reason this move is worth watching.

It may be a cinematic fish story but it works.

Overall: B+

THE HOLDOVERS

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

It would seem that director Alexander Payne and star Paul Giamatti are a reliably magical combination. I loved their last collaboration, 2004’s Sideways, and two decades later I love The Holdovers just as much—if not even more so.

I can’t remember the last time I saw a film so thoroughly heartwarming. There’s something about the script, by first-time feature writer David Hemingson, with its characters who are cynical and wounded, but we only get to watch them work through those challenges. Where other writers would give their characters a sudden, renewed hardship or mistake to overcome or get past at a prescribed point in the story, in The Holdovers you only continue growing more fond of them. There is nothing flashy about this movie, and yet its storytelling is deceptively unconventional.

Payne does like to give his movies odd little flourishes, as in this one, set in the year 1970, and given utterly 1970s-style production company logos at the start of the film, complete with visual graininess to make it look like a film that was actually shot fifty years ago. At first I thought this was a little unnecessarily cutesy, but Payne successfully plants you into the fully realized world of this movie.

Paul Giamatti is a peculiar movie star, a guy with a storied career, and an undeniable charm and screen presence that belies his longstanding frumpy look. Now at the age of 56, he’s perfectly cast as a longtime rural private school teacher with a lazy eye and a penchant for solitude. This is the kind of part we have seen a zillion times in movies, and Giamatti manages to make Paul Hunham utterly his own. Paul has a warmth to him that surfaces naturally, under the right circumstances.

In particular, the circumstances here involve him being roped into chaperoning the “holdovers” of the movie’s title: five kids who are unable, for various reasons, to go home for Christmas break and have to spend it at the otherwise abandoned school. One of these kids is Angus Tully, played by impressive newcomer Dominic Sessa. The school these kids attend has a lot of students from very rich families, and when one of the “holdover” kids gets invited home for a ski trip and invites all the other kids, Angus is the only one whose parents can’t be reached, leaving Mr. Hunham and Angus to themselves, alongside grieving school cook Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph, currently more likely than anyone else in this film to be nominated for—and win—an Oscar).

It’s difficult to put into words how wonderful I found The Holdovers. It filled my heart. I tried to think of other descriptors that could work. There’s an element of sweetness, I suppose, but that’s not really what the movie is. Maybe “wholesome” is the right word. Yes, I think that’s it: many “feel-good” movies of the 21st century are self-consciously bawdy with a “wholesome” subtext that just rings false. The Holdovers is the kind of movie that is never bawdy although it can be slightly vulgar when it wants to be, and it gets its tone of wholesomeness exactly right. It brings to mind old family dramas like Terms of Endearment—except movies like that are what I would call “comic tearjerkers,” and The Holdovers is neither as comic (although it’s often funny) nor nearly as much of a tearjerker (although I did cry a little).

It would seem that Alexander Payne is in a class of his own. His movies are about the people who connect in spite of familial challenges of almost pointed specificity. These characters are expertly drawn, complete people. The best I can tell you is to watch The Holdovers and see for yourself. Maybe it won’t bowl you over, as it’s not designed to be. But it spoke to me at a deep level.

An unlikely trio make for a cozy found family of wounded souls.

Overall: A