→ July 3, 2018
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The Death of Stalin.

The Death of Stalin (amazon • iTunes) , the latest film from writer/director Armando Iannucci, is a rollicking farce that is only loosely based on the death of the dictator in question and the mad scramble for power in the vacuum that resulted, with Iannucci moving events and even people around to suit the story. It’s frequently funny in a face-palming sort of way, even when the story is more barely contained chaos than structured plot, and a reminder to me that I need to spend some time with Iannucci’s past and better-known work, including In the Loop and the HBO series Veep.

Stalin appears as a character early in the film, mostly so we can see the rest of the Central Committee playing obsequious Ed McMahons to his Johnny Carson, laughing at nonsensical jokes and trying hard to stay off of Stalin’s legendary enemies lists, people to be rounded up and exiled or, more likely, shot after torturing, with one of the Committee members appearing on the lists the night that Stalin takes ill. (His death is also fictionalized – he did die of a cerebral hemorrhage, but the proximate cause, in the film, is fictional and played for laughs.) After a brief bout of will-he-die-or-won’t-he, he finally kicks it, and the chess game to succeed him starts, except it’s chess as played mostly by people who’ve never played anything more than checkers, except for the scheming Nikita Khrushchev (Steve Buscemi) and the odious Lavrentiy Beria (Simon Russell Beale). The factions behind these two are fluid, often in a nearly literal sense as when the two sides try to squeeze past each other to be the first to offer emphatic condolences to Stalin’s daughter Svetlana (Andrea Riseborough).

Georgy Malenkov (Jeffrey Tambor) temporarily became the Soviet premier in Stalin’s death, but Khrushchev wrested much of the power away from him in the nine days afterwards, which roughly corresponds to the events shown in this film. Tambor plays him as a seasons 4/5 George Bluth with more of a temper, generally a step behind everyone else and thus easily outplayed by Khrushchev and Beria throughout the story. The fact that everyone seems to be operating at a different speed, often missing things right in front of their faces, provides much of the humor in the film and all of those face-palm moments, as one character says or does something that others completely miss or just fail to understand.

The second half of the film, where the real machinations start up, kicks in when the army arrives, led by Field Marshal Georgy Zhukov (Jason Isaacs, chewing scenery left and right), and Khrushchev cooks up his final scheme to wrest control of the Committee for himself by throwing Beria under the bus. From that point, the humor shifts from the almost slapstick, misunderstanding-driven comedy of the first half to a mixture of high- and lowbrow farce, from the game of telephone the leaders all play while standing around Stalin’s casket to the antics of Stalin’s drunken son Vasily (Rupert Friend).

There’s no point in this film where it’s not funny, which saves it from the fact that the plot is rather slapdash and doesn’t hew closely at all to real events. The dialogue never stops, and Iannucci isn’t afraid to mix some bathroom humor (about up to my tolerance for that stuff) in with political gags, notably in the Keystone Kops routine after Stalin’s unconscious but not-dead-yet body is first discovered. The framing of the film around a recorded concert and vengeful pianist doesn’t work well, and some of the other Committee members seem superfluous to both the plot and the comedy, although it was great to see Michael Palin (as Vyacheslav Molotov) on screen again.

The Death of Stalin isn’t a great movie, or a particularly sharp satire, but it is very funny, often with jokes that build on top of each other as scenes become increasingly absurd. (Buscemi’s dance around Tambor at the funeral is beyond description and wonderfully choreographed.) I laughed, often, and then forgot much of the plot once the film ended – and the incongruous if generally accurate ending does burst the comic bubble too. The humor is smart, but the rest of the story doesn’t back up the humor with anything of substance.

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→ July 1, 2018
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Annihilation.

Paramount made some curious decisions earlier this year with the release of the film Annihiliation (amazon • iTunes), loosely based on the Jeff VanderMeer novel of the same name (which I have not read yet), including an off-period release date in the U.S. and the sale of the film directly to Netflix for most of the world (other than the U.S., Canada, and China). Marketing of the film wasn’t great either; I saw the trailer before its theatrical run, and the trailer doesn’t represent the film well at all, overselling the horror elements and underselling the story. The result is that the movie didn’t fare that well at the box office despite positive reviews, undercut somewhat by Paramount’s machinations and I think the failure to push this film as a smart sci-fi flick that overcomes some modest flaws with a big finish.

The movie opens with Lena (Natalie Portman) in medical isolation, being interrogated by a British scientist (Benedict Wong) about what happened to her on a mission that went wrong and from which she is the only survivor. She’s somewhat vague on details, after which we flash back to before the mission and see that she’s a professor at Johns Hopkins Medical School and that her husband, a special forces Sergeant (Oscar Isaac), has been missing for a year and is presumed dead. He shows up at the house one day, but is totally vacant and almost immediately begins hemorrhaging, which eventually leads to Lena volunteering to lead a mission of five women soldiers and researchers into a mysterious, growing region called the Shimmer, into which the military has sent many missions but from which only Lena’s husband has ever returned. The women find a seemingly impossible environment where animals and plants are swapping DNA, with increasingly horrifying results the longer the team stays within its boundaries.

Annihilation has two main conceits in its story: the ongoing mystery of what the Shimmer is and what it’s doing, and the fact that previous teams have all disappeared and are likely dead, a Lovecraftian mystery trending towards horror since we know from the start that Lena is the only survivor. (The Wikipedia entry on the movie notes the script’s similarity to a Lovecraft short story, “The Colour of Space.”) The former is revealed gradually at first, but proceeds in fits and starts in accordance with discoveries the team makes and with Lena’s examinations of blood and other cells under her microscope. The latter builds as the story progresses and the team moves through the Shimmer with increasing disorientation; they encounter animals that loosely resemble familiar creatures but that have evolved at impossible speeds. Eventually Lena reaches the lighthouse at the center of the Shimmer and discovers something more of the nature of the anomaly in a gorgeous special-effects sequence right before her final battle to escape.

The script does waste too much time on irrelevant details outside of the mission, including Lena’s affair with a colleague while her husband is missing, a subplot that is neither germane to the main story nor resolved in any satisfactory manner during the film. And while screenwriter/director Alex Garland (Ex Machina) tries to give the team members some identities as individuals, none but Lena comes across as much more than a redshirt, not even ostensible team leader Dr. Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh), so none of their losses is particularly tangible to the viewer. One team member cracks under the stress after the first death and another attack, which is foreshadowed in earlier dialogue but really not well explained by her character at all. Lena’s decision not to reveal to other team members that her husband was on an earlier mission is played up as a major issue, but without justifying why that’s a big deal or why the team member who cracks is so angry about the omission.

There are two scenes of gore in Annihiliation, more than enough to earn its R rating but not so much that I’d call this a straight horror film. There’s more of an intellectual undercurrent to the script than the trailer gave it credit for having; the way the Shimmer evolves, and then affects the members of the team, poses real questions about what it means to be human or even conscious, ones the film doesn’t try to answer even as characters directly ask what the Shimmer “wants.” Maybe it was just too hard to market on its own merits, but Annihilation is intense and smart enough to deserve to find an audience now that it’s more widely available.

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→ June 29, 2018
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American Animals.

American Animals is based very closely on a true story – the 2004 attempt by four college students in Kentucky to steal several rare books from Transylvania University’s special collection, including John James Audobon’s The Birds of America. Rather than unfurling as a traditional heist movie, however, the script focuses more on the four kids involved, interspersing interviews with all of them throughout the movie to try to get at why they tried something so stupid and so incredibly unlikely to work.

Spencer Reinhard (Barry Keoghan) and Warren Lipka (Evan Peters) are both friends living in Lexington, Kentucky, where Reinhard attends Transylvania and studies art, when he sees the Audobon book on an orientation tour of the library and learns it’s worth about $12 million. He tells Warren, and during one (or more) of their weed-fueled conversations, they decide to try to steal and sell it, less for the money than for the adventure, as Warren in particular talks about how pointless and empty their lives seem to be. They eventually recruit accounting student Eric Borsuk (Jared Abrahamson), who at least brings some rational thinking to the logistical planning, and Chas Allen (Blake Jenner), the getaway driver, and spend months cooking up a plan after doing “research” like watching old heist movies. The robbery itself goes very poorly and they’re arrested not long afterwards, but by that point in the film, the theft seems beside the point, as the unclear motivation of the four stooges overtakes questions of whether it’ll work.

The movie starts with confessional interview clips with the real Reinhard and Lipka, as well as comments from their parents and an old teacher or two, before shifting into the ‘fictional’ part of the movie (although the intro takes pains to tell us the story is true). Director Bart Layton continues to sprinkle comments from the four men, all since released from prison, throughout the film, and uses their differing recollections to show the same scene in two ways, and elucidate how unreliable our memories can be. The trick is clever, although I’m not sure it gets enough to what seems to be the main point of the script, which is that no one, including the four men themselves, can fully explain why they wanted to do this or thought it might work. They refer to it as an “adventure,” which sort of makes sense, until the plan starts to involve subduing the librarian through force, which should have snapped at least one of these four out of their delusion. They’re clearly not dumb, although the plan itself was; Reinhard and Lipka are both thoughtful and articulate, and with the more reticent Borsuk they all seem better able to express now how ill-considered the plan was and how remorseful they feel now for the people they hurt. But can being bored and maybe a little rudderless in life really take a kid like Reinhard, who appears to have never been in any trouble before this, and make him the co-mastermind of a multi-million dollar heist?

The problem with American Animals isn’t the story, but the direction by Layton, who also wrote the script. Layton, perhaps best known for the documentary Imposter, has made his first non-documentary feature here, and has far too heavy a hand, making his influence felt everywhere in the movie when he needed to just let it breathe. The constant rotating camera shots are beyond distracting to the point of dizzying – it’s clearly a gimmick for Layton, and it adds nothing to the film at all, especially since scenery is never the point here. The music is even more distracting; the movie uses few songs contemporary to the time of the planning or heist, with a ton of music from the 1970s, and the volume is often overpowering.

The actors playing the four thieves are solid, although Peters particularly stands out for his portrayal of Lipka as the driving force behind the plan – emotional, erratic, daring, and above all charismatic. Keoghan gets at the hesitation Reinhard expresses in interviews after the fact, although he gives the sense throughout the film of someone who’s physically and emotionally tired more than someone who’s bored and looking for a thrill. And nothing the actors do can touch the emotional responses the men give in confessional clips shown at the end of the movie, where several fight back tears (of shame or embarrassment) as they consider the consequences of their actions. Maybe American Animals would have worked better as a straight documentary, or just if Layton had eased up on the throttle and let the story drive the direction more.

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→ June 28, 2018
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Thoroughbreds.

Thoroughbreds (amazon • iTunes) is sort of Discount Heathers, with a girl playing the disaffected provocateur role, and a lower body count, plus an ending that doesn’t quite hold together as tightly as its obvious inspiration. Even with some of its flaws, however, it’s so tightly written and features two riveting performances by its leads that it’s worth seeing even if you, like me, have fond memories of the 1988 darkly comic original.

Thoroughbreds starts out with the two teenaged protagonists reuniting after several years apart, meeting as Andover student Lily (Anya Taylor-Joy) begins to tutor the peculiar Amanda (Olivia Cooke), the latter of whom has apparently just killed her horse. Amanda has exceptional perception and quickly sees through Lily’s pretenses, while also confessing to extreme emotional detachment: Amanda is anhedonic and perhaps antisocial, feeling nothing whatsoever and showing it in her perpetually neutral expressions. Her gaze and her tone are both disarming, which leads to the first of many funny scenes when Lily finally cops to the fact that Amanda freaks her out.

The plot kicks into gear shortly afterwards when Amanda suggests to Lily that she kill her controlling and vaguely creepy stepfather, Mark, who is very wealthy and berates Lily’s ineffectual mother. (Although I thought the film implied early in the script that Mark was at the least leering at Lily, if not actually attempting to abuse her, that turned out to be wrong, and Mark is just an asshole, but not a criminal.) Lily is aghast at the idea, until she sees Mark verbally abuse her mother again and finds out he’s decided to send her to a different boarding school, after which she tells Amanda she wants to go through with it. They plan to use a lowlife drug dealer, Tim (Anton Yelchin in what I think ended up his last film role), as hitman, although his willingness and his competence are both open questions. As the plan progresses, it turns out that Lily isn’t quite the delicate flower – or lily-white princess – she appears to be.

Taylor-Joy is perfect as Lily, embodying both the perfect little white girl persona and the stuck-up prep school teenager, but it’s Cooke as Amanda who grabs the wheel and steers the movie all the way to the big finish. Cooke has to be convincing as this weary, wise, incisive kid who is fooled by nobody and who rigorously applies logic to every situation, including understanding why people will act in specific ways and how to use that to their advantage. And she is, to an exceptional degree – her delivery is so dry, and her face so impassive, that Cooke sells Amanda as a teenaged automaton, making everything that comes afterwards credible, because nothing in this film works without that character. Taylor-Joy works, and it wouldn’t surprise me if she had the bigger career of the two, but Cooke has this film by the throat and never lets go.

Cory Finley made his debut as both director and screenwriter with Thoroughbreds, crafting those two compelling characters and working in plenty of very dark humor, although he seemed unsure of how to stick the landing, and the film wobbles as a result before more or less staying on its feet. Amanda’s motivation at the climax is unclear or just hard to accept, and the brief coda doesn’t add anything to the story; ending the film in the final shot with Lily and Amanda together would have been more effective. There are also some extremely strong and unsettling shots of the girls’ faces that add to the noir-ish feel of the film without interrupting its flow. It’s a very auspicious first effort for Finley, however, marking him as a filmmaker to watch, as well as a star turn for Cooke.

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→ June 18, 2018
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Incredibles 2.

Incredibles 2 comes almost fifteen years after the first installment’s release, but takes place immediately after the events of the previous film – literally, as we see Mr. Incredible & his family fighting the Underminer (John Ratzenberger making his obligatory appearance), which is how the first movie ended. That sets off a new story that bears a lot of resemblance to the original but flips the script so that Elastigirl is now the superhero out fighting crime, while Mr. Incredible turns into Mr. Mom and has to feed the kids, help Dash with his math homework, navigate Violet’s first foray into dating, and deal with Jack-Jack’s hitherto unknown array of spontaneously-appearing superpowers. It is just as good as the first movie, but without the boost the first movie got from being new. We know all these characters and we know how their world operates. The magic of meeting them all for the first time is now replaced by the comfort of seeing all the familiar faces and places and hearing those same voices (“daaaaahlink”) after so many years away.

The movie forks early on into two subplots that, of course, will rejoin near the end so someone can save the day – and really, if you can’t figure out where all this is going, you haven’t watched a Pixar movie before. Winston Deaver (Bob Odenkirk) is a communications tycoon, something Frozone explains to us in a clumsy aside worthy of an SVU episode, and a longtime fan of superheroes, just as his father was. He and his sister (Catherine Keener) have a plan to make supers legal again by launching a PR campaign around Elastigirl, putting a camera in her uniform and then letting the public see just what good work she’s doing fighting crime. She gets an opportunity to do so in suspiciously short order, saving a brand-new monorail from total disaster, which introduces her to a new villain, the Screenslaver, who says we’re all spending too much time looking at our phones (duh) so he’s going to cause chaos to wake us all up (good luck with that).

* I kept trying to figure out what the pun in his name might be, since its sounds like “winst endeavor” every time anyone says it. Google tells me “winst” is the Dutch word for profit, but of course it’s pronounced “vinst,” and that’s a long way to go for a pun anyway.

Meanwhile, on the home front, Mr. Incredible learns that parenting is hard. Some of the jokes are a little too familiar – yes, I’ve been through the new math versus old math thing, and still think the way my daughter’s school teaches long division is dumb – but most are at least funny, notably the sight gags. But it’s Jack-Jack who steals pretty much every scene he’s in. His numerous superpowers, a few of which were previewed in his fight against Syndrome (who, fortunately, does not magically re-appear in this film) at the end of the first movie, are pretty funny on their own. He also ends up in a fight scene with a tenacious raccoon that is by far the movie’s best sequence, busting out all of his powers and flabbergasting his sleep-deprived father – who, of course, decides not to tell Elastigirl about any of this while she’s out saving the world and trying to convince the public to make supers legal again.

The problem with Incredibles 2, other than the lack of newness – there are some new supers but they’re not that interesting, except maybe Void (Sophia Bush), who needed more to do – is that the villain is meh. You’ll probably figure out who it is fairly quickly, and then you’ll spend the rest of the film trying to figure out the villain’s motivation, which is not terribly convincing, and certainly doesn’t do enough to justify the plan to make supers illegal on a permanent basis. The exposition required to get to that point gives the film its one slow-down moment, and it’s not sufficiently credible to explain everything that the villain has done or is about to do.

The resolution, however, is a blast, literally and figuratively, with Jack-Jack again playing a critical role, as he and the family make use of his powers and his growing ability to control them. Brad Bird, the director and writer of both Incredibles movies, reprises his role as E in another fantastic sequence where she bonds with Jack-Jack (and, of course, makes him a new superhero costume). Even the ending leaves it open so that if they do decide to make this a trilogy, Bird can write the script right from the moment where the family takes off to go stop another crime. It’s very good, almost as good as the first one, but it could have been tighter.

The Pixar short film that airs before this – after the seven trailers, one of which was for Christopher Robin and five of which were for movies you couldn’t pay me to see – was Bao, a twisted, funny, and very sweet story about being a parent and letting go. The first ever Pixar short directed by a woman, Bao gives us a wife who makes exquisite xiao long baozi, the steamed dumplings that look a bit like a Hershey’s kiss in its wrapper – or, as it turns out, a lot like a little head, as one day the woman starts to bite into one of her dumplings only to have it cry out like a baby, sprout arms and legs, and then grow like a child. Eventually, the little bao starts to grow up and become a teenager and then a young adult who brings home a fiancée – blonde, and definitely not Asian – which really pushes mom over the edge. There’s one slightly demented scene in the short, which I thought was hilarious, but the end will have almost any parent in the audience tearing up. I know opinions on Bao are mixed but I think it’s one of their best shorts ever.

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→ June 11, 2018
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The Tale.

Documentary filmmaker Jennifer Fox won the Grand Jury Documentary Prize at Sundance in 1987, when she was just 28 years old, for her debut feature Beirut: The Last Home Movie, about a Lebanese family living in a mansion in the country’s capital during its extensive civil war. She returned to Sundance this year with her first traditional (non-documentary) feature, The Tale, which received rave reviews and was picked up by HBO, which debuted the movie at the end of May. Telling the story of how Fox’s track coach groomed and molested her when she was just 13, it stars Laura Dern as the adult Fox, whose memories around that summer mislead her into thinking of it as a romantic relationship, and who tries to uncover the truth of what happened to her, thirty years later, when her mother discovers a story Fox had written at the time that described the predatory “relationship.”

Rather than simply using flashbacks, Fox tells the story as if she (as Dern) were traveling through her own memories, not just witnessing them but interacting with them, including conversations with her younger self (played by Isabelle Nélisse) and interrogations of her equestrian teacher Mrs. G (Elizabeth Debicki) within the memories. Fox arrived at Mrs. G’s for a summer of horseback riding lessons, and is immediately introduced to the charming forty-ish neighbor Bill Allens (Jason Ritter), who is Mrs. G’s lover and who quickly turns the charm on for Jenny, then gradually grooms her for rape.

Nearly every revelation in Fox’s memory begins with a false start, some detail rendered inaccurately (including her own age at the time of the assaults) or person not remembered, so that The Tale becomes not just a story about a young girl sexually assaulted by an older man, but about how we respond to trauma within our minds – how our brains can try to protect us by creating a fictional shell around the more difficult truth. Thus the movie plays out as a true-life detective story, where the culprit is known but the crime is hazy, and Fox has to navigate her own memories by uncovering clues in the present day – talking to her fellow students at the time and visiting Mrs. G, who goes from helpful to stonewalling in the blink of an eye – so that she can peel away the fictional outer layer on those memories and show us the truth. The technique is jarring, as it should be given the subject matter, because any scene showing the past may subsequently be rewound and rewritten so we can see it as it actually happened, not as present-day Fox recalled it. It’s most striking when she discovers another young girl (older than she was) in photographs from that summer whom she hadn’t remembered at all.

Dern is riveting as Fox, carrying us through the stages of denial, anger, and eventually something like acceptance – she confronts Bill in the present day, in a scene that is truly fictional but also pivotal to resolving the film – and making her seem understandably irrational in her worst moments. There’s a fight with her fiancé, played by Common, that is anguishing to watch because it’s clear that he’s right and willing to help, but she’s incapable of even discussing what happened with the person who is, in theory, closest to her. And Ritter is so creepy in the grooming moments – let alone the utterly harrowing, barely watchable scenes of statutory rape (filmed with a body double for Nélisse) – that it’ll be hard to see him in anything else in the future. (It also doesn’t help that he looks so much like his dad, the late John Ritter of Three’s Company fame.)

There’s a recurring refrain in The Tale that’s used to hand-wave away any violations of social norms or boundaries, including the whole idea that a 40-year-old man shouldn’t have sex with a 13-year-old girl: “It was the seventies.” There’s such a note of dismissiveness in the quote, uttered by at least three different characters, that you feel how uphill Fox’s battle to get at the truth might have been for her. People don’t like to dig up the past in any unpleasant circumstances, even less so when they might feel some complicity in someone else’s crimes, and pointing to the sexual permissiveness of the era – which was used to try to whitewash the story of David Bowie sleeping with teenaged groupies after his passing – only adds another wall for the victims to scale as they try to grapple with their histories of trauma.

The Tale uses Jennifer Fox’s real name for her character, but changed the names of the real-life Mrs. G and Bill Allens, as both are still alive. There is no indication whether Allens ever faced any charges or even repercussions for what is later implied to be dozens of assaults on various underaged girls, or if the various buildings or wings of buildings named for him still bear his name. I understand the legal ramifications of using his real name in the film, but if he’s still alive, he may still be a threat, and there are likely may other surviving victims who would like answers, even if justice is still beyond them.

Because it hasn’t received a theatrical release, The Tale isn’t eligible for Oscar or other annual awards for movies, but should earn Emmy consideration this fall for the movie itself and for Dern, Ritter, and Fox both as director and writer. I’ll still rank it along movies that did go to theaters at some point, and I’ll guess even before the halfway point that it’ll end up in my top ten for 2018. It’s powerful without ever manipulating its audience, and the novel way it walks us down the false starts of memory gives the viewer such a sense of Fox’s confusion that you’ll crave the catharsis that Fox can never really receive.

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→ May 29, 2018
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Beast.

Who is the actual Beast of this taut, Hitchcockian thriller’s title? Although we’re led to believe from the start that it’s the rakish, mysterious outsider, who quickly becomes the suspect in a series of killings of young girls on the British Crown Dependency of Jersey, the title, like many other names and aspects of this intense and well-acted film, carries more than one meaning. (It’s available to rent on amazon.)

Beast is the debut feature from director and screenwriter Michael Pearce, who has just a handful of British TV credits to his name, and hinges on a star turn from Irish actress Jessie Buckley as Moll, a young woman in her mid-20s who lives with her domineering mother and senile father in a giant house that still feels awfully close on screen. The film opens with Moll’s birthday party, at which she is quickly upstaged by her beautiful sister, leading Moll to flee to go out dancing all night, eventually leading her to a chance encounter with Pascal (Johnny Flynn), a rifle-toting loner who lives on his own and seems to be the only person who treats Moll as an individual. His status as an outsider from polite society – ironic, as he’s of old Jersey stock, evidenced by his French surname, Deneuve – makes him an easy target for the police as they look for the man who’s raped and killed three teenaged girls on the small island, pushing Moll into the quandary of having to lie to protect her new lover or to question the possibility that he’s a murderer.

Pascal posterAlthough the obvious implication of the title and the posters showing Flynn out of focus at the front of the picture is that Pascal is or might be the beast, the script regularly offers us potential interpretations of the term. Moll herself has something in her past that’s revealed in stages over the course of the film, but it’s clear from the start that she is at least a complex character with something serious and unaddressed inside of her, based on something she does before leaving the house during her party. There’s a graphic scene later in the film involving an animal Moll shoots under Pascal’s training that also reveals an unexpected rage within Moll that will also be gradually and incompletely explained as the film progresses. And her mother, Hillary (Geraldine James), who favors her other two children over Moll, is utterly terrifying in her controlling nature, reducing Moll to a blubbering child, and her instantaneous shifts to everything-is-okay mode, even concluding one scolding with, “Let’s all be friends again.” Even as we’re given a Moll-Pascal relationship that could be dangerous, we’re given plain evidence that the relationship between Hillary and her mother is downright toxic.

Pascal’s name itself feels like another ironic twist in a film laden with irony and misdirection. Pascal’s wager argues that a bet on God’s existence, and thus eternal life after death, has a positive payoff if correct but little or no negative cost if wrong, while a bet against God’s existence, thus living a life of sin, has a huge negative cost if wrong and little to no benefit if correct. Beast‘s version of Pascal’s wager for Moll is flipped on its head – she can bet that he’s not the killer, but that bet carries some rather substantial downside risk for her, and she may actually be chasing the illusion of love rather than a true version of it. Even when she sees a glimpse of what Pascal is capable of doing when angry, and gets evidence from her very creepy cop friend (or cousin?) that Pascal has hurt someone before, she still decides to believe in her lover rather than anything else she’s seen – and we are left in the dark right up until the end of the film on whether she made the right call.

The ending of Beast is wonderfully ambiguous as well; after Pascal does something I would call unforgivable, the tenor shifts, and the last layers of Moll’s exterior are peeled back, and their entire relationship changes color to something much darker and bleaker. Buckley’s performance as Moll is riveting – I doubt there will be five better performances by lead actresses in all of 2018 – as she seems to portray a set of interrelated characters all rolled up into one, at times appearing to be an awkward teenager, at times an independent and headstrong adult. The film also gives us clues as to her states of mind or roles within scenes by changing Buckley’s hairstyle, whether it’s pulled back, tightly curled, frizzy, even a little mussed, just enough to alter her mien and put her in different footing in each setting. (Also, I know that the fairy tale character’s hair isn’t red, but the scenes of Moll walking through the forest gave me a Little Red Riding Hood vibe … and we’re left to wonder if Pascal is a real human or just a wolf in disguise.)

The scenes with Cliff and one with a stark, accented policewoman from off island are a bit forced, and it’s unclear why Moll or Pascal would be interrogated without attorneys or would agree to it when not obligated to stay; those are the only times when the tension flags and the element that puts the viewer right into the film starts to fade. The remainder of Beast is utterly intense from start to finish, and the conclusion is just ambiguous enough to let the viewer come up with another interpretation, Memento-like, to everything that came before. This deserves a much wider audience, and Buckley in particular should be on everyone’s short list for acting awards in the fall.

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→ May 8, 2018
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You Were Never Really Here.

I’m a known sucker for just about anything noir or even noir-ish – I mean, my most anticipated movie of 2018 is The Happytime Murders, which might be best categorized as “Muppet film noir” – so Lynne Ramsey’s latest movie, You Were Never Really Here, is more or less right in my subjective wheelhouse. It is dark as hell, unrelenting, and viscerally satisfying even as the grotesque imagery disturbs you. With yet another star turn from Joaquin Phoenix in the lead role, it gives the hero/antihero dichotomy a third look, with a detective who suffers from PTSD due to repeated traumas and channels some of that energy into finding missing girls – and into brutally beating his adversaries with a hammer.

Based on a novella by Jonathan Ames, You Were Never Really Here gives us Joe (Phoenix), a private detective who seems obsessed with secrecy to a paranoid extent, and who we see from the very start engages in self-destructive behavior like nearly asphyxiating himself in dry-cleaner plastic bags. He returns from a successful rescue in Cincinnati to see his boss, McCleary (John Doman of The Wire), and eventually receives a new assignment to rescue the missing daughter of a widowed state senator. Beginning with an address that the senator received via an anonymous text, Joe stakes out the building, which he suspects is a brothel with underaged girls inside, but the rescue attempt opens him up to a broader conspiracy – perhaps justifying his earlier paranoia – and a spreading web of violence that puts everyone close to Joe in the killers’ sights.

The mystery around the missing girl, Nina (played by Ekaterina Samsonov, who is 15 but looks much younger for this role), is secondary to the story of Joe, which we get via brief, often disjointed flashbacks as they might appear in Joe’s own mind as he re-experiences traumatic memories from childhood, where his father was abusive to him and to Joe’s mother; and from his time serving in the Army in the Middle East. The depiction of trauma is hard to watch, but ultimately realistic in how the brain revisits the trauma and the actions a victim might take as coping mechanisms that don’t do anything to solve the long-term problem. Rather than use the traumatic history as a plot device – here’s why Joe is the way he is – the film shows the ongoing damage he’s suffering from it. To the very end, there is no indication that Joe, who wants to assure Nina that thinks will be okay, is anything close to okay himself.

Phoenix is tremendous in this role, delivering a more nuanced performance than he did with his Oscar-nominated impersonation of Johnny Cash in Walk the Line, giving Joe the right level of simmering rage that gives little warning before it boils over. He won Best Actor at Cannes last year, just about a year ago this week, for the film, which also won the Best Screenplay award there for Ramsey. (It lost the Palme d’Or to The Square, which is a poor choice and seems a very Cannes thing to have happen.) Samsonov is a revelation in a small but critical role, one that becomes much more important and, I would imagine, difficult for a child actor, as the story progresses and Nina becomes more than just a prop for the plot.

The film is dark in the literal sense as well, with grimy shots of alleys and stairwells, disorienting top-down shots of Joe in action, and even some violence (almost all of which is left off-camera) shown as if on security-camera footage. The hammer is Joe’s weapon of choice, for reasons that become apparent in the film as well, but Ramsey films the various assaults from behind Joe or from such a distance that you don’t actually see the hits. There’s blood in the film, but it’s all shown after the fact, and in those cases it’s not Joe’s doing; the one time we see Joe interacting with one of his own victims, the result is morbidly comic and almost sentimental, one of the only times we get a glimpse of Joe’s deeply empathetic streak when he’s not beating someone’s brains in.

The lack of air is a recurring motif in this film, a possible metaphor for the feelings of panic and the sense of being ‘trapped’ that often haunt PTSD sufferers until they get real help (not just, say, cognitive behavioral therapy, which doesn’t work for PTSD). There’s no sign here that Joe has ever sought treatment, so he’s caught in a cycle of reliving his traumas, even dissociating for moments, to the point where I expected it to eventually cost him in a physical conflict. (I won’t spoil whether that happens.) But we keep returning to situations where he can’t breathe, or finds someone in such a situation, which certainly mirrors the experience of having a full-blown panic attack.

This isn’t a movie for everyone or even for most people; it’s grim, there’s enough results-of-violence on screen to merit the R rating, and while we see none of the abuse of underaged girls, it’s present enough in the story that it would likely deter many viewers. I think it’s superb, however, reminiscent of the bleak noir novels of Jim Thompson (The Killer Inside Me, pop. 1280) or Horace McCoy’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?. While not quite as hopeless as those books can be, You Were Never Really Here captures that same sense of existential darkness, and like Thompson’s books in particular, it succeeds in getting us inside the head of the protagonist and using the crime as a vehicle to explore his character in a way few films in the detective/noir genre have done.

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→ April 12, 2018
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Isle of Dogs.

Wes Anderson might be the most divisive director making movies in English today, as his fans love his work, and everyone else hears his twee dialogue and heads for the exits. He’s been on a critical roll lately, with The Fantastic Mr. Fox (good, but not very faithful to the wonderful book by Roald Dahl), Moonrise Kingdom, and the Oscar-nominated Grand Budapest Hotel. I had only seen two complete Anderson films, The Fantastic Mr. Fox and Bottle Rocket (somewhat annoying), and turned off Rushmore (insufferable) after about 20 minutes. So when I tell you Isle of Dogs, Anderson’s new, animated film from an original script, is excellent, perhaps it means a little more than when an Anderson fanboy critic says the same. It’s just great, no qualifier needed.

Isle of Dogs gives us an alternate-history Japan, ruled by the Kobayashi clan, which hates dogs based on a centuries-old grievance. The current Mayor of the city of Megasaki, also a Kobayashi, comes up with a scheme to banish all dogs from the city to Trash Island, while scapegoating the dogs for numerous public health problems and overcrowding. Trash Island becomes a concentration camp, looking more like one as the scheme and the film progress, with dogs organizing themselves into packs and fighting over scraps of food.

Atari, the 12-year-old ward of the Mayor, who is his distant uncle, hijacks a tiny plane and flies to Trash Island to find his dog, Spots, the first canine exiled to the island. He lands near one group of five dogs who, despite not understanding Japanese, figure out why he’s there and resolve to help him – especially since he is the only owner who has tried to come rescue his lost pet. This leads them on a quest the length of the island, all the while the Mayor and his henchman Domo try to recapture him and advance their plans to eliminate all of the dogs forever. At the same time, an American exchange student named Tracy Walker, boasting a comically round head of curly blonde hair, leads her Japanese classmates in starting a pro-dog resistance movement, during which she develops a crush on Atari, who has become a folk hero to dog lovers in Japan.

Anderson’s conceit here is to have all of the human characters other than Tracy speak Japanese, with translations appearing in subtitles as needed, while the dogs’ barks are ‘translated’ into English by the voice actors (or magic, I’m not sure which). This lets Anderson set a movie in Japan while using most of his favorite actors, and this one has a whopper of a cast – Bryan Cranston, Frances McDormand, Scarlett Johanssen, Jeff Goldblum (playing himself in dog form), Tilda Swinton (as a pug, which just made me laugh every time she spoke), F. Murray Abraham, Bob Balaban, Yoko Ono, Fisher Stevens, and, as “Mute Poodle,” Anjelica Huston, with narration by Courtney B. Vance. It’s also lighter on the twee-talk than the other Anderson films I’ve seen, perhaps because the script is credited to four writers, and I can only assume someone in the room pointed out, “You know, nobody talks like this in the real world, Wes. This is why everyone thinks you’re a fuckin’ weirdo.”

The story is totally over the top, so if you have problems with absurd plots in animated films – the octopus driving the truck in Finding Dory or the baggage-cart sequence at the end of Toy Story 2 come to mind – you may find suspending your disbelief hard here. Anderson et al compensate by populating the island with so many unique and surprisingly well-defined characters (given how little dialogue some of them get) that I found it easy to just roll with the story, even when Atari and the dogs built a fleet of boats to get themselves back to the mainland for the final confrontation. But there really isn’t any avoiding the fact that Kobayashi and his group are Nazis, the dogs are Jews being rounded up and sent to concentration camps to suffer and die, and oh by the way doesn’t this resemble stuff happening in the United States right now?

Like The Fantastic Mr. Fox, Isle of Dogs — say that out loud, if you haven’t caught the pun — is a stop-motion animated film, and the animation quality here shows a marked improvement from the preceding film. Several sequences are just visually enchanting, like the preparation of a bento box of sushi, or Atari giving the dog Chief a bath. The use of what looks like cotton batting to depict fight scenes is a great touch, and the details on Trash Island, while occasionally a bit gross, are meticulous and often look surprisingly real.

There has been much debate over whether Anderson is appropriating Japanese culture, or doing it well enough to get away with it, in this film, a debate in which I feel unqualified to participate, so I will merely link to film critic Justin Chang’s piece on the topic and walk away. Anderson puts numerous works of Japanese art in the background of the film, including The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Hokusai (several times, with dogs added) and Evening Bell by Hiroshige, both major figures in the Edo period of Japanese art; he based Megasaki city’s design on metabolist architecture from the Japanese architect Tanga; and he makes use of classical Japanese drumming several times as part of the score. (It’s much better than the mumblemopey song “I Won’t Hurt You” that besets the film like a frightened skunk in two different scenes.) There’s a clear affinity for Japanese art and culture, but whether it is done in a sensitive or appropriate manner here is not really for me to say.

I took my daughter, who is nearly 12, to see this, since she loved Mr. Fox and does indeed love dogs (and all animals, as far as I can tell). She thought much of the movie was sad, and had a hard time seeing references to dogs that died off screen. There’s also one death of a human in the film, and a lot of tears from human and dog characters. Her final verdict was that it was good, but she preferred Mr. Fox, which isn’t so graphic and which keeps dark elements in the dialogue rather than in the imagery. It’s animated, but it’s not a kids’ movie. We both laughed quite a bit, although I think I laughed more than she did, perhaps because I caught more of the subtle jokes about dog behavior and a few references she didn’t catch. (Yoko Ono’s character name is one; don’t look it up till you see the film.) With The Incredibles 2 coming out in two months, we might actually have a real fight for the title of best animated film this year.

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→ April 6, 2018
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Black Panther.

I’ve never been a big fan of the superhero genre of fiction, whether it’s comic books, TV cartoons, or the recent wave of movies set in the Marvel or DC universes. (I never collected or read comic books as a kid.) The characters never really work for me as fully realized individuals; the “it’s hard to have super powers” theme always felt rather silly, yet it keeps coming up in this corner of fiction. The Dark Knight is the only major superhero movie I’ve seen in the last decade, and I thought it was fine, but overlong and probably too ambitious for its execution. I never saw its sequel.

So I originally figured Black Panther would be another big hit that I skipped because it’s just not my kind of story; only when the critical praise was as effusive as the public’s reaction did I figure I should check the film out. There are two major elements here that I feel like I’m unqualified to discuss – how it compares to other superhero films, and the script’s attention to detail and and authentic depiction of sub-Saharan African culture – but I can at least break it down as a movie like any other work of fiction, and it is, of course, very good, with performances and visuals strong enough to overcome some flaws in the second plot and a sudden loss of momentum partway through the film.

Black Panther is both superhero and king of the (fictional) African kingdom of Wakanda, which appears to be located somewhere in the Great Lakes region of Africa near present-day Rwanda, a utopian society with technology well beyond that of any other country thanks to its location on top of the world’s largest deposit of the (fictional) metal vibranium. Wakanda has sealed itself off from the world, cloaking its location and its riches so the world doesn’t show up at its door with hands out or guns aimed. The story opens with a brief prologue showing the former king seeking out a traitor, his own brother, in Oakland, after which we see the coronation of the new king and Black Panther, played by Chadwick Boseman (42), and the first plot, around the theft of a half-ton of vibranium and the assassination of his father, kicks into gear.

That first storyline takes up about half the film, and it’s a chance for some great special effects and superhero-style combat, although the enemy, named Claue (no relation), is just a madman and not terribly interesting. That turns out to be a red herring of sorts, as the second half of the film involves a different, more politically-oriented plot, with a threat to the king coming from an unexpected outside source with connections to Wakanda, forcing the Black Panther to defend his throne and eventually retake control of the kingdom in a giant battle reminiscent of that in The Return of the King.

Boseman is solid as the title character, and apparently the ladies very much approve of his casting, but I thought he was overshadowed by the three leading actresses around him: His former lover, Nakia, played by Lupita Nyong’o; his sister, Shuri, played by Letitia Wright; and the head of the (all-female!) presidential guard, Okoye, played by Danai Gurira. are all more dynamic and fill roles more commonly filled by men in action films, especially Shuri, the tech expert who gets to make all the fun gadgets for Black Panther to wear, and who also gets the best one-liners in the movie. (“No, it’s Kansas,” was second only to the joke about vegetarians if I’m ranking the quips in the movie.) This isn’t just a movie that stars African-American actors in nearly every significant role, but it’s also one of the most female-forward action films I’ve ever seen, and never stoops to jokes about their femininity or contrasts their toughness with their gender. Boseman himself has somewhat less to work with, even in the titular role, because of what he has to be – the even-keeled statesman who sometimes puts on a mask and funny suit and kicks some ass – and there’s very little room for him to work beyond that, even when he tries to convince Nakia to stay in Wakanda and be his queen. Their chemistry is much better when they’re plotting and scheming than when they’re supposed to be in love.

The story itself starts to drag around the 2/3 mark, when Black Panther has been deposed by the usurper, even though we know he’s going to come back to fight to reclaim it. (Otherwise, there wouldn’t be much of a movie here.) The loss of momentum in the action comes as the script tries, with modest success, to delve into more contemporary political themes and into some perennial philosophical questions. Does Wakanda, a nation of endless prosperity (and great health care!), have a moral obligation to share its technology or resources with the world? Should Wakanda open its borders to refugees from war torn or famine-struck nations around it? With black populations in U.S. cities like Oakland (where the real Black Panther Party started) caught in a cycle of poverty and crime, does Wakanda have any responsibility to help its brethren?

The usurper arrives and all but promises to Make Wakanda Great Again with a “Wakanda First!” speech and belligerent mentality, arguing that Wakanda should show the world its greatness by force. His arrival and his words split the ruling council of tribal leaders, some of whom are rather quick to abandon their king’s pacificist-isolationist policies in support of the upstart. We know how this is likely to end, although the final battle is drawn out to try to infuse some drama into the inevitable outcome; there are few surprises, unless you still have a hard time seeing these badass women in every fight scene.

The cast is really strong across the board, with solid supporting performances by Daniel Kaluuya (Get Out), Martin Freeman (yep, that’s Watson, with an American accent), and Michael B. Jordan, and smaller but still notable contributions from Angela Bassett as the queen mother and Sterling K. Brown as the first King’s brother. (His name, N’Jobu, is a little unfortunate if you grew up with Major League, which I don’t think bothered as much with cultural accuracy or sensitivity.)

I’ll be very curious to see if the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences considers Black Panther seriously for any non-technical awards, given its critical reception and awareness of the awards’ tendency to overlook African-American films and actors in several recent slates of nominees. Star Wars earned a Best Picture nod in 1977, one of ten nominations for the film that year, and it’s probably the best historical analogue to Black Panther as a sci-fi action flick. It shouldn’t hurt that the cast includes two Oscar winners for acting (Nyong’o and Forrest Whitaker) and two more past nominees (Bassett and Kaluuya). If I had to bet money right now on one non-technical nomination, it’d be for Best Original Screenplay for Ryan Coogler (who directed this and also wrote and directed Creed and Fruitvale Station) and Joe Robert Cole (The People v. O.J. Simpson). I also wonder how many voters would check off Octavia Spencer’s name if she made the original ballot, even though she’s not actually in this movie.

As I said at the beginning, I’ve largely avoided superhero films because their stories just don’t speak to me, and I don’t think Black Panther will change that – it is so exceptional in the depth of its setting and back story while also bringing together as strong a cast as you could assemble that it’s not something other films in the genre could easily replicate. Even with that jarring momentum shift while Black Panther is temporarily off the throne is just a brief setback, one that made me more conscious of the film’s running time (a little over two hours) but didn’t truly detract form the experience. I will predict, however, that it ends the year as one of the top ten English-language movies I see.

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