→ April 11, 2025
→ By
→ Leave a Comment

Nosferatu.

I came into Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu knowing relatively little of the lore behind the story; I’ve read Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but had never seen any adaptation of it, not even the 1922 silent film of which this is a remake. It’s about as spot-on a gothic horror film as I’ve seen … maybe ever, really, with sound effects that will curdle your soul and a strong-as-always performance from Nicholas Hoult as the tragic real estate agent Thomas Hutter. (You can stream it free on Peacock or rent it on iTunes, Amazon, etc.)

Eggers’s screenplay adheres closely to the 1922 story, which changed several substantial elements of the Stoker novel, altering some major plot events and making the story darker and more violent while removing much of the sexual subtext in favor of more physical horror. Hutter is a young, ambitious real estate agent whose wife, Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) has a psychic connection to the monster Nosferatu, who poses as the Romanian Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) and demands that Hutter visit him to sign the contract for Orlok to purchase an estate in Wisburg, where the Hutters live. Thomas has no idea of the grip the vampire has on his wife, other than that she has intensely realistic dreams and a history of sleepwalking and seizures, but he is terrified by Orlok and realizes that he’s some sort of undead or otherwise unnatural creature during his brief stay at the castle. Upon his return home, he finds that bubonic plague is spreading through Wisburg, along with a huge number of rats, but the occultist Prof. Von Franz (Willem Dafoe) sees that this is not a medical disease but a spiritual one and leads the effort to find Orlok and kill him once and for all to save Ellen and the surviving townspeople.

The story is somewhat beside the point in Nosferatu and even in Dracula, as neither even has a real protagonist; the main character is the vampire, and he’s off screen (or page) for large portions of both works. He is everpresent, often working through his acolyte Knock (Simon McBurney) or just spreading fear because we know he’s coming for Ellen and know of the destruction he’ll wreak when he arrives. It’s all atmosphere, amplified by the way Eggers always shows Orlok in shadow, or from the back, so that we very rarely see him clearly until his final scenes in the film, when we see just what a deformed monster he has become; we hear Orlok much more than we see him, with Skarsgård speaking in a slow, guttural, overenunciated accent that sounds like he’s moonlighting (pun intended) from his job as the lead singer for a melodic death metal band from Gothenburg.

Most of the best scenes in the film don’t involve Skarsgård at all, though; he’s scarier when we don’t know when he’s coming or what he’s up to. McBurney is just as horrific, because he is utterly insane; we know what the vampire is doing, but Knock is unpredictable and his violence is all the more shocking for it. (He’s the equivalent to Renfield from Stoker’s novel, but here Knock is Hutter’s boss and appears at first to be a mild-mannered real estate man, more like an accountant or a barrister than the asylum inmate that Renfield is when he first appears in the book.) Rose-Depp’s main function in the movie is to appear terrified, which she does well, as she’s the only character who understands all along what the true nature of the threat is. For most of the film nobody believes her, including her best friend Anna (Emma Corrin, underutilized here), except for Dr. Von Franz, the man everyone else thinks is a crank, further underscoring Ellen’s terror – she knows he’s coming, she knows she is inextricably bound to him, and everyone thinks she’s a hysterical woman.

Nosferatu sounds great, by which I mean it sounds absolutely awful, especially if you watch it with headphones. You may never want to eat again after hearing this movie. I would imagine sales of black pudding plummeted after this film hit theatres. Some of this is obvious – you wouldn’t expect any less from a scene where a vampire feeds on a victim – but even when Hutter is eating dinner at Orlok’s castle, every bite or sip feels like a menace. It’s a crime that this film, which was nominated for four Academy Awards, didn’t get anything for sound; three of the five nominees in that category went to musicals or films about music, which seems to exclude films that rely on other forms of sound, which Nosferatu did more than almost any other movie in 2024.

Hoult is excellent here, as he is in pretty much everything, although even his character isn’t that well-developed, and the acting as a whole is probably the one weak point of the film. Ellen is a damsel in distress who only develops any sort of agency at the very end of the film, so Rose-Depp doesn’t have a lot to do, and spends most of her time on screen looking terrorized (with reason) but not doing much else. Dafoe seems like an obvious choice for a mad scientist, but that works against him here – he is so obviously Willem Dafoe, and is the only actor who doesn’t really do a proper accent for his character, that he isn’t terribly convincing as a character whose main job is to convince everyone, us included, that he isn’t mad. It’s also not a film that depends on the performances to work its dark magic, as Eggers creates such a bleak, foreboding atmosphere, and then layers increasing degrees of shocking violence on top of it, that it works extremely well throughout without getting as much from its actors as it might have. I’ve got one more major 2024 release to see, but this is easily in my top 5 from last year.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , ,
→ April 8, 2025
→ By
→ Leave a Comment

The Brutalist.

Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist is a vast, sweeping character study rich with detail and allegory, powered by a tremendous (and Oscar-winning) performance by Adrien Brody as the title character, memorable and meticulous scenery, and one of the strongest scores of the year. It’s also far too often a slog, running three and a half hours, with too much inconsistency in the pacing and the level of specificity from scene to scene. (You can rent it now on iTunes, Amazon, etc.)

Brody plays László Tóth, a Bauhaus-trained architect in Hungary before World War II who is sent to the concentration camp in Buchenwald by the Nazis, while his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and his niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) are sent to Dachau. Tóth survives the camp and immigrates the United States, where he works in his cousin Attila’s furniture store, although Attila’s Catholic wife clearly doesn’t approve. Attila lands a major renovation project for Harry Van Buren (Joe Alwyn) as a surprise for his father, the wealthy Carnegie-esque Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pearce), putting Tóth in charge. Tóth’s designs transform the library space, but Van Buren is enraged that his son made these plans without him, firing the contractors and refusing to pay. Attila kicks László out, which leads to him working as a manual laborer and living in a charity workhouse, while his previous use of morphine has devolved into a heroin addiction. Tóth’s design for the library ends up earning so much praise that Van Buren tracks him down and hires him for a major new project … and that’s all before the intermission, before Erszébet and Zsófia make it to the United States, before the stresses of the project and the exacting (and conflicting) standards of the two men begin to clash.

The Brutalist is a biopic of a fictional character, much like 2022’s Tár, that feels so specific that it’s easy to forget that Lázsló Tóth never existed. Brody is as good as ever – and I’d argue he’s always good, even in small roles like in Grand Budapest Hotel or Midnight in Paris – as the complex, tortured genius, who has some of the expected art-over-commerce philosophy, but also carries the weight of the trauma of his time in Buchenwald, his long separation from his wife, and his flight to a culture that is deeply foreign to him and that faces him with both its xenophobia and its antisemitism. Even in some of the film’s least believable scenes, his portrayal never wavers in the least, and he carries huge portions of the overlong script by himself.

The padding in The Brutalist is all around the edges, rather than entire scenes that needed to go (although the first scene of the Tóths in bed after their reunion probably could have been left on the cutting room floor). There’s a brief shot of László and some workers carrying a model of the community center he’s building for Van Buren up a flight of stairs into the mansion, probably lasting ten or fifteen seconds; the scene adds nothing, and there are tiny moments like that throughout the film that add up to make the film feel too long. Corbet, who directed and co-wrote the film, has a pace-of-play problem. It’s like he hired James Murphy as his editor.

Jones is somewhat lost here in a bad haircut and overdone accent, although the real problem is that her character barely exists outside of László’s orbit until her very last scene, when she acquires a force and gravity we haven’t seen before, underscored by the character’s infirmity and Jones’s own petite stature. (She’s nearly a foot shorter than Brody.) The movie isn’t about her, of course, but her absence is a huge shadow cast over the first half of the film, with László grieving the possibility of her death and then finding out she’s alive but can’t emigrate legally to join him, making the incomplete development of her character in the second half more obvious.

That’s generally a problem with the plot as a whole: the first half is itself a whole movie, and the second half isn’t. It’s the shell of a movie, but tries to pack in too much while giving it a similar level of detail, and that makes for irregular pacing and some portions that were just outright boring. There are also two sexual assault scenes, one entirely implied, one on-screen but shot from a distance, and neither is handled well – the first one is just dropped entirely, and the second has absolutely nothing to foreshadow it, making it seem like either a clumsy attempt at metaphor or just a very cheap plot contrivance to set up the denouement. After thinking about it what broader points Corbet and his co-writer Mona Fastvold might have been trying to make, I’m leaning towards the metaphor argument: A huge theme in The Brutalist is how inhospitable Tóth finds the United States, a country that, then and now, has held great hostility towards people from just about any other country, and has a very long and shameful history of antisemitism that still exists today. The assault is an act of degradation and dehumanization, emphasized by his assailant’s taunts during the attack. I don’t think the scene fits in the least in the film, but that’s the best I’ve been able to make sense of it.

The Brutalist is a proper epic, an ambitious film that tries to do more than almost any film I’ve seen in the last few years; the closest parallel I could think of was 2018’s Never Look Away, another long film covering a huge portion of an artist’s life, although even that one doesn’t try to tackle the giant themes Corbet and Fastvold cover here. Brody’s performance is remarkable – and I didn’t even mention how great some of his suits are, which would be useful information for me if I weren’t half his size – and the film looks like it should have cost as much as a Marvel movie. I’m holding it to a higher standard primarily because it’s over 200 minutes long, and if you’re going to ask that of your audience, you need to earn their attention repeatedly. I’m not entirely sure The Brutalist does that; even so, it’s a film to laud in the hopes it inspires more big swings just like it.

The Brutalist earned ten nominations at this year’s Oscars and won three, for Brody as Best Actor, for Lol Crawley for Best Cinematography, and for Daniel Blumberg for Best Original Score, deserving of all three of them. (I’ll note that 1) Tim Grierson pointed out to me that Blumberg was briefly the lead singer & guitarist for a British band called Yuck, and 2) the strongest competitors for those last two awards weren’t nominated, Nickel Boys for Cinematography and Challengers for Original Score.) Pearce is strong as Van Buren and certainly has enough to do that he was worthy of a nomination for Best Supporting Actor, but Jones’s character isn’t that well-written and her performance within it is one of the film’s weak points; I would have much preferred to see her Best Supporting Actress nomination go to Julianne Moore for The Room Next Door. I have The Brutalist in my top ten for the year, with probably just one more worthy film to go (I’m Still Here), but I wouldn’t have picked it over Anora for Best Picture.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,
→ April 3, 2025
→ By
→ 1 Comment

The Room Next Door.

Pedro Almodóvar waited until his 23rd feature film to make his first one in English, released the same month as the Spanish director turned 75. The Room Next Door, an adaptation of part of a Sigrid Nunez novel, is an intense movie about friendship and duty, driven by two outstanding performances by Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore, a sort of women-centered parallel to his 2022 film Pain & Glory. (You can rent it on iTunes, Amazon, etc.)

Ingrid (Moore) is signing copes of her latest book when an old acquaintance reaches the table and informs her that their former colleague Martha (Swinton) has cervical cancer. Ingrid visits Martha, whom she hasn’t seen in many years, and the two begin spending more time together, as Ingrid realizes Martha is quite lonely, with only an estranged daughter remaining of her family. When a promising treatment turns out to be unsuccessful, Martha decides to end her life on her own terms and asks Ingrid to accompany her to a house in the country, so that Martha knows someone who cares about her is in the room next door as she dies. Ingrid ends up agreeing, and the remainder of the film follows the two women through the last few weeks of Martha’s life.

There are only three characters of any significance in The Room Next Door, with John Turturro appearing as Martha’s former husband and Ingrid’s former lover, putting all of the pressure on Swinton and Moore to carry the film – and, naturally, two of the greatest actors of their generation are up to the task. Swinton’s performance is the more surprising of the pair’s, as she’s largely understated throughout the film; she’s played big or weird or both so often in recent years that it’s a treat to see her dial it back like this. Martha’s insecure and maybe neurotic, but resigned to her death, in contrast to Ingrid, whose latest book is about her own crippling fear of dying, and Swinton gives the character the right combination of nervous energy with a touch of irascibility. Ingrid is the more straightforward character, although Moore’s challenge is navigating the wide range of emotions she faces across the film – it’s clear at the start that she and Martha were never that close, or at least Ingrid didn’t think they were, so she ends up growing fonder of Martha as Martha’s death becomes inevitable and the favors she asks become more significant.

(As an aside, I realized after watching this that I’d never seen Michael Clayton, the 2007 film for which Swinton won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress – still her only Oscar nomination – so I watched it. That performance is also quite understated, and also one of her best.)

The production itself is lavish, visually and metaphorically. Nearly every scene pops with strong, vivid colors, even more so when they head out of the city to a luxurious house in the woods, with gorgeous shots of the forest just beyond the house’s deck. Almodóvar has a long history of using red for its symbolic value; the door to Martha’s room is red, and she wears deep reds many times in the film, while the chaise longue where Ingrid usually reclines on the deck is also red, certainly an unusual color (and fabric) for outdoor furniture. (Martha lays on the green one.) There’s also a sense of wealth and even abundance throughout the film that cuts both ways –these are two privileged women who can afford to do this and, for Martha, face the potential consequences; yet the contrast between this lush setting and the inevitability of Martha’s death underscores that all the money in the world can’t change the fact that we’re mortal.

The estranged daughter does appear near the end of the film, providing a brief but somewhat telling coda that gives a little more insight into Martha’s character – and into Ingrid’s as well. We know Martha’s going to die before the end, but rather than concluding on the most morbid note, or with something clichéd like a funeral, the story ends with a conversation and a scene on the deck that connects to an earlier scene. Both scenes include passages from Joyce’s short story The Dead, while earlier Martha and Ingrid also watch John Huston’s 1987 film adaptation – laying it on a bit thick, I suppose, although it is considered one of the greatest short stories written in the English language. Almodóvar has settled into a mellower groove as he’s aged, dispensing with the sort of shocking elements that helped make his reputation as an avant-garde filmmaker while he focuses more on character development and dialogue. The Room Next Door is (at least) his third straight film in this vein, and I think it’s the best of the trio thanks to the two lead performances.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ April 1, 2025
→ By
→ 2 Comments

American Fiction.

American Fiction is the first film adaptation of any of Percival Everett’s thirty novels, although its resounding success means it won’t be the last – an adaptation of James is already in the works (good!) with Taika Waititi possibly directing (so very, very bad). Directed by Cord Jefferson, who won the Oscar for his screenplay, the film adheres quite closely to the novel, which was called Erasure, until the very end, when Jefferson takes some creative license that pokes a little fun at Everett’s own ending but doesn’t entirely stick its metafictional landing. (It’s streaming free on Amazon Prime or you can rent it on iTunes.)

Once again, we meet Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright), a professor and author of arcane novels that don’t sell, here in a new scene where he lashes out at a performatively offended white student in one of his classes, leading his employers to put him on leave. He travels to New York to meet with his agent, and to visit his aging mother (Lesley Uggams) and his sister Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross), a doctor who provides reproductive health services. His mother is showing early signs of dementia, while we learn that his relationship with Lisa and their brother Bill (Sterling K. Brown) has always been distant. While traveling, he comes across a bestselling novel, We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, by Black author Sintara Golden (Issa Rae), an Oberlin graduate who has written a book that Monk thinks panders to white guilt, engaging in gross and dated stereotypes about Black Americans. Lisa dies very early in the film, in one of the most significant alterations from Erasure, and when their mother clearly needs to enter assisted living, Monk suddenly has some significant financial issues. He sits down and writes a novel, My Pafology, that parodies Golden’s book and the benevolent racism of the publishing industry, intending (he says) to offend the editors who receive it. Instead, he gets a seven-figure bonus (25% higher than the figure in the book, which was written 25 years ago) and everyone wants to meet the fictitious author Stagg R. Leigh, whom Monk invents as he goes along. As his personal life becomes more difficult, the book becomes more successful, until he finds himself on the judging panel for the Literary Award … and his book is one of the leading candidates.

Jefferson does a fantastic job weaving the twin narratives of the book – the family subplot and the Pafology subplot – together in a way that feels fluid, since he lacks the natural transitions that come with chapter breaks, and the two only truly intersect a few times in the novel. He’s kept the bones of the plot and most of the details are the same, although he changes a few character names (including Adam Brody’s movie producer) and creates some overly dramatic scenes involving Monk’s mother. There are also more outright laughs here than in the source, and the relationships between Monk and his two siblings are softened, which allows some fantastic scenes between Wright and Brown later in the film.

Wright is spectacular here – this is a well-written, three-dimensional character, and Wright just is Monk. He inhabits this character in every way, and when Monk has to act as Stagg, Wright telegraphs not just his discomfort at playing “Black,” but that this character was raised to not speak or act a certain way, leaving him flummoxed when he has to become Stagg R. Leigh on the phone and once in person. He’s just as strong in the family scenes, showing how Monk struggles with his interpersonal relationships even with people he clearly cares about; he doesn’t lack empathy or feelings, but – forgive the hackneyed phrase – sometimes he can’t get out of his own way. Brown and Uggams are also excellent in their respective roles, with Brown, like Wright, earning an Oscar nomination for this performance; Uggams probably just doesn’t get enough screen time to say she was robbed of a Best Supporting Actress nod – I don’t think she passes the Judi Dench Barrier here – but she’s superb in the limited time she gets, as is Erika Alexander as Monk’s love interest, Coraline.

I wasn’t bothered by Jefferson sharpening some of the edges and inserting some extra drama; Brody’s movie producer character even says in the film at one point that a movie made from a novel can’t be the novel, because you just don’t have enough time, and I think that can also apply to character development. Even changing the manner of Lisa’s death makes sense, because what happens in the book is tied to something larger that the movie would simply not have time to address, at least not in a satisfying fashion.

The ending, however … I will concede the argument that the book ends in a way that would probably not work on film. The movie might not even get made. I liked the ending of Erasure, but it’s unconventional, and would have been even more so in a movie. Jefferson’s solution is creative, certainly, but I’m not sure it works. Metafictional twists like that one are hard to pull off, and if you start thinking about this one, you’ll probably end up with a headache. The final, final shot, though, is excellent, so maybe it’s best to just not ponder the climax too thoroughly. Adapting a book as rich and sardonic as Erasure could not have been easy, and Jefferson managed to get the tone right without having to make any significant changes to the meat of the novel.

I’ve seen nine of the ten movies that were nominated for Best Picture in this year, and I’d put American Fiction pretty comfortably in the middle of the group. The Zone of Interest, which I didn’t see until November of last year and never wrote up, would be my top choice, and I wouldn’t put this over Past Lives or Oppenheimer, but it’s in the next tier with Barbie and The Holdovers for me. Wright never had a chance to beat Cillian Murphy for Best Actor, but if this movie were going to win any award for anything, he would have been my pick.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , ,
→ March 27, 2025
→ By
→ 7 Comments

Road House.

I don’t watch a lot of bad movies, by design. I’m not a professional critic, so I don’t have to watch any of them, and it’s only fun to pick a movie apart once in a blue moon. I’m not talking about when I watch an acclaimed movie and just don’t like it, but about a movie everyone kind of agrees is bad, one that shows the studio behind it thinks that audiences are dumb and will fork over cash for anything.

After seeing a few clips on TikTok from the movie Road House that made me laugh, I figured I’d give it a whirl, since it was free for me on Amazon Prime Video anyway. It’s a bad movie, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Dalton (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a former UFC fighter who now shows up at amateur fight nights as a ringer to make some cash; after one of those, he’s approached by Frankie (Jessica Williams), owner of a bar in the Florida Keys, who says she’s looking for a bouncer to deal with a group of thugs who are tearing up her bar night after night. Of course, he’s not interested, but after he tries to kill himself and bails at the last second, we see him arriving on a bus out in Frankie’s little town, where he’s greeted by a precocious teenager who runs a used book store with her dad, and then meets one uninteresting character after another before the fightin’ starts. Eventually, it turns out that the thugs aren’t just randomly harassing the Road House, but are doing so at the behest of an obnoxious nepo baby named Ben Brandt (Billy Magnussen), so Dalton’s in deeper than he thought.

There isn’t much plot here beyond that, and that’s fine; I’d argue that Road House would be worse if they made the story any more complicated. This is an action movie, and action movies need two things: action, and quips. Gyllenhaal turns out to be really good at delivering some funny soliloquies before beating the shit out of people; the screenwriters didn’t make him some sort of closet intellectual – when Frankie says that Hemingway once drank at the Road House, Dalton isn’t impressed and just says “good for you!” – but made him just smart and funny enough to make him an interesting character to watch. He’s got a back story, of course, and we get most but not all of the explanation, which is also fine because who cares? Not every character in every movie needs a tragic back story.

After Dalton dispatches the first wave of thugs, Brandt’s imprisoned father, irritated that his son can’t get the job done, hires a guy simply named Knox (Conor McGregor, who lost a civil rape case in November), who has several tattoos on him that read “Knox” in case he forgets who he is. He’s indestructible, extremely violent, and permanently smiling. He’s also got quips. Dalton can’t handle him the way he handled all of the Brandts’ other goons, so we’re heading for a final showdown between the two of them for the fate of the Road House.

Gyllenhaal is a blast in this movie; he looks like he’s having fun, and he’s got that brooding charm that’s a cliché across action films, but everything about the performance is restrained (other than the beatings, which involve a lot of mediocre CGI). There’s a natural cadence to his delivery that sounds even more authentic when he’s surrounded by people who either can’t act or were told to act like they couldn’t act; nearly everyone else in this film is just bad, even when delivering minor lines. There’s just enough depth to Dalton’s character to make him compelling, and to make you understand why he always seems to stop short of the critical hit in every fight.

I also regret to report that Conor McGregor is really quite good as Knox. The character is a psycho, and McGregor seems to have no problem whatsoever slipping into that archetype. I wonder why. His ridiculous swagger plays well in fight scenes and regular ones, and he’s pretty good at delivering the quips we expect from this sort of character. Even his gait is funny. The film’s a year old, so I don’t think this is a big spoiler any more, but Knox survives the film and I imagine he’s going to be in the reported sequel, but I hope they get someone other than McGregor to play him – or just make up a thinly-veiled version of him to be the new antagonist.

Everything else about the movie is kind of bad. The dialogue from any character other than Dalton is stilted and overexpository; nobody talks like these people and I’m not referring to their accents. There’s so much explaining how this particular hamlet is a small place and everyone knows everyone and things are different here that I assume the screenwriters (or whoever cleaned up the script) think the audience is even dumber than the usual one. Did you catch that the previous three bouncers Frankie used at the bar had names starting with A, B, and C, before capital-D Dalton? Or did you guess who the sheriff actually was before it was revealed? I was mildly grateful that they kept the obvious romantic pairing at a very superficial level – they chose to make Dalton fairly uninterested in the character, who I haven’t even mentioned because she is so boring, which would have just been a distraction from the main throughline anyway.

So yeah, Road House is a bad movie. But I was entertained the whole time. I didn’t even mention that there’s some great live music from bands playing at the Road House, often up there while there’s mayhem a few feet away, or that one of the thugs ends up part of a great running gag with Dalton. It’s the best bad movie I’ve seen in a while. (Oh, and I’ve never seen the original, if anyone’s curious.)

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,
→ March 20, 2025
→ By
→ 11 Comments

The Apprentice.

The Apprentice is a decidedly mediocre movie about a decidedly mediocre man. That man, who at the moment I write this is the President of the United States and is driving a serious constitutional crisis, is not boring, whatever you think of his behavior and professed beliefs. It makes it so hard to believe just how boring The Apprentice is, even when it’s trying its hardest to find something interesting in the story, often by humanizing its main character. (You can rent it on iTunes, Amazon, etc.)

The story begins with a young Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan) trying to buy a decrepit building near Times Square with the intention of turning it into a luxury hotel, against skepticism from all corners – including his father, Fred, a real estate developer himself and a dead stereotype of the father who never likes anything his kids do. Trump happens to be in a private club where Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong) is holding court, and Cohn, hearing Trump has just been accepted for membership, calls him over to meet him, clearly seeing business opportunities for the future. Trump turns to Cohn to try to get a gigantic tax break from New York City, which was in dire financial straits at the time, and Cohn extorts a city official to make it happen, setting off a decade-long business partnership where Cohn teaches Trump the secrets of his success, much of which you can see in Trump’s last decade in the political sphere, including repeating lies long enough for people to think they’re true and to never admit defeat regardless of the evidence. Along the way, Trump meets Ivana (Maria Bakalova), seduces her with his money and apparent largesse, has a couple of kids we barely see, watches his brother Fred Jr. drink himself to death, and pays very little to no taxes anywhere.

I’m obviously no fan of Trump’s, but there is plenty in his life story to provide enough fodder for an interesting biopic. The Apprentice is more of a connect-the-dots picture of Trump, giving a more intriguing picture of the last decade of Roy Cohn’s life than it does of anything about its putative protagonist, and seeks to explain Trump’s rise as a truth-denying right-wing politician as the result of his father not giving him enough praise when he was younger, leading Trump to become the sort of striver for whom no victory is complete and no success is ever enough. It’s simplistic and hackneyed, and means that when both men are on screen, Cohn is always the more compelling figure – something that is helped by Strong’s better performance, while Stan’s performance is an impersonation, one where you can’t forget that it’s just Sebastian Stan in a bad rug enunciating certain words the way Trump does. (Stan getting a Best Actor nomination for this movie is really ridiculous. Ethan Herisse of Nickel Boys was far more deserving, to pick just one actor from another acclaimed 2024 movie.) You’re not that likely to forget that it’s Jeremy Strong as Cohn, but there’s more depth to the portrayal here, especially near the end of Cohn’s life, as he was dying of AIDS (or a related illness) and still refused to concede that he had the disease or even that he might not be heterosexual.

There’s a thread within the movie that attempts to humanize Trump by showing the dynamics of his immediate family, including a successful father who belittles Fred Jr. for choosing to become a pilot rather than joining the family business and then belittles Donald for failing to live up to (perhaps unreasonable expectations). Fred Jr. is an alcoholic from the get-go in the film, but the script implies that their father drove him to drink, and he’s really here just for the one scene where Donald refuses to help him before he dies from the disease. This thread seems to imply that Donald Trump was, at one point, a regular person with some empathy and the ability to feel things like grief, fear, and sorrow, but that an emotionally distant and abusive father pushed that out of him and created an insatiable need for the tangible trappings of success – money, power, fame, and women – that eventually led him to run for President.

The Apprentice also makes a regrettable choice in showing Trump raping Ivana, based on her accusation in her divorce deposition, a claim she sort of walked back later. The issue isn’t whether it’s true, but whether it belongs in the movie: It doesn’t say anything about Trump’s character we didn’t already know, and the film isn’t otherwise interested in much of anything about Ivana or her marriage to Trump, so the result is it appears that the scene is included just to be controversial or lurid. If the script had spent more time exploring their relationship, which often seems transactional in the depiction here, maybe there would be some justification, but Ivana is mostly a prop and Bakalova is largely wasted in the role anyway. It just comes off as cheap, lazy writing in a script that has very little time for any women characters.

I find it hilarious that Trump and his organization tried to stop anyone from showing or distributing this movie – there is nothing here we haven’t heard before, and if anything it shows him doing the stuff his adherents believe he’s good at, like making deals and running roughshod over his adversaries. The film did come out, and hit theaters, and earn praise and award nominations, and it didn’t make a whit of difference. Most people already have an opinion of Trump that is set in stone; if the Access Hollywood tape didn’t dissuade his supporters, this movie isn’t going to do anything, either. It’s just a mediocre biopic of someone who, at this moment, is busy trying to hollow out the federal government and use what’s left to target his real and perceived enemies. Maybe after he’s dead someone will make a better film about his life and motivations. This ain’t it.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
→ March 18, 2025
→ By
→ Leave a Comment

September 5.

September 5 takes the story of the murder of most of the Israeli Olympic team by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Olympics and tells it from a novel perspective: that of the ABC producers and staff broadcasting the Olympics to the United States audience. The shift makes it as much a story about journalism and about the way people react to crises in real time as a story about the attack itself, allowing the film to hold the tragedy at arm’s length without trivializing its impact, and the result is a true thriller even if you already know all of the details of the ending. (It’s streaming free on Paramount+ or you can rent it on iTunes, Amazon, etc.)

We begin behind the scenes with what seems like another day of coverage, watching Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard) decide to focus on the despair of one of the losing swimmers after one of Mark Spitz’s victories, along with a mundane argument about what events to air between Arledge and two of his lieutenants in the control room, Geoffrey Mason (John Magaro) and Marvin Baden (Ben Chaplin). Not long afterwards, several other staffers, including the translator Marianne (Leonie Benesch), think they hear gunshots, and soon afterwards the group learns of the attack and the first killings, leading to a series of decisions of how to cover the events – doing so with a staff and crew there to cover sports, not breaking news, and certainly not this kind of crisis – and how best to leverage their position to benefit ABC. The producers even resort to some subterfuge to get a staffer inside the police perimeter, stare down German authorities who storm the control room to shut them down, and try to learn the fate of the hostages – with the last leading to the one big mistake that the decision-makers make over the course of crisis.

I’m a sucker for a good journalism story, so September 5 is catnip to me, and this movie does an excellent job of keeping the tension ratcheted up to 10 while barely leaving the control room, driving almost everything through dialogue. The film was nominated for Best Original Screenplay at this year’s Oscars, and that’s its greatest strength – there’s no fat on this script, and even though the crisis unfolds outside of the room where our characters are, the film doesn’t lose the claustrophobic sense that comes with a movie in a single, enclosed setting. It’s also unusual in the way it creates so much tension through a story where none of the named characters are ever in any sort of peril

The script doesn’t quite pay sufficient attention to the human tragedy that drives the drama in the control room, however. There are some mentions here and there of individual athletes, and a discussion of the possibility that someone might be shot live on camera where his parents might see it, but by and large this is a movie about the people in the control room. You may argue it’s just not that kind of movie, or that its lean running time – which is just right for the story it’s telling – requires it to skimp on treating the tragedy as such; I think the script could have done more to humanize the events at its core, and in the process giving its characters more empathy in the moment, unless Arledge and Mason and Bader were all just extremely callous men in real life. (Marianne is the one member of the big four characters who isn’t based on a real person, but Benesch – who was outstanding in 2023’s The Teachers’ Lounge – is so damn good here that I didn’t mind the fabrication one bit.)

The three actors portraying the three real-life ABC employees are all solid, but Magaro – who was excellent in a secondary role in Past Lives and as a mentally ill man in Showing Up – is the standout here, in part because his character has some more complexity and ends up confronting the biggest decision of the day, the one that happens to go wrong for the group. Sarsgaard and Chaplin are solid, but their characters can seem inert by comparison to Mason or Marianne, who show more emotion and seem more attuned to the human tragedy taking place just a few hundred yards away.

This movie is just too much in my wheelhouse for me to dislike it; I was riveted for most of its 90 minutes, once the attack begins and the movie just kicks into drive, never downshifting until the last few minutes. I can recognize its flaws with some separation from watching it, but I was probably as engrossed in September 5 as I’ve been in any movie I’ve watched from the 2024 cycle. It’s so well-told and well-paced that I never had the mental bandwidth to consider what might be missing.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ March 12, 2025
→ By

Sing Sing.

Sing Sing has no business being as good as it is. This movie sounds like it’s going to have more sap than a pine forest, and instead of devolving into sentimental claptrap, it tells its story in an understated way that doesn’t try to tell the audience how to feel or what to expect. Of all of the movies I’ve seen from the 2024 cycle so far, it’s not the best movie or close to it, but it’s the one I’m going to recommend to the most people, because it should have very broad appeal, and has the second virtue of actually being good, even if it’s a little superficial in the telling. (You can rent it on iTunes, Amazon, etc.)

The story is set at Sing Sing Prison in Ossining, New York, and follows several incarcerated men who are participating in the prison’s Rehabiliation Through the Arts program, which holds workshops in several performing and writing arts in prisons across New York state. Divine G (Colman Domingo) is a fervent participant both as an actor and a playwright, and becomes the de facto leader of the acting troupe, which works with coach Brent Buell (Paul Raci) to stage productions every six months or so. The group’s dynamic is upset when another longtime inmate, Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin (playing himself), joins the classes and brings a new perspective while also learning to deal with his own frustrations and anger, while also becoming frenemies with Divine G. The film follows the dance between the two men as they try to find ways to first work with and then help each other, all as the group works to put on a show and both men try to gain their freedom through a difficult legal process.

The story was co-written by Divine G and Maclin, along with the two screenwriters who eventually wrote the script, with all four listed when they received a nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. (It’s based on an Esquire story by John Richardson called “The Sing Sing Follies.”) Once you know that, it’s hard to see the film in any other light – this is a pretty remarkable piece of storycraft that gets at some real character development from both of the two leads, more than you find in many movies or even novels. Both Divine Eye and Divine G have clear story arcs, and the interplay between their characters and their characters’ stories is the beating heart of the film. Domingo’s superb as always, and more than deserved his Oscar nomination, but Maclin’s performance is excellent as well – even if he’s playing a version of himself.

The main problem with Sing Sing is that it’s almost too positive. The story focuses on the theater program and shows very little of prison life outside of it. There are some scenes in the prison yard that depict some illicit business, but that’s about all we get. The inmates in the theater program mostly seem to have significant freedom within the prison, even in how they dress, and the audience only hears about the struggles of incarceration, rather than seeing any of it. That’s part of why it’s a feel-good movie – you’ll feel good about how successful and meaningful the arts program is, and you won’t feel bad about how terrible it is to be locked up for years, even more so for a crime you didn’t commit. Prison just doesn’t look that bad in Sing Sing and I don’t think that’s accurate.

Nearly all of the cast here comprises formerly incarcerated men who came through the program; Domingo, Raci, and theater actor Sean San José are the only exceptions I see. Most are playing themselves, but it’s still remarkable how easy these performances are – there was never a point where it was clear that someone wasn’t a professional actor, even the many cameos (including the real Divine G, who appears early in the film as another inmate who asks Domingo for an autograph). It adds to the verisimilitude of the film, of course, but also underscores the point about the value of the program, which I interpreted as an argument for the value of many kinds of social-development programs for incarcerated people. These programs, like the one in Daughters as well, reduce recidivism, which is supposed to be the goal of most incarcerations (rather than punishment, or vengeance, which is what our carceral system is really about). We’re seeing men – there are almost no lines spoken by women in the film at all – who went through the RTA program, got out, and haven’t returned. Their very presence on the screen is a feel-good story. The script probably should have delved a little more into the horrors of life on the inside, but that would have been a very different movie, too. I’m flummoxed that this wasn’t a bigger hit – it only made about $2.5 million at the U.S. box office, coming out last summer, then returning to theaters when it started earning award nominations. Critics loved it, and loved Domingo’s performance. The ending is upbeat, but not saccharine. CODA was a critical success and Best Picture winner with less. I’m hoping Sing Sing finds its audience now that it’s streaming, because it deserved more than it got.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ March 10, 2025
→ By

The Substance.

The Substance has a great concept for a sci-fi/horror film, and an even better theme. Writer/director Coralie Fargeat depicts Hollywood’s obsession with women’s looks and youth, and the patriarchy’s obsession with the same through an aging actress and fitness-show star who learns about a cheat code to become a 20-year-old version of herself again – but only every other week. It is such a shame that Fargeat had no idea what to do with the story once she got the setup in place; the second half of this movie is a literal and figurative mess, so much so that it’s appalling that this profoundly stupid movie got Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay nominations. (You can rent it on iTunes, Amazon, etc., or watch it free on Mubi.)

Demi Moore plays the idiotically-named Elizabeth Sparkle, a Jane Fonda-ish figure who was once a huge star and now hosts a daily aerobics show, because I guess this movie is set in 1985 (although it never specifies when it’s set). On the day she turns 50, the show’s producer Harvey (as in Weinstein, because this film is just that subtle) fires her because she’s too old. (Harvey is played by Dennis Quaid, who hams it up as the role demands.) Elizabeth is so upset as she’s driving home that she gets into a car accident and ends up in the hospital, where somehow she doesn’t have any broken bones or internal bleeding or anything of the sort, but a creepy young nurse with ridiculously smooth skin slips her a flash drive that tips her off to a fountain-of-youth scheme called The Substance. She jumps through all kinds of hoops to get a hold of it – the film’s best sequences, really – and eventually tries it out: A second, younger version of herself (Margaret Qualley) emerges, literally, and takes over the lead spot on Elizabeth’s show. The hitch is that each week, Elizabeth and this new her, who takes the name Sue, must switch places: one goes into a sort of coma, and the other gets to run around and be alive and such. But when one of the two decides to take a little more than the allotted time, the center cannot hold and things fall apart – including the plot.

The whole setup is pretty brilliant, like something from a modern Philip K. Dick fable. (PKD did write at least once about “anti-gerasone,” a serum that reversed the effects of aging.) The attention to detail in the way the whole scheme works, right down to the packaging of the various parts of the Substance, would seem to presage a really thoughtful, smart conclusion, regardless of whether it works out for Elizabeth. There’s a wide range of points this story could have made about how society as a whole and the media industry in specific treats women as disposable assets with early expiration dates. It applies to women on screen in films and on TV, even news and sports anchors, but also applies to general societal attitudes towards women, even in what is supposed to be a more equitable and enlightened era. (Or was, I suppose.) Men who are Elizabeth’s age see her as old, then fawn over and leer at Sue, including, of course, Harvey.

Instead, we get a thoughtless, gross, and sloppy conclusion to all of that early promise. There’s an inexplicable rivalry between the two halves – which I interpreted as a commentary on women who step on or attack other women rather than standing together against the patriarchy – that leads each of them to try to sabotage the other during their waking weeks. And when one starts stealing time from the other, things go very awry, and it becomes clear that Fargeat never figured out the end of the story. The big concluding scene is a bloody mess, either way you want to interpret that phrase, and is also absolute nonsense: The hyperrealism that fills every part of the film outside of the use of the Substance is gone, and we’re no longer making or even pondering a point. We’re just covered in blood. There’s no further exploration of the entrenched misogyny across our society, or our obsession with youth and beauty. There’s no biting, satirical conclusion that takes down the Harveys of the world – or even the just normal, just innocent men who are probably contributing to the environment in all manner of little ways (and I’m not exempting myself here, either). Fargeat wrote herself into a corner, and instead of writing herself out of it, she just went for gore. I

Moore’s performance in The Substance earned her a Golden Globe Award and a SAG Award, as well as a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress; I don’t think this was a close contest between her and Mikey Madison, who won the Oscar for her performance in Anora. Moore is very good, but there’s some sentiment in the plaudits; she’s not even in the movie as much as a typical lead performer. There’s some daring to the performance, certainly, and she also has to act out some pretty gross scenes that couldn’t have been easy. Qualley didn’t get anywhere near the same attention, but she’s excellent and essential to the movie – she has to play a sort of scheming ingenue, and in any of her scenes at the studio, especially anything with Harvey, she nails the look and demeanor of someone who knows how to manipulate the hell out of the idiot man in front of her. She’s not better than Moore in the film, but she could have gotten some supporting actress support.

This just isn’t a good movie by any definition I would use. It’s very smart and entertaining for about half its length, and then it falls apart. It’s not smart, or interesting, or even entertaining in the second half, beyond the tension because we’re watching Elizabeth-Sue heading for some kind of terrible crash. I’m almost offended that it got a screenplay nomination, because the writing is the whole problem here. The performances are good, the effects and makeup are fine, but the writing is just lazy. A big violent finish is the easiest and least thoughtful way to end a story. This story, and the women it’s ostensibly supporting, deserved better.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , ,
→ March 6, 2025
→ By

Nickel Boys.

Nickel Boys, adapted from Colson Whitehead’s outstanding, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Nickel Boys,  is a daring experiment that tells the stories of its two protagonists in first-person perspective, giving the viewer the unsettling feeling of being in the abuse-ridden Nickel “Academy” for Boys. It’s easily one of the best films of 2024, earning just two Oscar nominations (Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay), although the script’s fidelity to the novel ended up blunting some of the suspense of the film for me.  (You can rent it on iTunes, Amazon, etc., or watch it free on that MGM+ thing nobody has.)

Nickel Boys starts by following Elwood (Ethan Herisse), a bookish young Black man in Florida in 1962 who ends up arrested as an accomplice to a theft he didn’t commit and is sent to a segregated reform school, based on the real-life Florida School for Boys, which was only closed in 2009 after decades of reports of abuse, rape, and murder of the children imprisoned there. Elwood becomes an easy target for some of the bigger, tougher boys there until a longer-term inmate, Turner (Brandon Wilson), comes to his aid, and the two become friends. When the pair see all of the corruption and violence going on behind the scenes, they hatch a plot to try to get the abusive school leader removed from power. Scenes from 1988 are interspersed through the film, showing Elwood, now an adult living in New York City, running his own moving business, eventually running into a former classmate from the institution and hearing how many others have died or fallen into substance abuse since they were “graduated.” We also see Elwood’s grandmother Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) in the beginning of the movie before Elwood’s arrest, in her attempts to visit him and use a lawyer to get him released, and in some of Elwood’s flashbacks to his life before Nickel.

This is the first full-length feature from director and co-screenwriter RaMell Ross, who directed the Oscar-nominated short Hale County This Morning, This Evening in 2018, making it even more impressive that he  chose to film it in first-person perspective, and to do so from the viewpoint of two different characters. There are several scenes we see twice, which naturally changes the way we interpret the events we’re watching, and even in scenes we see once the shift in perspective can be disorienting – deliberately so, mimicking the sense that the student-inmates must have had in an environment where punishment, including getting “disappeared,” could be arbitrary and capricious. The intense focus on only what Elwood or Turner could see means that the audience’s understanding of how brutal and corrupt the school leadership was is entirely defined by the boys’ understanding of the same. We might suspect it more than they do, of course, but the evidence comes to us through their eyes, so that their disbelief – especially that people in positions of authority could so blatantly ignore the rules and act unfairly – is more palpable.

That this film missed out on the Best Cinematography category is the great snub and mystery of this year’s Oscars; I understand the movie wasn’t that widely seen, but it got a Best Picture nomination, so enough people saw and appreciated it for it to land one of those spots even over some films that (I think) were seen as more likely to make the cut. The cinematography in this movie is everything; it is the defining feature of the film, and it elevates a story that was already fantastic to another level, making this one of the very best movies of the year. The two leads give excellent performances, but I can see the argument that both are too understated to become awards fodder, not when they were competing against impersonations and dancing lawyers and the like.

Nickel Boys is ultimately an experience, or a movie to be experienced, something that I seldom saw in this movie cycle; Anora, which won Best Picture and a slew of other honors, is one of the others, and I’d say the underrated A Real Pain is as well. All three movies draw you into their stories in the early moments and never break the spell until the final scene or two. I was at a slight disadvantage here, because I read the novel and remembered the twist, so the gut-punch moment that comes late in the film didn’t land the same way with me. That’s not a criticism of the film, but a comment on the particular experience I had in watching it. However, Ross made an editorial choice at the very end, after the resolution of the main narrative, showing some real-life images and footage that, unfortunately, did break the spell for me before we hit the credits. It was the only misstep for me in what was otherwise a superb film and tremendous directorial debut, one that I hope is a harbinger of more great work to come.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,