Lost and Found: WEAPONS

Writer-director Zach Cregger’s Weapons is a tightly constructed roller coaster of a horror movie, as thoroughly surprising and satisfying as that comparison suggests. I can hardly remember the last time a movie of this genre had me gasping and laughing and on the edge of my seat for the entire time, not merely through its skillfully manipulated tension, but through its confident and enveloping filmmaking. Perhaps that was Cregger’s previous feature, the deviously twisty Barbarian. He’s quickly become a reliable crowd pleaser. Weapons manages to be a hugely entertaining horror picture that wears its themes lightly, but no less sincerely, while giving its characters such a full sense of personality in their potentially stock types that we’re rooting for them as humans, not just as props. It starts a month after a small-town tragedy. Seventeen elementary school students, all from the same class, have disappeared. One night they simply walked out of their houses never to be seen again. We start with the perspectives of three flawed investigators: the kids’ teacher (Julia Garner) who is harassed by angry parents despite being as confused and scared as they are; a grieving parent (Josh Brolin) demanding answers from a lethargic police force; and a floundering beat cop (Alden Ehrenreich). As the movie picks up momentum, its ensemble cast finds more perspectives take center stage one by one in a procession of chapters that interweave and intersect building to one wild culminating crescendo. 

The sustains a level of entertaining suspense throughout its 128 minutes even as it swells with dramatic human feeling and comic release valves. It feels like a real movie, well-designed and imagined, with intentional frames, elegant tracking shots, clever editing and focus pulls, and full of life in its details. That’s what allows it to arrive so seemingly easily at instantly memorable images, cut and crafted with precise understanding of how to play an audience. It’s so well-structured in its interlocking semi-chronological back-tracking chapters and criss-crossing side-characters, and so expertly photographed to manipulate attention, that it keeps the audience in a state of freefall uncertainty that heightens every scream and every laugh, with neither diluting the impulses of the other. (Amy Madigan can even get both at once with her supporting role.) It’s an impressive tonal balance, all the more impressive for perching on such precarious thematic preoccupations. You can’t make a movie about a mass disappearance of school kids without inviting the specter of school shootings. Seeing depictions of grieving parents, overwhelmed teachers and admin, confused cops, makeshift memorials of poster boards and teddy bears are both chilling and sadly familiar in that from-the-headlines way. But the movie plays fair with this sense of dread, this sense of a sick society casting about for blame without solving the underlying issues, letting it seep into the characters and build to a climax that provides surprising answers to its initial mystery that play like an ecstatic, fantastical release. Cregger has calibrated the movie for maximal broad reactions pulled off with subtlety and intelligence. What a thrill to be in the hands of a confidently clever filmmaker, the better to enjoy never quite knowing what’s going to happen next. 

Separate Ways: TOGETHER and THE SHROUDS

Together is a gnarly little horror movie that emerges like a growth out of a simple relationship drama. It’s about a couple who’ve been dating for five years. Their move from the city to the country might induce a breakup. But that’d be pretty messy given all the entanglements that develop over so long living in each other’s lives. The horror springs up when it literalizes the idea that these two people might find it difficult to pull away and separate. It stars Alison Brie and Dave Franco, actual married actors, as the long-term couple. As such they have the sort of easy rapport that shows a total comfort with one another as they portray people who’ve started to take each other for granted. Brie plays the one who took a job that necessitated the move; Franco’s trying to make an idling career in music kick into another gear and laments leaving theoretical opportunity. She suggests they break up before they move or else it’ll hurt more later. (How right she is.) He dismisses the suggestion, shrugging off resentment we know is brewing under his increasingly strained grins as they move in.

Writer-director Michael Shanks, in his first feature, has a fine sense of atmosphere, letting their new little house in the woods become a reason for them to heighten the tension of the cracks forming in their relationship. And then there’s a paranormal thing in the woods that they come into contact with and suddenly, when they touch, it’s more and more difficult to pull apart. Hence the title. There’s are some fine cringing moments of sticky makeup and squishy Foley sound effects as the skin on their legs or arms (and even more uncomfortable parts) pull and stretch, increasingly strained as they rip apart. The trajectory of this logic is pretty clear once we get a fun sliding contortion scene where their bodies are literally drawn closer from across a hallway as they desperately try to grab hold of door frames and furniture. As a picture of a reluctantly co-dependent relationship that’s become a ’til-death situation whether they wanted that or not, it has its potent moments and crescendoes effectively. It also has a few moments where characters behave irrationally for plot purposes, and indulges some (hopefully accidental) nasty stereotypes in its suspicious neighbor character. That's all in service of an ending that’s satisfying in theory, but pretty underwhelming in execution. It may not ultimately know what it’s doing with its metaphor, but the vivid visuals are enough to keep it interesting right up until it’s not. 

David Cronenberg’s body horror movies never have that problem. In the likes of Videodrome and The Fly and Dead Ringers and eXistenZ and Crimes of the Future, he’ll follow a neatly nasty metaphor’s oozing and spattering with easy jolts and deep chills to its logical protrusions. He’s a master at the unsettling and the uncanny, looking at the fragility of the human body, penetrating the mysteries of life with keen psychology and a brave, unflinching look at physical and mental states of disrepair. Not to be too morbid, though I’m sure he won’t mind morbid, it’s worth mentioning that he’s at the age where every new movie might be his last. His latest, The Shrouds, is a work of such bone-deep grief and unshakable melancholic mortality that you’d surely pick up on its easy late style even if you didn’t know it was made by an 82-year-old. The movie stars Vincent Cassel as an entrepreneur who is an owner of a new style cemetery. His signature invention is a burial shroud weighed down with high-tech sensors that allow mourners to live stream the corpse. His wife is in one of the graves, and he shows her off to a date. The living woman’s expecting to see an old picture and is visibly disturbed in the background of a shot as, in the foreground, he pulls up an image of decaying skeletal remains. He obsessively zooms in and rotates the image, inspecting his late wife’s bones. He can’t look away, clinging all the more tightly the more she’s gone. 

Here’s a movie that literalizes a most painful aspect of a long-term relationship: how difficult it is to permanently lose the presence of a person whose life, and whose body, was joined with yours. We watch a man who has never emerged from mourning, watching as his wife quite literally fades away piece by piece. It’s unsettling, and in its exaggeration, painfully understandable. Cronenberg extrapolates upon this pain in his typical clinical style, staring straightforwardly into the plot’s complications with cold observational frames and a steady metronomic pacing that grows icily nightmarish. We get dream flashbacks to the wife (Diane Kruger) as she undergoes cancer treatments, showing up as a fleshy specter gaining stitches and losing limbs with each appearance. Kruger also plays the woman’s living twin sister, married to a frazzled programmer (Guy Pearce). The story soon encompasses gravestone vandals, a potential Chinese hacker conspiracy, eerie A.I. personal assistants, and a Hungarian tycoon’s blind wife (Sandrine Holt) who starts an affair with Cassel. It all clicks together with a chilly illogic, watching bodies and considering what we do with them, alive or dead. Where, then, is the soul, and the mind, as the body fails and exposes its fatal weaknesses? Cronenberg’s movie is so self-reflective and retrospective that it can’t help but echo back across his filmography’s pustules and decay and find another dark mirror on which to ruminate, all signposts and signifiers, an austere headstone to a auteur’s master thesis about human persistence and cold inevitabilities. 

Reality Bytes: M3GAN 2.0 and THE NAKED GUN

It says a lot about our current technological moment that two of the only big summer movies that speak even glancingly to it are also the most intentionally silly. Sequel M3GAN 2.0, for instance, makes fun out of the artificial intelligence bubble currently forming, in which the technology’s biggest boosters are really just salespeople lumping many functions, some helpful and many not, under one dubious umbrella. The picture is a slight pivot in mood and form from the original M3GAN, in which a toy designer (Allison Williams) makes a life-size A.I. doll for her lonely orphan niece (Violet McGraw). The fake girl is supposed to keep the real one company and protect her from harm, but then takes that directive so literally it’ll kill a mean neighbor or a schoolyard bully to do so. That film has a pretty basic slasher formula and some fine tongue-in-cheek performances. What really made it special was the eerie doll design itself, performed by child dancer Amie Donald in a partially expressive plastic mask and voiced with a pixelated mean-girl sneer by Jenna Davis. The creepy little dance she did right before she killed the main human villains went viral for a reason; it’s an eerie bit of performance, blasé and confrontational in one fluidly disjuncted wiggle. She’s not bad; she’s just programmed that way. 

But for all that movie’s modest horror charms, the sequel one-ups them in every way. Writer-director Gerard Johnstone and co-writer Akela Cooper return to transform the genre into a gleaming sci-fi action picture. It’s every bit the T2: Judgement Day to the first’s Terminator. This time there’s a rogue bootleg bot named AMELIA (Ivanna Sakhno) escaping military control and looking for revenge against her creators, which include the characters of the first movie who mobilize a souped-up M3GAN to help fight her relentless sister birthed from the same code. The movie doesn’t take its sci-fi convolutions too seriously, seeking instead to launch into fun combat and chases and gunfights and martial arts moves. And, yes, there’s a dance sequence, too. It’s all set in glowing neon and shiny surfaces and the actors are well-calibrated to inhabit broad genre shorthand characteristics while still feeling plausible and worth rooting for. It’s propulsive and entertaining with choreography and smirking humor balanced well. Then the movie’s best ideas spring forth from its A.I. ambivalence, making all of its human villains tech billionaires and the gullible customers who buy what hyperbole they’re selling. The last twist in that theme is to make M3GAN an ever wilier bit of programming that is simply following the logic she was taught. It’s a movie that entertainingly ties up its own loose ends while leaving the larger question unresolvable. Is A.I. both the cause of and solution to our problems?

Funnily enough, there’s an evil tech billionaire as the villain in the new The Naked Gun movie, too. Played by Danny Huston with the grit and gravitas in his line readings that he’d bring to a trashy drama, it makes the totally ridiculous lines he often has all the funnier. That’s a key insight director and co-writer Akiva Schaffer (he of Lonely Island and cult classic comedies Hot Rod and Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping) takes from the original film of the same name. That was a cop movie spoof from the makers of Airplane! and Top Secret!, part of their formula of having serious actors play it straight while acting through complete absurdity at a vaudevillian level of puns, slapstick, silly signage, and cartoonish vulgarity while simultaneously riffing on cinematic tropes and forms. It was the least of those three pictures, but a solid entry in that now-dormant style. Schaffer’s new legacy sequel comedy pivots back to that older tradition, and as such is so stuffed with gags and punchlines that even if it really only hits huge laughs half the time, that’s still more than we’re used to encountering in one sitting. I found myself occasionally annoyed or exhausted, and some of the jokes here are definitely clunky, but the movie is overall so cheerfully ridiculous, and somehow both a dusty throwback and breezily contemporary, that I was delighted to be continually surprised by its eager goofiness. Even the title card has an unexpected laugh.

Schaffer does a good job making the movie look like a routine studio programmer with a rumbling score and brightly lit action, and then around every corner is a running gag or a quick punchline or a background detail that sends laughter jolting through an audience. Liam Neeson is totally serious as the lead cop, son of the original’s Leslie Nielsen. (The similarity in their names is it’s own unspoken bit of whimsy.) It’s somehow a fitting tribute to the franchise that he’s riffing on his own previous 15 years as an older action star, while fully inhabiting the obliviously incompetent cop role expected from this series. He bumbles through a goofy pulp mystery involving a femme fatale (Pamela Anderson), a hapless partner (Paul Walter Hauser), and a tough boss (CCH Pounder). That he just might end up taking down the dastardly tech guy’s criminal conspiracy to drive the world mad (an apt jab) is semi-accidental. He drinks progressively larger coffees handed to him in increasingly incongruous situations. He pronounces “manslaughter” as “man’s laughter.” Cops pull cold case files out of a freezer, and are all thinking in overlapping hardboiled narration. There are gross gags about diarrhea and decapitation (those are separate scenes). A romantic montage turns into a spoof of a high-concept horror movie. Neeson blames his misbehavior on the Janet Jackson Super Bowl halftime show and says, “Who’s going to arrest me? Other cops!?” You get it. The movie goes anywhere for a joke, finding some of its own while borrowing gags from its predecessors, and a few from Austin Powers or Scary Movie, and is so very pleased with itself for reviving a whole style of comedy that’s disappeared. I might’ve been more skeptical if I hadn’t just laughed too much to pick nits.

We Wear the Mask: EDDINGTON

Over the course of his first four features, writer-director Ari Aster has made a habit of divisive movies, but, love them or hate them, you have to admit he has impressive control over the formal elements of filmmaking. He knows exactly what his movies should look and sound like, and every precise choice builds a coherent whole. Here’s a director in complete command of his craft, each movie a darkly funny, intensely upsetting experience. No wonder it gets people polarized as they stumble out. His first two pictures were solidly in the horror genre, with a possession passed down through the generations of a haunted family in Hereditary and a creepy cult in a folkloric freakout for Midsommar. Those movies built settings that closed in on their characters and thus trapped performances that built on a steady crescendo of madness and howling grief. His third effort was Beau is Afraid, a three-hour movie I often found endless and excruciating, but I’ll also acknowledge that that’s exactly Aster’s aim. Star Joaquin Phoenix plays a clinically anxious man with deep-rooted psychological issues relating to his mother. The entire movie is in his heightened mind as it clenches and extrapolates until its paranoid hallucinations reach a fever pitch of hyperbolic metaphors slipping further from our reality. It’s a movie that’s way more fun to talk about than watch, but it has some big laughs and such fascinating performances and Aster’s vision is so all-encompassing in layers of artifice and anxiety that it’s hard to dismiss. 

Now comes Eddington, perhaps his most straightforward movie and that’ll make it all the more upsetting. It’s a movie about what’s wrong with our modern American society, not in the easy talking points but in the core muck of broken relationships and festering paranoid suspicions. It’s about how often political stances are formed as reaction to personal slights or positive attention. It takes the idea of politics as personal deeper into wounded immediacy. This tendency isn’t new, but is certainly enhanced by the warped fun house mirror of online, a space that’s somehow both real and unreal at the same moment. Characters here are surrounded by screens, reflected in phone cameras and lit up at night by scrolling. Their sense of selves are both shallowly confident and so slippery as to be easily manipulated. But their digital selves and algorithmic diets move into the physical space of the world, and as they roam the dusty, empty streets of their tiny New Mexico town the movie pokes at the performative and the attention-seeking of the well- and ill-intentioned alike. There it finds a shared common void of purpose that leaves everyone floundering to feel important or at least needed. This emptiness is set in a No Country for Old Men-style modern Western, a needling, mordantly funny drama that becomes slow rolling thriller that erupts in violence and watches as characters scramble in its wake. This sense of alienation and division, of being trapped in your bubble and flailing in confused disconnection, is only enhanced by the decision to set the events in May 2020, with a pandemic raging and a public frightened and fractious. 

Tap-dancing on the third rail, the movie finds the town of Eddington’s exhausted sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix) deeply ambivalent about the whole COVID precautions thing. He’s clearly imbibing some misinformation. As he’s drawn into deeper rivalry with the town’s mayor (Pedro Pascal), while seeking the approval of his troubled wife (Emma Stone) and avoiding the scorn of his conspiracy theorist mother-in-law (Deirdre O’Connell), he impulsively decides to run for the office himself. His platform of freedom from masks and business closures grows increasingly conspiratorial itself, making muddled baseless accusations and driving around in a truck covered in misspelled handwritten signs (“Your being manipulated!”) and speakers that broadcast his meandering stump speeches. (It’s an echo of Altman’s Nashville, another movie about an American town in a particular fractious moment.) Eddington is also currently home to: a handful of shop owners and restauranteurs, a black deputy (Michael Cole), a ranting unhoused man (Clifton Collins Jr.), a roving cultish influencer (Austin Butler) who makes hyperbolic speeches about trafficking, a tribal officer on the reservation (William Belleau), a white teen girl (Amélie Hoeferle) who organizes protests when she’s not doing TikTok dances celebrating, say, finishing a James Baldwin novel, and the teen boys (Matt Gomez Hidaka and Cameron Mann) who want to get her attention. They’re all rattled and on edge, growing increasingly suspicious of each other from within their quarantined misinformation inflammation and boxed in by the cinematography that keeps trapping them in isolation, alone together and apart.

Aster develops his plot with his usual deliberateness and an eerie surface calm, while the characters tussle with the complications of pandemic life and fall into conflicts that escalate until they’re out of control. They’re all operating with darkness and denial or just deprivation in their lives, these deep holes they’re desperately trying to fill. But you can never fill emptiness with hollowness. Here are characters who are constantly trying to have the right position, the right attention, the right purpose, and talk all around the big ideas of the moment. Yet for all their talk, they get nowhere, and believe only what they need to cling to in order to survive another day. And they’ll say whatever’s convenient in the moment, scrambling about for ways to provoke a reaction. Phoenix complains the mayor’s being performative, then heads out to his car to film a video for Facebook. The mayor tells his son not to go out with a group because of the optics, then later is blaring Katy Perry at a backyard fundraiser. But this isn’t an easy “both sides” view from nowhere. These are specific characters, and the movie draws a pretty clear moral vision, the end point of all this culture war division and who’s doing the dividing. (It has something to do with the A.I. data center going up outside town, a threat to further drain their resources and give them hallucinations in return.) It sees the powerless reaching for easy answers and sacrificing more of their power in the process. 

When people reach out to make a connection through culture war buzzwords or interpersonal grievances they’re playing a game they’re already losing. It’s a movie about the dangers of not wanting to believe, but being seen believing. Here’s a movie about people who use their speech not as a vessel for ideas but as weapons to wield. An anti-masker just has to disingenuously bark “six feet” to get his adversary to back off. And when your words are just a means to an end, you’ll say whatever gets you the attention you seek. No wonder the result is darkly funny despair and intense violence. They have no core truth on which to build themselves. The movie takes these impulses to extremes, then executes five or six sudden turns in the finale that’ll provoke most audiences into wondering how and if it works. For my money there’s a startling escalation that gives a sense of an ending without a sense of closure. And that’s what makes it feel all the more 2020. 

Par for the Course: HAPPY GILMORE 2

In 1996, Happy Gilmore told the story of a hockey player with anger issues who became an improbable golf star. Since then, we’re told at the start of Happy Gilmore 2, he won several more golf tournaments and had four kids with the love of his life. And it was all downhill from there. Now he’s a retired broke alcoholic single father who dreams of affording tuition for a fancy ballet school that’ll make his darling teen daughter’s dreams come true. The habit of legacy sequels ruining the lives of characters we last saw in a happy ending (think: Star Wars, Ghostbusters, Halloween, Indiana Jones…) can often seem a cruel way of resetting the stakes of a story. Giving Happy all this sadness gets the comedy plot rolling in a surprisingly low, reflective mood for all its insistent jocularity. It’s nonetheless predictable. If you think that his desperation will drive him back into a new lucrative golf tournament, you know the way these decades-late sequels go. What a difference three decades makes. 

The original movie was one of Adam Sandler’s first big hits, and is now something of a comedy classic, although at the time it was written off by critics as a louder, crasser, dumber brand of comedy. What arrived to some as a shock of the new is now a reflection of a style of moviemaking past. Time will do that. Yesterday’s young upstart is today’s old favorite. When big screen comedies are such a dying art that this surefire hit has been sent straight to streaming, it’s nice to see Sandler up to his reliable nonsense. His brand of salty and sweet comedy, more broad slapstick than clever wordplay, with shaggy plotting and cameos for his pals and a tendency to scream and flail and then smirkingly shrug into a sentimental finale, made early Sandler movies recognizably his own. Although in the middle of his career, they trended toward an excess of those qualities, some of his initial efforts have a neatly contained idea that reigns in his worst impulses. The sports’ movie structure Gilmore borrows and goofs on gives it a fine through line for its nonsense. And, against all odds, one could even care about this wacky character. 

The sequel, however, is definitely a latter day Sandler picture. It’s looser and shaggier than ever before, running nearly two hours with a meandering story lumbering from gag to gag. It has a pretty even hit-to-miss ratio. It can be amusing, but leans toward too much of not enough. It’s full of affection for its characters, tributes to late cast members and pals, and a love for Sandler’s wife and daughters, who get substantial roles. Some of Sandler’s comedies of late have successfully used that love of family to make warmer, sweeter movies in which he gets to play the charming dad, like in the crowded wedding comedy The Week Of or colorful teen comedy You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah. To return to Happy Gilmore is to find a blending of his two modes, the earlier scrappy underdog eccentrics with wild crude set-pieces, grotesque supporting players, and wacky running gags, now with the lovable everyman father figure at the center. That’s what makes it so long and generously portioned. It has an enormous ensemble cast and lots of silly putting around. There's more than enough of everything. If you like famous people playing themselves, or a loopy caddy played by Bad Bunny (admittedly a highlight), or a mean waiter played by Travis Kelce, or a heckler played by Eminem, or an endless parade of Sandler regulars and SNL alum you’re going to get so, so much of it. No joke goes unrepeated. No opportunity for a flashback to the first movie is avoided. No old friend’s superfluous scene is cut out. Sandler is an affectionate Movie Star. He knows at this point that his fans just want to hang out with something familiar and here he serves it up over and over and over. 

They Slay: KPOP DEMON HUNTERS

The way fan armies on social media talk about their favorite pop stars would make you think they’re fighting a holy war. What KPop Demon Hunters supposes is maybe they are. The result is a fantastical action musical with a bit of satire mixed in. Rendered in a sleek and shiny digital style, the movie from Sony Pictures Animation makes sure every song is high-stakes, and every action sequence fluid and fanciful. It’s a sugar rush of adrenaline and appeal because of its dedication to making the most of its hook. We meet the Korean pop girl group Huntrx, a trio of stylish young ladies bopping around stage belting out shimmering pop vocals over thumping high-energy beats. It’s catchy, and that catchiness is precisely the point as it’s the only thing keeping the demons at bay. We’re told in a burst of exposition that mankind has from time immemorial needed massively popular singers with songs so powerfully melodious that their music literally weaves a spell to prevent the forces of evil from attacking the earth and harvesting our souls. In true Buffy the Vampire Slayer fashion, these teen girls are merely the latest in a long line of Demon Hunters. When not playing sold-out arena shows or dropping fresh singles on social media, they’re out there with literal swords cutting down demons who’ve slipped through their barrier. They stay busy, and stay winning. Tired of losing, the demons try a new tactic: a boy band. This mysterious rival group arrives out of nowhere with even catchier songs, and the more Huntrx slips from the charts, the more imperiled are the world’s souls. Their rabid fans, who cheer and cry with pop-up anime expressions, are drawing up the online battlefields, while the actual singers just might have to fight it out for real. 

It’s all cleverly done, with various conflicts within the groups as well as between them, and of course there’s a forbidden maybe-romance between the hottest member of each band that simmers with added tension as the movie hurtles through its fast-paced set-pieces. When the action slips into the endless-waves-of-anonymous-baddies mode, it can be repetitive, but the movie’s too quick to get bogged down for long. Besides, the light-hearted mood and the dark evil stakes remain a fun contrast. And the songs, produced by actual K-Pop composers, are actually incredible earworms. Like Josie and the Pussycats or The Stains before them, Huntrx is a honest-to-goodness fun girl group. You can see why they’d get armies of fans. There’s something funny about flattering that impulse as if it actually is life-or-death stakes if your favorite pop girls are top of the charts.

Family Business: THE PHOENICIAN SCHEME

In a filmography full of flawed father figures, there’s a good case to make for The Phoenician Scheme’s Anatole Zsa-Zsa Korda (Benicio del Toro) as the most flawed Wes Anderson father yet. He’s a rapacious international tycoon, brazenly skirting laws and regulations to exploit the world by any means necessary for his business interests. Those interests? Getting more. Little wonder his cold disregard for others leaves him dodging assassination attempts. They’re so frequent he practically yawns as he shrugs off others’ concerns about dangerous developments. “Myself, I feel very safe.” That we’ve seen an employee of his literally exploded in half in the opening moments makes us wonder where he finds that sense of safety. But it nonetheless must be this sense of mortality that drives him to invite his estranged daughter Liesl (Mia Threapleton) for a visit where he insists she leave her intention to become a nun and instead be his official heir. He takes her, and a nerdy tutor-turned-assistant (Michael Cera) on a whirlwind tour of a fictional Middle Eastern country. At each stop he renegotiates with various scoundrels and business interests (a diverse group including Tom Hanks, Riz Ahmed, Jeffrey Wright, Scarlett Johansson, Benedict Cumberbatch, and more) to fund parts of an enormous real estate and public works project that he claims will be his legacy. Of course he brings gifts to grease the wheels: complimentary hand grenades. 

You may at this point have suspected that this sounds a little harsher than the usual Wes Anderson picture. Indeed, it is his coldest picture, with a hard edge and, despite his usual visual whimsical specificity, little of his obvious sentimentality. Even his masterful Grand Budapest Hotel, with its parable of encroaching fascism, found a bit more lightness in its step. Here the characters speak in the deadest of deadpan, extreme even for his style, and the emotion buried deep within is deeper still. Sure, the film is stuffed with his usual love of still-life, dioramas, old-fashioned effects, and mid-century frippery, contained in his dryly funny framing and hyper-specific structural eccentricity. (This one is built out of a series of plans kept in small, ornate boxes.) One goes to a Wes Anderson film to delight all over again at his cohesive and coherent style or one doesn’t go at all. But here in The Phoenician Scheme he’s taking a hard look at a bad man and asking what could stop the greed in his heart. All of the capitalists, con men, and crooks he meets have some stage of the same affliction. Greed is an insatiable monster. Contemplating the monster makes for a movie that’s darkly cynical, with violence tossed off as casual gags and an imperious Del Toro unflappably determined to bulldoze any obstacle in his way. In true Wes Anderson fashion, he has an intricately imagined procession of obstacles and eccentrics to reveal along that route. Is there hope for Korda? Perhaps the only thing that’ll make a bad man even a little bit better is if he could possibly be forced to have nothing at all. 

Unfortunately, Korda’s in the business of more, more, more, and has a habit of corrupting all relationships toward this aim. This gives the movie an interest in the state of the soul, with religion and business and politics twisting around for purchase in materialistic persons. It’s a movie filled with schemers surrounded by paintings and literature and classical music. What beauty could a businessman possibly leave behind? Contemplating mortality, this spiritual dimension is underlined by the movie’s most startling and moving element: visions of an afterlife in blocky black-and-white where bearded sages, deceased family, and God himself sit in judgement of Korda. Whether or not his near-death experiences could help him come to a sense of self-improvement is up in the air. Like Royal Tenenbaum and Steve Zissou before him, Anatole Korda thinks he has it all figured out and needs no such self-reflection, convinced that he’s the father who knows best. But his daughter challenges him to be more of an actual, not just a theoretical, father figure, even if he may have murdered her mother. The ways in which their personalities collide and converge is a source of interest in the movie which clearly has lineage and legacy on its mind. Korda also makes mention of an unseen late father of his own whose influences on his son continue to reverberate in his decisions. (That lends poignant echoes to the short conversation which he has with God. Oh, how sons are treated.) The movie, though clever and bemused, is not as immediately lovable as Wes Anderson’s best works, so wedded as it is to its discomfiting, closed-off characters. But the ending finds Korda’s logic collapsing, and there just might be tentative hope in the wreckage.