Reel Life: THE 4:30 MOVIE

Filmmakers making films about loving film always show you a lot about themselves. Think of
Spielberg’s recent Fabelmans in which the young Steven character has a vision of himself filming a family argument. Here’s a boy who thinks with the camera, and who sees the world through cinema. It’ll make him a wunderkind. And it’ll make him use that skill to create joyously cinematic genre pictures that’ll, in part, interrogate family and how people make them and break them. It’s a whole career in an image—typical of the revealing nature of an auteur’s work, especially in a confident, relaxed Late Style. For Kevin Smith’s version we have The 4:30 Movie, in which the Smith stand-in is a dorky teenager in 1986 (Austin Zajur) who wants nothing more than to sneak into an R-rated movie for a first date with his crush (Siena Agudong). And so we get this: a pretty girl with a wide smile earnestly and affectionately telling a chubby nerd, “wow, you know a lot about movies and TV shows!” Smith, unlike Spielberg, has a pretty one-track mind—sex, weed, pop culture. That’s about it. The end credits of this movie include a long “Thanks” section that includes everything from Little Debbie and Little House on the Prairie to George Lucas and John Hughes. (It’s a succinct syllabus for Kevin Smith Studies.) His preoccupations made for a bit of Gen X freshness with his scrappy indie Clerks back in 1994, what with its minimum wage slackers chattering back and forth about movies or sex acts in amateur cheap-o black and white. But, aside from a few successful fluke attempts at developing a style and deepening his thematic concerns (apocalyptic Catholic fantasy comedy Dogma, sentimental single-father rom-com Jersey Girl, and grungy political horror Red State), Smith’s been stuck in a permanent adolescence ever since, both as a stylist—all flat coverage, bland lighting, and simple staging—and as a writer—all surface-level allusions and references. His previous picture, the dreary and sappy Clerks III, even indulges in recreations of scenes from the first, as its legacy sequel status has the characters in the movie making a movie about their lives, which is a kind of worse Clerks. 

As Smith became a more repetitive niche interest, he dug in deeper into his chatty nerds’ limited imaginations. (Even a couple weirder horror adjacent pitches the past decade play like shaggy podcast anecdotes.) He’s making hangout movies for himself, and his die-hard fans, and his chummy collaborators, keeping his work cheap and lowering expectations. But he enjoys himself and that's what still causes his movies to have little sparkles of idiosyncratic interest. That his latest is comfortably his best in nearly 15 years is a tribute to its breezy smallness that makes his newfound sentiment comfortably quaint. It finds our lead and his buddies hanging out all day at a three-screen movie theater in their hometown while awaiting his crush. We see a clips of fake trailers—decent—and some fake movies—pretty sloppy. (There are also tons of jokes in which characters straight-faced say something like “There’ll never be more Star Wars” or “Bill Cosby will always be admired” with dopey historical irony.) Along the way is some silly banter, some stupid antics, and a few funny performers (Justin Long, Rachel Dratch, Sam Richardson, Ken Jeong, Adam Pally, Jason Lee) doing their best with some thin characters. But nothing too outrageous happens, and the lines are never more than passably amusing, and the people are all broad shtick. It’s a genial enough thing, a pleasant, undemanding sit, and sure to please, or at least intrigue, the micro-generation of like-minded nerds for whom Smith remains a figure of note. But it’s ultimately so low-stakes and lacking in narrative and emotional—let alone comedic—juice that it mostly evaporates on contact with dead air between the projector and the audience. It’s a movie for people whose greatest dream is for a pretty girl to admire them merely for their movie knowledge. Hey, we can dream.

Blue Steal: REBEL RIDGE

Those of us with a taste for patiently proportioned action filmmaking, of the sort that’s all the more satisfying for a long fuse, will find much to enjoy with Rebel Ridge. Here’s a blood-boiler of a thriller, percolating with righteous anger as it stokes a steady sense of tension and suspense. Writer-director Jeremy Saulnier is good at this sort of thing—a slow and steady escalation of inevitable conflict. His fine-tuned Blue Ruin, with a fumbling amateur quest for vengeance, or Green Room, with a rock band besieged by neo-Nazis, show a gripping sense of tightly contained menace and looming doom. He brings those skills to Rebel Ridge, in which a perfectly unjust situation gets only more complicated the more those in power feel emboldened to do their dirty work in broad daylight, try to stamp it out instead of doing the right thing. It leaves a man without power no choice but to grab on for dear life and hope for real justice to prevail. The inciting incident finds a good man (Aaron Pierre), a black veteran, stopped by small-town police (David Denman and Emory Cohen) on his way to bail his cousin out of jail. Seeing a fat stack of cash in his backpack, his life savings, the cops take it and scoff at his protestations of innocence. Evidence, they say. Suspected criminal proceeds. Civil forfeiture. He can fill out a form to dispute the confiscation and hope for the best. Highway robbery. The more he tries to get his money back, the more the cops harass him, intimidate him, insinuate he’d be arrested or worse if he even thinks about pursuing this further.

The movie is smart about the ways in which a police force can get high on their immunity and act with impunity, even as their posturing bravado and barking orders barely cover their hair-trigger tempers and easily bruised egos. (Chief Don Johnson is perfectly enraging as a man used to getting his way through mere intimation of power.) And it’s smart, too, about the logic of a crooked cop’s traffic stop escalation, and the ways in which an officer can feel totally safe to pull a gun out and shoot an unarmed man without fear of retribution. This simmering in the background of the film’s slow-growing crescendo gives an edge of danger—even as potentially sympathetic “good cops”—let alone a local courthouse clerk (AnnaSophia Robb), who has her own dangers—are slow to do the right thing out of reasonable fear of their own colleagues. What gives the movie a satisfying kick beyond the social justice angle is its commitment to grubby genre simplicity—a good match of intentions. These cops messed with the wrong guy. Like a low-key, slightly more realistic Walking Tall or First Blood or Jack Reacher, this veteran is more than ready to stand up for himself. The movie’s look and mood is as clean and clear and simple as its setup, holding close on Pierre’s intense eyes and powerful stance, negotiating the frame to maximize the physicality of the blocking. It holds steady in stillness until—wham!—firearms are aimed and fists are clenched. It exercises such admirable restraint—even in its well-earned action finale never turning into a mindless blood-lust—that each punch or gunshot lands with considerable force.

Grave Humor: BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE

Now here’s a welcome surprise—a belated sequel that’s more a cause for celebration than for cynicism. The movie is Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, a late-arriving sequel to 1988’s Beetlejuice. (It’s fun that there are few ways to discuss that fact without summoning the eponymous ghoul.) And, contrary to current trends in legacy sequels, this isn’t some lengthy, ponderous brand extension. It’s just more Beetlejuice, which finds the characters from the original simply experiencing more Beetlejuice in their lives.The movie doesn’t meaningfully add to a mythos (though we get a stylish origin-story black-and-white foreign-language flashback to the ‘Juice’s death). It’s simply gleefully and grotesquely itself—a cheerfully mean comedy about the afterlife careening into one family’s actual life. Here’s Winona Ryder’s Goth teen all grown up—and now with her own disaffected daughter (Jenna Ortega—a perfect Burton performer with her wide eyes and flat affect). They’re called back to the family ghost house by the matriarch (Catherine O’Hara) upon the death of her husband. (Extra-textually a gigglingly gorily appropriate killing-off.) There, wouldn’t you know it, they just might need the horn-dog demonic Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton) to work a Faustian bargain to fix their problems. The result is an energetic throwback, both to the original and to a time when sequels were content to just serve up more of the same.

By doing so, it’s also an occasion to find director Tim Burton at long last back at peak Burton—mischievous, macabre, and mocking. (Of course a bureaucratic purgatory is a cartoon nightmare, and there’s plenty of haunted satire to small town life and big city pretensions, too.) He’s his most himself in a way he hasn’t fully unleashed in nearly two decades. Us Burton auteurists forged in the golden days of Edward Scissorhands and Batman Returns and Ed Wood and Mars Attacks and Big Fish and Sweeney Todd could still find some glimmers of fun here (Dark Shadows’ Gothic goofiness) and there (Big Eyes’ kitschy exaggeration). But even then it felt like the early edge he had was sanded down and his unbounded imagination suddenly bound. Here he is back in full prickliness and earnest eccentricity again, with wit and vigor. Every kooky corner is chockablock with vintage Burton antics, from the cockeyed production design and physical sets, all stripes and canted angles, to the frantic Elfman score and manic mayhem of all sorts of wild and wiggly gross-out effects. If nothing else, it’s a pleasurable aesthetic experience—so deeply familiar to Burton-heads it’s even comforting in its discomforts.

A riot of old-school techniques—stop-motion animation, puppets, models, animatronics, squibs—are married seamlessly to digital exaggerations and embellishments and put to use for madcap Looney Tunes logic and Fangoria fetishes. Corpses shamble about missing chunks from shark bites, growing moss, bulging with puss and gore. A dead actor (Willem Dafoe) struts about missing the side of his skull so bits of brain show through. A gorgeous dismembered witch (Monica Bellucci) staples herself back together so she can resume sucking souls. (She discards the empty bodies like flaccid water balloons.) The plot piles on these grotesquely cartoony ghostly dilemmas to ping off funny, but sincerely felt, family melodrama, leading to a fine, freaky scurry through a complicated finale that crisscrosses the lands of the living and the dead. This is an eruption of inspiration and imagination all the way, overstuffed and overflowing with a blend of the serious and silly, from a chalk-outline bomb exploding, to a recurring Dostoyevsky motif, a possessed disco song-and-dance number, and a literal Soul Train complete with a Don Cornelius lookalike as conductor to seal the pun. The whole production is on this level of manic entertainment, a delight from beginning to end, a quirky effects comedy about nothing but its style and itself. But what a great self, and one only Burton could bring. It’s nice to see him again at last.

Fatal Attraction: STRANGE DARLING and BLINK TWICE

JT Mollner’s Strange Darling is a dark, nasty, self-satisfied little thriller. Its commitment to squirming through discomfort and violence—teasing a line between adult play and assault in frank ways—is often gripping. But its empty-headed reversals and surprises grow pretty vile when taken in total. It opens with a man hunting a woman. He chases her down a country road with a rifle and then stalks through forest and field as she tries to hide. Even to suggest that all is not as it seems would be unfair to the movie, which tells its story in 6 chapters deliberately scrambled so as to hide its transparently obvious twist. That it works at all is a testament to a crackling filmic look, and the actors who inhabit it. The man is Kyle Gallner, who is such a reliable horror presence. (The Haunting in Connecticut, Jennifer’s Body, the Nightmare on Elm Street remake, Red State, Scream 5, Smile…is he an honorary Scream Queen?) Here he’s able to dial up the intensity of his menacing gaze, while retaining the possibility of a wounded frustration, even embarrassment, to instantly slip back into his eyes. The woman (Willa Fitzgerald, of the short-lived Scream TV show) is similarly slippery, in a blind panic in some chapters, while we soon enough get a flashback look at the rough-housing she’s hoping for when she first picks up the guy in a bar. Its self-consciously a movie about gender stereotypes and the possibility of sexual violence, about safe-words and mind-games. But as the movie’s scatter-shot timeline clicks into place, it’s a pretty straightforward, predictable movie, for all its bloodshed and self-impressed flourishes. That leaves the final stretch awfully tedious, then just awful as its final twists of the knife turn on some mean-spirited gags. It is a lot of effort spent on getting nowhere.

A lively contrast to such tediousness is Blink Twice. Zoe Kravitz makes a fine feature debut as director in a Jordan Peele mode—a high concept thriller with social commentary on its mind. The results here may not be as layered and complex as Peele wears so casually and confidently—it’s too surface level flimsy for that, and even the not-as-it-seems is more or less as it seems. But the film is stylishly photographed with glamour shots and prickly shadows, and is cut with a razor-wire jumpiness. It’s easy to buy into its stakes and watch invested in what happens next. The plot is set in motion quickly, trapping characters in a bad situation that gets its tense charge from contemporary conversations about navigating identity, power, and consent. It follows a cater waiter (Naomi Ackie) who catches the eye of a billionaire (Channing Tatum) whose fundraising dinner she’s working. He invites her and a friend (Alia Shawkat) to be in a group of pretty ladies joining his pals (Christian Slater, Simon Rex, Haley Joel Osment) for a vacation on his private island. Sounds fun, she thinks, with apparently no negative associations with the words: billionaire’s island. (It made me want to rewrite a famous 30 Rock quote: never go with a billionaire to a second location.) Days spent lounging poolside, eating gourmet meals, and drinking constantly refilled cocktails are a kind of pleasure for quite some time. So is the flirty atmosphere with the super-rich host. She thinks he might actually be falling for her. Why, then, is there this ominous feeling of something ugly beneath the tropical fun? One of the other pretty guests (Adria Arjona) finds herself with tears welling up in her eyes as she finally admits that it’s all fun, “except…not.” The nefarious intent of their hosts comes tumbling out in torrents of revelations and the climactic conflagration is the kind of violent eruption that’s the inevitable result of escalating bad vibes. Kravitz gives the movie a breezy, on-edge shimmer and lets the sickening implications land not as flip twists, but with their due weight.

Resurrection: ALIEN: ROMULUS

As a frightened character inserts a crackling electric prod into a dripping alien egg sac, I found myself thinking that Alien: Romulus will please those who love to read Freudian symbolism into these pictures. But then again, there’s something to please all sorts of Alien fans in this movie—a gripping little exercise in style and craftsmanship while playing the series’ greatest hits. It’s set between Ridley Scott’s original sci-fi horror Alien, in which long-haul space-trucker Sigourney Weaver barely escapes a close call with a nasty extraterrestrial infestation, and James Cameron’s slam-bang sequel of action escalation, Aliens. And so it naturally borrows from each of those in appearance and mood, while layering on nods and winks and tracing along motifs and plot threads from other prequels, sequels, and spin-offs. The leads are a group of young miners (capably led by Cailee Spaeny and Isabela Merced, and David Jonsson with a tricky robotic role-and-a-half). They’re stuck on a far-flung planet under an onerous corporate contract when they decide to heist a derelict company space craft drifting by. Once there they discover, oops, it was a secret research station abandoned upon getting overrun by the face-hugging, acid-bleeding, ruthlessly predatory Xenomorph Aliens we’d expect from this series. The following is mostly predictable, but done up with enough fine shorthand performances and cool effects and ominous sounds and a big score that it rattles and shakes with patient entertainments until it hits a surprising new gear in its finale.

The director is Fede Alvarez, who brings a knack for doing right by a franchise—his Evil Dead remake is one of the better, gnarlier, horror remakes of the last decade—as well as his ability to spin a claustrophobic vice-grip of tension—like his trapped-in-a-house-with-a-mad-blind-man Don’t Breathe. He’s a fine maker of images and can layer visual and sonic effects with a degree of teeth-rattling force, churning out resourceful pulp awe. Romulus looks and sounds sensational with endless dark corridors and shafts of light and creepy crawlies scuttling and scurrying. It’s freshly familiar, so its biggest success is always what keeps it from greatness: it simply can’t stop reminding us of all the other Alien movies. But maybe that’s fitting for a series that features, across its many iterations, evolutionary explorations, genetic manipulation, gene splicing, cloning, and mutations. What it lacks in originality—and I definitely would’ve trimmed its most thuddingly obvious homages—it makes up for in fun throwback appeal. Here’s a movie that’s built out of bits and pieces of the others in its tradition—a big eerie location elegantly framed, a desperate blue-collar ensemble, a ragtag colonial machine-gun set-piece, gooey body-horror eruptions, elaborate gore effects and expertly manipulated CG enhanced puppetry of the new protuberances and pustules on the attack. The whole thing moves with a fine sense of tension and release, slamming down with grave, bleak world-building in each new implication and crisp, legible action as piles on the complications. It’s a minor-key entry, but one built up out of enjoyable resonances. And I certainly found myself in the suspense of hoping the appealing characters could find their way out; it’s new to them, after all.

Irish to Speak: KNEECAP

Kneecap is one of those movies that teaches you something, although you certainly won’t be seeing this in schools. It introduces the audience to people and a subculture you might not’ve known about, but could be glad to discover. It’s based on a true story from around a decade ago in Northern Ireland about two teenage drug dealers who end up forming a rap group with a high school music teacher. Improbable, perhaps, but not impossible. More unusual is the language in which they rap: authentic indigenous Irish, at a time when the government refuses to acknowledge it as a legitimate language and, indeed, British elements in their country view it with a deep suspicion. These hoodlums run amuck snorting powders and snogging young ladies, but they have a love of their language that expresses itself in swaggering poetry of the sort imported from American hip-hop. The teacher, for his part, loves making beats, and is engaged in the political agitation for making Irish an official language of Northern Ireland. He sees in these boys a chance to bring his two passions together. Besides, he likes getting youthful stupidity back in his life, throwing himself into some of their more juvenile habits as they become intergenerational pals. (There’s a bit of a fun generation gap at play, too, like when he drops references to Dr. Dre or Abbey Road and they sail over the lads’ heads.) Calling themselves Kneecap, they start the underdog road to niche success, drawing the expected controversies any rappers exalting drugs and revolution alike attract. The movie, which stars the band as themselves in surprisingly charismatic and believable performances, ends up following a lot of the usual musical biopic beats. But its style and tone are enlivened by a cultural specificity and a raucous energy. Writer-director Rich Peppiatt takes his cues from their vulgar lyrics and rough-around-the-edges personalities—as well as a rooting in The Troubles that still linger in sociopolitical tensions in their town, from an estranged revolutionary dad (Michael Fassbender) to a girl (Jessica Reynolds) whose British roots give her fling with one of the fellas a naughty charge she loves to cultivate. The movie hops and bounces with a pattering narration, visual jumpiness like Danny Boyle-lite, and little animated filigrees or super-imposed handwritten embellishments, keeping things light and joyful even as the darkness of addiction and sectarian violence bubbles up. It’s basically as if Trainspotting was also A Hard Day’s Night. If it’s not quite as good as that sounds, it’s not for lack of trying. It’s a vibrant, vulgar ode to free speech that ends with a lovely syllogism: language makes stories, and stories make nations. I got a little misty eyed right there, even before the narration even draws its final conclusion.

Concerted Effort: TRAP

M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap is probably his slightest and most straightforward movie to date. It’s pretty much always exactly what it appears to be, all right on the surface with no surprises. And yet his pacing, rhythm and plot progression is always so idiosyncratically his own that it’s still unexpected in its every development and every preposterous turn of events. More than any Shyamalan before, this one has little logic on a scene to scene basis, with plausibility, or even basic sense, almost completely subsumed by his workings of style, character, and theme. It makes for a minor work, but a vivid and telling one. He’s too good a filmmaker to let something like coherence or context throw him off his game. Forget having a plot hole or two; this movie’s Swiss cheese. But, hey, cheese can be a good treat, too, and my fellow Shyamalan auteurists will still find plenty to appreciate in the movie’s total refusal to be anything but itself. That is to say, it is, like his other recent efforts like Old and Knock at the Cabin, another outlandish premise in which a family is put to an ultimate test of togetherness.

Here we find Josh Hartnett as a doting dad taking his daughter to a pop concert, an event we quickly realize has been infiltrated by an FBI team on the hunt for a serial killer they have good reason to believe is in attendance. The twist lands quickly: Hartnett is that killer. Now he’s stuck surrounded by cops and crowds—and proceeds to plow unstoppably forward, like a shark on the move. He’s cornered, and needs to find his way out by working all the angles. That’s clever enough—and a more conventionally satisfying thriller might’ve milked its central concept more fully. Instead it’s played loosely for a few macabre moments and a lot of cringing comic stings. It never quite makes a full convincing space. The concert itself is a pretty flat affair—Shyamalan’s daughter Saleka plays a pop star simulacrum with songs that are bland and a performance a bit under-characterized and sketchily choreographed. And the variables at play in such a location are utilized rather sparingly as Hartnett eyes every potential escape route without rousing too much suspicion. Holding nearly every scene, he does a fine job of tight, restrained flailing, desperate to keep the ruse of normality from slipping. Then, without building to pop music crescendoes of payoffs, Shyamalan wriggles out of the expected and denies us the simple pleasures with a more eccentrically unexpected series of developments. We might think we’re watching a movie about a killer caught in a trap, but it’s soon clear it’s a movie about the traps we set for ourselves.

Here’s a man whose evil hobby has taken over his life. The unrealistic expectations he’s set for his nice suburban fatherhood persona colliding with his ugly urges threaten to ruin the good family man he could’ve been. He seems like a good dad—smiling, generous, bantering—and yet there’s a victim tied up in his basement. The friction between these halves of his identity is now grinding quickly toward imminent conflagration. The setup as rolled out was pretty far-fetched anyway. As Shyamalan lets it simmer as a twisted character piece instead, and gives a slow-rolling, high-pressure picture of a family life falling apart as it collides with the disjunctions and unexpected connections of stardom and screens and teens and the ways in which people can hide from each other in plain sight. The movie takes on a typically Shyamalanian frisson of pinned-back melodrama and ominous, geometrically composed implications that heighten the unreality of its murmured line readings and precise shell-game theatrics. It may have still left me wishing for the more conventional setups and payoffs the concert setting seemed to promise—but the more bitter interpersonal stakes of its increasingly small turns and odd shifts might end up lingering all the more.

What Fresh Misery Is This? LATE NIGHT WITH THE DEVIL, IN A VIOLENT NATURE, MAXXXINE, and LONGLEGS

In a recent Facebook post, writer-director Paul Schrader asserted that horror movies resist seriousness and are difficult to use for serious ideas, writing that “for the most part their raison d’être is horror itself.” This he says despite, or maybe because, of his own interesting flawed Cat People remake and Exorcist prequel. Regardless. It’s certainly true that the horror genre is one that easily tips over into empty gestures and routine imagery. Even some of the best somehow milk suspense afresh from the same small bag of tricks. Lights flicker. Frames swell with negative space. The score stings with a tremor of strings or a bleat of brass. Figures suddenly appear. Fog lingers. Grass cracks. Leather gloves stretch and crinkle. Blades shine and snicker-slice through air and flesh alike. Hey, I can like these tools of suspense as much as the next incorrigible horror frequenter. The masters of the form make these same basic moves manipulate responses for something pavlovian, if not pathological, in their ruthless effects. The masterpieces might lean on these, too, but on their way to burrow beneath the skin by turning the unease into an all-consuming nightmare of discomfort and lingering psychological doubt and distress. All that potential to find so many of the buzziest horror films lately are all empty gestures? Or at least they have wide gulfs between good ideas and unsatisfying execution.

Take the surprise sleeper hit of the spring: Late Night with the Devil. It sets itself up as found footage: a doomed episode of a 1970’s talk show wherein a possessed guest wreaked demonic havoc on live television. That’s an incredible premise, and with character actor David Dastmalchian in the lead role playing a kind of flop sweat Dick Cavett, has some unctuous charms. The way the intimations of real horror build along with the chummy surreality of a bleary-eyed half-imagined midnight talk show, segment by segment, has a nice sick logic to it as well. Where the movie loses me, and keeps it from fully activating its potential, is its craftsmanship. Writer-directors Cameron and Colin Cairnes fumble all the little details—from the too-digital faux-video look, to the vaguely modern phoniness of some performances, to the too-smooth gore effects—and break their own conceit with implausible and unnecessary behind-the-scenes photography and some nightmare-perspective shots in the back stretch cut into what could’ve stayed trapped in the diegetic. The longer it went on like that, the more frustrated I was that such a promising idea was whittled away one distracting choice after the next. It’s like they didn’t have the confidence to fully commit to their own idea.

If you want to give some credit for commitment to the bit, though, look no further than In a Violent Nature. It isn’t much of a movie, but as an excuse to sit in the dark and think about slasher movies, it’s not so bad. It’s basically a knockoff Friday the 13th from Jason’s perspective, or more accurately from a third-person camera following closely behind him. The trance-like pacing includes a lot of tromping around in the woods, the distant sounds of shallow young adults carousing and camping drawing nearer as a hulking brute slowly, steady stomps toward them. The eventual kills are so grotesquely over-the-top, even by the genre’s standards, that one watches them with a sick fascination. It’s not so much about the death on display as clocking where, exactly, the wound makeup and eviscerated dummies are digitally stitched into the shots of real actors, and trying not to vomit through one’s appreciation for all that macabre hard work making it look excessive and real when someone is literally pretzeled inside out and pushed down a ravine. Writer-director Chris Nash makes a patiently punishing movie that makes the audience wait and wait, listening to nothing but the crunch of leaves and twigs underfoot as the killer’s back ambles onward to excessive violence. The plot, such as it is, is bone-deep derivative, and any glimmers of genre critique are quickly squelched out by the flat-faced slasher logic taken too seriously. For however much it had me contemplating why people, myself included, even enjoy this hack-and-stab form, it had my mind wandering to all manner of other films of its kind—both better and worse—rather than focus on the increasingly dull one in front of me.

I had a similar sense of diminishing returns with the summer’s bigger art house horror efforts: Ti West’s MaXXXine and Oz Perkins’ Longlegs. Both from reliable modern auteurs of the genre, they nonetheless fall flat in the way strong starts peter out into predictability. They’re not without their surface charms of style, but they never truly satisfy like their inspirations. West’s film is the third in a trilogy he began with his fun 70s throwback X, in which an indie porn crew is killed off on a remote Texas farm, and then continued with Pearl, a flashback to the beginning of the century where a desperate farm girl hoped for stardom and decided to murder instead. MaXXXine is in a neon-and-synths 80s L.A. and finds the imaginary actress of the title role (Mia Goth) trying to transition from porn to horror. Too bad people she knows are being killed off by a giallo-styled leather-gloved perv. It makes for a rather simplistic movie with a mystery that’s limply deployed and violence sparingly splattered. It also introduces nothing new or nuanced about its character or the doomed death-drive to stardom we haven’t already picked up. By the time we get to the weirdly routine conclusion—in which a detective played by Michelle Monaghan gets one of the funniest exits in recent memory—I was wondering what all the empty pastiche was even supposed to be saying at this point. 

At least Longlegs has some truly terrifying moments punctuating a thick layer of dread. It’s a dimly-lit, coolly framed serial killer procedural that slowly sinks into a satanic spell. Maika Monroe does a good Jodie Foster, and Nicolas Cage brings a typically talented and engaging push-pull between outlandishness and underplayed creepiness. His grotesquely made-up face, shrill vocalizing and halting rhythms puncture the chilly restraint of the filmmaking, warping the texture of the tone and bending the whole movie toward his evil gesticulations. That makes for a great uneasiness at play in every scene, especially when photographed in precision anamorphic tracking shots tied to a figure in the frame. But it’s all so cramped and small, and ultimately way more pedestrian, even in its nightmarish magical realism, that I spent the last third in a shrug. But compared to some of these other horror movies this year, no wonder this one hit the box office with a bit of a jolt.

Dead End: DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE

“Welcome to the MCU,” Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds), the irreverent regenerative mutant with a fourth-wall-breaking power, tells a Wolverine (Hugh Jackman). To this he adds: you’re joining it at a low point. You can say that again. Meant to be a joke about the lower box office and more mixed reception of recent Marvel Cinematic Universe pictures, this movie, the thuddingly obvious Deadpool & Wolverine, is the actual nadir for the whole hydra-headed franchise. Even by Deadpool standards, it is astonishingly witless and empty. It’s a movie with nothing at stake, in which nothing much of consequence happens, and in which every act of violence or feint toward character development is ultimately meaningless. (It doesn’t even, in the end, despite its promises, bring Deadpool or Wolverine into the MCU!) Its tone is typical of its meta-antihero’s: cynical, sarcastic, insincere. But it feels even worse, somehow, shorn from the comparatively more authentic edge of the initial two entries produced under 20th Century Fox. Since that studio was absorbed by Disney, that edge is now queasily subsumed within the sturdy sentimentality and baseline simplicity of the MCU, which continues its project of painting the earlier efforts of Fox (and others) as unsanctioned variants of the Sacred Timeline. That whole concept comes from the largely satisfying TV series Loki, which has some fun with the idea of hopping through time and multiverses. The problem, though, is that one must care about the characters to track motivations across a conceit in which anything is possible and nothing is permanent. And Deadpool is awfully hard to care about as a real character; he’s more of a stunt and a goof at best. It might make sense to pair him as a mismatched partner to Jackman’s Wolverine, whose many film appearances have been tense and tortured; instead it’s a one-note irritation with a wild card bouncing off a stone wall.

Any chance of taking the stakes or characterizations as anything but obnoxious and tedious vanish quickly. The movie opens with a phony sequence in which Deadpool slaughters innocent agents of the Time Variance Authority in gory cartoonish shots of CG gore splattering. He does this while dancing to NSYNC and miming sex acts, stroking a phallic femur he uses to stab an anonymous extra in the gut. Later, he’ll tearfully ask an alternate universe Wolverine to help him save his universe from destruction, since the villains plan to rip it apart after sending him to The Void, where other misfit Marvel castoffs sit around waiting for their cameos. Hard to reconcile those two modes—high-stakes exposition and flat displays of vulgarity and violence—especially when the finale also includes a bloody massacre of alternate Deadpools who are constantly torn apart and regenerated to get up and get dismembered again. Sounds a little clever in concept, but why they’re fighting, and who they’re fighting, never makes sense. They can live forever and exist in every universe. Why do we care about any of them? And the sequence is shot so dispassionately—in a steady, calm, monotonously paced tracking shot—with stunts digitally smoothed that it’s creepy in its total alienation from reality and consequence. Death doesn’t matter here, so what are we rooting for? That action beat starts when a nice character’s head explodes in a spray of bullets because Deadpool is holding him as a human shield, making jokes the whole time. Why should we care if his universe of supporting characters will survive when none of the other characters, or the movie itself, cares about life itself? It’s numbing in its senselessness.

To whipsaw between total adolescent depravity and painfully vacant sentiment almost sounds energetic. But I cannot overstate how deadly dull the movie is from scene to scene. It sparks to life in sputtering spurts, drifting off affection for other, better Marvel properties—from the retro-future TVA offices to previous X-Men finale Logan to appearances from surprise castmates. (One shot of an ersatz Avengers had me dreaming of such a misfit matchup in a better movie.) Director Shawn Levy can be a reliably anonymous technician. He previously pulled off a robot boxing movie with Jackson—2011’s Real Steel—to diverting results, and a video-game meta action comedy with Reynolds—2021’s Free Guy—to some crowd-pleasing effects. And he can traffic cop comic personas well enough in Night at the Museum. But here some combination of the dictates of Deadpool’s juvenile ugliness and the MCU’s polished anonymity, along with his typically flavorless direction, combines to make a broadly repellent mush. The screenplay flops along doing nothing, Jackson's innate Wolverine charisma tries to imbue literally anything of note in the downtime, and the bland images constantly undercut any sense of creativity or cleverness. 

The whole movie is oddly cheap and small, taking place almost entirely in an empty wasteland and on one city street. It says a lot about the movie’s mismanaged sense of its own expectations that it prefaces one particular action sequence with Deadpool asking the nerds to get ready for something awesome and then follows that promise with janky effects awkwardly filmed. The characters may be stranded in a Void, but to sit watching one limp scene after the next flail self-satisfied feels like its own particular purgatorial punishment. It makes constant reference to other perceived Marvel failures—X-Men Origins, a couple Fantastic Fours, Affleck’s Daredevil—and each time the smug superiority of this movie’s tone had me thinking we were too hard on those earlier efforts. At least they were trying to be real movies. Even flashbacks to the first Deadpool, a movie I hated at the time, and probably still would if I rewatched it, look like great cinema compared to this rot.

Home on the Range: HORIZON: AN AMERICAN SAGA - CHAPTER 1

It begins with a massacre and ends with a massacre. Kevin Costner’s return to the director’s chair, Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1, may be merely the opening of a much longer project—and feels it, baggy with detail and spacious with introductions and set-ups, withholding all payoff for much, much later. But its intentions are already becoming clear. Here’s a movie about American Manifest Destiny: settlers moving west and the indigenous pushed out or pushing back. It’s about the violence it takes to recreate a country in your image; it’s about the hope to uproot one’s life only to replant it elsewhere; it’s about the perseverance to maintain your culture and traditions in the face of those who wish to take it from you. As such, the movie is a sturdy and sentimental work, overflowing with character melodramas played out against the backdrop of the American West. But it’s also a tough and fair story, thus far, and prismatic in the way it turns over the scenarios and sees from multiple perspectives. It opens with a small tent city struggling to become something more—a would-be town called Horizon advertised to settlers back east as a place of potential. The townsfolk are slaughtered by nearby natives, leaving dazed survivors to confront a military man who glumly tells them it’ll happen again. The people on whose land they’re attempting to build will not give it up without a fight. Some settlers want to stay. Some flee to the safety of the nearby army outpost. Soon enough, we meet the natives, and see they too are of split loyalties. A chief chastises a warrior who led the attack. Violence makes them all unsafe, he says. Eventually, this long chapter ends with retribution—a pack of miserable mercenaries slaughter an innocent tribe. And the cycle continues.

Between these two bloody action sequences shot through with the excitement of grief and agitation of injustice, we meet many characters in a huge ensemble, and find a great deal of conflict and rooting interest taking place. There’s the strong widow (Sienna Miller) and her angelic young teen daughter (Georgia MacPhail who, in one scene with all-white wardrobe, underlines her role as a literal manifestation of innocence) taken under the wing of a tender-hearted cavalry officer (Sam Worthington). There are the squabbling tensions of a wagon train under the watch of a tired leader (Luke Wilson) leading them inexorably toward Horizon. There’s a taciturn cowboy (Costner, saving his introduction for over an hour) who becomes suddenly, and somewhat reluctantly, invested in the survival of a prostitute (Abbey Lee). She’s stalked by gunmen (with a glowering, pouting Jamie Campbell Bower the most sinister among them) hunting down her friend (Jena Malone), a fugitive who killed their brother—the father of the friend’s child. It’s at once complicated and clear. We start to get a sense of where these stories might go through the conventions of such tales, and the easy rapport the actors build in these characters whose circumstances are historical and dramatic, but shot with a dependable gloss of some more mythic aims. Costner allows for plenty of heroic shots and sweeping landscapes that heighten that larger-than-life feeling as he keeps up a generous pace that’s all rising action. Each sequence is patiently developed in square and sturdy images, sunny and dusty and cut with the grace of a classical engraving. (One character even has a hobby of making sketches for just that purpose.) The film’s playing in the iconographic expected tableau of such an old-fashioned tale, while the complications pile up with the sense that we’re getting somewhere vast and engaging—eventually.

The movie is an expansive, wandering one, content to roll out every kind of Western—historical, pulpy, epic, romantic, bloody, wry—and pile up the tropes of each until they sing anew in a dynamic chorus. Costner is clearly a filmmaker in love with the genre; he’s starred in a few and his entire directorial output is some form of Western—his Dances with Wolves a revisionist take partially from a native perspective, and Open Range a classical rancher shootout showdown. (His The Postman may be post-apocalyptic, but it, too, is all about horses trotting between outposts nonetheless.) With Horizon’s first chapter, he stretches across the plains and the canyons, echoing Ford’s She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and Wagon Master, Eastwood’s Unforgiven and his own Wolves and Ranges, letting each storyline start brewing with comfortably gripping potential and familiar images. He draws his narratives in languorous shorthand, letting the cliche gather the force of emotional expression from a sincere storyteller. The film’s three hours are engaging and expansive, while feeling lengthy yet somehow quick. I found myself leaving satisfied without any resolution, craving Chapter 2.

Triple Threat: KINDS OF KINDNESS

“Some of them want to use you / Some of them want to get used by you / Some of them want to abuse you / Some of them want to be abused”
— Eurythmics, “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)”

“This were kindness?”
— The Merchant of Venice (1.3.154)

For anyone worried that Greek writer-director Yorgos Lanthimos was drifting to the mainstream with his awards feted, and surprise box office hits, The Favourite and Poor Things, here’s Kinds of Kindness to most fully expose that bleeding heart of darkness within his works. Not that those other films aren’t wild with vulgarity and explicitness, too, but they were packaged in aesthetically pleasing historical intrigue or flights of fancy, respectively. Kindness is colder, slower, less immediately narratively legible, and without even the slightest hint of appealing character motives. That’s what makes it so compelling, too. One watches it trying to figure it out, and it's structured to keep slipping away. It’s fitting that it begins by blasting the iconic driving synths of Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This),” as the movie is about people used and abused, in darkly comedic and deadpan absurd stories in which everyone is looking for something, and in which reality seems to take on the logic of an inscrutable dream. Lanthimos pins down his characters in clinically precise widescreen frames, and then spins out the surreal plot turns, scripted with his Killing of a Sacred Deer co-writer Efthimis Filippou. He does so with an unblinking, mannered realism, dialing back the style and coaxing underplayed reactions just when the stories are aching for excess.

As the characters wriggle their ways through the emotional and physical pain of their plots, the movie becomes a caustic acid bath of cynicism, watching toxic people give into base impulses, and work their wicked ways. The film is made up of three short films, each nearly an hour long and starring the same ensemble. Each tale would undoubtedly test the patience at feature length, each take a sick joke inside a sick joke that starts strange, grows even stranger, and then ends on its bleakest, gnarliest punchline. The first finds a businessman (Jesse Plemons) totally controlled by his boss (Willem Dafoe) and the old man’s mistresses (Emma Stone and Margaret Qualley), down to the food he eats and whether or not his wife (Hong Chau) will get pregnant. When he finds himself doubting his commitment to his latest grotesque task, his life instantly changes for the worse. The second story finds Plemons as a police officer whose wife (Stone) has been missing at sea. It’s odd enough that in his grief he invites their friends (Qualley and Mamoudou Athie) over to watch their sex tape; odder still is how he reacts when his wife is eventually discovered. Lastly, we find Stone and Plemons looking for a Chosen One at the behest of a cult leader (Dafoe) and his wife (Chau). It becomes a sort of desperate ritual as it goes on.

In each story, the cast is so good at inhabiting these extreme situations of sex and violence with shrugging acceptance that the bubbling surreality is played out quite naturally—subtext and text dancing with extreme literalness, down to the black-and-white flashes of dreams and visions that mingle with their mindsets. These characters are constantly doing acts of a selfish sort of kindness, casually blowing up lives, behaving as dangers to themselves and others. If this were kindness, who needs cruelty? Here’s a movie with a pretty low opinion of human behavior that’s as darkly upsetting as it is grimly funny, in a preposterous string of circumstances held in the grip of skilled filmmakers making each moment count. Lanthimos using the same faces in new roles uses each switch of the narrative to recombine them into dynamics of freedom and control, power and submission, responsibility and individualism. These characters keeps slamming into illusions they’ve created to make sense of lives spiraling out of control—often of their own doing. The bruising absurdism of each accumulates into the sickest joke of all: sometimes the only kindness is to give into the absurdity of your circumstances and hope for the best.

As an aside—how wild is it to think back to 2010, when Stone’s Easy A was a satisfying comedy that confirmed her a star and Lanthimos’ nasty, explicit Dogtooth got a surprise Academy Award nomination for foreign-language film. Imagine telling us moviegoers back then that those two would bring out the best in each other.

Some Grief Shows Much of Love: GHOSTLIGHT

Ghostlight is a small movie about the redemptive power of theater, and about the powerful effects Shakespeare’s words continue to have in our modern lives. This independent feature emerges from the Chicago theater scene, and as such carries with it a distinctive regional flavor—a directness of approach and an earnest truthfulness in its clear emotional ideas. It’s about a construction worker (Keith Kupferer) who accidentally gets involved in a tiny community theater’s production of Romeo and Juliet. He didn’t mean to get wrapped up in a production so poetic and emotional, especially as it cuts against his usual gruffly taciturn blue-collar bottled-up demeanor. But the ragtag group of friendly misfits (led by Dolly de Leon and local Chicago actors) that make up this little troupe so quickly accepts him and cares for him and enjoys his presence that he just can’t bring himself to stay away from this new community. We slowly get the sense that he’s grieving, as his relationship with his stressed wife (Tara Mallen) feels strained with unspoken sadness, and their daughter (Katherine Mallen Kupferer) is a troubled teen who is pulling away from school, and her own theater dreams, in a spiral of sadness on top of her typical adolescent angst. Writers and directors Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson draw out the family’s troubles in a slow, withholding style, letting us slowly understand the contours of their disfunction as it relates to grief and tragedy. Ah, so that’s why Romeo and Juliet, of all plays, was chosen for this function in the film, we can consider, as the classic play’s themes of love and loss start to draw some emotional parallels with this family’s life.

That might be too simple or convenient, and the rougher edges around the filmmaking’s humble style direct our attention to the obvious screenwriting tricks at play in teasing out these connections. But the earnestness and sincerity of the filmmaking’s focus on these three main characters often overpowers objections. These three actors, clearly drawing upon their actual familial comfort with each other—how often do a husband, wife, and daughter trio get to play that dynamic on screen?—have the kind of honest interactions that sometimes feel painfully unrehearsed and raw. We see genuine halting, stumbling emotional pain, and we see the painful love struggling to reassert itself in the messiness of mourning. The dialogue might sometimes fall on the side of obvious, but the acting carries across the purity of purpose. That helps the film avoid potential overreach as it finds some honest sentiment in the ways this sad dad’s newfound acting interest might help him process his undiscussed feelings, and draw the family closer together. This isn’t a movie that concludes theater heals all wounds and fixes all flaws. This is a movie that says the deep resonant human truths within Shakespeare’s words can be reinvigorated anew in the hearts of each person willing to give themselves over to that power. It can reawaken bottled up feelings, and force you to confront them in a safe space. That’s what gives the movie’s final moments such power and force, to find a father looking off into the wings, seeing a silhouette in the ghost light, and finding some mysterious, transformative closure.

What They Gonna Do: BAD BOYS: RIDE OR DIE

When Belgian filmmaking duo Adil & Bilall made 2020’s Bad Boys for Life, they did so in the shadow of Michael Bay. He’d directed the first two Martin Lawrence / Will Smith buddy cop actioners in his distinctive style of crass comedy and loud, excessive, explosive spasms of car crashes, gunfire, and fireballs. They’re abrasive, eccentric crowd-pleasers, and their charms have only grown as respect for Bay’s craft has grown as being satisfyingly distinctive and reliably his own in an increasingly homogenous Hollywood blockbuster landscape. How could Adil and Bilall’s film compete with that accrued affection? That they nonetheless pumped out a sleek and muscular movie of shiny surfaces and jokey banter and genuine camaraderie between appealing performers in charismatic star turns was a credit to their skill. But now that they’re back for Bad Boys: Ride or Die, they’ve balanced the scales. It’s fun to see a franchise shift its center of gravity, now half Bay’s and half the new guys’. With Lawrence and Smith as the fulcrum, the style of these pictures has evolved a comfortable late-period energy, leaning even further into the ages of its leads while refining a swooping and fluid mode of pushy camerawork that’s distinctive from Bay’s, while still borrowing some of his best tricks to maintain series’ stylish continuity. That they take a few moments of Bay’s drone camerawork from his latest, and under-seen, Ambulance is a good example of beneficial inspiration. That they structure the movie to give each and every character in the ensemble a satisfying action moment is a sign of affectionate generosity to provide a good time.

With all the style to get carried up in, and affection for the people to power it, does it really matter what the plot of the picture is? At least it’s fun and complicatedly uncomplicated. The Bad Boys are in trouble again and have to shoot their ways out while busting each other’s chops before getting down to business and busting heads instead. They’re on the run after being framed by a crooked cop, so they have something extra charged to prove this time. I’m sure it helps energize the plotting that all involved do, too. Meanwhile, Smith has cranked up his stardom to a megawatt power he hasn’t utilized since his heyday—no doubt trying to remind audiences why they loved him and to forget recent contretemps. Lawrence always takes this series as a chance to renew his most energetic comic speed runs of insults and non-sequiturs. This one gives his character an early near-death experience that gives him a kind of zen Holy Fool energy that crackles in fun new ways off Smith’s posturing toughness. And the directors themselves are fresh off a project that was nearly completed before being deleted and slandered by Warners’ CEO to get the company a tax write-off; no wonder they’re flinging that camera around with a vigor and vitality to amp up every moment for maximum visually-pleasing impact. The action sequences and dialogues alike are given a charging forward momentum and are given glamorous surfaces from the velvety sunsets to the gleaming explosions to the neon-glow-in-the-dark strip club presided over by a scene-stealing Tiffany Haddish performance that swaggers out on a neo-blaxploitation register. The movie hits all the pleasing action notes you’d want and keeps love for its characters center frame—a heightened, goofily-humored, fast-paced, violent pleasure.

Beyond Fury Road: FURIOSA: A MAD MAX SAGA

Furiosa is an unhurried adventure epic to Mad Max: Fury Road’s cannon blast actioner. Together they form quite a pair. George Miller’s 2015 revisiting of his post-apocalyptic Aussie wasteland was an instant classic, with his hero Max riding that Fury Road with the imperious Furiosa (Charlize Theron), a warrior truck driver for a nasty desert despot who’s decided to free the villain’s harem and flee to her homeland. That film was an all-out road-rage chase picture that barely lets its foot off the gas. Miller’s endless invention found more ways to wring suspense and energy and righteous violence out of jerry-rigged, tricked-out vehicles than even his Road Warrior and Beyond Thunderdome—though no slouches in the action department—ever suggested possible. But now we’re borne back into the past for Furiosa’s origin story. Immediately it’s clear this movie will take on a different pace, with a structure of sturdy chapter designations letting us know we’re in for something with the weight of an epic—a story of sprawling biblical dimensions, a biographical excursion, a story of a girl’s survival across decades of duty and despair, and a gripping tale of vengeance long in the making.

The movie’s telling has a classical widescreen elegance—all Lean and Leone stretching across the desert in expressionistic CG embellishments—and a hard-charging action eccentricity, with Miller’s usual dedication to details of his world colored in quickly and casually. And it has that heart-felt attentiveness to vulnerability and consequences that give each act of violence such horrible heft, and each clever reversal in favor of an underdog such vivid satisfaction. It starts with Furiosa as a child (Alyla Browne) stolen by bandits from a verdant oasis. She takes a vow of silence to protect her friends’ and family’s hidden home, though it dooms her to stay in the villainous clutches of the brutal biker tribe lead by Dementus (Chris Hemsworth, breathing a menacing squawk of a voice through a prosthetic nose). He rides in a rumbling chariot pulled by two snarling motorcycles, and his ragtag gaggle of reprobates rev engines around him. There’s a Miller villain if ever there was one. The movie follows his attempts to consolidate power in the Wastelands—bringing him into conflict with one Immortan Joe, Fury Road’s despot with scraggly blonde hair, wild eyes, and a toothy mask. As war for resources in this corner of the dystopic post-civilization Outback escalates, Furiosa grows. She hides out in one camp, then another, making tenuous allies and proving her worth, all the while biding her time to get her revenge. She’s surrounded by oddball characters and dangerous deviants in a world tearing itself apart in the wilderness. Through her eyes, it becomes a movie about a society in free fall, and the indignities of chaos and injustice that accrue and explode.

This war for control of the Wastelands is clearly the crucible that forms Furiosa’s steely heroism. But rather than proceeding apace to a foregone conclusion, this is a movie that’s alive with possibility and entirely invested in her survival and development. An early scene in which she witnesses her mother tortured to death is shot in an extreme close-up as a reflection in her watery eye—and that sets the tone going forward. Here’s a girl who’ll see unimaginable horrors and, though they will become a part of her, they will not break her. Later, there’s an extended sequence—one with a lengthy chase sequence behind, around, aboard, on top, and through an enormous tanker truck attacked by Rube Goldberg machines (one imagines this is also Miller proving he can still pull off what made the last picture so great)—finds young adult Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy) making an ally of one of the Immortan’s drivers (Tom Burke). Together they find a kinship as kindred caring hearts made hard through the needs of survival. They connect on a human level in an inhumane environment. And yet this tenderness is inevitably subsumed by the need to fight—to emerge from flames holding a machine gun, or racing off on a motor bike cradling a broken and bleeding limb. (The action is as gripping as it is patiently distributed.) Miller finds time for these grace notes of cool and caring alike, in a film equally interested in iconography as it is in morality and motivation. It imbues the transformations of its title character with a deepening emotionality—coloring in the implications that were in Theron’s gaze last time with all this new understanding born from excitement and tragedy. Out of the darkest times, new hope grows.

Child's Play: IF and I SAW THE TV GLOW

John Krasinski’s IF is a miserable, infantilizing family film that disrespects children and adults in equal measure. It’s advertised as coming to us “from the imagination of…” the Office actor turned writer/director. If his Quiet Place movies, workmanlike horror pictures with modest charms, were enough to convince you he had one, here’s reason to doubt. It’s sloppy, sentimental hogwash about Imaginary Friends abandoned by children who grew up and forgot them. One girl (Cailey Fleming) encounters some of them corralled by a tired, impish ringleader and caretaker (Ryan Reynolds). She’s sad because she has to live with her grandma (Fiona Shaw) while her dad (Krasinski) undergoes surgery for an unnamed ailment. For all we know, he merely has a terminal case of whimsy, what with his few scenes eventually petering out with limp quips and smirking self-satisfied pauses for laughs or tears that never arrive. Since the girl’s mom died of implied cancer in the opening montage, it’s understandable that she’s leery to see her dad in the hospital, and amazing she doesn’t get more exasperated by mild japes like dancing with an IV bag on which he’s placed googly eyes, or when he hides in the closet and pretends to have escaped out the window with a ladder of bedsheets. She reacts to this struggle by retreating into her creativity. Or does she? It’s all a bit too simple to be this fuzzy.

The crux of the ostensible emotion is the group of CG creatures wandering melancholically without their former children—creatures that only the girl and Reynolds can see. They all look like Monsters, Inc rejects and have big name cameo voices that rarely register as such, while they mope about doing nothing. The movie wants us to think it’s sad that they’ve been forgotten and should be reunited. But they aren’t real characters and never do anything for anyone. Ah, maybe they reawaken an inner child of some grump for a moment of two. But to what end? It’s best scenes—anything involving Shaw, a dance number to Tina Turner, the girl’s eventual tearful, spit-flecked bedside breakdown—feel dropped in from a better movie, one without its cloying contradictions and flat staging. Here’s a movie that tries to be an ode to youthful imagination being a balm for troubled times. Instead it bumbles its way into saying that we should never grow up and put away childish things. It’s arguing in favor of a permanent immaturity. Why? Because it’s a cheap hit of feel-good when confronting adult emotions is too difficult. Yeesh. We’re not exactly a society overcrowded with maturity.

Ironically, IF’s opposite is likely playing in the theater across the hall in a big enough multiplex. Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow is a slow, entranced nightmare about getting trapped in childhood nostalgia. It conjures a fuzzy, bleary vibe and rides its off-kilter tremors to an odd, grotesque ending. The intimate movie follows two isolated, disaffected adolescents in the late-90’s getting hooked on a weird television program about psychic teenage girls fighting phantasmagoric monsters. Clearly a blend of X-Files, Twin Peaks, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Are You Afraid of the Dark? it’s easy to see why a freakish blend of kid-friendly plotting and woozy creature design airing late at night would mesmerize a young teen. These two kids seem especially prone to getting drawn into such an enveloping fantasy. One is a quiet, awkward, friendless 7th grade boy (Ian Foreman, though he grows into narrator Justice Smith) whose mother (Danielle Deadwyler) is dying and father (Fred Durst) is distant. The other is a lonely 9th grade girl (Brigette Lundy-Paine) from an abusive home. She introduces him to the creepy show, and is totally into its lore, such that it starts to become the architecture of her fantasies of running away. He's scared and hooked in equal measure. As Schoenbrun gives the interactions between the teens the kind of goosebump intimacy of lost souls connecting in their brokenness, the camera’s slowly mesmerized imagery lends a grainy, hushed suburban dreaminess and creeping dread.

It speaks directly to people who allow their adolescent obsessions to overtake their personality and identity, replacing satisfying adult pursuits with increasingly hollow simulacra of real experience. It becomes a way to avoid inner truths. Suddenly, a childish idea grows and darkens and inflates in complexity and importance. A key scene is when, late in the picture, so spoilers ahoy, our lead re-watches the show as an adult and finds something almost embarrassingly quaint. All that for this? This new view rattles and echoes off a maybe-imagined reunion that devolves into a darkly dreamy magical-realist monologue. How sad when love of a TV show seems to hide what you'd express as something truer about your identity than you’re ready to admit. And how frustrating to be unable to let that childhood comfort fantasy go. The movie’s mood is so intensely focused on the hypnotic tremors of this cultish entrapment bleeding between fantasy and reality that the final moments of the picture—clangs of hallucinatory violence followed by embarrassments, deflating and awkward—bring some kind of cringing reality crashing in. It’s about an inner hollowness that can never be filled so long as you’re chasing the unattainable—nostalgia, television, your adolescent understanding of your future, or your adult longing for youth. It’s ultimately a hazy movie feeling like a half-remembered nightmare slowly leaving your head after waking on the couch in the middle of the night, bathed in the TV glow.

Playing Doubles: CHALLENGERS

In Challengers, director Luca Guadagnino puts his usual obsessive attention to sensual detail to use in a hard-charging sports picture twisted around a juicy relationship drama. Its first shots find sweat dripping in slow-motion off the faces of its main competitors—one-time friends who are now rivals in a tournament. One (Mike Faist) is a wealthy tennis pro; the other is a struggling wild card (Josh O’Connor). When they were teenagers, they both had a crush on the same rising tennis star (Zendaya). Their paths merged and diverged over a decade. One dated her. The other married her. An elaborately structured screenplay volleys between timelines, stretching what a lesser effort might make the climactic match across all two-hours of the film while sketching in the details of their criss-crossed, intertwined romantic lives. Guadagnino makes of this his usual tale of romantic obsessions and lustful appetites marveling at what the human body can do. His camera drinks in the physical beauty of his stars, while his style swoops and zooms and cuts with an ecstatic aesthetic. It has the precision scrambling chronology, snappy dialogue, and the techno-momentum of a pulsating Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross score, which lends the film some of the surface cool of The Social Network. It also has talented young actors effortlessly embodying suggestive body language in a screenplay of crackling dialogue that bops and zips with repartee that might as well be tennis balls.

Guadagnino’s investment in sexual tension has the film sizzling and throbbing on a different wavelength. His films are always attuned to an intimacy of touch and the suspense of lingering looks—one doesn’t make the yearning romance of Call Me By Your Name or the tingling pool-side thriller of A Bigger Splash without a keen sense of physical and emotional textures. In Challengers, that’s all compounded the sheer physical exertion of a sports movie sends pulsing energy through its teasing, tense love triangle that wraps itself into knots of jealousies and frustrations that are professional, romantic, and athletic all at once. Each sizzling interaction plays like a dramatic volley across the net, complications arising with the regular sensation of a serve and a score. Zendaya plays a steely ref between the competitors, complicated by her own thwarted career aims sublimated into her husband’s. For their part, the guys are complicated, fascinating figures, too—by turns preening and pathetic and always carrying a capacity for physical prowess. Here’s a movie about three fascinating people driven by their appetites—for each other, for winning, and for whatever success feels like. They end up manipulating themselves as much as others. The way the characters shift and share and shame across the run time, refracted through the competition animating the sequences, are finely-tuned drama. When Guadagnino goes hard on the style—taking his camera on a tennis-ball-view or slowing down to watch every rippling muscle twitch or secret speechless message—it takes the sensational drama all the farther. It’s entirely an invigorating, enlivening experience. Where most modern melodramas trend toward the plodding, here’s one that dances.

Fear Itself: THE BEAST

Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast is a nesting doll narrative full of resonances fit for an age of anxiety. He’s done this playfully serious structuring around free-floating modern fears before. His Nocturama is a tensely shaggy hangout with a group of disaffected young bombers hiding out in an abandoned mall after a violent protest—captured by capitalism even in rebellion. His Zombi Child is a boarding school drama wrapped around voodoo flashbacks that tie together into a double-knotted story of immigration and isolation—twice over lost to oneself even as one is drawn even deeper into oneself. The Beast is hooked into a modern sense of foreboding and unease manifesting as eerie stasis and passivity that makes dangers, real or imagined, no less possible. It’s wrapped in a bevy of sci-fi conceits. It’s 2044. Some undefined apocalypse has left the streets of Paris largely abandoned, with stray animals wandering about, and passerby wearing clear air-filtering masks. Léa Seydoux stars as a woman who submits a request for promotion to her Artificial Intelligence overlord (Xavier Dolan’s voice) and is told she must undergo an emotional purging. Hooked up to a pseudo-spiritual machine—a vat of goo and wires that’s one part Minority Report and one part Cronenberg—that’ll prompt her to relive past lives and purge her centuries acquiring human softness.

As it begins, the movie quickly settles into a romantic tragedy straight out of Henry James. It’s a flooded Paris of 1910 where a the owner of a doll factory sneaks up to the edge of an affair with a dashing stranger (George MacKay) she meets at an art show. From the near-future interludes to the birth of Modernism—she sees avant garde paintings and is overseeing her product’s transition from porcelain to plastic—she’s stuck in a period of technological and emotional transition. (It also cues ideas about the creation of art as reflection and population of interior spaces, matched in time with an embodied A.I. “doll” played with impressive impassivity by Saint Omer's Guslagie Malanda.) Seydoux navigates serenely yet quiveringly across times with a slippery double role, playing the subterranean romantic yearnings and curiosities as her stuffed-shirt husband drifts away in favor of a pretty and serious flirt. The movie kicks into even higher tension in its second half as the double role adds a third. Now we’re in 2014 Los Angeles where the period piece stylings are rawer within our modern memory. This section deals with the burbling impending violence of MacKay as a vlogging incel stalker (a sadly familiar type) while Seydoux is now an aspiring actress disaffectedly ensorcelled in the labyrinthine gig economy of bad commercials and empty housesitting, only freed from routine by lonely websites, lonelier pills, and somehow loneliest crowded nightclubs. If the Jamesian story is about the pain of denial and the dangerous sparks of new possible connection, the Hollywood one is about the creeping dangers of the lack of connection.

In each time period, Seydoux and MacKay are on a collision course, sometimes romantic, but always fraught with contemporaneous fears and foibles. What form does society give to its unanswerable conflicts, its grinding prejudices and self-fulfilling prophecies? What, after all, is the beast? (A key line has to be an advertising director on a green screen set asking his actress: “Can you be scared of something that isn’t there?”) Here are two parallel plots that play out back to back, with the futurist frame dance between. Their implications and tensions and uncertainties circle, echo, and collapse. Bonello plays each genre almost entirely straight, but their juxtapositions accumulate and resonate. At times fleeting glitches filter in, lingering oddness even before Josée Deshaies’ cool digital frames might suddenly be pixellating, or skipping, or repeating, but just rarely enough to surprise each time. (Pity anyone seeing it streaming instead of theatrically or on a disc for the doubt they’ll have about whether these intentional choices are wi-fi troubles.) Here, in triplicate, is a woman and a man on a doomed loop of trauma reincarnated. Here, human fears feed human foibles and the inevitable dooms of our own, or others’, making. All one can do is scream as old anxieties are reborn anew and expressed afresh—familiar faces in new forms, every beginning fraught with the knowledge that this, too, shall end.

Point and Shoot: CIVIL WAR

A tense provocation, writer-director Alex Garland’s Civil War has sequences of frightening violence wherein the logic of action movies is turned inside out to make us root for the shooting to stop. Our lead characters are photojournalists courageously and recklessly charging after the action. The bullets fly and we flinch with them as the action charges ahead. We see bloodshed as intimate, personal—bodies hanging in an abandoned car wash, piled in mass graves behind farm houses, pulled apart by machine guns. The movie imagines a near-future America devolved into sectarian warfare, rebel troops amassing outside Washington to take on a fascistic president who has, in his third term, disbanded the FBI and shoots protestors. This isn’t the queasy-making romance of a lost cause, or a wishful thinking, that’s been burbling up with Civil War nostalgia for 150 years. If the United States were actually to fall into an all-out second Civil War it would look like this—balkanized, radicalized, individuated, dangerous and unpredictable. It’d be three backwoods guys with AR-15s guarding their local gas station. It’d be a random militia holed up trying to overpower and execute soldiers. It’d be insurgents storming the capitol.

Garland doesn’t worry overmuch about how we get there. The movie starts years into the conflict as we get the sense the war is drawing close to a climactic point of desperation. Dialogue has some free-floating allusions to past massacres, controversies, and realignments. We get the gist. The screenplay never announces the policy positions of its combatants, although a reasonably intelligent viewer could pin down the overarching particulars of the state of play. Instead, it stirs up its political intensity with immediacy of intent. It communicates clearly and directly, and with great force, ideas about the hell war puts all people through, and of the complicated natures of the specific people who make their mission the witnessing of it. This is a bleak vision of how some people are just waiting for an excuse to revel in chaos, and the movie plays it off with a throughly muddled sense of rooting interests. Of course we want our main characters to survive; that’s movie logic. But by stripping out actual specific policy or parties, we see only the tension between chaos and order. Stopping for speeches or debates that lay out the stakes might serve to soften the walloping dread and loud gunfire of sectarian violence and its rippling collateral damage. It’s a portrait of society in free fall, a little nervous about how plausible it could be.

Garland has often been a filmmaker interested in the fragility of the human body. Look at the time-warping drugs of Dredd or zombified rage that can infect from merely a drop in 28 Days Later. Or see the blurry lines between man and nature in the haunting alien landscapes of Annihilation and between man and machine in Ex Machina. With Civil War, Garland takes that investment in how fragile people are and pushes further into how that fragility is inextricable form the systems and institutions we build. It finds that larger perspective in sticking small and personal amidst the national ramifications. It’s confined to a picture of photographers dutifully witnessing while getting a charge out of following along—and it makes them vulnerable, too. Some (Kirsten Dunst) are disillusioned about the value of their job; her slow bleeding-out of conviction is a marvelously controlled and subtle performance. Others (Wagner Moura) gets a sick thrill out of the danger. Still others (Stephen McKinley Henderson) are tired veterans of the business, while a young newbie (Cailee Spaeny) gets a shock to her system as she enters the fray. All of them are shaken and stretched, with their fragility drawn out to the movie’s sick, cold conclusion that’s as inevitable as its central dialectic: guns and cameras are both point and shoot. The power of a still image is juxtaposed with the moving image—weaponizing a grainy freeze frame silence in the flow of clinical digital filmmaking to feel the etching of history and the foreshortening of context in each stuck frame—as it creates a tension between its creation and the chaos that breeds it. We’re left with the empty pit-of-the-stomach worry, and the wonder at what’s more powerful than fragile people rushing into history with a gun and a camera shooting in tandem—revolution written with or driven by a photo op.

Crash of the Titans: GODZILLA X KONG: THE NEW EMPIRE

Each installment in the ongoing Hollywood Godzilla series is a little worse than the one before it. Ten years on, Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla looks all the better for its thundering portent and heavy sense of scale. He shoots with mystery and mass, letting the real terror of an enormous creature seep through each frame of its monster movie paces. Its direct sequel, Michael Dougherty’s Godzilla: King of the Monsters, is a little less realistic in its dimensions, but the overstuffed apocalyptic mood gives a fine pulp jolt to its escalating cast of kaiju overshadowing an efficient cast of scientists and soldiers. Both are about families caught in the wake of these creatures’ paths, which gives just enough emotionality to hang on the shattering potential of such a monster mash. That’s the main inspiration that keeps writer-director Adam Wingard’s contributions connected—aside from the set dressing and proper nouns that knit the cinematic universe together—to the character strengths of its predecessors. Though finding some sentimentally in King Kong expert Rebecca Hall adopting an adorable deaf Skull Island orphan (Kaylee Hottle), his Godzilla v. Kong was generally cartoony. It’s drifting toward the outsized and preposterous, but enough of a colorful smash-em-up to be diverting. Give me a giant ape and a giant lizard fighting a giant robot and fill it up with a neon sci-fi light show and I’m reasonably satisfied, I guess. 

Wingard leans into the dumb cartoon qualities even further for the new Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire. We’ve lost whatever felt even tangentially real or threatening in the earlier entries. Now it’s CG animation for long stretches as Kong meanders through the Hollow Earth fighting big wolves and munching on enormous worms, and Godzilla plays the burly kaiju bouncer for the world’s major cities, cliff jumping off Gibraltar or curling up in the Coliseum. Hall and Hottle return to wander down in search of a distress call from deeper into the Earth’s core—taking comic relief conspiracy theorist Brian Tyree Henry and swaggering veterinarian Dan Stevens for the ride. And then, once everyone’s assembled amid the special effects of a Hollow Earth within the Hollow Earth, a rumbling wrestling tag-team erupts when an evil big monkey riding an evil big lizard take on our eponymous monsters. It’s basically an effects reel staged with reverse shots of actors reacting. That the movie is essentially passable nonetheless says something about the enduring appeal of these beasties. When Kong picks up a Mini Kong and uses it as a club to smash other monster apes, there’s a certain lizard-brained appeal. Ditto the appearances of Godzilla collecting radioactive power-ups to fuel his big finale fight. But there’s no suspense or intrigue or awe—or any believable thin genre characterization to care about—left when it’s all pitched at the most extremely broad Saturday Morning level, with nothing to provide us but cartoons collapsing through skyscrapers.