Drawn In: ARCO and ZOOTOPIA 2

The new French animated film Arco is a time travel movie about a boy from the far future accidentally stranding himself in the slightly less far future. It’s done in a lovely hand-drawn style that’s clearly anime influenced, and with its slow pace, flying suits, kindly robots, bickering sorta-antagonists, and sweet child protagonists, it’s unmistakably a work of Studio Ghibli karaoke. I can’t blame director Ubo Bienvenu and his collaborators for copying from the best; who doesn’t love Ghibli? In practice, it means the characters have rounded expressions and subtle movements, we spend time watching water bubbling in a stream, wind in piles of leaves, attentive food prep and other subtleties quietly and matter-of-factly rendered in clean lines. The characters are adorable, and the main boy’s plight is rendered with some degree of both whimsy and emotion, sometimes blending the two. In the far future, people can time travel in multicolored flying suits, leaving rainbows behind them in the sky like Tron light cycles. One boy too young to explore like that sneaks out and ends up crashing with a girl centuries earlier. She has been left in the care of a nanny robot while her parents are away. She needs a friend, and the boy needs help finding the right materials to get back home. Together they form a fast bond that’s a sweet childlike tumble toward softly rendered suspense, building to a bittersweet ending that feels just right. Its simple, colorful images are finely layered and textured with colorful graphical style that carries along the low-key tone with some genuine feeling. However much a jumble of influences, it manages to hit the notes even if it’s borrowing the melodies. 

Speaking of familiar: Zootopia 2. If you, like me, had, in the aftermath of the disappointing Wish and Moana 2, started wondering if Disney Animation had lost its magic, here’s a temporary reprieve for those doubts. Like its predecessor, the sequel is a cleverly plotted mystery that plays like a hard-charging buddy-cop action-comedy. The cops just happen to be a bunny (Ginnifer Goodwin) and a fox (Jason Bateman) in a sprawling metropolis populated by anthropomorphized animals. The first was a broad allegory for racial profiling and unconscious bias as the mismatched heroes stumbled into the mayor’s plot to exploit prejudice to consolidate power. This one picks up with the duo thrust into another conspiracy that goes all the way to the top, this time with a crooked family of billionaires plotting to hide the true history of the city and their complicity with its past of pushing marginalized species out of their neighborhoods. They don’t want anything stopping their attempt to expand their real estate empire by doing it again. Sounds like it could be tough medicine or obvious messaging, but the screenplay wears that all pretty lightly, as grist for racing through different biomes and introducing new animal characters and revisiting some favorites from last time while uncovering the plot. The animation is bright and colorful and vivid, with the best in CG furs and water and scales, and broad cartoony expressions. There’s that weird charge of seeing, say, a bunny’s legs in yoga pants or a sloth driving a sports car (and how are its reflexes fast enough for that?), in a city that’s slightly more New York than Busytown in its construction. It’s a funhouse mirror version of our world, with abstracted political cartoon social commentary and pun-laden gags mixed in with the high-energy chases and danger just real enough for suspense and just slapstick enough to keep from scaring the kids too badly. But of course, none of it would work if it didn’t care so much for its characters, and want to see them succeed. Like the original, it balances it all and makes it easy, breezy entertainment. 

Sinners: WAKE UP DEAD MAN

Rian Johnson’s third Benoit Blanc mystery, Wake Up Dead Man, is the least immediately appealing. Compared to the autumnal glow of Knives Out or the summery vibes of Glass Onion, with their pleasing puzzle-box structures to match, this new movie is darker, meaner, scarier, and heavier. It’s set largely in a rural Catholic Church in the middle of the woods during a muddy spring trending toward dark and stormy nights of weather and of the soul. That’ll also guarantee it’ll be the one that simpatico audience members will forever be saying, “you know which one’s actually the best?” I won’t be one of them, but I’ll know where they’re coming from. Here’s where the clever froth of the first two gets weightier, losing none of the sharp social satire while gaining a theological dimension. Its honest wrestling with faith and duty and denial of surface pleasures will resonate with people who tire of cozy mysteries and need that dark chocolate genre packaging of the Gothic. There’s a scene where Blanc asserts his doubts as the clouds blot out the sun, and as his innocent interlocutor loses himself in a spiritual rebuttal the sun returns full force through the stained-glass window behind him. Johnson’s playing in the light and dark more overtly here. The movie’s clearly got souls, not just lives, on the line in yet another expertly organized murder mystery plot. 

The small congregation’s charismatic right-wing Monsignor (Josh Brolin) has been murdered in a seemingly impossible way, and the new, more progressive, priest (Josh O’Connor) finds himself tagging along with Blanc (Daniel Craig) as he tries to untangle the suspects. We have a tense lawyer (Kerry Washington), a drunk doctor (Jeremy Renner), a wannabe influencer (Daryl McCormack), a wheelchair-bound cellist (Cailee Spaeny), a washed up sci-fi novelist (Andrew Scott), a recovering alcoholic groundskeeper (Thomas Haden Church) and a scarily strict devout old woman (Glenn Close). The sort of broken people drawn to such a cultish devotion to a cruel man of the cloth are all likely culprits. And the religiosity of the setting matching the apparent irreconcilable facts of the case lend toward much talk of potential supernatural solutions. The movie’s verging on horror at times, and even though it doesn’t tip over into total fantasy, this picture has the series’ gnarliest and creepiest sights. The ensemble of suspects aren’t as finely drawn, and get none of the snappy punchlines we’ve come to expect from this series. They’re all guilty as sin of something, though almost none are guilty of murder. And the intensity of their beliefs means they’re all sweating it out under the glare of their crooked faiths. The tangle of violence and betrayal is weightier than ever. Even Blanc is subdued in the face of it, though his honeyed southern accent remains a delight. Johnson’s clearly finding something dark and searching in our current cultural moment and gets to use the elements of such a dependable genre’s scaffolding to express them. 

A Grief Observed: HAMNET

A problem with every movie about Shakespeare’s life is that it constantly invites comparison to Shakespeare's works. Shrugging off a middling movie by saying “well, what’d you expect, it’s not Shakespeare” is a lot harder when the Bard is actually on screen. Add to that the known unknowns of his life, and any attempt at dramatizing it becomes a tantalizing case study in speculation at best. If I could wish any author’s autobiography into existence, it’d be his. Not only would it clear up a lot of conspiratorial wishful thinking surrounding him, it’d be, one hopes, further examples of his richness of language and ear for dramatic depth of character. But, in its absence, I suppose it’s only fair that other writers take a crack at getting in his head. He certainly used historical figures for his own dramatic flourishes and poetic license, so why not? In the case of Hamnet, we focus in on Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) through the birth of his children with Anne (Jessie Buckley) and then skip ahead to the death of one of their children in the plague. It’s the exact mirror image of Shakespeare in Love. (Call it Shakespeare in Grief.) Where that film is clever fanciful froth, this is quiet speculative sorrow. It is subtle to the point of emptiness at times, but builds to a considerable tearful conclusion. 

It keeps his career largely off screen until a climactic abridged and reduced Hamlet. Instead the focus is on the wind through the trees and murmuring in dimly lit rooms and the spoken and unspoken emotional transactions of life in a family. Sometimes they trade kisses and care; other times they cry in intense close up. It’s a movie about child death, after all. It’s not difficult to make that hit hard. Other times the period details of muddy boots and inky parchment squish or scritch scratch away on the margins like a casual reenactment serving as a replacement for memorable scenes. It’s a movie that’s all mood. Because it's a largely quiet, domestic movie, it earns its interest in grace notes and fleeting moments. But there’s also a sense that it’s gliding along the surface, trading off its actors’ fine interiority and patience instead of digging in and making meatier scenes beyond sniffling and staring and murmuring. Writer-director Chloé Zhao is usually pretty good at the surface details like that, attentive to the quality of light across a landscape or the flicker of expressions across an actor’s face. Given the right words, her aesthetic sparkles to life. Her Nomadland’s best scene is an extemporaneous recitation of a Shakespearean sonnet bringing strangers closer. It matches the transcendence of the natural world with the uplift of art. 

Here, co-writing with Maggie O’Farrell adapting her novel of the same name, the moment where the movie goes from interesting and small and cold to something grander and moving, is in that final performance, where we see his deep loss transmuted into theatrical tragedy. It’s a sequence teetering on the edge of preposterous as it begins, but suddenly we fall into the rhythms of Hamlet on stage. With Noah Jupe playing an actor playing the lead, its power draws an audience out of itself into a pure communion of catharsis between actor and crowd. It’s a deeply powerful moment that also pulls the movie out of itself and into something greater than everything before. The problem of every film about making a real work of great art is if it could possibly add meaningfully upon the experience of the art itself. (The dreary Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere struggled mightily there just a month ago.) And not many movies would survive direct compassion to Hamlet. Indeed, not even many Hamlet adaptations do. And nor does Hamnet. But Zhao’s film somehow manages to pull off a finale so moving it dilutes any complaints the rest of the movie accumulates. It’s a movie merely playacting something painfully real, but somehow gets realer when it’s about literal play acting. 

Over and Out: WICKED: FOR GOOD

Now movie audiences will have to confront the question that Broadway audiences have known for 20 years: how can Wicked have an Act 1 so solid, and an Act 2 so weak? It’s especially stark when the Acts have been split into individual movies separated by a year. That gave us time to appreciate the first half all the more. Introducing two big charismatic performances with Cynthia Erivo’s green-hued Elphaba and Ariana Grande’s tickled-pink Glidna allowed us to enjoy their antagonism slowly softening into friendship only to end in betrayal in one coherent story. They’re fully realized fantasy creations in an Oz that’s part Baum, part MGM, and all modern big-budget spectacle with sprawling CG landscapes behind backlots and impressively large sets in which catchy numbers spill out around every corner of the world-building. Sure, it ends in a cliffhanger, but after two hours of terrific musical theater sequences and fantasy gobbledegook, “Defying Gravity” has such incredible narrative, emotional, and melodic uplift that it makes the story so satisfying in and of itself that it’s no wonder the Broadway show had a problem of people leaving at the Intermission assuming that was the finale. (They presumably dance up the aisles with visions of Dorothy filling in the Act 2 in their minds.) Maybe that’s how it should be. 

With Wicked: For Good, the filmmaking craft remains consistent. Director Jon M. Chu has the same cast in the same colorful, backlit sets, draped in the same dazzling Paul Tazewell costumes and strutting along to the same score. It’s still a grand spectacle, but it loses its spark in a jumble of character decisions and reversals that never quite make sense or add up to a logical emotional through line. By the time our leads belt out their big climactic duet, in which they claim because they knew each other they’ve been “changed for the better,” I found myself wondering how, exactly, they’ve been changed, and if it’s really for the good. Why give Elphaba, now an anti-wizard activist, a big early number in which she encourages Ozian dissidents to stay in Oz and fight the authoritarian Emerald City—there’s no place like home, after all—if she’ll end up exiling herself in the end? Why introduce a more compassionate Glinda, now a propaganda tool of the wizard, after a movie’s worth of push-and-pull between her best and worst moral choices if she’ll end up lying again in the end—albeit we’re supposed to approve of it being For Good. The story is loaded with dramatic reversals and decisions made just to rearrange characters and twist them into what the plot requires for any given moment. It even loses interest a few key supporting players along the way, though how they’re feeling about the climax would seemingly be of interest. The first Wicked film worked so well in expanding everything that worked about Act 1 on stage. This sequel dutifully doubles down on everything that’s so out of shape about Act 2. 

A big part of the problem of all these twists and contradictions is that the plotting relies on the audience’s knowledge of The Wizard of Oz to fill in gaps of its own storytelling. Yet this is the case while having, in the process, changed so many of the classic characters and their dynamics that no existing version of The Wizard of Oz could function as we know it. Better to forge its own revisionist path down that yellow brick road, perhaps, than try to dance between and have it both ways. But although the results feel so sloppy, and have surprisingly little in the way of musical delights, I do appreciate the attempt to make a second act that critiques and complicates rather than just repeat. There’s some real emotional tension between the characters here, though it’s regularly undercut by adding up to such an incomplete picture. In the moments when it’s most alive, like numbers with Jeff Goldblum’s Wizard explaining his con man skills, or a romantic duet a wicked witch has with Jonathan Bailey’s Prince that slowly levitates, it’s emerging out of something rooted in the character conflicts established. Even the swooping fight scenes and stirring sentimentality tend to work because we care about these witches. Those performances are still comfortable and charismatic, playing to the rafters with every glance. Because of that grounding, and the effects swirling around them, watching the production unfold I had the sense of a grand spectacle almost working. No one scene is particularly bad, but the cumulative effect of its choices is to thrash these characters about just to arrive at unsatisfying, and pretty dysfunctional final moments. It fizzles right when it should explode. At least we’ll always have Part 1. 

State of the Arts: NOUVELLE VAGUE and BLUE MOON

It’s rare to know in the moment that you’re in the middle of an inflection point in the history of an art form. It usually just looks like creative people hanging around. How nice, then, that two new movies about such moments come to us from Richard Linklater. In movies as diverse as Slacker and Dazed and Confused and School of Rock and Boyhood he’s proven himself one of our finest observers of the dynamics of a hangout. It comes in handy in Nouvelle Vague, a movie about the 1959 making of Jean-Luc Godard’s classic debut feature Breathless, an early landmark in the French New Wave cinema of the mid-20th century. That movie is characterized by a breezy spontaneity, with a blend of pop genre shorthand with a man on the run from the law, and formal and narrative innovations like jump cuts and improvisatory location shooting. So it’s a little ironic that Linklater puts a lot of period piece effort into meticulously bringing such looseness to specific recreated life. But the movie is a warm love letter to this style and mode of filmmaking, shooting in textured black and white photography in a squared-off aspect ratio, with fuzzy French language tracks and English subtitles burned into the print in that soft analogue style. 

The story itself, gently draped over the prep, filming, and post-production of the film in question, gives us a Godard (Guillaume Marbeck) who spouts off theories of filmmaking, almost grinning from behind his sunglasses and puffs of cigarette smoke, drawing creative collaborators toward him with a oddly inscrutable charisma while befuddling the more buttoned-up financiers. He’s surrounded by a crew of fellow film critics turned filmmakers, and Linklater affectionately stuffs the frame and fills sequences with actors inhabiting all manner of bold named French film notables of the time. (Zoey Deutch and Aubry Dullin do an especially uncanny Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo.) The cast of characters universally speak in epigrammatic aphorisms, often featuring famous quotes that’ll be recognizable to anyone who has read the many volumes documenting this moment in cinema history. But this isn’t a closed-off picture for the die hards only. It has too much movie love, and a willingness to wave in newcomers and old pros alike to explore this period more. The fact that we know how this whole story turns out somehow doesn’t spoil the fun of seeing it play out. 

For all the focus on his writerly details as a screenwriter, Linklater is underrated for his director’s ability to shift his form to fit the subject. As such, it’s a continual unfolding delight to see Blue Moon feel as comfortably theatrical as Nouvelle Vague is specifically filmic. It feels effervescently like a play, even as its camera and editing takes us cleanly and cinematically through its confined space. It’s a form fitting for a movie about Broadway songwriter Lorenz Hart set entirely on Oklahoma!’s opening night in 1943. Hart was famously creatively paired with Richard Rodgers, who left him behind to work on this Okie musical with Oscar Hammerstein II. What Hart suspects this night, and which we know from the weight of history, is that Lorenz and Hart are old news, while Rodgers and Hammerstein were about to be the great new thing. The former made the kind of light, clever, cheeky patter that lent an air of elegance and mid-Atlantic sophistication to the early 20th century stage. The latter would make the big, sturdy, sweeping spectacle musicals of the mid-century. Linklater’s movie is perched perfectly on this pivot point, and has just the right person from which to view it. This is a story of the muse (perhaps literally, in the form of an ambitious co-ed played by Margaret Qualley) leaving one man, and finding companionship with another, told from the perspective of the man slowly feeling his opportunities slipping away.

Ethan Hawke plays Lorenz in a nearly nonstop monologue at the hotel bar waiting for the after party. He only pauses to take in fleeting dialogue in exchanges with characters who float in and out of his pity party. He’s flirtatious, he’s coy, he’s confessional, he’s vulgar and jealous and an overflowing font of allusions and amusements. He’s living his life like it’s a stage for soliloquizing, and those he interacts with are mere supporting parts for him to practice witticisms upon at best, mere audience for his genius at worst. And yet all this razzle-dazzle verbal dexterity is clearly compensating for deeply felt inadequacies (he's literally smaller in the frame than anyone) and other psychological ambiguities. The entrance of his former writing partner (Andrew Scott) sheds new light on their working relationship, its tensions and creativity, and we watch as one man’s neediness and the other’s kindness push and pull, two orbits briefly intersecting one last time as they’re about to diverge. Here’s the world as a stage where every man must play a part, and his a sad one. But the movie is not a mere sad-clown slice-of-biopic-life. It’s an insightful, melancholic character study buoyed along with a diegetic old school show tunes piano score and a clever, intelligent screenplay, the kind that’s studded with great punchlines that never quite puncture the melancholic core. We know that in a few months he’ll be dead and Rodgers will be better than ever. In some way, he suspects it, too. 

Dystopian Kings: THE LONG WALK and THE RUNNING MAN

When Stephen King first published The Long Walk and The Running Man in 1979 and 1982, respectively, they played as broad, heightened extrapolations of contemporary ills through classically satirical sci-fi pessimism. They’re stories about a callous American culture that sells its youth and its underclasses false hopes and delivers only violence. They’re stories about a society desensitized to cruelty and allergic to sincerity. They’re stories about a series of dead ends. It’s perhaps a sign of our increasingly dystopian present that as these stories return to us on the big screen in 2025 they seem a little less far-fetched. The movies preserve King’s sense of finely sliced pulp, with their origins in his shorter, more energetically nasty works under the pen name Richard Bachman. But they also cannily update their sense of doom. The former leans toward futility and despair. The latter gets a charge out of revolutionary violence. Both end up with endings that try to have it every which way, but they are totally earnest about the difficulty of exiting a social structure when every system is calibrated to keep you down. 

The Long Walk is the drearier of the two. It’s set in a desolated American landscape that looks grey and brown and dingy as far as the eye can see. A group of young men are called up to participate in the eponymous game. It’s a yearly contest done for propagandistic purposes. A grizzled military man (Mark Hamill) who carries about him a parody of tough masculinity barks out the rules. They’ll walk at a 3 mile per hour pace across the country. The last person walking wins. The others will die, shot in the head for the crime of pausing, or slowing, and giving up. If the idea of an annual death march sounds like a pulp fiction extrapolation of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” or an embryonic form of the themes that’d later come into fuller flower in Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games, you’re on the right track. That this film comes from director Francis Lawrence, best known for adapting Collins’ series in several excellent dystopian thrillers, completes the comparison. This movie has none of that franchise’s impulses toward the epic or to revolution. Instead it’s a deliberate trudge, as an ensemble of young male actors (with such likable leads as Cooper Hoffman and David Jonsson, looking for all the world like a pair of sad-eyed, round-faced puppies) is ruthlessly winnowed down to a tragic final few. Because they’ve come to share some camaraderie with each other, it’s all the more gripping and gutting when they, and we, know all but one will lie dead in the street before the credits roll. It’s a look at the dark heart of a society’s anesthetizing fear of violence. In its original context it’s a clear Vietnam War allegory. Now it hooks into free-floating anxieties about state power and our willingness to give ourselves up into the gears of the machine in fleeting hope for a better life. It’s a bloody bummer. 

More vibrant pop art action thrills are to be found in Edgar Wright’s take on The Running Man. Even the added participle in the title ought to signal the speed it has over the Walk. This one finds a bustling, glowingly dirty futuristic America that’s lost the fight against oligarchic takeover. Here the government and media conglomerates are basically joined in one corporate state. A permanent underclass looks toward exploitative game shows as the only way out, whether as mind-numbing entertainment or as a shot at fluke riches. The same basic premise made for a thuddingly obvious Schwarzenegger picture in the 80s. This new picture finds Glen Powell’s charms as a sly lunk giving the proceedings a more empathetic and energetic tone, a lightness of touch despite its grinning manipulations and toothsome media satire. He plays a desperate unemployed father with a sick child. Against his wife’s wishes, he tries out to be a contestant on any show and ends up sorted into The Running Man, a contest in which he must survive thirty days on the run from the show’s paramilitary hunters and the general public, too. Snarling producer Josh Brolin and slimy host Colman Domingo hype up the propaganda, hoping to get the audience at home hating Powell by smearing him as a criminal. But his runaway tour of action sequences through the backstreets and backwoods of New England finds eccentric helpers every step of the way, from a black market tech guy (William H. Macy) to a conspiracy theorist (Michael Cera) to an extremely reluctant hostage (Emilia Jones). The have-nots love to assist him in running; it’s the snitching haves he needs to watch out for. Wright doesn’t overwhelm the movie with his usual rhythmic editing and snappy transitions, nor does he push the pedal to the metal on his verbal cleverness or pounding pop soundtracks, a la his Shaun of the Dead or Baby Driver. Instead, that’s just a light pulse of personality in a totally proficient piece of genre craftsmanship that’s a little zippier and brainer than it needs to be, popping with color and movement and a cheeky sense of punk revolt. It doesn’t quite know how to get out of its crass, exploitative cultural mess of social issues with a satisfactory conclusion, but then again, we don’t either. 

After the Hunt: PREDATOR: BADLANDS

Since 1987 we’ve had six and three-fourths Predator movies about the eponymous alien big game hunter coming to Earth and hunting, and one and one-fourth Predator movies about humans going to another planet and getting hunted. The nice thing about Predator: Badlands is that, despite being the ninth movie to feature the hulking, dreadlocked, toothy aliens, it finds something new to do. This time it stars the predator. He’s a runt hoping to prove himself, so he blasts off to the most dangerous planet in the galaxy with the goal of bringing back the head of a hitherto unbeatable beast. This means that most of the movie we’re listening to a grunting alien language and watching a performance buried under makeup and CGI augmentation running through special effects. The fun thing is that it works. 

Writer-director Dan Trachtenberg is here making his third in the franchise, which makes him the first filmmaker to do so much with the material. Turns out he’s a great steward for this series. His first attempt, 2022’s straight-to-streaming Prey, was a period piece with the alien fighting a tribe of indigenous Americans. That had a great concept and modest charms. His second, another Hulu original, was this summer’s Predator: Killer of Killers, a vibrant splash-panel animated triptych that put the hunters up against first vikings, then ninjas and samurai, and then World War II fighter planes. That movie’s a ton of stylish action fun, using its animated form to draw creative skills and kills that never wear out their welcome. It’s clear that Trachtenberg is enjoying an impulse to unleash a fan’s imagination. His every effort with the Predators stems from the simple questions: who haven’t they fought before, and what would be cool to see. It’s a playground conversation—who’d win in a fight?—done on a pleasing, modest studio budget. 

Badlands ends up Trachtenberg’s best Predator movie yet because of its high-gloss, yet economical, use of convincing effects and an underdog story so bone-deep basic that it’s hard not to root for the main character, toothy uncommunicativeness and all. It helps that the performance is actually charismatic and sympathetic under all the fakery. (One gets the sense that for Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi, the relatively unknown 24-year-old New Zealander actor in the role, this would have big star-making potential if anyone could recognize him.) It also helps that the warrior alien is teamed up with a chatty robotic woman (Elle Fanning), who just so happens to have been torn in half and therefore carted around by our lead for information in her head crucial to this particular planet’s dangers . This gives the movie a relatively sweet and uncomplicated dynamic, and a straight line from setups to payoffs, that gives the movie a modest matinee charge. It’s has all the lasers and creatures and ships and decapitations you’d want from a Predator movie, with the right balance of familiarity to freshness to make it appealing once more.

Rebirth: FRANKENSTEIN

It’s no surprise that Guillermo del Toro would direct an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s classic novel Frankenstein. He’s a writer-director obsessed with Gothic fiction and monster movies and fantastical consequences and mythic metaphors and doomed Romanticism and sympathy for the creature. That’s animated his entire filmography so far, from creeping ghosts (Crimson Peak) to Mexican vampires (Cronos) and Spanish legends (Pan’s Labyrinth) to post-World War II American fish-men (The Shape of Water) and creature commandos (Hellboy). He’s always asking: who’s the real monster here? So by the time he’s gotten around to actually doing the real deal story, it feels a little played out. He’s been here before. It doesn’t help that the story of Victor Frankenstein assembling a new creature out of cadaver parts, and then fleeing from accountability for its development or responsibility for his actions, is itself so familiar. It gives the whole production a feeling of dustily reiterating what we’ve already seen countless times over. 

What’s surprising, however, is that Shelley’s original work has lost none of its power through that cultural ubiquity. To read the 19th-century novel itself in the year 2025, even if you’ve read it before, is to encounter with a shock its morbid earnestness and its deeply embedded wrestling with philosophical implications. What does it mean to be alive? What does it mean to be a person? How does one learn? To what does one owe the people in our lives, or the people one creates? Tough, tangled, painfully emotional questions are the stuff of Shelley’s vision, so much more than the cartoon caricature we’ve seen it become in the intervening centuries. Perhaps it is because of that softening that the hard edges of the original still retain the capacity to provoke and unsettle. Perhaps it is also what has maddeningly lead several film critics to confidently, and erroneously, state that Del Toro has been “faithful to the book” despite its clear, and frequent, divergences from it. He nonetheless feels the fate of the monster deeply, and is eager to situate it in his typically lush visual style that drips with affection for his horror inspirations. His movie is every bit as idiosyncratic and driven by passion as his other works. 

At least it’s an adaptation where everyone is on the same page. His cast leans into arch genre exaggerations, shouting exposition as they pace through enormous sets and around opulently designed grotesqueries. Oscar Isaac plays Victor with wild eyes alight with reckless fervor and, in the arctic frame story, fearful regret. Mia Goth does pale, double duty as his mother and an empathetic young woman. Christoph Waltz chomps up some scenes as a broad composite character. But the real star of the show is, as it should be, the creature. Jacob Elordi gives a physical performance that plays off his movement skills and his stretched, lanky physique for maximum melancholy. Del Toro has twisted around the story to give him more interplay with his creator in his halting, post-birth moments, which serves to minimize some of the tension later when its clear everyone involved knows what’s up. No mystery what’s lurking about here. 

It’s part of Del Toro’s literal-minded adaptation, which somehow misses the haunted poetry lurking in the text. That’s especially odd, since he’s hit that tone in prior pictures. Maybe it’s just too explicitly the thing to which his other works allude. This film is constantly larded up with swooping camera movements over expansive fakery, characters plunging off enormous heights and slipping in muck and staring slack-jawed at special effects. No wonder its best moments are the smallest and quietest: a boy looking at a coffin, a monster looking at a blind man, a scientific demonstration with a puppet prototype creature sparking to life. I wish I liked the whole movie as much as I resonated with those moments. Besides, Del Toro is at this point such a jolly appreciator of cinema and ambassador for the art that to say one doesn’t like his new movie feels akin to kicking a puppy. We’re better for having him, even if this effort has, ironically, better parts than a whole.

Mother and Child: IF I HAD LEGS I'D KICK YOU

As the end credits rolled, a young woman down the row from me turned to her date and said: I thought this was a comedy. And so it is, but If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is a thoroughly walloping one of emotional intensity. It has laughs, but they’re of the choking, scoffing, incredulous kind as a woman in crisis sees life pile on yet more stress at every opportunity. It’s a harrowing picture about how sometimes it feels like life won’t stop kicking you while you’re down. So no one showing up for lightness will get that expectation satisfied. Writer-director Mary Bronstein crafts a movie with the bitter absurdities of struggle, and keeps a tight focus on her main character. Her every silent micro-expression practically shouts through widescreen closeups and framing with shallow focus that hold her captive for our attention, our empathy, and our scrutiny. She’s played by Rose Byrne in a performance of exhaustion and honesty that sometimes feels physically painful to watch. It’s that good. She’s playing a middle-aged mother in the worst week of her life so far. Her husband (Christian Slater) is away for work for the next two months. Their young daughter has a feeding tube for a mysterious illness, and as such is in and out of a treatment center every day. And then the ceiling of their apartment caves in, leaving an eerie, cavernous hole over her bed. Mother and child are forced to live at a seedy motel down the street. And she still has to manage treatments, get to work, get to therapy sessions, contact contractors, and juggle her growing alcoholism with the role of caretaker. It’s a rolling snowball of one thing after another, each mistake feeding the next until she’s drowning in anxiety, depression, and despair. 

The movie has such literally sensational commitment to its central focus on her mental state. It keeps the camera so close to her face that it often ignores other characters in the scene. Most evocatively, the daughter is a largely unseen voice, her presence just barely off screen. She’s a stress and a focus as looming danger or endangered figure. She’s omnipresent, dominating her mother’s worries while barely interrupting as a psychic presence the woman’s downward, inward spiral. Same, the husband, who is a voice over the phone. A patiently exasperated therapist (Conan O’Brien in an impressive dramatic turn) and a doctor (Bronstein herself) get some screen time, as do various irritating or menacing figures who add to her stress. You get the sense that she might not always be seeing others clearly, and wonder if her perspective is starting to warp ours. Even provisionally nice characters, like A$AP Rocky as a low-key charming neighbor at the hotel, are clearly only glimpsed through interactions with her. And then we keep returning to moody flashbacks half-seen with muffled sound, and ominous shots of machines pumping intravenous nutrition or gaping black holes on ceilings. It’s an obvious symbol of the darkness opening up inside this poor woman, whose near constant heightened state takes responses to every inconvenience, every impoliteness, every criticism straight out of control. Even the emergencies only tighten and heighten her already vulnerable state. Because the movie is so tightly filmed and precisely performed, it has so many emotional peaks and valleys while crescendoing to electric exhaustion. It never becomes a mere wallow in misery. It’s a movie that’s profoundly human, and humanely sensitive. 

Bronstein got her start in film associated with the so-called mumblecore filmmakers. Interesting to note that, twenty years on, the most prominent currently working veterans of that indie movement turned out to be formalists. Their cheap early efforts were often recognizable by their ugly consumer-grade digital aesthetic, slapdash blocking, and, yes, mumbled improvisation passing for dialogue. But now see Greta Gerwig’s Little Women or Barbie or Josephine Decker’s Shirley or The Sky is Everywhere and you see great interest in form through beautifully constructed works with intentional choices of style and mood that are some of the glossiest and handsomest—and most literate!—studio works out there these days. Amy Taubin’s infamous (to me, anyway) 2007 Film Comment takedown of the mumblecore style said it “never was more than a flurry of festival hype and blogosphere branding.” Probably so. But thankfully the best talents incubated there have lasted to give us such memorable and vivid cinematic expression. With this new feature, Bronstein has made a movie so detailed in style and with deep feeling and specificity to match, that the power of the experience is impossible to ignore, or to forget. 

Hive Mind: BUGONIA

A continuing delight of contemporary cinema is the Emma Stone collaboration with art house auteur Yorgos Lanthimos. Who’d have thought that her blend of screwball feistiness and laconic confidence would fit so perfectly in his dark deadpan extremity. And such variety! There was the snappy, fish-eyed period piece The Favourite, the explicit warped feminist Frankenstein riff Poor Things, and the bleakly wacky triptych Kinds of Kindness. In each, she pushes and pulls her physicality and psychological acuity with an intoxicating freedom, loose-limbed fearlessness launching through scenes both clever and exposing. They’ve re-teamed for the fourth time with Bugonia, and it’s the least of these. It’s no less well-photographed, rigorously sound designed, or precisely calibrated with discomfiting interpersonal dynamics. But the plot’s contortions, inspired by the 2003 South Korean film Save the Green Planet, feel strangely stale and like an unusually disappointing dead end despite a live-wire contemporaneous flavor. Stone plays a calculated pharmaceutical CEO who is kidnapped by a desperately conspiratorial beekeeper (Jesse Plemons) convinced that she’s an alien in disguise. The bulk of the film concerns their mind games. He’s trying to get her to record a message for her mothership, demanding to be taken to her leader. He knows he's right because he's "done his own research." She’s trying to get in his head and talk him into letting her go. She never loses her sense of high status, even when her hair is shaved and she's shackled in a basement. It’s a tense standoff going nowhere fast. Screenwriter Will Tracy, of the similarly hollow The Menu, gets little deeper than the surface of the concept working despite all the right elements for something better buzzing around. 

It makes for a movie that’s largely a tense back and forth that’s also surprisingly static, going over the same points at progressively louder volumes. She’s so cruel and cutting, even in early scenes in which she’s a transparent, sanctimonious manipulator of a boss, and he’s so distressingly unhinged that we don’t get a good sense of where we stand. The movie is deliberately keeping us off balance, but it plays off our uncertainties with only easy points. We don’t much like the wealthy’s disregard for the common folk, but we also don’t want to see an innocent woman brutalized. We don’t much want a delusional man’s crackpot theories to be proven correct, but we also don’t want to see a grieving, mentally ill man taken advantage of, especially since he’s gotten his cousin (Aidan Delbis) wrapped up in this predicament, too. It’s a seemly intractable bit of unpleasantness surrounded by further characters who are either intensely vulnerable, like a comatose mother (Alicia Silverstone), or deeply disturbing, like a molester who’s now the town cop (Stavros Halkias). What could be bracingly misanthropic instead reads as empty provocation. It all adds up to a pretty grim straight line to a cosmic dark joke of a finale, and that’s hard to take. Where other Lanthimos movies are symphonies of bad feeling, this one’s pretty drearily one-note, despite his actors willing to go off on flights of fanatic nuance. He’s better than this. It takes a lot of talent to make a movie so well-made feel this much of a shrug in the end.