Reality Bytes: M3GAN 2.0 and THE NAKED GUN

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

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

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

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

We Wear the Mask: EDDINGTON

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

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

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

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

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

Par for the Course: HAPPY GILMORE 2

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

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

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

They Slay: KPOP DEMON HUNTERS

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

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

Family Business: THE PHOENICIAN SCHEME

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

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

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

Begin Again: SUPERMAN andFANTASTIC FOUR: FIRST STEPS

With Superman, writer-director James Gunn tries restarting the DC cinematic universe with the third attempt at this original hero in the last twenty years. To do so, he reimagines a colorful world with several superhero plot lines already in progress. He figures audiences can get up to speed without belaboring origin stories all over again. So here we are, three years into Superman’s career as a hero. David Corenswet brings the right golly-gee jawline to the upright iconography of the hero and aw-shucks humility of his bespectacled Clark Kent disguise. He’s already entangled in a romance with newspaper colleague Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) and embroiled in a one-sided rivalry with billionaire Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult). He has a friendly-but-frosty relationship with some other heroes knocking about his corner of the universe: Green Lantern (Nathan Fillion), Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced), and Mr. Terrific (Edi Gathegi). There are robots and giant monsters and portals to parallel universes and cameos form upcoming spinoffs an lots of glowing gadgets and opportunities for vivid, cartoony, splash-panel spectacle. There’s even lots for Krypto the super-dog to fetch. It’s all done in a coherent Gunn style, tonally more Suicide Squad than Guardians of the Galaxy, but recognizably in wide angles and blocky frames, overflowing with his smirking sincerity and hurly-burly earnest pop culture spirit. The result is a zippy, zany comic book eruption of excess. The movie’s chaotic and overstuffed, but with its heart in the right place. 

It really does care about the totally authentic goodness of its Superman, and lets the conflicts rise up organically out of a world that’s not built to take goodness seriously or even believe in it. There are puffed-up corporate interests and snarling foreign dictators and slimy pundits and rival do-gooders and they’re all jostling for the kind of authority and attention that Superman gets just by being himself. There’s something pure and lovely about that. Even as Gunn is less interested in the character as a symbol or an idea, he’s more interested him as a person who's a vision of how to do your best to be a force for good in a world falling apart at the seams. In doing so, he succeeds in making a big, bright movie full of likable characters, but as the scenes hustle by and supporting characters flit in and out and the movie hurtles through scenes of digital destruction, I found myself thinking it’s all a bit much. A little deadening digital destruction goes a long way. I’ll take a slow-mo shot where Superman swoops down and stops a little girl from being hit by debris over dozens of minutes of punching robots and super-beings every time. 

Coincidentally Marvel is also going back to one of its earliest comics for their latest superhero movie. It, too, is the third attempt in twenty years at getting these characters right, and eschews an origin story to just get down to business. Fantastic Four: First Steps starts four years into their heroism. They live in a retro-futurist alternate universe that looks like its just upstream from a Jetsons aesthetic. There the stretchy scientist Mr. Fantastic (Pedro Pascal), his sometimes-invisible wife (Vanessa Kirby), flammable brother-in-law (Joseph Quinn), and rock-monster best friend (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) are celebrities for defending the planet from all manner of comic book threats. There’s a charming rapid-fire montage that opens the movie blitzing us with glimpses of enough villains and action sequences to fill a few movies. Instead, it settles into a weirdly low-key family drama intercut with apocalyptic stakes, but keeps up the rapid-fire CliffsNotes style, racing through exposition and slaloming through plot lines and complications other movies might spend a whole run time developing. The whole movie has a feeling that it’s trying to make up for lost time. 

The period-piece sci-fi aesthetic gives the movie a fine visual look, and gives the midcentury comic book its best outing on the big screen. (Though arriving so late puts it deep in the shadow of the far superior Incredibles movies, which got to the look, and a Michael Giacchino score, better and first. ) The actors are all likable enough, and inhabit the familiar dilemmas of their characters without given the chance to really stretch out and play to those dramas. We do get to some extremely comic book sequences, though, including an invisible woman giving birth in zero-gravity while her brother shoots lasers at a space woman surfing behind their spaceship as it slingshots around a black hole. It caused me to reflect on the days when comic book movies were afraid to even use the costumes from the illustrations on screen. Now they’re doing spectacular sci-fi looniness without batting an eye. This one paradoxically goes all in on these enormous fantastical ideas while keeping the movie incredibly small. 

The ginormous intergalactic villain Galactus (Ralph Ineson’s voice rumbling the subwoofers) wants to gobble up Earth, sending the Silver Surfer (Julia Garner, cool with an eerie shimmery stillness and metallic intonation) to herald his impending arrival. We get a tossed-off reference to a Galactus cult forming, and crowds debating making a sacrifice to him, and the whole movie operates under this cloud of world-ending stakes. But the movie is content to leave that as the backdrop to the shot-reverse-shot predictability of its leads talking strategy and family dynamics. Solutions seem to arrive easily for our characters, side-characters are cut to glorified cameos, and, though the weight of the word hangs heavily on their shoulders, complications become backup plans in a blink. The movie’s in too big a hurry to get to the next thing, even by the end of the movie when it’s still just setting up promises that it’ll hopefully pay off next time. If there’s anything in the movie that most feels like typical Marvel Cinematic Universe routine, there it is. What’s here is just enough to count as a movie, and just charming enough to make these likable characters again, and just busy enough to feel like we’ve had the kind of blinking lights and flashy colors that make popcorn go down easy. But it is also relentlessly manipulative with an imperiled infant (and a shockingly shoddily composited one, at that) used as shorthand for us to care instead of investing in building depth for the plot’s complications and implications. Maybe the next movie can find a story instead of a collection of things that happen. 

Need for Speed: F1

F1 is an agreeably human-sized big-screen spectacle getting all of its excitement and thrill out of revving engines, squealing tires, and the intense effort of merging and passing on the race track. The movie is as sleek and aerodynamic as the F1 race cars zooming past. It’s director Joseph Kosinski’s first theatrical effort since Top Gun Maverick and, fittingly, extends his interest in professionalism, process, turning gears, and speed. It’s also a fine blending of a few reliable sports movie storylines: the underdog rookie, the old-man’s-still-got-it, and the unlikely comeback of the last place team. It knows that that’s the same blend that made Maverick such a crowd-pleaser, and invests in a high-gloss aesthetic that highlights the tensions and delights inherent in such high-velocity earnest expressions of such well-worn tropes. It helps that the plot lines are inhabited by charismatic Movie Stars who match the movie’s aims. The old timer is Brad Pitt at his most reliable craggy modern mode, with a sly charm and a grizzled grumpiness. He brings a magnetic screen presence to a fidgety confidence, and agitated stillness. His character used to be a hot shot F1 driver before flaming out 30 years hence. He’s called back to race at the behest of an old teammate turned tycoon, a slick and strutting Javier Bardem. The team he owns is the last place one, under threat of a hostile takeover unless he can run up some wins. The underestimated underdog is a firecracker up-and-comer, all hustle and muscle, a winning smile and a need to prove himself. It’s his first time called up to the league and he’s afraid he’s on the precipice of blowing his big break. That role goes to Damson Idris, in a similar spot in his career as a TV lead (John Singleton’s FX drama Snowfall) making his first jump to leading a blockbuster. Because the star personas fit so neatly into the characters, it adds a jolt to what could be shallow cliches as the old man and the young man arrive with competing energy and must learn to drive as a team if they hope to accomplish their goals. The supporting cast of pros, from charming engineer Kerry Condon to sleazy suit Tobias Menzies, bring a charming believability to stock roles. It’s lively and lived-in even when it's familiar. Kosinski’s too good at the rhythms of pros hard at work. Even his firefighter tragedy Only the Brave, mad scientist thriller Spiderhead, and programmers-in-the-program sequel Tron Legacy get that right. F1’s up there with his best efforts. It’s a movie of smooth and propulsive energy because of Kosinski’s camera’s steady gaze and the buttery editing between sleek shots. It has Top Gun velocity and thrill, minus the militarism, to the ways a car hurtles around a curve or glides aerodynamically past screaming crowds and gleaming skylines. And it gains its suspense and wit not just from spectacle, but from the endless work, good strategy, and fluke luck it takes to win. 

Spun Off: KARATE KID: LEGENDS and BALLERINA

If you’re looking for the second remake of an 80s movie, or a legacy sequel to an 80s series, or a sequel to a streaming show spun off from that series, or a sequel to a 2010 remake of an 80s movie that reveals that the original and the remake were in the same canon all along, well, here’s Karate Kid: Legends. It’s all of the above at once. It follows a new martial arts youngster (Ben Wang), a Chinese teen studying under Jackie Chan’s Mr. Han. (His prior student, Jaden Smith, goes unmentioned.) The boy moves with his mother (Ming-Na Wen) to New York City. There he promises his mom he won’t get into fighting. But would you believe there’s a pretty girl (Sadie Stanley) at his school whose ex-boyfriend (Aramis Knight) works out at a dojo and challenges him? Well, this is a Karate Kid movie after all. A fun wrinkle is that the girl’s father (Joshua Jackson) is an ex-boxer and the kid trains him, too, in hopes of winning a match and saving a struggling pizzeria. That’s an unexpected move. Still, the movie’s a five car pile-up at cliche station. Every plot thread proceeds exactly as you’d expect, right down to Chan, given only one brief, darkly lit action moment, calling in Ralph Macchio, fresh from the series finale of Cobra Kai, to assist in making this Karate Kid ready to fight in the Big Tournament against the bully. And the movie moves so quickly that it really can’t service all of the tropes it whips up. A tighter focus on the boy might’ve worked better, in that it could put more depth to the cardboard types it throws up around him. He’s likable enough, and the movie’s efforts to be a simple little teen drama are its best moments. There could be something there. Instead, we have a light, slight movie filmed with a minimum of fuss in bright, quick scenes that maneuver a handful of pleasant predictable elements into place for their foregone conclusions while managing the nods and winks toward the larger franchise.

If you’re looking for a spinoff that’s also a quasi-sequel set between two other sequels in an ongoing contemporary action series, well, here’s Ballerina. All of the marketing makes sure to append From the World of John Wick to the title in order to make sure we know what to expect. Set between Chapters 3 and 4 of that Keanu Reeves’ vengeful hitman franchise, this picture introduces Ana de Armas as an orphan trained by Anjelica Huston to become a ballerina assassin. Or is it assassin ballerina? Regardless, the movie is about how she wants revenge on the organization that murdered her father, and thus sends herself into elaborate action of the John Wick kind. What follows are the typical elaborate sequences in which bones are broken and heads are splattered in rhythmic and gymnastic ways. There’s some cleverness here. I especially liked a shootout in an icy neon club in which people go slipping and sliding. There’s also, later, a fun action sequence we discover in retrospect as she walks through the aftermath only to end up in the start of another as she exits the building. The whole thing is a bit deadening, though, in the way the lesser Wicks can be. All the endless shooting gallery stuff is repetitive past a certain point, and the gleeful gore becomes so routine as to be vaguely alienating and off-putting. The plotting here also stretches credulity with dopey twists and a setting in increasingly insular assassin circles until literally every character on screen is a force for violence. When everyone on screen is a killer, then the dangers of action spilling out over a small European mountain village lose their edge. Director Len Wiseman gives it all a phony sheen that does nothing to pump the stakes, and, though De Armas is a compelling presence, the movie never quite makes her stand out from any other anonymous killer. Worst is when she’s put up against Wick himself in scenes that remind us of better movies and which I frankly did not understand in the context of the others in the series. He paused between when to do what? Maybe you need to love the other entries more, or less, to get it. 

Seeing Double: LILO & STITCH andHOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON

Nearly 30 years ago, Gus Van Sant remade Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho nearly shot for shot and caught endless amounts of grief about it. Now the idea of slavishly remaking a popular movie is just par for the family film course. Van Sant’s Psycho doesn’t really work as its own movie, but as an experiment in auteurist personality it retains a weird power. Somehow copying another director’s work in most choices, save for a few frames here and there, ends up with a movie with an entirely different flavor. Where, then, is the soul of a film? Much to ponder. Not so much in this summer’s big live-action remakes of relatively recent animated classics, coincidentally from the same creatives. Animators Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois co-directed Disney’s Lilo & Stitch in 2002 and Dreamworks’ How to Train Your Dragon in 2010. You likely recall that the former is a sprightly, sentimental sci-fi comedy with a wild extraterrestrial critter finding a family with a troubled pair of sisters. The latter is a coming-of-age Viking fantasy in which a teen boy makes an unlikely pet out of a dragon. Both imaginative riffs on the boy-and-his-dog story have easy charm and likable characters and distinctive styles with Stitch drawn in light primary colors, soft rounded shapes and a Hawaiian palate, Dragon a Nordic action-figure ready CG pop-up picture book aesthetic. To transpose them to live action reduces the magic of the animation to humdrum effects, and their familiar story beats go from comfort watch repetition to sluggish recreations. They aren’t fully bad movies, but they are thoroughly boring and superfluous. I couldn’t watch even a single second of them without wishing I was watching the originals. 

The Lilo & Stitch remake is caught between two flawed approaches. When it directly copies shots and sequences from the original, it’s a charmless, lesser version. When it diverges, trimming characters or adding plot threads, it under-delivers or over-complicates. That leaves the whole thing a limp exercise in diminishment. The characters are still basically likable, with Stitch a more photo-real cartoon in the familiar design, and Sanders returns to voice his warbles, gargles, and growls. His interactions with the lead girls have some echoes of the original’s appeal. Little sister Lilo (Maia Kealoha) is a funny kid, and her older sister (Sydney Elizebeth Agudong) has a natural, low-key, sunny-but-stressed affect. Together they have a believable sibling chemistry that helps sell their strained and sentimental dynamic. And we almost believe they’d like this mutant creature. But it's all so dutiful in hitting the expected beats, and assumes investment more than earns it. The picture comes from director Dean Fleischer Camp, co-creator of the cute stop-motion Marcel the Shell with Shoes On. That character’s quiet eccentricities and small emotions bubbling up big might seem a fine match for a movie whose inspiration is full of cuddly edges with a big hit of emotionality. Instead the whole project settles for loud and obvious. It’s a pretty dull redo that knows the notes but not why they sang in the first place. 

For better and worse, it’s only karaoke found in How to Train Your Dragon’s live-action remake. Its commitment to recreating the look of the creatures and sets and costumes frames the movie as an extended deja vu experience. A good memory for the original makes it feel like you’ve already seen the storyboards or animatics; their frames are copied often exactly to make the new one. That it is Dean DeBlois himself in the director’s chair makes it all the more obvious we’re seeing a product of the exact same vision. At every moment, we’re looking at live actors dressed up to resemble their animated inspirations composited into effects sequences that are mostly the same as the original movie’s but with slightly more detailing on the computer animation. Everyone involved accepts the task and acquits themselves fine. It’s note for note the same. The original story is so solid, and the soaring score from John Powell is so stirring that it’d be hard to flub entirely. The plotting still works, the young actors are all cute and likable, and the adults (from Nick Frost and Peter Serafinowicz to Gerard Butler reprising his role as the Viking chief) bring enough warmth and gravitas. But unlike a rewatch of a classic, which has comforting familiarity and the benefit of deepening awareness, there’s a pervasive sense in a redo of tracing over fresh images for a stale paycheck. What’s so buoyant and imaginative in animation turns heavy and dreary when you have to see real people doing it. 

End Times:MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - THE FINAL RECKONING

There’s something genuinely apocalyptic in Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning. It sure does feel like an ending. The plot finds a rogue artificial intelligence wants to extinguish humanity. We’re told it has invaded the controls of half the nuclear weapons in the world and stokes geopolitical tensions with misinformation and deep fakes—all ways of hoping those missiles will drop one way or another. Though we really only learn that from blinking screens, since the tension is all on our ensemble’s faces. The score rumbles darkly, the camera tilts and looms, and every ridiculous turn of tension brings with it a somber sense that a fan favorite character will die. (Some do.) The previous entry, Dead Reckoning Part 1, had hugely enjoyable pleasures. It’s ebullient and energizing despite its weight and melancholy, a three-hour action extravaganza that, like all the best of this series, rockets through one sensational sequence after another. It was wholly satisfying and even complete in its way, though it leaves off on a literal cliffhanger. The first hour or so of The Final Reckoning is atypically tedious setting it all up to be a grand finale, regrouping and reorienting an audience it doesn’t have faith will remember, or even have seen, its immediate predecessor. We get several flashbacks to previous movies, some played multiple times, in this stretch, and endless exposition that shifts the characterization of a few characters and reassembles the team for a new last-ditch mission with those world-ending stakes. In this hour I found myself befuddled that it’s all gone so wrong.

Writer-director Christopher McQuarrie’s work in this series is usually so joyfully clockwork precise, a delightful dance of complications and stunts that escalate well and resolve brilliantly. This one’s tedious and ponderous at first, endlessly explanatory, and laboring under the weight of retcons and loose threads. For a series that’s often been dinged as difficult to follow—I wouldn’t agree, until maybe now—this one doubles down on inscrutability and referentiality. They’re the same impulses that hold back Deathly Hallows Part 2 and Endgame and Rise of Skywalker and most other attempts to coast a lumbering franchise narrative to something like a finale from being fully satisfying. Mission: Impossible has the good sense to have a mission, though. Once Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt is back in the field, the movie steadily picks up momentum and builds to a truly ecstatic sequence of cross-cutting between various team members pulling off their own impossibilities—hanging off planes, cutting wires on a bomb with a countdown clock, waiting to flip a switch in a split second. Because it builds up such a head of steam on its commitment to feeling like the world truly hangs in the balance, the release of the climax is satisfying enough. It hits that classic sense of teamwork and underdogs and long odds and preposterous close calls and real death-defying stunts. I'll miss it.

Family Style: FINAL DESTINATION BLOODLINES

The Final Destination movies are dances between predictability and randomness. Of course they’re about dying. The fun conceit is that a character’s vivid premonition of a mass casualty event causes them to prevent said event. Death then stalks the survivors to claim them with random acts of mayhem. Small details accumulate through insert shots—loose screws, leaky faucets, groaning chains—until a quick pile-up of calamities leads to a sudden accidental death. The movies are structured more or less identically, but the renewable novelty of these accidents keep them fresh. Blissfully free of tortured lore or a villain morphing into a mascot, here’s a horror franchise that has a consistent quality, a modest groove, and evergreen appeal. The sixth and latest entry, somehow the first in 14 years, is Final Destination Bloodlines. From the directors of Disney Channel's live-action Kim Possible remake, it somehow disappoints by hitting the right beats while going even bigger and broader. Where the franchise started with gore as delayed morbid punchlines, it’s now fully cartoony and excessive, over-the-top at any given chance. 

Part of it is the tone, a light and casual breeziness even when dread should be kicking in. A larger part of it is the style—an overly clean digital look with bland straight-to-streaming sitcom lighting and animated effects that make everything look totally artificial. The movie’s one new wrinkle is making the victims a family. It starts with grandma as a young woman preventing a collapsing sky-view restaurant. (The sequence has a fun rhythm but a totally phony look.) Decades later, the last of those survivors are finally dead and the curse descends the family tree, whacking branch after branch on the way down. This should escalate the tension, but it somehow evokes the flimsiest emotions of the already just-south-of-comic premise. They never feel like a convincing family, and by the second or third death their behaviors make little emotional sense. There are some good gags in the sequences—a tattoo parlor up in flames has some sly twisting humor, and a thwack from a soccer ball in the background of a shot is a fun jolt. But by the time, after nearly two hours, of the movie’s final deaths—a typical blackout gag in classic Final Destination style—the specifics of the variables are too outsized and the violence not too far removed from Frogger splats. This may be an official continuation of the series, and has some of the surface-level appeal of all of its superior predecessors. But the aesthetics make it feel like a knock-off. It left me craving the real deal.

Partially Assembled: THUNDERBOLTS*

If you’re looking for signs of life in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thunderbolts* has you covered. It gets back to what these Marvel movies did best in the first place: gathering a fun ensemble of character actors, turning them loose on eclectic comic book characters, and making the audience care about their plight as they banter and battle through a simple set of genre set-pieces. The larger world-building post Avengers Endgame remains a muddle, but this one goes a long way towards righting the ship and establishing a new normal—before it’s probably exploded in the next Avengers, but that’s next summer’s problem. With this kind of interconnected storytelling, this entry’s needs for the stage cleared for a straightforward plot even go a long way toward explaining why Captain America: Brave New World had to be about mopping up loose ends from The Incredible Hulk and Falcon & the Winter Soldier (plus the most conspicuous one from Eternals). It doesn’t explain why that movie had to do that badly, but, hey, you can’t win them all. And anyway, Thunderbolts* is pretty fun. It leans into our ambient cultural suspicions that the MCU has lost its way by centering characters who’ve lost theirs. Best is Florence Pugh’s Yelena, a sad black-ops freelancer who hasn’t had a passion for her spycraft since the death of her sister. She was a bright spot in Black Widow, but here her light is dimmed. So says her father (David Harbour), a once-super hero now down in the dumps as a limo driver. They’ll be pulled back into the action as the story kicks in. It’s about a ragtag group of misfit antiheroes targeted for elimination who, to the surprise of the villain, instead team up to take their collective antagonist down.

It’s a typical Marvel group project with snarky asides and sentimental heart, collecting supporting villains from other projects—Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan), Falcon’s U.S. Agent (Wyatt Russell), Ant-Man 2’s Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), Widow’s Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko)—and sets them through their paces of quick-cut, well-choreographed action. As proficiently and capably directed by Beef’s Jake Schreier, the characters bounce off each other well, physically and in prickly chemistry. The CG action doesn’t get too outsized, and accentuates the team dynamics without drowning them out in the third-act sci-fi threat that’s actually deployed cleverly. It helps that it is all done up in pop psychology, playing off metaphors for emotional repression and depression, with flashbacks in settings overtly labeled The Vault and The Void. It’s all rather neatly pulled off, light and suspenseful in the right proportions, with characters made improbably lovable and leave you wanting more. That used to be the MCU’s stock in trade. We’ll see if they can sustain that again, but this is a good (re)start.

Dark Night of the Soul: SINNERS

There’s a transcendent sequence in the middle of Ryan Coogler’s Sinners where the power of blues music blows apart the boundaries between space and time. A 1930s’ speakeasy concert starts with a few chords on an inherited guitar and then suddenly, with a fluid camera move, is layered with inspirations past and present until ghosts and premonitions share the same space as the roof is set ablaze. It’s as bold and earnest and symbolically rich a gesture as any sequence a Hollywood genre picture has ever given us. It’s also the highest high in a high-powered movie—a musical and muscular and confident piece of craft. Coogler gives us a historical dark fantasy Deep South vampire musical and plays fair with each component part as he makes them a coherent whole. It’s a film that flows with The Blues, a heartfelt yowl of pain so potent it summons the supernatural. It’s also a film that moves with an urgent craftsmanship that propels its images and ideas forward to populist crowd-pleasing effect. Coogler has long been one of our most promising young directors. His based-on-a-true-story Sundance debut Fruitvale Station is a warm, intimate real-life tragedy. His following franchise efforts somehow center that same intimacy, with Creed finding new nuanced character studies stepping out of the shadow of Stallone’s Rocky, and his Black Panthers tackling messy sociopolitical and moving interpersonal concerns within the slam-bang explosions of CG expected from such entries. So of course Sinners shares the recognizable thematic preoccupations of a Coogler picture. It’s about legacy, lineage, protecting one’s community with a tension between insularity and inspiration, fraught family dynamics, grief, manipulation, and the light of mortal goodness in the depths of immortal darkness. And it displays these themes in massive, iconographic shots in filmic IMAX frames—a deeply satisfying crackling warmth imbuing its story with the personal touch—set to a crunchy, textured, regional score from the reliably excellent, and surprising, Ludwig Goransson.

It’s a visually and sonically enveloping blockbuster, suggesting an enormous world beyond its margins while balancing the genuine emotionality of characters’ earnest communications with the outsized metaphors of supernatural invasion. The first half of the picture follows twin gangsters (Coogler’s regular star Michael B. Jordan in a neat dual role) returned to their rural hometown from a stint in the Chicago mob wars. They’ve escaped with enough money and booze to build their own juke joint on the outskirts of sharecropper’s cotton acres. We watch as they set out recruiting people who’ll help them with their grand opening—an innocent cousin (Miles Caton), an ex-wife (Wunmi Mosaku), a bouncer (Omar Miller), a drunk pianist (Delroy Lindo), bartenders (Li Jun Li and Yao), and some attractive partiers (Hailee Steinfeld and Jayme Lawson). Their business is intended to be a refuge from Jim Crow oppression and hard work in the fields. But their solidarity is threatened by the vampire (Jack O’Connell) who hears the call of their music and demands to be let in. Coogler frames the conflict in eerie slow building to spasms of violence. In its melancholic final moments, quiet after the loud catharsis, we see a young man, changed by his experiences of that fateful night, fully embodying a memorable observation of Bram Stoker's Dracula: "No man knows till he has suffered from the night how sweet and dear to his heart and eye the morning can be." The movie’s moral seriousness and storytelling seduction are clearly in conversation with others of its blood-sucking genre—Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark’s roving rural vampires and John Carpenter’s Vampires’ pseudo-mythic realism, and Robert Rodriguez’s From Dusk Till Dawn’s giddy fang reveals. But it’s all Coogler in its crackling synthesis that’s a hugely satisfying popcorn experience and an honest expression of his thematic and stylistic concerns. It uses the tropes well, and has a tense escalation from the logic of their clever deployment, cutting on actions, and cross-cutting with a teasing sense of build and release that matches its emotional skill. To see it is to see one of our best young filmmakers step fully into his power.

The Least of These: THE KING OF KINGS

The King of Kings is an unusual hodgepodge movie: a Sunday School-style Biblical literary adaptation twice removed made by a South Korean animator with Hollywood voice performances and released by Christian indie production company Angel Studios. All that to end up with a pretty routine retelling of the story of Jesus Christ in blandly produced, generic family-friendly digital images just in time for Easter. As is always the case with interpretations of religious texts, however, it’s most interesting, and revealing, for what it leaves out and for what it emphasizes. Furthermore, this one’s complicated by being based on a slim posthumous Charles Dickens book called The Life of Our Lord. That book is a charmingly Victorian effort, not up to the depths of feeling and wit of Dickens’ best work, but an earnest effort at distilling the importance of the Gospels’ message for an intended audience of his own children. The animated version makes Dickens (Kenneth Branagh) telling his youngest son (Roman Griffin Davis) the story of Jesus (Oscar Isaac) a framing device, and then puts the little lad, along with his doughy cat, in the New Testament tableaux as an unseen observer. There it hits all the expected highlights—the nativity, the baptism, the disciples, the loaves and fishes, walking on water, the last supper, the crucifixion, the resurrection. What’s more curious is the balance of what’s left out to what’s included.

Any condensing of these stories is inevitably going to pick and chose points of emphasis that shifts theological implications. For instance, Dickens didn’t have time for the Devil’s temptations in his book, but The King of Kings makes sure we hear about it, along with a flashback to Original Sin in the Garden of Eden. That’s fitting for a telling that’s all about the Power of Belief above all else. It puts weight on Christ the powerful—telling off the devil, expelling demons, raising the dead, and calming stormy seas. Christ the vulnerable, the compassionate, the defender of the meek and impoverished, gets shorter shrift, when it even appears at all. The end result is a movie that says Jesus should be worshiped because of what he can do for you, but doesn’t care too much about what he asks you to do for others. The Sermon on the Mount is glossed over, but skipped entirely are the Parables, and the Blessing of Children, and the Widow’s Mite, and the Woman at the Well, and nearly all moments of Jesus’ teaching that emphasize a need to care for those who’re marginalized or forgotten by societal norms.

The movie’s dry liturgical value, when it isn’t upstaged by the frame story, is clearly slanted in this one obvious direction, worshiping His power, but failing to mention that we should “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” and that “the last shall be first,” and what we “have done unto one of the least of these, we have done it unto [Him]”, and that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” Even the manger scene opening only has time for the genuflecting Wise Men, and not the shepherds. The ending resurrection has Jesus greet Dickens’ son in the garden instead of Mary. The filmmakers include a lot of the Greatest Hits of Jesus, but take most every opportunity to downplay or diminish women and the poor in them. (There’s time for many minutes devoted to the Dickens chasing that cat, though.) It says a lot about modern mainstream American Christianity to see what concepts are ignored when the idea is to make something broadly appealing and unobjectionable to the masses. I’d say it’s some upside-down accomplishment to make a Christian movie without wrangling with the actual tough questions of the faith, but that’s sadly par for the course.

Where the Boys Are: WARFARE

The soldiers burst into a house and shuffle the civilians to the side. The civilians don’t even become characters. This is a movie about the men with guns. They set up a stakeout shouting jargon and tersely staring down the barrel of their guns. They talk over their radios. They look warily out the windows. They wait. This is Warfare, a movie set in Iraq in 2006. It tells a very small story. There are a handful of military men—boys, really, with fresh faces and dewey eyes and a sense that, if not for their training and ranks, they’d be in the club. The opening scene shows them bopping around to the electronic dance hit “Call On Me,” a very mid-aughts reference. That’s also the only scene of happiness. The rest of the film is about fear and futility. They’re hunkered down in this random home, a place of shattered domesticity. The enemies are encroaching. A trap is set. Suddenly, they’re pinned down, with danger on all sides. A few are wounded, screaming in agonizing pain. Others’ pain is internal, mental. Still others are dead straight away. They all wait as the minutes tick by, with an agonizing wait filled only with fumbling attempts to help each other survive, and with desperate counting down the time elapsing before reinforcements can arrive. This spare, stripped-down war movie is advertised as coming from actual memories of service members who lived through these moments—a few harrowing hours in a larger conflict.

In its telling, it becomes the story of the entire Iraq War in miniature. It begins with invasion easily accomplished, then a difficult stay that grows violent and scary, before ultimately ending with a messy withdrawal leaving all the worse for wear. (The final shots of Iraqis carefully stepping through the debris of their neighborhood are an especially sharp closing note.) The film proceeds in extremely precise moments calibrated for experiential momentum, both the long stretches of procedural waiting, and the sudden thumping terror of gunfire and explosions. The characters are a blur of familiar and unfamiliar faces, and some familiar faces that are barely recognizable in their combat grimace and anonymizing uniforms. Boyish young actors including Joseph Quinn, Michael Gandolfini, Will Poulter, Kit Connor, Noah Centineo, and Charles Melton are totally enveloped in their roles. They form a tight unit as characters who fall back on training, with flickers of personality subsumed by the urgent need to do the next right thing. Writer-director Alex Garland, with Iraq War veteran Ray Mendoza serving as his co-writer and co-director, has made a technical and even clinical war movie that succeeds in conjuring a hellish look at what the monotonous unpredictability of war does to a body. Garland’s usual interest in the fragility of men and of systems, through movies like Ex Machina and Civil War, here finds another gripping expression. Here’s the story of a whole war in just a few well-observed stretches of chaos rushing in where control falters.

Played Out: A MINECRAFT MOVIE

I was in elementary school when Pokémon: The First Movie was released. It was greeted like Moses returning from the mountaintop on the playground. It was the must-see event of the fall if you were between the ages of 6 and 11. Here was the totemic video game craze of the age at long last on the big screen. That used to be an important sign that your corner of pop cultural awareness had gotten the upgrade in importance. Now it’s just another link in the chain. I remember being a little perplexed by the adults’ reaction to the movie. Why didn’t they agree we needed to be there opening night? And how could the critics syndicated in our local newspaper and on television review programs be so baffled by its premise? The children have to go out into the wilderness to collect the pocket monsters in little laser balls and then have the creatures fight each other to gain points toward evolving them into other iterations of those same critters. What’s not to get? Ah, but of course, I thought as a child then. Now I go into something like A Minecraft Movie and feel a million years old. I get why adults wouldn’t get Pokémon then, because seeing Minecraft threatens to turn me into a humorless scold.

I was a full adult when that video game first booted up and I’ve gained only a passing understanding of its mechanics and lore in the decade-plus since. I thought it was some building game where everything is out of blocks. I’ve been told it’s about creativity or something? Don’t you have to mine for materials and then craft them into buildings or stuff? And there are weird blocky creepers and villagers? Now here’s the movie. It’s a painfully formulaic green-screened fantasy picture with a motley crew of live-action misfits tumbling through a portal and forced to save the animated Minecraft world from an evil pig sorceress who is plotting to shoot a purple beam into the sky. Jack Black stars in a fit of wild-eyed derangement, accompanied by Jason Momoa in a bad Billy “King of Kong” Mitchell wig, Danielle Brooks in a track suit, and a couple kids. They proceed through ostensibly wacky comedy and action in sequences that are basically just levels and puzzles punctuated by exposition. It’s all brightly, flatly lit, totally phony as the characters pose and joke in groaning—or cringe as the kids might say—one-liners.

It’s directed by Jared Hess, he of Napoleon Dynamite, and the whole thing feels like that film’s flat affect, simple blocking, and boundless insincerity yanked into a dull copy of a video game fantasyland. Hess is also surely responsible for its most absurdist touches, like Jennifer Coolidge falling in love with an animated character in an uncomfortable, but brief, couple scenes. The resulting mix is hectic and vulgar and violent—dismembered cartoony zombies lit afire and portly pig henchmen skewered—in a way that’s just barely not PG-13. It oozes irony and innuendo. (A joke about “yearning” to work in “the mines” doesn’t go over as well this week, does it?) And it refuses to do anything seriously other than flatter fans who, in my screening, reacted in cheers to every reference to the games. It’s so empty and awkward and flat, coasting on combative tropes and empty peons to creativity. I felt ancient as I grew discomfited that so many children would be putting this annoyance in their minds.

The Lost World: PRINCESS MONONOKE

Animation master Hayao Miyazaki’s 1997 fantasy epic Princess Mononoke is back in theaters with a beautiful new 4K restoration showing exclusively in IMAX. It’s always a pleasure to be transported into its world of squabbling mortal factions made small in the face of the gods of nature. There’s the noble prince Ashitaka, cursed by a demonic infection, sent into exile to find the root of the disruption to the natural order. There he finds the wild girl San, who lives with the wolves, and is in battle with Lady Eboshi of Irontown for control of the forest. The forces of nature are besieged by the incursion of a burgeoning technological revolution—exemplified by the massive bellows forging iron that’ll make rifles and bullets. What are the wolves and apes and boars to do in the midst of this impending destruction? Conflict draws nearer. There’s also a beatific god of the forest, an elk with the face of a man, who walks on water and wordlessly wanders the woods leaving fresh growth in his wake. He’s endangered by poachers sent from the greedy emperor who has asked for the god’s head. The various factions of man do battle as the needs of industry and the free flow of nature reach a crisis point. In true Miyazaki fashion, all villainy and heroism is brought out in the fullness of complicated humanity, and all gripping action flows with fluid motion and a sense of scale and consequence.

Here is a complicated fantasy vision, effortlessly involving world-building and vividly imagined creatures and places, that unfurls with folkloric earnestness, spiritually engaged and classically structured. It feels like it’s a story that’s always existed. And its every frame reminds us it’s been crafted with human touch. Its hand-drawn spectacle, full of the deep breaths and luxurious pauses, the extra attention to details of wind and ripples and sighs and flinches that bring such richness to Miyazaki’s animation, is an illusion of movement and life given shape and form through the dedicated focus and attention of skilled artists with pen and brush. The characters are memorable, complicated, and lovable. The action is quick and exciting. The tension is gripping, and the detail of the environments are enveloping. And it’s all done in the patient, lovingly drafted images of Miyazaki and his team. This re-release is a good excuse to sit in the dark in front of an enormous screen, surrounded by booming sound, and be reminded of the primal magic of moving drawings. More than even the best CG animation, and certainly more than the pernicious anti-art prompted by technologists who think algorithmic computer programs can entirely replace the minds and efforts of artists, hand-drawn animation is a direct access to our shared humanity, and the wonders of which the human mind is capable. A film like Princess Mononoke will last; dishonest images spat out by a server copying its style won’t.

Princess Protection Program: SNOW WHITE

Disney’s live action Snow White arrives with a blizzard of phony controversy drummed up by the usual bad buzz mongerers. (Those angry influencers who make money off of algorithmically goosed phony fanboy outrage are bad enough. Those harping on the looks or race or progressivism of the lead are extra suspect.) Add that to the understandable doubts about another of its particular kind, as we’re now fifteen spotty years into the company’s project of remaking their animated classics. Look past all that and you’ll see a perfectly okay movie. It certainly doesn’t come close to matching the magic of the 1937 original. What possibly could measure up to one of the early milestones of cinematic history? That film is so stolidly in the canon that it’s practically a museum piece, it’s every note and design a part of the cultural firmament. It’s also still hypnotically magical in its breathing life into drawings, in a robust, fluid way for the first time at a feature length. It pioneered a whole new form of moviemaking. This new one is just a backlot musical with a fine star turn. The cramped sets and CG embellishments are almost quaint in a matte-painting-behind-three-fake-trees way; I wish they’d gone fully there, especially for the dwarfs, who are ghastly digital creations caught uncannily between the classic designs and photo-real monstrosities. That the reworked plot has Snow White also meet a band of seven bandits—played by actual humans—makes the fake guys all the odder a fit. Still, for all the padding with new complications that fall apart like tissue paper if you try to make it lore, it’s been nicely tinkered with to avoid the worst impulses of the other Disney live action remakes.

Under the anonymously proficient direction of Marc Webb, it’s at least not a thoughtless photocopy of the original—in which case, why’d you even see it, a la the 2019 The Lion King. Nor is it a pointless shedding of the original’s iconic charms—in which case, why take out the only reasons to remake it, like the 2020 Mulan. These usually fall in between those two extremes, and White’s just on the right side of the balance. Here she’s given a few new songs from The Greatest Showman’s Pasek and Paul and performed with fresh star power from Rachel Zegler. Her ballad “Waiting on a Wish” is a better “I Want” song than any in recent flop original Disney princess musical Wish. Here her White is a fine blend of sweet naivety and dawning G-rated political consciousness. She’s one of the only performers of her generation who could pull off such sweetly guileless innocence. (The movie also gives her another of what’s becoming a standard Zegler hero shot, like in her Hunger Games, with her leaning into a closeup so her big eyes look bigger and the determination behind her crooked smile gives off a sense of impending catharsis.) The plot gives her more of a confrontation with the Evil Queen (Gal Gadot, whose frictionless shallow villainy is put to smooth use). And there’s some nice ideas about cross-class solidarity against fascism, even if its hashtag-Girl-Boss logic leads to a tacit royalism. Isn’t it always thus with princess problems? Here’s a passable matinee diversion. Disney’s done way worse.

Stylish Substance: PRESENCE and BLACK BAG

The usual haunted house movie is all about how scary it would be to live with a ghost. Here’s one that goes a step further: it’d also be scary to be a ghost. The formal conceit of Steven Soderbergh’s Presence puts us in the ghost’s skittish perspective. The camera is the specter’s point of view. It lurks. It glides. It peers around corners. It eavesdrops on the family drama of the home’s new inhabitants. The mother (Lucy Liu) has looming legal trouble related to her job, the son (Eddy Maday) is a grumpy high school swimmer who is clearly a bit of a bully, the daughter (Callina Liang) is mourning the recent death of a friend, and the father (Chris Sullivan) is just tired of all this stress. Even without a ghost in the house, they’d be a troubled bunch. David Koepp’s screenplay tensely suggests these dilemmas as glimpsed from the haunted perspective. Joining the melodrama to an elliptical telling gives the story an extra eerie frisson. These are convincing, concisely drawn characterizations with a casualness that’s powerfully expressive in the performances. And the style lends all of that extra power as the camera floats and darts and stares and hides. It compounds the tension in interesting ways. It makes the audience lean in to fill in the gaps. And then there’s the additional electricity in seeing a typical ghost story scene in which a sleeping character awakens with a start and stares into a room’s dark corner, clearly sensing the supernatural presence, and seeing the character’s fearful eyes looking directly at us. Have we been spotted? The short movie (not quite 90 minutes) never outstays its welcome as it draws to a fine genre close—a kind of percolating teen drama slowly descending into horror—and takes a few gut-twisting swerves. The final shots pay off both the style and the story simultaneously with a shivering gasp. This is a fine example of playful style matching sturdy function.

Soderbergh is a rare modern Hollywood craftsman whose prolific and consistent sense of play with style only adds to the fine-tuned pleasures of his films. He clearly loves moviemaking, and it enlivens the genres to which he brings his touch. Whether a cheap experiment like Presence or his bigger studio productions, his movies reliably have slick surfaces and crisp editing, an intelligent precision to where he looks and what he sees, expertly calibrated with forward momentum and clever thoughtfulness. They are sensational entertainments serious about class and process and the ways our relationships get tangled up in ambitions and betrayals and systems. So of course Black Bag proves the spy movie works well for his style. He does it with an approach reminiscent of his Ocean’s trilogy. This is similarly a story that’s a nesting doll of intricate, intersecting secret plots done with warm colorful cinematography, a jazzy David Holmes score, clever multi-layered dialogue, and sexy stars outwitting one another. The movie, another scripted by Koepp, has a familiar cat-and-mouse game—a digital-age Le Carré mole hunt—enlivened by a cool, clinical, procedural logic. Husband and wife spies (Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett) host a dinner party for colleagues (Marisa Abela, Tom Burke, Naomie Harris, and Regé-Jean Page) that’s a cover for rooting out a suspicious character. Turns out each of them could be a suspect, too. Much sneaking and spying and setting traps ensues. Their boss (Pierce Brosnan) swoops in for a handful of scenes that keep the plates spinning, too. It has that pleasing confusion of the best spy stories, and the psychological gamesmanship you’d expect from wrapping it around a marriage. Soderbergh keeps this one short and sweet, too, playing out the setup to a crisp conclusion with a propulsive editing and clinical eye that suitably straightens out the complications with a satisfying snap.

Wild Child: NE ZHA 2

The bright and bouncy animated adventure sequel Ne Zha 2 is far and away the biggest movie of the year so far at the worldwide box office. It’s gotten nearly $2 billion to date, and shows little sign of slowing down. It’s a global crowd-pleaser, with a likable lead character and epic cartoony action that nonetheless knows how to pause to bring down the hammer of emotion. By the time you get to an emotional peak of the climax and find the title character, a little demon boy with a heart of gold, embracing his mother tightly, both of them weeping as they face certain doom in the fiery pit of the villain’s evil plot, it’d be tough to be unmoved. Yet you probably wouldn’t know much about this movie if you relied on the usual American mass media. Aside from some nods from showbiz reporters tallying up the grosses, this hit has gone largely unreviewed. Metacritic logs just two reviews, and Rotten Tomatoes has only aggregated six. That the movie’s nonetheless accumulated nearly $20 million thus far from American multiplexes is a sign that the word is getting out. And yet that it has done so to near silence from the usual sources of English-language criticism is an astonishing example of the provincial timidity of our media as it consolidates its coverage, contracts its scope, and nervously narrows its aims. It’s what Jonathan Rosenbaum was complaining about thirty years ago, the synergistic, parasitic demands of thoroughly corporate studios, media, and exhibitors artificially putting limits on the audience’s interests.

So here’s Ne Zha 2, a delight from beginning to end despite its 144-minute run time. It continues the story of the first picture, which introduced audiences to little Ne Zha, a scamp who looks like the British Dennis the Menace and acts like an anime hero filtered through Moana’s rounded sentimentality and Dreamworks' spiky silliness. He’s fighting his fate, trying desperately to battle the bad and uplift the good. It’s a story settled firmly in a loosely retold cinematic universe of Chinese mythology, and to a typical Western audience it’ll be occasionally baffling. (Try imagining getting dropped into a dense Hercules riff with no prior knowledge of Greek myth.) But writer-director Yang Yu has crafted a movie that moves like Hollywood blockbuster, even as it is so deeply informed by its cultural perspective. There are wars between immortal gods and trickster figures, jade palaces in the clouds, villages endangered by supernatural forces, gurus training students, martial arts, dragons, comic relief, and massive armies preparing for showdowns. It has the peaks and valleys, and twists and catharsis, a movie on this scale should deliver to its popcorn matinee audiences.

It’s satisfying, and easy to want more from its mythology unfurling as a backdrop to a lovable character just trying his best to be his best. The world is imagined well, with colorful complications and elaborate staging. The characters are vividly drawn and immediately appealing—from little Ne Zha to his roly-poly master, his noble parents, his ice-blue dragon-brother, and a big babyfaced deity. The writing is heart-felt and well-crafted to a sturdy family adventure formula, from escalating tension to kiddie humor asides. The action is well-choreographed, and takes advantage of the careening velocity and precision in framing that only a computer-animated sequence can pull off. Watching it, I got the feeling of being a foreigner looking in on something huge on which I’m almost missing out. This must be what international audiences feel watching blockbusters from us. It’s no more a work of Chinese propaganda than Hollywood blockbusters are visions of American hegemony. If you can believe only New York’s superheroes can stop international supervillains, or only a United States-led coalition can stop an alien invasion, you can hang with some Eastern mythology as it's rendered in vivid colors, appealing characters, and agreeable spectacle.