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. 

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. 

Fail Safe: A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE

In A House of Dynamite, director Kathryn Bigelow brings the procedural precision of her War on Terror films The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty to a hypothetical doomsday scenario. In tensely believable scenes of people staring at monitors and tapping on keyboards and frantically setting up phone calls, we see a scarily workaday picture of how the end might arrive. As the movie begins, a nuclear warhead of unknown origin has been launched toward America. The whole security apparatus springs into action, tracking the object, attempting to intercept it, tracing its origin, planning potential retaliation, and, finally, bracing for the worst. It’s a vision of competence in the face of the inexplicable and cataclysmic, contingencies planned for since the Cold War suddenly defrosted and put to use. Bigelow marshals a large cast of talented, dependable actors whose very presence denotes professionalism. We check in at the White House Situation Room with Rebecca Ferguson and Jason Clarke, in the oval office with Idris Elba, with high-ranking officer Tracy Letts and cabinet official Jared Harris, and at FEMA with Moses Ingram. The cast expands as the options narrow. There’s something uniquely suspenseful about watching people who we believe to be thoroughly knowledgable and totally capable growing frightened as the implications settle into their faces. 

Bigelow has such a firm grasp of tone to keep things tense and tenable that it is a shame it doesn’t add up to more. She here deploys the typical modern signifiers of Hollywood verisimilitude: handheld camera, spontaneous movement, tumbling jargon. The actors are all crisp and clear. It’s all pleasingly convincing on the surface, although the political context of its release in this turbulent 2025 has with it a kind of disbelief or alternate reality feeling. I watched these rooms of professionals calmly and reasonably and thoughtfully respond to a crisis with the awareness that rooms like these don’t look like this now. Imagine the current president, and cabinet officials, and advisors in this situation and the cold sweat induced by the premise grows even colder. That said, the movie is ultimately a disappointment, not for this disjunction alone, but for the movie’s ultimate lack of a conclusion. The movie is three first acts in search of ending. Noah Oppenheim's screenplay takes us to a cataclysmic climactic point and then doubles back to show us a different perspective and then goes back again a third time. We never get past that moment of peak suspense, and each trip through the same beats is actually diminishing returns, never meaningfully adding to the scenario since many actors and key lines repeat anyway. Then the intention to leave us in doubt certainly plays a part in drawing out a political statement about the dangers of nuclear proliferation, but it’s all The Day Of with nary a hint toward The Day After, which gives the movie a big deflating lack of impact or release. It’s a lot of expert suspense with nothing in the end to say about its ideas. 

Angel in the Right Field: GOOD FORTUNE

In Good Fortune, Keanu Reeves plays a guardian angel looking for a promotion who tries to save his first lost soul by showing a guy how the grass isn’t always greener on the other side. The joke is that he swaps a poor man’s life with a rich man’s life and the poor man decides it actually is better that way. For a cute comedy, the movie’s pretty sharp about the wages of poverty, enumerating the indignities of part-time and gig work. The result is a sitcom concoction with an unusual combination of influences. It’s one part Frank Capra fable—think It’s a Wonderful Life without the deeper emotional force—and one part Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed. That 2001 book-length work of reportage subtitled On (Not) Getting By in America is a now-classic look at the American working poor. To read its accounts of unpredictable schedules, runaway housing costs, labyrinthine fines and fees, arbitrary rules, and inconsistent low pay is to be reminded of the crushing obstacles toward success for those trying to cobble together a living with multiple minimum (or near minimum) wage jobs. The problems she describes have not been ameliorated, but instead exacerbated by the growth of fleeting transactional tasks mediated by tech companies’ apps. There’s no sense of community or connection between employer and employee in such insecurity and inequity, and certainly no sense of duty or responsibility to take care, either. It’s this tension that gets a working over in the writer-director-co-star’s Aziz Ansari’s comic concept. 

It’s an amusing and earnest effort for Ansari. He plays the poor man who’s sleeping in his car and working multiple jobs when he crosses paths with a shallow tech bro played by Seth Rogen. When they are swapped by Reeves’ angel, it appears that, although money may not buy happiness, it can certainly alleviate a whole lot of unhappiness. It also turns Ansari into quite an unpleasantly selfish guy willing to trick his way into more time in this setup. It sneakily makes Rogen into the main character, too, as he’s humbled by just how difficult it is to get and keep work, let alone make ends meet. He’s paired with Reeves, who’s increasingly zen frazzled as he’s made mortal as punishment by his peeved boss (Sandra Oh), and the two guys make a fun odd couple bumming around the lower classes while Ansari just might realize how his hollow riches still won’t win him a second date with Keke Palmer’s pretty union organizer. The movie has a light touch even as it hits its socioeconomic points hard, with a pleasant, likable cast as characters and with bantering dialogues that bounce breezily through the plot’s modest complications. If you think it’ll end without everyone learning a valuable lesson and returning to a slightly better status quo, you don’t know what kind of movie you’re watching. It’s all so bright and brightly lit that it’s hard to dislike even as you sense it won’t get any deeper. 

Off the Hook: BLACK PHONE 2

The Black Phone has a perfect horror hook for today’s youth since it dares pose the question: what if the phone rang? That movie was ultimately a repetitively structured work of video game logic. An abducted boy (Mason Thames) locked in a basement takes ghostly calls from the previous victims of his kidnapper, the devil-masked Grabber (Ethan Hawke). The kid learns from their mistakes to level up his escape attempts until he can kill his foe and flee. Now here’s the sequel, Black Phone 2, and returning director Scott Derrickson and screenwriter C. Robert Cargill have some solid moves. It doesn’t quite turn the premise into a good movie, but it’s at least a more distinctive one. First, the sequel is built entirely out of the psychological and supernatural consequences of its predecessor. Turns out killing a serial killer has given the poor boy a sullen and aggressive affect. His younger sister (Madeleine McGraw) has it even worse: she’s haunted by ghosts who invade her dreams and call her toward a remote woodsy campground where The Grabber’s first victims’ spirits linger. This leads to the sequel’s other good move: taking the action out of a bland basement and into that snowy lakeside forest sleepaway camp. (Between The Shining and The Thing, you could make the argument that wintry weather is an immediate elevating element for a horror picture.) 

The siblings end up snowed in with the camp’s manager (Demián Bichir) and a few others. Once there the hauntings get stronger, with eerie violent visions of the victims and increasingly malevolent poltergeist nightmare logic from the ghost of the Grabber himself. And, yeah, there’s that phone ringing and ringing. Pick it up and you’ll hear dead people. Why they keep picking it up is beyond me, but they’re hoping for clues to stop the haunting and I suppose that’s as good a reason as any. The 80’s camp setting, the dream antagonism, and the gory slasher suspense cause the movie to play like separate good ideas for Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street reboots run full steam into each other. That gives the proceedings a sense of overfamiliar and off-brand thrills. To liven things up, Derrickson shoots dreams in grainy filmic near-abstraction and the “real” world in pale digital dreariness. The interplay between the images, not unlike the dance between frames in his best work, the snuff-film chiller Sinister, causes some decent jumps, and an invisible man finale has its bloody appeal. But there’s a dull, grinding sense of horror tropes underlying every plot point, whirring away at the expected under every scene. It’s an empty experiment in which characters are drawn up for the needs of the plotting and no further. Why is anything in particular happening other than to exercise some neat horror imagery adding up to only itself? Ah, well. Its style makes it a better brand of boring. 

Off the Grid: TRON: ARES

Tron: Ares has a great concept for a Tron movie. It brings the inner world of the computer to the real world with a villainous tech company’s high-tech 3D printer zip-zapping evil programs out of the cloud into corporeal form. After two movies about people being zapped into the computer, it’s about time to flip the direction. The fun of seeing the fluorescent-accented bodysuit-wearing warriors and glowing energy vehicles swooping down San Francisco streets makes for a pleasing contrast. Add to that a thumping and throbbing Nine Inch Nails rock score and there’s all the aesthetic markers for a satisfying blockbuster. What a let down, then, that the whole thing feels so anemic as the journey to the real world is focused on the entirely wrong character. The warring tech titans are played by talented actors. On the side of good is Greta Lee, who’s hopping the globe looking for an old magic algorithm that’ll allow her to print real crops and save the world. On the side of evil is Evan Peters and Gillian Anderson who are trying to beat their corporate rivals to the control of this tech. But instead of settling into that understandable human conflict, the story is perched on Ares, a dead-eyed program who shambles toward something like self-awareness as he’s tasked with the baddies’ bidding until a glitch causes him to seek to rewrite his own code. In a movie that’s already under-serving its human characters with hollow blockbuster plotting and thin motivations, it’s a shame to take even a little real rooting interest and drive it into something as superfluous and vacant as the empty inner mind of a machine. 

This is already a series of false starts. The 1982 original is a strange artifact, a one-off sci-fi boondoggle in which Jeff Bridges is cast adrift on a sea of chunky, simple early CG landscapes. The sequel didn’t emerge until 2010, well after that first film was an established cult object. Tron: Legacy is an across-the-board improvement, fully activating the ideas’ potential with a tighter emotional focus on a long lost father (Bridges) and a troubled grown son (Garrett Hedlund) reunited in the vast digital grid. It’s also an elegantly exciting aesthetic experience, a fitting directorial debut for the speed and sensation of Top Gun 2 and F1’s Joseph Kosinski. He makes Legacy glowing neon propulsive spectacle, with a hard-driving Daft Punk score and a swooping camera hurtling through its digital spaces. Ares is a retreat from all of that fun and innovation. It has neither the quaint eccentricities of the first, nor the non-stop dazzlement of the second. And it forgets that the concept worked best through hooking into real human feeling. This belated follow-up, despite smooth professional lensing and decent bludgeoning sound, never jolts to life. It is an inert artifact, drafting off dusty references and tropes. Turns out the only reason we cared about the cool-looking and -sounding earlier efforts set in Tron’s computers was the personal touch.

This film is impersonally crafted as pure product. Director Joachim Rønning’s made a habit of producing lesser sequels to live-action Disney fantasy hits, having previously handled Pirates of the Caribbean 5 and Maleficent 2. He’s a competent craftsman, though. His best work is the Disney live-action sports movie Young Woman and the Sea, as sturdy an example of the form as that type gives us. He knows how to hit the beats and bring a screenplay to life. As such, Ares pops with red grids and pixelated chaos, and does indeed have a bit of a charge from putting the computer things on real city streets. But there’s just not enough there there to disguise the mercenary element involved. Of course all movies, especially those at this scale, are commercial products. But this one’s empty enough to make you sit there thinking about why the company would take another crack at a franchise that’s only barely before worked for their balance sheets, and then only through the modest long-tail cult audience. Even as this one sinks at the box office, they’ll surely sell plenty of theme park tickets for the Tron ride, and Blu-ray box sets (as a completionist, I’ll get one), and copies of the soundtrack album (NIN’s thrashing electric tones are the clear highlight; I’ll buy one of those discs, too). Maybe in another decade or three they’ll take another swing at it jump-starting the series. For now, this is a sad case of a promising movie in which everyone involved is on the same page. It’s just the wrong page.

The Lost Daughter: ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER

In Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another multiracial leftist militants and conspiratorial white supremacists share a love of codewords, rituals, purity tests, and in-fighting. In fact, they’re so concerned with their own inner workings, that we see the actual plot of the movie is an almost inconsequential side-story to these groups’ larger aims. Without drawing a false equivalency, or even clean lines of ideological dispute other than clearly preferring the doomed progressive impulses to the drooling cartoon evil of racist authoritarians, the movie becomes a picture of a well-intentioned father-daughter pair just trying to survive. “I don’t get angry about anything anymore,” says the man, a former explosives expert for that leftist terrorist organization who now spends his days in hiding smoking weed and worrying that the government, or his ex-wife, will come knocking at the small house he shares with his teenage daughter. One gets the sense that so much fear and anger has passed in the decade-and-a-half of hiding that he’s just tired of caring. He just wants his daughter safe. 

It makes for an electrifying contemporaneous American film. Anderson uses imagery of immigration raids, paramilitary invasions, and police harassing protestors as so much vivid, dangerous backdrop to a quite simple chase story embellished with literally sensational filmmaking focused on a roving camera, booming sound, and sequences chockablock with eccentric characters down to the smallest bit parts. It’s a lot of movie: a big, filmic beauty with exacting set-pieces and satisfying spectacle. Even so, Anderson swerves from the expected. It opens with what appears to be a doomed romance between Rocket Man (Leonardo DiCaprio), a slightly off-tempo activist, and the imperious militant Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor). She casts a strong impression as she almost instantly becomes a more complicated, hard-edged character who first secretly betrays him, then allows her hair-trigger propensity for violence to put her in a position from which she rats out the group. For appearing only in the prologue, her complications—and struts and stares—linger over the picture. She, and the dizzying political backdrop, is refracted in the relatively small story that follows as it’s blown up to epic proportions. The paranoid ex-radical DiCaprio is separated from his daughter (Chase Infiniti) when a paramilitary strike force (led by a wacky intense Sean Penn) takes over their small town in an immigration raid intended as a distraction for a personal revenge extraction. 

What follows is an overflow of action and activity, dense sequences with constant detail and movements, by turns sharply satirical and propulsively suspenseful, sometimes in the same moment. Somehow it manages to be a biting political cartoon, a hard-charging suspense picture, a bustling tossed-off portrait of marginalized communities, and an earnestly sentimental father-daughter picture. The result is a deeply on-edge hurly-burly whirligig of a picture, at once sweeping and small, chaotic and contained, wickedly raucous and righteously angry. DiCaprio floats through the chaos, pushing through the haze to find the right passwords and coordinates to rendezvous with his daughter, and to avoid the personal vendetta of the evil Colonel Jockjaw (the names are pure Pynchon, whose novel Vineland loosely inspired the movie). How dreadful to see the villain is emboldened to use the cover of law enforcement to selfishly chase the ghosts of his past and find favor in the secretive suits who literally lurk in underground layers. It’s in the dichotomies that the movie holds its bold, slippery power. Here a country is slipping into authoritarianism and tearing itself apart, between the boot heels hoping to stomp and the wide variety of resistance that pushes back. One group of radicals exits as others are born. One villain is taken down, but the system remains. There’s no winning the war, just the next battle, and the next. 

It becomes a movie about the legacy of struggle and division that each generation leaves for the next, this American life as a constant messy push-and-pull for progress in the face of old-fashioned backlash and repression, and those who’d use the struggle as excuse to wreak havoc. It’s also a movie about how caring for individuals is always better than centering violence. The latter is ideology as power; the former is real power. Consider the squabbling pedantic radicals on a circular hotline juxtaposed with the chill warmth of Benicio del Toro’s calm karate master who casually floats through his city’s underground communities, a steady center around which much activity orbits as he’s offering aid around every corner. (A long wandering take through his underground railroad’s maze of doors and corridors and tunnels as he confidently takes care of business while DiCaprio unravels behind him is a highlight.) 

I wish the movie had more time for its choice supporting players. Anderson’s usually so good at elucidating complicated relationships, like in The Master’s cult-leader-and-convert or Phantom Thread and Licorice Pizza’s romantic infatuations as power plays. But here they just breeze by. Only Del Toro really pops, and there’s entirely too much Penn, and the rest of the ensemble (from Regina Hall to Alana Haim) is just evocative fleeting impressions. I especially wanted to know more about what drove the father, and the daughter’s political perspective, and how they filled regular days. But the strong shorthand of Chase Infiniti’s rooting charisma, a blend of vulnerable and inviolable, and the stumbling melancholic comic urgency of DiCaprio, high out of his mind, flailing around like a Millennial Lebowski, make for a sturdy through line as the camera’s elegant tracking shots and jangled score find laughter and twists in the live-wire energy of now. Through its wild comedy and dark action, it sees all manner of leftists are targets of civic violence from those wielding the force of quasi-military power, who are themselves split between matter-of-fact law enforcement and a collection of loose-cannon militias and bounty hunters. By the end, the only hope is that the next generation will be even slightly better than those who’ve left them this mess.

Love Hurts: OH, HI! and TWINLESS and SPLITSVILLE

Too often small movies these days have a concept or a premise and then leave it there, flatlining for the rest of the run time. I yearn for these movies to discover a second, let alone a third, gear. Take the acidic relationship comedy Oh, Hi!, for instance. Here writer-director Sophie Brooks delivers a fine hook. A young couple is on a weekend vacation at a sleepy rural cabin far from the city. She (Molly Gordon) is head-over-heels for him (Logan Lerman). After a nice day of boyfriend-girlfriend fun, they’re cuddled up in bed when he admits that he’s way less serious about this relationship than she is. Bad move. She leaves him handcuffed to the headboard and insists she’ll win him over. Visions of Stephen King (Misery meets Gerald’s Game, perhaps) dance in this darkly funny inciting incident. She’s desperate to keep him, and the literal vision of that neediness twists with a biting mania. Unfortunately, the movie’s exactly as stuck as the guy is. The initial provocation is startling and silly, and the early dialogue just past this development has a tense ping-ponging triangulation as each party tries to say the right things to unlock the next right step. But as it goes on, Brooks doesn’t quite know how to bring it to a resolution. Some late additions to the cast fall flat despite their appealing presences because the comedy grows sitcom loopy and the last lingering strands of emotional intelligence dissipate. The performances are committed, and the movie’s blessedly short. But it still runs out of ideas by the halfway mark and then just repeats itself until finding a pretty limp final beat to play. 

For a movie with more than a couple good moves past its premise to offer, there’s Twinless. Writer-director James Sweeney’s dark relationship dramedy has an even better hook. Sweeney plays a gay loner who meets a depressed straight guy (Dylan O’Brien) in a support group for people who are mourning the death of their twins. They become unlikely friends. At first I was worried the movie tips its hand with an obvious twist. I was dreading waiting the next hour or more for the reveal. Instead, it almost immediately lets us know that it knows we know that (mild spoiler) Sweeney doesn’t have a twin. The betrayal has layers of deception, and as he gets closer and closer to the other man so desperately and earnestly reaching out for companionship in his loneliness and grief, the movie’s tone is all the more filled with sickly sweet tension and a sensitive queasiness. Here’s a movie so tightly attuned to both characters in this situation that it doesn’t short-change the compounded psychological damage that brought them together and is brewing a sad reveal. We’re waiting for the characters to notice the twist we’ve already been shown. Sweeney gives it all a soft wit and sharp eye, developing the characters’ awkwardness and neediness and slowly developing connection. The writing has clever construction, and there’s intentionality in the visual flourishes, too, like a casually masterful split-screen journey through a party in which the halves of the frame separate, wander, and then rejoin. And the performances feel just real enough, from Sweeney’s cringing vulnerability and awkwardly hidden secrets, to O’Brien’s convincingly inhabited fumbling through pain in a hunched posture and tight jaw. (When flashbacks to his cocky twin make it a double role, it’s all the more impressive.) The picture’s all of a piece in a melancholic and unusual situation in which two people are too entangled to make a clean break. There’s no real satisfying resolution on the offer, but it’s decent enough to sit in the ambiguities of a situation that maybe can’t resolve without something tenuous and sad. 

It’s Michael Angelo Covino’s Splitsville, however, that offers the most robust indie relationship dramedy in quite some time. What a relief to see a movie that starts with a provocative idea and then keeps building through the implications and consequences until we arrive at a dizzy screwball finale as natural as it is surprising. It’s about time one of these actually gave us characters with places to go and people to see and changes to make. It not only has a meaty first act, it has a second, and a third, each more propulsive and entertaining than the last. It stars co-writer Kyle Marvin as a well-meaning dope blindsided when his stunning wife (Adria Arjona) asks him for a divorce. He runs, literally, to his friends’ vacation home, where, as he whines over glasses of wine, his best friend (Covino) tries to cheer him up by admitting that he and his wife (Dakota Johnson) have decided to be non-monogamous. Marvin laughs it off until, late at night, he wonders if it was an invitation. Later, upon returning to his soon-to-be-ex-wife, he wonders if they should try that arrangement, too, instead of divorce. What follows is a riot of modern befuddlement over gender roles, sexual mores, and relationship norms as what people find exciting or even just plausible in theory, is pretty complicated once real feelings and bodies get involved.

It follows a couple marriages that threaten to turn into the Marx Brothers routine in which too many people pile into too small a room. It keeps up a brisk pace of hilarious line-readings, brisk banter, clever reversals, and surprising, only slightly heightened, sight gags, and then gives it all an undertow of serious emotional stakes. It follows the twists and turns of its characters’ whims as they can’t get out of their own ways, double back to try to provoke jealousy, then scramble more as their plans end up manipulating themselves more than others. It’s a movie of anxious tap-dancing over inevitable confusion, constantly second-guessing if they’re with the right person or making the right plans for the future. How apt for a society that feels perpetually on the brink of pulling apart these days. The movie’s blend of nervy humanism, too-easy sex, and Millennial neuroticism matches well with its vulgarity and its anything-goes permissiveness that has a sharp spine of regret and bewilderment. The performances are as energetic and committed as its script, and, though it occasionally threatens to play like a vanity project to pair its writer and director as actors with gorgeous scene-partners, it’s ultimately too self-critical and breezily open to fleshing out even the bit players with meaty, complicated humanity to succumb. It’s a feat of writing and directing to kick up all this mess and keep messing until it lands with a relaxed inevitability that actually cares about the fates of these flawed and fumbling people. 

Batter or Worse: CAUGHT STEALING

Darren Aronofsky’s Caught Stealing is atypical for him since it’s shorn of self-conscious ambition. He’s a filmmaker usually loaded down with style while straining for abstractions and existential metaphor. When it works it works. Consider the Biblical fantasy of Noah or epic existential time-spanning sci-fi The Fountain or the panicked pressure-cooker allegory of mother! or the twirling mirrored ballet nightmare of Black Swan. He’s an energetic image-maker, expert at enveloping with consistent mood and getting committed performances out of talented casts. For better and worse, there are no small choices in an Aronofsky film. The hysteria of his addiction dramas, the manic druggy Requiem for a Dream and doom-laden overeating of The Whale, is maddeningly misjudged. But the jumpy intensity of the grit and grain to his character drama The Wrestler is intensely focused. When his choices hit, they hit hard; otherwise they’re painful wild swings that totally miss. So it’s fun to see his newest feature be his breeziest and least burdened by weighty themes. It’s an up-tempo, low-level thriller set on the streets of New York City. It’s 1998 and an alcoholic ex-baseball player (Austin Butler) is barely making it work as a bartender with a nice girlfriend (Zoe Kravitz). Too bad, then, that he makes the mistake of agreeing to watch a pet cat for his punk neighbor (Matt Smith). This gets him caught between competing drug dealing gangsters (Bad Bunny and some Russians on one side; Hasidic Vincent D’Onofrio and Liev Schreiber on the other) who think the punk left him a clue to their cash. 

It sets off a mad, darkly funny, increasingly violent scramble to get out of trouble. Not even a weary cop (Regina King) seems much help. He’ll have to do it himself. Butler makes such a fine, sympathetic presence at the center of the tension. He’s stepped confidently into leading man mode, using his physicality to get and hold attention in the frame with an easy charm and casual energy that’s somehow both perfectly posed and totally relaxed. Now there’s a Movie Star. He holds the center easily as the thriller plotting pops off around him. Aronofsky gives it all a hurtling momentum, like a madcap After Hours take (there’s even Griffin Dunne) on the kind of scrappy, chatty, irreverent post-Tarantino thrillers that would’ve been on screens in 1998. Now that’s commitment to period accuracy. It’s a movie of small choices with big effects: the crack of a bat to bring our lead out of a recurring nightmare; an affinity for elegant long tracking shots; a well-spun collection of needle drops; a steady teetering between lighthearted eccentric characterizations and heavy deadly twists and turns. The movie has speed on its side; the thing doesn’t feel thin until the credits have ended and you’re walking back to the parking lot. If it’s ultimately just glossy genre pulpiness for the sake of it, then at least it’s done with such a high level of confident skill. I could get used to this style of Aronofsky. 

King's Ransom: HIGHEST 2 LOWEST

You’d never accuse a Spike Lee film of doing too little. Even a movie as relatively lean and focused as Highest 2 Lowest, a melancholic crime thriller, is overflowing with ideas. It’s not one of his State of the Union films stuffed with commentary on every contemporary concern, but Lee is so unfailingly current that it nonetheless plugs into a well-observed confluence of anxieties. Here he’s remaking Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low, itself adapted from Ed McBain’s pulp novel King’s Ransom. Each version is almost forensically interested in the haves and have nots of a particular place and time. Lee transplants the plot into modern day New York, where the business tycoon in the palatial penthouse apartment with a wall of windows is a music mogul played by Denzel Washington. He brings his usual charismatic combination of intimidation and charm, here starting at imperiously confident, dials up to false bravado and down to genuine doubt, discovering renewed intensities and determination as the line between risk and reward gets vertiginous. He’s secretly negotiating to leverage his life’s savings to buy back shares in his company to head off his partners’ interest in selling the whole thing off to corporate vultures who’ll feed it to the algorithm. It’s a tension between the human touch record executive and the soulless asset extraction of easy paydays. “All money ain't good money,” Washington warns. It’s in this moment of financial precarity that his 17-year-old son is kidnapped outside a basketball camp. Then comes the ransom request: $17.5 million. Paydays all the way down. Anyone familiar with the story’s earlier iterations won’t be surprised by most of the twists and turns that follow. But Lee’s telling makes them his own with the specificity of New York, and digs into Washington’s character in ways that complicate the construction of moral dilemmas around him. 

The twin questions of paying the ransom and finding renewed artistic authenticity find a neatly paired suspense, and Lee works them through tense negotiations and investigations toward some fine-tuned answers that are both surprising and inevitable. He gives the telling such a relaxed style here, less insistent and forceful than his peak, with low-key simmer that nearly swallows up important beats as it builds to some ecstatic aesthetic moments and his usual citational energy. It starts with a slow, dreamy montage of daybreak skyline shot in gleaming digital precision and set to “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’” covered by Norm Lewis. There the movie’s concerns are laid out in one elegant moment: the camera drifting away from the streets and toward a luxury apartment (adorned with portraits of Ali, Basquiat, Morrison, and more) while a typically white Broadway ballad is lifted up by a famous black voice. It's all there: New York as a vector of race and class, business and art. Later a police chase on street and subway will be intercut with the Puerto Rican day parade, the soundtrack blending a band’s percussive music with baseball fans chanting “Let’s go, Yankees!” Lee keeps up overlapping layers of New Yorker experience, building tensions between Washington and his colleagues, his investors, cops, his driver (Jeffrey Wright), a striving low-level rapper (A$AP Rocky). And then he locates the tensions between all of them, too, the suspicions and fears and jealousies that motivate and separate. But it’s all done in a pretty casual style, tossed off in the margins of behaviors and montage as the movie builds to its conclusions. Lee’s typically bold, restless style is here so chill and relaxed, riffing on the High and Low while percolating at its own pace, then switching up the look and feel, going from cold sleek digital to grainy film stock and back again. He gets layers out of every choice, and can make even less seem like more. His characters here, all trapped in hustles of their own making on the hunt for something more real, are trying to get there, too. 

Lost and Found: WEAPONS

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

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

Separate Ways: TOGETHER and THE SHROUDS

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

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

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

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

Reality Bytes: M3GAN 2.0 and THE NAKED GUN

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

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

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

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

We Wear the Mask: EDDINGTON

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

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

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

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

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