Through the Trees: WILDWOOD

Wildwood is Laika’s first movie in nearly a decade. It’s a suitably grand return. This 131-minute stop-motion animated fantasy is a stunning work of creativity and craftsmanship. Sometimes, watching dozens of characters moving through a complicated action sequence in a highly-detailed environment one simply has to sit astonished at what these artists can accomplish one frame at a time. Laika’s filmmakers first made a name for themselves with entertaining fables with shadowy edges, charming humor, and family-friendly thrills like Coraline and ParaNorman. Their latest is their most ambitious yet, an epic adaptation of a thick children’s novel by Colin Meloy. It is also about children, and it’s sure to delight and terrify mature ones in the audience in equal measure. But it’s not made with children in mind, particularly. It’s simply a robust and densely detailed story sculpted with care for anyone who likes a good yarn. It’s one of those dark and melancholic and violent stories about growing up and discovering that the world is scary and complicated, fractious and unresolved. And it’s about discovering that, even though there is such darkness in the world, it’s also a place of kindness, solidarity, and magic. 

Said magic is found not merely in fantasy worlds of magic and wonder, but in the transferable qualities of heroism and love that the heroes bring back to their real world. The movie follows Prue (Peyton Elizabeth Lee), an ordinary girl in Portland, Oregon, who has the misfortune of witnessing her toddler brother stolen by a swarm of crows. She and a dorky classmate (Jacob Tremblay) chase them into a mysterious deep forest realm where they encounter a society of birds and wolves, bandits and witches (and voices including Carey Mulligan, Angela Bassett, Charlie Day and Mahershala Ali). It happens to be in the middle of conflict. There they’ll find allies who want to help find the baby, and forces of danger that want to manipulate them. Sorting out which are which is part of the delight and tension as the movie goes from a warren of wolves in Napoleonic uniforms to a mansion populated by clothed animal servants of a sniveling human governor to an enormous magic tree. Along the way they also find a city of self-governing birds, an ivy-covered altar hidden in ancient ruins, far from the eccentric streets of Portland to which they hope to return. Those are as lovingly detailed down to every perfectly placed brick. All told, this fantasy is a distinctly American mythos—no Middle Earth or Narnia or Redwall with its Old Europe stylings. It’s a Pacific Northwest fantasy of foggy forest and muddy cliffs, indigenous secrets and outsiders intruding. 

This sturdy fantasy plot allows for the flourishing of craft. The design has wholly convincing spaces. The characters move through them with fluid animation and a real emotionality to their looks, be they human or owl or rat or dog or rabbit. The look and feel will be recognizable to anyone who’s seen director Travis Knight and screenwriter Chris Butler’s earlier movies. There’s something comforting about the Laika house style. There’s the tangible feeling of puppets and dioramas, but there’s a fluidity to their 3D-printed micro-expressions and patient posing augmented with digital effects. The camera and the story moves so smoothly, with characters whose emotions are so legible and evocative. There are moments where I was so swept up in the experience that I forgot I was watching animation. And then the knowledge would hit me with a scene of hundreds of characters moving, while the wind rustles the leaves and the grass, and a variety of smoke and light floats through the scene. Such complexity pulled off with such ease is the Laika way, all in service of a story overflowing with imagination and care. 

Look Here: YOU CAN SEE EVERYTHING

Nathan Fielder is used to being the manipulator. His Comedy Central show Nathan for You talked small business owners into elaborate pranks disguised as advertising gimmicks. His HBO show The Rehearsal is even more complicated, an ever-growing nesting doll of practice sessions for all manner of life events that gets all the more tangled by the episode. The fact of his manipulations are the form of his art, and key to the fundamental questions his work asks. What is truth? What is performance? And how are people’s behaviors and perspectives shaped, and pushed? Now his first feature film, singular documentary You Can See Everything, finds him in the position of manipulated. Maybe. That’s not to say he’s the total innocent here, but he’s crafted a film that finds him potentially in over his head with subjects who may want to use him to shape their own narratives more than he wants to use them to make his own art. 

He’s invited by Elizabeth Holmes and her husband Billy Evans to film the last month before she goes to prison. You might recall she’s the disgraced founder of failed tech startup Theranos, which claimed to have a machine that can run all manner of medical tests from just one drop of blood. That said machine could not do all of those tests is the reason why the company failed and she’s incarcerated for defrauding investors. It also fueled true crime tellings of her story, from a journalist’s book-length expose Bad Blood to Hulu miniseries The Dropout starring Amanda Seyfried. The interest in the story is in the character she seems to have created: the “lean-in” tech boss speaking in a low, slow affected voice that somehow charmed big names with deep pockets to fund her efforts. The very caricature she cultivated for her rise, abetted her fall. 

So it makes a certain amount of sense that Holmes and Evans would want to tell their side of the story. They have a vested interest in downplaying the crimes and proclaiming her innocence. In front of the cameras they’ll take care of their kids. They’ll claim total transparency when pressed for details. They’ll assert that she’s never lied, and even make plans for a “Theranos 2.0.” They play some transparently obvious power games with the documentarians. What doesn’t make clear sense is why they’d choose Fielder to record all of this. His playful, prankish approach to the documentary form and his slippery tonal sincerity seems a high risk if the intention is mere reputation recovery. At first he appears to approach the project with a genuine sense of wanting to understand them. His disarmingly blank affect and deadpan jabs allow his questions to hit hard before hitting their defenses. But the more he records the more questions he has. Holmes and Evans are committed to a devious definition of truth tied to pure belief, allowing themselves endless subjectivity while refusing it to others. They denigrate others’ interpretations of their actions as woefully inaccurate while claiming that truth is whatever they believe. 

Fielder, co-directing with Primetime’s Lance Oppenheim, provides an artfully lensed document with intense close-ups and a dread-filled score to keep the sense of suspicion growing as his subjects talk to him and past him. What is their relationship to reality, to truth, to each other, and to this project? We might even change our mind about who’s playing whom several times over. The deeper we get into it, the less we seem to know. Can we really know another person? That’s a fine place to start our inquiry. Somehow it expands to being about the collapse of certainty, the deep confusion of others’ minds. In typical Fielder fashion, what starts seemingly graspable slowly slips out of easy categorization. The way there is tensely uncomfortable, hilarious, surprising, and weirdly moving—sometimes all at once. By the end it’s somehow about everything sick at the heart of our culture. It’s about storytelling and narcissism and deception. It’s about how we know, and if we can know. Looking back, you might even realize it’s all in the title. Just because a camera’s there to see everything doesn’t mean we actually understand anything. 

Anti-Social Media: THE SOCIAL RECKONING

Conventional wisdom on 2010’s Facebook founding drama The Social Network says it’s David Fincher’s direction that makes it great. It's his camera and pacing and precise work with actors that gives it an ice cold framing and a speeding momentum and an endlessly quotable, densely characterized snappiness. But that really does short change screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s contributions. Even on the page it’s one of the great films of this century. Next time you watch it keep an ear on the structure of the interleaving deposition timelines and the dimensionality of character and intent in each conversation. The movie’s complexity is enhanced by the direction, but the screenplay is the foundation that lets it reach those aims. It’s the mix of the two that makes magic. 

And it’s the lack of the two that leaves its new follow up, The Social Reckoning, feeling pretty flat. Sorkin directs his own writing here. He’ll never be mistaken for being as distinctive a director as he is a writer. Not a big surprise the new movie is typically flat and simply staged. Those are the aesthetic decisions, or lack thereof, you’d make if all you wanted to do was letting writing and performance take center stage. But what’s most surprising is how the writing falls short, too. For all his idiosyncratic tendencies, Sorkin can write verbal pyrotechnics as well as anyone. Here it’s all expositional with a light dusting of the chewy self-righteous monologues for which he’s best known. It’s thinner and more utilitarian, more interested in making its points than building its world. If the first film couldn’t go more than a couple minutes without a memorable line, building complicated characters through a hurtling startup story in action, this one’s mostly about people explaining things to each other when they aren’t clicking around. 

Founder Mark Zuckerberg is now a villain lurking in a subplot, caring more about preserving power and time users spend on his site than the social consequences of the platform he runs. He’s played by Jeremy Strong, a good substitution from the original’s Jesse Eisenberg, if only because Eisenberg can never totally remove likability, or at least easy charisma, from his screen persona. Strong plays him as a total blank cocooned from real pushback and warped by a core belief shaped by oppositional defiance. He takes any criticism as impetus to get even worse. If the earlier movie was about how one young man’s antisocial tendencies were inflicted upon the rest of us, the follow-up’s Reckoning is all about what’s happening to the rest of us 20 years on. This movie’s mainly about a whistleblower (Mikey Madison) contacting an investigative reporter (Jeremy Allen White) to raise alarm about internal studies that show harmful effects of Facebook and its assorted social media products. He asks questions. She sneaks documents. Repeat. Meanwhile Zuck preps for a senate hearing with the help of friendly (Wunmi Mosaku) and combative (Bill Burr) interlocutors. All the while, COVID and the January 6th riots loom in the near future as the movie cuts between 2019 and 2021. 

The movie’s not particularly equipped to do anything with all these potentially provocative and productive juxtapositions other than asserting that social media is a social ill. It so obviously is, and it is nice to rehearse the reasons why. We’ve hooked our society and our economy up to these machines that pump poison into the body politic, accelerating radicalization and bullying and the collapse of objective truth. That’s a project that happens to flatter certain would-be authoritarians in our corporate-political landscape. And it leaves the rest of us worse off. But despite this movie’s good intentions and research, the project doesn’t work as drama or as documentary. It’s a pleasantly mediocre hybrid, flattering the assumptions of people who walk in ready to be just as angry. And even they might be surprised how sedate and surface-level the results are here. 

Truth or Consequences: VERITY

Verity, like other Colleen Hoover adaptations, is a twisty melodrama with the dynamics so heightened you get a little dizzy from the altitude sickness. But somehow taking the emphasis off of damaged lovers’ romances, like in It Ends with Us or Regretting You, and into a more straightforward sexy thriller makes for a more effective result. The long simmering tensions bubbling up into straight-faced delirium make sense in this context. It also gives its cast something to hide. This works better to subsume the wildest twists behind doubts and deceptions until the last possible moment. Dakota Johnson stars as a young author hired to sign a non-disclosure agreement and help a troubled bestselling novelist finish her popular series. Anne Hathaway plays the wealthy writer in a deceptive double role in slippery flashbacks and a struggling present. Josh Hartnett is her husband, a nice, supportive guy. Is that suspicious in a movie like this? Johnson moves into their home to sort through outlines and notes and, no surprise, starts formulating her own opinions about the couple’s dynamic as she’s learns about their past and gets entangled in their futures. 

The material makes good use of its cast’s strengths. Johnson, who here has a fine inquisitive blankness to her “resting bored face,” spends most of the movie very slowly reading a secret manuscript that may be a hidden confession to Terrible Deeds, and then wandering the mansion talking to its inhabitants. That each chapter ends on shocking revelations does little to speed her to the end. It’s a sensible chapter a day for this one, the better to string the movie along. It gives Hathaway time to play a wide range of modes, from fresh flirt, to postpartum psychosis, to wounded wife. And Hartnett keeps his chemistry with each woman on a low boil to keep you guessing about his ultimate goal. That the movie is self-consciously playing with the truth and perspective, from the title on down, makes it the kind of smart that people who don’t usually think too hard will find provocative. The rest of us can just vibe with the smooth surfaces’ appeal coaxed along by workmanlike direction and a screenplay that has just the right balance of dread and silliness. From the pretty people to the 80’s-style fonts to the lumbering ominous pace to the trip-wire twists to the fact that all of the bestselling author’s books are designed to look exactly like Hoover’s, it’s a pleasantly unpleasant pulp. 

Down and Out: DIGGER

And here I thought the one bright spot of the end of the world would be respite from having to hear about the ghoulish billionaires and waxworks politicians causing it. What Digger supposes is we’d still be telling their story in the dark ages to come. It’s meant to be funny. Sometimes it is. It’s also a nightmare. Writer-director Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s work has always played best as dark comedy, despite generally wearing the clothes of serious dramatic art. What is the grim survivalist revenge picture The Revenant if not a bleakly funny pile-on of insult and injury in stunning snowy western landscapes? Or how about the misrerabilist everything-is-connected globalism drama Babel? Its ice-cold framing of overheated dramatic twists has a bleary pile-up of tragedy that’s by turns moving and absurd. It stands to reason his Birdman, the most transparently comedic of his films, is his only Oscar Best Picture, what with its self-consciously showbiz showy one-take gimmick swirling around chewy monologues in the mouths of actors playing actors behind the scenes of a play. His latest is a bit of all of the above, mixed with a Yorgos Lanthimos straight-faced cynicism in the face of fish-eyed weirdness and a Wes Anderson conscious artifice and precisely ornate production design in a nesting doll narrative about narrative. 

It stars Tom Cruise, made more believably his mid-60s age with a dusting of makeup effects, as Digger, a tyrannical oil executive whose life is upended when he learns his drilling has broken off a chunk of glacier the size of Pittsburgh. Said iceberg is in a fast current on a collision course with the European coast. Disaster will ensue. The end of the world, even. The film quickly involves the United States’ government, as embodied by a tottering, quick-tempered, narcissistic president (John Goodman) and his staff of toadies and yes men, including a whimpering Vice President (Michael Stuhlbarg), snarling military men, and a pastor, all fervently praying with nationalistic fervor. The point is clear. There’s a toxic blend of corporate, religious, and political corruption gassing each other up and midwifing the apocalypse. It’s what Naomi Klein’s latest book calls End Times Fascism, and Iñárritu’s on the case. He’s never a subtle director, and here the stylistic pyrotechnics and thematic points alike are blasted out with a loud lack of subtlety. All the subtext is buried about half an inch deep at best until scene after scene dusts it off and presents it for our double-underlined awareness. And then (here I’ll be freely discussing what the film takes a half an hour to reveal, so reader beware) it’s revealed that we’re many years after the events in question, and we’re watching tech rehearsal for an improbably technically elaborate stage show revival of a play called Fossil Fools. It’s fools all the way down.

The movie’s a collection of good scenes that never quite cohere. The pale, filmic framing and layered artifice from Emmanuel Lubezki remains beguiling throughout. The actors storm and rage and flail in convincing satiric modes bolstered by thundering dialogue. (The supporting cast also includes Sandra Hüller and Riz Ahmed and Jesse Plemons; it’s a whole movie of scene-stealers given the material to fill their time well.) But the cumulative effect is somehow both too complicated and too obvious to support the architecture around it. We’re placed at a remove both from the story in the story and the frame story. The play never really makes sense as a production, and it’s difficult to see why it appeals to the audience gathering to watch it. Nor do we have enough to understand the people putting on the play—they’re more stock type like Director and Producer and Actor. And being stuck in the theater with them gives us a cramped view of a wider world. It’s a hermetic, caustically angry, omnidirectional cynical movie. That it surges to life on the back of its committed cast and aesthetic curlicues makes it watchable and fascinating, even if never entirely successful. It’s perhaps best viewed as a star text for Cruise, who is, after all, playing his first new character in nearly a decade. He’s both an earnest actor fumbling through backstage family drama—a missing daughter, no less!—and a bloviating deep-fried billionaire trapped in his own mausoleum-like mansion where the only thing his wealth has earned him is isolation and futility. It'll take a dissertation to disentangle all those threads. It’s a movie where you might think appreciating the effortful artistry on display is almost enough to recommend sitting through it. 

After Hours: RESIDENT EVIL

Zach Cregger knows how to communicate a character thinking under pressure. He builds sequences to frame tightening suspense around a figure nervously assessing surroundings and accumulating quick observations. The camera moves with their attention, the editing allowing us to think alongside them. One plus one equals two. We’re drawn into their plight because we’re adding it up, too. The mystery basement and rental confusion of Barbarian and the eerie class disappearance of Weapons are great spaces and dynamics to build his twisty, back-and-forth chronologies that allow revelations to fall into place with tight, satisfying turns. His latest is the fourth attempt to make a live action version of the Resident Evil survival horror zombie video games, following the Milla Jovovich action franchise, a one-off creepy-house reboot, and a one-season Netflix show. Turns out Cregger’s brand of horror filmmaking is perfect for reimagining this world for cinema. He’s consistently demonstrated a light touch, a clever structure, a human sense of peril and nervous laughter. Combined with the active mind behind the framing and pacing, it makes for an involving sense of escalating dread. This ends up being his most narratively straightforward, proceeding in a straight chronological line with one complication following another. 

Our lead is a hospital courier (Austin Abrams) on an overtime run taking a refrigerated bag to the next town over. It’s dangerous enough that it’s a dark and snowy night and the route takes him down a winding rural road. But he’ll soon find out he’s headed straight into a zombie outbreak. We move from the side of the road, to an isolated farmhouse, and onward. A tight focus on a sympathetic protagonist’s chain of thinking and strategizing gives it a constant forward momentum. How’s he going to get out of this one? Each variable slides into place, solving one problem and creating another. Cregger pulls off a kind of magic trick here. It’s a movie that’s so clearly indebted to the process of working level by level through a video game. Cregger even pulls off some first-person shots that flow perfectly into Dariusz Wolski’s fluid cinematography. So although it’s wearing its origins so obviously, it’s also so clearly a movie, with a cinematic sense of pacing and spacing, and a close-up interest in the character whose mind is puzzling through these problems. It delights in performances—from the lead through as fine a collection of one-scene wonders as you’d ever want to see—and in a fun procession of jumping surprises and honest laughs. It’s as likely to startle with a sudden appearance of a monster as it is to find humor in its lead’s stammering disbelief. It adds up to a fast, fun survival story with suitably satisfying cinematic tricks. It’s all technique, but what great technique! 

Have Not: THE UPRISING

There was a good decade where Paul Greengrass was among the most exciting mainstream directors working. He followed up an early career spent in documentaries and British television with some electrifying feature films. He brought a jumpy handheld aesthetic and docudrama realism to overlapping dialogue, matter-of-fact procedure, and intense emotional specificity. He made fact-based re-enactments with propulsive thriller mechanics that shook with a sense of political outrage, showing us an English massacre of Irish protestors in Bloody Sunday, or a hijacked plane on 9/11 in United 93. He added to the realism of his look and tone by casting a mixture of professional actors and amateurs whose day jobs were the roles they portrayed. These are overwhelming effective movies. In another excellent effort he dramatized the takeover of a freighter by pirates, and the daring rescue of the crew, in Captain Phillips, building to star Tom Hanks’ finest few minutes of acting as he decompresses from the trauma. Greengrass also built Matt Damon’s great Bourne franchise, helming three of his four outings as the amnesiac spy trying to piece back together the conspiracy in which he’s a central victim. As writer-director, Greengrass could always be counted on to make films with verisimilitude and direct political engagement. His next group of movies—dreary mass shooting drama 22 July, fine western News of the World, and solid real-life disaster movie The Last Bus—recaptured that magic incompletely. They weren’t without their lesser strengths, but they were movies somehow outside the zeitgeist. 

It’s nice to find that his latest, The Uprising, finds him returning to the appeal of his earlier films, transplanting his aesthetic and thematic concerns to the late Middle Ages for a recounting of the 1381 peasants’ revolt. It’s transparently a movie with modern resonance, with snarling upper class entitlement, encroaching authoritarianism, and fractured political expectation. Is it any wonder he’d be drawn to a movie about a post-plague world stumbling toward economic collapse exacerbated by widening inequality? He films the muddy protestors with bobbing over-the-shoulder following shots and rushing-to-keep-up traveling takes, whip-pans, and snap-zooms. Andrew Garfield plays a humble ploughman who semi-accidentally kicks off the uprising after resisting the onerous new taxes imposed by young tyrant King Richard II (Woody Norman). There are terrific scenes of the downtrodden treading toward London in long lines of protest. They rhyme interestingly with Bloody Sunday’s doomed march, and echo across time when this uprising also reaches a violent conclusion. The movie’s full of character actors young and old (Tom Hollander, Jamie Bell, Cosmo Jarvis, Jonny Lee Miller, Katherine Waterson, and so on) playing period dress-up, and spouting off dialogue that’s largely expositional. The movie remains frustratingly surface-level in this way. It’s all posing picture book history with all the surface grit and none of the characterization that would really make it grow beyond the obvious. Though it nonetheless has effective sequences throughout, it puts them between tedium and obviousness. It also undercuts a fine dreary ending with an epilogue that feels like wishful thinking (and overtly modern thinking) tacked on after the fact. The result is a movie with everything in place for success and then it just slowly deflates instead. I’m still looking forward to the next great Paul Greengrass movie. 

The Watchers: BUDDY and TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA

Two new horror pictures play like media studies seminars. That they manage to be both archly artificial genre commentary and functional entertainments makes for a fun time at the movies. Take Buddy, for instance. It has a great premise. What if there was an episode of Barney where the kid characters start to suspect Barney is a murderer? I can imagine a lot of ways for this hook to go awry. But there’s a total aesthetic commitment to the bit that makes the movie. It plays as a loop of episodes, squared-off, shot-on-video, late-90’s in look and feel. Everything from the primary-color sets, simple melodies, and vintage fashions down to the Comic Sans credits is just right. Buddy is a seemingly affable big orange unicorn mascot, living in a clubhouse on an astroturf soundstage. There he sings songs with and dispenses advice for a small group of kids. There’s a talking mailbox, a bunny in overalls, a nurse, a postman, and a googly-eyed train car. So far so normally absurd. That Buddy’s a murderer slowly reveals itself over the first episode, each subsequent entry becoming more deranged as the kids have to fight back and try to escape. The convincing mix of the form and content sells the curdled nostalgia at its core. 

It becomes a movie about the hidden abuses lurking beneath seemingly innocent programming, an exploded metaphor about what it feels like to watch an old show with fresh knowledge about behind-the-scenes nastiness. (Anyone successfully get through rewatching any random 20-year-old episode of a Nickelodeon sitcom since the documentary about creepy behavior toward those child stars?) The movie’s total absorption in its look and tone, like a nightmare you’d have after falling asleep on the couch with the TV on in the middle of the night, makes sense as the work of writer-director Casper Kelly. You might remember his short film Too Many Cooks, which was a viral sensation in 2014. That was a pitch perfect parody of 80s family sitcom theme songs that went on and on, mutating genres until it broke through the fourth wall into a slasher picture that finally collapsed in existential dread and apocalyptic context collapse. Buddy is a feature length version of the same impulse, stretched out with a few choice intentional swerves out of the style to create some breathing room, but always returning to the chamber of absurdity where laughs of incredulity accompany each splash of blood. 

Writer-director Jane Schoenbrun’s latest, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, is a similar hall of horror mirrors, a long self-reflexive trance state. It’s also about what it’s like to like horror movies, even, and especially, bad ones. It understands the strange formative psychic tremors that the right movie at the right time has on one’s sense of self. Star Hannah Einbinder plays a young director tasked with remaking a problematic cult slasher classic: Camp Miasma. Like the Friday the 13th franchise with a soupçon of Sleepaway Camp, it has a gender-bending villain named Little Death who perpetually wakes up from beneath the lake and goes on a killing spree. Einbinder’s earnest, awkward filmmaker is told to bring the dormant franchise’s views on gender up to date. Flush with an idea, she travels to find the reclusive star of the original (Gillian Anderson with an imperious honey-fried accent) in hopes of talking her into appearing in the reboot. The older woman lives at the abandoned summer camp that was the movie’s filming location. Now, in a matte-painting winter in the middle of nowhere, they have a tense meeting of increasingly entangled psychosexual conversation and bodily awareness. 

In the film’s centerpiece of reflexivity, the two have a discussion about gender, identity, perspective—and sex and violence, or, as the actress says, “flesh and fluids”—before and after screening the original picture. It becomes a film within a film that then further abstracts into muddled memories and flashbacks and sequences. Some feel authentically 80s in their scuzzy graininess. Others get slippery with anachronisms, half-remembered impressions rich with emotional baggage. They embody how horror fans toggle their identification between victim and predator, the penetrated and the perpetrator. If it all sounds artsy and academic, so it is. But it’s also so physical and fraught in its tensions between its leads that it’s hard to shake its dark undertow of confusion and discovery. It’s also constantly winking with meta asides, puncturing but not deflating the heavy mood. If you saw Schoenbrun’s other films you’re familiar with this sense of one’s identity tangled up in the media they consume. In We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, a vulnerable teenage girl gets lost in a spiral of internet influence. In I Saw the TV Glow, lonely teenagers get lost in the lore of a cult series that connects them. Another allegory of displacement and discovery, this new film is their broadest and narrowest, an intimate exposure and disclosure between two women desperate to filter the voids in their lives through the art that shapes them and drives them to new insights into their minds and bodies. 

Spirits Unlocked: INSIDIOUS: OUT OF THE FURTHER

James Wan’s Insidious is one of the great jump scare horror movies. It’s a haunting that leaps out and rattles you with sudden appearances and over-cranked sound design. Some people run down the very idea of a good jolt in a horror picture, calling it cheap and easy way to spike an audience’s attention. But, like all cinema techniques, it’s all in how you deploy it. Compare, for instance, how scary that movie is with how boring its sequels are. It takes a shivery execution and drains it of novelty and fright. It doesn’t help that the premise—a shadowy netherworld called “the further” where demons and spirits congregate hoping to be let into our world, and the living people who can travel there and back again—usually ends up in pretty dull climactic sequences. A sympathetic character wanders what’s essentially a black box theater with a fog machine pumping away off screen. They repeatedly scream the name of the person they’re saving while waving an old-timey lantern. Sometimes ghouls shamble forward and claw at them. It’s all a bit silly, and a bit empty. And this is how four whole sequels have attempted to resolve some standard-issue hauntings! At least the new one, Insidious: Out of the Further, finally comes up with something neat to do with the idea again. 

Writer-director Jacob Chase, new to the series, makes the early going merely a pretty good version of what these movies have done before. A single mom (Amelia Eve) is haunted by these spooky visions and hopes to stop them, and protect her daughter (Island Austin), before she goes totally off the deep end. She’s haunted not just by the spectral beings, but by the memories of her mother (Laura Hall) and her apparent psychotic break twenty years earlier. A psychic tells our lead she has a special gift that’s drawing unwanted ghostly attention. She can bring objects and spirits between these planes of existence and an evil ghost hopes to use her as a conduit to raise his dead acolytes. That’s good stuff! And gives a neat opening for reliable series regular Lin Shaye to reemerge as a spirited guide. (It’s always fun to see a woman above a certain age holding down a horror franchise.) The variables in play give the climax some earthier stakes and the emotional hook of mothers and daughters reconciling across generations and between life and death is nicely done. That our lead’s career in dentistry leads to some skin-crawling tooth business is just an added bonus on the tensions at play. It all adds up to a sixth Insidious that’s easily the best of the series since the original—small praise, perhaps, but a nice surprise, too. 

Working Man: SHELTER and MUTINY

I love that both 90-minute Jason Statham action thrillers released this year are one-word titles, and that they’re each a verb that could also be a noun. It speaks to the steady, sturdy reliability of Statham’s career as an action star. Of course he’ll be thrown into a predicament wherein he has to verb all the nouns until the villainous are dead and the innocent are safe. In Shelter, he’s an ex-military man who has to protect a little girl from a paramilitary conspiracy that wants him dead. In Mutiny, he’s an ex-military man who has to protect human trafficking victims from a corporate conspiracy that wants him dead. Let it not be said that Statham pictures lack range. They’re adept at finding infinite varieties of the same basic plot particulars. He’s been the star of these mid-budget action flicks for about 25 years now. Most of them are somewhere between good and pretty good. At this point it’s safe to say he’s had a longer run of quality control than most stars of his ilk.

I like Shelter’s emotional appeals, with Statham as a man living in exile on a remote British isle to hide from the special forces of which he used to be part, and now forced to care for a friend’s niece after a tragedy leaves her washed up on shore. It’s not exactly novel to see the tough guy melt a little under paternal figure pressures. But the tentativeness with which he plays it, and the deep, reasonable, suspicion the girl holds onto makes it all the more satisfying as they learn to trust each other. He hits some notes of warmth and sensitivity through his usual terse man-of-action gruff competence. And she, played with an unforced naturalism by Bodhi Rae Breathnach, the older girl in Hamnet, is neither too phony adorable nor too ready for violence. The movie’s a happy medium. Director Ric Roman Waugh (Angel Has Fallen) keeps the emotions handled with a light touch while pushing the momentum up. It jumps through some Bourne-adjacent set-pieces with determined hit men in the field and officials in suits stalking around control rooms. It races to exciting, melancholic conclusions, delivering exactly what you’d want from the premise in exactly the right proportions. You can trust Statham to do the right thing, even if it hurts. 

Mutiny is less outwardly emotional, but just as efficient and in a necessarily more contained plot. It’s largely set on a boat and uses every part of the vessel before it’s done. It uses our sense of Statham’s screen presence well. He first turns up at night, backlit in silhouette behind the wheel of a truck. Just from the shape of his head we know it’s him. How’s that for brand recognition? And even though he’s the driver of a vehicle that just purposely hit another, we just know he has a good reason. He’s out for justice. There’s never any doubt. The movie flashes back for some slightly convoluted setup to get his mild-mannered security guard on a cargo boat and in the know of the bad guys’ plot. But once he realizes that these guys murdered his nice CEO boss (suspend your disbelief!) and have shipping containers full of humans to sell, he knows he needs to take them all down. Director Jean-François Richet (Plane) makes crisp, clean use of the setting, and leans on Statham’s persona to fill in the gaps. We just believe he could navigate the tight turns and large pipes, the anchor and the harpoon gun. There are some thinly sketched characters around him, from a slimy captain to a sympathetic third-mate (Annabelle Wallis) to a navy vessel on the phone. But it’s largely his show and it’s fun to see him punch and stab his way through 20 villainous guys. He knows what his audience wants and just keeps delivering.

Girls Meet World: ROOMMATESand DON'T SAY GOOD LUCK

Wordsworth said the child is the father of the man. Consider the case of Adam Sandler. His early movies were certainly childish. They were boyish goofs, crude, rude, and ultimately harmless. They could be fun, too! That at their laziest they grew to become excuses to hang out with buddies on the studio’s dime is just symptomatic of those adolescent impulses. But time marches on. He’s a dad of two grown daughters now. They’re both actresses and he’s used his clout to help get them started. I’m glad he did. They give nepo babies a good name, with screen personas that are winningly sensitive and open-hearted. The older, Sadie, has a slightly distant and deeper vein of irony she’ll play around with. The younger, Sunny, has a more closely-held tremulous innocence. They’re similar instruments playing slightly different notes in the same timber. Their movies also happen to be the most emotionally intelligent Sandler’s Happy Madison productions has made. Turns out these children helped remake the man. It’s clear he’s proud of his daughters, and it’s nice that he holds their screenplays to a higher standard than his own. He co-starred with them in the charming tween comedy You’re So Not Invited to My Bar Mitzvah and they co-starred with him in the shaggy belated Happy Gilmore 2. The parent-daughter material of each elevated the projects, taking the former to terrific and the latter to passable. This summer has each daughter starring in her own movie, each without her father in the cast. Sadie Sandler has college comedy Roommates. Sunny Sandler has high school drama Don’t Say Good Luck. Both films are from terrific indie directors and are fitted perfectly to their strengths. Each has a nicely textured balance between emotional honesty and well-earned laughs, though in different proportions. 

Roommates is an unusually thoughtful college comedy, getting something truthful about friendship struggles into the usual moves for such a picture. It has crude humor, raucous parties, bad behavior, and other expected hijinks. But it also has a sharp understanding of the subtle shifts of power and insecurity in the pressure cooker setting of a freshman dorm room. Sadie Sandler plays a shy girl who never really made friends in high school, pinning her hopes on meeting new people at college. Her roommate (Chloe East) is a confident loose cannon, who wears revealing clothes and boldly struts toward whatever, and whomever, she wants. Sandler is drawn toward her charisma, wanting to be friends, but also a little nervous about her unpredictability. The movie is directed with a bright studio comedy aesthetic married to a perceptive attentiveness to character dynamics. Filmmaker Chandler Levack, whose indies I Love Movies and Mile End Kicks are similar sweet-and-sour character comedies about particular cultural spaces (the video rental store and music journalism, respectively), brings her casually insightful eye to a glossier studio product. She gets really terrific performances out of the cast—both the collegiate pals and adult figures (Natasha Lyonne, Nick Kroll, Janeane Garofalo, Carol Kane). Sandler makes an intensely sympathetic figure; we see why she’d want to go along out of her comfort zone, but it makes each little heartbreak all the more impactful. But it’s East—you might recognize her as one of the trapped missionaries in Heretic or Sammy’s Christian girlfriend in The Fabelmans—who makes the most out of what a lesser comedy would make a mere whirling dervish of party girl energy. Instead she brings out a brittle fragility just barely hidden beneath the bravado. It’s something her impressed new roomie easily misses until it’s too late. The movie gets a little broad and silly at times—the finale and frame story are especially goofy—but it never loses that believable core. 

Although it’s ultimately a tearjerker of a drama, Don’t Say Good Luck has some traditional high school comedy moves. It has warmly funny theater kid supporting players, some wise supportive teachers, and a sweet sentimental family life to surround Sunny Sandler’s main character. She’s a teenager excited to get the lead role in her school musical production of Waitress and is prepping for a hectic practice schedule. And then her mom gets a potentially fatal diagnosis. The movie becomes a breezy movie of usual high school problems consistently undercut by jackknifing emotional intrusions. Sudden jabbing grief cuts deep into what should be quotidian teenage concerns, making every usual problem—crushes, homework, friend drama—both heightened by her emotional rawness and diminished in comparison to the literal life and death problems at home. It’s a potent mix, getting some laughs in amid the gut-punch dramatic moments. As the mother, Melanie Lynskey brings such a deep well of maternal energy channeled into a fluttering between fear for herself and care for her family. And it’s all the more moving for her underplaying the lines that a heavier hand would’ve turned mawkish. Similarly, the movie as a whole, benefits from a gentle lived-in look and tone. It’s not a simple movie of Brave Suffering or a mere march through realistic misery. It’s just charmingly real in a polished studio movie way, refreshingly honest about the rough edges and crosscurrent pressures of its believable situations. As the mother’s condition worsens and the show’s opening night grows closer, you can start to see the outlines of moving moments ahead. But when it steers hard into them, it pays off with a succession of lump-in-the-throat scenes that are deeply felt and honestly portrayed. (If you’re already aware the songs in Waitress are moving, just wait for the climactic deployment here.) Director Julia Hart (Stargirl) knows how to make a small-scale, big emotion, broadly appealing movie, and trusts her cast to pull it off with subtle, but no less devastating, impact. She knows it’ll feel good to have such a genuine cry. 

Dino Might: THE END OF OAK STREET

We used to regularly have big summer special effects pictures with a light touch, lots of surprises, and a neat conclusion. The End of Oak Street makes it look so easy you’ll wonder why they've gone the way of the...well....dinosaur. If only all of its ilk were so simple and satisfying. Writer-director David Robert Mitchell’s working with an irresistible premise delivered quickly and confidently. It’s thin, but pays out with big results. The idea is this: a block of suburban Michigan is zapped from 1982 back to prehistoric times. The escalation is expertly handled from the early quotidian unease (maybe it’s just a power outage!), to the slow reveals (oh, it’s definitely not!), to the climactic tumbling out of variables that are both surprising and inevitable. We follow one family (mom Anne Hathaway, dad Ewan McGregor, and two teenagers) as they try to survive dinosaurs roaming their neighborhood. How do they get out of this predicament when their neighbors are getting chomped, and there seems to be no way home? The suspense is obvious here, but it’s no less exciting to see enormous creatures wandering down the asphalt, rummaging in trash cans, slipping through the forest, and towering over homes. What kid in a dinosaur phase hasn’t looked out the car window and wondered what that’d look like? The movie has the energy of imaginative wonderment driven into lean, effective survival thriller plotting. 

The movie has a playful mean streak and a sentimental core, a fun mix that works like jet fuel for its sequences’ thrills. No one’s safe from getting chomped, and the movie’s love of its lead family makes us flinch with every close call. Every time an enormous creatures comes stalking through the background of a shot is as effective as the last. (Watch out!) And each solution leads to another problem in fine roller coaster style. I enjoyed its overall sense of one-thing-after-another that works through every complication with gusto. And I appreciated the seriousness with which the characters take their dilemmas. They have doubts and stress, they slip and flail, they trial and error, they might even wet themselves when an enormous reptile is repeatedly slamming its head into the front door. But they also are animated by a clear love of one another that gets only tighter the more their lives threaten to slip away. That’s consistent with Mitchell’s strength with actors. He’s gotten earnest authenticity out of everything from awkward teen dramedy (The Myth of the American Sleepover) to arty horror (It Follows) and zany conspiracy thriller (Under the Silver Lake). And it’s consistent with the ease he has establishing widescreen mood and space while delineating high concepts. That’s enough on which to hang a quick and exciting genre picture. No need to load it up with extra metaphors or complicated twists. Just set it up cleanly and clearly, populate it with believable types, and let the blood start pumping. It may not be especially deep, but it’s a lot of fun. 

Web Sight: SPIDER-MAN: BRAND NEW DAY

Spider-Man: Brand New Day is the most straightforwardly entertaining Marvel movie in quite some time. It has no multiversal shenanigans or television tie-ins. It’s just a story about colorful characters colliding in the concrete canyons of New York City. Turns out Spidey’s at his best when he’s swinging between skyscrapers. That’s not to say the movie is without its Cinematic Universe trappings. It gets cluttered up with cameos and references and gives over most of its plotting in the back half to what is effectively a backdoor pilot for future comic book storylines with another character entirely. And yet it works pretty well, dovetailing with Peter Parker (Tom Holland) struggling with identity, while fueling some clever action sequences. We get lots of vignettes of crime-fighting, an attempt to stop a hijacked tank rumbling through the streets, a couple psychic chase scenes, and even some hopping among ninjas. Best is one that zips up, down, around, out, and through the top levels of a towering building while Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) and Punisher (Jon Bernthal) alternately help and hurt our main hero. It does a good job juggling variables, and heights. Finally we get one of these MCU Spider-Man movies getting the full vertiginous effect out of his hometown. Even the establishing shots of magic hour skylines or twinkling nighttime windows have some much-needed specificity that the increasingly hermetic green screens and volume video walls lacked in previous entries. (It doesn’t always feel like New York, but it generally feels like a real city streets. Progress!) Is it setting the bar too low to say this one always looks and plays out like a real movie?

It helps that the focus is on Spider-Man himself, even in the midst of all the walk-ons, foreshadowing, references, and loose threads. He’s center stage here; other heroes are clear supporting players in his story. He’s put through an emotional trial, grieving a death from the previous film, as well as recovering from the aftermath of the spell that caused everyone to forget Peter Parker. The citizens still love Spidey, but he’s never been more alone. He’s in constant action, and losing his sense of self. The balance between those ideas is held well in Holland’s body language. He’s a believably more mature and stressed superhero than his high school days. And it’s held in the tone and style, which director Destin Daniel Cretton is well-equipped to pull off from his experience with both outsized acrobatics (Shang-Chi) and small character studies (Short Term 12). He gets good milage out of the chemistry with Zendaya’s MJ, strained by her not knowing their history but sparkling all the same. And he digs into a mysterious quasi-villain played by Sadie Sink, who gets some terrific scenes, even if they often wink and nod in the direction other movies might take. (If they stick to their burgeoning metaphors in later entries, they might be onto something.) The movie is doing a lot, and suffers a bit for it, but it’s intending more of a sampler platter to go along with its core Spidey splash panels. It also manages to not devolve into CG nonsense for its climax, finding instead character-driven motivations and payoffs to root its effects. It’s all pretty entertaining. I’d almost forgotten what it was like to enjoy one of these. 

Coming Home: THE ODYSSEY

Christopher Nolan loves to play with time. Think about the dual timelines of Oppenheimer, the three speeds of Dunkirk, the backwards-and-forwards in Tenet, the dream levels in Inception, and relativity in Interstellar. So of course a part of Homer’s Odyssey that appeals to him is structural. Here’s a story that starts with an absence: Odysseus is gone. It’s been twenty years since he left for the Trojan War and, though his wife and son have long ago heard that the conflict has ended, he’s yet to return home. The son (Tom Holland) sneaks away from his mother (Anne Hathaway) and heads out to discover what happened to his father (Matt Damon). The story of his father’s leaving is told by a blind old man (John Leguizamo). An explanation of what happened during that absence is partially filled in by anecdotes from those who were at Troy and since made it home. It’s also filled in with Odysseus’ recollections of his travels, recounted on a remote island to a mysterious woman (Charlize Theron) as the words of a broken man slowly reawakening to his own memories. There’s also, in a nod to the original work’s oral tradition, a bard (Travis Scott) who gets the first words in the film: A face. A fleet. A war. A man. It’s his “sing to me of a man of twists and turns…” The movie feels suitably big and sprawling. The big budget’s on the screen. But because of its winding and familiar narrative, and the ways in which the telling holds back the emotions, Nolan’s typical momentum here draws slack as Odysseus’ crew gets lost and the chronology aligns. 

It ends up one of Nolan’s most straight-forward narratives, a recounting of several of the epic poem’s most famous sequences: the Trojan horse, encounters with giants, sirens, sea monsters, a witch, a cyclops, the dead. It’s given the full over-sized Nolan effect. The cast is jam-packed with recognizable faces doing solid work in every small role. The frames of IMAX film stock are towering and detailed with extras and effects. The landscapes and waterways are vast and real. (We’re never far from the roar and expanse of the wine-dark sea.) The soundtrack pounds away with repetitive deep bass and tense strings. And the film stretches to nearly three hours, winding its long way to the expected climactic homecoming confrontation. Along the way, the film smooths over some of the original text’s thornier elements, while introducing new notes of darkness and ambiguity (or muddling) all its own. Nolan makes the gods largely absent, but the monsters very real, and the effects of each moral failing fraught. It becomes a down-beat journey through a movie about loss and disappointment, about suffering the consequences of one’s actions and struggling to find honor and acceptance in troubled times. It finds uneasy answers, opting to give a bit of relational hope in its final moments even as the larger picture of civilization seems poised to topple. It evokes a certain amount of melancholy to have ancient Greeks talk about “living in ruins.” This Odysseus is full of regrets, feeling deeply the poems early lines that promise “he could not save [his people] from disaster…” In bringing this ancient story back to life, Nolan seems to be making a case for recognizing the damage in breaking old societal bonds for short-term gains, and how it leaves us all lost, fighting back to level from disaster. That may not be fully Homer, but it’s definitely now. How’s that for playing with time?

Moving Pictures: LUMIÈRE LE CINÉMA! andMINIONS & MONSTERS

We can always count on the French to do their part in keeping cinephilia alive. Thierry Frémaux takes us back to the dawn of the movies with his documentary Lumière, Le Cinéma! The form of the film couldn’t be more simple. The effect could not be more illuminating or entrancing. It’s a collection of late-19th century short films by the Lumière brothers, played one after the next without interruption. Frèmaux narrates, contextualizing and analyzing what we see. This is part of his ongoing project of researching and restoring the Lumières’ works. Those pioneers of cinema are perhaps best known today for two films: The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station and Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory in Lyon. The apocryphal story of the audience leaping out of the way of the oncoming train has taken on a position as the mythic Birth of Cinema. You don’t need to think of the imaginary audience. Look at what’s really there on screen. The documentary realism of the camera’s witness of both machines and people locate these two shorts squarely in the time of the industrial revolution, and set a standard for the camera as observer that carries us through today. Together these shorts tell us a helpful story about the appeal of the movies. They provoke strong reactions. They take us places we may never go and show us people we’d never meet. 

The magic of these formative images is compounded by the truth of their making and their context within a body of work. Not content to repeat those greatest hits, Frèmaux’s patient pace and thorough explanations take us through more formative moments captured on shimmering celluloid—early comedic conceits, gymnastic stunts, home movies, anthropological travelogue. What an expansion of our understanding of their contributions! We see people behaving so naturally in front of the camera, our only opportunity to see people who have no context for what it means to be recorded in this way. We see machines in all their new might, whirring gears and moving parts. We see a window into an old world ending, and a new one arriving. Here’s cinema—the personal and the mechanical, the head and the heart, the documentary and the fantasy—as it’s born. Frèmaux, as artistic director of the Cannes Film Festival, already helps shape contemporary film culture. With this film he pays reverence to the early black and white frames that got us here. To let these shorts wash over you is to clean out your eyes and see moving images afresh.

But what if, when you saw the workers leaving the factory, there were a couple Minions there, too? If you, like me, are already laughing imagining a couple of those goggle-eyed, overalls-wearing, mostly-hairless squishes waddling out alongside turn-of-the-century factory workers, then you get the appeal of Minions & Monsters. The seventh entry of an animated series usually spells creative exhaustion. Instead this movie is the best one yet, and by quite a large margin. Pierre Coffin, director, co-writer, and voice of the eponymous little guys, has taken the opportunity to proudly place his creations as shimmering, glowing stars in the Hollywood firmament. The movie follows a heretofore untold tribe of the Minions who, lost on their centuries-long quest to find a Big Boss to serve, end up in 1920s Hollywood. After a raucous slapstick tumble through the streets, during which they interrupt the filming of a Charlie Chaplin, a Harold Lloyd, and a Buster Keaton film, they end up impressing the heads of a studio with their silliness and pluck. It makes perfect sense they’d be instant silent comedy stars themselves. 

They have an inexhaustible persistence of juvenile spirit, and a seemingly immortal capacity to take and enact cartoon pain and just keep going. There’s always destruction ahead of them and unintended chaos behind them. Popular comic conceits in any time! But, with their Minionese language, they’re left behind in the transition to talkies. Hoping to make a creature feature comeback, a trio of Minions filmmakers summon some cute, but dangerous, Lovecraftian monsters to play the antagonists. So they’re risking the end of the world, or at least Los Angeles. But they’re making cinema! There’s something so pure about these particular Minions’ drive to create movie magic it’s easy to root for them. So it’s a movie about The Movies, a mad jumble of references and influences done as bouncy cartoony joyousness for showbiz history, riffing on countless classics in a gleeful and affectionate way. (You’ll never forget Minion Charles Foster Kane’s dying word.) And it also appreciates the act of creativity’s dual purpose as personal satisfaction and community building. Isn’t nice when a movie loves being a movie? And this one wears it with genuine lightness. Here’s a celebration of moviemaking through being every kind of movie. It’s ultimately an animated slapstick comedy, a satirical period piece, a western, a monster movie, a let’s-put-on-a-show picture, a fantasy, a robot movie, a UFO movie, a behind-the-scenes movie-within-a-movie, and, of course, a Minions movie. Here they’ve risen to their highest potential, unleashed to be a pure mad gag-a-minute delight from first frame to last. To be a real cinephile is to recognize that, to paraphrase Ratatouille, great movies can come from anywhere. And isn’t that why we keep going?

Double Deutch: VOICEMAILS FOR ISABELLE and GAIL DAUGHTRY AND THE CELEBRITY SEX PASS

Here’s an interesting case study in modern movie distribution. Sony has two comedies starring Zoey Deutch this summer. You might recognize her from supporting roles in Zombieland: Double Tap or Juror #2 or Nouvelle Vague or from confusing her with Haley Lu Richardson. She can make for a sweet and believable center of a movie when given the chance. Of her two starring roles this year, one’s in a straightforward romantic comedy with a traditional blend of charm and sentiment. It’s sturdy crowd-pleasing, pushing all the right buttons. The other’s in an arch alt-comedy riff that transposes The Wizard of Oz into a goofy R-rated joke. It’s deliberately niche, a cult item at best. Which one has been sent straight to Netflix via Sony’s deal with the streamer, and which hit theaters through their boutique Sony Pictures Classics label? Both could’ve found an audience on the big screen. But it’s strange to find the broadly appealing picture is the one you can play from the couch right now. 

If you did you’d find Voicemails for Isabelle is a reasonably effective version of its kind. Deutch plays an aspiring chef trying to survive a tough kitchen run by Nick Offerman. She calls her sister all the time to share the details of her life. They’ve done that since childhood since the younger girl is housebound with an illness and lives vicariously through her big sister’s adventures. When the sister dies, Deutch keeps calling, but the number has been reassigned to the new phone of a yuppie (Nick Robinson) who falls in love with the mystery caller. So he doesn’t message her to let her know it’s now a wrong number just to continue eavesdropping on her life. Eventually he has to meet her. From the premise you can already see the broad strokes of where the plot will go—manipulated Meet Cute to dating montages to revelation to reconciliation. The leads are charming with some sweet chemistry. It gives just enough sparkle to the familiar beats. But where the movie really lifts above routine is the sister relationship, fleshed out in early flashbacks and then lingering throughout the movie as a glossy but honest expression of grief and mourning. Writer-director Leah McKendrick has a light and often routine movie here, with pop music and little quips throughout. It tilts toward glossy phoniness, but remains sensitive with attention to the sisters. It’s the most believable relationship in the movie, and hits hard when gone. That makes the lightness of the surrounding movie all the more of an uplift, and a fantasy. 

Far stranger, though, is Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass. Writer-director David Wain’s penchant for absurdity and vulgarity is an acquired taste. I quite like his loopy rom-com parody They Came Together, commune satire Wanderlust, and his raunchy man-child comedy Role Models. This one isn’t in that league.  Maybe it’s the ugly digital look, and awkward combination of high-concept winking, sitcom punchlines, and occasional violence and flatulence.(Maybe it’s the severe lack of Paul Rudd, the star of all those earlier pictures.) Regardless I found Gail Daughtry more theoretically funny than actually funny, with the kind of humor you watch silently registering the technical forms of the jokes while rarely rising to level of actual enjoyment. Deutch plays Gail, our Dorothy. The red shoes are a tip off. She’s a naive Kansan hairdresser about to marry a dopey guy next door. They jokingly discuss the hoary concept of the celebrity sex pass. He has a crush on Jennifer Aniston. She’s hot for Jon Hamm. Well, turns out the fiancé actually goes and hooks up with Aniston, which really gets Gail mad. When she’s off on a work trip to L.A. her buddy (Miles Gutierrez-Riley) convinces her to seek out Hamm and do the deed. True to Oz, she meets a collection of misfits on her trip: an absent-minded agent-in-training (Ben Wang), a paparazzo whose heart’s not in it (Ken Marino), and a cowardly John Slattery. There’s also a wicked mob boss (Sabrina Impacciatore) and her flunkies. The whole tone is pitched at a preposterous broad shtick, like a straight John Waters. The actors are committed to the straight-faced absurdity, and there are a few real laughs along the way. (I liked the assistant whose only threat is that he’ll “make you sick!”) But it’s so conceptual and airless that it never fully comes to life. 

His Kryptonian Cousin: SUPERGIRL

Supergirl got dinged for the same exact things that have made other—better received!—superhero movies underwhelming over the last decade. It’s thinly imagined, visually sludgy, narratively limp, and loaded with gobs of bland special effect chaos trying to gin up excitement. For a comic book movie its locations and populations are as sparse and overfamiliar as its story. Hop across the galaxy and everywhere looks the same, listens to American songs, and is inhabited by human (or human-ish) people. But what somehow punches through this blandness is Supergirl herself. We met Milly Alcock’s Supergirl when she crashed into the end of last year’s Superman to pick up her super-dog Krypto from big cousin Clark Kent. She made a fast fun impression with a disheveled and irreverent youthful energy. Now starring in her own movie, Alcock continues along those lines, playing the 23-year-old Kara’s sense of cosmic displacement as a version of post-collegiate malaise. It’s a fetching combo befitting a melancholy lark. It has just enough going for it to make its all the more disappointing to watch it fall into cliche—cartoony violence, gentle quips, pop music cues, and an overall dilution of a fun take on a cool character through monotonous moves. 

Supergirl is pretty super, though. She knows her powers, and her responsibility, but she’s trying to dull the senses and ignore her calling. She preferred checking out to stepping up. We catch her touring planets with red suns, since they sap her invincibility and allow her to get drunk. Yet we see she has good core virtue. In finely rendered pulp backstory we see the destruction of her home planet Krypton through the eyes of her father. (David Krumholtz plays him, radiating compassion while emoting through a nonsense language.) He instills in her a goodness that her stumbling can’t erase. And it’s there when she needs it when an orphaned girl asks for help getting revenge on space pirates who killed her family. The movie really is that simple, a single arrow shot straight to its target. But the movie doesn’t quite match that potential, giving her a rote plot of meager spectacle and moral muddle to enact. (How does she spend the whole movie preaching against vengeful violence and then—spoiler!—kill the villain after she could easily have taken him to space jail?) Throughout, from story beats to set design, it makes the expected choice every time. It’s the sort of movie where even the surprises aren’t that surprising. Alcock is so lovable, and her backstory so sympathetic, that it’s easy to root for her. But it’s hard to keep one’s interest afloat when she’s punching bad guys in slow motion in the middle of a swirling cloud of CGI. It’s enough to make one wish she could fly off into a better movie. Critics and trolls pretending this is a calamity are mistaken. It’s just more of the same.

Child's Play: TOY STORY 5

Toy Story 5 could’ve been a smartly updated retelling of the original’s replacement anxieties. You'd think being directed and co-written by WALL-E's Andrew Stanton, who has a writing credit on the whole series so far, would help. Pitched as toys versus tech, it starts with the dolls and figurines in Bonnie’s room freaking out about a new addition: a tablet. The Leapfrog knockoff Lilypad instantly captures the 8-year-old’s days, leaving the toys in the dust. Unfortunately, Lilypad (Greta Lee) never becomes much of a distinct character, with little personality and a character arc that’s foreshortened in two quick reversals late in the game. So, instead of the inciting incident kicking off jostling egos among the familiar faces of returning characters facing off against the interloper, cowgirl Jessie (Joan Cusack, a delight and given all the best moments) takes it upon herself to get Bonnie better friends than the mean girl cyberbullies the tablet attracts. This sends her off hither and yon in an attempt to save their kid’s feelings, and of course Buzz (Tim Allen) and Woody (Tom Hanks) give chase. But the whole thing feels much more cramped and less detailed than the series usually manages. It’s a bland working-over of over-worked tech fears that ends up being more of a pat on the head for harried millennial parents—saying it’s okay to give them tech as long as you check in on their social media messages once in great while. It never takes off into a clever kids’ adventure or engaging object lesson that it could be. 

There is a neat distinction drawn between gaming and playing and the greater social benefit of the latter—it’s nice to see Bonnie make a real friend—but the movie is so focused on the kids’ emotional well-being that it forgets to be much of a toy story. The classic ensemble doesn't even get much in the way of dialogue, punchlines, or story, and the new characters are one-note jokes. My struggling interest finally gave up sometime between Jessie using web-connected toys to manipulate two kids into a play date and a fleet of drones carrying the main cast of plastic beings off to the rescue. I guess I just don’t think toys should be doing all that. This entry in the venerable series—hitherto Pixar’s best!—takes it too far away from neurotic playthings and pushes well past the suspension of disbelief into making them meddling Defenders of Real Childhood. I missed the interest in the frictions and eccentricities of the toy’s personalities and the existential questions about one’s purpose. Here there’s just too little room for interest in their toy society when there’s more time spent on didactically weighing in on ours. Even attempts to connect to the series’ most moving moments—consciously echoing lines and scenes from earlier pictures’ highlights—plays as hollow repetition instead of enriching the emotional texture. Compared to the aesthetic and thematic complications of the previous sequels, which somehow manage to push the detail of the animation and psychology of the characters while maintaining a consistent look and tone in the childish whimsy, this one is all too thin and simple.

Out There: DISCLOSURE DAY

Disclosure Day barely functions as legible paperback thriller plotting, but it is a feast for Steven Spielberg auteurists. It’s a layered work of visual thinking and thematic exploration that’s a buffet of recurring ideas and preoccupations from throughout his oeuvre. And all that plays out as a backdrop for a pretty flimsy central narrative. It makes the movie a totally fascinating experience, and a sometimes distancing one, an open-hearted intellectual and intuitive exercise keeping a chintzy chase picture afloat. Put simply: it’s a MacGuffin chase for stolen government secrets. (There’s also a magic stick, the properties of which shift for the needs of the plot.) The hidden truths within are as follows: aliens exist and the government is covering it up. That’s a little underwhelming after his Close Encounters' transcendent finale of music and science, and E.T.’s fleeting intergalactic friendship, and War of the Worlds’ harrowing invasion and biological protection. Spielberg’s been here before. In Disclosure Day, the characters are ideas. We have Josh O’Connor as a man with a backpack full of USBs containing leaked footage. He’s Technology: research, math, the hard facts. We have Emily Blunt as a TV weatherperson, usually reading the forecasts but now fearful as she finds herself becoming a conduit for brain-scrambling languages and interpersonal connection. She’s The Media: communication, empathy, the messenger. Together they make both halves of the whole message from outer space. They have to avoid the shadowy suit (Colin Firth) who doesn’t want the secrets out. He’s the System. To short-circuit his private army, our heroes need help along the way from another whistleblower (Colman Domingo) who’s orchestrating the big reveal. He’s building a simulacrum from which to trigger their latent memories. He’s Art. The chase also involves a lapsed nun (Eve Hewson). She’s Philosophy, Theology. “You haven’t lost your faith in God,” she’s told by a wise elder nun (Elizabeth Marvel). “You’ve lost your faith in people.” 

So it is that the movie’s about alienation in all senses of the word. It’s set in our modern world where we suspect that there’s more to the official story about most everything, but many aren’t convinced the truth will make a difference. It’s Spielberg spinning a metaphorical web so quickly and masterfully, with such a vivid mess of intentions and references, that it can’t help but skate over some yawning plot holes in the process. His fluid camera teases and traverses spaces, separates and joins perspectives, locked into who sees or knows what and when, easily slipping between perceived realities. It’s a movie that’ll be far too open-hearted for the incorrigible pedantic quibblers in the audience. Spielberg is using the raw materials of his most crowd-pleasing popcorn pictures to make something deep and strange. But it’s an honest movie, and one that risks silliness at most every turn. And, sure enough, the characters are flatly representational and all the running around doesn’t add up to much for which it’s worth investing. But in the high-gloss B-movie mess of it all, Spielberg’s really making a movie about the power of movies to show us what’s really important—a fiction that takes us to deeper truths. This one opens in media res with a smeary digital image—an elbow to the ribs from our master filmmaker—that’s immediately contextualized as diagetic camerawork at a cheap phony wrestling match. It’s a parodical muscle man in red and another in blue playacting conflict for a cheering, jeering, invested crowd. The real conflict happens in the shadow behind them—a confrontation between the leaker and the forces who wish to stomp out his message. 

The movie’s wandering chase sequences and flat exposition then build up to a finale that’s all about listening. It has some of his crisp cross-cutting and Movie Star awestruck gazes and some screens-within-screens of CG effects. But the emotionality rests entirely on a TV reporter played by Courtney Grace, a relatively unknown actress who pulls it off with astonishing work as she narrates for her audience through an array of heightened confusion, wonder, bewilderment, and context collapse. It’s a moving moment of processing the unimaginable in real time. It’s not so much about what she, and we, see in those moments. (What’s actually there teeters on the edge of silly cliche.) It’s about the human connection in that moment, bound together by something real, for once. Spielberg wants us to really listen, to understand each other. To hear a truth is the start of enlightenment. He believes it to the point of transcendence—math and art, mind and heart, The Fabelmans of his own making. It’s that reconciliation that breaks down our all-too-human isolation, between nations, between individuals, and within our own heads. He thinks we need to believe—in a higher power, in the potential to move beyond our selfish fears, in the transformative possibilities of witnessing together. He believes in cinema. He believes in UFOs. He wants to believe. He’s our greatest living filmmaker. His movies are usually airtight and precisely calibrated to function at a high level, on multiple levels, while pleasing crowds. This one dares to fall apart in personal, idiosyncratic moments that resolve in ways only Spielberg’s instincts could pull off. The real disclosure here is his own. 

He's the Man: MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE

I agree with the filmmakers behind the new Masters of the Universe that there’s something a little embarrassing about adults wanting to seriously play with action figures, especially if we’re talking something as silly as 80’s cartoon hero He-Man. Put away childish things and all that. Here’s a story about a scantily clad muscle man with a big sword. He lives in the mythical kingdom of Eternia. He defends it alongside sidekicks with enormous fists or retractable necks. One’s a talking tiger. They’re constantly fighting an evil skeleton man named Skeletor who almost, but never quite, wins. I recognize it has a lot of nostalgia for people of the micro-generation for whom Saturday mornings imprinted its discount fantasy fiction, adventure serial charms. It’s all pretty silly. But if you’re going to do it, just do it. Be embarrassing and it’ll be fun. Director Travis Knight (mostly of stop-motion Laika movies) is almost there. It’s certainly better than the late-80’s live-action attempt, which spent its time in our world, hedging its bets. This one starts in a charmingly artificial CG Eternia and takes the backstory just seriously enough to get some emotive tropes going amid the phoniness. It makes some smart moves. It’s bright and fantastical. It has vibrant, colorful effects. It has an epic orchestral score including a screaming electric guitar part for Queen’s Brian May. (Flash Gordon much?) It has a stacked straight-faced supporting cast (Idris Elba, Camila Mendes, Alison Brie, and so on) in cartoony costumes. It has a naive beefcake leading role (Nicholas Galitzine’s been hitting the gym) and a plot that actually wants to engage in discourse about modern masculine ideals. Poor little Prince Adam is sent to Earth for his protection, but memories of his home realm cause him to search for a portal where he’ll become the He-Man he’s meant to be. 

It’s a pretty standard hero’s journey, and the plot moves are predictable, but have a Saturday matinee appeal. And yet the movie’s held back by its embarrassment. It keeps sheepishly joking about its lore, teasing its cartoon jargon and juvenile naming conventions and toyetic tech. It also has a nervous tick in the dialogue in the back half that undercuts the boys’ adventure spirit with smarmy double- or (worse still) single-entendres out of all that. That’s too bad. It’s Mattel’s second attempt at making a movie out of a product line. Their first was Greta Gerwig’s Barbie. This one nearly achieves the masculine to that film’s feminine. It’s about a fantasy world with a porous literal and ideological boundary separating it from ours. It’s about messages kids receive from these plastic figures, albeit these of muscles and violence, and from our current culture’s competing poles of toxic masculinity and bland corporate culture. (The latter teeters on the edge of cynical confusion.) And then it substitutes a false maleness of might-makes-right for a more empathetic and understanding sense of justice and duty. (It even has the male equivalent of the America Ferrera monologue.) There’s a lot to like. It was clearly not made unthinkingly. There’s craft and passion here. And it has a ripped guy in a leather skirt that shows off his massive thighs and rippling abs. And he punches a skeleton man into dust. So why’s the movie embarrassed to be exactly that? I wanted to have fun, but the movie kept shrinking from its fullest expression.