The Power Broker: MEGALOPOLIS

How small our imaginations and expectations have grown as a culture if we have no room to accommodate something as grand and singular—for better and for worse—as Megalopolis. Francis Ford Coppola’s first film in over a decade, a passion project he partially financed himself, is a long, rambling, sometimes hallucinatory narrative set among the powerful in a city that’s somehow simultaneously modern New York and ancient Rome—New Rome. It’s a warped funhouse mirror of our present’s problems, and a cockeyed rearview mirror of problems we’ve had since ancient times. It’s a big swing, full of ungainly ideas and vivid juxtapositions. You’ll never quite guess what you’ll be seeing or hearing next. This has been greeted with sighs by some who seem preemptively exasperated by the financial folly the project represents. It’s so uncommercial they say; it’s so unusual and confused and messy. Others seem to greet it with schadenfreude, somehow gleeful at the supposed downfall of a once-great filmmaker. They seem to find it laughable that a master director in his mid-80s would dare try to make something bold and wild and weird—something so unmistakably his own, every idiosyncratic idea honestly intended. Indeed, this is a movie that’ll challenge conceptions of conventionality. It’s too direct and flat and ungainly to be called a mainstream narrative. It’s full of posturing and speechifying, theatrical symbolism and pulp philosophy, thudding narration and aloofly schematic emotionality. But it’s also too arch and vulgar and full of wriggly low humor and with passages of bewildering narrative density to be purely schematic art film. It refuses to fit neatly into any box other than, perhaps, this: a modern Francis Ford Coppola experience.

That din you hear when the mind fills up as the film unspools is the noise of every Coppola movie happening at once. Here’s a man who directed a little bit of everything: from a Warner Brothers musical to a 3D nudist movie, from a scrappy Corman horror picture to lavish all-star literary adaptations, from epic, luxuriously filmic period pieces to tiny, high-contrast experimental digital indies. Here’s a career that stretches the whole breadth and scope of American movies from the end of the studio system to whatever we call now. With Megalopolis, he’s giving it all back to us at once in one heterogeneous mixture. It’s the family saga of The Godfather and the special effects extravaganza of Dracula and the artifice of One from the Heart and the resourcefulness of a Dementia 13 and the self-portraiture of Tucker and the deeply personal superimpositions of Twixt and the scope of Apocalypse Now and the slapdash comedy of You’re a Big Boy Now and so on. But it’s also a mad jumble of other inspirations or comparison points—a carousing Felliniesque city of appetites; a Fritz Lang Metropolis of big, blocky metaphors; a Cecil B. DeMille epic of Golden Idols and fallen angels; a Star Wars prequel of green-screen politics and emotional constipation; a hodgepodge of anachronisms like Julie Taymor’s Titus; a Richard Kelly dystopia of disordered modernity. It’s filmed in an unreal honeyed glaze, with characters who pontificate and pronounce more than dialogue, and a storyline that’s a work of grubby modern scheming scandal and prejudice shot through with a vaguely classical sense of stakes and design.

We meet a troubled artist: an arrogant city planner (Adam Driver) who dreams of building a better future with glowing sci-fi public transit and a fabulous downtown bustling with life. That he might need to demolish areas of New Rome makes some forces upset. (He’s Robert Moses meets Hippodamus of Miletus.) Driver plays up the sanctimony and impetuous ego and the troubled, druggy, playboy image he both indulges and resists. And he’s just one of many in a powerful web of family and entanglements. His lover (Nathalie Emmanuel) is the daughter of the loathed Mayor (Giancarlo Esposito). His Machiavellian party-boy cousin (Shia LaBeouf) is the troubled son of the city’s sleazy top banker (Jon Voight). Even his driver (Laurence Fishburne) has an important role: he’s a witness and a philosopher—a historian behind the wheel who narrates, sometimes in phrases chiseled in stone. There’s also a sneaky TV personality named Wow Platinum who plays up her shamelessness (Aubrey Plaza) and a pop star who plays up her purity (Grace VanderWaal). They’re all Power Brokers, trying to grow their influence and leave legacies, consolidate power, or use theirs to build a future. The figures strut like Roman politicos—with laurels and robes for Senators and Vestal Virgins alike—and appear on talk shows or in City Hall. They shout pseudo-Shakespearian speeches—and sometimes the real thing—through bullhorns and microphones and show up for chariot races in Madison Square Garden. It’s boldly iconographic, and interpersonally messy, high culture and low conflict colliding and kaleidoscoping, often enveloping and maddening.

It’s so much: political intrigue swamps idealistic agendas; a nuclear satellite is crashing to earth; a Deep Fake makes a phony scandal; there’s a new element that allows for fantastic creations; there are assassinations and uprisings and parades and concerts and telethons and press conferences—including an actual question from the audience, if you’re so lucky—and hostile takeovers and sex jokes and incestuous allusions and off-screen murder mysteries and cross-dressing and magical realism and tearful confessions and oddball line-readings and elaborate sets and gloriously fake backdrops and split-screens and montages and a score somewhere between a flourish of brass and an electronic pulse. It has computer-generated visions and concept art paintings and historical footage—like Hitler and 9/11—and flubbed lines and living statues and spinning newspaper headlines and a rewritten Pledge of Allegiance. Does it have clear politics? No, but it has the suggestion of them. Does it have philosophical perspective or insight? Sort of. All of that is a strange stew of half-formed impulses informed by its historical mishmash and a host of name-dropped oddities, like a scene in which a father and daughter bond by quoting Marcus Aurelius, or when a man arrogantly refers to his “Emersonian mind.” It certainly has style. It’s freed of the idea of telling a coherent story or legibly tracking character’s motivations or building conventional setups and payoffs. We’re left with a balance of the banal and the transcendent, as its enormous cast is full of figures who drift in and out of focus with the thematic web ultimately a justification for its metatextual melancholic hope in amorphous striving. Here’s where someone might exasperatedly ask: but is it good? Well, that’s complicated. It’s certainly nothing less than exactly what it wants to be. The result is disorienting, befuddling filmmaking. It’s not easy to recommend, but it’s hard to forget. I watched it knowing that I’ll be thinking about it forever.

Jurassic World: 65

It may be a slow slog through a prehistoric jungle, but at least Adam Driver is there. The premise behind 65, named after how many millions of years in the past it’s set, finds a spaceship pilot crashing on Earth on the last day of the dinosaurs. He’s all set to off himself in despair until he realizes there’s one other survivor: a little girl (Ariana Greenblatt). Together they have to trudge across the wilderness, dodge a few dinosaurs, and get to the escape pod before the asteroid hits. Not a bad idea. In practice, the movie is sluggish and sparse, with a meager number of dino-related suspense moments and lots of slow-boil, largely dialogue-free, character interactions as the glum Driver and the girl—who don’t speak the same language—inevitably learn an ad hoc way to communicate and, wouldn’t you know it, care about each other. Driver is one of our finest actors, and though the movie gives him little to work with verbally or contextually, he’s able to use an expressive physicality that allows him to glower and smolder and sink into grief far more believable than what’s on the page. Imagine, say, a Tom Holland in the role, and I don’t know if it works as well. No offense to him.

It’s through Driver's performance—moving in a slow-motion, underwater sadness—that it becomes clear the movie is yet another modern genre effort that’s an extended metaphor for depression. His character is in a state of mourning for his home life—filled in with flashbacks—and in despair over his crashed fate. Only the glimmer of duty in protecting and caring for another person keeps him barely invested in staying alive and moving forward. No coincidence, then, that writer-directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods (cashing in on their big hit Quiet Place screenplay) have set the stage at the end of one era in our planet’s history and beginning of the next. By the time the movie arrives at its fiery conclusion, with asteroid pieces raining hellfire down on the prehistoric landscape as our characters make their last-minute attempt at escape, there’s something potent about the idea of a desperate climb out of one’s sadness—it’s either the end, or a new start. I just wished, for a movie about a spaceman trapped in dinosaur times, there were more use of that tension throughout. There are a few fleeting moments of effective creature feature skill—a tyrannosaurus rex ominously illuminated in the night by a lightening strike, a few jump scares with snarling teeth and looming claws—but the movie strangely underplays its own high concept. All the more accurate for its aims to make us feel Driver’s disappointment, I suppose.

Same As It Ever Was: WHITE NOISE

You can always tell when a filmmaker enjoys reading great literature. There’s the extra understanding of the importance of the shape of a story, an added attention to weaving incident and images with thematic motifs, a patience for constructing dialogue with an ear for layers of meaning and revealing detail. There’s the confidence for letting a story feel like it’s sprawling, even as the pile-up of moments and impressions builds to somewhere intentional. Watching a movie from such a filmmaker—even a partially-successful one—can sometimes activate the English class seminar in me, filling the brain with the pleasing close-reading feeling of getting absorbed in a fascinating narrative and pinging off each noteworthy detail as you build a grand theory of the text.

Noah Baumbach’s always been a clever, verbose screenwriter, with his early efforts like Kicking and Screaming and Mr. Jealousy of a piece with that 90’s wave of East Coast indie wordsmiths, like Whit Stillman and Hal Hartley, who made their bones on dialogue patter with a fine-tuned ear for idiosyncratic character. Lately, though, he’s risen to greater heights, and ever more literate efforts. His Marriage Story is a precise dance of perspective as both partners in a divorce have their foibles and complaints balanced on the fulcrum of what’s best for their child. In its focused generosity of character and anecdote, it has the vibes of a densely imagined ensemble adult drama of the Terms of Endearment or Ordinary People adaptations kind, albeit with more quotidian conflicts instead of tear-jerking tragedy. Fizzy comedies like Mistress America and Frances Ha are shaggy, observational, and quippy like a slim, charming, surprisingly soulful character study. Greenberg has its cranky epistolary hook. Best is his The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected), which, from the title on down, plays like the best collections of linked short stories. This one has insight into three generations, interest in art and legacies, empathy for revealing eccentricities and tender connections, and smart repetitions of key lines. That gives it the intimate interior scope of the finest-tuned concision.

His latest is a further expression of his literary tastes: White Noise, an ambitious adaptation of Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel. That classic was a timely satire of middle-class ennui, academia’s tunnel vision, and consumer culture’s mass homogenizing media noise. It’s the story of a small-town college professor (Adam Driver) and his family. He’s an expert in Hitler Studies. His wife (Greta Gerwig) is a frizzy-haired wellness coach and secret addict of experimental pills. They have a Brady Bunch of children from their previous marriages. The first part of the story is a swirling, arch take on campus politics—especially as the professor talks with colleagues, including a new friend (Don Cheadle) who teaches a class on cinematic car crashes and dreams of being the expert in Elvis Studies—and a cozy, overlapping ensemble family dramedy. The second, best, part takes a swerve for the apocalyptic, as a train derailment sparks what’s known euphemistically as an Airborne Toxic Event. The town has to evacuate, cutting short the brewing plot lines and tossing the characters dynamics into a tumbler. These sequences are shot with wide lens complexity and dazzling real-world spectacle—like Altman’s Nashville traffic jam meets the UFO gawkers from Spielberg’s Close Encounters. The final stretch, an extended denouement, returns to resolve some of the threads from before, but the traumas of the middle stretch contaminate. The new dark cloud of mortality that hangs over all.

Appearing on our screens now in 2022, the adaptation is somehow even more timely in the midst of a pandemic, and an opioid crisis, and an ongoing erosion of confidence in systems big and small. But to reduce it to the oblique commentary on its 80s times, or ours, is shortchanging it as a work of ideas. It buys into the humanity of its characters and their predicaments, even as the movie operates at a heightened pitch. It swings from quiet, tightly-framed, naturalistic dialogues to loud, highly choreographed, widescreen sequences saturated with colors and lights. In grocery stores and campus cafeterias, the fluorescents practically radiate with an intensity. In the home, crowded with kids and books and nooks and crannies, there’s a cozy hustle and bustle to the more naturalistic textures. In the wilderness, an endless highway and crowded campground, there’s wide open possibility that’s somehow closing in. Here’s a story at least in part about life as a jumble of sensations guided by circumstance and environment that don’t care for you or your systems. And it’s about the meanings we make with, and for, each other to make sense of it in spite of the bombardments of stimulus. “Family,” goes a repeated professorial axiom herein, “is the cradle of misinformation. We’re fragile creatures, and the society we’ve built to obscure that fact is easily strained. A key image has to be an evacuated man angry that their fear hasn’t made the news, and thus isn’t validated, or that that feels the same as not existing at all.

Baumbach stretches his style here with impressive dexterity and scope. He shoots his adaption like a 90s ironic version of a 70s suburban drama—all overlapping dialogue and roaming camera and self-consciously elaborate tableau. Lol Crawley’s cinematography is slick and insistent, not unlike what Conrad Hall brought to American Beauty or how Alan Rudolph half-successfully adapted Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions. It’s at once flatly naturalistic and cocked at a half-joking expressionism. Turns out, you tip an 80s consumerist playground or small-town aesthetic just slightly to the left or right and you get a rumbling, believable self-satirizing setting. There’s a high-toned seriousness played for woozy, breezy, frazzled choking smirks. Danny Elfman’s score has pounding carnival horns and soaring theremins and dark, noodling madness—a perfect amalgamation of his collaborations with Tim Burton and Sam Raimi. Together the sound and image create a tension, a lightness, and an inner motor for a movie that bursts with inner life—the suggestion of intellects spiraling. And in the middle is a rather believable family relationship, as Driver and Gerwig and the younger performers make a unit that’s lovably eccentric and unbelievably tossed about by the upsetting events that threaten to tear them apart. There’s something emotive there to hang onto as the movie takes its spins through incidents amusing, frightening, chaotic or cringing. It looks at a world with fears, and denials, and ominous signs of contamination and infection and distraction and despair and says, well, fair enough. But you gotta have hope, too.

The movie, like the book, albeit without slavishly chasing its every rabbit hole, feels caught, and overwhelmed, in a time of transition. DeLillo’s work was in the mode of fascinating 80’s boomer novels—far enough from the incomplete progress of 60’s radicals to feel the failures, and taking the temperature of the very waters that’ll brew the Gen X disaffected distancing. Inspired by this source, Baumbach has copied over its frazzled stream of ideas, a sure-footed confusion, a world bombarded with messages and television and radio dispatches and camcorders and corded telephones. He captures a sense of disruption, and places at its center earnest performances invested in the characters emotions. It’s a neat trick making the people real and their world hyperreal, piling on details verging on surreal—The Event, vivid nightmares, a drop into potential climactic violence—while the characters maintain their sense of self. The film strains to capture these extremes at times, tipping fleetingly into too-clever artifice while trying to play it flat. And without the inner monologue there’s some vagueness around some less convincing plot turns. (What works on the page is sometimes harder to transition on screen, especially the swerves in the final third.) And yet, Baumbach directs like a smart reader, drawing our attention like a tour guide to the ideas and images and people on display. He takes us through a book’s notable ideas, dramatized and stood up on a stage for us to see. Not unlike when Gerwig herself adapted Little Women (easily my favorite classic-book-to-film in many years), the form itself is an argument to return to the text. It may not be a great movie, but, at its best, it can light up one’s brain like one.

Great Scott: HOUSE OF GUCCI and THE LAST DUEL

Ridley Scott is a director of contradictions. On the one hand, he’s one of Hollywood’s last great technicians of human epics. On the other, he’s an aged cynical graduate of advertisement who still simmers in the splash and flash—slick surfaces illuminating a sickness underneath. He doesn’t always hit, but when he does he’s top tier. And he’s always admirable for marshaling enormous technical craft and skill to communicate a vision that’s all his own. His latest is House of Gucci, a story of the fall of a once fashionable family. (In that way, it’s of a piece with his recent All the Money in the World, another true story of a wealthy family in conflict.) For Gucci, the chic, fashionable brand may still be strong, but the founding fathers are long gone, driven out by ego, scheming, and a wicked true crime twist. Scott joins them near the end. He surrounds them with tacky opulence and hollow golden accoutrement.

Maybe it’s the fact the movie was shot during the pandemic, which probably cramped the ability to assemble huge crowds or tons of moving pieces, but everything, from discos to villas to storefronts, seems pinched and empty. We see an obscenely rich family who have walled themselves off from the human element, like the nasty industrialists in Visconti’s The Damned if they had a better handle on some of their morals. (But just some.) There are the wrinkled brothers ruling over the stale roost of a company past its prime—an emaciated Jeremy Irons with a hacking cough, and a bloated Al Pacino delighting in his self-satisfaction—and their inadequate sons, a dweeby pushover with a reedy tone (Adam Driver) and a pompous rolly-polly oaf with a honking accent (Jared Leto cocooned in a fat suit and expansive balding forehead). Scott clearly relishes populating the screen with characters who are caricatures at best, gargoyles at worst. He finds the Gucci family in the late 70s and pushes into the 90s, as the glamorous fashion brand has fallen on hard times. The fact it won’t rebound until none of the above are involved, or alive, is treated as a giddy irony.

This stance is double-underlined by the central figure of this wildly uneven picture: a scheming lover played by Lady Gaga. Done up in Italian drag, Gaga serves up a six-course half-camp meal in which each course is ham. She swivels into every scene like a pneumatic refugee from the Ryan Murphy version of the tale, glowering from under heavy makeup, wriggling into tightly-fitted costumes, and chewing over every sentence like she’s prepared to swallow the scenery whole. Her character is constantly working an angle, using romance as a way up the food chain, and then snapping up the weak wealthy marks around her. Up against the likes of Irons and Pacino, she’s pushy and insistent. Playing off Driver, she’s constantly throwing herself against his comparative naturalism in their high melodrama. Her scenes with Leto play like nothing less than stumbling into the theater department’s two most outlandish students egging each other further over the top.

There’s fun to be had in this swanning buffet of performances, bubbling unpredictably between lively and dead-eyed, but Scott’s material loses track of the plot’s pulse. It becomes a string of handsomely realized empty echoes—a dim tour through a melting wax museum of fashion tycoons and true crimes past. The tone, amplified with pounding pop hits and shimmery gowns yet drug down to earth in dim negotiations and disputes, teeters between gloriously fake and dreary disbelief.  That’s why, no matter how fitfully engaging, it’s hard to get into the larger portrait of systemic capitalist excess, squirmy scheming at the heart of its ladder of success, and delirious drops from the heights of inequity. The whole picture is too sad to be funny, and too funny to be sad.

Far better—sharper, perceptive, and complicated—is Scott’s other period-piece epic of the year: The Last Duel. Instead of shiny surface elegance, it has actual elegance in its design despite some bruising subject matter. Set in medieval France, it’s the story of a rape accusation as told from three perspectives: first the victim’s husband’s, then her rapist’s, and, finally, hers. The intelligent construction doesn’t get lost in the subjectivity of the viewpoints—it’s careful not to make the key details up for dispute—but cleverly draws out the ways in which people can convince themselves they’re the wronged party, no matter the cost. Scott summons an army of craftspeople and extras to populate chilly castles, sprawling manors, and muddy fields of combat, with horses tromping up and down, swords clashing, and ladies’ dresses swishing over the cobblestones. It has the same attention to messy historical detail that made his Kingdom of Heaven and Gladiator, not to mention his debut feature, the similarly downbeat view of chivalrous violence, The Duellists. But because the focus remains squarely on the even messier, and evergreen, human failings and foibles driving the drama, the humanity is never dwarfed by the large scale. It’s intimate and uncomfortable despite the occasional flourishes of fluttering banners and clashing blades.

It helps that the performers are uniformly charismatic, and unafraid of looking pathetic, powerless, or petulant. Matt Damon, constantly small in the frame, plays a frustrated mid-level knight who rides off into battle and expects to be rewarded by the feudal system game by which he’s playing. His younger wife is played by Jodie Comer, who is dignified even in defeat, and rather clear about using her marriage as a way of social currency for her father. She loves her husband, but chafes ever so slightly against the ways her husband’s ego structures her life. Adam Driver, tall and intense in an interesting evil twin to his Gucci performance, is a knight who eventually has his eye on Damon’s wife. The two men are friendly on the surface, fighting together and both under the domain of the king’s cousin (Ben Affleck). That bleach-blonde aristocrat has a libertine swagger and fratty attitude—Affleck brings an oozing charm and nasty privileged self-impressed edge to every line. Driver’s in his good graces, and manages to wheedle some land that was to be promised Damon. This sets off a tense relationship that eventually culminates in the central crime, and Damon’s demand for a duel to the death. According to the court, in this case of he-said she-said, it’s the only way to prove his wife’s good word. (The arguments the men in power make to discredit her sound exactly like today’s right-wing talking points on similar matters, right down to the medieval understanding of biology; that it’s plainly presented and allows the audience to draw the connection on its own is a sign of the movie's subtly.)

Written by Damon and Affleck with Nicole Holofcener (that expert dissector of social interactions stewing in money, jealousy, clout, and pettiness with the likes of Please Give and Friends with Money), The Last Duel becomes a wide-angle lens that nonetheless focuses tightly on actions and consequences. It’s a surprisingly lively experience for such dour subject matter, skewering the pathetic squabbles and scrabbling for power amidst the men even as it understands their frustrations, and empathizing with the quiet dignity of the woman who recedes into the background despite being the ostensible focus. The overall Rashomon effect of the separate but complimentary and contradictory tellings, without an interlocutor to guide us, returns to the beginning of the conflict thrice. The build up to the crime is enhanced by the empty spaces that are fleshed out each time through. For the crime itself, at first it is merely recounted, but later seen twice, each intense, tactful and impactful. The first two times, the film pushes right up to the brink of its climactic duel before skipping back to tell the whole thing from next point of view. The screenplay is sharply balanced to bring us deeper into clarity.

When Comer steps into the lead for her section, the one that finally leads into the final fight, we’re explicitly told it’s “the truth,” and the sad thing is that it matters little to the outcome. Here’s a society in which choices are constrained, when people suffer under powerful men who protect their friends and allies at the expense of those deemed lesser than, and the inequalities of class and gender dictate so much about who is believed and whose control is maintained. In the end, the duel is the only thing giving Damon a chance to win some honor back (although, he’s warned, if he fails, he wife will literally be burned as a liar). What no one much seems to care about is the truth, the woman’s perspective, as she’s left to suffer in silence (that’s even the advice she gets from her mother-in-law in a clenched scene of matter-of-fact confession) and hope the right man is killed.

Return of the Jedi: STAR WARS: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER

And now we arrive at an ending, although we’ve been here twice before. Star Wars is now a collection of three trilogies: George Lucas’s great founding original and a largely terrific (divisive) prequel, and a sequel trilogy composed of deliberate echoes and remixes non-Lucas stewards have made. Back in the hands of writer-director J.J. Abrams, whose Episode VII: The Force Awakens was a skillful reboot in bringing the world back to life with new characters meeting the old, Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker’s biggest disappointment is that it’s in such a big hurry to end the story just as it was getting good. It has to rush to tie up loose ends while letting others linger, and making new ones along the way. The previous entry, Rian Johnson’s Episode VIII: The Last Jedi, was an astonishing work, about as striking, surprising, and enriching as a corporate-mandated intellectual-property extension could be. It boldly deepened the stock personalities of aspiring Padawn Rey (Daisy Ridley), stubborn pilot Poe (Oscar Issac), and fresh recruit Finn (John Boyega), complicated the stormy interiority of villain Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), lovingly sent troubled old heroes into the sunset, and picked up the plot threads Abrams left dangling and ran with them. The future was wide open. After that film, it felt like the story could go anywhere in the galaxy. But now it’s time to end, and to do so we need a plot that moves at the speed of light, as spaceships moving at the speed of exposition need to hop planet to planet setting up the end game. Abrams simply steps back in, telling us right away that the conflict between the Imperial wannabe First Order and the woefully underpopulated Resistance is now, all of a sudden, at a tipping point. What’s new is old again. And vice versa.

As surface satisfying as it is to stage one last big galactic blowout, a confrontation of good versus evil with lineage stretching back across the trilogies, I found myself missing the characters already and wishing we could’ve set it up more thoroughly. Time spent zapping hither and thither is crammed into the first hour to set up the whiz-bang finale, each stop having the typically Star-Wars-ian menagerie of delights: fun creatures, cool robots, and a hodgepodge style all its own. There’s so much, cut so quickly, that there’s no time for this to settle, little patience for the character work of previous entries. That’s because the stakes are suddenly very high (although Abrams’ vision of the State of the Galaxy has nothing on Lucas’s brilliance at suggestive scope). This concluding chapter finds the evil Sith spirit of Emperor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) trying to come back to life and claim his place as leader of the Galaxy. (The gaps in narrative to make this make sense are begging to be backfilled with the ancillary materials this franchise has long enjoyed.) There’s high-energy action, zippy quips, reverent symbolism, and tearful goodbyes. (The narrative write-around for Carrie Fisher’s real-life death is strained, but better than writing her out entirely.) And yet, as it should, the film finds its center not in the voluminous fan service, a cast so overstuffed that great figures from past films are sidelined, or quickly, sparsely characterized new personalities destined for spinoffs of one kind (the usual books and comics and video games) or another (Disney+, here they come?). No, it’s in the faces of Rey and Kylo as they wrestle with the same old struggle their ancestors have in the stories told before.

There’s the push and pull of destiny and expectation, the draw of the dark side and the call to the light, the yearning for balance and the cravings for power. That their stories have been allowed to exist across three films as this peculiar connection — the one truly, beautifully unique addition to the canon in all this — gives these films their own power. Not just drafting off the hero’s journey architecture of the earlier trilogies, they gain from letting two fine actors play the psychic connection and the spiritual torment. Sure, it’s still in the context of space opera done up in glorious style with all the digital sturm und drang Disney can buy, but there’s a real charge between them. The movie’s at its best when it steers into the pulp fantasy spiritualism and romanticism — when the sky opens up, and there’s nothing but stars, and the voices of the past swirl and call. And though the past is fading away, and the present holds the promise of just more conflict like the ones we’ve seen before — dogfights and laser blasts doomed to repeat forever — in many iterations, the future is still unwritten. Ridley’s wild, vibrant eyes and Driver’s moody stares, her steady calm even in distress, his electric unpredictability even in control, bring them into two halves of a whole, the balanced force personified. They’re attuned to the film’s metaphysical undercurrent, even as Abrams world-building remains both imaginative and under-explained, a constant churn of movement and MacGuffins. It has this ice-and-fire emotional center latent in The Force Awakens, brought to the fore by Johnson and now taken to a fitting conclusion here. Abrams, always a fine technician of a filmmaker, here, with cinematographer Dan Mindel and the artisans in the effects departments, finds some of his loveliest images, and in the midst of the hurry and bombast brings it back to Rey. Fittingly, the hero of this trilogy is a scavenger, introduced digging in the wreckage of a story that came before her, and, by the end, has found something to hold onto.

Body Politic: THE REPORT and QUEEN & SLIM

Two movies out this weekend take politics as an explicit subject and make it personal. Their ideas and ideals are embodied in flesh and blood characters who are sensitively drawn and inhabited. They also come out of dependable lineages: one a based-on-a-true-story procedural docudrama, the other an agitprop thriller-of-sorts. The former is The Report, a rare directorial effort for its screenwriter Scott Z. Burns, who has written a number of Soderbergh films from this past decade. As with those works — like Contagion and The Laundromat — this one has a cool layer of clinical just-the-facts terseness that’s continually enlivened by an impassioned ensemble. It follows a determined Senate staffer (Adam Driver) assigned by his boss, California Senator Dianne Feinstein (Annette Bening), to lead an investigation into the CIA’s use of torture — infamously euphemised as “enhanced interrogation” — in the War on Terror. Over the course of years, he doggedly reads through thousands of documents and takes testimony of whistleblowers, all the while given the run-around by two administrations who’d rather not dig up too much of a mess. In fact, the CIA itself refuses to make its employees available for official interviews, stonewalls every attempt to corroborate basic facts, disputes every finding of which they catch wind, and disappears critical documents from the servers to which they have granted access. The film is as single-minded in its drive toward justice as its main character, seeing it maddeningly delayed and denied even as the mounting evidence is ever more sickening and overwhelmingly convincing.

Burns cuts all character down to the bone, devoting no time to the personal lives of these figures. Instead, it’s all back rooms and black sites, plush offices and austere conference rooms in which the critical work of keeping citizens safe with high ideals of transparency and ethics is regularly plowed under or studiously ignored by people too cowardly to do anything about it lest they jeopardize their job, or the power of their office. A swirl of recognizable actors in suits — Jon Hamm, Corey Stoll, Maura Tierney, Michael C. Hall, Sarah Goldberg, Tim Blake Nelson, Ted Levine, Scott Shepherd, Matthew Rhys, and more — speak the roles’ serious points with clipped professionalism and excellent shorthand personalities. Burns juggles an enormous amount of facts and faces, in ways reminiscent of All the President’s Men and Spotlight, with clarity and intelligence, navigating the competing goals and half-spoken power plays that consume this search for truth. A thriller about research, it makes its claims and proves them thoroughly and in dramatic fashion. It’s compelling every step of the way, and, by picking its moments sparingly and well, earns its righteous indignation in tense monologues and grim final title cards. I was reminded of an aphorism Soderbergh tweeted years ago: “When the person in charge won't get to the bottom of something, it's usually because they are at the bottom of that something.”

Queen & Slim is a woozier affair, dreamy and romantic even as it never loses a fatal undercurrent sparked by its provocative what-if? inciting incident. It starts with a first date, hesitant and awkward. He (Daniel Kaluuya) is a sad-eyed Costco clerk looking for a fun night; she (Jodie Turner-Smith) is a lawyer looking for a temporary reprieve to her loneliness. His car ever-so-slightly swerves, barely crossing a lane of traffic, but enough of a reason for a cop to pull them over. Driving while black appears to be the charge, and when the officer gets flustered and frustrated that they haven’t been drinking and have no contraband in the vehicle, he takes offense at an honest inquiry and pulls a gun. By the end of the confusion that follows, the cop is dead on the side of the road. The accidental cop-killing couple is left with no choice but to run, certain that no police force in the country would believe it was self-defense. What follows could be a white-knuckle chase picture, but is instead a languid road trip as they make their way south in hopes of avoiding capture, perhaps somewhere below the border eventually. There’s a sense of futility and doom to their endeavor even before a garrulous pimp (Bokeem Woodbine) calls them “the black Bonnie and Clyde.” Director Melina Matsoukas — the filmmaker behind striking music videos, including a portion of Beyonce’s brilliant Lemonade — gives it all a glowing style, contemplative and deliberative, with perfectly-composed stretches of moody lighting, expressive blocking and poised motion. She has a great eye. The film photographs skin so it glows, places so they shine, poses so they become easily iconographic. There’s a moment where Queen and Slim get their picture taken lounging on the hood of a car and, even before it shows up again, knows it was a memorable image — it’d make a great poster or t-shirt if and when the movie becomes a cult object.

There’s a carefully composed cool to the film, which could perhaps run counter to the underlying anger at the unfairness in this world, but is poignant as the characters themselves wrestle with knowing that what they’ve done and who they are will be reduced, their complicated emotions and lives whittled down until their legacy is mere legend. Lena Waithe’s script plays off the justified outrage from a decade marked by tragic viral cell phone videos of police executing unarmed black people, and the resulting swirl of attention ending in the officers, more often than not, getting away with it. That the film opens with a forceful reversal of the sadly typical conclusion is a tremendous jolt. Its energy powers the film through its dull patches and misjudged moments. The uneven episodes on their trip — encounters with a variety of black folks, a few white wild cards, and a handful of cops — are sometimes tense, sometimes funny, sometimes sad, always poised in the same hazy mood of melancholy. It’s as uneven and prolonged as it is lit up with ideas. Even when the film goes totally off the mark — there’s a violent plot turn in a protest that’s both more than the film needs and cross-cut with a steamy sex scene; that throws the film off balance for next few sequences — it’s not for lack of trying.

Throughout the lead characters are specific and symbolic, their romance as real as the positions into which they are placed can be forced. It’s never entirely a character drama it often is. The people can be too composed under the style. And it's never fully the blaxploitation riff it skirts around -- resisting the potential for genre play most of the time, even as it leans on some of its signifiers. It's both and neither. The film is too serious-minded to be reduced to tropes, but too energized by its premise to avoid it entirely. Call it prestige exploitation. What’s ultimately moving about the picture, though, is how these characters are allowed to be with each other, in the ultimate bad first date that lingers and expands, trapped together with plenty of time to connect and contrast until the inevitable end. At one point, Slim asks why they can’t just be — a question that hangs over the film as the promise of extrajudicial violence hangs over the characters. Who would they be if they weren't now defined by the constant potential threat to their bodies?

A New Hope: STAR WARS: THE LAST JEDI

I didn’t know they had it in them, but I’m grateful to be proven wrong. Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi is the first great Star Wars movie since creator George Lucas sold his company to Disney. Though run by Lucas collaborators and acolytes – from an ILM and Skywalker Sound stocked with Wars veterans to a story group built out of the prequel days, to a longtime producing partner in Kathleen Kennedy overseeing it all – the results thus far have been mostly successful recreations of franchise sensations past. They were nostalgic, fleet, and fun enough. JJ Abrams managed to introduce a handful of bright and promising new characters along the way in Episode 7 – the searching Rey (Daisy Ridley), stewing dark-sider Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), turncoat stormtrooper Finn (John Boyega), and hotshot pilot Poe (Oscar Isaac). Gareth Edwards and company cobbled together a decent margin note in the franchise’s canon with the heisting of the Death Star plans in Rogue One. But for all that potential, it took writer-director Rian Johnson (whose Brick and Looper marked him as an original voice to watch) to return the sense of surprise to the galaxy. He makes a movie following Abrams’ new characters and some of Lucas’ classic ones into a roller coaster of creative developments.

Where Johnson succeeds is in his molecularly precise evocation of the Star Wars style, not by simply copying faithfully what’s come before, but by returning to the source. He realizes the series is a suis generis blending of Westerns and World War II movies, gangster pictures and samurai films, high fantasy and low serialized sci-fi. He returns to these inspirations for whip-smart visual language, spirited tone, and adventurous spirit, shot through with zen portent and seriousness of mythological import. So once more unto the Star War we go, the sinister First Order seeking to crush the rebellious Resistance once and for all. General Leia (the late, great Carrie Fisher), hoping for the return of her brother Luke (Mark Hamill, soulful and unpredictable), leads the surviving rebels across space, pursued by the evil Supreme Leader Snoke (Andy Serkis). The usual sturm und drang of space battles and aliens worlds follows, with a healthy dose of Jedi mysticism on a far-flung planet where a Master hides from his mistakes and an earnest would-be Padawan desperately seeks his help. He’s their only hope. The Rebels assemble for dogfights and showdowns; the Dark Side and the Light ready their laser swords with patient, spiritual connections in The Force; nefarious characters plot backstabbings and pure-hearted beings become the sparks that will light up the darkness. In the middle is Rey, an ever more exciting new hero movingly unmoored from a sense of destiny, hoping to find her place in all this while Kylo Ren, similarly lost, circles with roiling bad vibes. 

This is rich emotional territory mined with crisp, clear storytelling in painterly precision and elegantly lensed filmic cinematography. It’s big, broad, immediately satisfying storytelling in the tradition of the series’ best moments. Every step of the way, Johnson finds visual invention for his gripping sequences and compelling settings – a bombing run is so crisply, efficiently unfolded, the fate of a character we’ve never before met and who hardly speaks is intensely felt; a dazzling casino world drips in military-industrial power and is larded with slimy monsters of all sorts (and a jazzy alien band to boot); a colony of frog-like nuns caretake a crumbling village surrounded by a sea of squawking bird-beings; a salt-covered planet is streaked in billowing red dust as a battle rages; a red-walled throne room is draped in ominous Dark Side intent; a hyperspace jump shatters plans – and minds. In these thrilling images and places are a host of creatures and more new characters, from a mysterious pink-haired admiral (Laura Dern) to a big-hearted rebel recruit (Kelly Marie Tran) and a slippery thief (Benicio Del Toro). Johnson imagines fun adventures, tense escapes teetering on massive stakes, and pleasing grace notes – First Order office politics, a melding of prequel lore in sequel minds, loving glamour shots of vehicles and tech – while never stepping wrong. 

What a deeply felt outpouring of the finest Star Wars anyone not named George Lucas has managed to get on the big screen! This isn’t a film entirely coasting on old nostalgia (though the familiar sounds of lightsabers, TIE fighters, and the like are powerful generators of it). Nor is it content to simply doodle in the margins of the expected. Johnson uses the old as a runway for new adventure to take off. In the end, I found it poignant to consider how he’s skillfully built in an old franchise a space for new imagination, while connecting to the childlike wonder at the sense of grandiose unfolding mythology that makes it evergreen. Johnson has pulled off a perfect balancing act – a reverent brand deposit that pushes all the right nostalgic buttons while fearlessly unfurling satisfying surprises. It’s a sensation as pure and as real as a kid, head swimming in the galaxy far, far away, picking up a broom and, for a fleeting moment, imagining it a lightsaber.

Run All Night: MIDNIGHT SPECIAL

One of the most remarkable aspects of Jeff Nichols’ Midnight Special is just how far it gets without needing to explain itself. In fact, by the time the end credits roll there hasn’t been extended meaningful exposition. Instead we’ve seen a sci-fi tinged on-the-run thriller about a boy and his father fleeing shadowy government forces and heavies from their church’s compound, a chase across the South that charges forward with simmering tension and intimate, methodical strategy. It’s a thriller with respect for the majesty of the unexplainable. With casual magic and mystery, it weaves into suspense tiny grace notes, finding large wonderment in small details, implying more than it says outright. The film saves big reveals for so long, and answers them in sideways intuitive ways. We’re left with more questions than answers in a most satisfying result. It’s tantalizing and evocative, grand filmmaking on a small scale, huge implications left dangling with an ethereal, almost spiritual mystique.

As the story begins we hear the muffled sounds of an Amber Alert on an old TV in a shabby motel room. A boy (Jaeden Lieberher) has been kidnapped. He’s in this room with his captors, a situation diffused of immediate danger to him as it’s slowly revealed he has been taken from a fundamentalist cult and its pastor (Sam Shepard) by his biological father (Michael Shannon) and a friend (Joel Edgerton) determined to take him to freedom. They travel under the cover of darkness, move quickly, and meet up with collaborators (including Kirsten Dunst) for daylight respites. They’re under a tight deadline involving coordinates and secret messages. They’re moving him to a better life, following mystery directives we slowly come to understand. Nichols maintains impeccable tension in this cloud of ambiguity by keeping close attention on the specificities, the small details in the process of fleeing across state lines.

The film works through a confident and relaxed focus on the hows, not the whys, allowing its later leaps to feel more intuitive and excusable. Steady shots take in precise steps taken to avoid detection, lingering on the clack of a gun being loaded, the stretch of swimming goggles perpetually protecting the boy’s eyes, the engine noises in various makes and models of vehicles, the snap of headlights disappearing on a dark Texan road in the middle of the night. The danger sits in the risks the boy’s father is willing to take to keep him from agents (like Adam Driver) and other governmental forces who seek to claim the boy for further study (echoes of Spielberg’s Close Encounters and E.T. and Carpenter’s Starman), and the church’s flunkies (Bill Camp and Scott Haze) who are out to capture him for the purposes of exploiting his gifts. Science and religion both attach grand meanings to massive unknowns. Fear and tension is in the doubt about what’ll happen if his father fails. The stakes are clear.

Nichols, whose work including the powerful mental illness nightmare Take Shelter, laconic family tragedy Shotgun Stories, and boyhood crime-fable Mud shows a gift for patient, empathetic, and self-assuredly paced stories, approaches Midnight Special with his typical good judgment. It’s not a loud or flashy sci-fi adventure; we don’t get genre efforts this confidently circumspect, beautifully restrained everyday, certainly not bankrolled by a major studio. He trusts silence, stillness, while still ramping up the thrills when called for. He reveals what we need to know through action, tells us about character through behaviors. This is a beautifully photographed (by Nichols’ usual cinematographer Adam Stone) and contained movie – set in stolen cars, cheap motels, tiny command centers – gathering suspense and sweep off the back of small emotional exchanges and intimate interpersonal investments.

It helps that the cast does fine work across the board, performers who can sketch in pain and determination with a glance, or a few well-chosen lines. It approaches Cormac McCarthy territory in some of its terse dialogue in dusty landscapes, sharp and expressive for their brevity, people who can’t risk feeling too much lest the crushing weight of their actions’ enormity – embodied in the wide open spaces around them – stops them cold. Shannon looks at his boy with such tenderness and caring, while charging forward with single-minded drive to protect him at all costs. Edgerton’s blind loyalty is quiet competence. Dunst’s maternal energy manifests itself as submerged worry pushed into protective energy, while young Lieberher has a serene otherworldliness that makes incredibly clear the uneasy extrasensory gifts will lead this road-trip to an ending no one understands. They just know it must be done.

What, exactly, are the powers of this boy at the center of so much drama? They remain beautifully vague. He can hear radio and satellite signals, is affected by sunlight – hence another good reason for night travel beyond hiding from authorities – and occasionally his eyes glow with eerie blue light. We’re told that to look into this illuminated stare is to see glimpses of a better world. Could there be a more lovely, forceful, intuitive metaphor for the lengths a parent will go to protect a child? They see overwhelming hope in his eyes. It’s a movie about parents protecting a child from the world and helping manifest his gifts, even if they don’t understand them. It’s about support for the boy’s future, wherever it may take him. It’s about the pain and profound contentment of caring for a child – a key moment finds Shannon telling his boy, “I like worrying about you” – and the difficulty of letting that child make his own path. The film’s powerful conclusion brings this metaphor to stirring heights, conjuring Amblin awe and blending it with an unearthly melancholy.

The result is a movie that plays out as a plaintive old-fashioned country flavor in a hair-raising low-key sci-fi mode, an usual combination that’s nonetheless comforting in its throwback appeals. It is involving and compelling for what is not said and what is left to the imagination, giving the Big Moments that much more room to excite and entrance. Nichols’ interest in human-scale stories brings great sensitivity to Midnight Special’s thrills and astonishments. The film crackles with intrigue and personality without overly insisting on it. Here he injects genre elements into a patient thriller, widening the scope of its implications only in its final moments, executed with aplomb. He trusts an audience to groove on a delicate metaphor and move with trembling echoes of extrasensory wavelengths without needing it all spelled out. Another fine entry in our recent cycle of vintage sci-fi throwbacks, it, like Super 8 and Tomorrowland, looks backwards and forwards, a timeless reinvention of a sturdy genre storytelling mode.