THE ODYSSEY

Directing: A-
Acting: A-
Writing: B+
Cinematography: A
Editing: B+
Special Effects: A-

It’s only taken me a few hours to realize I liked The Odyssey even more than I thought I did. And I had mixed feelings about it for a while, particularly during the first hour, in which it felt like a bit too much was going on for me to take in. But then, in its second half, The Odyssey really pulled me back around, and in the end both its 172-minute runtime and its climactic final act felt deeply earned.

How long has it been since we had a truly epic film like this, anyway? Or at least one that was successful? “Epic” is a term pretty broadly applied, granted, but it may be safe to say that The Odyssey is the greatest epic fantasy film we’ve been given since the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the last of which was released 23 years ago.

The source text, of course, was written by the Greek poet Homer somewhere around the 8th century B.C. I won’t pretend to have any insights about writer-director Christopher Nolan’s adaptive choices, as although as an English major I presumably did read this once or twice, I remember basically none of it, aside from what has seeped into permanent pop culture through millennia. I can say that anyone upset about Lupita Nyong'o being cast as Helen of Troy, or Elliot Page as Greek warrior Sinon, or even John Leguizamo as Greek servant Eumaeus, is a straight up idiot. I suppose if you really wanted to be regressive you could call this the Bridgerton-ization of The Odyssey, but really: who gives a shit? Ancient or not, this is still fantasy—indeed, along with The Iliad the oldest fantasy fantasy of European origin there is—and the geographical area covered in The Odyssey quite logically covers ethnic groups of multiple skin tones.

If I really wanted to nitpick with any sense of justification, it might be the choice to have every single character in this version of The Odyssey speak with an American accent. This was not just because Matt Damon, in the lead part, happens to be American so everyone else was asked to follow suit; it was instead reportedly that Nolan wanted to break the long-held trop that ancient characters would speak in a British accent and thus make their speech sound of a higher class. (The modern British accent is only a couple hundred years old anyway, and ancient Greeks pre-date it by, again, millennia.) To be sure, something as simple as hearing a character like Tom Holland’s Telemachus refer to his parents as “mom” and “dad” as opposed to “mother” and “father” is a little jarring. But that’s about the extent of it, and actually you quickly get used to the anachronistically modern way of speaking. It gives the dialogue an accessibility, at least to American audiences, never before had with Homer’s works. It’s easy to envision classrooms watching this adaptation as the default going forward, after they read Homer’s The Odyssey.

In a way, this version of The Odyssey brings us full circle in pop entertainment. There have been countless adaptations and reimaginings of this work over the years, particularly over the more than a century that motion pictures have existed. Just a couple examples include the Coen Brothers’ brilliant 2000 film O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and even The Wizard of Oz frequently gets compared to it. To be fair, for The Wizard of Oz to be closer to The Odyssey I suppose the Cowardly Lion, the Scarecrow and the Tin Man would have had to be killed by the end. In any case, Nolan has brought us back to a more direct adaptation of the ancient text, just with an update to the language.

Surely there is a lot of artistic license in the adaptive process, as always. This, I think, is among the chief complaints by the vocal minority who are dismissing this film as “silly”—which was not a word I would use. Thrilling is a better word. And it’s thrilling in multiple ways. For instance, Anne Hathaway’s performance as Odysseus’s wife Penelope: if anyone in this film deserves an Oscar nomination for their performance, it’s her. I have long thought she was a great actor, but I was enthralled by her screen presence here.

You may have also heard that every actor with a pulse is in this movie, and it certainly does feel that way. This was also reportedly a conscious choice on the part of Christopher Nolan, who wanted to use star power as a means of underscoring the iconic nature of these characters: Athena the Goddess of Wisdom (Zendaya); the witch Circe (Samantha Morton); Calypso (Charlize Theron); Menelaus the king of Sparta (John Bernthal); Odysseus's second-in-command Eurylochus (Himesh Patel); Antinous, a sleazy suitor of Penelope (Robert Pattinson).

Even Bill Irwin, who had voiced the TARS robot in Nolan’s 2014 film Interstellar (which, incidentally, both Matt Damon and Anne Hathaway were also in), was tapped as the on-set performer as the giant cyclops Polyphemus. This is the first of several thrilling sequences in The Odyssey, although a word of warning to those going to IMAX screenings: the action sequences in particular are really loud. I literally had to plug my ears several times, it was so loud, and it began with Polyphemus’s roaring. So, maybe bring ear plugs. Once that’s done, you can delight at watching a cyclops casually munching on Greek warriors, or at the fascinating creature design choice of Polyphemus’s face. It’s like he was born with a facial deformity, where his one eye and nose are sideways. Somehow, it works, and to a degree actually humanizes the creature.

Between the cyclops, the giant Laestrygonian soldiers, a huge whirlpool, a multi-headed sea monster, a witch that turns men into pigs, and much more (including a lot of screen time dedicated to the Trojan Horse, which is only covered at length in the Latin Aeneid), there is plenty to thrill and entertain in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. The onscreen effects are almost always thoroughly convincing, and if you actually pay attention you’ll see that the cinematography is incredible, particularly paired with elaborate staging and blocking so finely choreographed it almost goes unnoticed. The more I think about it, the more I want to watch this movie again.

Dude, where’s my penteconter?

MADDIE'S SECRET

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B
Editing: A-

I am left a little bemused by Maddie’s Secret, an elaborate and sharply observed homage to 80s and 90s “movies of the week” set in the world of modern social media food content production—in which first-time feature writer and director John Early cast himself in the title role. As a straight, cisgender woman. In which he almost totally plays it straight.

In short: I don’t get it. Why was it necessary for him to cast himself in this part? It’s not like he’s channeling Divine—or even John Travolta—here; there is no camp to be found, although ironically I suspect John Waters would love this movie. Would it play differently had Early actually cast a woman in the part of Maddie? I can’t imagine the act of homage and the very subtle satire here would be particularly different in that case. So what was the point, then, aside from the fact that it gets more people talking about the movie?

And here’s the weirdest part. Early is good in this role. It actually doesn’t take very long to just accept him as this character, in spite of facial structure and detectable Adam’s apple, which are fairly obscured by the 38-year-old Early’s enviable softness of skin. When Early presents as himself, he presents as pretty culturally “male,” but he can shift into zones of androgyny with unparalleled ease. He speaks with a soft voice as Maddie, and surrounds himself with quite a number of women in supporting parts—even more than male parts. Every one of them seems to understand the assignment, even if I don’t.

The thing is, as good as Early is, I was still regularly thinking about the fact that this was a self-identified man playing the part of a woman. This could only take me out of the story at regular intervals, even though the superb production is just as committed to the loving homage of the TV movies of our childhood as, say, Far From Heaven was committed to the loving homage of Douglas Sirk films. The key difference is that it’s a bit easier to take the characters in Far From Heaven seriously, since it makes no anachronistic casting choices.

I keep thinking of Divine and John Travolta, who were cisgender men playing the part of cisgender women in John Waters films, and the presentation was similar in that they played it straight—but, those movies were far more heightened than this one, under the direction of a man who practically invented camp. John Early is working far more subtly, even if the final product is still heightened. Maddie works as a dishwasher where chefs record themselves cooking original recipes, and when she quickly becomes a viral star after posting some food content of her own, the suppressed eating disorder from her childhood begins to resurface.

Early is 12 years younger than I am, but I can remember the very movies he’s referencing here. I can remember watching TV movies about women with bulimia, and their exaggerated close-ups of them binge-eating before purging seared themselves into my memory. Seeing similar scenes in Maddie’s Secret (which are done shockingly few times, only once or twice) brought those memories right back, which I suspect was by design. There was a moment during this film that I thought: Is this movie going to take a turn? I thought, maybe it will suddenly get truly wild. It never quite does, though. Early has a stupendous hold on the fine line of tone that he was clearly going for here, and he consistently gives us just a taste of the melodrama without ever truly taking it over the top.

Does any of that qualify as something to recommend Maddie’s Secret, though? This is where I struggle. Were I to tell you that you should see this movie, I would struggle to tell you why—even though so much of it is so finely attuned, so competently put together. Is it funny, at least? Not really; that doesn’t seem to be what Early was going for, although there were a couple of moments that got me laughing pretty hard. They almost felt accidental, even though they were clearly very precisely constructed. I suppose, if pressed, I could say Maddie’s Secret is worth watching for the marvel of how Early basically disappears into a role that, by his own assertion, is not drag. Honestly it’s not campy enough to be drag. It has no connection to trans people, either, which puts this film into a deeply niche space that defies categorization.

Will I ever watch this again? I will forever be impressed by the perfectly imperfect flyaways of Early’s blonde wig, but nevertheless: not likely. Early has long been a peculiar performer for whom a choice like this weirdly makes sense, but I’m going to have to spend some more time pondering whether the final product makes much sense for the rest of us.

It’s not much of a secret anymore.

GAIL DAUGHTRY AND THE CELEBRITY SEX PASS

Directing: B-
Acting: B+
Writing: B
Cinematography: B
Editing: B-

When a movie knowingly leans into how dumb it is, it’s always a tricky prospect, a truly fine line between genuinely entertaining and outright embarrassing. Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass walks that line, with humor that lands maybe half the time. It does find its footing, at the very least, and eventually I was laughing pretty regularly in spite of how embarrassed I was for everyone involved.

There’s a sort of built-in defense of a movie like this “But that’s the point!” Well, the point only means something if it actually works, and unfortunately the first act works less than the rest of the movie does, which makes it easy to see audiences checking out early. I’m not sure it would even mean much if I assured you it’s worth the wait, especially since even I found it barely worth the wait, but there remains the fact that I did.

Honestly, either you’re going to be up for a deeply silly movie like Gail Daughtry or you’re not. The tone is set immediately, when only minutes after Gail (Zoey Deutch) and her husband Tom Soursap McNoodleman (get it??—played by Michael Cassidy) agree on who their celebrity sex passes are, Tom has sex with Jennifer Aniston in the back room of a stop on her cook book tour in Kansas City. And therein lies the premise telegraphed by the movie’s title: the only way to even the score is for Gail to travel to Los Angeles with her bisexual hairdresser colleague and friend, Otto (Miles Gutierrez-Riley) and have sex with her celebrity sex pass, John Hamm.

I will credit Gail Daughtry with this, my favorite thing about it: this is a movie with real affection for all of its incredibly dumb characters. In someone else’s hands, this movie would find ways to poke fun at Kansas City as much as it does Los Angeles and the people who live there, and it really does neither; not one of these characters is ever individually the butt of the joke. These are all people who are naive and yet somehow things keep working out for them, right down to a couple of Midwesterners who consistently meet Angelinos who are happy to help Gail in her quest to bed John Hamm. The more this aspect of the movie becomes clear, the more enjoyable it becomes.

Said Angelinos, by the way, include John Slattery, here depicted as a washed up actor who hasn’t had any work since he costarred with Hamm in Mad Men—which ended in 2015. He’s actually been in lots of stuff since then, but that’s not the point. Slattery is actually one of the principals in this film, but Jennifer Aniston is the first of countless, major cameos that might make one wonder how the hell whoever directed this managed to get them all on board. Well, Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass is directed and cowritten by David Wain, who happened to direct and co-write the 2001 film Wet Hot American Summer. And that film featured the much younger Paul Rudd, Elizabeth Banks, and Michael Ian Black; he later directed the 2012 film Wanderlust, which featured both Rudd and Aniston. Guess who all appear briefly in Gail Daughtry? And this just scratches the surface of the wall-to-wall cameos here. This guy clearly has some pull, and tons of people are perfectly happy to appear in his new movie, even if maybe they don’t know whether it’s great or just . . . kind of fine.

Wain eventually draws an unsubtle parallel with The Wizard of Oz, slotting Hamm into the role of the Wizard—sort of. Gail is a kind of Dorothy (oh, did I mention Gail is from Kansas City?), and she assembles a ragtag group of friends, which includes Caleb (Ben Wang), the overly ambitious guy from Creative Arts Agency; Vincent the papparazzo (Ken Marino) who’s “white whale” happens to be a candid shot of John Hamm; and of course, John Slattery. This movie, of course, needs some knowingly contrived villains, which include Italian actress Sabrina Impacciatore as Ludovica, who is awaiting delivery of a suitcase full of all the paperwork plans for taking down the global financial system; and her two henchmen, played by Niccolo (Mather Zickel) and Sergio (Joe Lo Truglio, also a David Wain mainstay who was in all the aforementioned of his films).

While we get ridiculously pointless voiceover narration by Frank the Mailman (Fred Melamed), the evil Ludovica’s briefcase of paperwork is the subject of a mixup that serves as the plot’s deliberately flimsy excuse for finally getting Gail and John Hamm in the same room together. How does that happen, you might wonder? Aside from knowing it veers between comic sex and comic violence as a bit of spice sprinkled on all the cheese, you’ll have to watch the movie! Just go in with fairly low expectations, fully expect it to marinate in its own cornball sensibilities, and you’ll have a pleasant enough time. I did, and eventually found myself cackling in an otherwise empty movie theater. I just had to get to the point where I could surrender myself to what this movie was doing, and then it kind of worked out.

Midwestern hairdressers on a mission in Los Angeles just can’t help but to have fun with it all.

Overall: B

THE INVITE

Directing: A
Acting: A
Writing: A-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: A

The less said before you see The Invite the better, but here I am writing about it, and here you are reading it. What are we doing! Maybe go watch the movie and then read this. I mean, I won’t spoil any plot points, at least no more than are in the trailer, which is a truly rare example of one that is expertly cut. It intrigues effectively without giving anything away. And that is also my challenge here today.

Why don’t we start with the people who made it?

Olivia Wilde directed and stars in this movie, always a deeply impressive feat when it’s done well. This is her third feature film as director, and by all accounts she’s two for three: I never saw her 2022 film Don’t Worry Darling, in spite of being accused of shirking my duty for not seeing a movie everyone was talking about. Well, its almost universally weak reviews were enough for me not to waste my time. But! I do know Wilde is exceedingly capable, given her debut feature was the fantastic and hilarious 2019 film Booksmart, which may not have a cult following but it certainly deserves to.

Wilde returns to comedy with The Invite, in which she proves herself to be an incredible talent, both behind and in front of the camera. She’s phenomenal as Angela, one of only four people seen onscreen after just a couple of introductory scenes set outside of the San Francisco apartment that serves as the setting. She’s anxious, insecure, perpetually frustrated, and simultaneously authentic and believable. It’s also easy to believe she’s married to Joe, played by Seth Rogen. Now, all of the four leads are excellent here, but if I were forced to choose one that was the least impressive, it would be Seth Rogen, who has charisma to spare but also basically always plays a version of himself.

It certainly helps that he’s lifted up by the heavy hitters around him, which include Edward Norton and Penélope Cruz as Hawk and Pina, the neighbors Angela and Joe are barely acquainted with who have been invited to their apartment for dinner. Cruz has arguably cornered the market on being equal parts sexy and smart, and Norton is a veteran, versatile actor who seems always to understand the assignment.

The script, co-written by Will McCormack and Rashida Jones, could easily be a play—come to think of it, I would jump at the chance to see a live stage version of this tightly polished script, which would translate easily. It’s actually based on the 2020 Spanish film Sentimental, marketed to English speaking audiences with the title The People Upstairs. And—oh! Guess what? Sentimental was written by Cesc Gay, based on his own play! It turns out the play was called Los vecinos de arriba, which literally translates to “The Upstairs Neighbors.” Okay, that makes sense. I might have to find that original Spanish film, which apparently has been remade in at least six other countries. Thank you for going on this journey with me.

The American version stands as a testament to the potential of reinterpreting stories in other cultures, which often falls flat. It is perhaps no accident that Wilde cast Cruz, who is herself Spanish. The Hawk character spends a fair amount of time speaking with Pina in Spanish, and this becomes a well-integrated plot point.

In any case, all four of these actors crackle with onscreen chemistry, and both Rogen and particularly Wilde are incredibly funny. Hawk is a bit of an odd character, which provides Norton with several opportunities for effectively subtle humor as well. Cruz isn’t especially funny, for her part, but she more than makes up for it in hotness and being arguably the most talented performer there.

You can guess what happens in The Invite based on the trailer, and you would be right, except that it’s much more complex than that. Fundamentally, this is a film about marriage, or more specifically what happens in years-long romantic relationships that largely move beyond the romance. Angela and Joe are bickering the moment we see them together, and anyone who has been married a long time will deeply relate to the things they talk about and how they speak to each other. Pina and Hawk exist as a challenge to Angela and Joe’s long-entrenched ideas about their relationship, and when Pina kind of sums things up, some may find it a bit of an oversimplification. The thing is, simple things don’t become untrue just because they are simple. And The Invite, which is hilarious and moving and sometimes genuinely sweet, is a deliciously complex presentation of simple ideas.

A dinner party that goes off the rails in all the best ways.

Overall: A-

GIRLS LIKE GIRLS

Directing: B+
Acting: A-
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+

Between Leviticus and Girls Like Girls, I guess it’s the Month of Good Gay Movies, and I must say I’m delighted. It’s somewhat ironic that Girls Like Girls is set in 2006, because at that time movies about queer people had a pretty reliable, indie-janky vibe to them, some of them more charming than others. These days it’s much easier to find well-produced queer cinema, even if the budget is on the smaller side; I love that both of these movies were released on the same weekend, one week before most major cities have their Pride Weekend, but also simply in the month of June, which is Pride month. I can’t remember the last time I’ve been so satisfied with overtly queer cinema.

That’s not to say that either of these movies is perfect, of course; they are both definitively not—but, they are also both closer to it than they would have been twenty years ago, and for different reasons. Unfortunately I do think the script is Girls Like Girls’s weakest link, albeit not by a very wide margin. And a film need not to be perfect to be effective, and effective might be the best word to describe this film. I’m feeling all sorts of things about this movie, not least of which is that I really should have known to bring tissues into the theater with me.

This is a pretty straightforward love story, which just happens to be about two 17-year-old girls. And unlike Leviticus, which is a horror movie about the insidious influence of religious bigotry, regilion never even really gets mentioned here. The closest we get is Sonya (Myra Molloy) worrying about what her mom and her friends will think, if they find out how she feels about Coley (Maya da Costa), who is actually the film’s protagonist. And rather than struggling with her sexuality herself, Coley’s greatest challenge is with how Sonya expresses affection and then retreats out of fear. There is a heartbreaking, and deeply relatable, moment when Coley says, “Why can’t I be normal?” But that can be relatable whether you are queer, or just a teenager.

And this is the thing I love about Girls Like Girls, which simply illustrates what it’s like to be a teenager, dealing with other teenagers. These kids are all just learning how to be decent human beings through trial and error. But, Colely feels even more alone due to the recent death of her mother, and now living with a dad (Zach Braff) who did not raise her but is now trying his best to get to know her. This is a subplot that is at once an added dimension for Colely and a bit undercooked, but it does provide the context for the one scene in which I was constantly wiping away tears from my sleeve.

I did not know this until researching this movie—well, and director and co-writer Hayley Kiyoko’s recorded introduction to the film—but Girls Like Girls has had a bit of a journey over the past ten years. It began as a music video for the song by the same name, by Kiyoko herself, who began as a singer at the age of 16 and was taking acting roles not long after. The song was on her five-track 2015 EP This Side of Paradise, and it would be another three years before Kiyoko released her debut full-length album, the first of three to date, which I guess I need to check out now. Kiyoko also co-directed the music video, which eleven years later has 163 million views on YouTube. By 2023, Kiyoko had adapted the story from the video into a Young Adult novel, continuing its storyline, and along with co-writers Stefanie Scott and Chloe Okuno, it has now been adapted into a feature film.

It’s a good song, and Girls Like Girls the film follows many of the same beats as Girls Like Girls the music video, with several key scenes mirrored, just with different young actors. There’s a delightfully shocking turn in the video that was omitted from the film, and I can’t decide if that keeps the film on a higher level or if its inclusion would have improved it. It’s a curious thing to travel back in time when regarding all this story’s iterations; apparently the video was incredibly popular with many young queer people, and after the release of the film’s trailer you can find many fun comments on the video’s YouTube page like, “revisiting the ancient texts.” Because of course, something released in 2015 is an ancient text. And seeing a film created as a “period piece” set in 2006, complete with CD storage binders and a lot of scenes with texting over AOL Instant Messenger, makes me feel like I’m from the fucking Stone Age.

Honestly, I can’t decide whether Girls Like Girls overdoes it a bit with the AIM. Was it still that much in use in 2006? I think AIM and I think 90s. Grandpa Matthew went onto the Wikipedia to look into this, and evidently AIM was popular through 2005, at which time its decline began with the advent of SMS text messaging and Gmail. 2006 was pretty soon after that, so I guess I’ll allow it; it appears I didn’t even have my first iPhone until 2008, so for all I know I was still using AIM myself in 2006. I just can’t remember! Because I’m old!

Anyway, “period” details aside, there are moments of dialogue that come across as a little stilted. There are also scenes in which teenagers are socializing and talking about things no human adult would be interested in, and this comes across as authentic; it’s a different thing. The moment when Coley and Sonya have a “meet cute” of sorts didn’t fully work for me, and it was because of the writing. There’s a few scenes that unfold this way, but to Maya de Costa and Myra Molloy’s credit, they really sell it; they have real chemistry and it’s easy to believe they are falling in love with each other, yet being tentative with each other for their own separate, largely unclarified reasons.

When all was said and done, Girls Like Girls left me deeply moved, and I love that it’s part of a lasting legacy of making young queer people feel seen and feel good about themselves. The existence of movies like this makes it just a little bit easier to have hope for humanity.

If this isn’t truth in advertising I don’t know what is.

Overall: B+

LEVITICUS

Directing: B+
Acting: A-
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B+
Editing: A-

Does Leviticus hit different if you grew up closeted and religious, I wonder? Well, I did, and there’s no escaping the very personal way this film unfolded in my eyes. This isn’t just “queer horror” in the metaphorical sense; queerness not only is the text, but it’s about how willfully ignorant people will use our own desires against us—sometimes to deeply effective, and even fatal effect.

Leviticus is very effective just as a straightforward horror movie as well; Australian writer-director Adrian Chiarella understands how to make this movie work on both surface and deeper levels, allowing viewers to wade in as far as they’d like. Teenage friends Naim (Joe Bird) and Ryan (Stacy Clausen) are introduced to us like believably regular buddies, roughhousing until they tumble in each other’s arms, and before they know it they’re kissing. That may sound a little corny, but Bird and Clausen are such gifted, natural performers that it feels totally organic. There aren’t even any tropes of internalized homophobia here; they seem totally comfortable with themselves and each other, and are only wary of the rest of the world.

But then Naim happens upon Ryan in his backyard, with another teenager (Jeremy Blewitt), and they’re doing something rather unsettling: taking turns hurling stones right at each other. We have already seen scenes in the local church by this point, so at first I thought maybe this was some kind of allusion to stoning as punishment. This practice comes up several times more, until the it is finally revealed to be something very different—and desperate—and one of the pieces of the narrative puzzle clicking into place.

Soon enough, Ryan and this other kid are brought by the religious locals to a so-called “Deliverance Healer,” and the boys are openly derisive of the practice—again, comfortable in their own skin, dismissive of what they understandably regard as crackpot ideas. Except in this film, the ritual works, and it cannot be undone: the result is a sort of inner demon that never leaves you, but externalizes and manifests as the person, as another character puts it, “you’re most into.” So, when either Naim or Ryan is alone, they will see the other one, who seduces them, only to physically attack them. Left unchecked, it will literally kill them, as happens to the teen lesbian character in a pool shower in the opening scene.

I never saw the acclaimed 2014 film It Follows—I avoid most horror movies—but I do know Leviticus has invited many comparisons, though by all accounts It Follows is an allegory for sexually transmitted infections. Leviticus also explores a kind of personalized nightmare that never goes away, but its explicit queerness is what sets it apart. And I mean “excplicit” not in a sexual sense (there are two sex scenes, of sorts, and neither is at all explicit), but in the sense that it’s about queerness, with queer protagonists, and the pressures of a world that can’t even be bothered to understand.

The one character I have some ambivalence about is Naim’s mother, played by Mia Wasikowska, who looks strikingly like a young Martha Plimpton. Wasikowska looks so young, in fact, I wondered if she was too young to play Joe Bird’s mother; well, Bird is 19 and Wasikowska is 36. I guess this woman would hardly be the first in the world to have had a baby at 17 (or in the world of the movie, probably more like 19; Bird is clearly playing younger). Maybe it’s just because I have reached the ancient age of 50, but to me they looked so close in age that I really thought at first that she was maybe his much older sister taking care of him after the death of their parents.

Anyway, that’s not even the real source of my ambivalence; it’s the characterization of Naim’s mother, who never engages with him, never truly talks to him, and certainly never listens to him, particularly when he’s trying to explain the extraordinary things going on. She takes him to church, and writer-director Adrian Chiarella imbues her with a kind of prejudice that is unexpected: rather than, say, being disgusted by his sexuality, instead she fears the hatred of others—and uses that as an excuse for bringing the “Deliverance Healer” to him: “I can’t lose you too,” she says, as though curing him of what she sees as an affliction will protect him from outside threats. Instead, she invites one that manifests from within. There may be something to this among those of us with real-world experience in religious intolerance: the backfiring of actions by loved ones who are convinced they mean well.

Still, there is something weirdly repressed about Wasikowska’s mother character, stripping her of dimension even as she’s very effectively used to make the movie’s point. And there’s something very sinister about the effects of treatment like this, a lasting trauma that cannot be undone. There’s also an unsettling irony to the fascinating detail of how this living nightmare works, in that the demon manifestations only appear if you are alone. So as long as you are sure you are with the real version of the person you desire and not the nightmare version, presumably you’re okay? But also you can never, ever let them out of your sight, presumably for the rest of your life? That seems like a kind or forced commitment, a nightmare all its own.

Or maybe these two will inevitably fall out of lust with each other, start having eyes for other people, and then it will be those other people these nightmare entities take the form of when they are alone. Maybe they should just open up the relationship but never be apart? Shared orgies until the end of time!

I digress. I have to hand it to this movie, it really makes you think. It’s also very effective with its horror-movie scares, both in scenes with very successful jump-scares and scenes in which you are simply terrified one is coming. I’ve never been so terrified watching a hand job in my life, I was so convinced it was going to end with a nightmare version of either Naim or Ryan popping up and scaring the shit out of me.

And that’s what it all comes down to: “We need fear,” Naim’s mother says, as justification for what she’s done to him. “It’s how we survive.” That line will stay with me, a haunting idea by virtue of its deeply misguided contextualization. Well, I’m not sure I need the fear Leviticus put in me with effective horror staging, but it offers certain depths that make me very glad I saw it.

Okay but what if a man stands with a man?

Overall: B+

TOY STORY 5

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B
Special Effects: B+

Do we really need five of these Toy Story movies? I suppose you could say Disney and Pixar Animation Studios has made each one for a different generation—at least since Toy Story 2, which came out four years after the 1995 original that ushered in a new era of computer-animated movies that changed animated feature filmmaking forever. The thing is, though, that movie was also incredibly inventive on visual, stylistic and narrative levels, and it set the bar incredibly high for Pixar, which it met for nearly two decades thereafter. Toy Story 2 in 1999 was shockingly on par with its predecessor, and then, eleven years later, Toy Story 3 was the first and only film I’ve ever reviewed that was both the third in a series and the best film in the year it was released (2010). It was yet another nine years later when Toy Story 4 (2019) was released, and although it was highly acclaimed, I found it to be fun but slightly overrated, the first in this franchise not quite up to the task of justifying its own existence.

But, let’s say you were 5 years old when the first Toy Story came out. (Oh me? I was 19.) You would have been 9 when Toy Story 2 was released; 20 when Toy Story 3 was released; 29 with Toy Story 4; and now 36 with Toy Story 5. Kids have literally grown up with these movies, are are old enough now to have children of their own with the ability to understand some of the in-jokes. Toy Story, along with Pixar Animation Studios itself, has a history spanning over three decades. And while I can’t say it’s a bad thing per se that they keep returning to this particular well, I do find myself wishing they would get back to more original material, like they did far more consistently in their first couple of decades. (I can tell you this much: all of these movies are far better than the 2022 misfire Lightyear.)

Each Toy Story movie adds new toy characters to its cast, while struggling to retain the core cast from every movie since the others were introduced, always running the risk of being overstuffed. It’s been so long now since the first installment that some of the voice actors have died: Jeff Bergman has replaced Don Rickles as Mr. Potato Head; Blake Clark has replaced Jim Varney as Slinky Dog; Anna Vocino has replaced Estelle Harris as Mrs. Potato Head. Some of these iconic voices from the earlier films have been replaced by what sound like generic replacements, and unfortunately that sort of fits into the direction these last couple of films have been leaning.

Does any of that mean I didn’t still enjoy it? Of course not! I might even go so far as to say I liked 5 slightly better than 4, even if I wasn’t quite as impressed with that looks like pretty standard Pixar visual renderings these days. This one features a delightful subplot, which the narrative switches back and forth from, of about 50 Buzz Lightyears spilling from a shipping container crashed on a deserted island—this is, in fact, how the film opens. All of these Lightyears, convinced they are actually Buzz and having no idea they are toys, until they go on a quest across the sea that ultimately has them running across our regular heroes in the middle of their own story.

These movies have always been cram packed with ideas, with a lot to say and with only slightly varying levels of success. They all touch on how our perceptions of prized possessions change as we grow up, and this is a franchise that has always explored the question of how that might affect toys themselves. Toy Story 5, co-directed and co-written by McKenna Harris and Andrew Stanton, is a bit late in the game to bring up the effect of excessive screen time on kids; this is a premise that would have worked even better in 2019 with 4, and could maybe even have worked in 2010 with 3.

This time, little Bonnie (voiced by different actors in each of the three films she’s appeared in, this time by Scarlett Spears) is gifted a new toy that is a tablet for kids, here designed and named as “Lilypad,” or “Lily” (Greta Lee) for short. She serves as the primary antagonist in the story this time around, but not in quite the way you might go in expecting. Instead of being straight up villainous, there’s just a lot of misunderstanding between Lily and the other toys—once again led by Woody and Buzz Lightyear, and I suppose they’ll keep making these movies as long as Tom Hanks and Tim Allen are alive to voice them—as all of them are just taking different approaches to what they sincerely feel is best for the kid who plays with them. Even though we get wide shots of multiple houses in which kids are just sitting looking at screens, it feels as though this movie is raising its hands in surrender to the inevitability of what characters consistently just call “tech,” and ultimately it comes to the conclusion that the best approach is to let a combination of electronic and analog objects work together to ignite a child’s imagination.

The most significant new characters this time around are all older versions of electronic devices themselves: Shelby Rabara as Snappy the toy camera; Craig Robinson as Atlas the GPS hippo; and most delightful of all, Conan O'Brien as Smarty Pants, the electronic toilet training device. Smarty Pants gets all the biggest laugh lines in this movie, and I have to hand it to them, they could have run with truly cheap humor here but the literal toilet humor involved here is consistently clever and surprisingly subtle at times.

And that’s the thing with Toy Story 5, which invites you back into a comfortable world you love to return to, with all the old friends you love (Joan Cusack as Jessie—she might even have the most screen time—and Kristen Schaal as Trixie and Wallace Shawn as Rex and Annie Potts as Bo Peep and Tony Hale as Forky and many many more) and yet even more new friends you’re delighted to meet. But as much fun as I had watching this movie, and as easily as it affected me emotionally, often to the point of misty eyes, it is also by definition fundamentally unoriginal, which makes the script, arguably the most important part of a movie, its weakest link. And while it’s not extremely weak, it’s still easier to clock the contrivances with each one of these outings, taking us another step closer to boredom with each journey. There comes a point where it starts to feel a bit repetitive.

But, much like a TV show that loses its way but I keep watching because I love the characters, the winning characters and voice performances still keep me entertained. This is a franchise that achieved the unthinkable with three classic installments, and you could argue they should have stopped there. But this is clearly a well that Pixar will keep returning to as long as there is anything to pull out of it, and I suppose I’ll keep letting them take me to it as long as I’m having a good time.

It’s more of the same, but it’s so fun to return to

Overall: B+

STOP! THAT! TRAIN!

Directing: C
Acting: B-
Writing: C
Cinematography: B-
Editing: C
Special Effects: C+

Let me tell you a story, you ones. There once was a movie spoof comedy so hilarious, people went back to see it over and over again, just to catch the wall-to-wall gags they missed while they were too busy laughing the first time. It was a smash at the box office, it could reasonably be called the funniest movie ever made, and it was called Airplane! The thing is, if you are indeed young, you’ve probably never even heard of this movie, let alone the fact that it was sending up the countless, self-serious disaster movies being made at the time. And you certainly won’t understand that Stop! That! Train! clearly thinks its paying homage to it, but instead is straight up ripping it off.

It has the characters regularly returned to as a running gag—in this case, a horny woman (Missi Pyle) coming on to the train conductor (Chris Parnell) she doesn’t realize is dead; or the bitchy businessman (Jesse Tyler Ferguson) yammering to a pregnant woman (Mayan Lopez) about how he only likes babies when they are still inside the womb, or the distracted woman (Natasha Leggero) who can’t stop yakking on her phone. In retrospect, I suppose it actually is kind of hilarious that the woman playing a famous actress constantly thinking people are recognizing her, when really they just wanted to complain about her being in her seat or whatever, was an actually-famous actress I did not recognize, and it turns out she was Sarah Michelle Gellar.

Airplane! didn’t have these exact same scenarios, but it certainly had a number of similar concepts—enough, in fact, that here they play like overused ideas in Airplane IV. What Stop! That! Train! does do is have crew dragging the conductor’s lifeless body down the aisle while passengers fail to notice, and this exactly happens in Airplane!

What I’m saying is, I watched Stop! That! Train! constantly thinking of the far better movie that clearly inspired it but did everything a hundred times better and with actual laughs per minute. I won’t deny that I got a few good chuckles out of this movie, but the frequency was more like a couple laughs per act. I was excited by the thought of a major motion picture presented basically as a spoof but through a pointedly queer lens, but this is an exercise that would have worked far better as a five-minute sketch, or hell, even a thirty-minute short film. Stretching it out even as far as what otherwise should be a tight, ninety minutes, if you’ll pardon the pun, drags it down. Way too much of what’s onscreen just lands with an airless thud.

The opening credits sequence is amusing, as director Adam Shankman (who saw better days directing the 2007 film adaptation of the Hairspray musical—the ensuing two decades have not been kind) cuts back and forth between real footage of impressive high-speed trains zooming through verdant landscapes and shots of obvious model trains and toys. Unfortunately, this is the high point of the film. We then meet Tess and DeeDee (played by drag queens Ginger Minj and Jujubee), on their way to work at Stank Rail, only to find themselves laid off. When two crew members don’t show up for work at competing rail company Glamazonian Express, they quickly whip up disguises to go in their place. Very quickly this luxury train finds itself headed straight into a “Stormaganza,” and hijinks ensues. Shankman, and co-writers Christina Friel and Connor Wright, clearly want you to think that hilarity ensues. It might be more likely for your mind to wander.

If you’re a huge fan of RuPaul’s Drag Race, you might consider this movie star studded. I never got into that show, so while I’m sure plenty of people recognize the plethora of other drag queens in the cast (Brooke Lynn Hytes; Marty Lauter; Symone; Monét X Change; I think I may actually recognize Latrice Royale from somewhere), the only one readily recognizable to me was RuPaul, who plays President Judy Gagwell—part of the “gag” here being, obviously, she’s hardly any more ridiculous than the actual President we have right now, though her winning campaign slogan of “She fun” isn’t that far off from how he got here. Maybe my favorite was Matt Rogers as President Gagwell’s Press Secretary; his reaction after Gagwell says “Give it to me straight” and then “Now give it to me gay” is pretty great. This entire film could have used more of his vibe.

The thing is, I really want a movie like Stop! That! Train! to work, and to succeed. It was made for a paltry $20 million, and the $2.5 million it’s earned in the past five days might as well be regarded as nothing—but, if you watch this movie, you won’t be surprised. The people making this movie seemed to be having a good time, but apparently no one was around to tell them how much of it wasn’t working. The outtakes during the end credits have more energy to them than the entire film that precedes them.

Stop! That! Train! is the kind of project that would have worked far better as a janky live theater production, particularly one that could be workshopped in front of audiences so they could decipher which gags actually work. There’s a smattering of gags in the film that do work, but they are few and far enough between that you might start to get antsy, or downright impatient. The film does have a sort of knowingly low-budget quality, with what appears to be the aim of that being part of the charm. I really like a ton of the people seen in it (there are countless I haven’t even mentioned; I will say that Guy Branum is utterly wasted in it as one of countless idiot guys who won’t listen to the one woman—played by Rachel Bloom—at the United States Train Command Center who is trying to save the runaway train), but none of them get used in a way that comes close to meeting their potential.

This is a movie that actually could have been great, had they just used better writers. This makes it all the more disappointing, and given the hopes I had for it, maybe the most disappointing movie I’ve seen this year. I want to give the cast their due, say they’re doing their best, but that hardly matters in a comedy where most of the comedy doesn’t work.

Stop! That! Movie! and watch Airplane! instead.

Overall: C

DISCLOSURE DAY

Directing: B+
Acting: A-
Writing: A-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: A
Special Effects: B

Look, I reserve the right to change my opinion of Disclosure Day over time. I’m seeing it again next week; perhaps my opinion will evolve. After first watch, I found it riveting from start to finish, but I thought the aliens looked kind of dumb. Thankfully their cumulative screen time is mercifully brief.

As is always the case with Steven Spielberg, this movie is much more about the people—as in, the human people. Tonally, Disclosure Day is like a cross between Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Spielberg’s 2005 take on War of the Worlds—a flawed movie that I still return to every few years. (It is perhaps worth noting that the War of the Worlds aliens from 21 years ago looked better than these ones do.) Disclosure Day isn’t perfect either, but it spoke to me in a way Spielberg has not managed in a very long time, perhaps not since the 2001 science fiction extravaganza Minority Report.

Still, it’s easy to find things to be ambivalent about in this movie, and while I’m not sure I’d go so far as to call it polarizing, one can anticipate a degree of mixed reviews. The special effects, frankly, are not up to Spielberg’s usual standards. Some of the effects shots in the trailers, out of context, look worse than they come off while watching the film—but you can still see the CGI of it all. It would be one thing if the animals that appear out of nowhere to sort of mesmerize a couple of the lead characters were always part of a hallucination or a flashback of memory, but there are instances of this where we are meant to take it as occurring in their present reality.

And I really have to criticize the aliens themselves. Spielberg is clearly using the prototypical alien form from as far back as the forties as a reference. But, there are shots in which these guys just look like beanpole children in rubber costumes. There’s a shot in the final sequence that for me, pushes against the line of ridiculous; others might reasonably feel it crosses that line.

It’s a testament to the writing, by both David Koepp (who has written a great many great movies, including four previous Spielberg films) and Spielberg himself, that I am easily able to overlook these things. Ditto the direction, and also the phenomenal editing by Sarah Broshar (another frequent Spielberg collaborator). Janusz Kaminski’s cinematography is very good but not at quite the same level; there are a bit too many lens flares, and one major nitpick is the shot of a crowd of people recording through a window with their smart phone lights on—they would just be recording the light reflecting in the glass. It makes for a cool, haunting image, though.

Janusz Kaminski is yet another frequent Spielberg collaborator, and that seems to be a major theme here. Much of Disclosure Day is a revisit, of sorts, to ground he’s covered before. To its credit, it also looks forward, and although it hardly gets into the weeds, it has some pretty provocative philosophical questions to pose, and this is a big part of what elevates it. Should we be keeping proof of extraterrestrial life secret because we fear aliens, or because we fear how people will handle it? (There was one scene in which I thought: if this were the real world, some idiot would just whip out a gun and shoot that thing.) What kind of impact would proof of aliens have on global religious consciousness? These are things that characters in the film actually talk about, and we get very reasonable arguments from multiple sides.

Now, it’s on the record that Spielberg himself is convinced that aliens walk among us, and this is a perspective that clearly informs his approach to this film. My reaction to that is: that’s cute. The adorable old man thinks aliens on Earth are real! The idea is of course preposterous on its face. If any evidence actually did exist, it would have been leaked eons ago. There’s a throwaway line in this movie about how U.S. presidents are kept in the dark since they are civilians again eight years after being in office, and that explains how they are kept in the dark, and gives an out for speculation regarding the unnamed current president. The thing is, presidents still stack agencies with people who are just as moronic as they are, and it’s silly to think anything this huge could ever be kept secret by hundreds or maybe even thousands of people with knowledge of it. It’s mathematically impossible.

It sure makes a great movie, though. Conspiracies are typically ludicrous in the real world, but they make for great thrillers, and Disclosure Day is indeed a great one. Even better, it’s fantastically cast: Colin Firth is a government agent on the tail of Josh O’Connor on the run with the government secrets he’s spent a decade being paid to protect, and they both slip into their roles organically—as does Eve Hewson as O’Connor’s girlfriend, who is having a crisis of faith in the face of the information being shared. The standout, though, is Emily Blunt, as the Kansas City TV news meteorologist who suddenly finds herself uttering a click-like laguage nearly no one can understand, and occasionally slipping into Russian or Korean. She gradually discovers other abilities that I won’t reveal here, except to say that they provide a delightful mix of mysterious and comic moments alike. Blunt’s performance, as a relatable middle-aged woman confused by suddenly extraordinary circumstances, arguably makes Disclosure Day worth seeing on its own. Colman Domingo, on the other hand, is a a great actor underused as a guy who spends most of his screen time on the phone with one or another of the other characters.

For all I know, maybe one day I will find the writing in Disclosure Day less impressive and the visual effects somehow more sensible. All I know is, I look forward to seeing it again, and I look forward to being able to discuss it with people. This is a movie that grabs you from its opening shot, from the point of view of a professional wrestler stomped in the face. Within moments, we see O’Connor’s whistleblower character nervously sitting in the crowd, already on the run. Disclosure Day does not waste a moment, and is so well edited that its 145 minutes pass swiftly. This is action-thriller filmmaking at its finest, not a narrative sag in sight. It occasionally invites nitpicking, but that’s relatively inconsequential considering how high it’s flying when the story soars, and I felt like I was windsurfing on its intrigue the entire time.

To be perfectly Blunt

Overall: A-

TUNER

Directing: B+
Acting: B+
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B
Editing: A

What a delight this movie is, an original idea executed well. What a concept!

It probably helps that the director and co-writer, Daniel Roher, is an accomplished documentary filmmaker, shifting into narrative film for the first time with Tuner. This means we get fresh and new ideas from someone who already knows a thing or two about making movies. Most crucially, he knows something about editing, which can make or break any film but is especially important in documentaries, and is easily the strongest element of Tuner,

Leo Woodall plays the title character, Niki White, a guy with a hearing condition best described as “allergic to loud noise.” When things are quiet, though, he can take advantage of his greatest talent, perfect pitch, while working for an aging Harry Horowitz (Dustin Hoffman) for a piano tuning company. Roher, along with co-writer Robert Ramsey, takes his time getting to these details, but eventually we learn that Niki’s father, who died some years ago, was close with Harry. This is one of the many great things about Tuner, which doesn’t bother with spelling a lot of things out. You simply get the sense that, in the wake of Niki’s father’s death, Harry and his wife, Marla (Tovah Feldshuh), took him under their wing.

When Harry, who we see immediately is perhaps in very early stages of dementia, is hospitalized, Niki learns that Harry and Marla are already in deep medical debt. He falls in with a group of Israeli criminals who are delighted to learn of Niki’s other gift: in total silence, he can use his pitch-perfect hearing to crack the code to unlock safes.

I spent a lot of time watching Tuner wondering how the hell it was going to resolve. Is he somehow going to outsmart these thieves who increase their threats when he tries to pull away from them? Is he going to endanger his concert pianist girlfriend, Ruthie (Havana Rose Liu)? It’s the not knowing the answers to these questions that makes Tuner exciting, because in someone else’s hands, we’d see what’s coming a mile away. But, not in Daniel Roher’s hands. I never had the slightest clue where the hell it was going, and in the best way. This is a crime thriller that’s thrilling in its originality.

Leo Woodall is the perfect fit to play Niki, a guy whose potential as a child prodigy was ripped away from him by his hearing condition. He now moves through life frustrated and shy, but in the end he lets a relationship organically blossom after a bit of pushing by Harry. Hoffman, who is now 88 years old, is an equally good fit as a lovably cantankerous old man. (If anything, he plays younger here; we never hear how old Harry is, but who continues running a shoestring business at 88? It’s easy to believe Harry and Marla are around the same age, even though Tovah Feldshuh is 11 years younger than Hoffman.)

I suppose you could call the plot to Tuner a bit convoluted, but it’s always legible, which is a credit to the director and writers. I do have a couple of nitpicks, chief of which is the presence of a brightly colored piano incongruously hanging out in Harry’s hospital hallway, convenient for Ruthie to bring in and play for him. Niki also seems a little too smart to believe the obviously bullshit lies that the thieves tell him about the rich people they’re stealing from, but whatever; I’ll forgive it because what’s great about the movie more than makes up for these things.

More than anything, Tuner has great editing—and specifically, sound editing. I was reminded of another excellent film, Sound of Metal, which also featured great sound that vividly illustrated the experience of a man losing his hearing. In Niki’s case, he wears hearing aids that he can use to turn down ambient noise, and often wears noise-canceling headphones on top of that. There are villainous characters who occasionally use this condition against him, and instead of going the more predictable route of Niki somehow outsmarting the Israeli thieves who are progressively more dangerous to him, the story comes to a completely unexpected yet fully satisfying conclusion.

Niki isn’t so much a hero as he is a flawed protagonist you can’t help but root for, largely thanks to Leo Woodall’s nuanced performance. This is a story that is both complex and comprehensible, gripping and utterly unpredictable. It would be particularly fun to watch having known nothing about it going in, but then how would you convince people to watch it? I had such a great time, this is the kind of movie that can restore a person’s faith in cinema.

I hear you need a tuneup: Dustin Hoffman and Leo Woodall on the scene.

Overall: B+