A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE

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

All my life, I had this vision the thirty minutes or so it might take for a nuclear missile to reach the United States, and how I would spend those last moments, counting down the clock to obliteration. This vision always presupposed knowledge of the oncoming missile at the moment of its launch, giving time for us to . . . what? Prepare? Well, A House of Dynamite, directed by Kathryn Bigelow (Zero Dark Thirty) and written by Noah Oppenheim (Jackie), and streaming on Netflix now, has completely disabused me of this notion.

Once people even realize a missile is on its way, the countdown has already begun. And these are government and military employees with high security clearance, far removed from average citizens. These people have to spend precious minutes ascertaining whether the threat is even real. It occurred to me, while watching A House of Dynamite, that I really should have considered this long ago: the people spending all that time making decisions first on what's real and then on the select few who get whisked to some version of safety—they're not spending any time sending credible warnings to the masses. Hell, in this movie they spend several of those crucial minutes just ascertaining what the target is. In all likelihood, as is what happens in this movie, anyone just living their lives in a target city would simply be obliterated before they had any idea what hit them.

Is there a strange comfort in that? Maybe there is. One could argue it's not the worst way to go, with no fear or panic preceding it.

And that's a ton of what we see in A House of Dynamite: a huge, ensemble cast of characters having the reality of impending cataclysm settle in. A missile launch is detected, and in the first moments, everyone is blasé about it. They keep track of the trajectory, and realize it's not slowing down and it's headed for us. It soon enough becomes clear that in the best case scenario, ten million Americans are killed instantly and global destabilization ensues—and that is if we don’t fire any retaliatory shots.

There’s a fascinating angle to this film, in that the aforementioned 30 minutes are not enough to ascertain who fired the shot and thus who we should even fire against. Quick discussions are had about preemptive strikes against we could reasonably expect to take advantage of the situation. But Bigelow and Oppenheim never provide us with any of those answers—not what country the missile is coming from; not whether the bomb even detonates (sometimes the don’t, we’re told); not what the President decides about whether to launch our own strikes. This is the Cath-22 of the modern age, not quite as good as that classic film but with much to recommend on its own—because this is about the questions themselves, not the answers. This is about moral dilemmas under the deepest of pressures.

The three-part stucture of A House of Dynamite is arguably a bit of a gimmick: it’s told in real-time, from the moment of detection to the moment of impact, three times over: first in the Situation Room in communication with The Pentagon and Fort Greely, where attempts at ground-based interceptors will be lauched; then at United States Strategic Command (STRATCOM) in Nebraska; and then, inevitably, from the White House. Each of these chapters showcases separate groups of the ensemble cast, all of them interacting with each other: among the many familiar faces are Rebecca Ferguson as a Situation Room senior officer; Anthony Ramos as the commander at Fort Greely; Tracy Letts as the warmongering commander at STRATCOM; Jarred Harris as the Secretary of Defense; and Idris Elba as the President. In many cases, we first see important characters as only a face in one among many screens like an emergency Zoom meeting, then shift to the perspective of the room they are in, in another chapter.

Kathryn Bigelow unfolds this story in a very straightforward, procedural style, much like her multiple previous films set in wartime, but even more procedural in this case. The few moments that characters pause to show emotion are all the more effective. All of this doesn’t allow for a great deal of character development, but that is entirely beside the point: this is about making choices in the face of urgency. And side note, this is maybe not the best movie to watch about such a scenario with the current people actually in charge in Washington, D.C. This is unsettling shit, not the least because it quite pointedly reminds us that while things like climate change have long rivaled it as an existential threat, the nuclear threat to the world is very real and still goes on.

There are precious few genuinely amusing moments in A House of Dynamite, but one of them is when the President himself says how this phrase, “a house full of dyanmite,” was something he “heard on a podcast.” It’s something that feels both on the nose and very plausible. For the most part, these are just a whole bunch of regular people caught up in extraordinary circumstances. Even those who are on evacuation lists among all connected staff across these agencies can feel arbitrary. One character is extracted even though she’s only been in the position for a few months. “Why does she get to go and we don’t?” another woman asks. A fair question. Who in their right mind could expect things to be fair in these moments? But who in these moments would be in their right mind?

I feel a little ambivalent about what purpose this film serves, exactly—I found it to be riveting and unsettling, but to what end? It opened my eyes to at least one stark reality, I guess: not only would I not have any hope of escape from this sort of attack, but in a targeted city I wouldn’t even know it was coming. Surely Seattle would be on the list of targets. Whew! What a relief!

Yeah, you heard that right. It’s time to put you head between your knees and kiss your ass goodbye.

Overall: B+

IF I HAD LEGS I'D KICK YOU

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

You don’t want to know what a childless man thinks about If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. Not even an empathetic girly-man has thoughts of any true relevance, although that’s less because of the “girly” than still because of being childless. It’s possible no one of any gender who does not have children can truly relate to what’s going on in this movie. So why are you reading this, then? Go find a review by someone who actually knows what they’re talking about!

. . . Okay. Are they gone? It’s just us now. We can still talk about movie making, right? Maybe skip the wondering questions about how easily some people might be triggered by this movie, or how anyone who is easily triggered might want to steer clear of this movie? After all—trigger warning!—this movie features themes of both suicide and child abandonment (by multiple characters, no less). Oh, wait. I just put those questions right here. Crap!

Here’s what I can tell you with actual authority: If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is deeply stressful, from beginning to end. There have been many comparisons to Uncut Gems because they are apt: the main character is in every frame, and the camera’s point of view leads our desire, with increasing desperation, for this character to make anything but the bad, worst choice. In this case, it’s Linda, a married mother who is at the end of her rope as she cares for a sick child while her husband is away for work for weeks at a time.

Here is the most important thing you should know about this: Linda is played by Rose Byrne, who gives a breathtaking performance. She absolutely should be in the Best Actress Oscar conversation—and reportedly, thankfully, she is, for now at least. The challenge, maybe, is getting enough people to see this incredible film with its stunningly versatile lead actor. I think writer-director Mary Bronstein should also be in the Oscar conversation, but she is, alas, a lot less so.

I knew I was going to be into this movie from its opening sequence, in which Linda brings her child home, the child is first to notice flooding on the bathroom floor, and when Linda moves into another room to investigate, she sees water leaking through the ceiling—and then a giant hole suddenly bursts through, gushing water all over the room. The camera pulls into the darkness of the hole, until the screen goes black, except for some curved streaks of light that suggest an ultrasound. It’s very unclear whether this is actually a dream or not, and this is when the opening titles appear. And this was where I was immediately locked in: This is my kind of movie.

Bronstein makes a lot of stylistic choices that are both very unusual and work almost shockingly well. The child is never named, and until the very end, we never even see her, even though she is often in the scene, and we hear her. Like any normal child, she talks a great deal and nags her bedraggled mom about trivial things. It’s just that they also have conversations about when and how a tube will be removed, and how much food she needs to eat so she can gain enough weight for doctors to allow it to happen. We never learn the exact nature of the child’s health condition, except that it requires a great deal of maintenance by her mother, refilling bags of liquid and making sure machinery is beeping in ways that are not alarming.

Bronstein is on record about her choice to keep the child out of frame at all times: because this is Linda’s story and not the child’s, and because the natural instinct is always for the viewer to empathize with the child first, Bronstein doesn’t even give us that opportunity. Not only is the focus exclusively on Linda, but Byrne is shot frequently in uncomfortable close-ups. I have seen this technique many times in film, and I often kind of hate it. Here it works, because it underlines the claustrophobic feeling of Linda’s entire life. And this is one of the many amazing things about If I Had Legs I’d Kick You: not one other character is shown being empathetic toward her—not her husband (Christian Slater, the one casting choice that’s somewhat distracting, because after hearing him on several hostile phone calls you don’t actually see him until the end); not her doctor (played by Bronstein herself); not even her own therapist (a part Bronstein write specifically for Conan O’Brien, who accepted and gives a solid performance in his first-ever serious role). For the most part, they actually have good reason to be exasperated rather than empathetic with her. And yet, Bronstein has crafted a story with such delicate skill that we, as the viewer, cannot help but empathize with her.

And Linda does some very bad things. She makes bad choices, mostly because she can’t take the pressure anymore. That hole in her ceiling turns out not to be a dream, but a real incident that results in her having to live in a hotel with her daughter—in a unit with a thanklessly nice neighbor played by A$AP Rocky. Linda is herself a therapist, making the very odd choice of getting therapy treatment from a colleague at her own practice, and we see three different clients who all have problems that seem trivial compared to Linda’s. Or, maybe they aren’t—but this is how Linda is seeing them, which is not the best professional position to be in. One particular client (Danielle Macdonald) becomes the source of one of the many things that go terribly wrong for Linda.

It would seem the central theme of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is the inherent guilt of being a mother, particularly one who can never feel like she’s not underwater. Linda even says at one point, “I’m not supposed to be a mom!” We can tell she loves her daughter, but she also feels overwhelmed, and has no support network, although it’s hard to tell whether there might have been a network that she just sabotaged with her own behavior. The question is whether she’ll ultimately just give up, and there is a sequence in this film where that is harrowingly unclear. “I’ll be better” is something daughter and mother say to each other at different times, and it’s perhaps not an accident that they don’t say “I’ll get better.”

This is a film that ends on the kind of hopeful note that comes with a ton of baggage. I’ll be thinking about this one for a long time, and that’s a good thing. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is constantly harrowing, sometimes darkly funny, heartbreaking and uniquely humane.

Rose Byrne gives arguably the best performance of her career.

Overall: A-

SPRINGSTEEN: DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE

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

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere is an unconventional biopic in a multitude of ways, not least of which is it’s definitively, pointedly unexciting. This is a movie about three things: the making of Bruce Springsteen’s 1982 album, Nebraska, one of the lesser-known albums of his 53-year career; depression; and childhood trauma.

This film really leans into the childhood trauma part, opening with a flashback to Bruce at 8 years old, with his parents played by Stephen Graham and Gabby Hoffman. This era of his life, always presented in black and white, is returned to consistently throughout the film. As we return to Bruce as an adult, dating a composite-character woman (Odessa Young) we never particularly care about, Springsteen is working on this album we are clearly meant to understand is informed by these childhood memories. It’s a bunch of acoustic songs, a major departure from his previous rock albums, and Springsteen is very particular about how it’s recorded, how it’s released, and how it’s marketed—which is to say, not at all.

At the end of the film, we get title cards informing us that even with no tour and no singles to support it, Nebraska still reached #3 on the album charts. It doesn’t bother to say that the album sold a million copies—an impressive number out of context to be sure, but his previous album, The River, sold five times that much; and his next album, Born in the U.S.A., sold 17 million, by far his greatest success and the 7th-best selling album of the eighties. To say that Nebraska was overshadowed by these other albums is an understatement, and it never would have sold nearly what it did without Springsteen’s other massive successes.

I had never listened to Nebraska myself. I’m listening to it literally as I write this. I have never been a Springsteen guy—I think he’s fine; he’s just not my thing—but, knowing I tend to like it when an artist does what a record executive in this film (played by David Krumholtz) calls “a folk album,” I expected to be into it. Well—it’s okay. My response to this album is about the same as my response to this film. Somewhat similarly, I noted with last year’s Bob Dylan Biopic—a far better film than this one—A Complete Unknown that I was never a Dylan guy either. I did like Timothée Chalamet’s singing performance as Bob Dylan, though; in fact I preferred that to the real Dylan. Jeremy Allen White does a pretty spot-on performance as Bruce Springsteen, including performance. But I also prefer Timothée Chalamet-as-Bob-Dylan to this.

At least A Complete Unknown, and several other music biopics before it, had moments of thrilling musical electricity. Such things are beside the point with Deliver Me From Nowhere, which is about a deeply personal album that clearly was, and clearly still is, very important to Springsteen. He was reportedly on set every day, which indicates that this film is similarly important to him. This is probably not the story most of his diehard fans would be interested in, but it’s the story he wants them to know. It’s also very drab and melancholy.

If you approach Deliver Me From Nowhere from the perspective of childhood trauma and adult depression, it becomes quite unconventional for a biopic and a fascinating examination of something rarely discussed in this context. On the other hand, the extent of this relationship with Bruce’s alcoholic father, and especially with his protective mother, is never given a great deal of depth, even with the large number of flashbacks. Most of this movie is just Bruce quietly moving through his life, recording a studio album that baffles his record label, and dwelling on these memories.

Jeremy Allen White does a very good job in the part, and Jeremy Strong gives a fine performance as his manager and friend Jon Landau, if not necessarily one that seems to justify his notorious method acting approach. Paul Walter Hauser appears as a guy helping Bruce with the recording, and Marc Maron as a studio engineer is so underused that in the first several scenes in which he appears he doesn’t even speak. At least he got to hang out and chat with Springsteen on set, seven years after Springsteen opened up about his struggles with depression on Maron’s WTF with Marc Maron podcast.

I’m all for cinematic examinations of trauma and depression, if they’re done well. They just don’t make for a very exciting music biopic, which, a bit ironically, the marketers of Bruce Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere basically promised. I find myself wondering if studio executives responded to the final product of this film the way executives did to the Nebraska albums: what are we supposed to do with this? Throw it to the wall and see if it sticks, I guess.

Deliver me to something more exciting.

Overall: B-

BLUE MOON

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

Lorenz Hart, the lyricist who was composer Richard Rogers’s professional partner for 24 years, was about five feet tall. So this was a big sticking point for me with Blue Moon, in which 5’10” Ethan Hawke was cast to play the part. This is a film directed by Richard Linklater, which by definition means it’s a low budget film, and really none of the ways in which Hawke is made to look like a small man look real or authentic. It’s a constant distraction. Are there really no talented short actors who could have been cast? Where’s Joe Pesci when you need him? Being way too old now, I guess. And too Italian-American. Lorenz Hart was Jewish.

They accomplished the physical transformation, reportedly, with “old stagecraft” techniques, including camera angles and forced-perspective similar to how they made the Hobbits look smaller in the Lord of the Rings films. At least those films also had spectacular special effects to distract from when these camera angles might otherwise be noticeable. The real issue with Hawke, however, is that he still has the proportions of a much taller man. When you see his hands, or even his head, in the same frame as those of another character, they look strangely large for how small a man he was supposed to be.

I really found all of this difficult to get past, making Blue Moon one of the most distractible films of Richard Linklater’s career. It’s also very much like a stage play, having been written by Robert Kaplow, whose only previous screenplay credit is the 2008 film Me and Orson Welles. There have been other exceptions, but this is a rare case of Linklater directing someone else’s work. And with the singular exception of an opening flashback of Hart’s death in an alley eight months later, the entirety of the film is set in a single bar, on the opening night of Rogers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!

This is a transitional moment, the opening night of Rogers and Hammrstein’s first collaboration—and, essentially, the nail in the coffin of Rogers and Hart’s collaboration. Hart did contribute five songs to one more Hammerstein musical before his death, but that was it. On this night, in this movie, Hart sits at the bar, chatting up everyone who will listen: the bartender, Eddie (Bobby Cannavale); the bar pianist and aspiring composer, Morty (Joanh Lees); the writer E.B. White (Patrick Kennedy) who happens to be sitting at a nearby table; Richard Rogers himself (Andrew Scott) once the show has ended and the cast and crew has come here for a celebration; and Hart’s biggest obsession, Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley).

Hart’s sexuality is a constant touch point in this script, because of this obsession with Elizabeth, with whom Hart spent a weekend some months ago. Given that Hart at one point literally and unironically calls himself “a cocksucker,” I suppose we could call him bisexual. Hawke does play him with well-observed nuance, giving him a subtly queer vibe that still does not take away our belief in his desire for Elizabeth. Hawke is an objectively good actor, but given that he is neither queer nor short, there are multiple distractions to his very existence in the part.

Blue Moon is getting widely positive reviews, and for the record, I did like it. I just did not find it exceptional. Even for a Richard Linklater movie—and that’s saying a lot—Hart talks too much. I can’t fathom the number of lines Hawke memorized for this, and most of the time he’s engaging even when the character is being frequently deluded. But there still came a point at which Hart yammered on for so long at that bar that I thought: all right, enough! Shut up!

Hart spends a lot of time criticizing the writing in Oklahoma!—right down to the inclusion of that exclamation point—and then, predictably, fawning over every part of it to both Rogers and Hammerstein once they actually arrive. Blue Moon gets some energy injected into it once the crowd arrives, as at least then all the talking makes sense. Until then, it’s a seemingly endless scene in a sparsely attended bar that feels a tad overwritten. Margaret Qualley feels slightly anachronistic, out of time, in this movie, but still has undeniable screen presence. Andrew Scott seems capable of feeling comfortably at home in just about any part he’s in.

It’s a solid cast, and for a movie that seems tailor made to be tedious and dull, I was never bored. I did spend some time wondering when it could go somewhere or get to a point, but this is a hallmark of Richard Linklater movies (especially ones he actually writes), with varying degrees of success. It’s possible this one is just a tad past its time. How many people going to the movies today know who Rogers and Hammerstein were, let alone what musicals they made together? And they were a far more famous duo than Rogers and Hart ever were. Perhaps that’s why the small mess of a man Lorenz Hart was gets a bit of love here. It’s too bad he’s just as forgotten as soon as this movie’s over. Like his career, though, it was pretty good while it lasted.

To call this a towering achievement would be misleading.

Overall: B

THE MASTERMIND

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

I find myself thinking maybe I appreciate The Mastermind more in retrospect, once I have allowed it to settle a bit, but I keep coming back to this pertinent question: does that matter? It doesn’t change my experience of sitting through this movie, which occurred in three stages. First, I thought: this is a very compelling premise; this seems fun. Then, I thought: is anything going to happen in this movie that makes sitting through it worth the effort? Finally, I thought: holy Christ, I’m bored.

If you’re a fan of writer-director Kelly Reichardt, you might reasonably argue that this is a me problem and not the movie’s problem. Might is the operative word there. I quite liked Reichardt’s film First Cow (filmed in late 2018; in theaters for one week in March 2020 but pulled due to covid; available on VOD when I reviewed it in late summer 2020), about a cook and a Chinese immigrant scheming to steal milk from the first cow in Oregon Territory.

But Reichardt definitely has a particular style of filmmaking, with long, quiet shots that are perhaps better suited to period pieces from the Old West. The Mastermind is also a period piece, but in a very different way: this one is set in 1970, first in Framingham, Massachusetts and then through several other states. This movie answers the question: “What if Kelly Reichardt made an art heist movie?” It turns out the answer is: “You may not want to sit through it.”

Josh O’Connor is a great actor, and he’s very good in The Mastermind, but I credit him for that far more than I do anything else in this movie. His James Blaine Mooney is an unemployed, married father of two, and he cooks up a scheme to steal four priceless paintings from a local art museum where his parents are members. His choices are all varying levels of foolish from moment one, and the heist sequence itself, in which he enlists the help of two other guys, is far and away the most exciting in the movie—and the fact that even this sequence is pointedly quiet (they are in a museum, after all) says all you really need to know about this movie.

But, you know. I have to write this review.

There’s a different scene that says the most about my personal reaction to this film. James takes the paintings, each carefully protected inside a fabric pouch sewn together by his wife, Terri (Licorice Pizza’s Alana Haim—also talented, but utterly wasted in this part), and slid into slots inside a homemade wooden box case, out to a farm shed for hiding. Reichardt lingers on James’s every move in this scene, even though all it involves is using a ladder to take the paintings up to a hiding spot in the rafters. But he has to pull the sliding lid off the box case; take the paintings up the ladder two at a time; carefully take the box case itself up the ladder; put the paintings back in their slots inside the box case; replace the lid on the box case; then slide the box to the side and cover it in hay. We see all of this happen in real time, and I can understand the intention here, as we’re observing the efforts this guy is going to for what we can see clearly is going to have no payoff making it worthwhile.

The least a movie like this can do for us, though, is to give us a payoff that makes sitting through a deadeningly dull sequence like that worthwhile. At that point in the film, I was still giving The Mastermind the benefit of the doubt: surely this is a foreshadowing of something yet to come that will somehow make all of this satisfying? Not so much. The narrative does return to this location later, and I’ll grant that it happens in an unexpected way. But it’s also definitively anticlimactic. And that’s the takeaway from this entire movie.

James’s accomplices in the robbery come and go in relatively short order, especially Ronnie (Javion Allen), who is a loose canon and surprises the trio by bringing a gun to the heist, thereby making it an armed robbery. I had very mixed feelings about the casting of a Black man in this part, given that he’s basically the guy who ruins what otherwise might have worked out for these other criminals. He’s the one guy who is immediately incompetent, he’s the one guy with a gun, he’s the one guy who gets physically violent with anyone during the ordeal, and he’s the one guy who gets arrested and then coerced into ratting on the others. I certainly don’t blame Javion Allen for simply getting work—and God knows I can’t speak for how he felt about the implications of the part—but from my perspective, this all seemed a little on the nose, particularly for a movie, and a director, which otherwise traffic in subtleties.

A whole lot of The Mastermind is not so much about James figuring out how to get away with what he’s done, but following him as he’s on the run (hence the aforementioned multiple states), trying to outrun what is clearly inevitable for him. To be sort of fair, this film could also have been titled The Hubris of Mediocre White Men, and O’Connor plays the part perfectly. I just felt in the end that his talents were misused here.

We get a lot of other great actors in supporting parts, including Bill Camp and Hope Davis as James’s parents. James makes a brief stop at the home of friends in the country, played by John Magaro, and Gaby Hoffman without a drop of makeup on, making her almost unrecognizable. Hoffman does a lot with very little screen time, but as great as the cast is, none of them could save The Mastermind from being dreadfully dull at worst and tedious at best. The final moment of the film, when James is becoming dangerously desperate, has an almost flippantly amusing quality to it, leaving you to think: all of that, for this? That is clearly the point, but it was a point I left the theater feeling unenriched by.

Okay, James. Get on with it!

Overall: C+

GOOD FORTUNE

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

Good Fortune is, unfortunately. a textbook case of the best parts of a movie having been in the trailer. Admittedly part of my problem is how often I go to the movies, and therefore how often I sit through the same trailers over and over again—something the average moviegoer does not contend with. The rest of the audience at the movie today laughed at several moments where I had to stop myself from thinking: why are they laughing? This bit is overplayed! But, most of them weren’t even remembering what they saw in the trailer.

Still, the script for Good Fortune is undeniably lacking, and it’s the weakest part of the production. This is not great, since the script is arguably the most critical part of a movie’s success. Sometimes great performances elevate mediocre material, but that doesn’t quite happen here, even though the cast is stacked with either deeply talented people, bona fide stars, or in many cases both: Keanu Reeves is the angel Gabriel, who gets out over his skis when he leaves his assignment of saving people from texting-and-driving accidents to save what he sees as a “lost soul.” Sandra Oh appears as Gabriel’s boss, Martha, in a sort of heaven middle-management. Keke Palmer plays a working-class woman trying to organize her hardware store coworkers into a union. Seth Rogen is Jeff, a wealthy entrepreneur oblivious to how good he really has it.

It pains me to say this, because I like Aziz Ansari and his work, but he’s the weak link in all of this. Not only does he play the part of Arj, the lost soul Gabriel has decided to save, without any sense of true dedication to the craft, but he also wrote and directed this film—his first time doing so with a feature. He doesn’t particularly excel at any of these three jobs. I find myself wondering if he might have done better just doing one of them and not the other two. Would his performance have improved with a different director? Could he have polished the script if not starring in the film had given him more time? He stacked all the supporting parts, so he clearly could have cast a better actor as the lead. Good Fortune could have worked a whole lot better if Ansari had just picked a lane.

To be fair, there are auteurs out there who have succeeded at being this very kind of triple-threat. Ansari just isn’t one of them. His Netflix series, Master of None, was very well written, and his performance in it was fine. Good Fortune, though, is presented and billed as a really fun comedy. At best it’s a slight amusement. I got one truly good laugh out of its 97-minute runtime.

And I do rather like the premise, a sort of It’s a Wonderful Life except it’s not Christmas, and instead of showing a depressed man how the world would be if he had never been born, this angel takes a more misguided approach and decides to show Arj what would be missing from his life if he were given the life of the rich dude, Jeff (Rogen), he’s been working for. Jeff is thus switched into Arj’s life, and at first he doesn’t realize it, until a peculiar plot point has Gabriel giving Jeff all his previous memories but not yet his old life. It gets a little convoluted, where these two can only switch back if Arj actually wants it and can see that it’s a life worth living. Who made these arbitrarily strict rules, anyway? These angels are assholes.

Keke Palmer’s Elena is Arj’s love interest, and she’s the only character in the film with a truly grounded sense of the worth of a working-class life. This comes to a head when the rich-version Arj woos Elena, and she’s taken by it at first, but then pulls back when Arj proves to be out of touch. This is all fairly predictable, and that might even have been easily overlooked if the movie were actually funny.

The biggest problem I have with Good Fortune, really, is its point of view. Ansari seems to be congratulating himself for how much he understands the struggles of working-class people, all while still managing to come across as out of touch himself. It’s worth noting that Aziz Ansari reportedly has a net worth of $25 million. The thing is, rich people don’t think of themselves as rich if they know other people who are far richer than they are, and all we have to do here is consider that Seth Rogen reportedly has a net worth of $80 million and Keanu Reeves $380 million. Compared to Reeves, Rogen’s fortune is chump change, and compared to Rogen, Ansari is the “little guy.” I’m not sure he’s fully thought through how most people watching this movie have a tiny fraction of what even he has, or that his movie could have benefited from a pass on the script by someone much closer to the lives he’s depicting.

He does showcase a very diverse cast of characters here, I’ll give him that—right down to the Latino restaurant owner with a thick accent. It’s likely not an accident that the only principal characters who are White are the rich ones (and yes, we know, there are White poor people too). The thing is, none of these characters are very interesting. I probably never would have thought of this myself, and I wish I did, but I’ll have to borrow this from the observation made by the friend I saw the movie with: every single character could have been more interesting, with minimal effort. So why aren’t they?

I kind of liked Gabriel, I’ll admit. There’s something endearing about Keanu Reeves delivering the line “I’m a dumb dumb.” Reeves is perfectly cast as a “budget angel” with a kind of hapless incompetence. This guy never had the greatest range as an actor, but he’s still a star—so much so that Ansari wrote into the script that at least two people comment openly on how hot they think he is. There are even plenty of circumstances that should be more of a blast to watch, such as when Gabriel tastes some mushroom chocolate. But that scenario, as in all of them here, just leads to a whole lot of not much, which is maybe the best way to describe this movie.

Keanu Reeves puts his hand on Seth Rogen’s shoulder, and suddenly Rogen realizes this movie isn’t very good.

Overall: C+

AFTER THE HUNT

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

Is it regressive to say that even though his character predictably turns out to be pretty much a slime ball, Andrew Garfield is my favorite part of After the Hunt because he’s so hot? I suppose it is, but “I’m just a simple man,” as his Hank says at a key point in the film when saying such a thing makes him sound like an utter dipshit. He could sure stand to lose the beard, though.

Luca Guadagnino is a director, and a man, of curious choices. He knows how to shoot a man in a way that accentuates his thighs—something he did a great deal with the tennis players in last year’s fantastic Challengers. He does the same with Andrew Garfield in After the Hunt, shooting him lounging in a bed wearing an open-button shirt and boxers. On the one hand, he seems to be trying to catch the interest of a clearly disinterested Yale colleague, Alma (Julia Roberts). On the other hand, the camera itself seems to be visually caressing those thighs. Is that for our benefit? Given the subject matter of this film, it’s maybe not the best time for it.

I just learned today that 54-year-old Guadagnino is in a long-term relationship with 38-year-old Italian director and screenwriter Ferdinando Cito Filomarino. I can’t help but wonder to what degree this might be relevant. Is that fair? Perhaps not. But a lot of things happen to characters in After the Hunt that are unfair. Some things are arguably very fair. More than one thing is clearly one or the other depending on the observer—both inside the movie and out. This is almost certainly what Guadagnino was going for.

I just wish it all tied together better in a cohesive narrative. Alma and Hank are both professors in the Yale philosophy department. This means we get a lot of conversations, in classrooms as well as at dinner parties, that are genuinely fascinating to listen to, even when they inevitably delve into generational differences in attitudes about ethics. A lot of the time, these discussions are pretty on the nose. I still found them engaging.

After the Hunt is a cinematic curiosity, in that it is deeply flawed and also ripe for discussion and intellectual debate. I can just imagine this movie itself being discussed in a university classroom. It could be a philosophy class or a film class, and I’d still love to be a fly on that wall. Well, as long as the participants weren’t complete idiots, anyway. One of the things this film makes unclear is whether it thinks educated youth today are idiots. What seems very clear is that it understands the point of view of the middle-aged people who are exasperated by them.

Alma is mentor to a student, Maggie (Ayo Edebiri), who leaves Alma’s dinner party the film opens with, with Alma’s longtime friend and colleague, Hank. We get a bit of an eyeful of Alma’s and Frank’s physical familiarity with each other, they way they put hands on each other’s thighs. There’s a moment when Hank grabs Maggie’s thigh, which is subtle but easy to clock. Later, clearly inebriated, Hank leaves the party at the same time as Maggie. We only learn after Maggie comes back to Alma’s apartment in the middle of a rain storm and gives a relatively vague accounting of what happened that they went to Maggie’s apartment together.

In another scene, particularly well-performed, Alma meets with Hank at an Indian restaurant, where he gives his side of the story. In neither case do we get a direct look at what actually happened, which is clearly deliberate. A similar choice was made, far more effectively, by writer-director Eva Victor in one of this year’s best movies, Sorry, Baby, which was also about university faculty. That movie was more about the effects of trauma, whereas After the Hunt is about how competing narratives play out in the public eye. With Hank, he pretty quickly comes across as a douche bag, but the narrative is still exploring ethical gray areas.

When movies don’t quite work, I often wonder about the editing. Guadagnino has loyalists now; there’s a key part with Chloë Sevigny, who previously appeared in Guadagnino’s wonderful HBO limited series We Are Who We Are, nearly unrecognizable as another professor. Alma’s husband, Frederik, is played by Michael Stuhlbarg, who played Timothée Chalamet’s deeply empathetic dad in the Guadagnino masterpiece Call Me By Your Name (2017). Stuhlbarg was perfectly cast in that film, but in After the Hunt Frederik is a long-tolerant husband with saintly patience. But Stuhlbarg plays him with an array of subtly quirky choices, none of which much align with the rest of the film. It feels as though these Guadagnino loyalists read a script they found deeply compelling but then had offbeat performance choices that were all met with “Sure, let’s try that!”

The one true exception is Julia Roberts herself, who gives her best performance in decades in this movie. It’s too bad it’s wasted on something that is thematically kind of a mess. Not only that, but there’s no denying the parallel themes between this and the incredible 2022 film TÁR, and let’s face it, underrated as Julia Roberts may be, she’s no Cate Blanchett. After the Hunt even tries its hand at sly humor, with basically zero success. The opening credits are all done in the font that Woody Allen used for his films for decades, even presented in exactly the same way, which practically screams “Look what I’m doing here!” But then the rest of the movie is completely different stylistically, to this attempt at “ironic whimsey” is wholly incongruous.

After the Hunt has many great scenes, and makes a great discussion piece, arguably even more so because of its clear and plentiful imperfections. With the exception of solid performances across the board, it just falls short in the end—quite literally, as the coda set five years later is utterly baffling. “You won” is the last line we hear, but we don’t have clarity on how the supposed winning happened. I left the theater thinking less about who won or lost than about exactly what game was being played.

Julia Roberts is stuck between ethics and loyalty, and I’m stuck between Hank’s dipshittery and Andrew Garfield’s hotness.

Overall: B-

KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN

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

I can’t quite decide what to make of Kiss of the Spider Woman, which is a 2025 movie musical adaptation of a 1993 stage musical adaptation of a 1976 novel that was already adapted into a 1985 film drama. This much I can say with confidence: this new film is not going to make much in box office revenue, and it’s certainly not going to be remembered the way the 1985 film was—or even, in all likelihood, the 1993 stage musical was. This movie is going to come and go, less forgotten than widely ignored.

It’s too bad, because the movie isn’t bad. It’s just also unremarkable, save perhaps for some of the performances. It seems Jennifer Lopez can’t catch a break when it comes to her film career—she rightfully garnered awards buzz for the 2019 film Hustlers, but nothnig really came of it; she’s been doing her best ever since. Here she plays the title character, which is ironic on two levels: she represents a character in a fantasy escape from the Argentinian prison “real world of the film,” but the title character isn’t even the main character of that fantasy. On the plus side, she also plays Aurora, the heroine of the movie musical whose story is being told by prisoner Luis Molina (Tonatiuh), to his cellmate Valentin (Diego Luna).

A huge element of this story is that Music is gay, and Valentin is straight—or, so it would seem from the start. There’s a lot about the evolution of queer identity politics since the seventies that this film does not bother to acknowledge, most notably Luis’s desire to be a woman. Even without the very vocabulary to articular trans identity, Kiss of the Spider Woman manages to give no solid indication of whether we should fundamentally regard Luis as a man or a woman (or even neither). From the context of the script, one could even assume we’re meant to think of Luis as a gay man who simply lionizes women. This remains the case even when, predictably and inevitably, we get to what amounts to a dream sequence—and a beautiful one—featuring Luis as a woman (or Tonatiuh, who is openly queer, in drag).

And then there is the relationship that evolves between these two characters, which leans hard into a direction I wasn’t quite expecting. And what are the implications, then, of Valentin’s identity and sexuality? Perhaps the ambiguity is the point, but turning this story into a musical strips it of much of its nuance, leaning further instead into the escapist fantasy that Luis regales Valentin with. Valentin begins by judging the story’s stereotypes and tropes, and he’s not exactly wrong. But, he also eventually gets into the story, which the film we are watching cuts back and forth between, and eventually finds that even this story has some twists he did not quite expect.

The 1985 film adaptation starred William Hurt as Luis and Raul Julia as Valentin, and was critically adored. I may watch it soon, but I made the right choice not watching it just before seeing this new adaptation, which almost certainly would only suffer for it. The lush colors of the production design in the movie-within-a-movie (that being what makes this a musical) are well executed, and Jennifer Lopez in particular is fitted into several beautifully designed dresses. The choreography may have been hard work to execute but just looks all right onscreen, and here is the kicker considering the musical genre: the music itself is merely fine. Not bad; it serves its purpose—but the music itself is what makes or breaks a musical, and there’s not a single iconic tune to be found here. I can’t remember a single line right now, and I saw the film a couple of hours ago.

Lopez delivers the songs flawlessly, though. Diego Luna is great as ever, though I have some slight ambivalence about Tonatiuh’s performance. Tonatiuh being openly queer doesn’t change how exaggerated Luis’s effeminate demeanor feels, especially when we first meet them. It may very well that this is in keeping with the tradition of this story—maybe this is how Luis is described in the novel; maybe it’s how Luis is performed onstage. But, like most people who see this movie, I don’t have those comparison points at hand, and it feels here like a character trait that gets over-indulged, as though trying to telegraph to the back of the house that this person is queer.

Still, Kiss of the Spider Woman has some pointedly timely story elements, most significant among them being the setting of the final stage of Argentinian dictatorship—and some pointed reflections of where others in the world may be headed. Again, none of this has any time or space to be fully fleshed out because of all that gets reserved for song-and-dance routines. In the end, Kiss of the Spider Woman is a movie with something to say but an inability to say it with clarity.

Looks like Diego Luna has eyes for Jenny from the Block,

Overall: B

ROOFMAN

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

Roofman is an old-school, classic case of the trailer being wildly misleading from the actual vibe of the full film. The trailer is cut to make it look like a lot of fun, an entertaining comedy with maybe even a bit of action in it. Really none of that is the case. In fact, Roofman is a surprisingly melancholy film, when all is said and done.

It also can’t seem to decide on any coherent ethical center. The title character, whose name is also Jeffrey, or John when in disguise, is presented as a lovable family man who just can’t seem to get effective criminal behavior down. And, as played by Channing Tatum, Jeffrey is undeniably charismatic—which, we are told, was very much the case with the real-life person and story on which this film is based. Much is made of how “nice” Jeffrey is to the victims he locks into the walk-in freezer when he’s robbing McDonalds by—you guessed it—breaking through the rooftops. But I was out on Jeffrey almost from the very start. I’m supposed to empathize with a sharply observant guy who would easily get a great job if he just got his shit together, but instead decides to commit forty-five counts of armed robbery? Get real.

Furthermore, Jeffrey is recently divorced and has three children: a six-year-old daughter, Becky (Alissa Marie Pearson), and twin infants. The infants are never more than an afterthought, but the opening scenes have Jeffrey desperately trying to connect with Becky. But then, after Jeffrey is convicted, sent to prison, escapes prison, holes up in a local Toys “R” Us, and stupidly hides in plain sight while dating a local church congregant with two daughters of her own, Roofman might as well be suddenly saying: “Becky who?” It’s very odd, how Jeffrey inserts himself into this family, falls for the single mom who also works at the Toys “R” Us, Leigh (Kirsten Dunst) as well as her daughters Lindsey (Lily Collias) and Dee (Kennedy Moyer), all after making one passing reference to the existence of his own children, which he never brings up again.

At least, not onscreen—another odd element to the trailer is how if features scenes not featured in the final cut of the film. There’s a shot in the trailer showing Leigh saying to Jeffrey, “Tell me what’s going on—right now.” Now, to be fair, this is a very common practice and has been for ages; I can still remember the shot of Laura Dern tearing a prehistoric leaf off a plant in the trailer for Jurassic Park, and that shot not being in the film. But usually these changes are harmless. In this case we go in expecting a pointed confrontation between the two leads, and in the end, the way Jeffrey’s inevitable downfall is portrayed as something very passive on the part of Leigh. This is just one of several disappointing elements of the final product of this film.

And it’s too bad, because the story is still relatively engaging, the performances are solid, and Tatum and Dunst have real chemistry. One wonders whether Roofman could have been better than average before essential elements somehow got lost in the edit. There are certainly several other heavy-hitting actors in supporting parts that don’t amount to much, chief of them LeKeith Stanfield as Jeffrey’s army buddy friend, Steve. Stanfield has a proven record of great performances (Judas and the Black Messiah, Uncut Gems, even the opening sequence of Get Out—I could go on), and he’s just not given enough to chew on here. He deserves better than this. But so do Peter Dinklage as Mitch, the Toys “R” Us store manager; Ben Mendelsohn as the church pastor and Uzo Aduba as his wife; even Juno Temple as Steve’s girlfriend. This is a cast far more stellar than the mediocrity of the film would have you expect, which leads one to wonder how different the original script, by Derek Cianfrance (who also directed) and Kirt Gunn, was from the final edit. It’s worth noting that Cianfrance has written excellent scripts in the past, including Blue Valentine (2010), The Place Beyond the Pines (2013), and even a story credit on Sound of Metal (2019).

So what the hell happened with Roofman? Should we just blame the editor, Mikkel E.G. Nielsen? That’s probably unfair; he edited great films too, including both The Banshees of Inisherin (2022) and Sound of Metal. Maybe we should think of Roofman as a mystery movie, just in a very unique way: the mystery is how so many great and talented people got together to make a not-great movie. It’s not like that’s without precedent either, to be fair.

There’s another mark against Roofman, which I’m not sure anyone involved truly thought about: the misguided choice to present a deeply unethical man as a sympathetic hero. Sure, empathy is always a good thing, and that is something I actually feel very strongly about. But there’s a vast difference between empathizing with an unethical person and actively rooting for them in their unethical pursuits. Roofman doesn’t strictly do that, but it’s a bit of hair splitting to say so, when the movie never lands on true clarity regarding the matter. At best, it skirts around it.

Maybe Jeffrey Manchester actually is a fascinating, fun guy. And maybe a much more effective approach would have been to make a documentary about him. The end credits of Roofman features a bunch of archival news footage of people who actually knew him, and victims of actual robberies, talking about how nice he was to them. This is genuinely the most compelling part of the film, which is otherwise moderately entertaining but manages to spend more energy on that than exactly how wrong it is for him to be doing all these things.

Yes, we see you, giving a good performance in a barely-okay movie!

Overall: B-

TRON: ARES

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

I wish I had half the enthusiasm as the guy who sat three seats down from me at Tron: Ares, in a theater where about eight other people were also in attendance. This guy, though—he had a really good time. He clapped his hands excitedly every time something remotely cool appeared onscreen or there was about to be some sort of action sequences. Several times I heard him say, “Yesss!” Mind you, like me, this guy was seeing the movie by himself; there were no companions with whom to share mutual excitement. He was far from a child either; this was a young, but definitely grown, man. I couldn’t decide if he had a screw loose or if I simply envied him.

My experience of the movie was not quite the same. There’s an odd element to the Tron franchise: three films now, spanning across five decades, something for at least three separate generations. The first film was released in 1982 and enjoyed modest success—for its innovative visuals if not for a particularly compelling story. Its first sequel, Tron: Legacy, was released 28 years later, in 2010. It’s been fifteen years again since then, and now we have Tron: Ares.

The story is ostensibly different, but the basic aesthetics—really the only reason to see a Tron movie—are essentially the same. The only difference now is that instead of the human characters spending most of their time inside “The Grid” (though there is some of that), this time we get AI-generated characters who assume human form in the real world—as do the vehicles they ride, or in some cases, fly. Of course, there have to be cool looking motorcycles with plenty of neon lines all over them. These race all over a city that is never identified in the film but is quite obviously Vancouver, British Columbia.

Who even cares about Tron these days, anyway? Even people who were kids in 2010 are young adults now; young people who were into the original in 1982 are basically retirees in 2025. Predictably, just about everything you see in Tron: Ares is recycled, either from previous Tron movies or other science fiction (there’s a lot of Blade Runner vibes here—it’s a little like Jared Leto’s creepy tech CEO from Blade Runner 2049 just jumped from that movie and into this one, only now he’s “the world’s most advanced AI.” He’s also “Ares,” the title character. Anyway his performance is very similar, which is in a way amusing because we are ultimately meant to think of Ares as a hero.

There’s a whole lot that director Joachim Rønning, and a team of three script writers, could have explored with AI in Tron: Ares, but very much in keeping with the franchise, he keeps all the proceedings at a level of basic comic-book simplicity. Two rival corporations are in a race to find the “permanence code,” so that they can use their gaming companies to render objects in the real world that last more than 29 minutes before they disintegrate. Why 29 minutes? Hell if I know.

There’s a bit more “legacy” stuff in here, just to create some tenuous connective tissue between the films. Evan Peters plays Julian Dillinger, grandson of Ed Dillinger, who had been the antagonist of the first film. Somehow Gillian Anderson was convinced to play Elisabeth Dillinger, Ed’s daughter and Julian’s mother, even though she isn’t given anywhere near enough to do. She just spends all her screen time fretting about how her son is fucking everything up. They’re all entwined with Dillinger Systems, the corporation to which ENCOM, at which Ed Dillinger had previously been CEO. Are you following this? None of it matters!

Ares is created by Julian; Ares becomes self-aware rather quickly; somehow other programs in the same system stay loyal to Julian as they take on human forms and ultimately hunt down both Ares and Eve (Greta Lee), the ENCOM CEO who has found the “permanence code” in an old system in the middle of snowy mountains somewhere. It’s all a big, beautiful mess.

Well, I don’t know if it’s beautiful. Plenty of the sequences are pretty cool to look at, but most of Tron: Ares also looks like the result of an AI prompt to “create a Tron sequel.” I had been impressed with the visual effects in Tron: Legacy more than anything else, and the effects here are . . . fine. I’ll forget this entire movie by next week. I can barely remember that last one. It was something to do, I guess. The visuals are decent but hardly stand apart from other effects-heavy movies; there’s nothing new here, in the story or in the visuals, to make the film in any way forward-thinking or particularly memorable.

It held my attention, I’ll give it that—but that’s a pretty low bar. The critical consensus with Ares is basically the same as that with Legacy (definitively mixed), but it feels to me like clearly diminishing returns. To say that this is brainless entertainment is an understatement. You don’t have to be above average intelligence to sense that nothing in this movie reflects any understanding whatsoever of how computers (or AI, for that matter) actually work. This is just a film capitalizing on both a surprisingly enduring franchise and the zeitgeisty concept of artificial intelligence. The 2001 Spielberg film AI: Artificial Intelligence had—and still has—far more compelling, provocative, and interesting things to say in its first five minutes than this movie does its entire runtime. And that was two and a half decades ago.

Granted, people don’t go to Tron expecting a “thinker.” I just have this naive idea that a script that makes AI its hero might have something interesting to say about it. The most interesting thing that happens here is when Ares finds himself inside the 1980s version of “The Grid” and meets an aged version of Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges—the only actor to appear in all three films).

At least Legacy had a great Daft Punk soundtrack going for it. Daft Punk have since disbanded; this new film uses Nine Inch Nails for its soundtrack. Not even this is all that forward-thinking, frankly. Using Trent Reznor for the soundtrack to The Social Network was the product of innovative thinking; now it’s just another generic soundtrack with propulsive beats to ride along with neon motorycles. I guess that’s all some people need. It was clearly all the guy three seats down from me needed. Oh, to be that easy to please.

It’s mentioned more than once that Ares was the Greek god of war. I’d have loved for that to become actually relevant.

Overall: C+