HIT MAN

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

It’s been a dismal June so far for theatrical wide releases, and I’ll have to include the end of May in that: May 31 had no major movie releases at all, less because of the inevitable shift of moviegoing habits in a post-covid world—although that’s certainly part of it—than because of countless postponements after last year’s writer and actor strikes. And for the record: any movie studio crying about the sad state of box office returns so far this year has only themselves to blame, as they could have accepted the unions’ quite reasonable demands from the start instead of digging in their heels for months in 2023.

So, here we are. This weekend, there actually are theatrical wide releases—a couple of them—it’s just just that I don’t personally have any interest in them. If you thought you might come here for my take on Bad Boys Ride or Die, you were mistaken. (I don’t flatter myself that any of you particularly did, mind you. Still, I’d have to be actually getting paid for it to write a review of that movie, in which I would likely write much about my undampened distaste for Will Smith. And even if Smith had never slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars, I’d have little faith that his new film was any good, given 2020’s Bad Boys for Life certainly wasn’t.) The other is The Watchers, by Ishana Shyamalan, which is clearly “M. Night Lite,” and: no thank you.

What to do in the absence of anything worth seeing in theaters, then? Something I haven’t done in five months: turn to a streamer—specifically, Netflix—for a significant release to watch and review. And releases like this going to streamers instead of theaters, at least some of the time, is clearly here to stay. There is no question that five years ago, a film starring Glen Powell, cowritten by Glen Powell and Richard Linklater, and directed by Richard Linklater—this is the guy who gave us Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise, School of Rock, and Boyhood—would have gotten wide release in theaters. It was indeed five years ago when his last live action narrative feature got a wide release, and that one wasn’t even particularly good.

Admittedly I found something immediate to get past about Hit Man—which was originally set to be released around the same time as The Killer (also on Netflix!), ostensibly similarly themed but a very, very different movie. The visual vibe of the movie, I can’t quite put my finger on it precisely, except to say that it feels a little . . . low-rent. A bit like a “TV movie,” to be honest. And yet, as the story unfolds, it somehow fits: both as a Richard Linklater film in particular, and as part of the film’s knowingly yet deeply subtle cornball tone.

Unlike The Killer, and hundreds of other films before it, Hit Man openly acknowledges that “hit men” as we think of them in pop culture are a myth: “Hit men don’t really exist,” says Powell’s title character, Gary Johnson. But Gary has been hired by the New Orleans police department to pose as the “hit men” would-be murderers expect to see, in sting operations to arrest them before the kill can actually happen. And this is a side gig: Gary’s day job is as a psychology and philosophy professor, scenes of which provide fertile ground for scenes exploring the nature of identity, which fall just short of metatextual.

It takes a while for the real crux of the story to take hold: after helping arrest several would-be criminals, Gary, in one of the many disguises he’s thrown himself into with this job (many of which are subtly but very effectively funny), comes across a young woman who is meeting him about killing her asshole husband. But this time, seeing a young, beautiful, and seemingly very vulnerable woman named Madison (all of it expertly played by Adria Arjona; hopefully with a great career ahead of her), Gary—as “Ron”—convinces her to change her mind, much to the consternation of the NOPD.

There are too many fantastic plot turns that ensue from there, so I won’t spoil them. Just do yourself a favor and watch the movie on Netflix. Viewers should be forewarned about one thing, though: I truly don’t know why anyone is listing this movie under “action” as a genre. Crime and comedy, sure; but action—there is none to speak of in this movie. If you have any familiarity with Richard Linklater whatsoever, you’d know not to expect it, as his films are all constructed around dialogue. We see a literal gun onscreen maybe once, and in neither case does it even get fired.

And yet: people do get killed in this movie. This is the genius of Richard Linklater, if you know how to appreciate his specific brand of art. Hit Man has some uniquely clever story turns, if not outright plot twists, and they are quite satisfying. He has an impressive knack for economy of storytelling, particularly on a budget: consider the police officer Jasper (Austin Amelio), a thorn in the NOPD’s side due to his suspension after violent excessive force on some teenagers, an incident that was caught on tape. This information is only ever revealed through well-written dialogue you barely even register as expositional, and (thankfully) we never see the video footage—although the Police Chief does hold up his phone at one point while talking about it, while his phone isn’t even on.

Jasper inevitably becomes a crucial plot point himself, worming his way in between Gary and Madison. Jasper is a deeply annoying douchebag of a man, which is a credit to how Austin Amelio plays him, which makes his fate by the end of the film, thematically complex as it is, deeply satisfying. Just about all the performances are great in Hit Man, but none are as great as Glen Powell’s, an undeniably handsome man who manages to be believably dorky as a professor and then convincingly hot as “Ron,” who is the guy Madison is into. Still, the montage of character disguises Gary takes on is great fun.

Hit Man on the whole is just a fun hang, an impressive achievement for a film in which little more than talking and plotting actually takes place onscreen. I suppose we could argue that’s what makes this perfect for a streamer release—there are no special effects and no action set pieces to make anyone insist it should be seen on the big screen. I would counter that there’s something to be said for seeing a fun movie of any sort with an audience, where there can be a sense of collective enjoyment. On the other hand, no theatrical release would have the breadth of reach that Netflix now does, and it does make me happy to think how many people will see, and likely enjoy, this movie.

This is the most action you’ll see in this movie—but it’s still really fun I swear!

Overall: B+

IN A VIOLENT NATURE

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

Here is a title that believes in truth in advertising: unlike the bemusing Evil Does Not Exist, which is not a horror movie, In a Violent Nature very much is. This is a title you can take literally, on multiple levels: it’s about a reanimated man with a “violent nature” (to say the least), and it’s a movie in which a ton of entertainingly grotesque violence happens exclusively in nature. To be more specific, the forest near Sault St. Marie, Ontario, which is about 300 miles northwest of Toronto, across the St. Marys River from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

Sault St. Marie also happens to be where writer and director Chris Nash is from, and In a Violent Nature has a very “do it yourself” vibe to it. Whether that’s an asset or a liability depends on your point of view. On the one hand, this is arguably the prettiest cinematography ever seen in a slasher film—this was a big reason I even went to see it, as I normally don’t go see horror movies. I heard on a podcast that it was “like Friday the 13th shot by Terrence Malick”—an influence Nash openly admits to—and suddenly I thought: in that case, I’m interested!

It’s not often you see a slasher flick that is also a mood piece. I find myself wondering how audiences respond if they don’t know to expect this going in. I have a tendency to prefer being surprised by movies, but I was glad to have been armed with this knowledge beforehand: that nearly the entire film is told from the point of view of the monster killer; that there are long, unbroken shots from right behind him walking through the forest; that there is no film score in the film whatsoever. Instead, the soundtrack consists of the ambient noises, rustling of branches or sounds of animals and insects, in the forest. The couple of times you do hear music, it’s only because there happens to be a radio playing.

As such, it would be fun to watch someone else respond to this movie if they went in completely cold—not that it’s possible for you to do that now that you’re reading this review (sorry!). They might take some time to even register the genre of this film, as the first kill happens after several scenes of this giant man in torn clothing walking through the forest.

This is all fertile ground onto which to plant a premise. Nash directs it competently, clearly knowing what he wants. I’d love to have seen this movie directed by him, but written by someone else. The monster killer we follow through the forest comes upon a secluded house where we hear a father and grown son arguing; later he finds a cabin and camp fire where the requisite group of young men and women we know intuitively will mostly become victims. None of the dialogue between these characters ever quite flows naturally, like real people talking. There’s always something slightly off about it, and not in a way that feels deliberate.

Furthermore, we actually do get an explanation of sorts, for why this killer has re-emerged from his grave, as well as his connection to a “massacre” that occurred in the area ten years before. This is all pretty standard stuff for a movie so clearly inspired by Friday the 13th, but even within that context the contrivance gets stretched a little thin.

What this means, ultimately, is that In a Violent Nature falters in both its script and performances, but has a premise and overall execution that goes a long way toward making up for it. The kills themselves get increasingly creative—and, to me, funny. Admittedly I was the only person overtly laughing at this stuff, but then, I also had a great time watching last year’s Cocaine Bear, which qualified as a comedy only insofar as it had ridiculous violence in it. That and In a Violent Nature share a couple strands of the same DNA, although this movie leans much more toward a uniquely ambient tension. When the kills do occur, though, it’s all old-school practical effects; by all appearances, there’s not a single shot using CGI.

I’d have loved for any of the characters in this film to have even remotely dimensional personalities, but to be fair to Chris Nash, the nature of their expendability is very much the point. He’s taking a clear love of eighties and nineties slasher movies and giving it multiple twists. As to which of those twists really work, your mileage may vary. There’s an extended scene at the end, with a conversation between two women in a truck, that skirts of the edges of philosophical, but it feels slightly incongruous to the rest of the film and the philosophy doesn’t quite crystalize.

You could say that about In a Violent Nature overall: its philosophy never achieves clarity, but its premise is an undeniably compelling exercise.

On the upside, none of the people murdered are anyone you’re going to miss.

Overall: B

EVIL DOES NOT EXIST

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

Evil Does Not Exist is an odd title for any movie. The word “evil” alone is evocative of horror, but the rest of this particular title negates that. Or is that ironic, in which case one might still assume it’s horror? Evil may not exist, but nihilism does! One of the many things about this film that are lost on me is the fact that it’s actually a very simple and straightforward drama.

Emphasis on simple, as opposed to drama. To call this a feature-length exercise in deadpan delivery would be an understatement. The most “dramatic” sequence would be several minutes covering a community meeting for “feedback” by townspeople concerned about the impending construction of a “glamping” site in a rural area outside of Tokyo.

This is the first time things get even remotely interesting in Evil Does Not Exist, and it felt like it was about 45 minutes in. Here’s something I have no idea about: was this just a reflection of Japanese cultural politeness, or was this scene muted by even Japanese standards? I would guess the latter, but it’s a wild, uneducated guess. All I know is that several townspeople bring up perfectly reasonable concerns, from potential pollution to their groundwater to the impact on their local economy, and the two hired hands there to listen largely deflect by saying things like “We’ll take your feedback under advisement.” The small crowd gets increasingly agitated, but I use the word “agitated” loosely: they each take a turn to deliver their concerns calmly, while everyone else in the room is dead silent. One young man in the front row finally says “What?” in response to being told not to get too emotional, and he ultimately stands up aggressively—only to have Takumi (Hitoshi Omika) force him back into his chair.

Takuma is the central character here, a guy referred to as “weird” even by others in this movie, a widowed, reclusive “odd job man” living in a cabin with his young daughter, Hana (Ryo Nishikawa). One of the odder aspects of this movie is how the two hired hands sent to the village by the company planning the “glamping site” refer to themselves as “talent agents” who work in “show business,” even though they’ve just been sent to convince this town that a glamping site in their midst is a good idea. Is this the Japanese equivalent of “paid crisis actors”?

Takahashi (Ryuji Kosaka) and Mayuzumi (Ayaka Shibutani) ulimately try courting Takuma to take the job of full-time caretaker, after being told that is something they will need in order to keep guests from the city in check, and it’s a bit of a fool’s errand. All of this runs parallel to Takuma’s live with Hana, where they walk through the forest and he teaches her the names of trees and how to identify them. The visitors keep hearing distant gunshots, told they are people hunting deer in the area. Eventually the point is made that deer are not dangerous to humans, unless they are been shot and are still alive and cornered. This becomes an apparently crucial plot point in the end, and I could not put together how it related to the story overall.

Evil Does Not Exist is getting extremely high praise by other critics, but I just could not connect with it. Its first half hour or so is particularly challenging, with truly glacial pacing—the opening shot alone is just a slow pan looking straight up at barren winter tree branches, for what seem like countless minutes. Then it cuts to Takuma outside his cabin, chopping wood, for another several minutes. Not a lot happens in most of the scenes in this movie, until the aforementioned community forum. Not much happens there either, but compared to the scenes that preceded it, it practically feels like an action movie.

And then, at the very end, things take a jarringly dark turn. Maybe there is something allegorical going on here, or something subtle regarding Japanese culture, that I just don’t have the wherewithal to grasp. Or maybe it’s something else entirely. All I know is that it took a herculean effort to get halfway toward connecting with this movie, which in the end I could only respect as something I assume exist on a level I can’t grasp.

Hey can we take turns, and you can watch me chop wood for five minutes?

Overall: B-

IF

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

I found this movie utterly baffling. A story can be any kind of fantasy it wants to be, but once it establishes the rules of its own universe, it needs to follow them. If does not do that.

Ater having written and directed A Quiet Place and A Quiet Place Part II, John Krasinski has clearly built up a lot of goodwill—arguably too much. With If, he turns his attention away from horror and toward family-fantasy fare, and brings with him the voice talents of every movie star imaginable, from Steve Carell to Louis Gossett Jr. to Phoebe Waller-Bridge to Awkwafina to George Clooney to Bradley Cooper to Matt Damon to Bill Hader to Bill Hader to Richard Jenkins to Christopher Meloni to Matthew Rhys to Sam Rockwell to Maya Rudolph to Amy Schumer to Jon Stewart—and more!—all of them voicing a different, animated “Imaginary Friend” (IF). For some reason, somehow, they are all still hanging around Manhattan after their kid friends have grown up and forgotten about them.

All of these “IFs” might have made for a fun combined cast of characters, were this movie to have as much pep as the trailer clearly aimed to suggest. None of the marketing for this movie suggests how incongruously wistful it is in tone, sometimes downright melancholy, certainly downbeat. There are certainly peppy moments, but virtually all of them were in the trailer. You come to this movie and instead find a story about a 12-year-old girl who is growing up too fast due to the death of her mother.

Lest we miss an opportunity to get even more maudlin, our little-girl hero, Bea (Cailey Fleming), is now worried about her dad—played by writer-director John Krasinski—staying in the hospital for a major surgery. What kind of surgery is never explicitly stated, although the gag of his “broken heart” suggest perhaps heart surgery. Bea has already lost one parent and is now facing the risk of losing another. What fun, family entertainment!

Honestly, in spite of several genuinely fun “IF” characters that get too little screen time, I can’t see IF really working for children viewers of any age. This seems to be more aimed at adults who feel wistful about their own inner children.

While Bea’s dad is in the hospital, she goes to stay with her grandmother (Fiona Shaw), where she and her dad had also stayed when her mother was dying. It’s in this building where Bea discovers all the IFs hanging out in a sort of junk room up on the top floor, alongside the one evident human who can also see all the other IFs. This man is played by Ryan Reynolds, who gives a serviceable if surprisingly muted performance. Every once in a while, IF would give me genuine chuckles, among them a running gag where Ryan Reynolds keeps tripping over the one who is invisible.

What purpose these IFs serve in the movie, though, is never presented in a way that quite makes sense. First Bea is helping Ryan Reynolds match IFs with potential replacement kids, like they are running some kind of imaginary orphanage. When that doesn’t pan out, they set about reuniting the IFs with their original kids who are now adults. In one cast, a nervous adult played by Bobby Moynihan gets reassurance from his own IF right before some kind of job interview. What we are supposed to understand is happening there exactly, I couldn’t tell you. This guy’s Imaginary Friend would have been an original figment of his own imagination, right? So he’s gaining confidence for an interview (or presentation, or whatever the hell it is) by tapping into the imagination of his own childhood, in a way that’s beyond his control? What?

The fundamental problem with IF is the evident blank check Krasinski was given after his previous success, where no one else bothered to step in with some guard rails outside his own passion. This movie clearly means something to him, and presumably it made sense in his head. It has some fairly imaginative ideas in it, to be fair, but it also feels like it came from the imagination of someone who recently had a lobotomy.

The story improves, slightly, by the time IF reaches its final half hour or so—a fact that is undermined by the real fear that maybe Bea’s father will also die. Somewhat ironically, the best part of this movie is Fiona Shaw as the grandmother, a character who spends most of the film seemingly unrelated to any of the IFs (although you can probably predict where things are going there). Cailey Fleming as Bea is clearly a talented young performer, but a little mismatched with this movie, having that precocious quality of so many child actors that stops just short of unsettling.

Furthermore, no one in this movie has a conversation that sounds like actual people talking. There is a subplot of a budding friendship between Bea and another little boy in the hospital (Alan Kim), and after their first conversation I literally thought to myself, That was really weird dialogue. In short, Krasinski threw so much talent at his passion project that he could not properly organize it, and the final result is a total mess. If there was anything that genuinely impressed me was how a mess could be not so much chaotic as strangely dull. At least some more consistent gags might have kept me awake.

I’m very sorry to inform you this movie’s condition is terminal.

Overall: C

BABES

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

Finally, another movie that actually lives up to its promise! It’s been nearly a month since I saw a narrative feature that was actually as good as anyone could expect it to be (the last one being Challengers—a very different kind of movie). Much more to the point, I can’t even remember the last time I saw a mainstream studio comedy that actually lived up to its promise. One could make the case for last year’s American Fiction, although that’s more of an intellectual dramedy. Although a couple of other comedies in the meantime have also been good, the best comparison I can come up with is You Hurt My Feelings, which features a similar caliber of laughs, and was released a year ago this month.

The point is, mainstream studio comedies that are this good—and this genuinely funny—are a rare thing anymore, largely because people don’t go to the movies to see them anymore. Why bother, when it costs far less to wait until it’s either on VOD or a streamer, and it will be available to watch that way within a month or two? There’s no visual spectacle to make the case for seeing it in a theater, leaving me as one of the few holdouts left who love seeing movies in the theater no matter the genre. But am I going to tell anyone they need to rush out and see Babes in theaters? Nope. The trick, I guess, is to get you to remember that I still say it’s very much recommended, once you do see it on streaming.

I hesitate to call Babes a “gross-out comedy,” mostly because you don’t really see anything particularly gross onscreen. What you do see, is people discussing gross things onscreen—specifically, things relating to childbirth. For instance: “Oh my god, did I just shit on my baby?” “No, it’s more like you babied on your shit.” The comparison to Bridesmaids is an apt one insofar as this is a film with female leads who talk about gross things you don’t often see discussed in movies, but in a genuinely funny way.

The impressive trick of Babes is how it follows the standard beats of a romantic comedy while avoiding the most common tropes. This is a love story between lifelong platonic best friends Dawn (Michelle Buteau) and Eden (Ilana Glazer), where one of them, Dawn, is married and has two kids—one of which is born in the opening sequence of the movie—and the other one, Eden, decides to keep the baby that is the result of a one night stand.

And even though the overall story arc is fairly predictable—there is a rift between them which they must eventually overcome—it’s the details of storytelling here that really set Babes apart. What becomes of the man Eden hooked up with is surprisingly not revealed in the trailer and is such a genuine surprise I won’t spoil it here, except to say that it effectively gets that guy out of the way of our story of two best friends without demonizing him. Similarly, Hasan Minhaj plays Dawn’s husband, Marty, and with two young children he proves just as challenged as Dawn, yet supportive, when other movies might characterize him in a far less forgiving way.

Maybe my favorite thing about Babes is its run time, a perfectly respectable 104 minutes, never rushed but also not overlong the way countless studio comedies of the past couple of decades have been. Last year’s No Hard Feelings, which I also very much enjoyed, was about the same length, and I’d love for this to become an identifiable trend. When comedies make the sensible choice of not overstaying their welcome, they lower the risk of narrative lulls, and pack all their punch lines in much more tightly.

And Babes has a lot of punch lines. I laughed a lot at this movie. It could be argued that that’s the only important measure of success with a comedy, but I prefer they also be integrated into a coherent story. Otherwise we might as well just watch a standup special. Ilana Glazer and Michelle Buteau have great chemistry together, and their improvisational styles complement each other well. These two have reportedly been friends in real life for twenty years, which makes the successful execution of this film—their “baby,” if you will—all the sweeter.

A movie can be both genuinely funny and a quality film, but not often both at once. This is one of those rare specimens that is packed with delightfully dirty humor that belies an authentic sweetness at its core.

Anyone who thinks of their best friend as family will get it.

Overall: B+

FURIOSA: A MAD MAX SAGA

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

There was never any hope of matching the action movie masterpiece that was Mad Max Fury Road (2015). That movie wasn’t perfect in its time, but it only gets better as it ages, and I feel comfortable calling it arguably the best action movie ever made—in spite of the B+ grade I gave it at the time. What that movie inarguably lacks in depth of story, it more than makes up for in the purity of its stunningly executed sequence of action set pieces—and its surprising but unmistakable feminism. After three famous movies starring Mel Gibson as a widowed family man seeking revenge in a post-apocalyptic Australian wasteland, the gravitas of Charlize Theron, and her chemistry with an equally stoic Tom Hardy stepping in the role of Mad Max, were just the breath of fresh air this franchise needed.

Fury Road never got the respect it deserved among general audiences at the time of its release, but it has become a classic of modern American cinema in the years since. And if you read the fantastic 2022 book Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road, by Kyle Buchanan, you’d know that the history of development for Furiosa is nearly as fascinating. Once intended as an animated film, the first script for Furiosa was written as fleshed-out backstory for the character during preproduction for Fury Road.

Which is to say, both films took similarly long roads to the screen, their journeys overlapping for some years. Now that Furiosa is finally completed a full nine years after Fury Road, one might reasonably ask the question: will this one also be given higher regard as time goes by? I suppose it’s possible. But, I also doubt it—Furiosa spends too much more time on ultimately inconsequential story, stretching the film to an overlong 146 minutes (by far the longest film in the Mad Max universe to date), with action set pieces that are impressive but still feel like extensions of the previous, much better film.

There are also the casting choices. Anya Taylor-Joy is an excellent actor, but does not inhabit the soul of Furiosa, or have the simple weight of physical presence, the way Charlize Theron did. Theron was much more believable as a woman who could truly kick your sas. On the flip side, Chris Hemsworth steals the show as the villain, Dr. Dementus—the man who kidnaps Furiosa as a child, taking her from the so-called “place of abundance” where she was born. Hemsworth has the perfect blend of psychosis and charisma, although the choice to give him a prosthetic nose is a bizarrely pointless one.

But: here’s the thing. Furiosa still has several action set pieces that are amazing, filled fantastically executed stunts. They take a bit longer to get to because of the more drawn out story, but they are worth the wait, especially a “war rig” chase with hang gliders, and a battle set inside the Bullet Farm. These sequences go on much longer than set pieces do in your average action movie, and are riveting examples of expert stunt work, collectively what still makes Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga worth seeing. Sure, it’s all better in Fury Road, but that film set such a wildly high bar, a film like this one could reach half those heights and still genuinely impress.

All that said, I must address the visual effects in this movie. All those people who immediately lashed out at the artificial look of the trailer—they were right. Furiosa has too many obvious CGI shots which distract from the incredible stunt work (in stark contrast to the CGI in Fury Road, which was only ever used to enhance it), and too many of the scenes have their color so oversaturated that it takes you out of the movie. Honestly, for all the talk of potential Oscar nominations for Furiosa in the technical categories, I just don’t see it. Not in the same year of release as Dune Part Two, which is all but guaranteed to sweep all of those awards.

It’s tempting to wonder if Furiosa might more easily impress if Mad Max: Fury Road had not come before it. I’m leaning toward the conclusion that it would not—in a cinema landscape of cheap looking CGI for decades, Fury Road came along and showed us something we had never seen before. Even if that film had never existed, the same could not be said of Furiosa. That doesn’t mean it’s bad—I found much of it genuinely thrilling to watch. It just means it fell short of expectations, and that makes a movie feel like more of a disappointment than maybe it deserves.

Anya Taylor-Joy is miscast in the title role of an otherwise entertaining movie that’s still an undeniable comedown.

Overall: B

BACK TO BLACK

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

Marisa Abela is clearly talented. She plays Amy Winehouse well enough that her performance is far and away the best part of the movie. She can even sing quite well. All of this means I’d really like to see her showcased in a better movie than Black to Black.

Also, there’s no escaping the shadow of the giant talent that Amy Winehouse herself was—Abela did Winehouse justice in an otherwise tedious biopic, but she’s got nothing on the real Winehouse.

Back in 2015, an excellent documentary feature was released, called Amy. I’m going to quote myself now, from my own review of that film:

She is shy, she is radiant, she has a charisma that can't be contained in spite of her apparent ignorance of it. She is the embodiment of nuance and vulnerability on the way to a tragic end, mirrored in the story arc resulting from the nearly perfect editing of this film.

Not one of these things applies to the 2024 narrative feature Back to Black, which feels a little like Winehouse’s family getting the last word in. Except, who is listening? This movie has barely made more then $3 million domestically. To be fair, the worldwide gross has reached $40 million, making it a rare English speaking film that made 93% of its groses internationally. Considering the budget was $30 million, that’s not the greatest profit margin.

It might have been, had there been good word of mouth, but no one is talking about this movie. Maybe because they are asleep. Marisa Abela has an undeniable onscreen charm, but with all due respect, saying she has a charisma that can’t be contained is not something that would ever have occurred to me. And she’d need that kind of charisma to elevate the deeply lackluster material, which seems to focus on the duller moments of Winehouse’s life, whitewash the enabling of her parents—and especially her father (Eddie Marsan)—and most baffling of all, de-emphasize the user of her actual music.

The music itself is clearly this story’s greatest asset. And we do get to hear several of her original songs, albeit often sung by Abela herself, which is the work of a competent singer rather than a superstar. But frankly, we don’t hear enough. Isn’t this supposed to be a music biopic? Instead we spend half the time on her rocky and drug-addled relationship with husband Blake Fielder-Civil (Jack O’Connell), and her adoration or her Nana (Lesley Manville).

Mind you, these are worthy elements of Amy Winehouse’s story, certain relevant. But Back to Black would have gotten a much-needed shot of energy if it focused less directly on these relationships and more on how she processed them through her music.

There’s also the casting of Winehouse’s father and Nana, where the two actors are so close in age it’s distracting: Leslie Manville, at 68, is perfectly plausible as 28-year-old Abela’s grandmother. But Eddie Marsan is all of twelve years younger than Manville, and is playing her son. He’s also plausible as Abela’s father, at age 56, but onscreen he just looks too close to Manville’s age. Weirdly, Manville looks younger than 68 and Marsan could believably be in his early sixties.

Manville is a consummate talent herself, and would be the second-best thing in this film, even if she’s not given any material really worthy of her. It’s always frustrating to see performers doing well in a lackluster movie. Well before it’s 122-minute run time was up, I was ready for it to be over. Maybe three or four scenes in a row I thought to myself, “Maybe this is the end.”

None of Back to Black is outright terrible, but one does want a movie to aim above mediocrity. At least an actively bad movie elicits a genuinely emotional response. Back to Black has its priorities out of order, and has nothing to recommend it—even its good performances are by people who have done better elsewhere. Take my word for it and just spend three bucks to rent the 2015 documentary Amy on VOD. You’ll have a far better time.

The best thing in Back to Black still doesn’t make it good.

Overall: C+

SIFF Advance: THE SUMMER WITH CARMEN

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

There’s a lot of dicks in The Summer with Carmen. It’s largely set at a clothing-optional queer beach in Athens, Greece, where platonic friends Demosthenes (Yorgos Tsiantoulas) and Nikitas (Andreas Labropoulos) hash out the plot points of a movie script. Nikitas is directing and Demosthenes is maybe starring, and they are co-writing the story based on Demosthenes’s recent life experiences, including an ambivalent love life with Panos (Nikolaos Mihas) and a passive aggressively homophobic mother (Roubini Vasilakopoulou). We see the scenes they discuss play out in flashbacks, regularly cutting back to this day at the nude beach, where occasional hookups are playing out in the open around them, but Nikitas and Demosthenes are concentrating on their scripts, occasionally taking breaks to swim.

There is always a subtle, tongue-in-cheek presentation to The Summer with Carmen, where the story playing out pointedly reflects the plot constructions of their script, or even more on the nose, the script writing book Nikitas has with him as a reference. There’s also the unseen producer they talk about, who wants their movie to be “fun, sexy”—and so, Greek director and co-writer Zacharias Mavroeidis wants us to think of The Summer with Carmen as “fun, sexy” primarily by giving us plenty of close up shots of butts and cocks attached to generally hot bodies at a nude beach.

The metatextual approach was once something I found myself really into as a narrative device—I used it a lot in my own writing 25 years ago—but it has long since lost its novelty. What I’ll give to The Summer with Carmen is the casual way it’s used, in a very laid back, beach-stained story. I use the word “beach” loosely here, as this queer beach is mostly large rocks. I have clearly gotten old, because in one scene, Demosthenes bounds up some rocks in the nude, and rather than admiring his incredible body I just worried about how badly he could hurt himself if he slipped and fell.

There’s a fair amount of sex in this movie, but very little of it at this beach where you might expect to see most of it. The few times it does come up is as humorous asides, such as when Nikitas feels bad for an older man trying to get a “pervy peek” at two other guys who tell him to fuck off. The sex actually serving the story happens in the flashbacks that make up the scenes Nikitas and Demosthenes are writing, in which Demosthenes hooks up with guys in the wake of his breakup with Panos, all the while leaving Nikitas unattended to as his close friend.

That is what The Summer with Carmen is about, really: Demosthenes and Nikitas’s friendship. I always enjoy when a movie focuses on friendship more than romance, as it still gets sidelined most of the time, and especially when it’s between two characters that many writers would want to give some kind of romantic tension. Even in stories about gay friends, writers often throw in something about how they tried to be romantic and it never worked. There is no indication that Demosthenes and Nikitas ever had any romantic or sexual interest in each other, only that they have always been close friends and collaborators.

That said, the cynical side of me doesn’t feel that bad for Nikitas. Romance taking priority over friendship is just the way the world works, and it kind of feels like Nikitas is just pouty and doesn’t understand that. Through the course of this movie, though, we get title cards about the rules of script writing, while it identifies Demosthenes as “The Hero” (and Nikitas as “The Heroe’s Friend”), and that according to the basic rules of script writing, The Hero must learn something and change in some way by the end. In The Summer with Carmen, Demosthenes changes, to one degree or another, in both his romantic and platonic relationships. Except he very directly addresses the fact that scripts only end there and never reveal the frequency with which people just go back to their old habits.

There is a certain cleverness to The Summer with Carmen—the Carmen of the title is a dog, by the way, which Panos adopts after the breakup, and then Demosthenes becomes attached to after offering to pet sit, it’s a whole subplot with a somewhat nebulous reflection of the primary plot. It also has undeniable charm, especially with its breezy yet frank reflection of sexuality among gay men in their thirties.

There is nothing profound or deeply memorable about this movie, nor does it aspire to these things. In fact, it’s very direct about its aspirations to be simply fun and sexy—although Demosthenes and Nikitas also discuss the complications of throwing in heavy themes like homophobia and an ailing parent. The Summer with Carmen never gets too heavy with these things, though, and uses them only to give its characters a measure of weight. I felt the editing could have been tighter, the ton of this movie being more suited to a breezy 90 minutes than even the 106 minutes it runs. But, I still had a lovely time with it.

Sun’s out, plot turns out: Nikitas and Demosthenes rehash their lives in a script written in the buff.

Overall: B

SIFF Advance: SEBASTIAN

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

There’s a lot of gay sex in Sebastian. Many of these scenes go on longer than you might expect, and are unusually frank, it not overly explicit. It seems to be part of the point, given the title character is engaged in sex work in nearly every case, and he comments on how sex workers using modern technology regard it as a job, like any other.

As always, it’s the context that matters. “Sebastian” is actually a pseudonym, used by Max, a 25-year-old writer working for a magazine, getting short stories published, and working to finish a novel. This is where Sebastian’s premise gets particularly compelling: evidently unable to dream up scenarios for his fiction that feel authentic, Max’s “research” involves engaging in actual sex work.

Sebastian has far less to say about sex work, actually, than it does about the ethics of representation. Max is constantly telling people he gets the details for his content from interviews with sex workers; he’s not telling anyone he’s doing the work himself—and, somewhat predictably, he gets in over his head in this endeavor. Why Max doesn’t just do the actual interviewing of seasoned sex workers instead of lying about it is really never made clear. Perhaps he’s genuinely interested in sex work but can’t admit it to himself.

We never get a straight (so to speak) answer to this. There’s a memorable line during a conversation with Max about his novel in progress, another man tells him he spoke to a woman sex worker once, and asked about how she must, inevitably, find some of her clients repulsive. “She said it was never about them,” the man says. “It was always about her.”

Clearly we are meant to infer the same to be the case with Max/Sebastian. But why? To what end? This is, to me, the open mystery of Sebastian. There’s another exchange where Max complains about his own work having nothing to say. His friend retorts that his work need not always have something to say, it need only be true. The tension I constantly felt with this film was whether it’s presenting itself as something “true,” or if it indeed has something to say. I found it difficult to gauge, which kept me at a distance from it.

Which is not to say I didn’t find it engaging, if for no other reason than Ruaridh Mollica’s stellar performance as Max. There’s a moment when another character, another person in the home of one of his clients, says something that could have been the casting call description Mollica responded to: “You have this wholesome, boy-next-door look. But underneath. it’s all filth.” Mollica plays Max with a stunningly calibrated level of nuance, a guy who is eternally uneasy and vulnerable, but with a sturdy sexual confidence. I can’t think of any other character in film that I have ever seen quite like him.

Max’s clientelle tends to skew toward older men, and to Sebastian’s credit, these characters are all very well drawn, and feel like people with real-world dimensions. This film rightly doesn’t judge any of them, even as they have varying reasons for hiring a sex worker. Max has these experiences with them. and the way writer-director Mikko Makela puts this film together, it cuts mid-experience to Max at his laptop later, writing about the experience but from the perspective of Sebastian. This makes it impossible to tell how much truth there is to the rest of these hookup scenes, and how much Max is embellishing or inventing for his novel.

When Max develops a nonprofessional affection for one of his older male clients, Nicholas (Jonathan Hyde), he incorporates this turn into the novel he’s writing. Ironically, his publisher announces that this turn away from all the emotionally detached sex work is something that doesn’t work for the novel, while it’s the very thing that makes Sebastian more interesting. Max even makes reference to it being a means of handing down queer history between generations of gay men that might never have otherwise had anything to do with each other. I’d have loved for Sebastian to explore this more, but evidently the movie is as interested in that as Max’s publisher is.

By the end, Sebastian does manage to shift into a space I did find moving. But, overall, it feels like something is missing, something vital left unexplored. At least Ruaridh Mollica very much elevates the material with his performance, and I’ll be thinking about it for a while.

A perfect performance in an imperfect story.

Overall: B

I SAW THE TV GLOW

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

Maybe I Saw the TV Glow just isn’t for me. Who am I to say it’s bad?

I don’t even want to say it’s bad, really. I just . . . really don’t get it. I’ve never seen a movie so chill and so wackadoodle. How does one accomplish that? This film was written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun, and Schoenbrun being both trans and nonbinary is, it seems, deeply relevant. I have a personal history myself of fitting not quite into such neatly defined categories, but on the periphery of their realm—if nothing else I would be called “gender nonconforming.” And still, I could find no way into I Saw the TV Glow, no direct point of connection. Perhaps it’s a generational thing. Schoenbrun is a Millennial, and I am a Gen-X girly-man.

I have read that the nineties TV show that the two main characters in I Saw the TV Glow watch and obsess over, called The Pink Opaque, is a loose parody of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Presumably it is also relevant to my perspective that I never watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and what few clips I have seen seem too dated and corny, something too far past its time to get into. When Owen grows up and revisits The Pink Opaque, he finds it surprisingly dated and corny. There could be something there.

It’s not difficult to find glowing reviews of I Saw the TV Glow with headlines like “‘I Saw the TV Glow’ is a profound vision of the trans experience”—written, ironically, by a cisgender man. Sometimes it feels like people who fancy themselves “allies” fall over themselves to praise odd—one might say, opaque—art like this. I’m not saying that’s what’s happening here. I very much get the sames that I Saw the TV Glow is just as profound as they say it is, and for some reason it just flew over my head. I still can’t help but wonder: do the critics understand what Schoenbrun is doing here as well as they think they do?

It was about half an hour in when I literally acknowledged to myself: This movie is losing me. I spent a legitimate amount of its run time legitimately baffled as to what was going on—mixed with a legitimate insecurity, visions of smart people I know watching it and then saying, “How could you not get it?” Forgive me, but I prefer films, even ones this laden with metaphor and allegory, to be a little more straightforward.

At least it didn’t annoy me. I wanted to understand it, and was frustrated that I couldn’t. I am very fond of the lead actor, Justice Smith, a gifted actor with talents squandered in the likes of Jurassic World Dominion (2022) or The American Society of Magical Negroes (2024). His performance here is fantastic, genuinely moving, the work of someone who clearly understands the material better than I did. (Side note: interesting that the leads should be cast with cisgender actors—but clearly it gets a pass if the writer-director is trans.) His Owen is deeply repressed, shy, nervous, and forges a tentative connection with a fellow student two years older than him in high school, over the aforementioned The Pink Opaque.

The older student, Maddy, is an out lesbian with abusive parents (indicated only by a passing reference to her stepfather breaking her nose), played just as compellingly by Brigette Lundy-Paine. Owen’s own sexuality is left much less clear, but he does get a quite memorable passage of dialogue when in conversation with Maddy on the otherwise empty high school bleachers: “When I think about that stuff, it feels like someone took a shovel and dug out all of my insides, and I know there’s nothing in there, but I’m still too nervous to open myself up and check.”

Later, when Owen asks his parents if he can watch The Pink Opaque even though it airs at 10:30, past his bedtime, this is the one line his father utters in the entire movie: “Isn’t that show for girls?”

Later in I Saw the TV Glow, when lines are overtly blurred between reality and existence inside The Pink Opaque, which stars two girls, one Black and one White (Owen has a Black mother and a White father; Maddy is White), we briefly see Owen trying on a dress, one similar to the one worn by the star of the show. Should I even be using he/him pronouns for Owen? I’m choosing not to worry about it, especially given almost none of the meaning in this film is made explicit.

I kind of wish I could have gone to see this film with one of the trans people in my life. Might they relate to it deeply, in a way I could never fully imagine? Or, maybe it is just a wild swing and a miss. I hate to be this ambivalent in one of my own reviews, but I guess you can’t always get what you want, like a complex trans allegory that makes sense at first glance.

To be fair, I kept feeling there was some quality thing in there, something I just could not put my finger on. The acting is excellent, and there is some deeply indelible, dreamlike imagery. But then, I Saw the TV Glow ended in a way I found so bemusing and bonkers, I’m tempted to call Jane Schoenbrun the trans-nonbinary Ari Aster. Perhaps they would be flattered by that. For my part, I guess I’ll just accept that I didn’t get it and move on.

A nervous attempt at guarded connection, like me and this movie.

Overall: B-