THE PRESIDENT'S CAKE

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

Sometimes it’s worth just checking out what’s playing at your local movie theater, and looking up a movie you’ve never heard of. I had certainly never heard of The President’s Cake before doing this, when I also learned this was Iraq’s 2025 submission for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film. It’s Iraq’s 14th submission, in fact; the country has never secured a nomination—although The President’s Cake, which made the short list, came the closest.

I’m not certain I have ever even seen an Iraqi film before. According to my extensive movie watching records over on Letterboxd.com, I have only seen 11 other films in the Arabic language; only eight of them feature length. None were from Iraq, although I have seen several excellent films from Iran. I’m used to seeing subversive storytellers using film to reflect and expose the oppressive regime in Iran, but seeing something from an Iraqi perspective is both novel and new.

Not only that, but the story in The President’s Cake centers around children—in particular a 3rd-grade girl, Lamia (Baneen Ahmad Nayyef), whose name is drawn in class as the school’s chosen student to bake a cake for the president’s birthday. This is set in 1990, so the president was Saddam Hussein, the year he turned 53. The opening title cards inform us that the country is subject to UN-backed sanctions which significantly exacerbates the population’s poverty. Nevertheless, the entire country is required to celebrate his birthday every year, and a student in every school is chosen to bake a cake. We see Lamia’s teacher pass around a box into which all students must enter their name written on paper; one kid, who arrives late, must enter his name five times as punishment. One student’s name is drawn who has to clean the school; another must bring fruit; Lamia’s name is drawn for baking the cake.

The actual capability of each kid and their family evidently does not matter. When Lamia’s classmate and friend, Saeed (Sajad Mohamad Qasem), protests that he’ll be in the city with his father, the teacher notes that it is his “duty” to report anyone who disobeys, and mentions another family who was “dragged” for a similar infraction.

The President’s Cake is very impressively staged, as Lamia travels with Bibi (Waheed Thabet Khreibat), the grandmother who is taking care of her, to the city, ostensibly for ingredients. Lamia and Bibi live in a very rural area among marshes where Lamia commutes to school and back on what appear to be community canoes. Whether here or in the city they travel to, we see constant images of Saddam Hussein, in framed photos, paintings, even a wall mural pretty impressively rendered at the local school. The students are conditioned to shout things in their class like, “We sacrifice our blood and souls for you, Saddam!” In the city, the kids weave through both bazaars and crowded processions celebrating Hussein’s birthday.

Much of the film takes place in the city, where Lamia runs away after Bibi attempts to transfer custody of her to a friend, both due to her age and her inability to afford the cake ingredients. Lamia runs into Saeed, there pickpocketing with his disabled father. Both the marshes and the city are rendered in a way that feels deeply lived-in. In both environments the people are well aware of the state of the country but barely acknowledge it, just living their daily lives as they can. In one scene in the city, where the kids try everything from selling Lamia’s late father’s watch to offering labor to thievery in attempt to secure cake ingredients (eggs, flour, sugar, sugar, and baking powder), Lamia winds up in a coffee shop with a kind of jam band performing, the singer a young woman of some sophistication.

Lamia has a beloved rooster, which she has named Hindi, she’s brought with her. This seems like an unnecessary complication to a journey into the city, but I guess you can’t expect a 9-year-old to think logically. You might be right to worry about the fate of Hindi, who kind of has an adventure of his own. Lamia meets many people as she runs around the city, of course; sometimes they’re very kind and helpful, sometimes they’re clearly bad news. Sometimes you simply can’t tell.

There’s a few scenes in a hospital, and we meet people with injuries both their and elsewhere. There are casual references to being “bombed by the Americans.” Lamia and Saeed stick together for a while; they have conflict; they have resolution. All of this unfolds with the backdrop of everyday life in Iraq, with compulsory birthday celebrations happening and jets flying overhead. Lamia is too young to be concerned with geopolitics, or even war, until its effects come right up to her. All she knows is she wants to stay at home with her Bibi, and she needs ingredients to make a cake.

I don’t have a clue what life is like in Iraq today; it’s an entirely different universe from mine. But a film like The President’s Cake, even set 35 years ago, offers valuable insight into a culture and history that Americans were long encouraged to dismiss and dehumanize—to a large degree we still are. It doesn’t feel like writer-director Hasan Hadi made this film for that purpose, but rather to tell a deeply human story from the point of view of an average person who grew up in this historical context. It’s deeply affecting, and a truly impressive feature film debut.

The resilience of scrappy kids in The President’s Cake.

Overall: B+

MIDWINTER BREAK

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

I have kind of a thing for movies about older married couples who have been together for decades. Life isn’t all young love, you know—nor is it even all about new love (though I do also enjoy movies about older people who find love). I’m fully aware that the average moviegoer isn’t exactly demanding stories like this, and my being on the precipice of 50 years old is probably a factor here. So what? If any of you young whippersnappers don’t care about this then go read some other movie review!

Well, here’s the thing. Midwinter Break is still, unfortunately, kind of forgettable. We could start with the title itself. I saw the trailer to this movie several times, and still I often struggled to remember the name of it. Midwinter Break sounds like an off-brand version of the Vacation franchise, except trust me, nothing outrageous happens here.

What does happen is some very good acting. Ciarán Hinds and especially Lesley Manville effortlessly elevate what is otherwise pretty milquetoast material, about an older couple whose one child has long since moved out, they are set adrift in their lives together, and the absence of other family puts their conflicting spiritual beliefs into sharper relief. Stella buys tickets to Amsterdam as a Christmas present to Gerry, and they mean to go on an adventure together. You know, in midwinter.

I was very interested in the location shooting in Amsterdam, as I will be visiting there for the first time this summer (not in winter, thankfully). We do get several shots of Stella and Gerry walking along the canals, and one brief sequence of them walking through the Anne Frank House, which winds up becoming a relevant detail in one of their later conflicts about their respective approaches to religion. I’m not sure it’s the best reflection of the narrative onscreen that I found myself thinking, oh right: I definitely need to book timed tickets to the Anne Frank House before we get there.

To call Midwinter Break “meditative” would be an understatement. It’s filled with quiet, contemplative scenes. Early on, we just settle into Stella and Gerry’s quiet routine together, the comfortable way they coexist, though we see very quickly how Stella feels alienated and Gerry is a bit oblivious. She goes to Christmas mass without him, and she’s very devout; Gerry, for his part, basically puts up with her piousness, though he does also scoff a bit, something that naturally comes up later.

It’s not that I didn’t find Midwinter Break compelling, though I do think that with other actors it would really have been a drag. Plenty of viewers will likely find this a drag regardless. But director Polly Findlay gradually builds up the idea of a secret that Stella is living with, and it has to do with when she was once caught in crossfire during a siege in Belfast when she was pregnant. Eventually Stella delivers a long monologue about it to an expatriate fellow Irishwoman she’s met in Amsterdam, and Manville’s delivery, as always, is impeccable, even moving. Nevertheless, once the reveal we’ve been waiting for occurs, it’s hard not to think: that’s it?

Ultimately Midwinter Break is about the beginning of a long-term marriage unraveling, due to religious incompatibility, basically. Stella uses the word “spiritual,” but I would argue it’s more religious—the taking of comfort through religious ritual. It ends on a very subtly hopeful note, after an emotional exchange at the Amsterdam airport while they wait for their delayed flight in a snow storm—I do rather wish we could have seen more of the city to give this relatively drab story some more environmental character. Ultimately, Midwinter Break isn’t for everyone, but some, like me, might at the very least be moved by the performances.

This is a vacation we’re bound to forget.

Overall: B-

THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATER

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

There’s a lot to love about The Chronology of Water, Kristen Stewart’s feature directorial debut. I just didn’t love all of it. I can see how it might work in its entirety for other people, but its endlessly quick and random cuts in the editing grew tiresome for me, as did the incessant voiceover, poetic as it might be.

Stewart also wrote the script, adapting from the memoir of the same name by Lidia Yuknavitch. This makes it a little harder to groan at yet another movie about someone working through astonishing traumas, as it’s based on real-life events. Suffice it to say that Lidia’s father is a deeply horrible person. Maybe the source text does a better job of explaining the logic in this, but I found myself astonished to find Lidia, and her older sister Claudia, kept him in their lives even after they grew up. Trust me, based on everything we see here, he deserves to be discarded and forgotten.

I suppose I could just be speaking from my own experience as a survivor of child sexual abuse—something that is not even quite clear is going on in The Chronology of Water for a while. Stewart presents a highly stylized story, shots in all awkward angles or extreme close-ups. Lidia doesn’t even state plainly to anyone that her father was sexually abusive until the last act of the film. We all deal with trauma in specific and individual ways, I guess, and this was how Lidia did it—first by finding the release of self-reflection through writing, and later, apparently, through the dreamlike lens of fractured memories. Or at least that’s the way it’s filtered through Kristen Stewart’s lenses.

The Chronology of Water begins with quite a stretch of this kind of dreamily fractured presentation, dialogue either minimal or nonexistent. It tested my patience a little, to be honest. There comes a point where an actual narrative comes int focus, but it’s some time before that happens. I get what this movie is going for, I guess—there’s a sense of being inside Lidia’s mind, prone to addiction and self-destruction, repressed memories brought back by specific triggers. There’s a challenge to this experience, and your mileage may vary when it comes to its effectiveness.

For me, what saves The Chronology of Water is the performances. Imogen Poots is a revelation as Lidia, unsurpassed by any other performance in awards contention this year. Thora Birch is incredible, and slightly underused, as Claudia, Lidia’s revered older sister who leaves home to save herself even though it means leaving Lidia behind. There’s a curious element to the relationship to these sisters, where you might expect Lidia to grow up resenting her for leaving her in the sights of their disgustingly horrid father, but it is established early on how Lidia worships Claudia—”You were mythic to me,” she later tells her. It would seem that never quite went away.

As you might imagine, water figures prominently in the story here, though I still left the movie not quite understanding the phrasing. But, Lidia is a competitive swimmer, who is offered multiple partial scholarships, all of which her father (played by Michael Epp, an unsettling combination of handsome and creepy) dismisses by declaring it means she’s “not good enough.” Eventually her mother (Susannah Flood), who is usually totally checked out, comes through and gets her off to college. “I almost loved her,” Lidia says, in voiceover. But after Lidia squanders her potential as a swimmer with drug and alcohol abuse, she eventually finds writing as an outlet, and the plot turns yet again. There are several scenes with Jim Belushi as novelist and mentor Ken Kesey, and he is also fantastic.

To Kristen Stewart’s credit, a whole lot of detail gets packed into 128 minutes, and it manages not to feel overstuffed—occasionally difficult to follow, but the broader arcs are easier to register. The performances in this film are the strongest argument for seeing it, and that consistency across the cast is an indicator of Stewart’s talents. I have to admit, I really sold her short back in the Twilight days. (To be fair, it’s still true that her performances were shit in those movies.) This is a woman who has truly broadened her horizons and effectively diversified what she has to offer—and, in the right hands, is actually an amazing actor herself (consider Spencer, my favorite film of 2021). Clearly she knows what great acting is, and can coax it out of others.

It’s the technical stuff I’m less convinced by. It’s not incompetence, to be clear: it’s easy to tell that all the choices here are very intentional and thought through. They just made much of The Chronology of Water, particularly in the beginning, feel inaccessible. I felt pretty detached from this movie for the first quarter or so of it, and that’s more than enough time to lose a lot of people. I’m hesitant to say you should stick it out, but in the end I was glad I did.

Imogen Poots is amazing in this movie that is otherwise a bit of a mixed bag.

Overall: B

H IS FOR HAWK

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

One might be forgiven for watching H Is for Hawk and saying: We all experience grief, I get it! How many films in recent years have tackled the subject of grief, in one way or anther? And, across genres—countless horror films in particular, presented as “a metaphor” for grief. Grief, grief, grief! Bad grief, weird grief. Good grief!

Well, here’s the thing. I was much more taken with H Is for Hawk that I expected to be. And when it comes to grief, it really cannot be repeated too many times that everyone deals with grief in different ways, all of them correct. In this case, it’s quite the specific expression of grief: college professor and avid birder Helen (a wonderful Claire Foy) gets herself a goshawk to take care of as a massive distraction from dealing with the death of her beloved father (Brendan Gleeson, not given nearly enough screen time, most of which is in flashbacks of Helen’s memories). She lets the massive challenge of taking care of this bird of prey keep her from confronting her emotions, plummeting herself into a deep depression.

I went in thinking, based on the trailer, that this would be a story about a woman who adopts a bird and the experience helps her through her grief. But, it’s actually the opposite: she uses the bird as an excuse not to confront her grief. This does make for a pretty fascinating story, even as her mother (Lindsay Duncan), her brother (Josh Dylan), and especially her close friend Christina (Denise Gough, in quite the departure from her iconically villainous performance as Dedra in Andor) look on helplessly, and attempt to reach out to Helen with increasing futility.

This would all be compelling enough, honestly, but I must mention cinematographer Charlotte Bruus Christensen, because so much of H Is for Hawk is beautifully, stunningly shot. Helen spends a lot of time building trust with the hawk she pointlessly names Mabel, building up to taking her out to fields and forests where the bird can hunt. This film features several scenes of Mabel hunting, and they are absolutely incredible, with some shots defying the imagination. I cannot find any information on whether CGI was used in this film, only reports of the painstaking manners in which cameras were camouflaged to pick up the birds they used for filming. Several stunning shots are in perfect focus of the bird in flight, though, and one memorable shot has the camera trailing the bird in flight—I can’t imagine how they did that practically, but it absolutely looks real. For an indie British drama about a woman denying her grief, they went truly above and beyond with the visuals in this film, to a far greater degree than they needed to. But it left me deeply impressed.

The questions it raises about keeping wild animals in captivity is perhaps another story. H Is for Hawk is impressively frank and objective in how it avoids any anthropomorphization of a bird of prey, and even Helen as a character is quick to clarify that this is a species that does not feel affection. Helen holds no illusions about how Mabel feels about her, and I love that about how this story is told—but, Helen also allows herself to get far too attached to Mabel. There’s even a moment when Christina says to her, “I think you might be overidentifying with Mabel.” Helen responds by saying she’s certain she is not, even though she clearly is.

But, beyond all that—why buy the bird to begin with? When Helen buys the bird, she meets the seller on a pier, and Christine, who is with her, says, “This feels like a drug deal.” Indeed. Conversely, H Is for Hawk features a memorable scene in which Helen is giving a public talk about Mabel, and a dipshit young man attempts to take her to task for “killing for fun,” as if a natural predator is just hunting for kicks. Helen is memorably struck between defending the bird of prey hunt as a natural act and getting flustered due to her state of grief. But what I often thought about, and what the film does not ever directly address, is whether any of this is actually good for the bird itself.

I can’t say that affected my appreciation for the story being told here, however. To what degree a film like this might upset conservationists, I have no idea. My focus remains on the fact that Helen is making ill-advised choices in the thick of grieving the loss of her father, and this is done incredibly well. I am frankly not a fan of any birds, and this movie gave me a new appreciation for them, so there’s that. I suppose we could have a separate conversation about the ethics of how the birds were used in the filming of this movie, and arguably we should have just left the source text of Helen Macdonald’s autobiographical book of the same name at that. To my mind, I am only here to judge what is onscreen, and ultimately, H Is for Hawk just really worked for me.

Helen (Claire Foy) walks her unconscious distraction through the streets of Cambridge.

Overall: B+

THE TESTAMENT OF ANN LEE

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

The Testament of Ann Lee is a musical like none other. It’s almost like a musical on a technicality: it has people breaking out into song, for sure, but nothing lyrical or catchy. Instead, it repurposes actual, 18th-century Shaker hymns. The voices, especially that of Amanda Seyfried as the title character, are angelic. But, they are only ever used as a tool to convey deep piety and faith. There is even dancing, but in a sort of physical version of speaking in tongues—the faithful allowing the spirit to move them.

There is a curious and fascinating element to this film, in that it never casts judgment on Ann Lee or her followers. One might even be tempted to call her a cult leader, but we only see the story through her experiences. This is a woman who bore four children, all of whom died before reaching the age of one. The one sex scene that is included features Ann Lee and her husband, Abraham (Christopher Abbott), is early in their marriage, and completely devoid of tenderness or sensuality. Abraham is weirdly obsessed with a ritualistic act in which he whacks Ann Lee on the ass with a sort of broom of switches. It’s unclear to me whether there was some genuinely devotional aspect to this, or if he was just looking for an excuse to engage in a particular kink.

Whatever the case, Ann Lee clearly does not enjoy sex—whether because she’s never had it with her own pleasure in mind or because she’s simply not into it at all is perhaps an open question—and, as she allows herself to become the prophet of a religious movement, she makes celibacy a central tenet of their belief. You cannot be close to go when engaging in the pleasures of the flesh, that sort of thing. I would argue the opposite, but whatever. My life experience is nothing like this woman’s.

There’s something very odd, and detached, almost impenetrable, about The Testament of Ann Lee. It feels like the kind of “high minded” film that regular filmgoers just aren’t going to get. I felt like I barely got it myself. It has an excellent lead performance in Amanda Seyfried, solid performances among the rest of the cast, scenes that are very well shot, beautifully performed music that is otherwise fairly inaccessible to modern audiences. It’s the story itself that seems to aspire to greatness without quite getting there. I can easily imagine a select few people finding this film to be an amazing experience, but I could never fully connect with it.

This may just be a personal thing. While director Mona Fastvold, who cowrote the script with The Brutalist’s Brady Corbet, never cast judgement on the “Shakers” (so named because of how they dance in religious ecstasy), neither do they explicitly endorse them. The story is narrated, a little too much for my taste, by Ann Lee’s close friend Mary (Thomasin McKenzie), with clear reverence for her. We also see Ann Lee’s rise as a religious figure, from Manchester to New York, looked upon by Abraham with utter befuddlement. There’s a scene in which he demands she perform her wifely duties and I feared it would take a dark turn, which thankfully it doesn’t—although what he then does right in front of her is not much better. We’re clearly not meant to be on his side, but I never felt compelled to take her side either, at least not as a religious figure claiming to be the Second Coming of Christ in female form.

This is simply a telling of her story. Ann Lee certainly does suffer some serious hardships, over many years, from the deaths of all her infant children to a horrifying and degrading attack by neighboring locals in New England. There are suggestions of Ann Lee being a witch, but only somewhat in passing. I won’t spoil the age to which she lived, even though it’s a matter of historical record, but I found myself surprised by it. This is a film that follows her from childhood to her death, making it quite definitively a biopic. I’m not a huge fan of life-spanning biopics, and even here it seems like huge swaths of her life get gleaned over. And yet, clocking in at 137 minutes, the style of the storytelling often makes it feel like a bit of a slog.

Much of The Testament of Ann Lee is like an immersion into her psyche. Sometimes a religious-themed film is something conservative Christians can take as an extension of their own faith, but that does not seem likely here. I think Ann Lee is likely to be as alienating to faithful Christians as she would be to those of us who practice no religion at all. This is still a compelling idea, given that the movement she led is a variation on longstanding Christian beliefs from her own culture. It’s so insulated in this way that this film barely touches on her disdain for slavery when she witnesses it for the first time in New York, and we see just one shot of Shakers interacting with an Indigenous man. Surely there are countless nuanced implications here, especially considering this was a group of White people migrating from Britain to the “New World,” but Fastvold isn’t much interested in examining them.

This is all about Ann Lee, and her unquestioning faith in God—her God, anyway. She’s careful to state that people should join them of their own free will, but should they break the rules, they are cast out. One wonders if Ann Lee had a mental health disorder. It’s impossible to say, as this was so long ago that The Testament of Ann Lee essentially amounts of speculative fiction. A fair amount of that speculation is fascinating to me from an intellectual standpoint, but as narrative storytelling I found it to be just slightly less than the sum of its parts.

Overall: B

FATHER MOTHER SISTER BROTHER

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

Look. Don’t talk to me about the “beauty in the ordinary.” We all get more than enough of the ordinary just walking down a residential street on any given day. Or, in an example much closer to the vibe of Father Mother Sister Brother, simply staring at a blank wall.

Every time I see a movie like this—or, more to the point, a movie that leaves me baffled by its very existence—I find myself imagining the talent reading the script for the very first time. All these people, in this case an ensemble cast of eight mostly-great actors, wanted to do this?

It would seem there is a whole lot here just flying way over my head. Over at MetaCritic.com, this film has a rating of 76 out of 100. It has a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 81%. It seems worth noting that the user ratings on these sites are 6.4 out of 10 and 46%, respectively—and there’s nothing “woke” here for people to stupidly review-bomb. This may be a rare case in which the populist response is actually the voice of reason. You won’t find any pretensions toward an inflated sense of worth in this review—Father Mother Sister Brother does more than enough of that on its own.

Which is to say: holy Christ was I bored by this movie. In my opinion, writer-director Jim Jarmusch has a spotty record at best; my favorite film of his would have to be Only Lovers Left Alive, about a vampire couple contending with the prospect of being together for eternity, and I gave that a solid B. It was an absolute thrill ride in comparison to this film.

Jarmusch’s project this time is to present an anthology, three separate stories with a thematic connection: the death of a loved one hangs in the air at all times. There are some viewers who find something profound in this. I did, too: profound boredom. Halfway through the first story, “Father", in which Adam Driver and Mayim Bialik play siblings on a deeply awkward visit at the home of their widowed father played by Tom Waits, I thought: Is the whole movie going to be like this? It was not long into the second story, “Mother,” in which Cate Blanchett and Vicky Krieps play sisters on an annual visit for tea with their mother, played by Charlotte Rampling, before I realized: Yes, I guess it is. And when the third story was presented as “Sister Brother” and I realized there was only one more story and not two, I thought: Oh, thank God. In that one, by the way, Luka Sabbat and Indya Moore play twins visiting the emptied home of their parents who died in a small plane crash while one of them was flying it.

There are several details Jarmusch playfully—I use that term loosely—puts into all three stories. All of them feature extended shots of the adult children driving cars. All of them feature characters wearing, and commenting on, a Rolex watch. In all three of them, one character utters some version of “Bob’s your uncle.” In all of them, the characters have tea—although in the third one it switches to coffee. In only the first and third one, a toast is made with their drinks; in the first the question is asked whether you can toast with tea, and in the third the question is asked whether you can toast with coffee.

Playing the game of keeping track of these common details in all three stories is the best chance you’ve got at staying awake. Seriously I could have slept through this entire movie and gotten as much out of it. Even identifying the common details got tedious after a while, because it was the closest thing to anything actually happening in any of the scenes, and by the end these touches felt forced and contrived.

I took particular issue with “Sister Brother,” in which the twins’ backstory made little sense. They’re clearly in France, they’re ostensibly visiting the apartment they grew up in, but they both have American accents? Maybe the family moved here when they were teenagers. But then they examine multiple IDs and birth certificates left behind by their parents, and this is somehow the first time they learn they were born in New York.

Father Mother Sister Brother is brimming with intentionality; it’s clear that nothing in it is accidental—including the long, awkward silences that characterize most of the 110-minute running time that felt to me like an eternity. I can’t remember the last time I was so happy a movie was over. There is a tone here not far off from that of the 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, which somewhat famously topped the latest Sight and Sound Greatest Films of All Time poll in 2022. That film also marinates in the ordinary, only in that case for three hours and 22 minutes. The key difference is that Jeanne Dielman has a point it makes far more clearly. I left the theater at a loss as to the point in Father Mother Sister Brother.

Maybe Jarmusch is your thing. He really isn’t mine.

Overall: C

THE SECRET AGENT

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

Those Brazilians, man. They sure know how to convince the world that their movie is significant, worthy of attention, and worthy of awards. The did it with I’m Still Here—a much better film, in my opinion—last year, and they’re doing it again with The Secret Agent this year. The thing is, I’m not fully convinced. Sure, this is a competently made film, but it also takes some truly bizarre turns, and it overall strikes me as compelling but flawed.

More importantly, The Secret Agent clocks in at 161 minutes, and I cannot see any reason why that was necessary. There is a climactic sequence that is genuinely exciting, the kind of crime thriller stuff you love to see in the cinema—but it happens after a solid two hours of languid plotting. I hesitate to say it was worth the wait.

I don’t even fully understand the title. How is Armondo (Wagner Moura) an “agent,” exactly? Does going into hiding from government officials who have put out a hit on youn make you a “secret agent”? This title suggests a spy thriller, but Armondo doesn’t spend any time spying. Granted, he does assume different identities, and depending on the circumstance he is known as Fernando. (To muck things up even further, Armondo also has a young son, Fernando, who we later see in flash-forward to present day, and the adult Fernando is also played by Moura.)

Don’t get me wrong, I actually liked The Secret Agent. I just have a lot of nitpicks, and enough of them to leave me mystified as to the idea that was one of the year’s best films. For example: there’s a single tonal shift that is so wild a departure from the seriousness of the rest of the film that I found it to be a true “What the fuck?” moment. It has to do with a running subplot about a severed human leg, first discovered swallowed inside a shark, and later snatched by local law enforcement and dumped into a river. We cut back to our regular programming for a while, and then, seemingly out of nowhere, the narrative jumps to the leg washed up on a riverbank, and it suddenly twitches on its own. It’s alive! Suddenly we’re in a park with a bunch of late-night public sex going on, both straight and gay. In one of the latter cases, a guy on his knees giving head is completely naked—like, what? did he just walk there from home without his clothes? or did he completely strip and toss his clothes aside in the park just to give head? This really isn’t how these things go down. Anyway, this severed leg with a bloody stump at about mid-thigh just goes on the rampage, hurling itself through the air to kick all the horny park patrons in the face, leaving them screaming and bloody.

I was stupefied. To be fair, I suppose, this sequence jumps to the group of people being protected in secret, Armando among them, reading this account from the local newspaper, cracking up at how the story is written as though this really happened. It turning out to be a sort of fantasy sequence notwithstanding, it’s a whiplash-inducing shift in tone.

There’s a lot of the rest of The Secret Agent that I quite liked; I might even be more inclined to think of it as a Great Movie if it simply cut out that attack-leg sequence altogether, and cut the rest of it to maybe half an hour shorter. The acting is solid, especially Wagner Moura himself, as a man achieving an outward calm while clearly often being deeply frightened. In the opening sequence, which I would argue is itself overlong, Armondo is stopping for gas after days of travel, and there’s a random dead body covered by cardboard in the dry dirt nearby. Armondo is clearly unsettled by this, but he also needs gas. This effectively sets the stage for what it’s like for him to navigate his native country of Brazil in 1977, during their military dictatorship.

We then spend a lot of time meeting a lot of characters, including a duo of hired assassins, stepfather and stepson Augusto and Bobbi, played by Roney Villela and Gabriel Leone, respectively. This is most notable to me only in that I hope to see more of Gabriel Leone because holy hell is he gorgeous. I guess it doesn’t hurt that he’s also a pretty good actor. On the flip side, there is also a cat with two faces that hangs out in the building where the people being sheltered are staying, and while I get the symbolism of duality, it’s a pretty unsettling sight.

There are also the local police chief in Recife, the northernmost major city in Brazil (it’s near the easternmost point of South America), and the chief’s henchmen; the guy who hires Armando to pretend to be a desk worker when a sham of a deposition is held in a space only made up to be the police station; several of the other workers in this space that is also an archive office; the Jewish holocaust survivor the chief harasses; Armando’s fellow political refugees also under protection; the government officials who hire the hitmen; and the father of Armando’s late wife who runs a local cinema—too many characters to name. I suppose I can credit the slow plotting for how easy it actually is to keep all of these characters straight.

Mind you, I am fully open to the idea that The Secret Agent really is some masterpiece and it’s just not for me, because I don’t get it, and I am unable to—because I am not Brazilian, and the only history I glean from that country is through movies like this. Even the wild leg sequence could be explained as an illustration of the ridiculous ways the media of the time was used to obfuscate otherwise blatant corruption. I just found some of the depiction of queerness in it to be a bit misinformed, and the narrative contextualization of the entire sequence to be inadequate. But, that’s just me. I feel confident that the average movie watcher will be bored to tears by this film, and plenty of film snobs will hail it as a masterpiece. I don’t quite fall into either camp, in that I clearly have a lot of notes, but I’m not sorry I saw it.

I guess the secret is exactly what kind of agent he is.

Overall: B

IS THIS THING ON?

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

People like to make fun of Bradley Cooper for his unabashed earnestness as both an actor and a filmmaker, but you know what? I am here for it. A Star Is Born (2018) was shockingly good—both the movie and his performance—and although reviews were much more mixed for Maestro in 2023, I genuinely adored it (it was my favorite movie that year, in fact). I am so consistently impressed with this guy—much of The Hangover aging poorly notwithstanding—that I’m now leaning toward the position that he is underrated. And what’s wrong with being passionate about what you do? Isn’t that a good thing?

Which brings me to Is This Thing On?, which exceeds expectations on nearly every front. Cooper co-wrote the script with Will Arnett, who is also the star, and Mark Chappell, this is an unusually down-to-earth portrait of two middle-aged people unhappy in their marriage. But what sets this movie apart is not just that the protagonist, Alex Novak (Arnett), discovers standup comedy and that he loves doing it, but that both he and his wife, Tess (Laura Dern), gradually realize that the reason their marriage wasn’t working was not because they were unhappy with each other, but because they were unhappy with their own lives.

Now, they also have “Irish twin” boys, both of them—for a few months at most—ten years old: played by adorable and impressively natural Blake Kane and Calvin Knegten. Arnett is 55 years old and Dern will be 59 next month, which means if we are to think of their characters as the same age, then they had these kids in their mid- and late-forties. Not unheard of, granted, but unusual—I’m much more used to people in their fifties being grandparents. The script takes care of this by noting that Tess had children using fertility treatments. (It may still be worth noting that Alex’s parents are played by Ciarán Hinds and Christine Ebersole, who are both 72. I guess they had Alex when they were 17, which is actually quite plausible.)

I spent the first half or so of Is This Thing On? unsure of exactly how great I thought it was. Alex and Tess agree to “call it” early on, but then Alex, alone and without direction, walks into a bar and signs up for the open mic as a way to get a free drink. Is This Thing On? has a lot of scenes with Alex onstage, but it’s not overstuffed with it, and I spent a lot of time dreading how awkward it might become—but then, kind of miraculously, it never gets that way. He’s never shown being particularly good at comedy (and a fellow comic literally tells him “you’re not good at comedy,” albeit in a loving way), and this film’s many very funny scenes tend to happen between Alex and his family and friends. As all of this unfolds, the story becomes increasingly well-constructed. There’s something both sad and funny about a fellow comic calling Alex “Sad Guy,” and thanks to Cooper’s knack for compelling and innovative storytelling, you can’t help but feel for this broken down, sad, middle-aged White guy.

The trick, I think, is that Arnett plays Alex as a smart guy, who is also smart about comedy, even while he’s not particularly good at it. You believe it when he manages to hold his audience’s attention, even when he’s not being hilarious. They give him a lot of courtesy chuckles, but they also clearly support him.

There’s something wonderfully warm-hearted about this movie–even in the setting of the comedy clubs Alex frequents, which is not often how we see such spaces depicted. Here, the other comics see a newbie with potential, and they offer him tips and tricks of the trade. There’s no resentment among the ranks, which actually seems more realistic, and that’s not what this movie is meant to be about anyway. We get to see real-life comedians here and there, including Amy Sedaris (who shows up multiple times as an emcee) and Dave Attell, among others.

Meanwhile, Tess, who is a former Olympic volleyball player now long past her prime, is putting out feelers about becoming a coach and thereby finding a way back into a world she once had great passion for but gave up long ago. This is a significant subplot, which means Is This Thing On?, in spite of the implication of its title, is not just about a divorced dad discovering standup comedy. It’s about a couple in a marriage who have lost their way with each other because they either gave up on or have yet to discover what truly makes them happy. There’s also discussion about wanting to be unhappy together, a point about successful relationships that I really liked. Marriage isn’t constant bliss, and it’s finding the person you want to weather rough patches with that really makes it work.

Tess and Alex are part of a friend group that includes one straight couple and one gay couple. The straight couple figures more prominently in the story, both because we get a taste of their own struggles, and because they are played by Andra Day, who honestly doesn’t get the most interesting stuff to work with (although she does get one great monologue in which she shares with Alex why she detests him), and Bradley Cooper himself, as a real self-centered dipshit of an aspiring-actor guy. This character, who everyone actually calls “Balls,” seems at first like a bit of self-parody, except that Cooper embodies him well enough to give him dimension, even as he’s providing a good portion of the movie’s comic relief.

Is This Thing On? is mostly a drama, but with a lot of comedy in it—the best formula for the twin goals of entertainment and relatability. More than anything, though, it’s progressively uplifting. This is a movie about good but unhappy people finding the simple things that bring them joy, and that was the feeling I had as I left the theater.

Listen, Alex Novak. It’s on, okay!

Overall: A-

NO OTHER CHOICE

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

No Other Choice is so much of a piece with the 2019 Best Picture winner Parasite, the comparisons are inevitable. It would seem that darkly comic examinations of South Korean capitalism—most of which can be applied globally—are part of an evergreen idea.

I’m not sure which of the two movies is objectively “better,” but Parasite certainly has the gigantic advantage of having come first. Setting aside its Best Picture win and the fact that No Other Choice has no such hopes, had No Other Choice been released in 2019 and Parasite released now, we might very well be having this exact same conversation, just in reverse.

It could be said that No Other Choice is more cynical. Multiple murders happen in this movie, and ultimately without consequence. It’s all in service of getting the good job: Man-su (a fantastic Lee Byung-hun) has been laid off after 25 years working at a specialty paper manufacturer, and takes increasingly desperate measures to pull ahead of three competitors for a similar job at another company.

What I love about these measures is how unpredictable they are. Just like Bong Joon Ho, famed Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook (who also co-wrote) has a very specific sensibility to his storytelling, the kind of thing it’s easy to see being ruined by any attempt at an American remake. And before any of the real action starts, we get to know Man-su’s family: a wife, Mi-ri (Son Ye-jin), who proves both refreshingly complex and surprisingly loyal; a teenage stepson he’s been raising with her since he was 2, Si-one (Woo Seung Kim); and a young cello prodigy daughter who doesn’t speak much, Ri-one (So Yul Choi). They even have two dogs, named Si-two and Ri-two—hence the “ones” of the children’s names.

This is a family of very fully realized characters, who are all very used to the comforts of the life Man-su’s career has brought them. Man-su is convinced he’ll have another job in three months, and 13 months later, he’s working at a Costco-like warehouse. There’s a very odd scene in which he evidently quits that job in order to chase a mid-afternoon opportunity, and he’s forced to strip out of his work jumpsuit and stand on the loading dock in his tank top and boxer shorts. Unless there’s something I am missing about Korean culture, that seemed a little over the top.

Granted, Man-su is enagaged in multiple attempts at murder not long after this, so I’m not sure how fair it is to judge this film for being “over the top.” There’s a lot of humor at play here, and, also much like Parasite, it doesn’t come on strong until pretty far into the movie—particularly a tussle between Man-su, his first competitor applicant, and that man’s frustrated wife, all tumbling comically over each other in their living room and wrestling for sole control of a pistol. A key difference is that Parasite had delightful plot twists no one could see coming; No Other Choice, by contrast, leans a bit more into hijinks.

That said, No Other Choice makes clear that there is some irony in its title: Man-su, and multiple others, have plenty more choices than they will admit to, even as they resort to what seem to be life-or-death measures—until that’s actually what they become. There’s a scene where Man-su verbally berates Goo Beom-mo (Lee Sung-min), his first target, for his stubbornness in refusing to look for reasonable alternatives, and he could just as well be speaking to himself.

That first attempt goes to some wild places, involving everything from surprise infidelity to a snake that may or may not be poisonous. But whether it’s Goo Beom-mo, or Ko Si-jo (Cha Seung-won), another laid-off worker now reduced to selling shoes, or social media influencer Choi Seon-chul (Park Hee-soon), all of Man-su’s targets are presented with full stories of their own, sometimes deeply flawed but always easy to empathize with in their own situations. This is perhaps part of the point: the job market is a cutthroat world, and sometimes you have to turn into a sociopath to get ahead.

There are some technical things that really make No Other Choice stand out, though, particularly some beautiful and clever cinematography. There’s a memorable shot of Man-su parking his car on a street surrounded by fall foliage, and another incredible shot of people’s reflections in an iPad screen while the screen pages are being slid to the side with someone’s finger. This makes for a movie that is often as fun just to look at as it is to engage with.

In years past, No Other Choice would be about a downtrodden, unemployed guy we can’t help but root for. Man-su is a peculiar character in that you are absolutely compelled by him, but whether you’re rooting for him gets much more complicated as the story unfolds. This is a family who, by the end, we slowly realize are living their lives as though the ends justify the means. The means is often quite entertaining to us, but deep down it’s a cynical reflection of what unchecked capitalism actually does to people.

I mean, there are lots of choices here.

Overall: B+

MARTY SUPREME

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

The last feature film writer-director Josh Safdie did was Uncut Gems in 2019, an extraordinarily stressful film which featured Adam Sandler as a gambling addict, in what was arguably his best performance since Punch-Drunk Love. I have recommended that film to several people, always qualifying how deeply stressful it is, which I think is a fair warning to make.

Uncut Gems was co-directed and co-written with Josh’s brother, Benny Safdie; Josh has gone it on his own with this new film, Marty Supreme, but it seems worth noting that it follows a very similar arc: it’s about a guy with a single-minded passion, who makes countless bad decisions in service of that passion, usually not seeing how said bad decisions are actually a form of self-sabotage. The key difference is that this time it’s about a guy enamored it his own talent as a table tennis player, and set in the 1950s. But, all the needle drops are eighties pop songs, and that incongruity I still remain ambivalent about.

Marty is played by Timothée Chalamet, a perennial favorite, and who will almost certainly get nominated for an Oscar for this role. It could be argued that this is one of those parts where a beautiful actor becomes “ugly” for a part in a bid for an Oscar nomination. Chalamet, as Marty, is nowhere near as beautiful as he usually is, right own to almost-pointedly visible pock marks on his cheeks. He also wears glasses, and has a thin mustache, giving him a very distinctive 1950s, self-important 1950s “young New Yorker” look.

There is a pregnancy that figures as a key part of the plot, though not what I would call prominently—but the opening titles still run over images of sperm cells racing for the egg. Ultimately, this serves as the reason why Marty Supreme ends with a far more upbeat note than Uncut Gems. Marty Supreme still ends with a whole lot of hopes and dreams unrealized, but basically Marty sort of realizes his dreams should be shooting for other things. If nothing else, at least Marty Supreme doesn’t end tragically.

And there is certainly a lot going on in this movie’s 150-minute runtime, which I am not convinced is a length that fully justifies itself, although to this film’s credit it doesn’t have a single dull moment in it. This seems to be a hallmark of the Safdies’ work, this incredible propulsion of plot and narrative. Marty is convinced he is destined to be “on a Wheaties box,” because of his undeniable talent. What he doesn’t seem to see is that table tennis—ping pong—will never be as popular in the United States as it is in Asia. Marty keeps going around telling people he’s a “professional athlete.” He’s fundamentally a conman, doing all he can to score the funds he needs to get where world championships are being held. Marty spends a lot of time barely getting out of scrapes. Until, of course, he doesn’t.

When Marty runs across retired-actress Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow, better than we have seen her in years), we know immediately that his interest in her is entirely self-serving. Soon enough we see them fucking in her hotel room shower, and at first I was baffled by him unhooking her necklace so it falls down the drain. But then it became clearer, as he does find a way to retrieve it later—it’s what happens after that with the necklace that is somewhat of a surprise.

Kay is married to Milton Rockwell (Kevin O’Leary), the rich owner of a pen manufacturing company, so Marty finds a way to weasel his way into Milton’s awareness as well. This is in service of Marty’s desire to get to Tokyo for the world championships, so he can attempt a rematch with the Japanese table tennis superstar, Koto Endo (Koto Kawaguchi, given a lot of screen time but no actual lines to speak of), who defeated him the year before. This is really all Marty thinks about, whether he’s having sex with a faded film actress twice his age, hustling amateur table tennis players with his Black friend Wally (Tyler the Creator), or teaming up with the woman he impregnated, Rachel (Odessa A’zion), to retrieve a lost dog for reward money. That dog is a whole thing in Marty Supreme, the impetus for more than one wild sequence that involves either fire or water or gasoline or gunfire or murder, depending on the sequence.

Given how much is going on, the writing is pretty impressive, well plotted and unpredictable in a way that keeps you on the edge of your seat, even though is neither a suspense movie nor an action movie. Except it kind of is both of those things, just of different sorts. I didn’t find Marty especially likable—Kay is maybe the only truly likable character in this movie—and he’s not even the sort of lovable loser you find yourself rooting for even when they make plainly bad decisions. Marty is objectively a kind of self-involved dipshit. The minor magic trick of this film is that in spite of that, you still find yourself invested. You still want to know how things turn out for him.

Marty Supreme is mercifully not as stressful as Uncut Gems, but it still gets about halfway there. Marty lives in a wildly chaotic universe, and we are just taking a ride through that universe with him. Beyond the undeniable craftsmanship of this film, I didn’t find it to have quite as much depth as I might have hoped—although there is some incredibly well-observed nuances of national pride among the Japanese people at this time set only about a decade after the U.S. ended the second World War with two atom bombs on their people. These are fascinating details otherwise incidental to the primary plot here, though, and I rather wish the primary plot were as fascinating. Ultimately, this just about a guy obsessed with his own talent as a table tennis player.

But hey, it’s still a story told in a way that locks you in from the start, and so much is going on that you barely notices the unnecessarily excessive run time. The comparatively quiet but upbeat note on which the film ends is a bit of a relief. Although I should say that “comparatively” is a key word here, as the last scene involves the baby room at a hospital, and the cacophony of baby cries then plays over the end credits, which is kind of funny. It’s a way to amusingly annoy the audience, which is basically what Marty himself has been doing all along.

Marty doesn’t reign quite as Supreme as hoped.