ROOFMAN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Overall: B-

THE LOST BUS

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

What a strange movie landscape we live in now, where something as truly cinematic as The Lost Bus gets distribution rights by Apple Inc, who merely releases it on their streaming services. The irony here is that, even though this is a film that would have far greater visual impact on a movie theater screen than on a television—no matter how big that television is—it still has far greater audience potential on a streaming service. Granted, it would almost certainly get an exponentially larger audience on Netflix (300 million+ subscribers) than on Apple TV+ (45 million subscribers), but second-tier streamers have to put up the cash for their own exclusive content to lure suscribers. It’s hard not to imagine that’s a big part of what this movie is.

The unfortunate part of it is that I can tell you The Lost Bus comes highly recommended, but I can’t tell you to go see it in a theater, or even to pay for it on VOD. You need to subscribe to Apple TV+. Or! Here’s a deal for you, and I do this regularly: start a 7-day free trial, watch this movie, and then just make sure you cancel the subscription before it auto-renews. This is more trouble than a lot of people want to go to. If you want to go to the trouble for any particular movie, this is one I would regard as worth it.

I mean—it’s not perfect. It’s simply very good. It’s only momentarily distracting that 55-year-old Matthew McConaughey is cast as 44-year-old Kevin McKay, a native of Paradise, California who has only recently returned after decades of estrangement from his recently-deceased father. And when the film begins, the narrative really lays it on thick that this guy is down on his luck: in addition to his father having recently died, his cancer-ridden dog has to be put to sleep, and his 15-year-old son Shaun (played by Levi McConaughey, Matthew’s actual son) screams at Kevin that he wishes he was dead. We either learn about or actually see these things happen within 24 hours of the notorious 2018 Camp Fire breaking out, which then spreads through the entire region within hours. I haven’t even mentioned Kevin’s feeble mother (Kay McConaughey—Matthew’s actual mother) who also lives with him and is not equipped to take care of Shaun when he falls ill and starts vomiting.

In other words, to say that everything is going wrong for Kevin McKay, both in life overall and on this particular day, is truly an understatement. You might even say the script, co-written by director Paul Greengrass with two other writers, overdoes it a bit. It doesn’t seem likely that this part of the “true story” is truly sticking to the facts. It’s a little odd that a movie production would lean so hard into Hollywood tropes when Apple TV exists outside the typical plot notes of Hollywood executives.

And yet: I’ve got to hand it to Greengrass, who is a perfect fit for a production of this nature. Even with more plot contrivances than a lot of his other similar films, The Lost Bus has a procedural nature akin to United 93 (2006), which arguably leaned too far away from plot or character development. Or maybe a more apt comparison would be Captain Phillips (2013), which featured Oscar-worthy performances by both Tom Hanks and then-newcomer Barkhad Abdi.

I’d love to say The Lost Bus also features Oscar-worthy performances, but as good as they are, that’s just not what this movie is. There is an emotional speech that Matthew McConaughey gives, but it’s worth noting that when it finished, my husband simply said, “I don’t think the real guy gave that monologue.” Yeah, I don’t think he did either.

What The Lost Bus does do is grip you, from nearly the beginning to the very end. We get just a few minutes of all that aforementioned hard luck Kevin is under, and then suddenly the Camp Fire is spreading, threatening the entire town of Paradise, CA (population 27,000—down to 4,764 as of the 2020 Census). The bus of the title is being driven by Kevin, a relatively recent hire, who is running late to get his bus back to base for maintenance. When fate has him the only empty bus in an evacuation area with a couple dozen elementary kids whose parents haven’t reached them need to be taken away, Kevin answers the call.

One of the teachers, Mary (America Ferrera), winds up on the bus with him and these kids. And then, maybe three quarters of The Lost Bus simply follows these two adults and all these children on a bus, facing gridlock, and rapidly approaching fire, and occasionally more than once, as they make a long succession of desperate attempts at getting out of the area. There’s a lot of fire onscreen in this film, and most of it looks like CGI—relatively impressive effects under the circumstances, but still recognizable as such. This is a rare occasion where I was weirdly comforted by that: I’d rather not think all of these children were constantly surrounded by actual fire only feet away.

It’s worth noting that 85 people died in the 2018 Camp Fire, and that is tragic, but—spoiler alert!—none of them are characters in this movie. Movies aren’t made about the victims. Movies are made about the heroes, and the people who survive. This is a large group of people who came very close to death (there is one particularly heavy sequence in which the two adults on the bus make the mutual decision that their only choice is to sit in the unmoving bus and hope the fire doesn’t take them all out—but fret not, this is closely followed by the most thrilling/harrowing sequence in the film) but still barely made it out alive. It’s the stories of inspiration and hope that we want to see and hear, and that’s exactly what The Lost Bus delivers.

America Ferrera and Matthew McConaughey are having a hot time in the small town tonight!

Overall: B+

ANEMONE

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

If you like gorgeous cinematography above all else, then Anemone might work for you. I tend to give different aspects of filmmaking equal weight, perhaps when I often shouldn’t, and I was quite taken with much of the visuals in this film. Never mind the stunnig shots of stormy skies or the birds-eye shots of verdant forests—cinematographer Ben Fordesman (Love Lies Bleeding) manages even to shoot the head and face of a young woman in a nondescript bedroom beautifully. The thing is with Anemone, it’s the story more than anything that is a challenge to penetrate.

I spent much of the story feeling like director and co-writer Ronan Day-Lewis was being very intentional about how I had no idea exactly what the hell was going on. This was less compelling than it was frustrating, but to the credit of both Ronan and his father Daniel Day-Lewis, who came out of retirement to both co-write and star in his son’s movie, things actually do gel narratively by the end. It just takes a while to get there.

I’m not sure how much of a compliment it is to say about a film that it rewards patience. Patience shouldn’t necessarily be tested in film, depending on the story and the point of view I suppose. Reasonable people could disagree on the matter in this case. The key selling point for Anemone is actually behind the scenes: the heartwarming story of the man widely regarded as the best actor alive, coming out of retirement to help his 27-year-old son make his first feature film. You might be surprised to find Daniel also apparently came out of retirement so he could deliver an extended monologue about taking laxatives so he could deliberately shit all over a pedophile priest.

“Did you believe that?” asks Ray, his character, after finishing telling the tale to his brother, Jim (Sean Bean). This feels kind of like the most pertinent question about the film overall, which spends a lot of time on both visual and narrative abstractions—a couple of pointedly surreal dream sequences, and a lot of caginess regarding these brothers’ past involvement in “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland. After a great deal of time in the film, eventually we learn that Ray is a deeply emotionally scarred man who abandoned his wife, Nessa (Samantha Morton) and their son, Brian (Samuel Bottomley) some twenty years ago and has been living in a cabin so deep in the woods there isn’t even road access ever since. I kept wondering about the inevitability of land development eventually reaching this cabin.

With the exception of a couple of brief scenes in pubs, or of Nessa at her emergency call center job, these four characters are the only ones we ever see in Anemone, which presumably kept production costs down. We get several scenes of Nessa and Brian in their home, coming to terms with how much trouble Brian is in after an antagonistic comment by some other unnamed kid set him off to the point where he beat him nearly to death. We get regular visual reminders of this by close-ups of Brian’s scabbed knuckles. Brian does get a visit by a surprisingly empathetic friend, Hattie (Safia Oakley-Green). Meanwhile, Jim, the brother who was also left behind and helped Nessa raise Brian, has gone off to find Ray in an effort to convince him to come back and help Brian move on from his own pain by providing some answers that have been denied him his whole life.

A lot of stock is put into this idea, and it’s one I was never fully sold on. The return of Brian’s absent father with his own fucked-up past will magically turn things right for Brian’s future? When it comes to suspension of disbelief, the suspension’s strength isn’t holding all that well.

And Anemone is very vague about the connection to The Troubles in these people's past, even with one more Ray monologue about a very specific, very violent incident that was clearly a decisive factor in his becoming a hermit in the woods. Daniel Day-Lewis is very good in this film, but no one could credibly say it comes close to his best performances; he commands attention far more gracefully in what previously had been his last role, Phantom Thread (2017), an objectively superior film on all fronts (except, perhaps, cinematography).

Incidentally, Daniel Day-Lewis is not the only thing Anemone has in common with other Paul Thomas Anderson films. There’s a thrilling sequence of a storm with giant hail stones that very much brought to mind the plague-of-frogs sequence in the 1999 film Magnolia—right down to the sequence of shots depicting each character reacting to the freak occurrence. There are many recognizable influences at play in Ronan Day-Lewis’s film, but that doesn’t preclude his obvious talent either. Much as Daniel Day-Lewis is rightly beloved, I am left more eager to see what Ronan might do next on his own.

Oh, brother!

Overall: B

ELEANOR THE GREAT

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

Every day we still have June Squibb with us is a gift. She’ll be 96 years old next month, and as Eleanor the Great was shot in early 2024, she would have been 94 then—the exact age as her character, the title character. Squibb seems to be following in the footsteps of Betty White, who was born 7 years before her, and whose final live action role was in 2018, at the age of 95. It’s amazing these women were, or are, able to keep working at that age.

The thing is, thanks to The Golden Girls, I knew who Betty White was for the last 35 years of her life. I never really knew who June Squibb was until her Oscar-nominated role in Alexander Payne’s 2013 film Nebraska (the only Oscar nomination Squibb ever got, incidentally). I totally forgot she also had a part in one of Payne’s previous films, About Schmidt (2002). Squibb was 84 years old and 73 years old when those two movies were released, respectively. Which is to say: I have only ever known Squibb onscreen as an old lady—albeit a consistently compelling one. It seems worth noting that she has over a hundred acting credits, dating back as far as 1985—when she was 55. She previously worked exclusively in live theater, starting in the late fifties.

The truth is, all of the aforementioned films are better than Eleanor the Great, but that has nothing to do with June Squibb, who is far and away the best thing about it; the film could have easily collapsed under someone else in the lead role. The greatest distinction of Eleanor the Great is actually that it’s the feature directorial debut of Scarlett Johansson, and to put it diplomatically, Johansson has potential but could use some more practice.

Johansson’s status as a superstar can easily overshadow some of the more interesting things about this production, such as how script writer Tory Kamen very loosely based the Eleanor character on her own grandmother, Elinore. It should be stressed, however, that the real-life Elinore never lied about being a Holocaust survivor. That’s something Squibb’s Eleanor does, and it’s the basic premise of the film.

Eleanor the Great is also about grief, though, and as such will have a lot that’s very relatable to those of us who have lost someone very close to us. The story here is often a bit clunky in the telling, but it does have some insightful themes about how, as one character very directly puts it, grief can make us very selfish. It’s often said that everyone deals with grief in their own way, and there is no wrong way, but Eleanor might serve as an argument that there’s at least one wrong way. Maybe don’t sit in on a Holocaust survivors’ support group and tell someone else’s story as your own.

To be fair, every step of the way, we can empathize with the decisions Eleanor makes, even when we know they’re wrong. She lived with her best friend, Bessie (Rita Zohar), as two widows for 11 years before Bessie passes away. When Eleanor’s daughter Lisa (Jessica Hecht) moves her from Florida back to her native New York, Eleanor reluctantly goes to a social event only to get mistaken for someone looking for the Holocaust survivors’ group. Eleanor even starts to apologize when she realizes she’s in the wrong place, but another person in the group, mistaking Eleanor’s apology for simple nervousness, urges her to stay and tell her story. And, she does. Except she tells Bessie’s story.

Knowing this premise, I really expected Eleanor the Great to be about Eleanor getting to know the others in the survivors group—who are cast, incidentally, by real Holocaust survivors. I might even have preferred that. Instead, there’s a young girl sitting in on the group, Nina (an excellent Erin Kellyman), working on a story for her college journalism class. It’s Nina who takes an interest in Eleanor’s story (why none of the other people in the group would be as compelling to her, I’m not sure), and the subsequent story that unfolds is much more about Eleanor and Nina getting to know each other. The standard story arc of conflict and resolution exists between those two.

One of Eleanor the Great’s many implausible details is how Nina’s father, Roger (Chiwetel Ejiofor), happens to be the TV news journalist both Eleanor and Bessie were big fans of. He also happens to be grieving the loss of a loved one, his wife—and thus Nina is grieving the loss of her mother, and this is something over which Nina and Eleanor bond. The resulting complication of their budding friendship is undeniably fascinating, as everything the two of them bond over is sincere and genuine, even though the thing that brought them together in the first place was a pretty significant lie.

Eleanor the Great is a movie unlike any other, I’ll give it that. It’s far from perfect, but there’s a lot to like about it. Certain technical decisions are distracting to the point of taking you out of the movie—such as the staging of Eleanor’s visit to Nina’s class, in which she begins speaking with no formal introduction, and the class applauds after she finishes speaking without any clear indication that’s she done. This sequence plays a lot like a slightly stylized scene in a stage play, and it’s a bit incongruous. There’s a few somewhat baffling choices like this in the movie.

Still, it’s June Squibb who is the glue who holds everything together, and if there is any one reason to see this film, it’s her. Chiwetel Ejiofor is well-established as a great actor but not given a whole lot to showcase it here; Erin Kellyman as Nina is far more memorable. A whole lot of the actors in smaller parts deliver their lines with a bit of an amateur vibe. I guess I’ll give the people who were actual Holocaust survivors a pass on that, but it’s still something that offsets the balance of performance overall.

In the end, Eleanor the Great is about both grief and forgiveness, and it ultimately works thanks to June Squibb, especially once Eleanor has moved to New York and is an amusing crank about this new phase in her life. If you’re a fan of Squibb, you’ll have a good time—and you’ll want to have a few tissues handy.

Eleanor and her charming little sucker, Nina.

Overall: B

ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER

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

The more I think about One Battle After Another, the more impressed I am with it. This is the sign of a great movie. I didn’t have the wherewithal to think about whether it was a Great Movie while I was watching it, because I was too absorbed by it. I wouldn’t even say I was blown away by it, per se—and I mean that as a compliment. I was simply invested in every single character onscreen. I only had the bandwidth to reflect on it once it was over, and then, after some time, it gradually dawned on me: that was an amazing movie.

Everything that’s amazing about it is done subtly—not something that writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson is exactly known for. Many of his films, particularly early ones like Boogie Nights or Magnolia or Punch-Drunk Love, throw a lot onscreen that amounts to showing off. And don’t get me wrong, it works: those are all objectively great movies, top-tier in the PTA canon. Not that much of his output can qualify as bottom-tier—the only one of his films I did not particularly like was Inherent Vice (2014). Licorice Pizza (2021) got rave reviews and I thought it was very good but without the usual P.T. Anderson impact, and his debut feature film, Hard Eight, is fine. Just about any of his seven other feature films, though, you could reasonably call a masterwork. How often does a director come along like that?

Anderson does have a signature style, both in writing and in look—if you look deep enough. Many of his movies are truly like no other, and yet they all have a connective tissue to them. As such, One Battle After Another feels like the culmination of his life’s work. It might be his crowning achievement. He’s only 55 years old, though. Imagine what more we might get out of him over the next twenty, maybe even thirty years. It’s thrilling just to think about. Maybe he’ll give us a dud or two, who knows? I expect it will be worth it. This is a guy who takes huge swings, over and over, and nearly every time it pays off.

And how to even talk about One Battle After Another in a way that effectively illustrates its greatness? This is a movie about America, told through three different ethnic lenses: Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio), the once-revolutionary White guy who has long since given up; Willa (Chase Infiniti), the daughter he’s had with Perfidia (Teyana Taylor), a Black woman with a passion that cannot be domesticated; and Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio Del Toro), Willa’s Latino karate sensei who has his own immigrant-underground-railroad going on.

There’s a bit of yin-and-yang with the Whiteness in this film, Bob being counterbalanced by Col. Stephen J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn, as committed to the part as ever), who is eager to join the White-supremacist “Christmas Adventures Club,” but also has a conflicted attraction to Perfidia—who may or may not have similarly conflicted feelings about him. Lockjaw is one of the most compelling and layered villains to come along in cinema in a long time, and I will only say that there’s a pointed poetic justice to his ultimate fate.

It feels important to note that a great deal of time is spent on Bob and Perfidia (and, to a degree, fellow revolutionary Deandra, played by Regina Hall) many years in the past, their hunger for both revolution and each other, and the ultimate consummation of their relationship and what would appear to be the resulting offspring—and then, time jumps forward, and little Willa is sixteen years old.

The “French 75,” the name these revolutionaries have given themselves, is loosely based on the revolutionary spirit of the 1960s, particularly as detailed in the 1990 Thomas Pynchon novel Vineland—which is credited here as “inspiring” One Battle After Another, rather than being an outright adaptation of it. In this film, however, these revolutionaries are clearly grafted onto a 21st-century world, with no other added commentary: we get no context clues about what the French 75’s numerous bombings or bank robberies did to American culture. We only see that these things happen; this group exists; and they are in active pursuit by law enforcement. It is perhaps telling that this stuff does not necessarily feel out of place being decontextualized to the modern era.

The story does’t even take off until the jump forward to Willa as a 16-year-old. Her mother disappeared when she was a baby; her father spends his time frying his brain with weed. But a sudden turn of events has Colonel Lockjaw going after both Joe and Willa for the first time since her infancy, and the motivations here all come back to his obsession with his own Whiteness. A reactivation of communications between current and former members of the French 75 creates a lot of comic moments when Joe can’t remember all the communication passwords he’s supposed to have had memorized for the past sixteen years.

Nothing goes in the direction you expect it to in One Battle After Another—another hallmark of Paul Thomas Anderson films. You root for the characters, and you fear for them; sometimes they get out of scrapes and sometimes they don’t. Whatever is going on, the runtime of two hours and 41 minutes flies by, thanks to a kinetic energy that never abates. It has this in common with Magnolia, the only P.T. Anderson film that was longer. One Battle After Another is less stylized and far less high-concept; the characters here are much more grounded, making them more plausible and real. All of these things tie together into what amounts to the best film of the year so far.

One Battle After Another is so good you’ll be convinced by a 25-year-old-actor playing a 16-year-old character.

Overall: A

THE HISTORY OF SOUND

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

Maybe The History of Sound isn’t for everyone, but it’s certainly for me. It’s a moving love story, it’s a period piece, it’s a sad meditation on love and loss in the context of a same-sex relationship but without any gay trauma tropes associated with it. It’s about two men who fall in love who also happen to be incredibly talented musicians with a love of hyper-regional folk music, of which this movie is packed—The History of Sound isn’t quite a musical, but it very much hinges on its musical content. Many, many songs are performed, mostly solo or in a duo and mostly a cappella. Occasionally there is guitar or banjo accompaniment, but only as subtle augmentation to the beautiful, and often haunting, vocals.

It’s been quite a year for movies about folk musicians, from The Ballad of Wallis Island to Sinners, and now The History of Sound. I’m pretty disappointed to discover that although those first two films had soundtrack albums issued, it appears The History of Sound did not; I’d love to listen to it again. It also has a key thing in common with Sinners, in terms of what appears to be authentic history of folk songs.

In a pretty long stretch of the film, David (Josh O’Connor) has taken Lionel (Paul Mescal) along with him on a “song collecting” trip, walking from village to village in New England. In one key scene, they visit a village with a high percentage of Black residents, and this is the one time we see them recording a song by a Black singer on the machine they use to record songs on wax cylinders. When they leave the village, they pass a large group of police, clearly preparing to wreak some kind of terror on that community. This is our first glimpse of wildly different approaches or worldviews between David and Lionel. Lionel grew up on a small farm in rural Kentucky and knew a grandfather who was a Confederate soldier in the Civil War. David is American-born but spent a couple of years in England with an uncle, doing a “song collection” project there when he was younger. David, who has been drafted in World War I and only hints at how he’s seen some shit, bristles at Lionel’s suggestion that where you’re from should have any relevance to how you view and understand the world and how it works.

The History of Sound moves at a very slow pace, but is constructed with some expert plotting, bringing some of it full circle in an ending sequence starring Chris Cooper as Lionel as an old man, in a way that will truly pierce your heart. Maybe half of The History of Sound is sort of like Brokeback Mountain if it were quieter, much more concerned with music, and far less tragic. In the other half, we see these men, and particularly Lionel—he’s the one we follow in this story from start to finish—in academia, attending university, in some cases teaching. Lionel eventually sees much of the world just as David suggests, but after multiple reunions and separations, he spends some years writing to David, then finally stops after a lot of time with no responses.

The latter half or so of The History of Sound is more concerned with Lionel and his longing memory of David, as Lionel moves on. He gets into a relationship with and nearly marries a woman (Emma Canning), and he uses the imminent death of his mother (Molly Price) as a means of ending it. One of my favorite things about The History of Sound is Lionel’s relationship with his parents—somewhat complicated with his mother; surprisingly pure with his father (Raphael Sbarge). Lionel shows no guilt about his sexuality, but neither does it ever seem to be a relevant part of any conversations with his parents. Instead, he gets a beautiful memory of his father showing him how to light a tub of thin paper on fire (I think it may be an unfolded tea bag?) in a way so the it burns straight down, and then lifts into the air in its final seconds of burning. You won’t get any of the tropes here about a macho or abusive father to a sensitive gay kid here. Lionel is clearly sensitive and accepted as his whole self; he’s also fully capable of all the things associated with running a farm.

Come to think of it, The History of Sound sidesteps stereotype at every turn, which is a big part of my love for it. There is a flashback, one of many later in the film that goes back to their time hiking and camping through New England, in which David asks Lionel if he worries about “what we’re doing.” Not only does Lionel not worry, it doesn’t even appear to have occurred to him.

This is a film in which two men have fallen in love at a time when such things were not at all understood, often by the men themselves, but it is simple circumstances rather than oppression that keeps them apart. There is a moment when Lionel suggests he could go back with David to help him catalogue his cylinders, and David discourages it. He says to Lionel that he would not be happy there in that small town, and possibly he’s right. David has a much surer sense of the direction of his own life, and he can see the direction of Lionel’s life better than Lionel can.

Much is revealed, much later, that was not at all clear during that time they spent in New England, and I won’t spoil it, except to say that you should keep tissue handy. And, of course, the thing that pierces through the heart is done through song—something that can carry the weight of emotion in ways nothing else can. It’s a callback to the scene of their meeting, and it brings things around to resolution, after years and decades of longing, in a perfect way. I can see how some might lose patience with the pacing in this film, but it would never have worked as well if the plot moved faster. This is the nature of longing, is it not? This is a film that will deeply move those with a mind to be spoken to in the way it’s communicating.

The songs of the countryside provide more than just dialectal history.

Overall: A-

DOWNTON ABBEY: THE GRAND FINALE

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

Downton Abbey is nothing if not consistent. All three of these movies exist as little more than feature length episodes of the British historical drama series that aired on ITV in the UK between 2010 and 2015, and on PBS in the U.S. between 2011 and 2016. It is arguably writer Julian Fellowes’s crowning achievement, at least in terms of success and durability, though it was clearly an idea expanded from his own 2001 film Gosford Park, his best work thanks to direction in that case by Robert Altman. Fellowes is now 76 and still plenty busy, with his work on HBO’s The Gilded Age, an inferior series that owes its life to Downton Abbey and is nevertheless still addictive in its passive-aggressive cattiness in period grandeur.

It’s all fundamentally the same, really: soapy stories of ensemble casts of characters whose lives intersect between the upstairs and the downstairs of grand houses. And what is there to say about how good it is otherwise, really? If you’re into this sort of thing then you’re into it for the long haul, and if you’r not into it, you have no reason to care. Why would you watch The Grand Finale if you haven’t been watching the show for 15 years, or at the very least have seen the previous two films?

And these films, as a trilogy, serve a dual purpose. All of them exist as a nostalgic revisitation to the world a beloved TV series, and also to provide grand closure that only the cinema can provide: when the first film was released in 2019, it was a means of giving all these many characters a chance to shine on the silver screen. That was the only thing that was different, really, as it otherwise felt like simply stepping into the cozy comfort of a world fans had loved so much. It was more of the same with Downton Abbey: A New Age in 2022, except that it also served as a more definitive goodbye to one of its more iconic characters The Grand Finale now rolls in to be the definitive goodbye to every one of them. Mind you, this was already after the series killed off so many beloved main characters it was like Game of Thrones without the blood and gore—spoiler alert, we get flashes of each one of them in the closing scene of this new movie.

And here I am, a sucker for it all, every time. Downton Abbey is not now, nor has it ever been, great. What it has always been was fun, with its constant stream of pleasantly polite banter. The stakes are never very high, and the closest thing to a villain in this latest iteration is basically dispatched hardly more than halfway through the movie. Of greatest concern, always, is how these deeply traditional Brits reckon with changing social and moral attitudes of the 1920s—or, in this case, the first year of the thirties. It’s ironic how Downton Abbey is always ostensibly about cresting waves of the future while simultaneously being a period piece told in always the comfortably same way.

In this final story about the Crawley family and their array of service workers, the biggest deal is Lady Mary’s (Michelle Dockery) divorce—from a man never actually seen in this movie. This makes Mary a social pariah, and naturally the Crawleys band together to support her, and ultimately change local attitudes about divorced women in the process. Lady Mary’s other struggle is with her father, Robert (Hugh Bonneville), who has stated Lady is ready to take over control of Downton but is having difficulty letting go. Meanwhile, there are plenty of other subplots as always, including a visit from Noël Coward (Arty Froushan), who arrives with his friend Guy Dexter (Dominic West), who is in a secret romance with Thomas Barrow (Robert James-Collier). A scene in which Barrow, no longer working as a servant at Downton, is invited to join the group upstairs in front of the rest of the workers downstairs is particularly delightful.

There are other sendoffs: Mr. Carson (Jim Carter) is retiring as the family’s butler, also having difficulty letting go; Mrs. Patmore (Lesley Nicol) is shortly after doing the same as the longtime cook of the house. There isn’t even time to get to all the other characters, but I will mention Paul Giamatti as Harold, brother to Cora (Elizabeth McGovern) and brother-in-law to Robert, who has been hoodwinked out of most of his and Cora’s family’s wealth. This all leads to inevitable discussions of tightening budgets and figuring out ways to move on—including Robert and Cora moving out of the main Downtown house, which makes no sense to me. The house is gargantuan, why can’t Lady Mary take control of the house and still allow them to live there? (Cue some English aristocrat gasping and dropping their tea at such a preposterous idea.)

I have to admit, a runtime of 123 minutes is impressively tight given these countless narrative threads—as was the case with both the first and second movies (122 minutes and 124 minutes, respectively). Just as it had as a TV series, Downton Abbey runs like clockwork as a film series. Should we even believe that this is truly the end? Will this be the historical drama version of the Friday the 13th movies? If Julian Fellowes comes back with a fourth film the subtitle should be Violet Lives. Except they’d have to re-cast Maggie Smith, who sadly passed away just last year. So never mind on that. Maybe this really is the end.

The Grand Finale is admittedly a little misleading, in that it’s just as “grand” as it’s ever been but not particularly exciting. There’s no “going out with a bang” with Downton, and at one point Robert even utters the quote “So this is the way the world ends, not with a bang but with a whimper.” I wouldn’t exactly call The Grand Finale a “whimper” either, but it is pretty stolid. It does effectively tug at the heartstrings in the end, and I am not above admitting I got misty-eyed in the closing scene. Downton Abbey was never long on thrills, but it was dependable, in both its writing and its performances. It gave you reasons to love its many characters, and never gave you any reason to stop. In the end, this movie serves as a two-hour cinematic hug goodbye.

Now let’s all gather round and hear basically the same story yet again. Because we love it!

Overall: B

EDDINGTON

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

Soooo how many times are we going to keep writing Ari Aster a blank check just because his first two movies were the critical and commercial successes Hereditary and Midsummar? Maybe someone needs to convince him to stick with horror. Or maybe just stop making movies with Joaquin Phoenix?

There are multiple ironies here, not least of which is the fact that Joaquin Phoenix is by far the best thing in both Beau Is Afraid (a deeply unpleasant, three-hour panic attack) and Eddington, which is a straight up mess of a movie with a few redeeming qualities (like Phoenix’s performance). Another irony is that Eddington attempts to be a snapshot of the pandemic-era zeitgeist of “late May 2020,” and that was the exact month in which I finally gained the courage to watch Hereditary for the first time.

I think most of us have a perfectly vivid memory of what it felt like in May 2020, arguably the greatest collective trauma experienced across every nation around the world in a solid century. Eddington fails to reflect that moment, five years later, with any real accuracy or authenticity—hard as it tries. Granted, it seems to be going for satire, maybe half the time. The other half of the time I couldn’t figure out what the hell it was going for.

As early as April 2020, I shared, in part, that the way pop culture reflects this uniquely global experience for a long time to come was going to be interesting. Predictably, however, we haven’t gotten a lot of it: Covid-19 remains too recent (not to mention variants of it still going around to this day) for people want to revisit that collective trauma. It also remains relevant that a pandemic where millions died but for most of us the challenge was just loneliness and monotony does not provide much opportunity for excitement in a medium like film. So it’s understandable Ari Aster would gravitate toward the turbulent nationwide fallout of the George Floyd murder and subsequent violent protests, and how that fallout eventually makes its way to a fictional New Mexico town with a rivalry between its sheriff (Phoenix) and its mayor (Pedro Pascal), who are running against each other in the upcoming election.

I’m just not sure Ari Aster is the right person to tackle these things. If, say, Spike Lee or Jordan Peele had made this movie, it probably would have been good—it could have been great. As made by Aster, it’s not terrible. It’s just consistently baffling, and leaves you with a lot of questions—and not the kind of unanswered questions that make a movie more intriguing. These are the kinds of unanswered questions that makes you think: What the fuck did I just watch?

I don’t know what the population of Eddington is supposed to be, but it’s clearly meant to be very small. Filming took place partly in Truth or Consequences. New Mexico, which has a population of just over 6,000. Maybe I just don’t know enough about politics, but is it normal or a mayoral candidate of a town of such size to hold a major fundraiser six months before the election? Don’t even get me started on the scene in which Phoenix’s Joe Cross hosts a “town hall” in a local restaurant, the few attendees sitting silent (and masked) at dining tables, not one of them saying a word through Joe’s rambling speech being recorded for his socials. In what universe would not one of those people pipe up and say anything during this event—which, by the way, occurs during a contentious protest that forms all of a block away outside?

There’s a lot of White protesters who openly express their White guilt in over-written and obvious ways, clearly designed as the aforementioned satire, but never quite landing. It consistently feels contrived in a misguided way, and like something people on the right could easily misinterpret as just making fun of “woke people.” Aster’s ideas are far more nuanced than that—he just can’t seem to make the ideas come together coherently.

Both Emma Stone and Austin Butler are among the most talented actors working today, and their talents get wasted in supporting parts that never connect. Stone plays Joe’s wife, Louise, who has a peculiar romantic past with Pascal’s Mayor Ted Garcia but which has been misrepresented in local media. Butler plays the quasi-cult leader Louise eventually gravitates toward. There’s a scene in which Louise and her mother (Deirdre O’Connell) arrive home late in the evening, Austin Butler’s weirdly charismatic character and another couple in tow. This guy shares a story of bizarre childhood abuse with so many plot holes that even Joe starts to pick it apart. This might be the moment when the audience also first says: Huh? It’s certainly the point at which Eddington lost me, and it’s not even the point at which it goes completely off the rails.

I would say that both Beau Is Afraid and Eddington are roughly equal in quality, albeit for different reasons. Eddington is certainly more pleasant to watch and more entertaining, although in its final act it descends into a chaos that is very similar to the entire runtime of Beau Is Afraid. What they have in common is excellent performances—this is clearly Aster’s greatest strength, and I am increasingly interested in seeing how he would do directing someone else’s script. And while Beau Is Afraid was far too long especially for its unending sense of foreboding and anxiety, Eddington feels like it was also made as a three-hour movie, then whittled down to its current 148-minute runtime, somehow cutting out the scenes that would have made it make sense.

The opening shot is of a homeless man with some kind of mental health issue, walking into town. Call him Chekhov’s homeless man: he turns up multiple times again, until he’s predictably part of a pivotal plot turn. In the middle of the movie, there is a hard cut to a group of agitators on an airplane, clearly headed for Eddington, after Instagram video of Sheriff Joe wrestling the homeless man to the floor in a bar is shared. There have long been stories of agitators perpetrating violence among otherwise peaceful protests just to sow greater unrest and damage collective reputations, and in Eddington Ari Aster takes this idea to their most wildly violent conclusions—to what end, is very unclear. He does fold in Joe’s two local deputies, one White (Luke Grimes) and one Black (an excellent Michael Ward), just so he can show what Joe initially declares “a them problem” before the problem creeps its way inevitably into the relationships between the three of them.

Aster is just throwing everything at the wall here. The first conflict, which is the initial frustration before everything else strains the entire community as too much for them to handle, is the debate over public policy regarding mask wearing. When Joe walks maskless through a grocery store and explains the difference between public policy and law, he’s technically right, but that doesn’t make him any less of an asshole. Conversely, Mayor Ted Garcia is portrayed as nakedly ambitious and disingenuous, even if he’s correctly obsessed with following public policy. Eddington features almost no characters who are likable or empathetic (Michael the Black deputy comes closest), and this is an excusable choice only with either truly successful satire or a film with an unmistakable point of view. Eddington is neither, leaving us instead with a truly random and wild choice in its final scene. And trust me, you’ll never guess what happens in that final moment—not even while watching the movie, not until the very moment it happens. You’ll leave the theater saying, “What the fuck?” and that about sums it up.

Can’t we all just get along? Maybe if we got better movies!

Overall: B-

SORRY, BABY

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

Rare is the film that is as self-assured as Sorry, Baby, which is written and directed by 31-year-old Eva Victor—who also stars in the lead role, as Agnes. Directing oneself is an impressive challenge in the best of circumstances, and doing it this successfully is practically a miracle. Victor’s performance is simultaneously subtle and astonishing, the kind of thing it’s tempting to say deserves an Oscar, except the Oscars don’t pay much attention to “small movies” like these. And Sorry, Baby has so much integrity, it’s almost condescending even to mention the Oscars, as this isn’t a movie with any aspiration for prizes.

I find myself thinking of the male gaze, because this movie so deftly sidesteps it. This is a film very much about trauma, but it takes a unique approach to it. The separated chapters, each with a title card, aren’t even presented in a fully linear timeline. Once we get to “The Year with the Bad Thing,” the bad thing itself is never shown onscreen. The camera is stationery, across the street, facing the house where it happens. There’s a hard cut to dusk, another hard cut to night. Agnes leaves the front door clearly in a bit of a daze, which continues as the camera follows her to her car, and along her drive home. We only learn exactly what happened when we hear Agnes recount it to her very close, lesbian friend Lydie (Naomi Ackie).

One of the many things I love about Sorry, Baby is how much humor is in it, and nearly all of the humor occurs after we learn of this assault. There’s humor in the doctor’s office the very next morning, when Agnes is getting “standard questions” from a clueless doctor, with Lydia by her side. There’s humor in Agnes’s meeting of a random sandwich shop owner who calms her down when she drives off the road by his shop due to a panic attack. There’s humor in Agnes’s awkward dinner with university colleagues which includes a deeply jealous woman (Kelly McCormack) who believes she should have gotten the full-time position Agnes was offered. And there’s some subtle humor in Agnes’s cautious development of a relationship with her neighbor, Gavin. Lucas Hedges is perfectly cast as Gavin, having returned to film last year after a break to focus on writing. He’s been missed, and as always he works incredibly well as a character actor in supporting parts.

And Gavin, incidentally, is the closest we get to a male point of view in Sorry, Baby. And to say it’s told from a female point of view is itself a bit complicated: Eva Victor reportedly uses both they/them and she/her pronouns. Agnes, the character, never states any preferred pronouns, except for a scene in which an arrow is pointed to the space between M an F under “gender” in a jury duty questionnaire. Lydie, on the other hand, is depicted both post- and pre-coming out in subtle ways, consistently refers to herself as gay, but is in a relationship with a nonbinary person named Fran (E.R. Fightmaster, who is themself nonbinary). These variances in gender are never the focus of the story or any particular character, which is what’s so great about it: they just are, and art getting made by younger filmmakers will inevitably do this more often, thereby slowly but surely conditioning audiences to the idea, whether some dipshit Alabama governor likes it or not.

With all that in mind, it’s somewhat amusing to think of how Eva Victor is referred to when referred to only by last name. Sorry, Baby clearly has more than just these things on its mind—and even has the way people are treated based on perceived gender on its mind. There’s a scene in which two women on the faculty basically feign concern for Agnes when one of them says, “We know what you’re going through. We’re women.” Except it sounds like a memorized script, and that’s the point. It plays funny, but with a deep subtext of sadness. People who have never experienced sexual assault might feel like such odd, awkward or wildly tone deaf reactions to it are unrealistic. People who know the experience are fully aware of how often this sort of stuff happens—both being victimized and being completely misunderstood about it.

It would seem at first glance that Sorry, Baby is a movie about the friendship between Agnes and Lydie, but it’s actually far more specifically about Agnes, and how they come to terms with this trauma. Lydie, while clearly a very good friend, is just one of the narrative threads. Still, once the story gets to Lydie and Fran having a baby, we get to how that baby is, in her way, the title character. This is only revealed in the final scene, when Agnes is looking after the baby while Lydie and Fran are on a walk, and Agnes assures the baby that she can tell her anything no matter how scary—and scary things will happen. Life will have its challenges, but we’ll help each other get through it. And I feel lucky to have Victor take me through Sorry Baby, a film that turns deeply complicated issues and themes into a gem of poignant simplicity.

This might be the smartest movie you’e seen about such heavy subject matter.

Overall: A

F1

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

Brad Pitt and Damson Idris play rival racecar drivers of different generations, who butt heads when first put together on an F1 racing team, and—spoiler alert!—eventually learn to work together and find mutual respect. This is the driving force behind the ultimately very simple and very Hollywood plot of F1, the movie, and it really offers us nothing new in terms of storytelling.

As always, however, it’s the context that matters. F1 is set entirely within the world of Formula One, complete with blink-and-you-miss-them cameos of real-life F1 drivers, and is sure to be a delight to bona fide Formula One fans. The thing is, though—I’m hardly a fan of Formula One (I would best be described as utterly indifferent), and even I was pretty delighted by this movie.

Here is the credit director and co-writer Joseph Kosinski deserves: the surest sign of a truly skilled filmmaker—indeed, a truly skilled storyteller—is an ability to make something of otherwise no interest compelling. Kosinski did this extraordinarily well with Top Gun Maverick and its jet fighter planes, and now he’s done it again with car racing.

Whether Brad Pitt’s career-highest salary of $30 million, or the film’s reported $300 million budget, turn out to have been wise investments, remain to be seen. If nothing else, the money appears well spent onscreen: F1 has many racing sequences, all of them gripping, if not outright thrilling, thanks to excellent editing and a certain kind of cinematography that stops just short of being too flashy.

In any case, there is not much to be said for the depth of any of these characters. But, this film is so well cast that they infuse otherwise fairly stock characters with real chemistry and personality. I was relieved to find Brad Pitt is playing a character roughly his actual age (61), making him a believable friend to Javier Bardem (56), playing the owner of an F1 team struggling to win any races. Ruben (Bardem) has convinced Sonny Hayes (Pitt), a driver whose seemingly limitless prospects were destroyed in the nineties by a horrible racing crash, to join a team with another young man with incredible talent, Joshua Pearce or “JD” (Damson Idris). Sonny’s hire is widely seen as a last-ditch desperate act, with hopes pinned on combining cocky youth with cocky experience. Can you guess how things turn out? No spoilers! (I suppose there are literal spoilers. Those are things on cars, right?)

There are plenty of other characters in the mix, played by the likes of Kerry Condon (as the team technical director, out to prove all her doubters wrong—and also to hook up with Brad Pitt, but I mean, who among us); Tobias Menzies (as a dubious board member); Kim Bodnia (as the team principal); even Shea Whigham in a surprisingly small part (as the owner of a team Sonny drove for at 24 Hours of Daytona), among others. Although Pitt is clearly the major star of this film, in another era this would be a reliable star-making turn for Idris; it may be yet. Otherwise, F1 is very much an ensemble film, and it succeeds as such—much is made of Formula One being a “team sport,” and this cast is well matched for approaching their onscreen performances the same way.

I found myself caring about all of them. Not in any profound way, as this film is not designed to be profound: it’s designed as entertainment. And it is very much that, especially with all the globe trotting it takes to actual Formula One race settings around the world. I had a very similar response to Ford V. Ferrari in 2019, and I would still say that one’s a slightly better movie. Formula One fanatics may disagree; this kind of thing can depend on where your interests and loyalties already lie.

My interests and loyalties lie far outside of any sport, let alone racecars—they lie in cinema. And that’s what F1 the movie is: it’s just a great movie-going experience.

Listen punk, just do your job, which is entertaining people at the cinema!

Overall: B+