FJORD

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

Fjord is quite the cinematic Rorschach test, making it quite easy to elicit empathy for different characters depending on your own cultural and religious background. Set in a village on the west coast of Norway, it all comes down to the cultural and legal judgment of a deeply conservative Christian family who immigrates from Romania, and the degree to which they may or may not be abusing their children. And this is really the crux of it: some might say the word “abusing” is being used loosely here, while others would say there is no other word for it.

Where might you side on this matter? Conservative Christians might easily side with the argument that Norwegian Child Protective Services involvement amounts to religious persecution. Progressives might easily side with the argument that authorities should intervene when parents get physical with their children at all.

The amazing feat of Fjord, written and directed by Cristian Mungiu, is that, so long as you don’t have particularly extreme views in any direction, it’s easy to empathize—if not necessarily agree with—all parties involved. There certainly is a subtle sense of xenophobia among some of the school staff who report the existence of bruises on one of the children, even though it’s never clear that she got them from her parents. Police interview records state that these parents admit to “repeatedly hitting” their children, when all they ever explicitly admit to is a swat on the butt or a slap on the hand.

But, in short order, CPS takes the children and places them in foster homes, and a criminal trial ensues. Many other complicating factors come into play, from the local school principal being a neighbor with whom the family has become friendly, to that family’s teenage girl who consistently convinces the two older children to disobey their parents. There is also the fact that these children seem perfectly well-adjusted, happy at home, and actually want to be reunited with their parents.

I find myself wondering how this film was received in Norway, where it is set. Was it very controversial? It seems there has been some controversy, but not a huge amount. Making the conservative family here Christian seems like a very deliberate choice. What if the family had been written as Muslim, its growing size in Scandinavian countries being a contentious issue (as everywhere)? That likely would have caused a far bigger stir, both in Norway and its surrounding countries as well as in the U.S.

I’m not judging the choice to make it a conservative Christian family, mind you, but one wonders if there is any sort of allegory at play, perhaps for other religions. Secular aversion to any kind of religious orthodoxy works in a story like this, however, and using Christianity was likely safer. And coming from a strictly Christian upbringing myself, I am by default inclined to judge this family—but, I always have great respect for films that portray Christian characters with the kind of dimensionality they do not often get in wide release films. Portraying them as wild fanatics is a trope that grew tired long ago.

In the story here, the situation is further complicated by the mother in this family being Norwegian, but who fell in love with and married a man in Romania. The husband, Mihai Gheorghiu, is played by Sebastian Stan, who happens to be Romanian by birth; still, his accent work and physical transformation here illustrates his stunning versatility as an actor. The wife, Lisbet Gheorghiu, is played by Renate Reinsve, in a performance so understatement you might wonder how good the acting is—until you see her ncredibly different performances in other films.

As the leads, Stan and Reinsve are incredibly compelling. It feels difficult to judge the rest of the cast, many of whom are Norwegian actors, with some who are either Romanian or of Romanian descent—such as the two eldest children, Elia (Vanessa Ceban) and Emmanuel (Jonathan Ciprian Breazu). The director, Cristian Mungiu, is himself Romanian, and as an American viewer with no experience in Scandinavia, it’s impossible to tell whether the uniformly stoic delivery of nearly every other person on camera is a reflection of the local culture or a specific artistic choice on the part of the filmmaker. I will say, I found the consistently deadpan delivery a bit distracting.

The deeply provocative story is another thing entirely. I wish I could have seen it with someone, so we could spend a great deal of time discussing the many questions it raises. Setting aside the actual scientific evidence to support the idea that physical punishment is broadly ineffective: where do you draw the line in terms of dictating what parents can or cannot do with their own children? There is a blurred line somewhere in there, between “discipline” and “abuse.” At what point does it justify removing children from their parents? Is it wrong to acknowledge that even when you disagree with certain behaviors, there are still degrees of severity? And when all of these questions are considered on a case by case basis, to what degree does xenophobia inform those decisions in one case versus another?

We never see Mihai or Lisbet physically discipline their children onscreen, which is the right choice, as otherwise too many of these questions would get—or seem to get—cut and dried answers. We do see them get disciplined, however, such as Elia and Emmanuel being forbidden from attending the birthday party of their neighbor friend Noora (Henrikke Lund-Olsen), after roughhousing dangerously around the baby. We see others use arguments against the Gheorghiu parents with debatable relevance, such as Elia stating to Noora her belief that being a lesbian is a sin, among other things. (Noora’s sexuality as a plot point, especially as she becomes closer friends with Elia, is a bit underdeveloped. It is never clear if the friendship makes Noora question her lesbianism at all, or if Noora’s influence in any way loosens Elia’s belief on the matter. Noora is clearly a bit smitten with Elia, but we never see any consequences of that.)

I have reached my own conclusions regarding how Mihai and Lisbet live their lives and raise their children, and it may not be exactly what you expect. I am eager for others to see the film and come to their own conclusions, which is the unique way in which Fjord is a must watch.

Should we just let them be happy in their own way?

Overall: B+

Tasveer Advance: ELEPHANTS IN THE FOG

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

It’s a challenge to find lived-in, stereotype-free representation of trans people in cinema broadly, but rarer still to find any kind of trans representation at all in international feature films. Enter director and co-writer Abinash Bikram Shah, with a truly stunning debut feature film Elephants in the Fog, starring Nepali trans activist Pushpa Thing Lama—also in her film debut. Several trans women actors are featured here, and this was the film debut for most of the cast; this is a big part of what makes the film such an extraordinary achievement.

The community depicted here is known as Kinnar, a legally recognized third gender in Nepal since 2007—the first country in South Asia to grant such recognition. (This community was given legal recognition in Pakistan in 2009; India in 2014; and Bangladesh in 2013.) In much of South Asia this community is known as Hijra, but in this film the Nepalese characters default to the evidently more respectful Kinnar—at least when the women in question are referring to each other.

Legal recognition or not, there remains cultural discrimination and oppression, as with anywhere on Earth. In South Asia, however, there is a sort of tenuous tolerance of this community, widely seen to be capable of either blessing or cursing. We see these characters in Elephants in the Fog clapping their hands together as part of this ritual, its intent contextualized by attitude and demeanor. In many scenes, one of these women is seen granting a blessing at weddings or to a pregnant woman. They are given often meager amounts of money for this service, and this is how they make a living, all the while living in a tightly structured community with a spiritual leader and a vow of celibacy.

It is within this framework that the story of Elephants in the Fog unfolds. I suppose I could give a trigger warning: this is indeed a tragic story—but not in anywhere near the typical way trans people have long been depicted in film. Pirati (Pushpa Thing Lama) is “mother” to several of the other trans women in this community, including the recklessly rebellious Apsara (Aliz Ghimire), who goes missing shortly after a confrontation between the two. These women share a house in a vollage bordering an area where dangerous wild elephants roam, and the immediate assumption is that Apsara may have been trampled in that adjacent forest.

The bulk of the story involves Pirati’s obsessive search for her, in the face of police indifference and building community resentment of this entire Kinnar community. This is all complicated by Pirati’s own hypocrisy, as she is engaged in an affair with a man who lives in the city of Birgunj, a little over 30 miles away. Pirati is all stoic resolve, but her refusal to give up even as she endangers her own standing among her “daughters” indicates a deep-seated guilt.

Apsara’s ultimate fate is not what we spend the movie expecting, and yet it’s deeply tragic in its own way. What makes Elephants in the Fog work so beautifully is how flawed all of these characters are—these are not magical heroines in the face of their oppression. They are simply surviving, and in this exceptionally well-written script, they are fallible and messy, just like all human beings. Rarely do trans characters come across as so well-drawn, their community and environment so authentically lived-in.

Elephants in the Fog is also beautifully shot, by cinematographer Noé Bach (in this case, far from a film debut: Bach has been working since 2012). The film’s budget does not appear to have been made public, but it’s probably safe to assume it was relatively small; I found myself wondering whether we would get to see any elephants at all, or if they would remain unseen and, to a degree, merely metaphors for partial truth. Never fear, though: elephants do get some screen time, but they are used so sparingly that their impact is incredible, and in the end almost overwhelming. The final shot of this film is one of the most powerful in any film released all year.

Indeed, Elephants in the Fog will easily be one of the best films I have seen all year, if not the best film I’ve seen this year—a bit of a frustration, in that I cannot tell you where to see it: there has not yet been any U.S. theatrical release date announced, and if there is one, it will not likely be until sometime in 2027. But I cannot ignore this film until then, because it simply cannot be ignored. I implore you to make a note of it, and see it as soon as it gets U.S. distribution.

Kinnar in the Fog: a beautifully painted portrait of a very specific community.

Overall: A

YOUR MOTHER YOUR MOTHER YOUR MOTHER

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

What a singular achievement Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother is, to be genuinely unlike any other film. And a singular vision on the part of Bassam Tariq, who wrote and directed. Where else are you going to find a tense action-drama with violent grudges and retaliation, presented with deeply devout, Muslim characters?

Ultimately, this is a film about faith—and it very much acknowledges other faiths as well, and is surprisingly respectful of them. Recently widowed Latif (Mahershala Ali) and his three children live in an apartment complex where teenage Fatiha (Adia) hangs out with neighbors who are all devout Mormons. Eventually Latif gets mixed up with an evangelical preacher, Pastor Hwan (John Cho—looking, forgive me, a little ripe) who is convinced he needs to “liberate” people from the porn industry—including Hatty (Abubakr Ali), the son of Mike (Laith Nakli), the Arabic man who has a history of hiring Latif for hit jobs.

It is one of these hit jobs that opens the film, after an introductory reading of the Islamic story behind the film’s title. The film later returns to the characters we first heard reading and listening to that story, but in the meantime we see Latif dispatch a faceless man with some effort in a public restroom, which turns out to be out of both working faucets and paper towels. But within minutes after this scene, we learn that Latif’s wife has recently died, leaving him with his aforementioned teenage daughter; an preadolescent boy, Qadir (Jahleel Kamara); and a baby still used to breast milk who will not accept formula.

There is only a limited amount of pumped breast milk left, so Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother quickly becomes a race against time, as Latif desperately tries to find breast milk for his baby, from multiple sources. As a parent, this is Latif’s driving motivation whatever else is going on—and a lot else is going on. He’s trying to maintain family stability. And Mike is so pissed about Pastor Hwan’s baseless accusation that Hatty is using his porn studio as a front for human trafficking that he insists Latif dispatch him. He doesn’t care about Latif’s many other concerns at the moment, and asserts that he has no choice.

All of this is just the groundwork for the story that unfolds, and it’s a lot—Bassam Tariq works his own miracle by getting all of these characters to cross paths organically. Latif is a seasoned and skilled hand-to-hand fighter, who has created his own “code” in which he never uses guns and only uses knifes. Why is never made fully clear, but it makes for some great action sequences. It’s worth noting that, aside from the opening bathroom sequence, it’s a while before any real action takes place. The action in this film is exceptional but used sparingly and therefore with unique effectiveness. We really get to know these characters, which raises the stakes far higher than your average action movie.

In the midst of all this, Latif is having a crisis of faith—something clearly suspected by his most trusted elder at his mosque, Abdul (Giancarlo Esposito, finally in a role in which he is barely recognizable). But this is where I get into some ambivalence with Your Mother Your Mother, which takes a turn into the supernatural in the final act—something that ultimately connects Latif and Pastor Hwan in a surprising way. I still can’t decide how I feel about it. I prefer my tales of crises of faith to be ambiguous, and this film takes a sharp turn into the opposite.

On the other hand, it could be said that this is one for the Muslims: Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother is a single dot of American cinema with a broadly positive depiction of Islam in a vast history of film that villainized Muslims by default. This is a story about flawed people, not a flawed religion. Granted, that is where my ambivalence comes in, because as an atheist I believe all religion is flawed. I also know I am in the minority on this, and I still champion fair depictions onscreen. Fair representation is one thing, though; telling a story in which something that appears to be an outright miracle occurs is quite another.

Whether it still works for the purposes of the storytelling here is something reasonable people can debate. It just took it a step into the realm of the ridiculous for me, but that doesn’t change how expertly crafted this movie is. The acting is exceptional across the board, and especially impressive on the part of the young actors playing Latif’s children. It’s probably worth noting that this story is very specifically about American Muslims, which might account for the degree of religious tolerance they have. They live in a country in which they have no choice but to coexist with other religions, after all.

In any case, until that turn at the end, which was clearly what Tariq was leading up to all along, I was super into it. Perhaps it’s a parable, or a morality play, and I’m open to these interpretations—I don’t even begrudge the many who have only good things to say about this remarkable film. I may not have been moved by faith the way the characters were, but I was still moved by this movie.

A father sits in, for Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother.

Overall: B+

Tasveer Advance: LALI

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

I am clearly not the target audience for Lali, which makes me patently unqualified to comment on it. I can’t even tell whether director and co-writer Sarmad Sultan Khoosat made it with the idea of general audiences worldwide watching it. One would presume so, but consider this user review on Letterboxd: Fucked with this hard and could smell the white people‘s confusion in the entire cinema heheheheh. It is perhaps relevant to note that I am married to a South Asian man, and when the movie ended he asked what I thought; I said: “I didn’t get it.” He said, no fewer than three times: “That was a crazy good movie!”

Context is everything, right? I saw this at the Tasveer Film Festival, which is specific to South Asian film, and that audience ate it up. This is pretty typical of festival audiences, regardless of the festival and regardless of how good the movie really is. I once saw a “documentary” called Orwell Rolls in His Grave at the Seattle International Film Festival, and it was one of the worst movies I had ever seen. There was a Q&A after the screening and the questions were shocking in how they revealed that the audience there clearly thought it was brilliant.

There is nothing so stark going on with Lali, which I kind of vibed with until the unhinged final act. There remains the context of cultural and ethnic experience, this film being dense with both, and which I have almost zero experience with. Even my husband grew up Hindu in India, so I have some broad knowledge of that cultural context—but, notwithstanding the obviously fair amount of cultural crossover, Lali is about a Muslim family in Pakistan. It opens with a wedding, and my husband did explain to me that green is a traditional color worn at Muslim wedding events. This was the first I had heard of that, and that would be the tip of the iceberg when it comes to cultural details densely packed into this narrative that I was unfamiliar with.

Even the experience of being one of only a handful of White people in the sold-out audience otherwise full of South Asians (or Americans of South Asian descent) was a somewhat peculiar experience. Lali is presented as a dark comedy, until the final act when it just slips into straight up (if not necessarily straightforward) darkness, but I was often baffled at what moments people in the audience laughed at. I laughed out loud a couple of times, but even my husband laughed a couple of times at moments when I thought: Is that supposed to be funny?

The basic premise of the film is that Zeba (Mamya Shajaffar) is finally getting married, to a man named Sajawal (Channan Hanif), or Sajju for short—after multiple previous engagements resulted in fiancés winding up dead. The community being convinced that Zeba is cursed is her cross to bear; Sajju’s is is huge birthmark on the left side of his face. The people in his family and community rarely use the word “birthmark,” though, in favor of the far more evocative word “scar”—an indicator of differing degrees of attitudes as compared to the West, perhaps. (Not to suggest that anyone in the West would have it easy with a giant birthmark on their face.)

It took me a while to understand why Sajju was so quiet and brooding. In the opening, wedding event sequence, he’s wearing a headdress with strings of flowers obstructing his face. Soon enough we see the birthmark, and we learn how it shaped him growing up. He has a comically overbearing mother (Farazeh Syed) and a father whose death he eventually reveals he blames on her. In the early scenes shortly after the wedding is finally over, with many people comically paranoid about Sajju’s fate with this supposedly cursed woman, it feels like we are meant to see that he’s deeply self-conscious but a good guy.

Much of Lali is very surreal, and it takes a turn when Sajju is suddenly prone to jealous rages. Maybe because of such deep-seeded self-loathing that he assumes Zeba must be looking elsewhere, despite all obvious evidence to the contrary? All I can say is, when a disturbing scene occurs in which Zeba comes home drunk, pours liquor over Zeba’s head, and the scene ends without depicting but unsubtly suggesting marital rape, it was a jarring narrative leap that felt a bit unearned, after we saw him making odd but still kind gestures toward her. This type of mystifying narrative turn only continues in the final act, in which I completely lost the plot and thought Lali went right off the rails, with both Zeba and Sajju having wild breakdowns that come out of nowhere.

Lal translates as “red” in Hindi and Urdu (this film is spoken in Punjabi but with sprinklings of Urdu). Lali is thus a pejorative nickname for Sajju and his “scar,” which he suddenly leans so far into in the final act that he wraps himself in a red blanket, covers himself with a red oil or paint of some kind, and otherwise starts hopping around and hanging from bars like a lunatic who thinks he’s a bat—all while referring to himself as a jinn, a dark spirit from Arabic mythology. The nickname is used exclusively by a neighbor woman who visits frequently and was much more kindly welcomed by Sajju’s mother than by Sajju himself; her condition is never specified but she is clearly mentally disabled in some way. If there is some symbolic meaning there, I completely missed it.

And therein lies the challenge in my experience with this film, which, while it left me baffled in the end, I did not hate—largely because the performances of both the leads were equally excellent. And I certainly cannot write it off the way I might have if it were made by an American director and writer and infused it with equivalent amounts of American or Western mythology. I read enough reviews and reactions to this film to know that I was certainly not alone in it losing me in the final act—what would be interesting but impossible to find out would be what the ethnic breakdown of these reactions were. It may be that it’s simply the audiences who are not of Muslim, Pakistani or South Asian background who do not get it. Lali is clearly dense with meaning that only a certain population can fully grasp. They get it, and I don’t, and I guess that’s okay.

Lali may surprise you, but who knows how much you’ll vibe with that surprise?

Overall: B

THE SOCIAL RECKONING

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

Aaron Sorkin is a rightly celebrated screenwriter. This is the guy who wrote A Few Good Men, The American President, The West Wing, The Social Network, and Moneyball. His most recent four movies, however—Molly’s Game, The Trial of the Chicago Seven, Being the Ricardos, and The Social Reckoning—were both written and directed by Sorkin. You can tell at a glance what the issue is there: other directors have historically raised Sorkin’s work to the level of excellence. Sorkin manages to direct his own material to a level one or two steps below that.

So it is with The Social Reckoning, a follow-up to The Social Network sixteen years later, thus qualifying as a “lega-sequel.” Critics left and right constantly hail The Social Network as “a masterpiece,” and I’ve never been willing to go quite that far—it’s a really good movie that I gave an A-minus, but it’s not perfect. I still clearly did myself a favor by not rewatching it before seeing The Social Reckoning, in which both David Fincher’s direction and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s score are sorely missed.

It feels a little like Aaron Sorkin feels like he is the only one who can truly bring his visions to light, and he is mistaken. Parts of The Social Reckoning feel pointlessly heavy handed, and there’s a couple of editing choices that are genuinely baffling. Twice there are cuts to shots of only a set of people’s calves and feet walking on a sidewalk, with the audio deliberately going in and out. I don’t get it.

What I do get is the point of making this movie, though—I’m not really on board with the people saying the movie itself is pointless. Anything that keeps people talking about Facebook and its now-widely-known dangers is a good thing, however ineffectual it may ultimately be. “Based on a true story” movies don’t always have the intended impact when they are set less than two years before its release, and this one gets to within about five years ago. A lot of what was going on in the world then is still pretty vivid in our collective memory, and depictions of the covid years remains a tricky business. Yet again, we get shots with characters here and there wearing masks, but only just enough to jog our memory, and not nearly enough for it to be realistic. We have to keep seeing all these actors’ beautiful faces, right?

Covid is deeply relevant to this story, though, because it’s used as one of countless examples of Facebook being culpable in the spread of damaging misinformation. A brief but key scene is set in a grocery store (the one scene in which nearly everyone is actually wearing a mask), with a mask-less woman shouting at everyone “You’re a sheep!” And we all know she got this idea from Facebook.

Which is to say, of course, that The Social Reckoning is also often pretty on the nose. Is this movie actually providing any insight? I suppose it might be to some, who pay far more attention to movie entertainment than actual news, which sadly is most people—but most people seeing this movie aren’t necessarily going to care. I’d say you can just find the 17-part series The Facebook Files that was published in The Wall Street Journal in 2021 and the writing of which forms the basis of this film, but a) most of it is behind a paywall; and b) you wouldn’t likely read it even if it weren’t. (I haven’t read it, nor do I have a subscription to The Wall Street Journal.)

Still, by and large The Social Reckoning is pretty engaging, mostly because of being very well cast. This isn’t exactly a showcase for Mikey Madison, who plays the awkward and nerdy Facebook employee whistleblower Frances Haugen, but if you happened to see her in either the Scream reboot or her Oscar-winning performance in Anora, you’ll get a sense of her incredible versatility. This is a showcase for Jeremy Strong, whose performance as an almost sociopathic Mark Zuckerberg is almost worth the price of admission on its own. Nearly all of his scenes are set during a rehearsal for testifying before Congress, however, and we only get one scene in which Zuckerberg and Haugen are even in the same room (and they don’t even speak to each other). Sorkin’s choice to set this rehearsal on the same day the January 6 insurrection is one of several things that make this script feel a little over-written.

Jeremy Allen White is a great actor, but here he’s in a role—as Wall Street Journal investigative reporter Jeff Horwitz—that any competent actor could have played. The same could be said of Betty Gilpin, who plays Horwitz’s editor; or Bill Burr, who plays an evident frenemy of Zuckerberg’s implausibly brought into the rehearsals to help with crisis management. But, it’s still really fun to see them both.

In any case, The Social Reckoning is packed with performances that range from competent to quite memorable, and I’m not sorry I saw it. That’s a very different sentiment from being thrilled by it, I realize. Some of the writing choices are deeply contrived and corny, but I still left with a certain appreciation for the overall experience. I certainly hoped for better, but my highest praise for this movie is that it could have been a lot worse.

Watching pretty people look at Facebook internal documents is so exciting!

Overall: B

DIGGER

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

Digger opened five days ago, and it is already well-documented what a huge flop it is: made with a production budget of over $125 million and a marketing budget of around $100 million, it landed at #4 at the box office its opening weekend, grossing a paltry $8 million domestically and $23 million worldwide to date. This is a movie many media outlets are reporting needed to make $300 million in order to break even, and instead is Tom Cruise’s worst opening weekend in nearly two decades—likely longer in adjusted dollars, considering $8 million in 2007 was the equivalent of $13 million in 2026 dollars.

All of this is to say: Digger being not for everyone is the understatement of the year. Reactions have been sharply divided, to the point that word of mouth is actively working against it. It’s too bad, because there is a hell of a lot to say about this movie, and such conversations can be fun as hell. So: is Digger for me? I really couldn’t decide for a while. I actively thought about this while in the middle of watching the movie, which does not say much for it. And yet, I found it really stuck the landing in the end, on an unsettling note that was somehow both incredibly on the nose and subtle at the same time. There is no way of predicting this, especially in today’s siloed media consumption landscape, but this is a movie I can easily imagine being reclaimed sooner than later. It could be as soon as it releases on a streamer somewhere (it’s a Warner Brothers film, so probably HBO Max), or it could be a decade from now. Someone is going to discover this movie and wonder how they slept on it. The question is whether that someone will be in the company of significant number.

More than anything, because this movie is not for everyone, Digger has a marketing problem. For instance, let’s talk about that quite-obviously animatronic cat, which was featured prominently in the trailers. No context is given for why the cat looks and moves like that, and the result is something that seems to suggest the production skimped on budget and wound up with a pet that looked bafflingly artificial, given the state of visual effects capability today. And I don’t really know what the answer is here, as it would be a notable spoiler for the trailers to give context—maybe they should not have shown that cat in the trailers at all? Because the film itself does provide context to how that cat looks and moves, and it’s something that actually makes sense. But who would know that, watching the trailers? Whose boneheaded choice was this?

All that aside, I can’t say that Digger always worked for me, but it certainly worked better than I expected it to based on the reviews. This is perhaps one of the most critically polarizing films of the year, and usually a MetaCritic score of 46 is a reliable indicator that I will not like a movie. There are occasional exceptions, though, and this is one of them—fascinatingly, the user score on MetaCritic is a much more respectable 6.8 out of 10, so evidently I am not alone. (The user rating over on Letterboxed is a similarly respectable 3.8 out of 5 stars.) It’s worth noting that this is only among the few people who actually bothered to see the movie.

I just love what a swing Digger is—not that unusual for director and co-writer Alejandro G. Iñárritu (this guy directed both Birdman or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance and Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths; thankfully this movie’s title is shorter), but very unusual for Tom Cruise, who hasn’t taken a swing this big since his appearance in Tropic Thunder in 2008. I want him to keep taking swings like this, as it makes him a far more interesting actor. I was afraid the poor box office performance might scare him off such swings in his late-career years, but evidently he’s been defending Digger, which is a good thing.

Now, there are many big swings in Digger, and some of them work better than others. Cruise’s performance is excellent, especially considering he actually plays two characters—oil tycoon Digger Rockwell himself, and Curtis Markson, the actor playing Digger in a satirical play. This is where Digger leans hard into meta territory, something I love when done well, but the jury may be out on that point here. When the film suddenly shifts to the same actors we’ve been watching all along playing actors rehearsing a stage play, for a while it’s very confusing. It doesn’t help that clarity comes after these “actor” characters are suddenly arguing about whether this is a satire or a farce and whether it is funny. Up to that point, some of the comedy in Digger has landed well, but some of it also has very much not. I got several good laughs out of this movie, but also experienced multiple attempts at it that just fell flat. And if you are very directly asking us to consider whether what we are watching actually works as a satire, I’m not sure it’s actually working as intended. Or was that the point? Here Digger starts to get lost in its own convoluted plot machinations.

Digger has a sister, Emma, played by Sandra Hüller, an actor rightly celebrated as her profile has been raised in recent years. But this may be the worst performance I have ever seen her do, she spends so much time just shrieking at her brother, and it never quite feels genuine. Or was that a deliberate choice, and the actor playing Emma is not that great at her craft? It seems Iñárritu has built in a clever excuse for what appears to be subpar acting. The same can be said of John Goodman, as the idiotically bombastic President of the United States. His performance is so over the top it makes Digger himself—also an outsized character—seem subtle. And again, suddenly, we see the play actors discussing how different their play characterizations are from the real people they are playing, and how that is all part of the satirical intent.

There’s a lot going on on Digger though, and I have a feeling a lot of people are missing the point in what seems on the surface like a narrative mess, much like the characters themselves are missing the point of how they got themselves into the climate catastrophe that forms the basis of the story. There is a barely-detectable, unsettling truth seeping through Digger, about the hypocrisy of “advanced” societies reaping the benefits of the technology that they self-righteously deride as ignorantly self-destructive. There is a key scene in which Digger addresses a room full of world leaders prone to speaking out of both sides of their mouths, and again, much of what he says is very on the nose—and still, I listened to his screaming monologue about environmental hypocrisy and just found myself thinking: Well . . . he’s right.

I wonder what the carbon footprint of this movie’s production was, incidentally? Not that that’s part of Digger’s point either; this is not a movie that is preaching to its audience—if anything, it’s a skewer aimed at people prone to preaching to their audience. And there’s a lot in it that’s really fun, including Riz Ahmed as Digger’s Head of Environmental Safety, Dr. Ganesh, who seems to be a slightly stereotypical character at first but then proves to be satisfyingly nuanced. We also get Michael Stuhlbarg as the Vice President; Jesse Plemons in a ridiculous red wig as the play’s benefactor; and House of the Dragon’s Emma D’Arcy, who it took me a while to fully recognize in the part of Digger’s assistant.

There are some baffling choices in Digger that only come halfway around to making sense later, such as the scene in which Digger, the President and a host of other government officials are watching a live feed of environmental destruction in Europe, but the camera only ever shows the reactions of the people in the room and never what they are actually watching. Was this also a budget choice? Clearly not; we later see news feeds of the same destruction, rendered quite impressively. Was this a staging choice if we were to later consider how it would have been performed in a play? That idea also falls flat when you consider the extensive use of screen imagery in the play. I still don’t have an answer to this one.

Some of Digger may always remain a mystery. Some of it may become clearer after repeat viewings. Will I ever rewatch Digger? Probably, although I couldn’t say whether it will be any time soon. I can only say it had my undivided attention from its first moment; it veered dangerously close to losing me in the middle; and by the last scene, which is expertly staged and edited, I found myself surprisingly satisfied, if not exactly blown away.

There is so much more going on than you think,

Overall: B

PRIMETIME

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

It’s hard to put my finger on exactly how I feel about Primetime, which feels intentional. I went in expecting to feel pretty icky about it, from virtually every angle—and that’s nearly where I landed. What I didn’t quite expect was not being able to tell what this movie has to say about its subject, if anything. If it’s intended as a showcase for Robert Pattinson’s talents, it certainly succeeded there—but I left wishing I’d gotten a bit more.

Shouldn’t a movie about a show as exploitative as To Catch a Predator have something clear to say about it? There is so much to say about the actual television series, which aired twenty episodes between November 2004 and December 2007 (most of them just between February 2006 and July 2007), that it feels odd that Primetime has so much less to say. If nothing else, it reflects the moral bankruptcy of the entertainment industry as it blurred the line between “news” and entertainment—after all, To Catch a Predator was part of Dateline NBC, but was transparently more concerned with ratings than with actually catching child predators. When the most elaborate sting the show staged inevitably ends in a kind of tragedy no one can particularly feel good about, we see the show’s producer (a wonderful Merritt Wever) say to show presenter Chris Hansen (Pattinson), “I can make this work.”

What does something like this do to the “performers” who play the decoys, anyway? Skyler Gisondo plays “Decoy Dan,” the 23-year-old actor cast to impersonate boys as young as 13. Gisondo does a great job of conveying the wild emotions that must go through someone who sees a guy whip out his dick and spray whipped cream all over it. (This never actually happened on the show, by the way, although some did get caught completely naked.) This is indeed a wild situation to be in, being a young man impersonating a teenager, who then becomes subject to a genuinely pedophilic act—all of which is caught on camera. One wonders whether “Decoy Dan” needed therapy after this.

Director Lance Oppenheim’s film is thus ripe for examination of the psychological effects of all this, but what we get instead is something presented as a media satire. Is it really satire, though, if it’s inspired by things that actually happened? Just because Oppenheim is taking artistic license doesn’t mean he’s not reflecting real life here. Hollywood has a long history of films depicting a dystopian media future, and here we have something that winds up being pretty disgusting from all angles, and it happened two decades ago.

I haven’t even gotten to how many of these sting operations, which were done with the cooperation of local law enforcement, stink of entrapment. No one wants to be defending pedophiles, but there are proper ways to catch criminals, and this isn’t quite it. Among the many ways To Catch a Predator was criticized, Charlie Brooker wrote at the time, “When a TV show makes you feel sorry for potential child rapists, you know it's doing something wrong.” This is worth noting because in many cases, Primetime does exactly the same thing, and it does not seem to be commenting on the fact that To Catch a Predator was itself doing it. We see actors portraying the entrapped predators, and we feel conflicted because of how close we get to sympathizing with them.

And, to be clear, I do hold the controversial stance that even pedophiles should be treated humanely. There have been a couple of films in the past, most notably the 2004 Kevin Bacon film The Woodsman, that dared to challenge their audiences with this notion. It’s a provocative idea worthy of debate, and an idea not particularly explored in Primetime, which is far more concerned with Chris Hansen, his (fictional) producer Andie Bender, and their insatiable quest for ratings. These people don’t really care about the supposed righteousness of catching these predators, except that it is this idea of righteousness that brings in audience numbers. There are multiple scenes of fans talking to Hansen and saying things to him like, “You’re doing the Lord’s work.” Of course no one is considering the damage being done to the people actually doing this “work.”

There is a subplot involving The National Inquirer hounding Chris Hansen for comment on photos taken of him with a woman he had an affair with, a clearly juicy angle given his purported moral crusade—as if a simple affair is in any way equivalent to pedophilia. Primetime’s cinematographer, David Bolen, shoots a ton of the action in incredibly dark rooms, almost to the point of distraction. I know the show’s crew did a lot of its work in hiding, but if they are all in separate rooms, am I to believe they still kept the lights off? This combines with a heightened style of shooting to really drive home of the darkness at play. And yet, everything onscreen is designed to entertain us more than to elucidate us, which kind of makes Primetime guilty of the same thing To Catch a Predator was guilty of.

And I won’t deny it—I was very engaged by this movie, maybe even entertained, albeit at someone of a loss when it ended. The acting is excellent, especially on the part of Robert Pattinson but also Skyler Gisondo as “Decoy Dan,” as well as Merritt Wever. I just can’t come up with a purpose to this film that sits well—the same as any sane person would feel about To Catch a Predator. I’d have loved to be enlightened by this film in some way, and instead I was entertained. There are certainly some who feel that the publicly humiliating punishment of pedophiles is just and right as well as entertaining, but I’d rather we just find an efficient way to protect our children from them. Using them for entertainment is not it.

A media satire about a sickening subject, what fun!

Overall: B

PRACTICAL MAGIC 2

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

There’s an oddly contemporary dissonance to whatever math there is supposed to be in the timeline of Practical Magic 2—which, as it happens, is based on the novel The Book of Magic by Alice Hoffman, itself a sequel to the original novel Practical Magic. These novels were published in 1995 and 2021, respectively; a 26-year gap—though the timelines in their stories were apparently roughly 20 years apart. Plus, The Book of Magic is the fourth in the Practical Magic series of books, but this is only the first film sequel to be made—28 years after the first. But, although specific ages of characters are never revealed in either film, we certainly know that Sandra Bullock, Nicole Kidman, Diane Wiest and Stockard Channing have aged 28 years—albeit with Bullock and Kidman having had work done, making them appear unnaturally younger than they actually are (this isn’t quite as much the case with Wiest and Channing, who are 78 and 82, respectively). Bullock and Kidman are now 62 and 59, respectively; but their characters’ two daughters, who were played by girls who were 10 and 7 years old in the 1998 film, are now played by 28-year-old Maisie Williams and 26-year-old Joey King. One of them was a toddler and the other not even born when the first film was released, but, I guess everyone is playing younger here across the board. (Incidentally, 46-year-old Lee Pace is playing Bullock’s love interest in this movie. Get it, Sandy!)

Anyway, realistically, Bullock and Kidman’s Sally and Gillian Owens sisters would realistically be contending with grandchildren closer to the age of the kids in the first film by now, but, whatever. In Practical Magic 2, Antonia (Maisie Williams) is a medical intern, and Kylie (Joey King) appears to be still in college—and falling in love with Gideon (Xolo Maridueña). Anyone familiar with the first film knows where this is going, which is the predictable concept around which the plots of both films revolve: the Owens family has been suffering a curse for generations, in which any men who fall in love with their women meet an untimely death.

I must admit, I have some questions. Does the Owens family never produce any male offspring? Evidently not. And why do we never learn anything at all about Sally and Gillian’s mother, except that she “died of a broken heart” because—of course—her husband met with an untimely death? The original Practical Magic ended happily with Sally mated with an Arizona cop played by Aidan Quinn, but by the time we’re seeing Practical Magic 2, we learn quickly that that character has also met with an untimely death. In response, Sally casts a spell to make her daughters forget about being witches and makes Gillian promise never to tell them. To call this contrived could be the understatement of the year, but we have to get a further storyline from somewhere, don’t we?

Again: whatever. Movies like Practical Magic are built to withstand nitpicks like this, because they exist only to charm audiences coming for fluff and magic. I have always thought the original film could have been better, but still had its charms; I’ve seen some reviewers of this sequel characterize it as lacking “the magic” of the original, evidently forgetting how the original played in its time. Practical Magic is more of exactly the same, which actually makes it the exceedingly rare “lega-sequel” that actually matches and lives up to its predecessor. Anyone fond of the original is just as likely to be fond of this one, particularly if you are fond of the older principals in the cast.

We don’t get broadly successful movies like this with so many main characters who are women, after all. And by all accounts, the fluff-and-magic of the movies honor the books on which they are based; there is no serious depth getting missed anywhere here. It does make a difference that characters this thinly drawn across the board are played by such deeply talented actors, without whom the film would easily pass by totally ignored.

When it comes to “witchy” stuff, these stories never got super deep into that, either. We see spells and hexes, and actually more onscreen magic than in the first film, with more involved and better (if not perfect) special effects as well. But, as always, this is about the generational relationships between aunts and nieces, and more importantly the bond between sisters. This is always rather slight in characterization, but it all still makes for perfectly pleasant entertainment. I’m not going to be rushing to rewatch this movie any time soon, but I always felt the same about the original, which I’ve probably seen at least four times now. I suppose that still averages out to once a decade. Still, when I inevitably go to watch it again another decade from now when craving something both nostalgic and witchy, I’ll probably inevitably double-feature it with this one. It’s just as good, after all, and as I already clearly demonstrated, it’s fun to overanalyze everyone’s respective ages. Youth is temporary, but nitpicking is eternal!

In any case, predictable pleasantness does not preclude having a good time. Practical Magic 2 is just as blandly cute as you’d expect or want from it.

A family reunion you’d actually want to attend.

Overall: B

THE SUN NEVER SETS

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

There’s a case to be made that The Sun Never Sets is a well-written and impressively nuanced drama about a modern love triangle, but there also remains the question: who wants to watch these people? I’m honestly at a bit of a loss as to what writer-director Joe Swanberg himself found compelling about these characters.

To be fair to Swanberg, I suppose, it’s certainly a well-observed account of two men vying for the same woman, who want to think of themselves as evolved, but still wind up being predictable jerks. Dakota Fanning’s Wendy has her own jerky moments, sure, but if we put it to a contest, both the guys are the clear winners.

The title of the film is a subtle nod to the setting of Anchorage, Alaska, where they have around 20 hours of daylight in the summer. Maybe it’s also a subtle metaphor for the nebulous state of Wendy’s relationships, one with Jack (Jake Johnson), a divorced father of two young kids who love her; the other with Chuck (Cory Michael Smith), a pilot ex-boyfriend who has been out of the state for three years and is suddenly back and seemingly changed—or is he? I don’t know if Jake Johnson got deliberately a bit more schlubby for the part of a middle-aged school coach or if Swanberg is just taking advantage of where he is right now, but he’s balanced out by Chuck’s fit outdoorsiness, and both characters provide plenty of pros and cons for Wendy to consider.

That said, everything that happens is Jack’s fault. He says so himself more than once, and he’s right. When we meet them, Wendy has her own place but regularly stays over at Jack’s house, where he is very set in his ways, and worries about Wendy committing to him when he has no interest in getting married again or having more kids. About this, Jack is also right. On the other hand, his insistence that they “take a break” so she can see what she might find out in the world before making a final decision about staying with him seems a little counterproductive, particularly in light of their having been together for two years. This does seem to strip Wendy of a little bit of credit in regards to knowing what she wants, and I find myself wondering how this story might have unfolded had it been written by a woman. Swanberg clearly knows how self-invovled men can be, but Dakota fanning is over here elevating a female lead part that is perhaps a bit underwritten on the page. It doesn’t even occur to Wendy that she might be throwing her life goals away by staying wth Jack until Jack insists on it.

Wendy goes on one date with a a friend she has no chemistry with but has had a longtime crush on her, and it’s pretty convenient, for plot purposes, when she runs into Chuck at the very bar at which she’s on this date. What a perfect time to run into an old flame who maybe might work after they themselves have spent some time apart!

I feel a bit of ambivalence about The Sun Never Sets, which is competently made, and, I suspect, succeeds at exactly what it sets out to do—frustrate us with the behavior of these people. Jack’s immediate second thoughts when Wendy starts spending time with Chuck are utterly predictable; he almost becomes a caricature of a jealous man–except that we’ve all known men who behave exactly this way. There’s a moment when Chuck says to Wendy, “I don’t want to be part of an open . . . thing,” and Wendy says she doesn’t either, and I thought: well shit, why not? Wendy doesn’t get all of her needs met by either of these guys, but she gets pretty much all of them met between both of them. Chuck will go on spontaneous camping trips that Jack has zero interest in, and Jack will go to Wendy’s friends’ art showings that Chuck has no interest in. Okay I take it back because I know exactly why not: neither of these guys are completely mature adults. They want to be, but they aren’t.

The Sun Never Sets provides plenty to ponder and discuss, I’ll give it that. Consider this: why does whether or not Wendy might one day decide she wants children have to factor so heavily in all these choices right now? Discuss! It could be argued that Jack is being weirdly paternalistic on this point, which really means she shouldn’t be with him to begin with.

I don’t have to like all the characters in a movie, but if it’s not something like a biting satire, it’s helpful to have at least one person to root for. Wendy, as a character, is just a fairly average young woman living her life in Alaska. These two guys she’s trying to decide between have no interest in truly sharing an equitable life with her. I regularly wanted to punch them both, but it’s also a relief that there is no scene in which they punch each other (in one scene, they kind of get halfway there).

I suppose it sort of sounds like I disliked this movie, which isn’t quite accurate. I didn’t love it, which is different. Aside from the somewhat flawed script, everything else about the movie is perfectly serviceable, and the performances are solid all around. These all feel like real people, particularly people you know, which does reflect a certain talent—the characters are drawn far more successfully than the plot unfolds. I was just glad to not be hanging out with them anymore when it ended.

Maybe next we can get a movie about a successful poly threesome in the Alaskan winter called The Sun Never Sets.

THE MARCHING BAND

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

I can just hear all the criticisms by film snobs of The Marching Band: it’s emotionally manipulative, it’s treacly, it’s occasionally contrived—you know, all the things that make a crowd-pleasing movie work. Well, this movie very much worked on me, and I’m happy to say I thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s practically the definition of a crowd-pleaser, and isn’t that precisely what the crowd wants?

It also has far more depth than it might seem at first glance, thanks to a tight script that was co-written by director Emmanuel Courcol. A ton of plot happens within just the first act: successful orchestra conductor Thibaut (Benjamin Lavernhe) discovers he has leukemia, and when his sister, Rose (Mathilde Courcol-Rozès, making the most of fairly little screen time), takes a DNA test to see if she is a match for a bone marrow transplant, it is revealed for the first time that Thibaut was adopted. He also discovers he had a brother he never knew he had, Jimmy Lecocq (Pierre Lottin), whose DNA is a match.

Most of The Marching Band is far less about Thibaut’s cancer than it is about the budding relationship between these two brothers who have only just learned of each other’s existence. This is one of the many surprising delights of The Marching Band, the title being a reference to Jimmy’s own extracurricular interests—something he keeps from Thibaut at first. It seems Jimmy, in spite of Thibaut’s discovery that he has perfect pitch, has a bit of an inferiority complex.

A whole lot of the story that unfolds here deals with class differences and the assumptions made by people born of privilege. Thibaut is understandably furious at his parents for not telling him he was adopted—”Lies kill!” he shouts at them—but takes a while to register the opportunities that would not have been available to him if not for his adoptive family. More than once the two brothers contemplate what their fates might have been had they actually grown up together: Thibaut in Jimmy’s working-class environment, or Jimmy in Thibaut’s world of comparative education and opportunity. (By way of brief explanation as to why Thibaut’s parents did not also adopt Jimmy, it is explained that they thought they were unable to have children, but then Rose was “a miracle” that left them ill-prepared to take on yet another child.)

The Marching Band also naturally brings up age-old questions of nature vs. nurture, at least when it comes to innate talent: Rose was not up to par with violin lessons in school; Jimmy is a natural musician. Jimmy is a divorced dad of a 13-year-old daughter he doesn’t get to see often enough, playing trombone in a community marching band in northern France. When the band’s conductor has no choice but to take a job in another region in order to pay off significant debts, the first suggestion is that Jimmy step in, but he has no confidence. Thibaut steps in to help him, with the encouragement of another band member, Sabrina (Sarah Suco), who Jimmy is too blind to see has a thing for him.

The whole cancer backstory seems to take a surprising backseat after the first half an hour or so, until it comes up again in a way that some may find surprising and some may find predictable—I was so taken with this movie, its characters, and particularly its performances, that I was happy just to go with the flow as the story went along. And in the end, all the story threads and the musical threads come together in a kind of emotional and musical crescendo that you’d have to be dead inside to resist. I was so moved by it, I really wish I had known to bring tissues.

It’s easy to see how The Marching Band became a smash hit in France, earning over $20 million in that country alone, and more than $30 million globally, before finally coming to the United States. This is happening, a bit inexplicably, nearly two years after it was first in wide release in France (November 2024). I’m a little baffled that this movie is not more well-known here; I only discovered it when checking to see what was playing in my local market at SIFF Cinemas. Time will tell whether France will enter this as their selection for the Best International Feature Oscar, but it is well deserving, and would give it greater exposure to American audiences. Otherwise, if you happen to see this review, and you enjoy deeply heartwarming dramas, then either check your local listings for this movie or make a note of it for eventual VOD or streaming options.

The orchestra conductor slums it with The Marching Band.

Overall: B+