AFTER THE HUNT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Overall: B-

KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Overall: B

ROOFMAN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Overall: B-

TRON: ARES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Overall: C+

ARE WE GOOD?

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

To some people, Marc Maron is endearingly aggravated. To other people, he isn’t. It’s pretty safe to say the former camp will enjoy the documentary Are We Good? It’s probably even safe to say the late director Lynn Shelton would have enjoyed this film, although it likely never would have been made without her, and it certainly would have been a completely different movie had she not died suddenly of acute myeloid leukemia all of two months into the pandemic.

And herein lies the key difference between fans of Marc Maron and people who don’t know him, and how Are We Good? is likely to hit. I was barely familiar with Maron as a standup comic before he started his podcast WTF with Marc Maron in 2009, and I didn’t even learn about the podcast until maybe around 2013. But I had certainly been listening to his twice-weekly podcast for several years by the time Maron was still recording the regular solo intro to his scheduled podcast episode, only days after Shelton’s death. It was heartbreaking to listen to, but in keeping with Maron’s penchant for holding his heart on his sleeve, in ways that ran the gamut of emotions.

The kind of cool trick that director Steven Feinartz does with Are We Good? is show us how Shelton and Maron fell for each other to begin with. An actor friend, as one of several talking heads in this film, refers to Maron as “endearingly fussy,” and says that the more aggravated Maron got, the more it made Shelton laugh. It’s difficult to watch this film and not think about what could have been for these two, who were friends for several years, and then finally allowed themselves to fall into each other. Fans of Marc Maron know well the kind of relationship history he has, and this is one that felt like it could have been the one that truly stuck.

As such, Are We Good? follows two narrative tracks: Maron’s relationship with Lynn Shelton, and particularly how he navigated the grief in the wake of losing her—often in real time, on-camera, and much of it being worked out onstage—and the overall arc of Maron’s career as both a comedian and a podcast host. If you know anything about Maron you know how the podcast was borne of desperation when his comedy career was stalled, and how over just a few short years it both reinvented and reignited his career.

On the other hand, if you know Marc Maron, there’s really nothing to learn from Are We Good? that you didn’t already know. It’s just a pleasant, fun hang with a guy who feel like you know because of this 21st-century concept called parasocial relationships. So what if you don’t know Marc Maron? In that case, this film isn’t really made with you as its target audience. I suppose it’s just as well; the film got special one-night screenings across the country on only October 5 and October 8. I have no idea where it will be found going forward, though presumably it will stream somewhere,

I will say this: Are We Good? is a unique and engaging exploration of grief, how there’s no wrong way to deal with it, and how it affected one of the most lovable straight men who ever existed. That could be the entry point for people unfamiliar with his work. This is a movie squarely aimed at the familiar, however, and while it’s by turns moving and entertaining (and occasionally genuinely funny), it’s fairly short on insight. You’ll get much more out of watching Maron’s own comedy specials, particularly the most recent couple of them (which can be streamed on HBO Max).

I had a good time. I’m glad I went out to see it. But it also left me eager to re-watch the comedy specials, which are far more rightly constructed and have a more clearly defined narrative arc. This illustrates the difference between a comic who has truly honed the skill of his craft, and a documentary filmmaker who is just pretty good at it.

I guess the answer is: yeah, pretty good.

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 BALTIMORONS

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

I’ve seen The Baltimorons described as “cringe comedy,” and I suppose that’s what it is—but it also feels like an unfair act of pigeonholing. This is a movie that is utterly and completely itself, in spite of all the other things you could call it: a May-December romance, a Christmas movie, a single-day story, etc. The thing is, The Baltimorons works incredibly well as all of these things.

Set over the course of Christmas Eve, Cliff slips on the stairs while taking his potato pecan casserole to his future-in-laws’ house for dinner, and knocks out a tooth when he bashes his face into the door frame. He calls all over town to find a dentist that’s open, and the one who picks up is Didi, who only reveals her office was actually closed when she shows up and lets Cliff in.

I should note that the May-December aspect here has Cliff as the younger one and Didi as the older one. We never learn the characters’ names, but Cliff is played by 36-year-old Michael Strassner; Didi by 66-year-old Liz Larsen. That’s a pretty wide spread, sure, but the gender inverse of what has historically been seen onscreen, and at least Cliff is clearly well past his youth. These things actually make a difference, and the casting of The Baltimorons is one of its greatest strengths: Strassner and Larsen have incredible screen chemistry, and their characters really work together.

Most crucially, the day that unfolds before them takes them many unexpected places, but it always feels organic. This is thanks to the skill and talent of director and co-writer Jay Duplass, as well as Strassner himself, who co-wrote the script with Duplass. Strassner is an alumnus of The Groudlings, which clearly informs the improv sketch comedy background of his character (“The Baltimorons” is the name of the improv troupe Cliff used to be in).

The improv background doesn’t even come into focus until well into the film, as we get Cliff, a sweet guy who also has plenty of fuckups under his belt but has also been sober for six months, entering the dentist office of Didi, who has just learned her ex-husband eloped with his newer, much younger wife and turned their Christmas Eve dinner into a wedding reception, thereby co-opting Didi’s Christmas Eve dinner plans. Cliff overhears the breaking of this news as he makes a wrong turn looking for the bathroom, and insists on taking her out to dinner as a thank-you for fixing his tooth.

That’s a pretty specific reveal, I realize, but this happens so early in The Baltimorons that it’s not any kind of spoiler. What follows is a series of events, some a bit more plausible than others but none so unrealistic that you don’t buy it, that keep these two hanging out even after multiple moments of what they both believe to be a parting. They wind up all over Baltimore, in cars and at the aforementioned Christmas Eve reception and at an improv show and on a boat and even briefly at a jail.

All of this makes The Baltimorons sound like a wild ride, which it really isn’t. It’s more sweet than anything, even in a key scene in which Cliff is very reluctantly pressured into performing improv and Didi finds herself on stage with him. I suppose this is where the “cringe comedy” idea comes in, because there are so many moments that feel like things may be headed to a very bad place—but it never is. It’s more like a lot of near-misses, which packs The Baltimorons with a lot of feeling of relief. But also laughter: I laughed quite a lot at this movie. I also found myself touched by its unusually sincere sweetness, to a point that I even got a bit teary-eyed. This is the kind of movie that really works on the softies.

If I had any one true criticism, it would be the subplot of Cliff’s betrothal to his girlfriend, Brittany (Olivia Luccardi). It’s fine, I guess; and it does provide some context for people who care about Cliff being worried about him because of his past precariousness of emotional state. Still, it felt a little like a plot contrivance to create a clearer-cut barrier to Cliff and Didi’s connection, and the way they meet and their age differences are plenty barriers enough. Every scene with both Cliff and Didi onscreen is far more compelling than any with Brittany onscreen, which I spent just wanting Cliff’s story to return to Didi. That just underscores what a great duo these two are, though, and I would recommend The Baltomorons to anyone who loves being utterly charmed by the movies.

Sometimes you just find yourself having to “yes-and.”

Overall: B+