THE CYCLE OF LOVE

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

If The Cycle of Love isn’t the most earnestly romantic documentary ever made, then it must be close. Director Orlando von Einsiedel does fill about half of the film with narrative recreations of the two lead characters’ pasts, using very pretty young actors and blurring the line between documentary and narrative feature—but, in so doing, he actually intensifies the romance. Much of the literal narration comes from present-day interviews with PK Mahanandia and Lotta von Schedvin, who are also the subjects of the film.

This is the true story of a young man who traveled, in 1977, nearly 7,000 kilometers from Delhi, India to reunite with the traveling Swedish woman he’d fallen in love with in in India at her home in Borås, Sweden. The road distance between these two points is 7,355 km (4,570 miles), but PK was not able to make this trip as a straight shot—he had to bypass Pakistan altogether due to not having a passport, and endured a number of setbacks along the way. He was also offered very moving assistance from kind strangers along the way, allowing him to travel by train in certain segments. What makes his story so distinctive and unique is that he traveled more than half that distance by bicycle.

This couple’s relationship is a matter of public record, but Orlando von Einsiedel’s edit of their story is decidedly coy about their fates. We get present-day interviews with both of them, but we do not see them together. PK is seen in India, and Lotta is seen in a home presumably in Sweden. We see her reading some of the letters PK wrote her while making his journey that took him over four months, and she even comments, through tears, that she hasn’t read them since shortly after receiving them. You spend much of the film wondering if PK didn’t make it all the way there, or maybe he took so long that Lotta was forced to move on and wound up with someone else. It feels very much as though von Einsiedel intended this. The story of this guy riding a bike from India to Europe would be extraordinary no matter what, but amping the intrigue and raising the stakes is what great filmmaking is all about.

Now, is this movie great? I must admit to some ambivalence about it. There is a sort of plaintive tone to much of it, with a pacing that can generously be described as reserved. The Cycle of Love has a 98-minute runtime and it kind of feels like two and a half hours. And yet, by the end it had completely won me over, I was so moved by its purity of heart and uplifting sincerity. It’s extraordinarily rare to see something so completely uncynical.

We do get to see a smattering of film clips and photos from PK’s and Lotta’s youth, but mostly we see flashbacks recreated by actors, who are both decidedly prettier than the real people they are playing: Chirag Lobo as PK; and 24-year-old Norwegian actor Mina Dale as Lotta. We see them meet when Lotta is visiting Delhi after having traveled the so-called “Hippie Trail” for 22 days from Sweden, and she sits for one of PK’s portrait drawings. When Lotta returns to Sweden and PK eventually follows after her on his second-hand bicycle, these very impressive drawn portraits are largely how he supports himself along the way.

Orlando von Einsiedel takes yet another fascinating approach in the construction of this film: Chirag Lobo and Mina Dale are actors, but as we see depictions of PK in the flashback scenes encountering many people along his travels, who are clearly real people and not actors. This raises a lot of questions. Did these people know they were part of a recreation? Did they know Lobo was an actor and not really a guy traveling to Europe to be reunited with the woman he loves? I haven’t found answers yet with the specificity I desire, but it sounds like they simply took a camera crew on a road trip and had conversations with people met along the way, and then creatively and cleverly edited the ineractions into the film’s narrative. Von Einsiedel told The Movable Feast that the real PK traveled along with them, and was moved by experiences not exactly like this own but evidently similar enough.

These sorts of details leave me more impressed with The Cycle of Love as a cinematic accomplishment the more I consider it after the fact. This is a truly unique endeavor, using mostly real people even in recreations made with an actor for a documentary. There may be a solid helping of genuine performance in this film, but its sentiments are entirely genuine. There is even a brief moment of Lobo-as-PK chatting with a diverse array of young people going through letters at a post office, and one of them explains a tattoo to him, which turns out to be in solidarity with a queer friend struggling with the possibility of being disowned by his family. In plenty of other hands, this would come off as corny tokenism, but this is a film of such sincerity that I deeply appreciated it.

There is a quality to The Cycle of Love that might be best described as “you have to be in right mood for it.” And I don’t mean its jarring lack of cynicism and its unapologetic hope for humanity—I mean the somewhat labored way in which the story unfolds. An action movie, this is not; this is the kind of movie you want to quietly marinate in, should that be the vibe that you’re looking for. I must admit that, on this level, I wasn’t quite feeling it for a while. But again, that ending—truly contrived as it was—perfectly landed the plane. If you’ll pardon the discordant metaphor for a movie about a guy on a bike. I left misty-eyed in the best way, and any of the hopeless romantics out there are bound to be moved by PK and Lotta’s incredible story.

You might be taken aback by how charmed you are in the end.

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

HOPE

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

I had such high hopes for . . . well, you know. I was genuinely excited to see this movie, and then walked away disappointed. At the ending, such as it was, I was completely baffled.

What does writer-director think this is, Dune Part One? Sort of, in a way: he reportedly has a script all ready to go for a sequel that he hopes to be part of a trilogy, depending on this film’s success. And what if there never is a sequel? Hope ends so abruptly that I actually said out loud, “What?” And this was after two and a half hours of non-stop armed pursuit of what gradually are revealed to be not just one, but multiple aliens in Hope Harbor, a small South Korean town very close to the Demiitarized Zone.

With a runtime this long, I expected Hope to take its time a bit—which it does, for the first twenty minutes or so, after which it’s fairly effective non-stop tension or action. Na Hong-jin employs a lot of economical filmmaking, clearly saving money on effects shots by having his characters pursue an unseen “monster” that is constantly on another block or out of frame. The many scenes with production design of massive destruction is impressively detailed, but I kept wondering why the town is so quiet and deserted. Apparently it’s mostly elderly people who live here, but you’d think there would still be a lot of panicked screaming and running in the streets. Instead, we get destroyed streets with dead and maimed bodies here and there, with no set pieces involving any more than just a handful of extras.

The camera follows police chief Ko Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min) as he follows the trail of an evident monster through the town, gun in hand and terrified. In the beginning, there is a dead cow found in the middle of a road, and the wounds indicate something very large having attacked it. There is speculation as to whether it’s a rogue tiger. But as Bum-seok and assorted others pursue it, at first there is some logic in the idea that whatever it is needs to be killed before it starts killing everyone in town. Never mind the fact that the whole population of the town seems to be gone already—something I could not stop thinking about—but the longer Bum-seok pursues this thing, the clearer it becomes that it is unnaturally gigantic, and he is no match for it. Neither are any of his cohorts, and nor really any of the guns or ammo they possess. And still they persist. Why? I would be thinking about was a place to hide.

Eventually this creature wreaking havoc on the town appears onscreen, and I can hardly convey the depths of my disappointment. It really just looks like a weirdly agile, gigantic cartoon man. I thought this was supposed to be an alien? Indeed it is, we discover soon enough, but another group of men is exploring the forest outside of town, and the more they discover the weirder everything gets. I’m okay with plot twists revealing more questions than answers, but Hope offers no answers whatsoever, just an Escher painting of endless questions, which I found very frustrating.

I really couldn’t tell if Na Hong-jin was just drawing inept characters with cliched mindsets for his own amusement, or if there was some kind of commentary going on. It’s clear to the viewers very quickly that fighting these aliens with guns is ineffective, and not once does it ever occur to a single one of them to try a different approach. Not even after the aliens pick them up and throw them against buildings or trees, or in some cases whack one of them with the hurled body of another. No matter what happens, even after Ko Bum-seok finds himself briefly feeling sorry for the first creature, it’s the same tactic: guns, guns, guns. Na Hong-jin must be going for something a little deeper here, because more than once a person is asked, “Where did you get all these guns?” and the reply is always a variation on “That’s not important right now!”

Over time we find out these aliens aren’t quite what they seem, although none of the characters register this deeply enough to interrogate things like, say, motivation. Actually, Ko Bum-seok thinks about this briefly, one time, and then never brings it up again. He’s too busy angrily shooting at aliens with ineffective bullets. Eventually the movie tells us way more about the aliens than the characters ever discover, but in a way that answers nothing and just leaves us bewildered.

Perhaps the sequel script is designed to dole out some of these deeply desired answers, but after sitting through Hope, I half expect another installment to be just another series of narrative rabbit holes. This movie feels like it’s trying to be some kind of thrilling setup, but instead it’s a series of set pieces that have their share of thrills but collectively amount to nothing more than “Huh?”

I also can’t decide whether I might have liked Hope better if it had better—or at the very least more consistent–special effects. The very first alien creature looks like cheap CGI. Later ones have some surprisingly impressive renderings but then look like they’re in an outdated video game as they move and run. There are some very different creature shapes seen, with some clues as to how they are related to each other but with other examples of differences that have no clear relationship to each other. Much of Hope feels like a lot of ideas thrown at the wall, by an author who is just hoping to come up with ways to make them click together later. For now, how about we just abruptly roll credits!

Very early in the film, we see a sign that references keeping out “infiltrators,” a clear reference to North Koreans. It feels like the suggestion of some kind of commentary, as does a lot in Hope, which are either never more than suggestions or are getting lost in translation. Is it possible that Hope somehow actually succeeds and I just don’t get it? Sure. Is this a movie that simply has no hope of working for me? Absolutely.

I really wanted to see what was around that corner, until I did.

Overall: C+

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+

FINDING EMILY

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

If you’re here to criticize Finding Emily because of its predictable, formulaic writing, then you need to read the room. Get out of here! Find some other vibe to kill, because you’re missing the point.

And that point? It’s the genre: romantic comedies. They either work for you or they don’t, and the truth is, even within the basic rules of the genre, most romantic comedies are crap. Just google “best romantic comedies of the 21st century” and you’ll find lists that are, in the aggregate, a bit pathetic. Is Finding Emily better than, say, Bridget Jones’s Diary? I’m going to sound ridiculous to many when I say yes, it is. I certainly suspect it’ll age better over time, even if it is very much of its time. Is it the best romantic comedy since Four Weddings and a Funeral? Only time will truly tell, but: maybe!

Finding Emily does have its imperfections, even if they largely lend themselves to its ample charms. Spike Fearn is utterly adorable as the lovesick Owen, and his performance is superb. I also love how Rachel Hirons’s script flips the usual positions of the two leads, here making the woman (a charming Angourie Rice, who the criminally few who saw The Nice Guys might recognize as the 13-year-old girl from that 10-year-old movie) the one who makes the big mistakes and has to offer all the grand apologies. That said, as adorable and sweet as Owen is, he’s a little too perfect. He’s just a little naive, sweetly making his way through life and having no inkling that someone is taking advantage of him.

Owen meets a girl at the club at which he works as a sound engineer, in the opening sequence—the Emily of the title, or at least one of them. They connect, they have easy conversation, and when she has to rush off with her friends to the next thing that night, she leaves Owen her phone number, but it’s missing a digit. Along comes another Emily (also, we know instantly, of the title), this one being the Angourie Rice Emily, who is an American student at this unnamed Manchester university. She’s looking for a subject for her dissertation, someone she can use to make a strong case for how “romantic attachment” leads to self-sabotage, and she offers to help him find this Emily. He winds up sending an email to the more than 300 Emilys who go to this school (that seems like a lot), and hijinks ensues, along with predictably desperate secrets and misunderstandings, and we see where this is all going a mile away.

And I don’t care how far away we can see it! I had a blast watching this movie, and it even moved me, if not to tears, then to misty-eyes by the end. It’s worth noting that many of the movies on those lists of “best romantic comedies” really stretch the definition of comedy; some even include movies like Materialists, which I was surprisingly taken with, but it’s not a comedy. But Finding Emily? This is a movie that will actually make you laugh. What a refreshing change!

It’s also, evidently, an example of a “Gen Z romantic comedy,” which is definitionally true given that Angourie Rice and Spike Fearn are both 25. I also found it refreshing to see such a well-made movie about people this young; the kids need quality too, don’t they? Where else are they going to find light, fun movies this good about people in their own generation? (Not that I have a clue what the kids are doing these days or what they think of as high quality. I’m 50.)

If I had any real complaint about Finding Emily, it’s the Manchester accents. Rice is actually Australian but plays an American student whose visa is on the line with her dissertation, and half the time she was the only person I fully understood. You might do well to find a showtime with closed captions included. I’d say you could wait until it’s on a streamer where you can also turn on the captions, but this movie deserves the same success as, say, My Big Fat Greek Wedding—even though we all know it won’t get it; we don’t live in that world anymore. Oh wait, I also want to complain about Minnie Driver as Dean Watkinson. There isn’t enough of her! Why do people keep under-using this excellent actor?

Anyway, Finding Emily gives you everything you want from it and more—genuinely effective humor, heart, romance, and precisely the story beats you expect from a romantic comedy. Formula works because that’s what it does. It treats ideas like toxic masculinity with a light hand but without trivializing it; conversely, it does also follow the unfortunate formula of centering Whiteness in its main characters while self-consciously diversifying its supporting cast. I’m not sure it’s worth holding a grudge against it for that, but it’s certainly worth mentioning. Whether the ample charms to be found here can transcend its smattering of imperfections over time may long remain to be seen, but for now, British director Alicia MacDonald has offered up something that’s impossible to resist, and will have you leaving the theater with a pep in your step.

The kids are not just all right, they’re delightful.

Overall: B+

COYOTE VS. ACME

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

There will never be another Who Framed Roger Rabbit, though multiple attempts have been made over the 38 years since that movie marked a pivotal point in film history. They have consistently failed to replicate that success, but it could be argued that Coyote vs. Acme comes the closest. It’s not a very high bar to clear, really, but this script, by May December writer Samy Burch (sharing story credit with James Gunn and Jeremy Slater), is surprisingly clever, and delivers pretty consistent laughs and chuckles. It might give you just the right amount of tickle.

Are the inevitable comparisons to Who Framed Roger Rabbit unfair? Maybe, but that was a film that pushed the industry forward with unprecedented technical accomplishment while also being both visually and narratively inventive. Coyote vs. Acme is made in an almost identical style, with cartoon characters existing in real-world environments alongside human characters. It does not, however, push the industry forward or feature unprecedented technical accomplishments.

And no one’s asking it to, for the record. But it’s hard not to feel like just a little something is missing, mostly due to pacing that would have done well to inch a little closer to that of actual Warner Brothers cartoons. It doesn’t have to be wall-to-wall zany, but the pace could be picked up a bit. With just a little bit more energy—Will Forte’s lazy-loser personal accident lawyer character Kevin Avery doesn’t exactly help things on that front—and some punch-ups with more gags in every scene, this could have been a modern classic.

Instead, Coyote vs. Acme exists in movie lore more as the movie that fans brought back from the dead: director Dave Green shot this in 2022; Warner Brothers announced in 2023 that they were canceling release of the completed film in order to claim a $30 million tax credit; controversy ensued, and after a sale to independent film distributor Ketchup Entertainment, it now has a wide release, four years after principal photography wrapped.

Was it worth the wait? I can’t help but mention Who Framed Roger Rabbit again, because that is a special film with historic importance. I would be hard pressed to call Coyote vs. Acme special, but it’s undeniably fun, and I was happy to have seen it. This is a world in which the rules of cartoon character existence are not really explored; they just exist matter-of-factly alongside humans. They hold jobs, they have opinions, some of them (like, say, a single-minded coyote desperately trying to catch a Road Runner) have clear purpose. And they consistently sideswipe the audience with left-field cartoon gags.

This is essentially a “real world” with cartoon rules, in which Acme is a giant corporation whose products never work—at least, not when cartoons use them. You name it, Wile E. Coyote has used an Acme version of it in his attempts to catch the Road Runner, and if you’ve ever watched Road Runner cartoons, you know he always fails. Enter Kevin Avery, who takes on Coyote as a client and sues Acme for all their defective products. Eventually this becomes a cartoon version of a court drama, which brings its own set of absurdist gags (including Luis Guzmán as the judge). Witnesses include CEO Foghorn Leghorn (voiced by Eric Bauza, as one of ten different cartoon characters here) and Head of PR Tasmanian Devil (Jim Cummings); John Cena plays Acme lawyer Buddy Crane, in honestly kind of a nothing part that could have been given far more humor but is never all that funny.

It’s always a delight to see monotone queen Martha Kelly, though; she plays one of Avery’s law office staff somehow with more verve than anyone else in the room besides Coyote. Coyote vs. Acme would have benefitted from more compelling human characters for sure, but its commitment to old-school Warner Brothers cartoon silliness still makes it pretty entertaining. The animation itself isn’t anything new or impressive, but the integration into real-world footage is well done. I’m not sure anyone is going to remember this film years down the road, but they’ll have an undeniably good time while watching it.

Look at all those drawn faces.

Overall: B

THE DOG STARS

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

This movie is kind of a mess. I really wanted more from it. The talent involved certainly elicited hope for more: Jacob Elordi, Josh Brolin, Guy Pearce, Margaret Qualley, Allison Janney, Benedict Wong. And then there’s director Ridley Scott, whose long and storied career has included multiple classic genre films, but also, if you’ll pardon the expression, plenty of dogs. You could say that the title The Dog Stars is a little on the nose. Our main character is declaring constellations based after his dog—spoiler alert, the dog does not make it—but that’s not exactly helping,

The Dog Stars wants you to think it’s a different kind of post-apocalyptic story, except it kind of isn’t. Most of it is a bit more meditative, sure; Mark L. Smith’s script, adapted from a novel of the same name by Peter Heller, ostensibly leans into themes of grief—as if we haven’t had enough movies about that in the past fifteen years. And who needs a movie about a world decimated by a fly virus, only six years after the outbreak of an actual pandemic that did kill millions? Clearly no one around here: I was one of eight people in the theater I went to. It was a 4:45 showing on a Thursday, but still. Seeing characters get asked to hold a digital thermometer to their forehead doesn’t have the same kind of otherworldly quality it had a decade ago. I think it may be some time before it does again.

There’s something to be said for timing—including this film’s late-August release date, which telegraphs a lack of studio confidence in it. And there’s really nothing fun about The Dog Stars. It’s either too grim, too sad, or it straight-up doesn’t make sense. In this post-pandemic world in which we see very directly it’s supposed to be 2035—are we to think of this as what the world would be like if covid actually did kill everyone?—a large group of the few survivors left in the world are referred to as “Reapers.” Why, I couldn’t tell you. How people completely isolated would catch wind of this group name, I have no idea. And when the “Reapers” show up, they are all White, covered in tattoos, disorganized and manic. We never see a single one of them utter any actual lines. They simply serve as a collective threat for our primary characters, who basically just act like monkeys on crack the few times we see them.

There’s another sequence in which Elordi’s Hig, bringing along two people he has tentatively befriended, Cima and her dad, “Pops” (Qualley and Pearce), to an operational airport in Grand Junction, Colorado—we previously learned that Hig was originally from Denver, a CGI-desolate city we see in a few different scenes. This is where we meet Allison Janney’s Darlene, and while I probably shouldn’t spoil the turn of events here, I will say that Janey may as well be playing a literal clown. Darlene is clearly meant to be suspicious as a woman not just acting like she’s still a flight attendant but literally wearing the uniform and caked-on makeup. I haven’t read the novel, but I know that the pointlessly surreal turn of events at Grand Junction that happens in the movie is not from the novel.

Why does it have to get weird, anyway? Is it that Ridley Scott just can’t help himself? Honestly, I think he’s just working for a living. He’s made some underrated films even in recent years (see The Last Duel). And all of these actors are undeniably talented, though I suppose you would only know it from other films. Jacob Elordi carries the film competently, but I did find myself wondering where he does his laundry. Hig’s jeans are scuffed up, but never quite enough; he was a mechanic before the world ended, and now he repairs a small plane and flies it around. Honestly, Elordi is too beautiful to be in this world. Hig comes across another scavenger in Denver City Hall and that other guy looks busted. Realistically, Hig would too, but we don’t want to mess up that pretty face.

The Dog Stars starts off promising but starts going off the rails before long. Some of the lack of realism is wildly distracting: why would digital screens still be flickering images in town after at least a decade? Where the hell is this electricity still coming from, in a long-since abandoned city with buildings covered in overgrown vegetation? Hig regularly returns to the house he used to live in, with a convenient view of the Denver skyline right from his front porch, to continue grieving the loss of his wife, and the house is spotless. Is Hig cleaning up every time he visits?

This is a movie that fails from a lack of narrative foundation, made by people with poor attention to detail. And attention to detail, which makes the depiction of a grim future like this work, is the only way movies like this can succeed. The actors all give solid performances (albeit with Janney going a little over the top), some of them weirdly under-used. I wish I could say they made this worth movie worth seeing, but it feels like everyone else was cutting corners. You should probably cut your own corner and find some other movie to see.

Is there any way to fly out of this movie?

Overall: C+

MUTINY

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

Jason Statham and Gerard Butler should get together and do a movie about a survivalist ex-military man seeking vengeance against terrorists in the middle of a natural disaster. These guys have never worked together, but they have worked with multiple same directors: Ric Roman Waugh (Greenland, Shelter); Jean-François Richet (Plane, Mutiny). So what are they waiting for?

The idiocy of Greenland: Migration (also directed by Waugh) notwithstanding, I seem to have a thing for these guys’ movies—quite literal B-movies in every respect, I tend to give them solid B grades (spoiler alert: it’s what I give Mutiny), because they are exactly what they state themselves to be, and thus solidly deliver on expectations. Mutiny is merely the latest in a line of these, the second by Statham this year alone, after Shelter. Last year we got A Working Man (the weakest of this recent stretch—not quite a B for that one); the year before that, the one that launched this stretch of Statham movies and still my favorite (albeit also getting a solid B): The Beekeeper.

I do wish the rest of these movies were more like The Beekeeper: self-aware, sprinkled with effective humor, leaning into its own preposterousness. I liked Mutiny a bit more than I expected, but was still slightly disappointed at its self-seriousness. We’re all here to see Jason Statham shoot a bunch of bad guys in the head, I get it, but would it hurt to make it a little more fun? I guess Statham is just cranking these out for a regular paycheck, and I don’t begrudge him that. I suppose my plea is more for the directors and writers. Beekeeper writer Kurt Wimmer has not written any of these other movies, and someone needs to pick up the phone and call him again. Apparently he wrote The Beekeeper 2, coming out next year, so that’s promising, at least.

As for Mutiny, I’ll give Jean-François Richet credit for pacing, and maybe most surprising of all, restraint. There is plenty of engaging action in this movie, but it’s not wall-to-wall with it; we actually get some semblance of a story. Statham’s ex-cop, Cole Reed, has been working for shipping company magnate Tibu Campallo (Ramon Tikaram) for five years, and they’ve become close friends. Reed is even declared “family” by Campallo, who is retiring and handing the company off to his son, Kameron Campallo (Chaneil Kular). While Reed is driving Tibu home, they are ambushed—the first exciting action sequence in the film—and the rest of the film follows Reed’s quest for vengeance against the perpetrators.

Most of this happens on a container ship, making Mutiny feel like Captain Phillips if it were a dumb action movie. It’s not like we’ve never seen action sequences among shipping containers before, but having it be the setting of three quarters of the movie does lend it a small bit of novelty. We also get one female lead, Angie Ellis (Annabelle Wallis), a KMG employee forced to report to this ship at the last minute who is evidently the only crew member not in on the whole human trafficking scheme that is ultimately revealed. As the sole female principal cast member, Mutiny is far from passing the Bechdel test, but I’ll give the movie points for not putting romance anywhere in the story, and for making Ellis herself an ex-Navy woman who is more than capable and never needs saving.

So really, we get to watch Statham and Wallis kick a bunch of guys’ asses for a bit more than an hour, all on a container ship. It’s what I expected from this movie, it’s what I wanted, and it’s what it gave me. There’s also the primary villain in the ship’s captain, Marko Madsen (Roland Møller), who might be taking orders from a guy orchestrating all this, but he’s also the guy we all know Statham will have a final, climactic square-off with. Sure, this could just be called “Die Hard on a container ship,” but formulas are followed because they work.

It’s when people try to get too cute or complicated with formulas when they stop working. That’s where these movies smartly refuse to go. They are clearly mid-tier, mid-budget, and employ mid-level movie stars, but a movie like Mutiny is truly making the most of what it has to work with, sometimes slightly clever with its action sequences but never getting out over its skis with that cleverness. Statham’s final hand-to-hand battle is not wildly inventive, but is just inventive enough, as with the rest of the movie, to keep you inching closer to the edge of your seat. It’s why I keep going to these movies, even though they aren’t great—they’re not just good enough, but consistently so. If “working class action” is its own subgenre, Jason Statham was born to play in it.

Okay, fine: this makes her look like a woman in need of protecting. Blame the people who selected available screen shots! These two are equally capable of kicking ass, take my word for it.

Overall: B

TONY

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

I thought a lot about the 2004 film Sideways while I was watching Tony. On the surface, there’s nothing earth-shattering here, but is there anything wrong with it? I would be hard pressed to find any genuine criticisms of this film, which is just lovely from start to finish, with surprisingly elegant nods to how Anthony Bourdain got into heavy drug use in his early adulthood.

Nearly everything about this movie charmed me. Maybe the best thing about it is the choice to focus on Bourdain’s very early career. This is generally the only way a biopic is successful, when the story narrows its focus to a single incident or particular time of the person’s life. In this instance, a college-aged Bourdain follows his high school crush from New Jersey to Provincetown, is quickly brought down by his own hubris, and winds up takig a job at a local restaurant run by a Portuguese chef played by Antonio Banderas. (Banderas is actually Spanish, but there is no indication he changed his accent at all. I suppose I could criticize that? Chef is a composite of Bourdain’s early-years mentors, though, so I suppose I can let it go. It’s not like I’d be able to distinguish between a Spanish or Portuguese accent anyway; it’s only that the character is referred to as Portuguese and Antonio Banderas is widely known to be Spanish.)

Bourdain himself, through most of the movie telling people to call him “Tony” until a key moment that makes him change his mind, is played by Dominic Sessa, who was previously seen in the wonderful 2023 Alexander Payne film The Holdovers. I noted then that he was impressive, and in Tony he proves to be inspired casting; I find myself eager to follow his acting career going forward. Granted, both of these particular parts are young kids of bravado masking insecurity, so hopefully we’ll get to see him play many kinds of roles.

Emilia Jones plays Nancy, the crush Tony follows to Provincetown, and she’s also lovely, if playing a part that mostly exists to move the plot forward. But that’s just it—the plot moves forward so assuredly, thanks to excellent direction by Matt Johnson. This is the guy who directed the incomparable Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, which opened earlier this year; and the surprisingly excellent BlackBerry in 2023. And Tony’s breezy 106 minutes were edited by Curt Lobb and Robert Upchurch, both of whom also worked with Johnson on both those other movies. These guys clearly make an excellent team.

I’m not usually struck by the cinematography in movies like this, but even without it ever calling attention to itself, I was here—and Tony was shot by One Battle After Another cinematographer Michael Bauman. All of this underscores that even the best director is nothing without an excellent crew working with them.

Rounding out the cast are Tuner’s Leo Woodall, as a kitchen colleague who introduces Bourdain to drugs; and Stavros Halkias, who had a memorable turn as a cop in Bugonia. (Here, his character also works in the kitchen, and takes a lot of good-natured hits at his weight.) Although there’s a few others who work in this kitchen who really don’t get much in the way of lines—all of them Black characters, it is perhaps worth noting—this restaurant staff become a kind of found family for Bourdain as he’s away from home.

We only get the slightest hints at Bourdain’s relationships with his parents, including an encouraging father (Rich Sommer) and a skeptical mother (Dagmara Dominczyk). But even the smallest parts in Tony are almost uniformly great performances; it’s a big part of what makes this movie irresistible. And there’s something about Sessa’s performance as Tony in particular, you can’t help but root for him even as he’s being a dipshit twenty-something with far more confidence than could possibly be justified.

Maybe the best thing about Tony, and its focus on the very start of a career that he stumbled into when convinced he was going to do something else (specifically writing, and he lies about being a writer for much of the film), is how it sidesteps this man’s lifelong struggles—not to mention his sad and tragic end—without completely ignoring them. Johnson alludes to the directions Bourdain’s life is destined to go, but only ever in a way that showcases the young man’s vast potential. I didn’t care as much about Tony’s pursuit of Nancy as I did about his evolving relationship with Chef, who allows Tony to sleep on his porch in exchange for clearning dishes as the restaurant.

It should be said that Antonio Banderas is a good a reason to see Tony as any, in one of the warmest roles he’s ever played. I’m starting to feel a little like I’ve been sleeping on this Matt Johnson guy—I’m consistently delighted by his films, and he should be credited for clearly knowing how to assemble teams that fit perfectly as collaborators and make great art. I’ll be eager to see what we get next from Johnson and from Dominic Sessa. It’s such a treat to experience such synthesis of talent.

Just like that chef’s jacket, this movie is a gift.

Overall: A-