TWIST Advance: SATURDAY CHURCH

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

Back in 2008, there was this thoroughly charming, coming-of-age / coming-out movie that was also a gay-themed musical, called Were the World Mine. Its music was so wonderful that I bought the soundtrack. Ah, those innocent -- or maybe ignorant -- cisgendered, white-centric days.

That's not to denigrate Were the World Mine in any way, as to this day I would eagerly recommend it to anyone. Its Shakespearean themes are magically interwoven into its story, and it remains a unique vision worthy of attention. But a lot of time has also passed since then, and we now live in a post-Tangerine world. In 2008, the year Barack Obama was elected, we lived in a time of naive hope. The 2017 Trump era underscores the need for attention to wider ranges of oppressed communities, and to intersectionality, and Saturday Church couldn't be coming at a better time.

Indeed, it should be very much considered a compliment to say that Saturday Church bears notable resemblance to Were the World Mine. It doesn't rip it off in any way, and neither is it literate in the same way -- rather, it expands upon similar concepts, and draws a clearer line between fantasy and reality, even as it indulges in fantastical musical numbers. These are all literal fantasies of its main character, Ulysses (Luka Kain, fairly new to feature films after some experience in both commercials and on Broadway, very well cast here), a young teenager withdrawing from the harsh real-world reactions to a budding interest in women's clothes.

With Saturday Church, writer-director Damon Cardasis is not preoccupied with gender identity, particularly when it comes to his main character. The hard-nosed Aunt Rose, recruited to look after Ulysses and little brother Abe (Jaylin Fletcher) in the wake of their father's death as their mother has to take on extra work, is the only one who makes a point of characterizing Ulysses as both "a black boy, and he's gay." But Aunt Rose, played by Regina Rose without much nuance perhaps because her character is the most one-dimensional, clearly doesn't know what she's talking about.

Ulysses takes the subway into Manhattan, encounters a group of young trans women, and gets invited to the Saturday Church of the title, inspired by a real-life church program for LGBTQ youth.  These transgender women, who are a few years older, takes Ulysses under their wing, along with a young boy, Raymond (Marquis Rodriguez), who develops a sweetly romantic interest. Neither he nor any of Ulysses's other new friends spend any time discussing labels -- an almost ironic notion, given that Saturday Church is one of very few films in which trans women of color are actually played by trans women of color: the only other notable one that comes to mind is, again, Tangerine. That said, for all their entertainingly jaded sarcasm, they prove to be real friends to Ulysses, very much encouraging the blossoming of interest in makeup and high heeled shoes.

In its way, Saturday Church is also a coming-out story, only within the context of gender variance. And make no mistake, there is some real emotional pain and some sexual trauma, a realistic reflection of what too many people go through in order to survive. This movie goes out of its way to reflect the stark realities of many trans women of color in particular, the wide range of attitudes toward sex work and the constraints on finding lasting relationships. What makes this movie truly stand apart is how it spends equal time on the unequivocal joys that can also be found along the journey of authentic self-discovery.

To say I found Saturday Church deeply moving would be an understatement. Sure, it made me laugh, it made me cry. It made me cry for multiple reasons. I shed tears for the familiar tensions Ulysses endured in the face of ignorant family members, contrived as they sometimes were. But for perhaps the first time at a movie with so much focus on transgender issues, I shed far more tears of joy, quite literally, as I watched a young person never specifically gendered find an authentic self.

The musical sequences, used both sparingly and effectively, are icing on the cake. Unlike a more conventional musical, where characters burst into song for no discernible reason, here the singing is always part of the main character's elaborate fantasies, which still grounds them in the real world. Compared to Were the World Mine, which I just can't help doing because the films are so similar in concept, the songs are not quite as good, the lyrics less refined or clever, but on average the vocal talent here is far better.  Saturday Church features some truly great singing, albeit paired with choreography that could have used a little more polish.

That said, any minor complaint I might have about it is nothing but nitpicking. It's all about the story, and even with at least one particularly one-note character, this story is deeply affecting. Saturday Church has charms all its own, unlikely to be forgotten for some time.

Luka Kain turns tragedy into beauty in Saturday Church.

Overall: A-

THE FOREIGNER

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

There's a shot that opens The Foreigner that immediately makes the film feel like something with potential, a birds-eye view of students exiting a school building that's so well composed, you think this movie might be more than just a suspense procedural, maybe something a little artful.

Well, that's also where that potential pretty much ends. The cinematography remains solid throughout, but it doesn't take long for the unfolding of the story here to prove it's by the numbers. A lot of this is in the details, only noticeable if you find yourself looking for it. This, I suppose, is the double-edged sword of seeing movies far more frequently than most: "movie magic" has to make far more of an effort to woo critics than it does regular audiences. The swiftness with which computer forensics zeroes in on the details of things like video surveillance of a vehicle license plate -- none of that is ever realistic, but if it were, these movies would be very dull.

The Foreigner is hardly perfect, but neither is it at all dull. Anyone going to a movie like this will get all they're asking from it -- and possibly more, in fact. The plot is a little more complicated than just Quan Minh (Jackie Chan, in an unusually dramatic tole) seeking revenge on the terrorist bombers who kill his daughter in the film's opening sequence.

A whole lot of the movie involves Minh doing a bit of terrorizing of his own, aimed at Irish deputy minister Liam Hennesy (Pierce Brosnan, never better and giving easily the best performance here) in an effort simply to get the names of the bombers. Minh never kills anyone, just uses his extensive background of special forces training to scare the shit out of Hennesy and his staff and bodyguards with nonlethal explosions and traps, going so far as to follow him to his secluded farmhouse and hide out in the nearby woods.

There is an intriguing backstory to all this, involving the IRA and a new faction behind the terrorist bombings calling themselves "The Authentic IRA." This taps into some real-world politics in the UK, and it bears noting that American audiences are perhaps more likely to swallow any historical details here without question -- that part all seems realistic enough to me, but who knows how British audiences will perceive it.

In any case, Quan Minh finds himself inserted into the midst of some very messy and violent political activism just by virtue of his daughter being collateral damage. The unfolding of this plot offers much more food for thought than movies of this sort tend to have, and that is to its credit.

In the end, though, The Foreigner is just a straightforward revenge flick, with a martial arts legend proving he's still got the goods at age 63. Chan has long been famous for doing his own stunts and he's not letting up here, which makes a lot of the fight sequences a joy to watch. They do take a while to get to, because the story comes first, which is refreshing in the midst of today's endlessly brainless blockbusters.

Here is a movie with much going for it, and also a lot of unrealized potential. Chan himself is great as an action star, and serviceable as an actor. Engrossing though the story may be, ultimately this is still a genre flick, and one that will please those with interest, and leave everyone else assured they aren't missing anything vital.

Jackie Chan and Pierce Brosnan find themselves with shady connections.

Overall: B

VICTORIA & ABDUL

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

It can be fun to hear untold stories about hugely famous historical figures, and in the case of Queen Victoria, it was only revealed within the past decade that her close friendship with a Muslim Indian man had been kept secret for over a century.

To call this a juicy story would be an understatement, and that's what makes the film adaptation of Victoria & Abdul somewhat disappointing. One can only presume the book of the same name on which it's based, by Shrabani Basu, gets into much more depth. For the movie, director Stephen Frears (The Queen, Philomena) turns it into little more than a pleasant diversion. And there is a lot to mine in a story like this, considering the story begins only three decades into Britain's rule over India, and the context of overt racism of the British toward South Asians.

Queen Victoria is the one person in her house who not only doesn't seem to care that Abdul isn't white or Christian -- she even enlists him to teach her his native language of Urdu -- but is largely ignorant of the geopolitical details behind the racial resentments among her household staff, or among the rest of her country for that matter.

A lot of this is touched on in Victoria & Abdul, but it is also largely glossed over, in favor of telling this amusing "opposites attract" story. Within that context, Frears offers something fairly entertaining, but fails to impress upon the audience how historically significant this really was. The tone is very "isn't it funny this happened!" rather than demonstrating how extraordinary it was, both that it happened, and that Victoria's successor, her son, King Edward VII, nearly succeeded in scrubbing Abdul completely from the historical record.

But, I suppose there's another approach you could take with this film. It's telling a story not yet told on film, at least, and a unique one at that. It gets a tad corny at times ("Based on true events ... mostly," we are told at the beginning), and with a different approach it could have been much more profound. Still, the performers elevate the material.

How can anyone resist Judi Dench as Queen Victoria -- twenty years after she played the same character in Mrs. Brown, also about another scandalous relationship with a servant? Dench is now 82 years old and is as commanding a screen presence as ever. Ali Fazal, as Abdul, is plenty convincing as the exotic man who charmed the queen. And it's a treat as always to see Eddie Izzard, here playing her son Bertie with unusual subtlety.

I do wish Frears did more to unpack the gender politics of a Muslim man fawning over a British queen in the 19th century, while the wife and mother-in-law the queen insisted he bring out from India spend all their time in burqas. That was a bit too heavy for the tone Frears was going for, though, so Abdul's family is just regarded as exotic curiosities rather than figures of cultural misogyny. I guess racial prejudice and classism were enough for Frears to tackle -- and even there only superficially.

Realistically, the criticisms I have for Victoria & Abdul are not going to be on the minds of most people actually bothering to watch it. This is the kind of movie that makes it easy for viewers to convince themselves they can feel good about how much progress has been made since the time of its setting, and admire the independent streak of an unusual woman in power. In much the same vein but to far less a degree than Gone with the Wind, it gets more problematic the deeper you dig but within the context of undeniably compelling storytelling.

Judi Dench and Ali Fazal are an internationally platonic odd couple in Victoria & Abdul.

Overall: B

BLADE RUNNER 2049

Directing: B+
Acting: B+
Writing: B+
Cinematography: A-
Editing: A-
Special Effects: B+
Production Design: B+

If "Future Noir" actually is a genre, then the 1982 film Blade Runner both originated it and remains the gold standard. How long that has been the case is perhaps up for debate, given the film's definitively lesser version that was seen in its original theatrical run; its much-improved tenth-anniversary "Director's Cut" in 1992 (which director Ridley Scott, ironically, did not directly work on); or the 25th-anniversary "Final Cut" released in 2007, which Scott did supervise and which remains widely considered the definitive version.

This puts Blade Runner 2049 into a peculiar position, with a uniquely rich cinematic history behind it, which includes what is arguably the most influential science fiction film of the past forty years, something it took years to be recognized as the masterpiece it remains, and gives this sequel truly impossible standards to live up to. Those of us with a working knowledge of the original Blade Runner are left to wonder: How does Blade Runner 2049 play to the many people likely to see it that have not seen its predecessor?

This movie, made 35 years after the first but set only 30 years later (so the aging actor Harrison Ford is playing five years younger than his real age -- typical), does work on its own terms. But is it a wholly original, or even potentially influential, cinematic vision? Plainly it is not. But that doesn't mean it isn't worthy of our attention -- original writer Hampton Fancher returns as story writer and co-script writer; Ridley Scott serves as an Executive Producer; and visionary director Denis Villeneuve, who brought us the likes of Prisoners, Sicario and Arrival, steps in as director. All of these things are to its benefit.

But those things alone are not enough. I don't usually focus as much on production design as other elements of a film, and perhaps I should, but the world of Blade Runner commands it. What made Blade Runner unique was its very deliberate film noir aesthetic, set in the future -- right down to its 1940s-influenced fashions, Sean Young with her sculpted hair and high shoulder pads. Not one single scene was bathed in bright light; all exterior shots were at nighttime, and any daytime interior shots featured deliberately dimmed beams of daylight filtering in through tinted windows at sharp angles. This shroud of darkness served a dual purpose: it kept the film's look in line with film noir, and also helped obscure any set designs that might otherwise look far more dated over time. Almost every detail of that movie still holds up after all these years, with few exceptions (perhaps most notably, all the indoor smoking, which never occurs in 2049).

And while Blade Runner's claustrophobic and crowded cityscape was exclusively confined to Los Angeles -- that film's characters never leave the city -- Villeneuve goes out of his way to expand those horizons in Blade Runner 2049: there's even a fleeting glimpse of a sign that says NOW LEAVING GREATER LOS ANGELES. Police Officer K (Ryan Gosling), on a mission to unravel a new mystery very much tied to the first film, visits a vast area of San Diego turned into a gargantuan waste dump, and spends an extended sequence in a post-apocalyptic Las Vegas, virtually uninhabited and shrouded in orange fog, "radiation: nominal." This makes for several exterior shots featuring no crowds whatsoever, Ridley Scott's world of overpopulation replaced with vast, open spaces. It succeeds in making Blade Runner 2049 its own thing, but also pulls it rather far from the film noir aesthetic on which this world was originally predicated. Even the office of LAPD's Lieutenant Joshi (Robin Wright, continuing her late-career trend of delivering all her lines like a robot), is stark white -- so stark, in fact, that one can easily imagine that set looking dated within just a few years.

So what of the story itself, then? There really is too much to spoil, preventing me from saying much about it -- true fans of the original film in particular will want to experience on their own how this film turns what is accepted to be true on its head. Anyone who hasn't seen the first film should be able to follow, but they won't have a full grasp on the historical significance of 2049's twists, within the Blade Runner universe.

As such, I am left to comment on that universe itself -- the very thing that made the original Blade Runner the cultural touchstone it is. One thing slightly bugs me: the worlds of Blade Runner's 2019 and Blade Runner 2049 are a tad too similar. Villeneuve takes Ridley Scott's original vision of a future Los Angeles and successfully expands on it, but I hesitate to say he updates it. The world changes dramatically in three decades. Consider what an average crowd looked like in 1982 versus today -- most notably how today's crowds are made up of people looking down at mobile devices. The key change here is that in 1982, what Ridley Scott presented seemed like a completely new, but still plausible future. But that film's setting is essentially our real-world present, clearly turned out to be nothing like it, and by necessity turns Blade Runner into an alternate rather than future universe. Even within that framework, I would expect greater cultural shifts over three decades than what we see here. The Los Angeles cityscape remains the same kind of dense world of giant advertisements, just switched from screens to holograms and rendered with crisper special effects.

Yet, for all that nitpicking, I found myself completely absorbed by Blade Runner 2049, both its story and its world. Does it really need to be two hours and 43 minutes long? Probably not, but even for a film with very little in the way of action set pieces, that times goes by without a dull moment. Not even the friend I saw it with, who had never seen the first film and even declared "I'm just not that into sci-fi," complained about the run time.

And Blade Runner 2049 certainly has provocative and beautiful and haunting moments all its own. The themes of what it means to be human remain, and are expanded; not only does this world contain the original "replicants" -- synthetically created humans with shortened life spans whose rebellious members are hunted by the officers known as Blade Runners (of which Officer K is one) -- but here we have the addition of Joi (a luminous Ana de Armas), a holographic companion K keeps at home, who seems very convincingly to develop real feelings for him. If a replicant sex worker says, "Oh, you don't like real girls" as means of recognizing her own rejection, what are we to consider "real"?

It's hardly a spoiler to acknowledge that Blade Runner 2049 answers the defining question of its predecessor: whether Rick Deckard himself was a replicant. This alone is sure to disappoint some fans of the original, as many hold dear the joy in the mystery. But once Officer K catches up to Deckard, solving that particular mystery only gives way to myriad new ones. 2049 occasionally suffers from clunky dialogue like "If this gets out, it breaks the world," but there is something to the way this film expands that world. It can't possibly live up to what came before it, but it is still filled with riches that are their own reward, which likely increase with repeat viewings.

A Blade Runner takes a 2049 detour to a post-apocalyptic Las Vegas.

Overall: B+

BATTLE OF THE SEXES

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

Here is a movie that is fun from the very start. The moment the 20th Century Fox fanfare begins the picture, the sound design as deliberately made to come across as though it's something literally from 1973. And thereafter, the detailed seventies-era production design is very impressive, at least to someone who wasn't quite born yet. Maybe it's different if you were actually around at the time.

But it can hardly be argued that Emma Stone and Steve Carell aren't both perfectly cast as tennis champions Billie Jean King and Boby Riggs. Carell had to wear clearly prosthetic teeth, but with the makeup and hair design, the actors' similarities to the real-life people they played is uncanny.

There is much to love about Battle of the Sexes, not least of which is its depiction of King's sexuality. Here it is seen with a unique level of understanding in historical context -- King's fears regarding secrets being made public at a time when homosexuality was far less accepted in American culture. That said, her husband, Larry King (Austin Stowell, classically handsome and almost pointedly unthreatening), is depicted as so supportive and understanding it's almost suspect. It's not unrealistic to think the two of them remained friends, but was he really so understanding so quickly?

It's just a movie, after all -- but an effectively entertaining one, with just the right amount of subtle poignancy. Battle of the Sexes is clearly intended as a rallying cry for feminism, but never at the expense of its existence foremost as a fun time at the cinema. This is the almost curious thing about Bobby Riggs, in fact -- Carell makes him easily sympathetic, in spite of his bloviating about being openly chauvinistic. He may be a genuine tennis champion, but he's also a showman, something Billie Jean King always understands. "He's just a clown," she says. It's Jack Kramer (Bill Pullman) she has a problem with, as he's the guy going out of his way to keep woman players unfairly paid a fraction of what the men get.

Bobby Riggs as a character is somewhat problematic, being characterized as this "lovable sexist." But when Riggs wins his publicity stunt of a match against women's champ Margaret Court, who buckles under pressure, King finally takes on his challenge because she can't stand Riggs getting publicly validated as he declares men the superior sex, no matter how ridiculous the context. She largely plays along with the silly publicity, but when it comes down to it, what matters is the match.

There's a lot going on in Battle of the Sexes, a sports movie that triples as a women's liberation period piece and a coming-of-age lesbian love story. In lesser hands, it could have been a mess. This is a quasi-biopic that necessarily oversimplifies things, but in all the right ways, moving the story forward at a steady clip but never feeling rushed. King falls for a hairdresser, and honestly Emma Stone's onscreen chemistry with Andrea Riseborough is moderate at best -- this might provide a little weight to the argument for casting actually gay actors in gay parts. Stone is otherwise wonderful, however, fully convincing otherwise as Billie Jean King and playing well off of Carell.

With unusually well-executed cinematography for a film about athletes, Battle of the Sexes is always nice to look at. And since it's not so much challenging as it is a reflection of changing times and one of the key women in manifesting change, it qualifies as a crowd pleaser, offering a story easy to get pleasantly lost in. The movie itself isn't shattering any of the barriers that Billie Jean King did herself, but a reflection of where we once were as a society and how far we've come from it. It's subtle on this point, but it's hopeful and comforting.

Emma Stone and Steve Carell turn showboating into a match point.

Overall: B+

BRAD'S STATUS

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

Writer-director Mike White and Ben Stiller are a match made in heaven for people who like movies that make them uncomfortable. They both specialize in uniquely awkward scenarios. In this case, Stiller plays the titular Brad, a man pushing fifty who is obsessed with comparing his own life accomplishments with those of his friends from college.

The script for Brad's Status is easily its greatest strength, and clearly a lot of people thought so: those college friends make their own brief appearances in the story, and they are played by the likes of Michael Sheen, Luke Wilson, Jemaine Clement, and Mike White himself. All these friends have gone on to far more success than Brad feels he's achieved, since he started a nonprofit and is "merely" middle-class.

Here was have what is essentially a midlife crisis movie, but a rather unusual one. Brad is taking his son Troy (Austin Abrams) on a trip to Boston to tour prospective colleges, and the curious thing about Brad's deep insecurities is how little he presses them on his son. Brad makes mild missteps with Troy, but generally they have a thoughtful, loving, healthy relationship. It's nice to see a story like this where none of the problems stem from a guy's issues with his father.

Brad's Status, in fact, avoids cliche all around -- except that at one point Brad refers to himself as a cliche. This is in the same scene where a young woman of color literally says to him, "Trust me, your life is enough." The whole of this movie could be distilled to that point, with this straight white man paralyzed by envy and an inability to see his own privilege. This alone could make Brad's Status worthy of academic analysis, given the irony in the film itself still putting all of the focus on a straight white man.

I guess it's the rare movie that could perhaps open the minds of other middle-aged straight white men, though. If there were a message here, it would be "You don't have it so bad." There doesn't seem to be any real dysfunction to Brad's family, which is nice, and allows for a more focused, if subtle, look at a man's fragile ego.

Brad marvels at the ability of his wife, Melanie (Jenna Fischer), to be just satisfied with the things in her life. I am perhaps in the minority here, but Melanie was who I related to the most -- why spend time regretting untapped ambitions? I watched this movie and thought about how there are literally studies showing that wealth makes people no happier than poor people, and actually poor people are often happier. Brad is so jaded he feels he can make a bigger difference in the world by getting rich and becoming a philanthropist than by running a nonprofit. That's objectively debatable, and soon enough Brad's amusingly ridiculous fantasies about his college friends' imagined great lives give way their respective harsh realities.

Mike White is particularly skilled at nuance, and it takes a while to appreciate the quality of a movie like this. At first Brad is so disillusioned with the direction of his life, as he considers the possibilities for his son, I found myself hoping the whole movie wouldn't be this depressing. But fear not -- Brad's Status may be regularly squirm-inducing in its awkwardness, but it gets less dark as it goes on. It ends in a place surprisingly pleasant, and deeply affecting.

Austin Abrams and Ben Stiller have pretty good lives, it turns out.

Overall: B+

THE TIGER HUNTER

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

Context is everything, I suppose. Would I have liked The Tiger Hunter, a pleasant diversion of a feel-good movie, any less if it didn't feel like the perfect antidote to mother! ? I wouldn't go out of my way to recommend anyone rush into theatres to see The Tiger Hunter, and I would warn everyone to stay the hell away from mother! -- yet, if you were to insist on seeing mother!, then The Tiger Hunter is the perfect palate cleanser. It's so oversimplified it's just this side of corny -- if not brainless -- but the performers are every last one of them undeniably sweet and charming.

Something tells me no one involved in the making of The Tiger Hunter expected any direct comparisons to mother!  Well, here I am! But okay I'm done with that line of thinking now. Let's just talk about The Tiger Hunter.

The title is slightly misleading. You get one fleeting glimpse of an actual tiger in the beginning, an imagined flashback to a revered father's time when he saved an Indian village by killing a local tiger. The "present day" of this movie is actually 1979, which means the tiger incident would have been some two decades before. Again with the context: anyone revering the killing of a tiger in 2017 would be met with much derision. It's a different world.

Even 1979 Chicago, to which Sami Malik travels from Indian in search of the good life through an engineering job, is a different world. Sami is played by 38-year-old Danny Pudi, who is himself actually from Chicago. This means the Indian accent he has in the film is faked -- and now I feel a little vindicated thinking his accent didn't sound quite right, especially next to all the genuinely Indian actors in the scenes set in India.

Other than the accent, though -- which is barely noticeable -- Pudi has an irresistible screen presence, his character relentlessly upbeat. Even his smile brightens the screen, as does that of his love interest, Ruby (Karen David), the childhood friend he wants to marry and is trying to impress with a good job so her army general father (Glee's Iqbal Theba) will approve of their union.

Anyway, it sort of makes sense for director and co-writer Lena Khan to set this story in 1979, especially for one about an immigrant. Setting it in 2017 would make it feel far more tone deaf, given all the current politics. Surely 1979 wasn't so ideal either, but it's a lot easier to imagine as a simpler time for people to come to America filled with simple and idealistic dreams.

Sami discovers upon his arrival that the company that had offered him a job has been restructured, and his only opportunity is a bottom-of-the-rung position literally in the basement. This is where he befriends a coworker played by Jon Heder (of Napoleon Dynamite fame). He's also given charity from a Pakisani immigrant (Rizwan Manji) who takes pity on him and invites him to stay at his place. Although it's part of the joke that they get to this apartment and 12 other South Asian engineers with low-level jobs (plus one guy who "looks Bangladeshi, but he's just black" -- one of the odder jokes in the movie), this offer comes so quickly that The Tiger Hunter is rendered its own kind of fantasy very early on.

Everything about this story is simple, and predictable, straightforward, and unchallenging. Sometimes that's exactly what you want. Even as a comedy this story could really have used more depth -- any depth at all, really -- but it's still fine for what it is. It's unoffensive and ridiculously easy to surrender to its charms; to its credit, The Tiger Hunter never quite gets stupid. Sami is just trying to live up to the reputation of his revered "Tiger Hunter" father. Will he succeed? You know the answer to that, but you'll have a nice enough time getting your expectations met.

Danny Pudi stars in the least homoerotic movie ever to feature seven men in a single bed.

Overall: B

MOTHER!

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

The pretension seeping through every surface of Mother! begins with its very title. What's with that exclamation point? To me, it punctuates the contempt I feel for this movie.

From the very first frame, the reaction is What the fuck? It ends with a bit of a What now? Everything in between makes absolutely zero things about it clear. Darren Aronofsky is a truly accomplished director, but I guess in his middle age he's more interested in offering a cinematic version of a stroke. He clearly wants his audience to understand Mother! is about something. What is it about, then? Someone explain it to me. No, I take that back. I wasted two hours of my life on this movie already.

I don't even know how I could offer any spoilers. Mother! is rotten as soon as it starts. But it's a sneaky kind of rotten, like when you chew a bite of food a few times, pleasantly oblivious until you realize there are maggots in your mouth. Too disgusting for you? Well . . . spoiler alert! There's a point in Mother! where a rabid crowd of zealots eat the main character's baby. Why that happens, I couldn't tell you. Darren Aronofsky should have a chat with Cormack McCarthy. Now there's a guy who knows how to make effective use of baby eating.

I couldn't provide a logical reason behind a single one of the choices Aronofsky makes in Mother! Well, except maybe for his decision to cast Michelle Pfeiffer, in one of the countless mystifying and/or pointless supporting roles. Pfeiffer is legitimately hilarious in this movie, which is weird because of how dark and disturbing it is. For a while, anyway. Then it's just oppressively chaotic. By then, Pfeiffer has disappeared. But when she's on screen, she plays the wife of a surprise house guest (a cigarette-hacking Ed Harris) as a deliciously cold bitch. We need to see more of Michelle Pfeiffer.

The point of view is from Jennifer Lawrence's nameless protagonist. Or is it? It would sure seem so, with Matthew Libatique's cinematography incessantly following her around this gigantic house she never leaves, right behind her head. She's consistently bewildered. It's her one emotion during this story that I could relate to.

It doesn't take long to realize time isn't quite linear. Things switch around too quickly. We learn that she helped restore this entire house, a massive house with countless rooms that evidently stands in the middle of a field with no roads to it, after it burned to the ground. "I lost everything," says her husband, played by Javier Bardem. These are two excellent actors who, in this instance, occasionally don't seem so excellent thanks to some clunky or subtly bizarre dialogue. By the end, there's an endless sequence in which reality gets so distorted that I couldn't tell if this was all an echo of a literal apocalypse (a word Jennifer Lawrence actually utters at one point), or maybe her character was nuts and having hallucinations so elaboriate that at one point the house literally turns into a war zone. I'm talking graphically shot soldiers, bullets through the face.

Weirdly -- I mean, this whole movie is weird -- Mother! startled me several times, like it was trying to be a horror movie, but each of them occurs within the first half. I even jumped when the heart that appears in the toilet squirts blood. Oh, and the toad in the basement.

I'm sure film snobs will insist this movie's "deeper meaning" is clear and anyone who can't figure out what the fuck it was about or what literally any of it means is a moron. There's a strong sense of allegory, just nothing even approaching clarity.

I found the massive marketing push over the past couple of weeks to be suspect, and I was right. Someone saw this movie and said, "Let's bombard the public with so much advertising that they give in before they knew what hit them!" I, on the other hand, put my trust in a proven director. But, even the greats typically make one or two steaming piles of shit movies.

Could this have been better if it were edited differently, maybe? Surely? Did all these great actors really read this script and say, "I have to be a part of this!" Did Darren Aronofsky roofie them all? Seriously, I don't understand. I can't remember the last movie I willingly sat through that had so few genuinely redeeming qualities. We're meant to ask, Is any of this real? By the last quarter of this movie I was just thinking, Get on with it! At least give us the detail that ties this mess together. And then the so-called twist comes in the closing scene and it's simultaneously dumb, disappointing, and more confusing the more you consider everything that preceded it. All that's left is the compulsion to warn the world not to waste their time and money on this movie.

Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem are like whaaat and so is everyone in the audience all day forever.

Overall: C-

BEACH RATS

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

Here is a young actor to keep an eye out for: Harris Dickinson, who is a revelation in Beach Rats, as Frankie, a sexually repressed and confused teen living in Brooklyn. Dickinson is himself all of 20 years old, and grew up in London, and yet it's impossible to imagine any other actor better conveying the fine nuances of Frankie's complex range of emotions -- his self-doubt, his inner struggles, even his internalized homophobia.

Writer-Director Eliza Hittman unpacks this story with deceptive simplicity. She also ends it with a frustrating lack of any resolution whatsoever, something at once respectable and maddening. It's the one true complaint I might have about this film, the way it feels like it ends abruptly in the middle of Frankie's story. Being ambiguous is one thing; fading quickly to black at a seemingly random moment is quite another.

Until that end, however, Beach Rats is a uniquely compelling vision, Frankie systematically making your heart break for him. He hangs out with three straight "bro" types whose behaviors he emulates. It's only after an opening scene in which Frankie is on his computer trolling for older men that we find this out. And he meets a sweet girl (Madeline Weinstein) on the boardwalk while hanging out there with said friends. She complicates things as she makes bold moves in pursuit of Frankie, who has difficulty feigning arousal.

Beach Rats is unusually frank in its depictions of sex, no doubt made easier by its lacking of an MPAA rating. Just consider it a hard-R, considering the number of (flaccid) penises that flash on the screen -- several of them on Frankie's computer as he clicks through a Chat Roulette type site evidently local to Brooklyn. But whether they are of Frankie and Simone making fumbling attempts at physical intimacy, or Frankie and several older men he takes to the beach at night, all these scenes are tastefully shot.

The cinematography, in fact, is regularly hypnotic -- even shots of Frankie and his friends blowing smoke rings at a hookah bar. Beach Rats was shot by Hélène Louvart, who has a long resume but also shot Pina, the 2011 tribute to choreographer Pina Bausch that is arguably the single documentary in history that worked stupendously in 3D. Beach Rats employs a lot of handheld camera work which is seamlessly and beautifully integrated into the story.

That story takes a darker turn near the end, and that's after learning that his father is dying of cancer. He has a younger sister with her own interest in boys, and a mother with clearly too much on her emotional plate. Then Frankie and his friends hatch a plan to get drugs off one of the guys he finds on that website -- he convinces the guys that it's all he uses the site for. Frankie does a lot of drugs, including snorting pills he snatches from his father's prescriptions and crushes into powder.

Now all they want is weed. But in this endeavor, things get increasingly uncomfortable. A feeling builds, that this is going nowhere good. Where it heads is something that could have been worse. It could also be a lot better. Such is the case with Frankie. But if you're looking for either a definitive sign of hope or confirmation of hopelessness with this poor kid, you won't find either one of them here. Will his turmoil go on for the rest of his life? You might leave this movie just overcome with the wishful thinking that one day he'll be okay. That feeling is a credit to both the film's assured direction and Harris Dickinson's unsurpassed performance.

Harris Dickinson gives a uniquely heartbreaking performance in Beach Rats.

Overall: B+

HOME AGAIN

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

Home Again had a unique effect on me. I can't think of any other movie that started out inadvertently creeping me out and ended by winning me over with its objectively contrived charms. I can't even think of anyone I would recommend this movie to, at least not fairly. If I wanted to jump right into sweeping generalizations, I'd say that superficial and/or easily entertained middle-aged women would love it. Okay maybe also superficial and/or easily entertained middle-aged gay men.

Everyone else? Not so much. Smug intellectuals and anyone who fancies themselves a movie connoisseur would revel in tearing this movie apart. This movie isn't for them anyway.

Home Again has much in common with Nancy Meyers movies like Something's Gotta Give (2003) and It's Complicated (2009) -- and for good reason: it's written and directed by Meyers's own daughter, Hallie Meyers-Shyer, practically as an homage. I'll give her this much credit: Meyers may be well-known for placing characters in lavishly decorated homes that seem far more expensive than they could possibly afford, but Meyers-Shyer actually lends the impeccable home some real plausibility. Reese Witherspoon's Alice Kinney lives in a gorgeous home left to her by her late dad who was a famous film director. And after all, Meyers-Shyer knows from having a famous film director parent.

The plausibility of the premise is another story. Alice, on her fortieth birthday, meets a blandly handsome twenty-something, Harry (Pico Alexander), at a bar, and takes both him and his two friends home. Harry sleeps in her bed after getting sick before they can consummate a would-be one-night stand, and his friends pass out on living room couches. Before she knows it, Alice's formerly famous actor mother (Candice Bergen, given not near enough to do) is suggesting she allow these "struggling artist" types who are trying to get a movie made to stay a few nights in her guest house.

Harry is a director, and his friends are writer George (Jon Rudnitsky) and actor Teddy (Nat Wolff). Together they form this one-dimensional trio of young Stepford Men whose main quality is that they all embody what every adoring old lady imagines their grandson to be, which is to say, flawlessly wholesome. These guys are always just barely off from how normal humans interact with each other, another writer could really take this into another direction and reveal them to be pod people. Honestly, I don't think Hallie Meyers-Shyer really knows what it's like to be young and trying to make it as a filmmaker in L.A. These kids get all the luck, encounter no grime or starvation, and somehow successfully move in on what in L.A. qualifies as a upper-middle-class family. Anywhere else, Alice would simply be rich.

Somehow, though, even in L.A., Alice has no entitlement complex, and neither do these three young men. That seems left up to the "socialite" played magnificently by Lake Bell, who briefly employs Alice as the fledgling interior designer she's attempting to reinvent herself as.

And that's the thing about Home Again, really: the performances. The material is far too trite for any of it to be exactly Oscar-worthy, and yet all of the seasoned players elevate the material. Meyers-Shyer's writing has serious room for improvement, but Reese Witherspoon hasn't met a single line of dialogue she can't make work. It doesn't take long to start rooting for Alice, even though her problems are so benign. Everyone in this movie is so relentlessly pleasant, not even Michael Sheen as the separated husband can manage to be unlikable. Alice has two young daughters who are, of course, both precocious and adorable.

There are no shitbags in this universe! In Los Angeles. That alone should disqualify the whole movie. But, as the story went on, I found myself won over by this objectively stupid movie, because -- well, that's what well-executed fantasies do. Home Again doesn't present itself as a fantasy, which is one of its many problems. It also has three Millennial men so "decent" they come off as anachronistic. It's like members of the Cleaver family from Leave It to Beaver time traveled to present day but somehow just didn't notice. Although, okay, Harry Cleaver does have sex with a forty-year-old woman. Leave it to someone in the Meyers family to make even that come across as wholesome.

Not that it can't be, mind you. It's just that in the Meyers world, there are no truly deep character flaws -- only minor mistakes the world's exclusively good people quickly learn from. Honestly, nothing about this movie is sensible, except for the idea that a woman can date a younger man and not be judged for it. It's disconcerting to see such a ridiculous story carried by winning performances.

Reese Witherspoon and Pico Alexander make an attractive inter-generational sandwich.

Overall: B-