ELIO

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

Elio had its hooks into me from the very beginning. I really thought, until all the alien stuff started happening, that I might love this movie in a way I haven’t loved a Pixar film in a while, since their early days of one animated feature masterpiece after the other.

In retrospect, that was kind of the point. After thirty years of cinema history, Pixar has a playbook, and Elio very much follows it. I could mention who wrote the script, but who has time for that? This movie has nine credited writers. It feels a little like an advanced AI was prompted to “write a Pixar movie.” Opening sequence with overtones of incongruous sadness? Check! Lonely child protagonist who has lost either one or both parents? Check! Eventual non-human buddy for said child designed or optimum merchandising potential? Check!

Maybe I’ve just gotten old and cynical, but unfortunately, Pixar is feeling its age a bit as well. I was charmed well enough by Elio, but I could also see that it worked because of a well-worn and successful formula. The story is permeated by layers of familiarity. Pixar is supposed to be pushing the boundaries of the form, but Elio often feels like a cross between E.T. and Finding Nemo, at least in terms of its world-building.

Don’t get me wrong. Small children will almost certainly love this movie. Not that small children have standards. I long for the days of Pixar’s revolutionary depth of sophistication, both visual and thematic. WALL-E (2008) or Inside Out (2015), this is not. This is more on par with Onward (2020) or Luca (2021), more recent titles that push Pixar closer to the realm of “generic.” Elio is certainly flashier than those other recent films, and as such will probably dazzle kids more successfully, with its alien characters that are wildly varied, in both physical form and personality.

There’s still something missing, though, a certain depth of imagination. The visuals here are rendered well, but they take sometimes surprisingly rudimentary form. When Elio is sucked through a portal from earth by the aliens he so desperately wants to be abducted by, the tunnel of shifting lights and forms he glides through are patterns of simple goemetric shapes.

Elio begins with a huge amount of potential—even as it recognizably tugs at our heartstrings, introducing us to his aunt, Olga (Zoe Saldaña), who is still getting used to taking care of Elio (Yonas Kibreab) after the death of his parents. Olga being too busy with work to pay enough attention to him, and Elio’s deep loneliness and difficulty connecting, is all very familiar territory. But then we find out he is obsessed with connecting with life on other planets, and in particular the Voyager 1, which was launched in 1977 and equipped with a “Golden Record,” pressed with greetings in many languages from Earth.

Both Voyager 1 and the Golden Record figure prominently in the plot of Elio, which is easy to imagine catching the attention of anyone with an obsession with the intersection of science and history. Elio lends these artifacts appropriate thematic weight—until it doesn’t. In the end, these things are just used as plot devices for something . . . cute. If it ignites interest in any other kids in these artifacts, I suppose that’s a plus. But the story of Elio takes everything predictably back to themes of familial connection, using alien characters, half of which look like exotic sea creatures and half of which look like robots, as the vessel.

Elio himself is a delightful, charming, and deeply empathetic character, voiced well by Yonas Kibreab and rendered with visual nuance. The same goes for Olga, and the arc of these two, disconnected and then finding each other, was indeed something that moved me. I even got teary-eyed a couple of times. A formula that works is still a formula, and it’s the trappings that really make all the difference in greatness. Once aliens hear Elio’s call to come and get him, Elio spends much more time on standard cuteness than on anything truly meaningful.

Perhaps I ask too much of this movie. Indeed, not every movie has to mean something. My issue here is that Pixar spent years setting an industry standard, and now other studios are meeting that standard more than they do. It makes me sad. For the most part, Elio works—but, it works as a fairly generic entertainment, one that no one will be talking about generations from now, certainly not like they do with Toy Story or Finding Nemo or even Inside Out (all of which got boosts from sequels, granted—but good ones, all of them better than Elio).

I am constantly saying a movie should be judged on its own terms. That’s just the trouble with Elio, though: none of its terms are really its own. It’s a Frankenstein of Pixar films, stitched from previously used elements that saw better days in their previous lives. I had a pretty good time watching it, I smiled a lot, I suppose that counts for something. I’m also going to post this review and then get on with my life without ever really thinking about this movie again.

We know how to have fun, right?

Overall: B-

28 YEARS LATER

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

There is a lot that makes 28 Years Later stand apart from its two predecessors, the breakthrough 28 Days Later from 2002, which was a watershed moment for zombies (they’re fast now!) as well as the horror genre overall; and 28 Weeks Later from 2007, which was arguably even better. Now, 18 years after the last film, 28 Years Later does some surprisingly deft genre blending, easing into some dramatic territory, and it’s something I really respect. I will also be very up front about this, though: this film just isn’t as good as the previous two.

It does make one wonder, though, how anyone going in blind to this film might digest it, with none of the baggage of films that changed cinema history in mind. It’s certainly not critical to understanding what’s going on in this story, especially since, as all of these movies do, it opens in flashback to the outbreak of the “Rage” virus (a term I don’t recall any character saying in this film, come to think of it). In this case, we are introduced to a young boy who narrowly escapes the “infected.” The character shows up again in the very last scene of the film, serving as narrative bookends—neither of which land especially well. The rest of the movie in between is far better.

I really must say something more about that final scene. I won’t spoil what happens, except to say that the character has become someone I think of now as “Parkour Altar Boy.” If you think that sounds painfully corny and stupid, you would be right. Indeed, the scene offers a tonal turn that makes no sense whatsoever, and left me just thinking: What the fuck is this? Truly, my overall opinion of this film would be higher if not for that one scene, which truly knocked the entire enterprise down a peg, and has the unfortunate distinction of serving as its final note.

After we flash-forward from the opening sequence, to 28 years later, and until that closing scene, the characters we follow are entirely unrelated: Alfie Williams is excellent in his feature film debut as Spike, the 12-year-old embarking on a rite of passage in his isolated, island community. After decades of the entire island of Great Britain being under strict quarantine—anyone who steps foot on it is not allowed to leave—a smaller island has sustained a community that sporadically ventures to the mainland via a heavily fortified tidal causeway. Spike is now being escorted by his dad, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), to the mainland to experience his first kills of infected.

Here we already arrive at Nitpick Corner. I rewatched the previous two films in recent weeks to prepare for this new release, and my biggest complaint about both films was the astonishingly stupid decisions the characters kept making. To 28 Years Later’s credit, there’s not nearly as much of that, as there is far more logic to character behavior this time around—which also allows for a pretty funny sequence in which a shipwrecked Swedish soldier (Edvin Ryding) tries to explain to a confused Spike what life in his home country, which is clearly just like ours in the real world today, is like. Not only has Spike never seen a smartphone, he doesn’t even know what a radio is (although that seems implausible). There remains a lot of unanswered questions, such as the first film’s establishment of the ability to starve infected to death, and yet now the infected seem to be thriving.

They also seem to have adapted and evolved, in some cases in very odd ways. The trailer to 28 Years Later is cut to suggest there are now giant swamp-monster infected, as well as a possibly sinister psycho played by Ralph Fiennes. Both suggestions are very misleading, and the “exciting twist” of this third installment isn’t so much a new direction with “fast zombies” as a new population of slow, bloated zombies that look like giant baby dolls that just dug themselves out of their own graves. Also they love to eat earthworms (or shoelaces, in a pinch).

I suspected at first that Spike and Jamie would get stuck on the mainland and have to fend for themselves, maybe survive and maybe not, for the entire movie. They do make it back to the island, albeit barely—thanks to a beautifully shot, harrowing nighttime sequence in which they barely escape a giant one of the infected. (Who is naked, by the way, as are all the infected in this movie. You’ve never seen so much zombie dong.) But, Spike also has a mother, Isla (Jodie Comer), who is clearly unwell with increasingly frequent spells of confusion, in a community with no doctors. When Spike learns there is a doctor not far away on the mainland, he slips Isla across the causeway in search of the doctor, even though Jamie insists he’s insane.

Dr. Kelson is indeed a nut, weirdly obsessed with death and collecting human bones and skulls to fashion into giant towers. He’s had a lot of time on his hands, I guess. Anyway, of course Kelson is not quite what he seems. Ralph Fiennes plays Kelson in a way that injects 28 Years Later with a welcome new energy, although he’s really only present in roughly the final third. The narrative shifts from focusing on Spike’s relationship with his father to that with his mother, and eventually there are people in the theater audibly sniffling. “Horror tearjerker” was a new direction I was not expecting.

Director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland worked together on 28 Days Later in 2002, and they re-team here, to mostly satisfying success. “Mostly” is the operative word there. They bring welcome new ideas to the franchise, most notably that death can be beautiful even in a post-apocaplyptic world. Maybe not fully fleshed out, but whatever. A whole lot of 28 Years Later is uniquely compelling. I just wish it didn’t end with a narrative choice that was utterly baffling.

Here we are, guests of a very stable and very normal person.

Overall: B

JANE AUSTEN WRECKED MY LIFE

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

Who decided on this English translation of Jane Austen a gâché ma vie, I wonder? That’s the original, French title of this film, and when you ask Google to translate, it comes up with Jane Austen Ruined My Life. That’s a better title, no? Am I wrong here? If you remove every word except gâché, however, it translates as spoiled. Should the title have been Jane Austen Spoiled My Life? I should note that I do not speak French at all, and for all I know, gâché is closer colloquially to wrecked in American English than to ruined. I have no idea! I’m really glad we had this talk, I think we really accomplished something here today.

Did writer-director Laura Piani, though? That’s the real question here, because I feel a little ambivalent about this film. It seems to have genuinely charmed a lot of critics. Right now I am kind of leaning toward the title Jane Austen Muted My Evening.

I mean: it’s fine. I have no major complaints. Well, except that I could get little sense of Piani’s direction, and I often could not tell if the characters here lacked any naturalism or if it’s just a vibe of French sensibility that is foreign to me. The characters interact with each other with an unusually comfortable familiarity, which ironically radiated off the screen to me as awkward.

Here’s a burning question. Are Parisians big on book stores? The one where Agathe (Camille Rutherford) works appears to be thriving. Apparently, this is one of the things in Jane Austen Wrecked My Life that is real: the French love books. In fact, the bookstore where Agathe works, Shakespeare and Company, is very real—an English-language bookstore that has been open in Paris since 1951. I wish I had known that while I was actually watching the movie. I’d have paid more attention during the many book store scenes. I remain a little annoyed by the seemingly haphazard way they put books on the shelves. Is there no order in this store?

Agathe works with her best friend, Félix (Pablo Pauly), who indulges Agathe in her obsession with Jane Austen novels. She is also a writer, an insecure one who writers “cheap romances” (as one writing teacher puts it), but Félix submitted her unfinished chapters to the Jane Austen residency without telling her. After much resistance, Félix convinces her to go. This place is located in the middle of the woods somewhere in England, and the sweet old lady running the place speaks French fluently—as does her grown son she send to pick up Agathe, Oliver (Charlie Anson). These are British actors and characters, and Agathe of course speaks English fluently, so Jane Austen Wrecked My Life has dialogue pretty evenly mixed between the two languages.

Here we get to the Great Question: should Agathe be with Félix, or with Oliver? The story here plays out in a way transparently meant to mirror Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy from Pride and Prejudice. Ironically, when Agathe and Félix first meet, he has a prejudice against Austen’s work, calling it “overrated.” We already know Agathe has deep pride in Austen’s work.

It’s all pleasant enough, although Agathe longs for the “poetic spark” of novels that she finds lacking in reality—and most of the time, I kind of felt the same way about this movie. The one exception, and a notable one at that, is when the Jane Austen Residency puts on a ball, with everyone wearing the clothing of Austen’s era, and doing the same English Country dancing. At this point, Félix has surprised Agathe with a visit, the day after she actually has discovered a spark with Oliver, and here she moves from dancing with one, to dancing to the other, and back. This sequence is dazzling in its execution, the moment when Jane Austen Wrecked My Life actually sidesteps into the realm of movie magic. I rather wish more of the rest of the movie were like it.

As it is, Jane Austen Wrecked My Life is sprinkled with subtle charms, including Oliver’s dad evidently slipping into the kind of giddy dementia that has him gardening with nothing on from the waist down. I’ll probably forget this movie entirely within a week, as it blossoms in moments but utterly wilts in the shadow of the work that inspired it, but it’s still a nice memory for the short time it will last.

That moment when magic happens.

Overall: B

HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON

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

The burning question right now is this: what was the point of a live-action remake of the Dreamworks Animation hit How to Train Your Dragon, all of fifteen years later? What purpose does it serve, aside from greater box office earnings?

I’m coming up short on an answer. When the original animated film was released in 2010, one of my minor complaints was about its “needlessly breakneck pace from start to finish,” in a film with a runtime of 98 minutes. With this 2025 live-action remake, however, the runtime is 125 minutes—and that feels about 20 minutes too long.

Disney has already cashed in on a string of live-action remakes of classic animated features, which were also mostly pointless but for their box office potential. Dreamworks is apparently eager jump on this bandwagon, even though the animated How to Train Your Dragon already spawned two sequels, the most recent of which was released only six years ago. Sitting through the live-action version today, I found myself struggling to see how it justified its own existence, especially given how similar it is to the original, just fleshed out to a runtime far too long for an ostensibly “family film” one can assume would include children in its audience. Kids were rapt by the 2010 film; they may get bored with this one. For more likely, adults will.

What’s more, “live action” is a term used very loosely here, as all the dragons are rendered with CGI animation. The only difference is the human characters actually acted on camera. The most fun thing, arguably, about this How to Train Your Dragon is that Gerard Butler reprises his role as Stoick, the disconnected father of Hiccup, this story’s hero.

Hiccup was voiced in 2010 by Jay Baruchel, who was 28 at the time but still had his youthful-sounding voice. He’s 43 years old now and clearly can’t play a teenage character onscreen—he wouldn’t even have been able to 15 years ago—so he’s replaced by 17-year old Mason Thames, much more convincing as the scrawny Viking kid who dreams of being a dragon killer but only manages to wreak havoc with his awkward mistakes instead. Thames is well cast as a live-action avatar for how Hiccup was drawn as an animated character, and he holds the screen well too.

On the off chance you don’t already know, the basic premise here is that Hiccup discovers the dragons of this world, of which there are many, are misunderstood animals and not the ruthless killers the Viking villagers have regarded them as for generations. He manages to injure the elusive “Night Fury” dragon, but when he goes to hill the dragon, whom he later names “Toothless,” he befriends him instead. What follows is a struggle for Hiccup to convince his village that the dragons are smarter than they appear and mean them no harm.

Hiccup is very effectively an awkward outsider, which makes for a lot of awkwardness in the first half of this film, which sometimes works and a lot of times doesn’t. A lot of this How to Train Your Dragon is so cutesy and cartoony, it again begs the question: why not just let the animated feature stand on its own? Nothing truly realistic occurs in this “live action” rendering, least of all the way Hiccup eventually figures out how to ride Toothless. And I said this in my review of the 2010 film and it still feels the same now: the creature design of Toothless has an uncanny resemblance to that of Stitch from Lilo & Stitch—and ironically, a live action remake o Lilo & Stitch is also in theaters right now.

To this new How to Train Your Dragon’s credit, it gets better as it goes along—the second half is much better, and certainly more exciting, than the first half. I suppose that’s better than it being the other way around. I eventually found myself invested in the characters and in the story, in ways I wasn’t for some time at the start. And some further fun casting includes Nick Frost as Gobber, the guy who trains upcoming dragon slayers; Julian Dennison (the kid previously seen in Hunt for the Wilderpeople, Deadpool 2, Godzilla vs. Kong, and Y2K) as one of Hiccup’s fellow dragonslayers-in-training; and Nico Parker (Joe’s daughter from the premiere episode of The Last of Us) as Astrid, Hiccup’s eventual love interest.

By the time of How to Train Your Dragon’s conclusion, I had to admit I was pretty entertained. It just had to go through a bit more awkward, cartoony cutesiness to get there than I would have preferred. Entertaining or not, I remain unconvinced there was any great reason to make this movie to begin with, but if it’s the thing on the screen in front of you then it works well enough.

This seems awfully familiar.

MATERIALISTS

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

Materialists follows the expected beats of a romance. It goes where you expect it to go, because that is what audiences that go to movies like this come to see. It also slowly becomes much more than its genre trappings, revealing a depth that is probably much more than typical audiences bargained for. In some ways, it even subverts the genre, even as it adheres to its basic rules. We know who the protagonist is meant to be with, and we know who she will end up with.

The marketing makes Materialists seem much more typical a romantic film than it really is. Indeed, had anyone else written and directed it, I’d have taken one look at the trailer and said: “Bleh.” But this was made by Celine Song, who also wrote and directed last year’s sublime Past Lives. Materialists is the kind of sophomore effort that typically brings far more mainstream fare, and that is clearly what the marketers want you to think. But Celine Song smuggles in a shocking amount of cynicism and subtle commentary—on romantic cinema, and on romance itself. This remains unchanged even after the expected note of hopefulness it ends on.

Song’s approach is something I deeply respect. She can be counted on to do something different, as in the opening sequence, which features what we later learn to be the first two cave people who ever married. It’s a serene setting, we hear birds chirping, we see an exchange of flowers and tools. I had no idea what to expect, and kept wondering if something jarring was about to happen. Were they going suddenly get attacked by a bear? What? Instead, they simply lean their heads into each other tenderly, and then a hard cut to the title card, over modern-day New York City.

Lucy is a professional matchmaker with a string of proud successes, yet deliberately living her life as a single woman. To play this part, Song cast Dakota Johnson, an actor with talent and potential but who only really succeeds when paired with the right director. Celine Song could not be more right for her; she’s exceptionally well cast here. I was invested in Lucy as a character, even though she treats romance like “math” (a word she uses frequently) and has such an aversion to low income that she’s convinced herself she’s waiting for a filthy rich man to marry.

Enter Pedro Pascal, borderline overexposed at the moment, as Harry, who has earned millions in “private equity,” as he reveals to Lucy while hitting on her at his brother’s wedding, where the bride was also Lucy’s client. Implausibly—again with the typical story beats—Lucy also runs into her old boyfriend, John (Chris Evans), during her first conversation with Harry. Thus, much as in Past Lives, we get a love triangle of sorts, though it plays out much more differently.

There is still an unusually contemplative tone to Materialists, which I appreciated. There’s a real shallowness to Lucy’s approach to matchmaking, and this feels very deliberate, at times pointed. Lucy is very aware of her own shallowness and harbors a great deal of self-loathing. One of the many things I loved about this film is how there is no competition of jealousy between the two men. There is a minor twist to Harry’s arc, but it humanizes him rather than making him the villain. In fact, Song tells this story entirely from the point of view of the women in it—Lucy’s most of all, but also the others at her matchmaking firm (particularly her boss (Marin Ireland), and one client she’s struggling to find a match for (Zoe Winters).

Admittedly I have some mixed feelings about the subplot involving this client, Sophie, who gets assaulted by a man she was matched with by Lucy. This isn’t exactly a spoiler, because not only do we never see the assault onscreen—Lucy gets told about it after the fact—but Celine Song doesn’t even cast any actor to play him: we never once see him onscreen. This is a wise choice much more typical of a woman filmmaker, but I am also not sure how I feel about its inclusion as a subplot at all. Maybe it’s about the inherent dangers of the dating world, and the thoughtless ways they can be disregarded. On the other hand, Sophie herself is used as a plot device to reveal the kindness Lucy actually has deep inside her.

One wonders how much Celine Song herself even thought about these nuances, the way audiences could easily argue back and forth as to whether the film itself is cynical and materialistic, or if it’s a commentary on these things. Honestly, I just found myself deeply engaged with the story, between all three of these characters, largely because of Song’s phenomenally layered writing. It’s lovely to see Chris Evans again in a part that’s not Captain America, and it’s especially nice to see actual grown-up actors in a romance for grown-ups (Pascal, Evans, and Johnson are 50, 44, and 35, respectively—a pretty wide age rang in which the woman is predictably the youngest, sure, but even she’s now ten years past her Fifty Shades of Grey breakout).

In any case, I was taken in by the romance of Materialists, its effectiveness augmented by excellent writing, competent performances, and Shabier Kirchner’s cinematography, which is far more beautiful than a film like this has any need to be. But therein lie its success, with many parts of it being better than they need to be. Song is not cashing in here, she is sharing an authentic vision every bit as much as she did with her previous film. If I had to choose I’d pretty easily say Past Lives was better, even though I have given them both the same overall grade—but a film need only be judged in its own context, on its own merits. Materialists takes all the familiarities of the romance genre and enhances them.

This is one in which Dakota Johnson is actually good!

Overall: A-

THE PHOENICIAN SCHEME

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

Wes Anderson is nothing if not singular, unique, a director who long ago became an instantly recognizable brand. You need take only one step into a cinema universe to know that it’s his. No one else makes movies even remotely like his.

He is also remarkably consistent. To any extent that he varies, he simply moves from good to delightful and back. Sometimes, the over-reliance on detailed dioramas for his production design is a distraction from the story he is ostensibly telling. Sometimes, the design and story work perfectly in tandem, as in 2023’s Asteroid City, which I found to be his most delightful film since 2012’s Moonrise Kingdom. In fact, I was so taken with Asteroid City that this new film, The Phoenician Scheme, suffers a bit by comparison. I do wonder if anyone who hasn’t seen Asteroid City might be more inclined to enjoy The Phoenician Scheme. That indeed seemed to be the case with the companion I saw the film with today.

I just didn’t find the story to be as compelling. Sure, the opening sequence is an attention-grabber: Zsa-zsa Korda (Benicio Del Toro) is experiencing the latest in a long line of assassination attempts, during which a copassenger on a plane is blown in half. Of course, being a Wes Anderson film, this is done with a trick of editing and set decoration, with a quick flash and cut to the passenger left in his seat only from the waist down, with a large splatter of blood on the wall behind him. It’s noteworthy that there is more violence in this than any Wes Anderson film before it, giving it a distinct flavor even in the context of his aesthetic. But it’s still all done with a sense of on-set practical effects, like an ornately staged play on camera.

The Phoenician Scheme has separate parts that are far more interesting than the film is on the whole. Korda is a morally dubious and wildly resilient character, surviving assassination attempts so many times that he now takes it for granted—both the continued attempts on his life, and his “habit” of surviving them. What I can’t quite decide is how well Benicio Del Toro fits into Wes Anderson’s universe. He plays Korda with a gravelly American accent, which is both impressive and the source of some cognitive dissonance if you’ve seen him in many other films.

Broadly speaking, The Phoenician Scheme focuses on a father-daughter relationship, between Korda and a 21-year-old nun named Liesl (Mia Threapleton, Kate Winslet’s 24-year-old daughter). Anderson stages his scenes so meticulously, it’s tempting to find the performances of his actors lacking in some way. On the contrary, by and large they are impressive in the context of these unusual demands. Things like camera position and blocking are far more important in Wes Anderson films than in most others, making it sometimes feel like diorama positioning is more important than nuance. Every character in these movies stands very still and delivers a deadpan performance—and still, Del Toro and Threapleton offer surprisingly credible deliveries as estranged family members.

The most delightful performance is that of Michael Cera, who, without spoiling anything, gives two different performances as the same character. He’s perfectly cast and a perfect fit for Anderson; it makes you wonder why he hasn’t been in a bunch of Anderson’s films already. Beyond these three, once again we get a cavalcade of stars in bit parts, some of them shockingly brief: Tom Hanks (who had a larger part in Asteroid City), Bryan Cranston (ditto), Scarlett Johansson, Jeffrey Wright, Benedict Cumberbatch, Riz Ahmed, Hope Davis, F. Murray Abraham, even Bill Murray. Willem Dafoe is onscreen for literally a matter of seconds, you could check the time on your watch and miss him. One of The Phoenician Scheme’s minor wrinkles is the widely varied nature of how well cast these actors are in the parts they play—Jeffrey Wright is amazing in almost anything, but not so much here; Benedict Cumberbatch completely disappears in his part, both physically and through performance. The tiny part Bill Murray plays is an effectively clever joke unto itself.

The plot here, though, was the thing I found difficult to lock into. Korda plays an unscrupulous industrialist meeting different investors in turn to convince them to help fill the gap of a budget shortfall—for what, I could never quite retain. It had something to do with using slave labor in Phoenicia (hence the title), and provides fodder for Liesl to judge Korda’s moral shortcomings, even as she considers his offer to make her sole heir of his estate—why, when he has nine other children, all of them sons, is never quite clear, even though she immediate asks him directly: “Why?” He brushes such questions aside, evidently Anderson’s means of doing the same. It does allow her, however, to accompany him with all his visits with investors, allowing for a succession of very Andersonian, if unusually but cleverly violent, set pieces.

I am not the father of a daughter, so there could be some lack of relatability for me there. The Phoenician Scheme has a definite arc for these two characters, giving them far more dimension, both individually and in relation to each other, than you might expect. The plotting is so complex that it requires a lot of setup and exposition, and yet most of the time you just marvel at the artistry of how every scene is designed and framed. Wes Anderson is a true original, and so is this film, even among his own filmography. There’s just also a bit of unevenness in execution, particularly in both the story editing and the casting. I could argue that Michael Cera’s performance alone is worth the price of admission, though, and Threapleton’s comes close as well. Del Toro didn’t quite compel me as much here, and he’s in nearly every scene. This makes The Phoenician Scheme somewhat of a mixed bag, but on average a fine time at the movies.

Hey I’m going to start icing my wine in my bathroom’s bidet too!

Overall: B

SIFF Advance: TWINLESS

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

Twinless is about an unlikely friendship that occurs between two guys, one straight and one gay, after they meet in a support group for people grieving the loss of a twin. That is the log line of the film, and it remains an accurate descriptor from beginning to end, albeit deceptively so: Without spoiling anything, I will say that a major twist occurs in the second act, and it was one I found deeply disappointing. I wanted this to be an exploration of an unlikely friendship under these circumstances, but not only do the circumstances change—we discover them to have been different all along. This allows for some profound conflict between the two lead characters, but does the conflict have to be that profound? I would argue that it doesn’t, and that it changes what makes their connection compelling in the first place.

And yet, here’s the thing: I was utterly charmed, and sometimes deeply moved, by Twinless in spite of this disappointment. It’s a big thing, but it’s still the only thing I didn’t like about this film. And it should be noted that writer-director James Sweeney, who has been developing this script for a solid ten years, has written his characters with such dimension, depth, and authenticity, it goes a long way toward making up for that one disappointment. Sweeney himself plays the gay character, Dennis, and it’s always impressive when a director can star in his own film and actually pull it off. It could be argued that Dennis is borderline psychotic, at least judging by his behavior, and still he’s undeniably empathetic, even when it becomes unclear whether he deserves empathy.

The crucial element of Twinless, however, is Dylan O’Brien, previously best known for Young-Adult roles like Thomas in The Maze Runner or Stiles in the television series Teen Wolf. Now in his early thirties, he’s making a new name for himself in indie cinema, and nowhere more impressively than here in Twinless, as Roman, who is grieving the loss of his identical twin brother, Rocky. O’Brien’s performance is amazing in this movie, the one thing that most recommends it.

There is a relatively short flashback sequence in which O’Brien also plays the twin brother, Rocky—the gay one. This makes the second film in short order featuring a non-twin actor playing twins onscreen, and although the movies share nothing in common otherwise, it still invites mention of Sinners, in which Michael B. Jordan does the same. The key difference is that Jordan plays opposite himself in a great deal of Sinners, in ways that are often disctracting because we know, and can tell, that there were never two of him actually on camera at the same time. Sweeney deftly sidesteps this problem by making Roman and Rocky estranged, and never showing the two characters onscreen at the same time.

There’s also the fact of Roman and Rocky’s diverging sexualities, though—something that becomes a key plot point, and one very well handled. This does mean that O’Brien, a straight man, spends some time playing a gay man, which is something many often argue should not be done. While I agree broadly that gay actors should be given gay parts, I am also not militant about this, and believe context and circumstance always matter. It’s certainly relevant that Sweeney himself is gay, and he was the one giving direction on these performances, reportedly with some reticence on O’Brien’s part to get too far into depicting effeminacy. The minor miracle of Twinless is that O’Brien’s performance is incredible, both as Roman and as Rocky—they may be technically identical, but they have distinct mannerisms and appearances (choice of clothing, facial hair) that make then feel like wholly different people. In the Rocky flashback scenes, it took me a while to realize it was even the same actor.

The central theme of Twinless is loneliness, and though it is contextualized with the specificity of losing a built-in best friend that often comes with being a twin, it also transcends that specificity. Dennis is lonely for different reasons, and these two guys are dealing with their loneliness in very different ways, but have found each other as a means of, if not filling that hole, then covering it up a bit.

Twinless also has great, well-rounded characters, particularly Marcie (Aisling Franciosi), the receptionist at Dennis’s work who Roman starts dating after he accompanies Dennis to her Halloween party. Dennis has spent a lot of time making wildly inaccurate assumptions about Marcie, which makes it easy for us as viewers to do the same, to see her as a sweet but incredibly naive woman. She actually is sweet, but not naive, and it turns out she won’t stand for anyone’s bullshit—certainly not Dennis’s, and not Roman’s either. In addition to Franciosi, Gilmore Girls’s Lauren Graham is a welcome presence in just a few scenes as Roman and Rocky’s mother, playing tensions with Roman as they both navigate the loss of a loved one. In a scene when both Marcie and Dennis go home with Roman for Christmas, Marcie, ever the understanding one, tolerates their inevitable arguing with grace, explaining to the less-understanding Dennis, “I think they’re grieving.”

I haven’t said much yet about how funny Twinless is, with both a unique sensibility and a unique sense of humor. This film is very much a dramedy, and I would indeed recommend having tissues handy. It also has a keen understanding of how people deal with grief in very different ways, and may hit differently if you have lost someone very close to you, twin or not. But it also has some incredibly effective humor, often cutting through the grief in the best way. It’s often uncomfortable, but I hesitate to call Twinless “cringe comedy,” as it rarely truly made me squirm in my seat (not usually my favorite kind of humor). It could also be said that a gay character pining after a straight guy he can’t have is a bit overdone, but again, Sweeney effectively makes it his own, creating a truly singular story. Were it not for the one thing that genuinely disappointed me, I would probably be saying I adored this movie, to a similar degree that I adored films like All of Us Strangers or National Anthem. But, reconciliation through disappointment—also a major theme of Twinless—has its own deep and lasting value.

They don’t have their twins but they have each other: a complicated but compelling story of connection between a straight man and a gay man.

Overall: B+

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - THE FINAL RECKONING

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

If you’re a Gen-Xer feeling nostalgic for movies featuring Tom Cruise in his underwear, then boy, is this your lucky weekend! He spends a lot of time in his underwear in Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning. I can only assume he’s eager for us all to see how fit he still is at the age of 62. With a net worth of nearly $900 million, this guy can surely afford all the necessary personal trainers and nutritionists he might need, and still I shudder to think of the time and effort that must go into maintaining a body like that. Plus, he needs that body for all the stunt work he famously does himself. I’m 49 and I can barely get up from a sitting position without groaning in pain.

Still, I’m a little stuck on the screentime Cruise spends in nothing but tight boxer briefs in this movie. At first, Ethan Hunt is running on a treadmill to prepare for a deep sea dive. Of course one of many expendable villains attacks him, and we get a fight scene entirely choreographed with Cruise in his boxer briefs. It’s like the Mission: Impossible version of the fight scene in Eastern Promises, except Cruise doesn't have the courage to go totally naked. Don’t be such a coward, Tom! You’re known for movie stunts, after all—why not truly shock everyone by going full frontal? Maybe his scrotum is the only part of his body with enough wrinkles to make him actually look his age.

A few scenes later, Ethan strips down again, this time as part of his narrow escape from a crashed submarine rolling off an ocean floor cliff. This is how we get the iconic shot of him in the fetal position, floating toward any iced-over ocean surface. Admittedly, it’s a beautiful shot, and all that bare skin effectively adds to the visual impact. This is, in fact, one of the things that impressed me most about The Final Reckoning—Fraser Taggart’s cinematography. Taggart has only four feature film credits as Cinematographer, but his last one was 2023’s Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning (Part One in 2023; now just Dead Reckoning since they changed their mind about the name of this year’s movie, its own release date delayed several times, the final delay due to the 2023 actors’ strike). There are two different signature set pieces in The Final Reckoning, and the biplane chase is clearly getting the most attention. But I was most wowed by the rolling ocean-floor submarine sequence, in which Ethan is in and out of water depending on the compartment he’s in, and water flowing from one compartment to another is what causes the submarine to tilt. This sequence has a great deal of fantastic camera work, the angle we see frequently off kilter from what is actually up or down for Ethan, giving us a visceral sense of his own spatial confusion. The missiles that also roll around or fall into the water just to complicate things is icing on the cake.

This is, after all, what we come to Mission: Impossible movies for. It wasn’t so much the case in the franchise’s early years—the first Mission: Impossible was released in 1996, and although it did have some enduringly famous set pieces of its own (the wire heist; the leap from an exploding helecopter to a train—honestly the dumbest looking stunt in the entire franchise), it spent a lot more time on spycraft and, particularly in the wire heist scene, suspense. As the films have gone on, now 29 years of them, on average they have gotten better as they went. Mission: Impossible II was the most forgettable, and then, for me at least, Dead Reckoning was the first since then to dip slightly.

And this is where I seem to break from the critical consensus—people really loved Dead Reckoning two years ago, but while I still found it very entertaining, I also found it overlong (2 hours and 43 minutes is about 40 minutes too many) and too reliant on rehashing set piece concepts from earlier movies. What’s more, the visual effects during the train crash scene were too obviously CGI, to a degree not as noticeable since the aforementioned helicopter explosion in the first film.

Thus, I find myself surprised at how the critical consensus on The Final Reckoning is less enthusiastic, and yet I found myself enjoying it more. To me, this film is closer to a return to form—utterly preposterous story, sure, but the set pieces are genuinely amazing, worth the price of admission on their own. What’s more, much like Dead Reckoning, Christopher McQuarrie (who has now directed the last four of these movies) doesn’t bother wasting any of the best action on the cold open, which here has smaller stakes than in earlier films. It still opens with a clever escape, but it’s just a taste of what’s to come, a sign of better storytelling.

Granted, The Final Reckoning is also overlong (2 hours and 49 minutes is about 45 minutes too many), evidently to allow enough space for its convoluted plotting. As in the last film, this one lacks any villain with personality, because the villain is AI, or rather “The Entity,” which is somehow breaching global nations’ nuclear arsenals one by one, with the threat of igniting a nuclear war that will annihilate humanity. We do get U.S. cabinet discussions about “strategic strikes” against eight targets worldwide, as if that has any rationale at all when it would make the planet uninhabitable. Notwithstanding the objective idiocy of the premise of these movies, it’s still nice to fantasize about Angela Bassett as the U.S. President rather than the genuine dipshit president we actually have. Bassett effortlessly commands respect, at least.

The Final Reckoning works overtime to tie all the previous films together, just as Dead Reckoning did; this time we get yet another key character returning from the first film from 1996. As always, we get unlikely heroes, and Ethan loses someone he has long cared about. Given the nature of this entire franchise, the writing is serviceable but never what we come for; what it delivers are true thrills beautifully shot (my one cinematgraphy complaint being how frequently characters stand in just the right spot for just their eyes not to be in shadow). It may be too long, but it’s never dull.

McQuarrie and Cruise do give us a somewhat curious ending this go-round, something that feels very much by design: long running characters get their own moment onscreen, as if sayiny goodbye. But the story ends with nothing preventing a return to this universe of endless stunts yet again, except maybe Tom Cruise’s age. His physical prowess is still incredible, but he can only maintain that for so much longer. Maybe the next Mission: Impossible will finally find someone to pass the baton to, even if Cruise returns in something more of a supporting role. The possibilities are endless, and there’s no reason not to think this franchise will be too.

Ethan Hunt covered from head to toe—but it doesn’t last long!

Overall: B+

THINGS LIKE THIS

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

Things Like This is an awfully bland and forgettable title for a movie premise with real promise: it’s a romantic comedy about two young men who fall in love in New York City, and one of them just happens to be fat.

I use the word “happens” loosely, because this is the first of many flaws in the execution of this film. The trailer makes it look like it’s just about two guys who don’t have their lives together, and falling in love with each other eventually helps them figure their shit out. It seemed refreshing to see a fat guy get cast in one of the lead roles, and in the trailer, his fatness is never even mentioned. And here’s the weirdest part: his fatnesss is incidental to the romance int his movie—and yet, in the opening scene, Zack Anthony (Max Talisman) is verbally dressed down by a hookup he’s just had sex with, telling him how he finds him unattractive. Zack’s response is to eat cake frosting straight out of a can. What the hell is this shit? There is almost none of this through the rest of the movie, so why make it a part of setting the stage, in the very first scene?

Things do not exactly get better from there, unless you want to count the few moments of genuine sweetness. Zack meets his love interest at a party, and the other guy’s name is also Zack—Zack Mandel. Mandel is played by Joey Pollari, and I hate that I have to say this since he’s the one “conventionally attractive” major character in the movie, but he’s also the only one with a natural screen presence, the only one with an unforced or unself-conscious delivery. The one critical thing he doesn’t have is chemistry with Talisman as the other Zack. They might have found someone he did have chemistry with had they been able to spend much time on, say, chemistry reads, but this film quite clearly did not have the budget for that.

To be fair, there is a sense that Talisman might have fared better under a different director. But the thing is, he is the star, and the director, and the writer. Which means he made the choice to cast and write himself as the fat guy who not only loves to eat right after sex (that alone isn’t so bad, I guess), but also defiantly eats cake frosting when made to feel bad about himself. These are choices I find frankly baffling.

Beyond that, Things Like This is utterly predictable, in ways that are inherently disappointing, because it didn’t have to be—it being a romantic comedy notwithstanding. Overall, the script has a vibe of being a first draft. (Realistically, it was not the first draft, which means I shudder to think what the actual first draft was like.) There’s a deeply dramatic, emotional scene on Zack Anthony’s apartment building rooftop, where Zack Mandel freaks out and breaks things off because of fear he’ll screw it up. This is a pretty universal feeling, sure, but the way the scene plays, this early in the film as well as this early in their relationship, the clear expectation of our emotional investment as viewers is entirely unearned.

Zack Mandel works for a talent agency where his boss is a complete caricature, where his friend is thinly drawn at best. Zack Anthony is a struggling writer looking to get a book about vampires published. One of Things Like This’s few accomplishments is giving Zack the confidence to say “I’m really good” about his own writing without coming across as insufferable. Nevertheless, there is a scene in which Mandel tells Anthony the plot of his book, and while Mandel says it sounds really cool, I just thought: this book sounds dumb as shit! It would never get published, but in the world of this bizarro movie—spoiler alert!—a book publisher almost immediately offers him what, to Zack Anthony at least, is a shocking amount of money.

There’s a climactic scene in which Zack Anthony sings a song (of course) in order to win over Zack Mandel, and Talisman has some genuine vocal talent. Honestly, even his performance as Zack Anthony might have been honed into something convincing in the hands of a director other than himself. Bringing another writer also wouldn’t have hurt. He must have been desperate to cover many jobs in order to get this movie made, but sadly, the final product just leaves you wondering how this movie got made. Even the outtakes that play during the end credits fall flat, a bunch of clips that make no real impact and simply intensify the mystery of their own existence.

There are many problems with Things Like This, but the fundamental one is the one-dimensional nature of nearly all of its characters. There’s earnestness here, even occasionally effective sweetness (I quite liked the winter scene in the park when they first kiss, albeit after some truly clunky dialogue), but no depth. There is always a sense that there is some depth around, somewhere, but this movie is always out of it.

A deceptively sweet image of characters who have no idea how contrived they are.

Overall: C

FRIENDSHIP

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

My experience with deeply awkward movies is very similar to that with horror movies. I spend a lot of time covering my face, unable to look at the screen. I might peek through my fingers. This is how I spent a lot of the time watching Friendship.

And, much like with horror movies, I am typically loathe to subject myself to such experiences, or certainly to recommend them to others. I make exceptions for films that transcend the genre. I suppose that makes Friendship the Exorcist of awkward-relationship movies. Except the comparison, made my many others already, to Fatal Attraction is far more apt. Nobody boils a pet in this movie, but there is a scene in which you become terrified that the obsessed character might actually kill somebody.

Marketing a film like Friendship is clearly a tricky task. I sat through the trailer to this at many other movies, always wondering at all the pull quotes from critics talking about how funny it is, while only showing clips that make it look like a disturbing thriller about someone who is increasingly unhinged. It was a very incongruous juxtaposition, and if nothing else, I knew to expect painful awkwardness—and found myself having little interest. But then the movie I was going to see tonight was revealed to have terrible reviews, so I looked over what the other options were. I couldn’t even remember what Friendship was by merely seeing the title on the theater schedule, but I looked it up and was surprised to discover it getting pretty positive attention.

So, my movie companion and I thought: what the hell, why not? Let’s pivot to this other movie where we have no idea whether we’ll be into it or not. I did come across the phrase “the Fatal Attraction of male bonding comedies,” though, and that piqued my interest immediately. That should have been used as the logline.

And, lo and behold Friendship actually is hilarious, the kind of movie that twenty years ago would have quickly gained a cult following. People familiar with Tim Robinson, and particularly his Netflix sketch comedy show I Think You Should Leave (which, full disclosure, I have never watched, may not be so surprised by this. But he is by far the best thing about Friendship, turning in an amazing performance as Craig, the socially awkward app developer who forms an unlikely friendship with his new neighbor.

The neighbor, Austin (Paul Rudd), is a local weatherman with his own insecurities, the kind of guy you wouldn’t particularly want to hang out with either but who feels like a straight up everyman compared to Craig. Craig’s wife, Tami (Kate Mara), encourages him to accept Austin’s invitation to come over for a drink. Tami has her own things to deal with, such as a fledgeling floral business and an almost-uncomfortably intimate relationship with their teenage son (Jack Dylan Grazer, previously the lead in the deeply underrated HBO limited series We Are Who We Are).

When Craig and Austin first hang out, it’s just the two of them, and Austin manages to take the awkwardness in stride. It’s when he gets invited to a group hangout with Austin’s other friends that the awkwardness begins to go truly sideways. The plot then follows a familiar arc, but it feels fresh because of the context: an obsessive man-crush taken up too many notches. Craig starts calling Austin too frequently, he shows up unannounced at inappropriate times and places, and tries to emulate some of Austin’s reckless but cool behavior, but at which Craig is deeply inept.

Rudd is well cast as the weatherman whose own social skills lack any genuine depth. But Robinson is the one who truly shines here, the single source of a great many uniquely fantastic comic moments. The parade of expressions that flash across Craig’s face is a delight unto its own, as he reacts with confusion, then suppresses it with quick denial. Robinson can be skillfully subtle one moment, then singularly over the top the next. Truly, I laughed far more at Friendship than I expected to.

Some people love the emotional turn of laughter through tears, What Friendship has to offer is laughter through suspense, a nagging sense of danger, such as when Craig goes to deliver one of the many packages that keeps getting delivered to his house by mistake, and then finds himself causally walking through Austin’s unlocked home. We don’t even know if Austin is there. And when Craig finds something truly dangerous in Austin’s office, we know Chekhov has been paged. This pays off spectacularly later.

Friendship pays off, in all senses of the phrase. This is a delicate performance walking a delicate line, and a quite impressive one at that. Offering a familiar story arc that still manages not to be predictable is no small feat. It’s all in the details, and the best details are in Tim Robinson’s performance, which is both weird and nuanced. We’ve all been in group settings with that one guy who has no idea he’s the oddball no one really likes but no one wants to hurt his feelings. If you haven’t, then maybe you’re that guy. Friendship gives us all a lot to think about.

Letting the dangerous naïveté blossom in Friendship.

Overall: B+