CATS

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

The trick to enjoying Cats—or at least, to almost enjoying it—is to be drinking while you watch it. A lot. This was what my friends and I did going in, and it really made a difference. Particularly for me, by comparison: the other two people I saw this movie with had two cocktails each. I, on the other hand, had two margaritas, to which I added an extra contraband shot of tequila each, and I then had a snack of tequila chocolates afterward. Clearly I was the smartest person in the room. That would include everyone who had been involved in the production of this movie.

But there’s another trick! If you want to be pleasantly surprised, by even the tiniest sliver of a measure, seriously lower your expectations. The one true defense that can be made of this film is that condensing it down to a two-and-a-half-minute trailer made it look a lot more horrifying than it really is, on the whole. The flip side of that is, it also made it look a lot less dull. Because let’s face it, particularly if you have never seen the famously record-length-running Broadway show on which it’s based (which itself was largely derided as just for clueless tourists), Cats is largely just a 110-minute exercise in tedium.

And yet, because of the rolling mass of negative press, we all left the movie saying it wasn’t quite as horrible as we thought it would be. We dodn’t hate it. It was just . . . dull. The second half less so, but who wants to have to sit first through an hour of confusing editing, unsettling CGI, and a script that makes no sense? It’s originally based on a 1939 collection of T.S. Elliot poems called Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, written for his godchildren. In the play, the “Jellicle Cats” are all going to a “Jellicle Ball” where they will compete to be chosen to go to a place called the “Heaviside Layer” to be reincarnated. That’s basically the extent of any plotting, as most of the story just consists of songs that serve as introduction to many different Jellice Cat characters.

The music is entirely forgettable. “Memory” is the sole famous song from it, and while it is indeed the best performance in this film (by Jennifer Hudson), I found even that song forgettable. I could hardly make out the words, what with Hudson’s constant sniveling and the inexplicable choice to keep showing more snot on her lips than tears. Yuck. In a long tradition of adding an original song to a musical adaptation to qualify for Oscar contention, Taylor Swift shows up to co-write “Beautiful Ghosts” with original book writer Andrew Lloyd Weber. That turns out to be an apt song title, because the memory of it disappears as soon as the number is finished. (Swift, incidentally, shows up onscreen as one of the cats, not to sing that song—though she does sing a pop version of it over the end credits—but to sing “Macavity.”)

But of course, I must address the spectacularly misguided special effects. This, more than anything, makes you wonder how or why any of the people involved—which also includes the likes of Edris Elba, Judi Dench, and Ian McKellen, among others—thought a film adaptation of Cats was a good idea. At least, not with live action integrated with CGI in such a way, where fur and realistic-looking cat ears and tails were digitally grafted onto human bodies. Just filming a version of the stage play with people in the traditional cat leotard costumes and face paint would have made far more sense. That’s the only way you can imagine this impressing audiences, after all: to see incredibly fit bodies achieve the kind of dance moves you could never do on a stage. Not to see cat-leaps enhanced by digital effects, director Tom Hooper included apparently just because he could. Evidently he never stopped to think about whether he should.

And the thing is, it’s not even done well. This is the part that is the stuff of nightmares, the stuff that makes you imagine a bad trip after taking acid. Is that what the effects team did before they set about their work? The humanoid faces don’t even always match the herky-jerky movements of the bodies (apparently to evoke “cat movements,” not at all successfully) quite right, vaguely evoking a horribly evolved, digital version of the rudimentary animation from South Park. People complained as far back as the first trailer about the inconsistency of scale. I found myself thinking about that while watching the full movie, even thinking the scale was working a lot better than I expected. And then the number by and about “Skimbleshanks” The Railway Cat” first features all the cats atop railway tracks, on which they are way too small'; mid-sequence they suddenly appear inside a railway car, in which they are way too big. What kind of inter-dimensional horror show is this? The weirdest thing about Cats is that the effects could have been done so much better, but somehow they just got their visual priorities all mixed up.

There’s always also the inevitability of bias, and how that affects how you feel about something for which already have a particular expectation. With Cats, the bias works kind of backward: I liked it better than I expected to, only because I had such profoundly low expectations. What if I had gone into this movie cold, having no idea what I was walking to, having never seen the trailer or even heard about it? Realistically, I probably would have hated it. I was already literally thinking to myself, What the fuck? multiple times as it was, even going on four shots of tequila. This movie includes a dance sequence featuring tiny humanoid cockroaches, several of which get eaten by the cat played by Rebel Wilson, who gets several moments of “gags” that land with a thud. My favorite is when she makes a crack about whether one of the other cats had been neutered, even glancing at his crotch. And this is in a world where none of the “cats” have genitals at all, just finely furred humanoid and flat Ken Doll crotches.

A lot of the production design here is visually interesting, I guess, but that hardly makes up for much. The truth is, even factoring in a deliberately specific approach to make the experience more fun, Cats still qualifies as the worst movie I’ve seen all year.

Just for the record: that cat is not peeing. She’s just a ballerina.

Overall: C-

STAR WARS: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER

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

There’s a huge twist, which changes everything, in The Rise of Skywalker. It reconfigures the Star Wars mythology in a way on par with “I am your father,” and honestly, I welcomed it. It’s an intriguing, even exhilarating idea. I just wish it didn’t feel so much like it was never part of the long game in plotting the story arc of this entire trilogy, like they only just thought of it when making this movie, to correct a perceived scattered aimlessness of the previous two installments.

And mind you, I loved The Force Awakens (2015) and especially The Last Jedi (2017). I liked The Rise of Skywalker, but I cant say I loved it. I still had one particular complaint throughout, which certainly bears out now: the “Marvel-ization” of Star Wars was arguably the biggest mistake made in the history of this franchise. In the cases of both the original and the prequel trilogies, each film was released three years apart. It made every single film an event, something for which massive anticipation was part of the process and the fun.

The core “episode” films this go-round were only released every two years, with two “Star Wars universe” films released in both the years in between (Rogue One and Solo), to diminishing returns. Sure, The Rise of Skywalker qualifies as “an event” in that it’s the final of nine episodes of the Skywalker Saga, but there is no doubt how much bigger these events would have been had we had to wait until 2018 for The Last Jedi and then 2021 for this one, with no extras in between. Why not wait for the “a Star Wars story” movies until the next decade? Instead, they flooded the market with five movies in as many years. This shit works for Marvel (though not as much for me even there, honestly); it doesn’t quite work for Star Wars. If more time were taken between releases, there would have been a lot more time to make this one better.

I spent the first half hour or so of The Rise of Skywalker feeling a numbing sensory overload, much more than excitement about what was going on. Eventually incomprehensible pacing gives way to convoluted plot, and that’s actually a welcome improvement. Either way, it’s far better to find yourself thinking What’s going to happen next! than What the hell is going on? The opening sequences of this film are in sharp contrast to the previous two, which have an urgency to them that feels right, is exciting, and is easy to follow.

All that said, I did think about this while watching The Rise of Skywalker: What if I were just one of the millions of movie-goers who don’t pay any attention to the minutiae of things like who directed it, who wrote it, how it’s edited or how it’s shot, and just come to have a good time? Would I care about any of this stuff? Would I care at all what critics are saying, whether positive or negative? Probably not. Consider this: for many years, Return of the Jedi was my favorite one of the original trilogy—until I gained a working knowledge of the critical consensus. Everyone knows The Empire Strikes Back is the best! I actually still have a special place in my heart for Return of the Jedi. And guess what? That movie’s critical consensus is on par with The Rise of Skywalker.

So. Did I have a good time at this movie? Of course I did! I just made the mistake of spending too much time comparing it to what came before, particularly among the sequel trilogy. I would suggest that you not do that. It’ll probably be easier for you, since in all likelihood you don’t go out of your way to watch every movie with a critical eye. Granted, Star Wars fans are of a particular breed, and far too many of them were whiny bitches about the curve balls introduced in The Last Jedi, which I found to be a delight. And also, it’s true, we now live in a world where fan bases get far more steeped into the details than they used to, now that we have far more talk shows and particularly podcasts in addition to all the reviews and blog posts and tweets. Your best bet will be to let all that go. Come to the movie and surrender to it. I fully intend to see The Rise of Skywalker at least once more in the theater, and although I have zero expectation that I will change my assessment of it, I also expect that a second viewing, which is by definition impossible to disappoint, will be far more fun.

Just a few more points. J.J. Abrams had a thankless task of figuring out how to integrate the late Carrie Fisher into this installment, and there was just no way to make it really work. Having General Leia Organa pass away between movies, with characters all just dealing with the aftermath now, would have been just too sad; digitally inserting old footage of her from previous productions feels both wildly contrived (particularly with how her dialogue integrates into the script) and awkwardly placed, even in a strictly physical sense. There’s just no winning there, but Abrams handled the character as well as anyone could hope under the circumstances. Fisher gets just about as much screen time as she got in The Force Awakens, which is to say, not much.

This weakens the effect of the broader sense of acting performance among the entire cast. There’s also the effect of countless new plot points shoehorned into the story arc as this movie, long as it is—141 minutes—moves at an exhaustingly breakneck pace, which gives little time for a lot of the dialogue or performances to breathe. All the acting here is immeasurably better than that of the prequel trilogy films, of course (not exactly a high bar there), but many of them feel a bit phoned in, at least compared to the others in this trilogy. The notable exceptions are Daisy Ridley as Rey, who gives possibly her best performance in this fanchise, and to a slightly lesser extent, Adam Driver, who was given meatier content to work with in previous films. Kylo Ren winds up with that stupid and pointless helmet right back on again in this movie, which means we get less time to see the emoting on his beautiful, tortured face.

And yet! Several moments in The Rise of Skywalker are genuinely emotionally affecting. True lovers of Star Wars from childhood will likely cry multiple times (the one I saw this movie with did); even I got genuinely teary at least once. As weak and disjointed as this movie it as it starts, it largely course-corrects itself as it goes on, and by the end, just because of all that had come before it, the final conclusion is genuinely moving. There’s a couple of things that feel like throwing a bone to certain communities (a somewhat brief return of Billy Dee Williams as Lando, for the Star Wars purists; a brief lesbian kiss, for the gays), and although I don’t like feeling like I’m being patronized, sometimes I’ll take what I can get.

And if nothing else, The Rise of SKywalker is certainly a thrill ride, even if it’s not your favorite one at the amusement park. Once it’s done, it’s shocking to think how long the movie really is, because it never feels like it. Some people out there even think it’s the best; we all have our preferences. I, for one, think it’s far from the best—but, it’s also far from the worst. A solid outing. Lots of fun, and probably even more fun with repeat viewings. And when it comes to the bottom line, that’s far more relevant than subjective ratings, isn’t it?

Wow, this place turned into a dump!

Overall: B

DARK WATERS

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

Maybe it’s just because we are currently living in an era with such blatant injustice and corruption, being waved in front of our faces as a constant taunt every day. It just feels like more of an effort to get all riled up about a movie like Dark Waters, and this is a movie about a mega-corporation getting away with knowingly poisoning an entire community. It makes me wonder, would Spotlight have made anywhere near the same impact if it had been released in 2019 instead of 2015? That movie won the Academy Award for Best Picture and stopped just short of $100 million in worldwide grosses. Dark Waters is about just as vital a subject matter, has grossed barely $6.8 million in three weeks, and will almost certainly get no Oscar nominations at all. People are exhausted by being told what they already know: our system is not for the people. No wonder people flock to fantasies like Avengers: Endgame.

When it comes to Dark Waters, though, this leaves me in a bit of a pickle. Should you see it? Oh, definitely, yes. Will it make you feel better about anything at all? Oh, probably not.

This film starts in 1975. A brief scene of a few drunk kids getting caught swimming in a lake they shouldn’t be in, or more reasons than one. There’s a brief shot of a bare skinny dipping butt, so I guess that’s exciting. After a brief moment seeing officials on a boat shooing the kids away and then spraying the surface of the water with something from hoses that is never given any specific explanation, the timeline jumps to 1998 Cincinnati. This is the year the initial case against DuPont begins. By the end of the film we’ve reached 2012, attorney Robert Billott (Mark Ruffalo) and his wife Sarah’s (Anne Hathaway) kids are teenagers, and even that’s not the end of it.

In other words, it’s a bit of a slog—and that’s the point. It’s just what DuPont wanted. Still, Dark Waters could have stood at least some tweaks of its editing. At least twice during long tracking shots, I found myself thinking about how the film, which runs at 126 minutes, would have been no worse off without these few minutes. But, cinematographer Edward Lachman (Carol) needs some time to make things look interesting. He actually does a good job, all things considered, but there’s only so much you can do with a movie largely set in law firm meeting rooms. Every once in a while we get a party or a banquet.

Robert does visit the farm in West Virginia where nearly 200 cows have died. The local townspeople as well as this farmer and his wife are presented as no-nonsense and with respect and empathy. The acting across the board is possibly the best thing about this movie. Mark Ruffalo, all scowls and hunches and boxy shoulders and frumpy, is a far cry from the Hulk he plays in the—speak of the Devil—Avengers movies. He disappears into the role. Anne Hathaway’s presence is a little thankless by comparison; perhaps the writers did not see the irony in having her say the line, “Don’t talk to me like I’m the wife.” She’s a stay-at-home mom, and in this movie, “the wife” is all she can be. If Hathaway just wanted to be a part of this because she believed in the overall message of the movie, I can respect that.

That said, while I can’t say I was ever bored watching Dark Waters, it is also lacking in any genuine drama. It’s tedious with a point, and it does feel like necessary information. We’re meant to get a feeling of how much time and effort—literally a decade and a half of it—it took for Robert Billott to make any headway on this case. In the end, there are some positive results. Just not enough to make you stop feeling like DuPont is basically getting away with murder to this day. If nothing else, this movie contextualizes why these days we all avoid Teflon like the plague. A chemical compound used to make it remains in all of our blood streams and won’t ever go away, though. Fun!

I don’t know . . . maybe if you just read this review, that’s enough. DuPont sucks, they literally poisoned all of us, don’t buy . . . whatever they make. This actually is important. The movie is well put together and skillfully acted. Watch it if you feel like maybe you should, and at some point at least, you probably should. Or you could just take another dose of the opiate of the masses and watch another Marvel movie. Just imagine The Hulk turning to the screen and shouting, “Boycot DuPont! HULK SMASH DUPONT!”

This is when Mark Ruffalo turns into Oprah. “YOU get cancer! And YOU get cancer!”

Overall: B

MARRIAGE STORY

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

I have reached a point of accepting that companies like Netflix and Amazon are irrevocably changing movies as we know it, or at least the way we watch them—and I say this as someone who has historically been a cinema purist. Marriage Story, much like The Irishman last month or Roma last year, is a mostly excellent film made with the backing of Netflix, given a very brief theatrical release to qualify for Academy Awards, but available to the widest audience by very quickly thereafter being available streaming.

There are two key differences between those two previous movies and this one, though. Roma in particular, with its stunning technical achievements, commanded theatrical viewing. The Irishman, some would argue, commanded the same—its three-and-a-half-hour run time notwithstanding—due to its director (Martin Scorsese) and its context in cinema history, although I didn’t find it particularly imperative to view in theaters, personally. And, really, the same can be said of Marriage Story, which is an incredibly absorbing drama but with nothing technical about it to woo viewers any more on the big screen than it would have at home.

There’s always the argument of the “communal experience,” of course, which I generally subscribe to as well. And that is available here, even now, here in the Seattle area, playing at Landmark’s discount Crest Theater in Shoreline at least through the end of next week. It isn’t playing anywhere else, though, which severely limits your options if you’d really like to see it in a theater. That is precisely why I’m breaking with my own convention and actually posting a review of it, even though I did not see it on the big screen. I watched it alone at home, as it’s also available streaming as we speak—an increasingly common case of a movie available streaming or on demand simultaneously with theatrical release. And, yes: I want to be part of the discussion about this movie’s award prospects.

The thing is, though, in relative contrast to The Irishman and in sharp contrast to Roma, I would not suggest you go out of your way to see this one in a theater. I’m even leaning toward suggesting you watch it at home. Whether or not you should watch it with your spouse, in the event that you are married or partnered, I am having trouble deciding. Marriage Story seems like the kind of movie that, depending on your circumstances, can either strengthen your gratitude for being married, or nudge you closer to deciding you don’t like it so much. For now at least, I fall into the former category. This could have been awkward to watch with my husband, and yet I immediately imagined it making him take hold of my hand. Not out of desperate hope, but out of loving appreciation.

And just contemplating this film has its own rewards. It sinks into you slowly, and then takes hold, and you keep thinking about it. This is not your conventional movie about divorce. And that’s not just because it’s written and directed by Noah Bombauch, whose uniquely cutting wit previously brought us the likes of Frances Ha (2015) and The Squid and the Whale (2005). Marriage Story, though, is by far the most accessible film he’s ever made, and it may also be his best.

This is a movie that refuses to simplify its characters, never allowing either party to fall into caricature, or become villains. They never quite even behave like bad people. They just occasionally make a mess of things. They’re just . . . human. That may not exactly sound revolutionary, but as performed by Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver, it’s at the very least revelatory. There is no hate between these two people, even when they occasionally do and say hateful things. Their actions are fueled by a frustration with an inability to make it work even when they still love each other.

They have a child, which complicates things. Charlie is a theater director in New York City; Nicole is his lead actor who has felt a potential acting career in Los Angeles has been sacrificed to stick with him in New York for ten years. This gives Marriage Story a slightly “inside baseball” feel, what with how personal and semiautobiographical this is for Baumbach. You might expect this to alienate some viewers slightly, but the issues and themes of compromise and resentment between a married couple are universal. If there is any lesson to be learned from this, it’s not only the importance of communication in any relationship, but clarity. Charlie and Nicole traffic in a lot of assumptions stretched over many years.

The kid, played by Azhy Robertson, is kind of a little shit sometimes. One might be tempted to say “the kid kind of sucks” (as was said on one podcast I listen to), but I don’t think that’s fair. He seems like a perfectly regular kid to me, and it’s nice to see a kid character in a motion picture who is not creepily precocious. As for Henry’s behaviors, what else do you expect when a couple going through a breakup inevitably put their child in the crosshairs?

As you might imagine, Marriage Story gets very sad at times. You’ll want a tissue at the ready. The nice surprise, though, is that this movie is also a lot funnier than you might expect. It’s still a Noah Baumbach film, after all, and it provides enough laughs that it borders on dramedy. And it’s not just to cut the tension; it’s just a part of life. Laughter and sadness, we all experience them both. I’ve seen Baumbach films that made their characters almost self-consciously “quirky,” in a way that made them feel just short of real. By that measure, this is Baumbach’s definitive masterwork, having ironed out such quirks. Everything about Marriage Story feels plausible and authentic. You laugh with and hurt for all parties involved. These are people you feel confident will never stop caring about each other. And even in a movie about something as painful as divorce, that is a great comfort.

A couple reads from the same book, and realizes they aren’t on the same page.

Overall: A-

QUEEN & SLIM

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

There’s a lot to love about the production elements of Queen & Slim. It’s directed by a black woman (Malina Matsoukas, her feature film debut), and written by a different black woman (Master of None’s Lena Waithe). In addition to supporting parts featuring Chlöe Sevigny, Flea, and a cameo by Gayle King, it also features trans actor Indya Moore, in a part that makes no mention or reference to trans-ness. This strikes me as significant: so the argument goes, trans parts should go to trans actors (as Moore has in the FX series Pose as Angel), precisely because trans actors never get offered parts otherwise. Here is the first example I have ever seen of that happening, in a wide release, studio film.

Here’s an odd bit, though. Lena Waithe’s script is written from a story developed by her and . . . James Frey, of A Million Little Pieces infamy. Now, don’t get me wrong; that media circus about a “memoir” that was largely fabricated was a decade and a half ago; and, a good writer is a good writer. I have no issue with Frey continuing to make a living off genuine talents. All that notwithstanding, a white guy with the kind of baggage James Frey has, for a movie like this, about a black couple on the run from the law after shooting a police officer in self defense? It’s just an odd choice.

And one has to wonder, which one of these writers contributed the most to Queen & Slim’s unfortunately gradual slip into implausibility, or how as it goes on, the cornier it gets? The opening sequence, before the title sequence, is a fantastic scene between the two leads, Daniel Kaluuya as Slim and Jodie Turner-Smith as Queen, on their first Tinder date. The dialogue is snappy yet well paced, and these two immediately prove they have chemistry together, and they’re just talking over dinner at a diner.

But then, the inciting incident happens very quickly: as Slim is driving Queen home, they get pulled over by a jumpy police officer, a white guy later revealed to have a separate incident in his past that I’m not convinced was necessary for making this story work. Queen has already revealed herself to be an exceedingly knowledgeable attorney, and when the cop pulls his gun on Slim without provocation, she gets out of the car and effectively complicates an unwinnable scenario. The cop is dead and these two are on the run before we even see the title Queen & Slim on screen.

What follows is effectively a road movie, “black Bonnie & Clyde” meets “black Thelma & Louise.” (Only the former phrase is ever actually uttered in this film’s dialogue, by Queen’s Uncle Earl, played by Bokeem Woodbine.) We meet many characters for comparatively brief sequences, as they pass through Queen and Slim’s travels. As their fugitive status becomes a bigger and bigger media sensation, they become icons of the black community, getting help from random strangers to such a degree, ultimately, that it begins to stretch believability. I’m not convinced a black cop would let them go just because he happens to be black, but this movie seems to suggest just that (having said cop get reflexively defensive about his white partner’s fairly benign use of the word “boy,” just for good measure).

The first half or so of Queen & Slim is very well edited and expertly paced, a movie about two young people barely staying one step ahead of a situation that has them out of their depth. It’s exciting in ways that are unnerving as well as subtle. In its second half, it never goes off the rails, but it feels like it’s moving in a slow arc in that direction. As Queen and Slim become icons, there is a brief but overt suggestion that they have inspired young black kids to think it’s okay to shoot cops, and this idea is treated neither with as much time as it should get, nor with any nuance.

Even as the dialogue begins to veer into the realm of the cheesy, as Queen and Slim catch romantic feelings for each other in the midst of their intermittent fear and chaos, Kaluuya and Turner-Smith elevate the material with their charismatic performances. Queen & Smith feels like something with aspirations to have an indelible mark on the zeitgeist, indeed something on par with Thelma & Louise—right down to its unfortunately predictable ending—but that might just be its biggest problem. The only movies that have that kind of seismic impact are those that aren’t trying to, the ones whose makers never even considered that possibility.

Which is to say, as compelling as Queen & Slim is from beginning to end, the more you think about it, getting into the details, the more subtly problematic it becomes. This movie has a great many things that are worthy of celebration, but sometimes we have to celebrate something not because it’s as great as it could be, but because it’s the best we’ve got. And to be sure, this movie’s ambitions alone are commendable. Let’s hope it paves the way for more artists to fully realize their potential.

Can you see it? The inevitable murals and posters and T-shirts?

Overall: B

FROZEN II

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

It’s been six years since Frozen unleashed itself onto the zeitgeist, inexplicably striking a cord with millions of children—particularly little girls—the world over, creating a generation obsessed with one animated feature to an extent not seen in at least two decades. In all likelihood, Disney could never have predicted such a visceral audience reaction to a movie that was merely lots of fun and yet so clearly not a “classic” in the same way many of its earlier films were. What absolutely could be predicted was that they would come back with a sequel, although waiting six years was an unusually long time. (Pixar has several sequels after many more years than that, but Pixar is in a separate category from Disney Animation Studios.) All those kids who were little in 2013 aren’t so little anymore.

But, plenty more little kids have been discovering Frozen in the years since, and as such it is hardly a surprise that Frozen II will be by a wide margin the #2 movie of Thanksgiving weekend. Does it stack up to its predecessor, then? I’d say it does. Granted, it has no standout, immortal track like the original’s “Let It Go,” but to be fair, the producers of the first film probably had no idea they had lighting in a bottle six years ago. They seem somewhat to try repeating it with the song “Into the Unknown” this time around, and the effort shows. That rarely works.

In spite of that, I found myself rather enamored with Frozen II, and even its music. Just because it has nothing that stacks up to the catchiness of “Let It Go” does not preclude its own music from being quite lovely—and it is. I even got a little misty-eyed a couple of times just listening to the songs in this film. That could be because I am just a sentimental old sap, or maybe the music is actually good. The singing certainly is, what with the likes of Idina Menzel (as Elsa), Kristen Bell (as Anna), Jonathan Groff (as Kristoff) and even Josh Gad (as Olaf) on all of the vocals.

There’s not much point in getting into the plot of this sequel, except to say that the magical harmony of this universe is threatened, and sisters Elsa and Anna must help each other to save it. Once again, they do this on their own terms, without waiting for a man ot be their hero. It should be stressed as well, though, that the male characters here are hardly useless; feminism, even as subtext, does not render men pointless. In fact, both Kristoff and Olaf lend this film its greatest charms. And all of this is to say, it’s pretty much more of the same as what we saw before. But, what’s the problem with more of the same when what we got before was quite wonderful? Frozen II is a welcome reminder of magical storytelling done right.

It could even be argued that the original Frozen need not be seen first to understand and enjoy Frozen II, although it certainly provides some depth of understanding of the sisterly relationship between Elsa and Anna. The animation is very well rendered, particularly the depiction of a rush of water through a fjord, and a water-horse with running streams as its mane. Ultimately, Frozen II is a feast for the eyes as well as the heart.

The only major drawback was as soon as the end credits began and so did Panic! at the Disco’s rendition of “Into the Unknown,” and trust me, that’s the right moment to “nope” right out of there.

A captivating experience, same as before.

Overall: B+

HONEY BOY

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

Apparently 2019 is the year of quasi-meta meditations on filmmakers’ pasts and careers. There are two key difference between Honey Boy, though, and the likes of Pain and Glory and The Irishman. The first, and most significant, is the runtime: in sharp contrast to The Irishman’s three and a half hour run time, Honey Boy clocks in at a wonderfully economical 94 minutes. The second is that, instead of elderly directors using movies to make a statement about their overall film careers, Honey Boy is a thirtysomething actor telling the story of his experience as a child actor with an emotionally abusive father.

Honey Boy also takes the “meta” aspect of the filmmaking to a different level. The thirtysomething actor is Shia LaBeouf, who wrote the script (his first one for a feature film, and an impressive debut at that) based on his own experience as a child actor, although it’s fictionalized and the names have been changed. Still, it’s an unusual circumstance indeed where LaBeouf plays the part of the fucked up, addict dad, which in effect means he’s playing his own dad. And then, near the end of the film, the actor character (played by Lucas Hedges) actually tells his dad he’s going to make a movie about him.

Actually, this scenario is at least vaguely similar to that of Pain and Glory, in which Antonio Banderas in effect plays the director of that very film (Pedro Almodóvar), after having been directed by him in several films over the past fifty years. Both films are deeply personal ones, but the meta layers go even deeper when an actor is playing his own father. And LaBeouf’s performance is astonishing, given how much abuse he endured, and yet he manages to imbue him with real humanity.

Honey Boy is expertly edited, jumping back and forth between the young actor “Otis” at age 12 (Noah Jupe) and Otis at age 22 (Lucas Hedges). The opening shot features Hedges as the older Otis on the set of a blockbuster film, which is clearly meant to evoke the Transformers franchise, although actual movie titles (or TV show titles) are never uttered in the script. It then flashes back to Otis at 12, in a similar filming setup, only this time he’s getting a pie in the face instead of being thrown away from the camera by an explosion.

Of course, there is little doubt that LaBeouf’s reality is far messier than Honey Boy depicts things, with its clean arcs and themes that don’t tie themselves together seamlessly in real life. Such is the nature of storytelling, though, and Honey Boy does it very well. It’s easy to imagine that making the film was just as therapeutic for LaBeouf himself as was the rehab therapy Hedges takes us through as Otis. Hedges, incidentally, is just as great as we have now long come to expect from him; Noah Jupe as 12-year-old Otis is even better.

LaBeouf depicts Otis’s dad, James, in either case, in 1995 or 2005, although he’s only seen briefly in the later-set scenes. He dominates the scenes from 1995, where the way he raises his son is shockingly fucked up in several ways. With one exception, none of it is physical abuse, as you might expect from a story like this. Instead it’s something a bit more subtle and sinister. He lets his 12-year-old son smoke cigarettes. He attacks Tom (Clifton Collins Jr.), the man in Otis’s life form the Big Brothers and Sisters program, out of jealousy. He and Otis’s mom (Natasha Lyonne, only ever heard on the phone) have an argument in which they refuse to talk to each other, but instead have Otis pass on uniquely fucked up messages for them over the phone. These ultimately become more a series of vignettes that don’t quite allow for real depth of character building, but it remains an impressive overview of a kid actor’s life.

The greatest achievement of Honey Boy, though, is how it makes clear that it would be an oversimplification to call James a villain. Would it even be fair to call him a bad man? He’s a man who does very, very bad things. There is a real sense of the nuance, the ambivalence with which LaBeouf regards his father. The film, directed with a sensitive hand by Alma Har’el, also offers insight into LaBeouf’s behavior over the years, but without overtly absolving him of it. Shia LaBeouf is a flawed man, just as his father was, but it would appear that the greatest differentiation between them is talent. Say what you will about Shia LaBeouf and his motivations, the man has talent to spare. Still all of 33 years old, his potential remains unbounded, and we can only hope to see him in more parts this thoughtful onscreen in the future.

A man, as his father, addresses a child, as himself.

Overall: B+

WAVES

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

Waves is a movie that truly takes the concept of “two acts” seriously. It runs 135 minutes in length, and about halfway through, everything changes—and more than just saying that might suggest. Even the central character shifts, after a type of loss not often seen on film.

There’s a lot to like about this movie, although I can’t say I’m quite as crazy for it as some critics seem to be. I found the cinematography in particular to be kind of self-consciously stylized. As the story begins, we follow high school student Tyler (Kelvin Harrison Jr, excellent) through a typical day, and it involves a lot of interior shots of cars being driven down highways and roads, the camera spinning around in horizontal circles, looking outward at the characters packing the vehicle, from its center. It’s very odd, and it happens over and over again. I suspect cinematographer Drew Daniels thought it clever; I found it consistently distracting.

Tyler is in wrestling, and has ambitions to compete at the state level. His father, Ronald (Sterling K. Brown), coaches him and puts a lot of pressure on him. Ronald is married to Catherine (Renée Elise Goldsberry), who is not Tyler’s biological mother but raised him and his sister Emily (Taylor Russell) most of their lives. Much is to be learned, about Tyler and Emily’s biological mother; about what two separate but equally momentous things occurring simultaneously make Tyler begin to spiral; and even eventually about the boy Emily later begins dating (Lucas Hedges), but I won’t spoil any of it. This movie, minor flaws though it has, is still best just experienced.

I will tell you to keep tissues handy. Waves is a definite tear jerker, and in myriad unique ways. Writer-director Trey Edward Shults has drawn entirely well-rounded, multidimensional characters—kind of a relief, given Shults is a white guy and this is mostly about a black family (something I can never help but point out). To be fair, very little about the telling of this story has any dependence on the characters’ race, although it does get at least one vague reference in dialogue and one very overt, malicious one. Whether the telling should have more overt focus on their race is perhaps a debate for another place and time. I’m just here to tell you whether the movie is good and should be seen, and the answers are yes and yes.

As usual, I do have minor quibbles. These kids, Tyler and Emily, get intense focus in sequences that had me wondering where the hell their parents are and why they don’t seem to be more involved in what’s going on. Tyler sees a doctor and gets some very difficult news after a CAT scan, and somehow he goes to this appointment by himself, and then keeps the results from his family. That doesn’t seem to fit all that well with how domineering his father can be; I have a hard time believing Ronald would be “hands off” about this. But he is, evidently to make the storytelling easier.

That said, when Sterling K. Brown is onscreen, he very much justifies all the talk of his being a Best Supporting Actor Oscar contender. Even calling Ronald “domineering” is tricky; he is often shown being very personable and full of love, a guy who loves his children and his children love him, as opposed to being afraid of him. But, Ronald is strict when he needs to be, and the kids understand when to take him seriously. With Tyler, Ronald has too much emotional investment in his son’s success, which predictably complicates Tyler’s feelings about the possibility of letting his father down.

Well, that does happen, in a shockingly tragic and massively consequential way. In essence, Waves is about how easily broad contentment can break down into sadness and grief. Even those with the greatest potential are one or two decisions away from tragedy. Waves does not show this as any sort of “lesson,” but rather just as a compelling story. And then, in the very different second half, which still has plenty to make you keep the tissues at the ready, it shows a family finding their own ways to come back from that grief. Life has a way of turning into something you never could have predicted, and everyone involved just has to learn how to cope.

Waves is a beautiful movie in many ways, and some might even argue that its flaws are part of that beauty. I felt like certain things were just kind of missing, but nothing significant enough to make its narrative fall apart. Honestly if there is any deterrent to watching this movie, it’s how much it’s likely to make you cry. Some people do like a good cry every once in a while, just because. This movie might just be the emotional catharsis you need.

And then things fall apart.

Overall: B+

KNIVES OUT

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

You can’t say much about Knives Out without ruining all the fun. Suffice it to say that it’s a mystery-comedy (in that order) in which the central question is “Who did it?”, and while writer-director Rian Johnson adheres to every trope of the mystery genre with virtually every story beat, he also does it with his own fun twist every step of the way.

At first, you may be asking yourself why so much is being revealed so early. Surely this isn’t the whole story? Of course not! But then, just when you think you’re actually finding what comes next predictable, without fail, Johnson manages to do it in an unpredictable way. That, precisely, is what makes this movie worth experiencing.

That said, to be honest, the trailers and marketing made it easy to expect this movie would be funnier. This is not a rip-roaring comedy. To be honest, Ready or Not was a lot funnier, more consistently, not to mention much darker and far more biting in its satire. But let’s be fair, that kind of movie is my jam, and mysteries never really have been. Which is to say: if you do like mystery movies, Knives Out is probably the best one to come along in ages. And if by some miracle you happen to watch it without predetermined expectations of comedy, in that case you really would find it surprisingly funny. It’s certainly clever as hell.

The setup takes a while at the start, which is perhaps par for the course in a mystery, where we must be introduced to all of the characters and see the myriad ways in which they all have motives. And the casting is this movie’s greatest achievement, with Christopher Plummer as Harlan Thrombey, the wealthy patriarch of a large, combative family, who dies the evening of his 85th birthday. The family here spans four generations, Harlan not even the oldest: “Nana” (K Callan), is Harlan’s mother. When one of the detectives marvels that an 85-year-old man’s mother is still alive by asking, “How old is she?” the answer is, “Nobody knows.” Some mysteries just remain unsolved.

As for the many suspects, there are Harlan’s four entitled grown children, Linda (Jamie Lee Curtis); Walt (Michael Shannon); Ransom (Chris Evans); and Joni, who is actually Harlan’s widowed daughter-in-law (Toni Collette); two grandchildren, Meg (Katherine Langford) and alt-right teen troll Jacob (Jaeden Martell); we also get Linda’s husband Richard (Don Johnson); Walt’s wife Donna (Riki Lindholme); and Harlan’s nurse, Marta (Ana de Armas). Marta is part of an immigrant family, and we never find out what country she really comes from because every single family member mentions a different one.

In any event, Knives Out is stacked with star power, all of the cast at the top of their game. Jamie Lee Curtis is especially delightful, and Toni Collette’s vast talents are slightly wasted on the vapid woman she plays, but still, there’s never an off note with any of these performances. I haven’t even mentioned Daniel Craig as Private Investigator Benoit Blanc, whose deep southern accent is a bit jarring at first, but then I found it to be impressively consistent. Maybe actual southerners would feel differently, but I thought he was excellent. Rounding out the cast are the two detectives, Lieutenant Elliott (Sorry to Bother You’s LaKeith Stanfield) and Trooper Wagner (Noah Segan, who has secondary parts in all of Rian Johnson’s films); and Fran the Housekeeper (Edi Patterson), whose part is small but key, like a whole lot of them. Even all the bigger parts are key, really. In contrast to Toni Collette’s talents, when it comes to the writing, nothing gets wasted here. Knives Out has a fairly long 130 minute run time, but not one second of it is pointless.

I should also note that the set is fantastic, this huge, quasi-gothic mansion’s interior design based on the tastes of an eccentric novelist’s tastes rendered in intricate detail. Much is made of the family’s expectations of Harlan’s fortune, even after all four of the grown children have lived in one way or another off of it for years already. This is one movie where, the more you consider it, the more impressive its massive attention to detail becomes. Occasionally some elements are on the nose, such as the overtness of the ornate sculpture of countless knives arranged in a circle and pointed at its center, with a chair in front of it so characters can sit and get perfectly framed by this kaleidoscope of knives.

It’s still fun to look at. As is every part of this movie, which has an increasing velocity of entertainment. It will surprise and delight many, but especially fans of mystery thrillers. At least those who don’t take the genre too seriously.

Ensemble casting done right.

Overall: B+

A BEAUTIFUL DAY IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD

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

If there is a male equivalent of “America’s Sweetheart,” it might just be Tom Hanks who fills that role. And if anyone were born to play the role of Fred Rogers, the beloved PBS children’s show host from Pittsburgh, it’s also Tom Hanks. This casting choice for what is, in the end, a supporting role in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, is a stroke of genius.

And, that’s in spite of Hanks not particularly impersonating Rogers in any specific way. He is still very Hanks-ian, but, dress him up in that signature cardigan and comb his salt-and-pepper hair the same way, and he embodies the man’s spirit effortlessly.

It’s only been a year and a half since the release of the wonderful documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, a film whose director noted that Fred Rogers reportedly stated that any movie about his life would be incredibly boring. And in less than two years, he has been proven wrong twice over, in both documentary and fictionalized form. A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is anything but boring, and anyone with memories of his show from their childhood would do well to have several tissues handy.

They would even if they did not, like myself, ever watch his program as a kid. I did not even become aware of Mr. Rogers until I was a somewhat older child, more inclined to write off Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood as corny and dopey; it would be decades before I came to understand how widely beloved the man and his show really were.

The show aired between 1968 and 2001, with one three-year break between 1976 and 1979, the end of that run being only three years after the setting of this film. In the story here, Rogers himself actually does not take center stage, which actually works well, lest he overwhelm the viewer with emotion—which is apt to happen anyway. Instead, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is the story of how Fred Rogers impacted the life of Esquire biographer Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys). Vogel is a fictionalized version of Esquire biographer Tom Junod, who really did publish a profile of Rogers in 1998; he is reportedly very happy with the film, but it does take enough liberties to make it merely “inspired by a true story.”

It captures the essence of these two men, and when it comes to motion picture storytelling, little else really matters. Ultimately, even with frame of reference from my own childhood, I loved nearly everything about this movie. The editing and cinematography are both particularly clever, giving both the feel and the framework of Mr. Rogers’ Neighorhood’s old episodes. It even begins with Hanks as Rogers, hosting the show, introducing us, the viewers of the movie, to Lloyd, his friend and the protagonist of this story.

All of the “exterior shots” of A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood—Pittsburgh or New York City skylines, a plan taking off from an airport—are done with miniature models, in the style of the old show. It’s as disarming as it is utterly charming. There are no stylized flourishes here beyond that, and that’s a huge part of what makes it work: what we see onscreen is very straightforward and practical in terms of how it is filmed, just as Rogers’s show had been. There is just one sequence I would consider inessential, a dream in which Lloyd finds himself in miniature and on the set of one of the shows during filming. It’s odd in a way that doesn’t quite integrate seamlessly into the rest of the film’s narrative. But, truly, that is the closest I come to any one genuine criticism of this film.

Lloyd has a wife (Susan Kelechi Watson), who, when she learns about the profile he’s doing, says to him, “Please don’t ruin my childhood.” At that point she becomes the avatar for every moviegoer who remembers Mr. Rogers from their own childhood. They have a newborn son, and Lloyd is strugging to make amends with his estranged father (Chris Cooper, a master at playing complicated men), which becomes the key to the whole plot of Lloyd’s story with Rogers. We also briefly see Rogers’s wife, Joanne (Maryann Plunkett), whose short screen time is put to very insightful use. I would loved to see more of her.

Best of all, A Beautiful Day in the Neighorhood finds ways to underscore how Fred Rogers was a work in progress himself, an imperfect man just doing his best to do right by the world, particularly with helping children learn to understand and cope with their feelings. Honestly, last year’s documentary gets slightly deeper into exactly how flawed he was, and even then it could not dig up a whole lot. Being regarded as “a living saint” is a lot to live up to, and Tom Hanks is a superb conduit for conveying that sentiment with subtlety and humility. This movie doesn’t really portray any of his imperfections or flaws specifically, because it doesn’t have to. Hanks plays him as a man who simply knows those flaws are there, but he continues to do his best, without necessarily realizing that his best is far better than most people’s.

I probably spent about a quarter of this movie quietly shedding tears. It’s truly, deeply emotionally affecting, without ever quite feeling emotionally manipulative. Just as last year’s documentary did, it brings to light how Fred Rogers was one of a kind, an anomaly as much in his own time as he would be today. He passed away in 2003, but the telling of his story (or stories) could not be coming at a better time.

One of those times when earnestness and sincerity are worth your while.

Overall: A-