HAPPIEST SEASON

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

Listen, Happiest Season won me over in a way that I truly never expected, even after about a third of the way into the movie. But let’s get the truly negative out of the way first, because we have to talk about that absolute turd of a title. It bears repeating, because I literally keep forgetting it: Happiest Season? What kind of generic-holiday randomized generator title is that? I hate it. It sounds like a spit balled title place holder that no one bothered to replace.

For much of the first half of this movie, I found myself thinking about how great it is to be getting a Christmas romantic comedy that features a gay couple, and how great it would be to have such a movie that is special enough to be rewatchable every Christmas, and . . . this movie is not it. Except, maybe it is? It pains me to say: probably not. But not because it’s not worthy. It’s because the title sucks. It sounds like the title of the holiday episode of a third-tier network sitcom.

So, please. Please, please, please! Forget about the title. Or wait, strike that. Write the title down! HAPPIEST SEASON. Put it somewhere you can reference it easily, lest you fall victim to how forgettable a title it is. Because this film is absolutely worth watching.

Directed and co-written b Clea DuVall, in her sophomore feature film effort, I’m still not convinced directing is her calling. This was my biggest issue with the film early on, that its direction was adequate at best. Sometimes, however, a script can make up for a lot, and the writing here absolutely does that. Granted, I have a specific bias here: as a gay viewer, I can not only relate to the issues related to coming out to one’s family, but in the end, I was deeply moved by this story. As such, I can see a pretty widely varied response among audiences, depending on their own personal experiences. To be sure, anyone with the slightest capability of empathy, this movie will work. But this movie will also really speak to some people in a way it just can’t to others. And I am definitely among those some people.

Luckily, Happiest Season also has a great cast. The gay couple at the center of it are Abby and Harper, played respectively by Kristen Stewart and Mackenzie Davis. They make a believable couple, although I found Davis’s height occasionally distracting. Abbey’s sisters Sloane and Jane are respectively played by an uptight Alison Brie and a rather funny Mary Holland; stepping into the role of the sisters’ parents are Victor Garber and Mary Steenburgen. We even get Aubrey Plaza as one of Abby’s exes, and best of all, Daniel Levy as Harper’s close friend. This movie would not have suffered without a gay male character to throw a bone to the gay men in its audience, but I sure was delighted to see him, and he provides a good amount of the comedy, without ever quite overdoing it.

In fact, Levy’s character John is essentially the heart of the movie, being the caring friend that every decent person deserves. Abby could use a friend of the same caliber, and does not seem to have one; she’s far too preoccupied with keeping up appearances for the sake of her dad’s campaign for mayor of his town. And this is another thing I love about Happiest Season (ugh, that title!): it breezily sidesteps gay clichés from start to finish: no melodramatic histrionics, and no reducing family members to small-minded caricatures. They aren’t even presented as especially conservative, and when it comes to how scary it can be for a person to come out, this is a key point: the family doesn’t have to be conservative for it to be a frighteningly uncertain prospect.

DuVall, to her credit, offers a great deal of empathy for Abby, even as she basically makes by far the shittiest choices, often to the detriment of her partner. But the broader point is that a person must be ready for such a huge step, and this actually fits perfectly with movies about the spirit of Christmas: the spirit of giving and of goodwill. Considering this is a romantic comedy—albeit one that made me cry much more than expected—it’s no spoiler to say that things work out in the end. The predictability here is immaterial; the very real struggle before such inevitably happy endings is what we are meant to understand. And we are still reminded that not every story is so happy, as told by Harper’s friend John. This isn’t his story though; it’s Abby and Harper’s, and Christmas movies must end with uplift. Happiest Season delivers on that front, in more ways than one.

Just be sure to write that title down so you know what to look for when you go looking for it on Hulu.

You’ll be happy you watched it this season.

Overall: B+

RUN

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

In effect, Run is Misery for Gen Z. I suppose that might pique the interest of boomers more than Genzers. Do the latter even know about Misery? They should; it’s a definitively better movie—but, this one is still lots of fun, and to the credit of director and co-writer Aneesh Chaganty (Searching), he gives clear credit to Misery as an influence, with a particular character being a sort of Easter-egg reference to it. I won’t spoil it; you’ll have to catch it while watching it yourself.

For most of Run, there are all of two characters: the protagonist, Chloe, a sickly wheelchair user who is homeschooled—and otherwise excessively sheltered—by her mother, Diane. It’s not really a spoiler to state that Diane is the absolute villain here, and it’s fun to see Sarah Paulson playing such a role rather than as a victim of the many horrors she endures as characters on American Horror Story. Most interestingly, Choe is played by Kiera Allen, a very young actor who happens to be actually a wheelchair user. And while it’s pertinent to note the rarity of disabled actors being cast in parts that are disabled characters, a curious twist in this casting is that Chloe, the character, was not only never meant to be disabled, but presumably, without her mother’s interference, she would actually not be a wheelchair user now at all.

Because Diane, you see, has some kind of mental illness that, I suppose, comes closest to Munchausen By Proxy: in a bent response to a tragic turn of events with her baby delivered some seventeen or so years ago, she is feeding Chloe multiple medications that cause the very ailments she claims they are meant to improve. In fact, the opening title card offers specific definitions to five of them: athsma, arrhythmia, hemochromatosis, diabetes and paralysis. Some of these play into the plot more readily than others, particularly the athsma (with Chloe fighting for breath on multiple occasions), and of course the most visibly obvious one, paralysis. We do see her taking what are at first assumed to be insulin shots, though, and syringes do later play key parts in plot turns, as do the medications Chloe has been told are for the other conditions.

It’s only when Chloe is rummaging through a grocery bag and discovers a bottle of pills actually prescribed to Diane that she begins to suspect something is amiss. Eventually, things like Chloe’s long wait for unanswered college applications start to come into sharper focus for her. Side note, speaking of colleges: Run is set in a small town in Western Washington, although it was filmed entirely in Canada and mostly in Winnipeg, of all places—but, Chloe’s clearly top choice of college is Seattle’s own University of Washington, which gets an almost absurd amount of product placement in this film. I wonder what kind of deal was struck for that?

Anyway, unlike in Misery, in Run the protagonist is not bed ridden through most of the movie; in fact, Chloe is given a pretty atypical amount of agency for disabled characters usually seen in movies. Her mother is still effectively keeping her captive, though, and Chaganty creates very effective, meticulously edited sequences—which he openly states are mostly influenced by Alfred Hitchcock and M. Night Shyamalan—where Chloe is persistently getting the best of her limitations, the very ones that her mother has created for her. One such sequence with Chloe making her way from her bedroom window around the roof of her house and over to her mom’s bedroom window is especially nail biting.

I’d be curious to hear how disabled people, and wheelchair users in particular, respond to this movie. It’s entirely possible it misses something crucial that my own biases are preventing me from seeing. But, barring that, it strikes me as a step in the right direction to allow a disabled character to exist on her own terms, even in a trashy thriller. Because, lets face it, that’s what Run really is: a trashy thriller. It’s also a very good one, as trashy thrillers go.

It’s also somewhat surprisingly subtle. This is, perhaps, the difference between “thriller” and “horror,” in that horror is much more inclined to go over the top, which Run never does. It traffics less in shocks than in suspense, and it’s better for it. When it comes to new, feature-length content on streaming services in 2020 (this one can be found on Hulu), you could do a lot worse. I enjoyed it enough to recommend it.

A new challenge of wits between daughter and mother.

B+

THE PERSONAL HISTORY OF DAVID COPPERFIELD

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

This is a tricky one. It may come as a surprise to many that I have never read a single novel by Charles Dickens—an oddity that I hope one day to rectify—but it would also come as no surprise that I have seen many film adaptations of Dickens novels. Because, of course, who hasn’t? And I usually enjoy them quite a lot.

This new adaptation of The Personal History of David Copperfield, by director Armando Ianucci (In the Loop, The Death of Stalin), however, leaves me a bit bemused. Well, except for the fact that, in my looking through Ianucci’s past filmography, it seems this is a truly rare director with a consistent record of making movies other critics on average like notably more than I do.

Indeed, although this David Copperfield is a period piece that goes far back in time than his other works, the filmmaking style becomes recognizably distinctive when regarding Ianucci’s filmography. But the thing is, the most interesting thing about this film is its casting of nonwhite actors in several of the key parts, including the title role—and, quite rightly, that fact in an of itself turns out not to be all that interesting at all. It’s not a gimmick, nor does it particularly make any difference.

The character, David Copperfield, is played by Dev Patel, and he fits well into the part. In fact, by and large, I enjoyed the acting all around, and quite like the cast overall, including Tilda Swinton as David’s Aunt Betsey; Hugh Laurie as Betsey’s cousin Mr. Dick; Gwendoline Christie as David’s stern step-aunt Jane; and Ben Wishaw, unusually unattractive as the villainous Uriah Heep, among others. (If you’re wondering about other nonwhite actors in the cast, a perfectly reasonable desire after my calling attention to it, these include Nikki Anuka-Bird as the snobby Mrs. Steerforth; Rosalind Eleazar as David’s friend Agnes; and Benedict Wong as Agnes’s father Mr. Whitfield, also among several others.)

But, acting alone is not enough, and I found this Personal History of David Copperfield to be too frenetic for its own good, the the persistently zigzagging handheld cinematography a constant distraction. I may not have ever read any Dickens, but I understand it to be fairly dense; here Ianucci tries rather too hard to cram too much story into a mere two hours. I suspect it’s a lot easier if you have read the novel, but at the risk of sounding like a broken record given how often I say this, a film should stand on its own merits. I have not read the novel and I found the plotting often incomprehensible, difficult to follow. This plots the entirety of Copperfield’s childhood and young adult life, and the characters are countless.

To its credit, this film does have several visually clever editing transitions, which would be easier to enjoy were the rest of the editing such that I could keep all the characters and the story threads straight. And, although by all accounts the novel is far more serious, the story here is presented as much more farcical, and I will admit to laughing out loud several times. This movie does have its moments. Audiences with a better working understanding of Dickens’s work will perhaps enjoy it the most. For the rest of us, however, this is a lesser work of Dickens adaptation, at best a moderate disappointment.

It’s too bad when great actors are in something that could have been better,

Overall: B-

Small Axe: MANGROVE

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

Here is where the line between film and television is blurred, perhaps in a way it never has before—and also in a way that might just have been inevitable. This has been the direction things have been headed for a while; a global pandemic just hastened certain elements. The hastening might be why its presentation is somewhat confusingly inconsistent: IMDb.com lists Small Axe as a “miniseries,” each installment listed like television episodes. Except that, although one of them clocks in at a mere 68 minutes, most are feature length, and the Amazon Original digital posters for it refer to Small Axe collectively as “A collection of five films.” Indeed, the first three films had their debuts just last month at the New York Film Festival.

So there’s a lot of context to consider with today’s release of the first installment, Mangrove, which happens to be a triumph of filmmaking—a movie with a lot in common with last month’s Netflix release of Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7, an Oscar-eligible film that certainly has its merits but doesn’t quite stack up to this one. But, I guess, all Mangrove can hope for is Emmys? I mean, setting aside the ridiculous artifice of respective weight and importance between these different awards, still: whatever Mangrove qualifies for, it deserves to win a lot of them.

Mangrove makes incredibly judicious use of its 124 minutes, telling the true story of West Indian immigrants living in the 1960s version of Notting Hill, when it was a neighborhood far removed from what is seen in that other film from the nineties starring Hugh Grant. Much like The Trial of the Chicago 7, which is set within just a few years of the events depicted here, Mangrove is also a courtroom drama—although that is confined to the second half.

This film is very clearly set in two parts, the first half focusing on the Mangrove restaurant from which the title is taken, its West Indian immigrant owners and patrons, and the deeply racist local police force constantly raiding the establishment with no provocation. It gets so bad that the Black community demonstrates, and when they react angrily to yet more arrests without just cause, nine of them are charged with “rioting and affray.”

And thus, because of them getting charged multiple times over the course of several years, it is roughly halfway through the film that Mangrove jumps forward half a decade. There is where the editing in this movie most impresses, as confining the story of something happening over the course of years into a mere two hours is a challenge. Director and co-writer Steve McQueen, who is himself British and set out to tell stories of the Black experience in the UK with this collection, threads it all together with a steady hand. Not a moment is wasted; not once is there a lull.

In fact, much of Mangrove is a bit chaotic. These people are angry, as they have every right to be, and they express their anger forcefully and often. Nearly all the principal characters speak with a strong West Indian accent (close to what Americans would most readily recognize as Jamaican), and keeping the closed captions on—something I always do when watching anything at home anyway—is likely to be helpful.

It’s certainly a fascinating exercise to get a bit of a history lesson on these issues from elsewhere in the world, see how similar they can be to American racial injustice, and how all of these legacies inform what still goes on today. This is, of course, a direct reference to police departments in and their institutionalize racism in particular.

Mangrove is very much an ensemble in terms of its cast, and the performances are excellent without exception. It is made up of relatively unknown actors, the most recognizable of them Leticia Wright, who had played younger sister Shuri in Black Panther (2018). If anyone qualifies as a lead and also deserves specific mention, it’s Shaun Parkes as Mangrove restaurant owner Frank Crichlow, who anchors the story and provides both an anchor and a tipping point for the aforementioned anger. But, these were only two of “The Mangrove Nine,” and that’s not to mention the judge (Alex Jennings) or their lawyer (Jack Lowden) or any number of the other many characters.

What truly elevates Mangrove is its script, which remarkably manages to avoid the kind of emotional manipulation typically expected of films telling stories of this sort. McQueen presents this story entirely without sentiment, letting the facts of the events as they happened speak for themselves. He does give multiple characters pretty powerful monologues that are affecting, but in a way that feels based in reality, and in authentic struggles. This is the kind of movie that illustrates what a long road it’s been and how far we still have to go, and as such commands attention.

Standing up for themselves and leading by example.

Overall: A-

Advance: UNCLE FRANK

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

I really wanted to like Uncle Frank more. I liked Uncle Frank, the character, a lot—which would be thanks to a fine performance in the role by Paul Bettany. This is the guy who plays Vision in the Avengers films, and you’d certainly never realize it to watch him here, as a gay man returning from New York City to his small South Carolina hometown where his pathologically homophobic father has just died.

Frank also serves as mentor to his niece—hence the title—to 18-year-old Beth (Sophia Lillis, perhaps best known as Beverly from the It films), who is now going to the same New York college where Frank is a professor. Thus, the two wind up driving together back south for the funeral, illustrating a sort of familial connection surely many viewers will relate to, especially ones who are either gay, or had a favorite relative who turned out to be gay.

This uncle-niece relationship is easily the most realistic aspect of Uncle Frank, and by far what makes the film most watchable. I found myself moved by it in spite of the films many, many flaws.

Most significant is “Wally” (Peter Macdissi), short for Walid, Frank’s Saudi Arabian boyfriend. No one in Frank’s family knows about him, with the exception of his sister—and, now, Beth. Macdissi, who being Lebanese is at least legitimately Middle Eastern, if not actually Saudi Arabian, gives a serviceable performance of a role that is quite strangely naive as written. I would expect better from writer-director Alan Ball (American Beauty, Six Feet Under, and much, much more), and this particular script left me wondering if this movie represents an unfortunate yet all-too common late-career decline.

Frank comes from a deeply conservative Southern family, now in his late forties in the early seventies, no less—and still, Wally keeps pressuring Frank to come out to them, insisting that it doesn’t compare to the literally life-threatening fate that would await him had he stayed in Saudi Arabia. “It would bring shame on my family,” he says, quite directly suggesting it doesn’t compare to any possible reaction by a family in the American deep south. Seriously, Wally? He does this even knowing the tragic fate of a young boy Frank had taken an interest in during his youth—none of which makes any logical sense. In other words, Ball’s script makes the mystifying choice of not giving Wally any credit or perceptive intelligence.

Furthermore, the deeper we get into Uncle Frank, the more melodramatic it gets, with detours into dialogue that alternates between stilted and clichéd. Much of what transpires is frustratingly predictable, and reminiscent of more typical gay stories of yesteryear, from a time when writers didn’t know any better. I hesitate to say this film is over the top, but several moments come pretty damned close.

If it has any saving grace, it is the great cast, as Uncle Frank is packed with comfortably familiar faces: Steve Zahn as Frank’s younger brother Mike; Margo Martindale as his mother; Stephen Root as his dad; Judy Greer as his sister; even the always-lovely Lois Smith as his great aunt. We meet all these characters in the opening sequence of the movie, and it has a sort of instantly calming effect: who wouldn’t want to spend some time with all these people together? And for the most part, it is indeed a pleasant ninety minutes hanging out with them.

Much of the ending is rather saccharine, arguably unrealistic in its niceness, a sort of fairy tale that seems to be a little deluded about it being a fairy tale. I don’t mean to sound cynical; I still fell right into the trap of its transparent emotional manipulation and shed a few tears, both sad and happy, for these characters. And to be fair, the entire film is a nostalgic look into the past, and what else is nostalgia besides a comforting revisionist history? Plenty of viewers will find Uncle Frank to be a perfectly lovely experience overall; that does not make it a particularly high quality film. What disappoints me is its squandered potential, as this could have been far better, had Alan Ball bothered with much in the way of nuance. But, this is what we’ve got, and even if much of the script is informed by ignorance, at least in the end it’s of a more blissful sort.

Just like Beth, Uncle Frank is my favorite in an otherwise incomprehensible world.

Overall: B-

Advance: COME AWAY

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

Come Away has a premise that’s hard not to love: Peter and Alice are siblings, and they turn out to be Peter Pan and Alice from Alice in Wonderland. This movie thus becomes a combined prequel to both classic texts.

The pedigree isn’t half bad either, starting with director Brenda Chapman, who directed and wrote the Pixar film Brave in 2012, and has story credit on both Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (1991) and The Lion King (1994). Come Away thus is her first foray into feature-length live action, and she brings the imagination of a longtime animator to the proceedings.

Cast in the roles of Peter and Alice’s parents are David Oyelowo and Angelina Jolie, making for a kind of representation heretofore never seen particularly in nineteenth century London cinema: an interracial couple with multiracial children. Oyelowo has himself noted that “It so happens to be a family the likes of which would and could have historically existed in that time in British history, yet not the norm of what you are used to seeing,” in response to the film getting “review bombed” by bored racists prior to the film’s release. That alone motivates me to support this film.

Except . . . good-hearted as Come Away is, as lovely as its visuals often are, in the end it all just falls a little flat. The central conflict of the story is the death of Peter and Alice’s eldest brother, and how the family copes with the tragedy. Come Away qualifies as a fantasy in its own right, and classic fantasies are no stranger to these types of dark elements. It also presents children’s imaginations as a perfectly reasonable escape from this kind of sadness. And yet, the film could stand to be a lot more imaginative, and it could stand to be more effectively poignant. Instead it resists going too far in either direction.

The children actors, Jordan A. Nash as Peter and Keira Chansa as Alice, are well cast, if almost too precocious in their deliveries. There’s something nearly unsettling in their glowing dispositions, the way they maintain bright smiles the entire time they play, projecting a sort of glossy wholesomeness as they engage in pretend sword fights. And then the direct literary references get a tad weird, such as the “potion” Alice drinks turning out to be her mother’s bottle of psychotropics,

I wanted to be moved by Come Away, or delighted, or better yet both in alternating intervals. The movie is pleasant enough, though a tad sadder than one might desire from it. Not even supporting turns by Michael Caine The Wire’s Clarke Peters can quite lift it up. It’s not a bummer per se, but its charms are oddly muted. It could have been a new sort of fairy tale classic, but at best you finish it thinking: I guess that was fine.

Don’t ask Alice.

Overall: B-

LET HIM GO

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

Kevin Costner seems to be enjoying a bit of a cinematic renaissance in his old age. This is a guy who made several great movies in the eighties—granted, some have not held up as well as we’d like over time—then made multiple straight-up stinkers in the nineties, and as far as I’m concerned, Let Him Go might be the best film he’s starred in, in nearly thirty years. He’s taken a lot of perfectly respectable supporting roles in recent years, though, playing older father-figure types (or just literal fathers), and while a key element of his role here is also that of father, it’s nice to see him again in a lead role in a movie that’s actually worth recommending.

The other key roles are both women who are reliably consistent in their excellence, the co-lead being Diane Lane, as Costner’s wife. George and Margaret Blackledge are an aging couple whose grown son has died from a horse riding accident, and as they still grieve this loss, their son’s widow, Lorna (Kayli Carter), has remarried into a dangerous family from North Dakota. Without warning, Lorna and her very young son are taken to said family, without a word to the Blackledges on their 1960s ranch in Montana, Margaret decides very quickly they will head out looking for them, and bring the child back. Okay, and Lorna too, fine.

The matriarch of this family, Blanche Weboy, is played by Leslie Manville, and as good as Costner and Lane are, if there is any single reason to watch this movie, it’s Manville. She is in all of maybe three scenes, one of them a climactic extended sequence, but in all cases, she commands the screen, and makes for a formidable villain.

Granted, writer-director Thomas Bezucha (Big Eden, The Family Stone) can’t be bothered to tell us how Blanche gained this kind of power over a large family of grown men in 1960s North Dakota. It seems a slight oversight that this movie casts women in three roles key to the plot and in not one single other part: does Lorna’s brothers-in-law have not one single other wife among them? Seems weird.

But, okay, we’ll let that slide. When George and Margaret finally find themselves at Blanche’s house, ostensibly for dinner, the entire scene is riveting—all because of Leslie Manville’s performance, characterizing a woman with a harrowing sense of being just this side of unhinged. In her later scenes the woman treads dangerously close to caricature, but Manville can always walk a fine line with confidence.

What I like most about Let Him Go, actually, is how the story unfolds. The first half is much more of a quiet drama, Costner and Lane playing a couple working through their grief by steadily and stubbornly working against their own self-interests, searching for a child who, logically, would always be left with the mother he’s already with. But, once we meet Blanche, it becomes clear that Lorna and her little boy need help getting away from this family, who intimidate even local law enforcement.

The second time we see Blanche, things get violent—a bit gruesome, even. There’s a pivotal moment that is, fair warning, kind of hard to stomach. It’s not that difficult to see where things go from there, but to this movie’s credit, you’d never guess that’s where it’s headed by its first half. This is a movie that surprises you, and even if the surprises aren’t exactly pleasant, it makes for great storytelling.

Let Him Go sort of switches genres over time, from “western mystery” to “crime thriller.” It’s always kind of a thrill when a film can pull of such a trick without falling apart. And even with its minor flaws, Let Him Go keeps it together. I’d recommend this movie to anyone.

These two don’t know what they’re getting themselves into. And neither do we. Which is great!

Overall: B+

GREYHOUND

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

Greyhound brings to mind the 2006 Paul Greengrass film United 93: packed with real-time procedure, a little short on story development. In the case of both films, it really just means it works for a particular type of viewer. It’s just not for everyone.

Would I have gone to see Greyhound were it playing in theaters? Probably; although it’s moderately lacking in many regards, it has a degree of visual detail that would best be seen on a big screen. Or, I suppose, I should just get myself a truly large-screen TV screen one of these days. This film is now available streaming on Apple TV+, where I watched it on my 32” screen.

Probably 95% of 91-minute run time takes place on the open ocean of the Atlantic, the Greyhound of the title being the ship captained by Krause (Tom Hanks), leading an Allied convoy on his first-ever crossing, in early 1942. All of them are being stocked by a German submarine wolf pack, one of them occasionally getting onto their intercom to taunt them, and all of the strategic moves among the convoy are made at Krause’s direction. Some have tragic consequences; some are near misses; some are skilled successes.

And there’s a lot of said direction. The script is written by Tom Hanks himself (his third, after That Thing You Do and Larry Crowne, so this marks a bit of a departure) and based on the 1955 novel The Good Shepherd by C.S. Forester. Clearly Hanks has a longstanding interest in World War II, and he must be going for authenticity when he packs what must be more than half the dialog with straight-up repetition: Krause gives an order; the person taking them repeats it back. That person passes along said order; another person repeats it back. I’ve never seen a movie with so many of its lines repeated verbatim in quick succession.

The only back story we get on Krause is the woman he left back home (Elisabeth Shue), whom he asked to come away with her the previous december. There’s a brief scene of this single encounter near the beginning of the film, with quick flashbacks sprinkled through the rest of the movie. We know nothing more about Krause, apart from when we learn of his inexperience; we know even less about the woman. The focus of this film is otherwise entirely on the sea battles and chases between Allied navy ships and German submarines.

To director Aaron Schneider’s credit, these battles are very well staged, and often very well shot. One memorable visual entais a camera sweep from the sea up through the clouds, flashes from bombs still visible beneath them, and the aurora borealis above them. Still, this is also similar to Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk (2017), in that it’s visually impressive but gives us virtually nothing in terms of its characters. At least Dunkirk was a technical marvel; to be honest, occasionally Greyhound shows its seams. Some of its CGI augmentation is fairly obvious.

That doesn’t lessen its degree of engagement, though. Greyhound is fundamentally an action movie; it’s just old-school serious in tone, no witty quips by action heroes. Decisions have consequences, often fatal on a grand scale. Oddly, Hanks’s script doesn’t give himself much to chew on as an actor, as all the suspense and drama here is procedural, only emotional in very subtle ways. He won’t be getting an Oscar nomination for this one. And that’s okay; he has enough of them.

Still, Greyhound is a suitable movie for fans of either Tom Hanks or World War II films, or particularly, both. Even for the casual viewer (that’s me!), it commands attention.

Look out!

Overall: B

ON THE ROCKS

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

It seems Sofia Coppola has a knack for making solid-B movies. They can be very different from each other, though they do all have a certain touch that gives it a vaguely recognizable sensibility specific to her. I didn’t even realize until looking back that every film of hers that I have reviewed, I have given a solid B: Marie Antoinette (2006); Somewhere (2010); The Bling Ring (2013); The Beguiled (2017). Her famous debut, Lost in Translation, came out in 2003, the year before I started reviewing movies—but, after all those that have followed, this year we get On the Rocks, and it would appear the streak remains unbroken.

Which is to say, I’m glad I saw it, and I enjoyed it; others likely will too, but I wouldn’t say it demands to be seen. And there is also “the 2020 effect,” where contrary to what had been the plan once upon a time, the film is not getting seen in movie theaters, but streaming. Granted, Sofia Coppola Films never had the kind of visual command that necessitated big-screen viewing anyway. On the other hand, so many films this year have been diverted to streaming platforms just so they could be seen by audiences, and although a clear majority of them are going to Netflix, which streaming service it goes to is otherwise largely a crap shoot. Amazon Prime Video? Hulu? Disney+? On the Rocks has gone to one of the newest platforms, with far less brand recognition than Disney, and thus arguably the most obscure. I signed up for the free trail week of Apple TV+ just so I could watch this movie.

Would it be worth you going to the trouble? If you already subscribe to Apple TV+, sure, On the Rocks is very much worth your time. If you don’t already subscribe, is it worth the extra trouble? That’s where it gets debatable.

On the Rocks is perfectly pleasant, and sweet, and in many ways a sort of wistful, almost nostalgic hang. Bill Murray basically helped launch Coppola’s career with Lost in Translation, and he returns here, in a somewhat similar part. This is also about an aging man and a much younger woman, although in this case it’s Rashida Jones, playing his daughter. Rashida plays Laura, who is overwhelmed by the scheduling demands of a young mother in New York City, and only slightly paranoid about the fidelity of her husband Dean (Marlon Wayans, an interesting casting choice).

Laura’s dad, Felix (Murray), is an aging playboy who can’t stop himself from flirting with, if not hitting on, virtually every woman he comes across. He fancies himself a man who understands how men’s brains work, and so he manages to fill Laura’s head with ideas of what constitutes so-called evidence of Dean cheating.

What I like most about On the Rocks is how it’s much more about Laura’s relationship with her father than about her relationship with her husband, and that the story doesn’t quite go where you might expect it to, especially for a movie this otherwise conventional, at least by Coppola’s usual standards. There is usually something more extreme about the circumstances in Sofia Coppola’s films, be it the degree of misfit her main characters are, or a fish-out-of-water setting in which the protagonist feels out of place. The trappings of On the Rocks, on the hand, are all very familiar, with very recognizable and regular characters in a present-day American city.

There is one clearly unintended effect, though, as of course no one making this movie would have known during filming that a global pandemic was coming. So, On the Rocks becomes a sort of pleasant time capsule of a time not so long ago, but still very different from now: no social distancing, no masks, just people taking the city of New York for granted. Remember hanging out at bars? Laura and Felix do that a lot in this movie. And even though it takes them on an ill-advised detour to Mexico and back, their journey is one in which they recognize each other’s flaws, and accept them for who they are anyway. It’s a touching thing to see things go that way, much more realistically than when a character goes through some kind of preposterous emotional epiphany. This movie is simply a pleasant watch, a low-key tale that is comforting in its way.

Hey, where’s the ice, anyway?

Overall: B

THE WITCHES

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

And here we are again, with yet another remake—at least this time, no one can claim the film being remade was “a masterpiece.” I saw Nicolas Roeg’s 1990 adaptation of Roald Dahl’s children’s book for the first time just a few years ago, and I did not find it particularly memorable on its own. I recall thinking it was . . . fine.

This means a remake in this case is, if not particularly exciting, then also . . . fine. And Robert Zemeckis is a great choice to direct a film like this. In fact, coming in already armed with the knowledge of how mixed the reviews of this 2020 version have been, I spent the first quarter or so of this version of The Wtiches thinking it was going a lot better than I expected. I was quite enjoying myself.

In the first several scenes of this story, we learn the backstory of the orphaned boy whose story this is: his parents killed in a car accident (in a cleverly rotating-camera shot of him still strapped into the backseat of the overturned car), he is taken in by his grandmother (Octavia Spencer). When they realize a local witch has tried to offer him candy in a grocery store, Grandma takes him into hiding at an opulent resort where her cousin is the chef—and where, it turns out, a local conference of witches is convening. What bad luck!

The setting in this iteration is shifted to 1960s Alabama, and there’s something odd about the choice to make the principal characters Black, particularly from that era. The choice itself is not necessarily odd, but there are only two logical approaches here: either keep the characters as they were in the book, or, if the focus will be shifted to a Black family in the Jim Crow-era American South, there should be more direct acknowledgment of very real racial inequities. Minority actors (not to mention female leads, of which this film has both) getting work is always good to see, but pretending their unique real-world experiences don’t exist doesn’t make much sense. The closest we get here is Grandma telling the boy that witches are more prone to prey on “the poor” because their children aren’t as missed when they are gone.

That said, I did very much enjoy Octavia Spencer’s performance in this movie. Anne Hathaway, as the Grand High Witch, is a bit more spotty. There are moments when her delivery has some hilarious subtlety, and also moments when she goes too far over the top. That is when The Witches kind of goes off the rails.

The first half is much better than the last half. The Witches introduces itself with compellingly stylized visuals, and a nice sprinkling of humor. I laughed out loud several times, more than I had expected. The laughs evaporate in the second half, when the story gets overrun with slapstick antics and Zemeckis’s over-fondness for the grotesque: the witches’ hoof-like feet, their clawed hands with only three fingers, Hathaway’s SGI grin so wide on her face she looks like a second-rate Joker. To the credit of the effects team, the look still manages to be genuinely creepy.

I must bring up the effects, however. The cinematography in this film is its best feature, highlighting a production design packed with vibrant colors. The special effects never hit the mark. The Grand High Witch has a cat, which she has amusingly named Hades (mental note: name for a future pet cat of my own?), and rather than deal with a real cat on set, it is entirely rendered in CGI. I don’t know how they allocated this movie’s clearly big budget, but not much of it went to that cat. Even worse is the three talking mice that are also CGI rendered, all of them way more expressive than they need to be, as though literal cartoons inside what is supposed to be a live-action film.

I do go back and forth regarding how well this film works for children themselves. This is a kids’ movie, after all, and such movies have no obligation to speak to adults at the same time—though it’s always convenient when they do. Depending on the age of the child, The Witches might be eye-roll-inducing and dumb; it might be riveting from beginning to end; for younger children it could easily be terrifying. It all depends on the child’s age and maturity level, although I do like the dark places this film is unafraid to go, and that it doesn’t quite offer the type of “happy ending” one might expect—though it is one viewers can live with. It’s the getting there that is definitively a mixed bag.

I mean, okay. That’s a little much.

Overall: B-