LET THEM ALL TALK

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

If there’s any director with the ability to adapt to a rapidly changing film industry, it’s Steven Soderbergh, whose proliferation as a mainstream director is also unparalleled. He was adapting—and experimenting—long before the global pandemic of 2020, and doing so right up to it, with his latest film, Let Them All Talk. He’s been marching to the very specific beat of his own drum for so long, the results have been a bit spotty, but this one is worth a look.

If this were any other year, I wouldn’t even be reviewing this movie. Let Them All Talk was never intended for theatrical release, always part of Soderbergh’s 3-year deal with HBO. Indeed, even after reviving my reviews after a seven-month hiatus, I am now violating what had been my rule that I simply continue reviewing films that were intended for theatrical release and were forced to pivot to VOD and streaming platforms, or in other words, films that still qualify for Academy Awards. But now we live in a gray area, and as with Steve McQueen’s “Small Axe” series on Prime Video, I moved to reviewing films that had ever been seen in a theater at some point, even if it was at a film festival. Let Them All Talk doesn’t qualify by any of these measures, but you know what? Functionally speaking, it’s no different than any of the other film’s I’ve reviewed since September: it’s available to stream, was directed by a widely respected and long established director, and perhaps most notably, stars three iconic actors. In the very specific context of December 2020, I simply could not ignore this movie.

And I say that even though, to be sure, Let Them All Talk is not for everyone. Experimental in multiple ways of its own, Soderbergh shot the majority of it during a legitimate crossing of the Queen Mary 2 from New York to Southampton, England in the summer of last year. Real passengers were given the opportunity to be in the film as background extras. And most unusual of all, Deborah Eisenberg’s script only existed as an outline, otherwise completely improvised by the cast—even though it’s a drama.

This has a curious effect, in that the dialogue never feels in any way polished. To be honest, I think the script would have been improved with some polish, but there’s something compelling about this approach nonetheless. It lends the story a certain sort of grit, and makes the characters feel real in a way they almost never do, particularly when starring iconic actors. Soderbergh’s editing is rather skilled here, in how these improvised exchanges are cut together. It’s the plot that moves the story forward, far more than the dialogue, and yet I still found myself interested in what they had to say.

The stars in question are Meryl Streep as a rich, alienating, slightly distracted novelist, whose body of work is both high-minded and sparing. She invites two old and estranged college friends, played by Dianne Wiest and Candice Bergen, to join her on the transatlantic crossing. Resentments resurface and rebuilt, and they do come to a head, although none of them involve histrionics or even major drama. It’s all relatively quiet: no one ever screams or yells in this movie.

All three of these women are between the ages of 71 and 74, and it’s wonderful to see a film centered around not one, but three such women, proving with ease that they have stories that can be just as compelling as anyone’s. Two of the principal supporting characters are indeed younger: 24-year-old Lucas Hedges as Streep’s nephew she brings along; and 38-year-old Gemma Chan as Streep’s literary agent who has booked herself on the crossing in secret. And even though Hedges and Chan play characters forging their own sort of friendship on the sly as a subplot, they remain absolutely minor to the plot as compared to the three elder women.

It’s easy to imagine some viewers finding Let Them All Talk somewhat dull, even those who have nothing against this bevy of great actors. Some movies are electric with crackling dialogue, and this is not one of those. Soderbergh is dealing almost exclusively in subtleties here, and that’s really what endeared the film to me most. They all seem just about as relaxed as if they were merely taking a pleasure cruise that happened to have a film crew tagging along. Except these characters really have far greater emotional stakes going on than other people on board, and even if it’s not at all bumpy, it’s a pleasant diversion to be along for the ride.

Let Them All Talk is literally what Steven Soderbergh does, and then he skillfully molds and edits.

Overall: B+

THE PROM

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

Where do I even start with the beautiful hot mess that is The Prom? This is a film that never met a performance it couldn’t overdo, filled with “hot takes” that are glaringly obvious, a feature film that basically serves as en extended, reprise episode of Glee, right down to its director, Ryan Murphy. To be clear, this movie is deeply flawed. And I generally had a blast watching it.

There’s one key thing that is The Prom’s saving grace, such as there can possibly be one: the musical dance numbers. I know this is a radically low bar to clear, but at least this movie musical is better, on all fronts, than Cats. That movie’s best element was also its music, and even that was barely adequate. The vast majority of the songs, and their accompanying dance routines, are a genuine kick to watch in The Prom. As written by original Broadway play lyricist Chad Beguelin, the songs are rather witty, and I got a good number of laughs out of them. A couple of them are so on the nose, I could have lived without them, as in the Andrew Rannells number “Love Thy Neighbor,” a song about double standards in following the rules of the Bible. It’s catchy as all get out but tonally dated and preposterous.

And that’s the thing about The Prom: with some exceptions, when there are no songs being sung, the movie skates along the borders of dreadful. I suspect the stage production was far better and great fun to see; choosing Ryan Murphy to direct might have seemed to others a no-brainer but strikes me as totally misguided. The one consistent thing about all of that man’s projects is how wildly uneven they are: often enjoyable but usually in spite of needless flaws. From the very start, every actor delivers their lines as though a deliberate caricature of themselves. Anyone who is not a fan of musicals could easily cite this movie as exhibit A.

On the flip side, plenty of people who are fans of musicals will likely quite enjoy this movie. And certainly, any true lover of theater would quite understandably be moved by the whole package being delivered here. It’s hard not to argue, however, how wildly miscast this film is—and I’m not going to take the side of the countless people out there complaining about James Corden being cast in the part of a flamboyantly gay man. Sure, it would be better if they hired an actually-gay man to play this part, but Corden is otherwise fine: he’s performing it as written, and all things considered, he’s far more subtle about the flamboyance than he could have been.

What irritates me more is this trend of hiring huge stars for singing parts not because they are great singers, but merely because they are stars who happen to be able to carry a tune. Why does this movie in particular need Nicole Kidman and Meryl Streep? Streep is arguably the greatest actor alive today, and people act as though it’s so impressive that she can also sing. Except her singing ability, while serviceable, is hardly exceptional. But for some reason, she keeps getting cast over and over again in musicals. As for Kidman, she has far less prior experience with musicals, her most famous role in Moulin Rouge! notwithstanding. And her singing as a novelty in that film was part of the point. And granted, James Corden is nowhere near the same caliber as an actor, but he’s a merely adequate singer as well. Is it really so imperative to hire huge stars in a movie like this in order to sell it? Why can’t we get actual, Broadway-caliber performers in these parts? All three of them are saved only by the finesse of the songwriting itself.

So what about the story itself, then? Honestly, it’s corny as hell—which is, frankly, on brand of Ryan Murphy. A group of Broadway stars licking their wounds, after their musical Eleanor! (about Eleanor Roosevelt) flops, head to Indiana for a publicity stunt to improve their images after being labeled narcissists. They find out about a small town high school that is canceling their prom rather than be forced to let a young lesbian couple go to it, and they’ve got it in their heads that they can combat bigotry with their celebrity.

There’s actually some incisive satire to be mined there, most of which The Prom squanders. Murphy seems to want to have it both ways, weaving in the message that it’s naive to think you can solve deeply complex issues with simple minded solutions . . . and then the movie wraps up its conflicts with insanely oversimplified ideas, mostly devoid of nuance. It’s a classic sitcom trope, just stretched out over 130 minutes. That’s roughly half an hour longer than this movie ever needed to be, by the way, and that’s including its several largely irresistible musical sequences.

The thing is though, by and large, The Prom’s heart is in the right place. It feels a little lost to time, the kind of movie that could have become a beloved cult classic were it released twenty years ago. Alas, we are now so massively flooded with new content, it’s been ages since any movie had any hope of being a “cult” anything. The Prom has its narrow lane in the zeitgeist this week, to be replaced and forgotten within a matter of days.

And I won’t lie, I was won over by it—even by the over-the-top performances. To be fair, Jo Ellen Pellman has both talent and charisma to spare in the role of Ellen, the young lesbian in question; Ariana DeBose is lovely as her love interest as well. Still, even some of the smaller supporting parts are oddly miscast, such as Logan Riley as the head cheerleader, who is supposed to be a teenager, is actually 21, and looks at least 25. Somewhere along the line, I lost count of this movie’s many flaws, and almost came to find them endearing. There’s no escaping how much better The Prom would have been had countless better choices been made in its production and casting, or even the fact that it’s objectively not a good movie. But is it fun? I found it undeniably so.

Did I mention Tracey Ullman is also in this movie? Try to find her!

Overall: C+

Small Axe: ALEX WHEATLE

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

Alex Wheatle may be my least favorite in director Steve McQueen’s “Small Axe” collection, only in that I wanted more. This is yet another true story, this time about the young adult novelist Alex Wheatle, having grown up without his parents in a group home, and ultimately serving time in prison for participating in the 1981 Brixton Riot in South London.

I suppose it could be argued that McQueen deflty whittles down Wheatle’s story to its barest essence, presenting this installment of his so-called “Collection of Five Films” at a mere 66 minutes. That makes it the shortest installment thus far, ablbeit barely shorter than the second entry, Lovers Rock, which clocked in at 70 minutes. Lovers Rock as presented, however, with an aesthetic much like an extended music video, worked well with the shorter run time. Music also plays significantly in Alex Wheatle’s story, though not nearly to the same extent; regardless, the resulting effect is as though these two shorter entries serve more as a sort of interlude between the entries that are closer to feature length. (Mangrove and Red, White and Blue, both excellent, are 127 minutes and 80 minutes, respectively.)

As this “collection” goes on, with its weekly release of the next installment, really none of them near the feature length of the first, the more it does feel like an anthology series meant for television. I’ve been reviewing each of them so far, though; I can’t stop now! They’ll just have to stand as the shortest “films” I have ever reviewed.

And Alex Wheatle is a solid film on its own terms. It just feels lightly incomplete. Newcomer Sheyi Cole is well cast in the title role, serving a quasi-Citizen Kane narrative structure as he tells his story in flashbacks to his cell mate in prison. I’d love to see a version of this film with a second hour, which tells the story of how Wheatle finds success as a writer in the 21st century. Evidently, McQueen isn’t interested in that, although we do see by the end how he gains interest in other authors who clearly later become influences on his work.

Perhaps McQueen is attempting to avoid any kind of fatigue on the part of the viewer in regards to scenes depicting riots and uprisings—I don’t know—but he makes an interesting choice here, presenting the actual event of the 1981 Brixton Riot almost exclusively through still photos of it with voice-over narration. We then get brief scenes of Alex hiding from the police directly after the uprising, and then later getting arrested during a police raid on his building.

As with the other installments before it, the characters in this story have Jamaican heritage. This makes sense as part of this project clearly very personal to Steve McQueen, who is himself of Caribbean heritage—although, like Alex Wheatle, he was born British. Wheatle, in fact, after growing up in a mostly white home for boys and thus gets raised and conditioned in very British ways, finds himself in a Black neighborhood as a young adult where he has to learn how to speak and behave in ways that allow him to blend in. Early on, he naively addresses a police officer politely, sparking frustration among the would-be friends trying to teach him how to get by.

There’s a moment when we see Wheatle talking to his cell mate, and he says “It was always all about the music.” Oddly, Alex Wheatle the film is hardly the same: his experience as a budding young musician gets surprisingly little attention. If it wasn’t actually all about the music, why have him tell us that?

Still, Alex Wheatle is very well shot and well acted, and although I would hesitate to say this one works as a standalone piece anywhere near as well as the other films do, it does fit well into the big picture McQueen is attempting to represent in terms of the Black experience in Britain.

Alex has understandably had enough but I want more.

Overall: B

BACURAU

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

It’s said that Bacurau is packed with subtext, so it may very well be that it works better for Brazilian audiences, or at least non-Brazilians with a deep knowledge of Brazilian history and politics. I must admit that I am almost completely ignorant of such things, save for such broad details as their horrible President Bolsonaro, or Brazilian wildfire deforestation, neither of which are referenced at all in this film. At least not directly. Whatever co-directors Juliano Dornelles and Kleber Mendonça Filho are getting at with this film exactly, I don’t have a clue what it is. I feel like I need some sort of cinematic version of Cliffs Notes.

The film doesn’t even seem to know what genre it is, and I sure don’t. It certainly can’t settle on a particuar tone. Consider the genres listed for it on IMDb.com: adventure, horror, mystery, thriller, western. The very beginning, when a young woman and a young man are returning to the rural Brazilian town of the film’s title, feels much like a documentary without narration. The woman has returned to pay her respects to the town’s matriarch, who has recently passed. The entire town is in mourning.

I great deal of time is spent setting the scene here, with not much of anything at all going on. It goes on long enough to make even the most dedicated viewer lose interest. Bacurau does get interesting, if never quite coherent, but did it have to insist on waiting until well over half its 131 minute run time to do so? I’d be tempted to get far more critical even than this, but for the fear that maybe there’s more to this film that I’m just not seeing due to my ethnocentric perspective on it.

Bacurau is certainly unique, I’ll give it that. At least three times, you become convinced you’re starting to get what kind of movie it is, and it throws you for a loop. Locals in this small town discover that Bacurau seems to have disappeared from all digital maps, and they lose their phone signals. A pair of motorbike riders, presumed tourists, show up, soon after several members of a farm family outside of town are discovered bloody and murdered. And a drone that’s in the shape of a B-movie UFO starts to get spotted flying overhead.

It took me a minute even to realize it was supposed to be a drone, as opposed to an actual UFO that’s just being rendered with terrible special effects. There’s a moment that feels very Ed Wood, until you realize what’s actually going on. And this is where Bacurau most severely turns on its own head, introducting non-local characters who all speak English to each other. Even that gets dangerously close to spoiler territory, and I don’t want to ruin it . . . although for whom, I have no idea. Who in the world would I ever convince to watch this movie?

Maybe someone who is intrigued by this tidbit: Bacurau winds up being an ultra-violent film. I suppose fans of Quentin Tarantino might enjoy it, although Tarantino at least writes stories whose pieces all fit together, even when he’s playing with time. Bacurau is entirely linear in its presentation; it just has pieces that, while they do fit together in the end, you still can’t quite make out the picture once they’re all fastened together. Is it about aliens? About something supernatural? These questions actually get answered pretty early on, through a series of baits and switches. The opening shot, in fact, is from outer space, looking down on Brazil, closing in on the land as it moves beyond an orbiting satellite. Don’t get attached to anything about that opening shot, because it has little to nothing to do with the rest of the movie. You could say the same amount most of the sequences in the first third or so, in fact.

If you like to be surprised, I suppose, then Bacurau is full of rewards. You just have to wait a long time to get them.

Droning on in its own special way.

Overall: B-

MANK

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

It’s been ten months now since I last saw a film in a movie theater, and in all that time, I have indeed missed movie-going dearly. But, it’s been in a much more abstract sense, being in terms of the overall experience as opposed to being tied to a specific movie I wished I could have seen on the big screen. This is hardly a surprise, given all the blockbusters that were delayed again and again, many of them even now delayed until next year. But even this depends on things like the studio and its parent company: not everyone has an HBO Max they can pivot their entire slate to as part of a long-game strategy.

That said, things are shifting, and in a way few people imagined possible a year ago. And this includes more movies, coming sooner than later, which actually would indeed work better on movie theater screens than they do on home television screens. David Fincher’s new film Mank is the year’s first notable example of that.

And it’s not because it’s a blockbuster of any sort, but because it’s great cinema. Its technical finesse just doesn’t translate as well on the small screen, and I found myself really wishing I could have been watching on a projector screen. Now, if I were to offer Mank any concrete criticism at all, it’s that although it remains an excellent film on its own merits, it is also somewhat self-conscious about being “great cinema.” This is a key distinction from the many other films that have gained attention this year in a way they could never have any other year, revealing themselves to have shifted into the realm of greatness through a far more organic process. I would never quite call Mank “organic.” In fact it’s rather focused on a meticulous attention to detail, both in its present-day storytelling and its references to cinema history—fundamentally, it’s about artifice. But in Fincher’s context, that is done in all the best ways.

Mank is the kind of film that won’t ever top my best-of list, but I wouldn’t be bothered by it eventually winning Best Picture anyway. Of course, like everything else in 2020, the Academy Awards are to be wildly different this year, starting with being scheduled two months later than planned. Thus, even with all the Oscar buzz this film is getting now, there’s plenty of time for people to forget about it in favor of something else to be released between now and then. And honestly, this film has gotten so much critical praise that some might come away from it feeling it was over-hyped. For the record, I don’t really agree with that assessment.

I would say that its script, but David’s late father Jack Fincher, after decades of trying in vain to get it made until Netflix bankrolled it, is rather dense. It is also absolutely enhanced by a working knowledge of Orson Welles’s seminal 1941 masterpiece Citizen Kane. Some even suggest watching that film just prior to this one as a double feature, but even in quarantine, who has the time or the bandwidth for that? I considered it myself, but came back to my long-held conviction that a film should work on its own merits. And Mank absolutely does. It’s just that its universe expands in richness the more you delve into it—the degree to which you do that is up to you.

One thing about the casting is a bit odd: Gary Oldman is 62, playing Citizen Kane script writer Herman Mankiewicz (hence the title, his nickname), who reveals himself at one point to be 43. Granted, Mankiewicz was evidently quite the drunk, which surely ages a man, but Oldman still seems like a stretch. Then again, Oldman’s performance is so great, conveying a uniquely charismatic casual confidence, it’s easy to overlook. The true standout, however, is Amanda Seyfried, of pop trash Mamma Mia! (2008) fame. Here she is unrecognizable, giving an Oscar-worthy performance all her own as MGM actress, and William Randolph Hearst’s longtime mistress, Marion Davies.

Hearst unsurprisingly plays a key role in this film, played flawlessly (as always) by Charles Dance, as the newspaper mogul has always been known as the unofficial target/subject of Orson Welles’s portrayal in Citizen Kane. More importantly, he was the target/subject of Mankiewicz’s original script—the credit for which he shared with Welles, even though Welles really didn’t write any of it; and for which the film later won its single Academy Award. It’s also notable that Welles, played here by Tom Burke, plays a minor role in the Mank story, existing onscreen in but a few select scenes and otherwise existing solely on the other end of phone calls during Mankiewicz’s convalescence after a car accident.

Mank is a historical drama, shot in beautiful black and white cinematography in a clear ode to Citizen Kane itself, about a particular moment in 1940s Hollywood, but it’s about a whole lot more than just the making of what many critics still regard as the best film ever made. A particularly notable and memorable subplot involves the 1934 California gubernatorial campaign of Republican Frank Merriam, who beat Democrat Upton Sinclair with the help of MGM’s hiring of actors to pretend to be real voters in their campaign ads. It’s a subtle reminder that the “fake news” bullshit we get so exasperated with today is far from new—it’s been going on for decades, the better part of a century.

Lastly, I must bring up the editing, as Mank follows a relatively similar narrative structure to Citizen Kane itself, with many flashbacks to nonlinear dates in the past used to inform the “present-day” of the story. They key difference here is something I rather liked: with each flashback, a line of script stage direction appears onscreen, identifying the year we’re going back to, and always specifying “(FLASHBACK).” It works incredibly well, making it impossible to get confused as to where or when we are, and it’s less patronizing than it is just plain useful.

Mank is available to stream on Netflix right now, and incidentally was always produced as a Netflix film. In fact, it’s the third year in as many years we’re getting a Netflix film that is some level of Oscar bait, after the jaw-dropping technical proficiency of Roma (2018) and last year’s good-but-wildly-overrated The Irishman. The previous films both garnered many Academy Award nominations but not as many wins as Netflix clearly hoped for, and I suspect the same will be the case with Mank. That said, while I still think Roma is objectively the best of the three, even with the density of its excellent script, I would venture to say Mank is the most accessible. They key is just to get you to press “play” on this one even when there are countless other, perfectly worthy options over many streaming platforms. All I can tell you is it’s absolutely worth it.

Mank takes his appealingly casual confidence on to the next scene.

Overall: A-

Small Axe: RED, WHITE AND BLUE

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

There is so much about Red, White and Blue that is . . . tricky. Once again, the first tricky thing is it being the middle installment out out of the five “Small Axe” films by Steve McQueen being presented weekly on Prime Video (this one went live today). So much of this entire project exists in the margins of categorization: this installment, for example, runs at 80 minutes—short for a movie; long for a television episode. I still lean toward regarding these all as feature films, but given that there are five of them, it’s a commitment. Who besides the film-obsessed like myself is going to watch them all?

And the thing is, even though they are not sequels, it’s becoming clear that their thematic connection is important. They each certainly stand on their own, but they are enhanced by watching them as a series. And Red, White and Blue might very well be the best of them yet. Mangrove got slightly better reviews on average, but I suspect at least part of that is first impressions of a clearly great project. Or, I suppose, I am currently experiencing recency bias. What does it matter when both films are great? The one that came second, last week’s Lovers Rock, didn’t strike me as quite as strong, but now that there are three, it feels in retrospect like a perfectly appropriate interlude. That one has its darker moments but on the whole is an expression of joy through music . . . the other two films in the series so far are much more direction focused on excessive force by the police.

And, like the first film, this one is also based on a true story, about a young Black man in 1980s London who finally decides to join the police force in an attempt to change it “from the inside,” after his immigrant Jamaican father is severely beaten by police. The Caribbean heritage has been a through line in all three films so far, making me expect now that the next two will be as well.

Boy, are these films well timed. Then again, they would be any time—but 2020 is a particularly relevant year for it. Some American films have tacked it as well, but given how many movies focus on cops (usually characterizing them not just as heroes, but easily assumed to be), it’s not that often you see the story of a Black person joining the force specifically because of its institutionalized racism.

Here McQueen deftly weaves in threads of multiple forms of racism, as well. When Leroy Logan (John Boyega, excellent) graduates and is assigned to the precinct in his home neighborhood, he meets and befriends a Pakistani man already also a cop there. Leroy is now the second of only two nonwhite cops there, and they immediately bond over shared experiences. Leroy also soon encounters the very same shit Asif (Assad Zaman) has been enduring all along, with colleagues openly mocking their races in their presence.

And this gets us back to what’s tricky: it’s tough to be in a position like this no matter what, but it’s especially tough when you’re the first. Leroy clearly doesn’t think of himself as a trailblazer per se, nor does this film call attention to that, but it’s what he is. He makes little headway in making the changes he set out to do in London policing, but his very existence makes it easier for another to come along after him and push things a little further along. This context is not discussed or presented at all in the film, in fact, but I sure thought about it. We watch his spirit getting slowly broken, but it’s on his shoulders on which those who follow him will be standing. Or did stand: this is based on a true story, after all.

Red, White and Blue is also compelling in technical ways, as I particularly enjoyed the cinematography in this film. There’s one tense sequence in which Leroy is navigating a factory maze of heavy machinery, with the camera moving ahead, behind and around him as he twists and turns in a long, unbroken take. It’s much like 1917 except without it being a gimmicky selling point. I’m using it to sell it to you now, however: it’s great work. It’s also the kind of camera work that’s only particularly appropriate in this one sequence, so it never distracts from or strains the storytelling. It still places the focus on the character, showing in real time how he’s in pursuit of a dangerous suspect, he calls for backup no fewer than three times, and for the entire chase he’s left on his own.

The entire series of “Small Axe” films is intended to represent the history of Black experience in Britain, and two installments now focus directly on the police—this time from within its ranks. Not only does Leroy face persecution from his colleagues, but since others in his community quite rightly regard the police as their enemy, they think of Leroy as a traitor. He gets his support from a narrow supply channel, mostly through his Aunt Jesse (Nadine Marshall) who works as a Police Liaison, and his wife, Gretl (Antonia Thomas). Incidentally, Tyrone Huntley appears in a few brief scenes as Leroy’s cousin, Imagination singer Leee John, and his being gay is merely subtly hinted at. Leee is incredulous, though, when he first hears of Leroy’s intention to become a cop.

So it takes much of Leroy’s family some time to even slightly warm up to the idea. Leroy faces uphill battles on all sides with this decision, and all these angles are seamlessly woven into this tight hour and twenty minutes, all of it absolutely worth your time.

Out of the frying pan and into the fire.

Overall: A

Advance: SOUND OF METAL

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

I can’t say enough good things about Sound of Metal—literally have no bad things to say about it. I’ll be open to whatever criticism there might be by others, to be fair, particularly those who are part of key groups represented. Namely, the deaf community and addicts, or to be sure, deaf people in twelve-step programs. I belong to none of these groups, but from my perspective, this film absolutely kills it when it comes to representative intersectionality.

The cast is diverse in just about every way imaginable, and Darius Marder, offering a stunning directorial debut, directs a cast of supporting characters actually hired from the deaf community. Much of the story takes place at a home for addicts, and the people there are diverse even aside from being deaf. And a key part of the plot involves all these deaf characters having the fervent belief that being deaf is not a disability, “not something to be fixed,” while the main character is eager to get implants to regain his hearing.

Riz Ahmed is phenomenal in the lead role, his learning both the drums and ASL in preparation clearly paying off. From very early on in this film, I kept thinking of the excellent 2014 film Whiplash—what I felt at the time was the best film of the year—and not because both films are about a drummer; that’s really just a coincidence. Whiplash was about musicians and being the best at honing talent at all costs; Sound of Metal is about adapting to a sudden and permanent change to your world and reality. But in both cases, from the very start, you cannot look away. The film hooks you, and you are deep in it through the end.

In a way, it’s even more effective in the case of Sound of Metal, given that films usually use music to tell their stories, often in manipulative ways. By contrast, in this movie, you hear a score, and a subtle one at that, maybe three percent of the time. What Marder does is use sound to tell his story, and if this film does not get an Oscar nomination for Sound Editing it will be a travesty.

As the film begins, we are seeing Ruben (Ahmed) playing the drums in a band gig, his girlfriend Lou being the singer. Lou is played by Olivia Cooke, who had previously impressed me a great deal in the 2018 film Thoroughbreds. It’s only one or two scenes later that we see Ruben experiencing sudden hearing loss, so the film gets right to that point: the story isn’t so much about his hearing loss, but about how he deals with it. And at first, because Ruben has difficulty dealing with curve balls in life, he attempts to ignore it. But, the problem gets bad enough quickly enough that he sees a doctor, who tells him his hearing is at about a quarter of what it should be.

Sound of Metal is in a class all its own, always taking its own path, a story that commands attention. It also provides much food for thought, such as that notion of getting surgery for hearing loss being wrong-headed. I can’t decide if I agree with it, or at least, maybe it depends on the person. After all, the experience of someone born deaf is far different from that of someone who grew up hearing and then suddenly loses it. And Ruben’s entire livelihood is tied to his hearing, so it’s understandable for him to feel desperate to get it back.

Now, I’m going to get into quasi-spoiler territory, so be warned. Ruben gets this surgery, and how the film presents the way he hears things after his implants are “activated” is fascinating. I wonder, first of all, how accurately represented that sound could possibly be? The movie is made by hearing people, after all; and even if those who have actually had this surgery can explain it, that can only go so far—no one could possibly truly know how the brain processes sound with the implants unless they actually have them, I would imagine. Ruben’s experience is that the sound is very tinny, and often distorted, especially when there’s a lot of noise around. I found it interesting that sound of his “corrected” hearing would be tinny, on top of his being in a metal band, hence the film’s title. That’s how I took it, anyway; to be fair, no one in the film ever refers to his band’s music as “metal.”

All that said, one of the messages of this film does seem to be that this kind of surgery is not all it’s cracked up to be, or at least it won’t be the solution some think or hope it will be. That’s far from its primary purpose, however, which is one of the many things that make it exceptional. Its purpose is to tell a great story, which it does with flying colors. All these other things, the finesse of its representative intersectionality (I particularly enjoyed Ruben’s friendship with a lesbian addict staying at the group home with him), the sensitivity of its character portrayals, the smart casting, are all bonuses. And they combine to make what is easily one of the best films of the year.

Riz Ahmed learns a new way of navigating his world.

Overall: A

Advance: HALF BROTHERS

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

Of all the many, many movies I have watched in my life, Half Brothers is backward in a unique way. When it’s sweet, it works; but the funnier it tries to be, the less it works. It’s usually the other way around, but in this case, there is greater success when director Luke Greenfield is actually taking things relatively seriously.

A running gag involves a goat, and this is my least favorite thing about the movie. I kind of hate it. The majority of the film follows half-brothers who never knew they had the same dad, one from the U.S. and one from Mexico, on a road trip through the American Southwest. Renato (Luis Gerardo Méndez) is the successful engineer who built up a company in Mexico; Asher (Connor Del Rio) is the younger, irresponsible American who never holds down a job. Even with that in mind it makes little sense when Connor takes them sixty miles off course to tour a goat ranch and then kidnaps one, escaping with guys literally shooting at their fleeing car. The goat basically becomes a third main character from then on, designed to provide comic relief that mostly falls flat. It’s utterly pointless, and Half Brothers would have markedly improved without that stupid goat.

The goat is not the only attempt at humor that falls flat, however. A lot of it is just plain distractingly unrealistic, as when Renato and Asher happen to first cross paths in coffee shop by coincidence in Chicago, and Asher literally asks Renato, who happens to be standing behind him in line, to spot him two bucks so he can pay for the coffee he just ordered. What? Okay, the coincidental meeting I can suspend my disbelief about, but why the fuck is Asher even at a coffee shop placing orders if he has no money on him? One of the plot threads is the possibility that Asher has something mentally wrong with him, and while we are clearly meant to take that as unfair judgment against him, this behavior is strong evidence otherwise.

A peculiar case of caricature in Half Brothers is something that, upon further reflection, I have decided is kind of fair. With the exception of Asher himself, who is actually given multiple dimensions, every other American encountered in this film displays an exaggerated ignorance, all of them absolute stereotypes of fat, dumb Americans, who constantly speak slower and louder at anyone with an accent. It’s uncomfortable and objectively dumb, but . . . maybe turnabout is fair play? God knows we’ve spent a lifetime seeing movies and TV shows with Mexican characters similarly presented—Americans can take a turn for once. What I can’t decide is whether this was Greenfield’s intention, and given this film’s broader lack of sophistication, I kind of doubt it.

I also keep thinking about how these two men’s father (Juan Pablo Espinosa) never told them of each other’s existence, and sending them on this riddle-addled scavenger hunt to unlock an explanation for it all is supposed to endear them to him and forgive him his transgressions. Once you get past the “feel-good” tone of the movie, though, you might realize that their father is basically inflicting emotional abuse even after his death.

I did laugh out loud a few times. I’ll give Half Brothers that much, even though some of the time I still didn’t think the movie deserved it. Sometimes cheap shots still work, after all. I found the story much more engaging, however, when it focused on the bond Renato had with his father early in life, and on Renato and Asher’s road trip serving as a bonding experience. I’m just not sure sending them on a wild goose chase was the most rational way to make that happen.

Méndez and Del Rio’s performances as the title characters are honestly the best things about this movie, which alone make it relatively engaging. Their personalities are winning enough to make it pleasant enough to hang out with them—in spite of Renato’s exaggerated propensity for getting uptight, and Asher’s exaggerated idiocy. Everything in this movie is some level of exaggerated. Even that would be bearable if not for the script, which is just boneheaded too much of the time.

A generous dose of Mexican-American cheese. And a goat.

Overall: C+

THE NEST

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

I can’t quite decide what to make of The Nest, a drama that seems to traffic exclusively in subtleties, and which only ever hints at something sinister going on. Is this a thriller? A drama? It’s the latter, I guess, but with a couple of twisted turns that are either impossible to explain or simply sailed right over my head.

The is the first feature film by writer-director Sean Durkin since his 2011 cult-escape drama Martha Marcy May Marlene, and it’s both a little more straightforward and a little more mystifying than that one. An entrepreneur (Jude Law) who has spent ten years in the U.S. with his American family moves them back to his native Britain after ten years, chasing opportunity. He buys a gigantic country estate, gets construction going on horse stables for his wife, and plays the part of a good dad to his two children.

Of course, things are a little more complicated than that—although, what I can’t really decide is, if they are complicated enough to make for a compelling movie. To be fair, relatively slow as its pacing was, I found myself compelled by this movie. On the other hand, I truly cannot think of a single person I would recommend this to you. Perhaps you, dear reader? I mean, do what you want.

The Nest certainly has strong performances going for it. Jude Law can generally be relied on, and this is the first co-lead in a feature for Carrie Coon, whose most memorable roles to date have been on television (Fargo, The Leftovers). She plays Law’s American wife, increasingly frustrated with his insistence on uprooting the family yet again, and with his gradual unraveling as his new position in London does not deliver on what he thought to be its promises.

The kids are a bit older, a teenager and a preteen: Oona Roche as Samantha, and Charlie Shotwell as younger Ben. It’s curious neither of them spend any time at all complaining about being moved from New York to London. Are they really that agreeable? The two kids seem largely just along for the ride, although Sam finds a way to get in touch with her rebellious side.

There are subtle hints that there is something about this very old house that is affecting them all, turning them into basket-case versions of their formal selves. The transition is very gradual, and Sean Durkin never inserts anything into his scrip directly to suggest anything supernatural. The closest is one scene in which Coon turns her back, turns back, and a door is suddenly ajar. That’s it. Well, and the fact that her horse has died, and in a truly bizarre later scene, she finds the horse’s buried body starting to stick out of the ground, and starts trying to dig it out again with her hands.

Really, The Nest is just a family drama, and I’m not certain it succeeds on strictly those terms. It’s like it exists just to the left of family drama, one tiny step closer to thriller, but never any closer than that. Richard Reed Parry’s original score is always just slightly sinister in tone, while Jude Law’s unraveling husband and father keeps making misguided mistakes, and Coon’s increasingly fed up wife reacts. In the end, it’s the children who come to the rescue, sort of, as the film’s final shot settles on bemusing ambiguity.

My guess is how much interest The Nest might hold will depend on how versed you are in its pedigree: how much you like the actors, or how much you’ve liked previous films by those who have made this one. With no knowledge of any of that, I cannot estimate how much interest this film will hold. I do have a feeling it might gain greater depth of meaning upon multiple viewings, except I have no desire to watch it again. That doesn’t mean I didn’t like it; I actually kind of did. I just can’t quite figure out why.

Prospects aren’t looking as good as we thought.

Overall: B

Small Axe: LOVERS ROCK

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

So here we get the second of the “five films” that make up the Amazon Original series Small Axe, all of them purportedly about the history of Black experience in England. Just as was the case with last week’s Mangrove, the characters are either Caribbean immigrants, or the children of said immigrants. There’s a curious difference in storytelling, however, wherein last week’s first installment was very much a clear-cut feature-length film at 124 minutes; and this week’s “film” is all of 68 minutes in length, and is much more episodic in both presentation and tone.

It fascinates me that the critical consensus is even more positive for this piece than for Mangrove—which got a rating of 90 at MetaCritic, and this one gets a whopping 95. That puts both of them in their “Must-See” category, and while I won’t dispute that per se, I also won’t be quite as likely to tell people they have to see this one. Then again, to what degree is any one of these meant to stand alone, anyway? They may be called films, but it’s still a series, after all. Granted, they are also not sequels: each film has its own distinct set of characters.

And that’s sort of the thing with Lovers Rock: its characters are comparatively far less distinct. Nearly the entire run time is set at a West London house party in the eighties, director Steve McQueen’s camera lingering, for one extended shot after another, on a thick crowd of Carribean people dancing. I will say this much: Lovers Rock is packed to the gills with fantastic music. Many songs are featured, most of them some variation of reggae but also included are disco, and one particularly prominent track: “Silly Games,” a 1979 single by Janet Kay. That song’s genre, according to wikipedia? “Lovers rock”—apparently a more romantic style of reggae which enjoyed popularity specifically in London in the seventies. I knew none of this. I learned something new today.

And that illustrates the unfortunate issue with my even trying to approach this film with any kind of standard critical eye, actually: I’m an American white guy who was born in the seventies. When it comes to this stuff, what the fuck do I know? I can only assume this film speaks in particular to those who have a life experience with a kind of specificity represented here. To McQueen’s credit, this film does offer a window into this world for outsiders like myself. It’s a fully realized world for sure; I don’t have to fully understand it to see that much.

Lovers Rock is also not much concerned with plot, however. More than anything, it’s an extended vignette, a portrait of a world within a world at a particular time. McQueen does touch on a few dark sides of this world, usually with a subtle hand, such as when Martha (Amarah-Jae St. Aubyn) walks out into the street after a friend leaving the party, and a group of white guys down the street start making monkey noises at her. This is one of only two times white people are even noticed in the movie. The vast majority of the time, we’re just watching people dancing in the house party, almost like an extended music video.

After some time, Martha is revealed to be the primary character here. She intervenes in a sexual assault taking place in the house’s backyard. She and the man she meets at the party, Franklin (Micheal Ward), are the only two seen in a brief sequence the following morning. We do meet another volatile character in the form of Martha’s cousin Clifton (Kedar Williams-Stirling), a brief and tense conversation between them being the only limited amount of back story given to anyone in the movie.

Even that doesn’t happen until about halfway through. When Lovers Rock begins, we see handheld cameras following several guys moving furniture around, setting up for the party. There are women in the kitchen cooking, and they break out into song, the lyrics later revealed to be from the aforementioned “Silly Games.” Later when the DJ plays it for characters to dance to—McQueen’s camera lingering for quite some time on one couple grinding their groins together sensuously to it—and after several verses, the music stops, but the whole crowd just continues dancing and singing the lyrics on their own, belting it out passionately. It goes on so long it almost gets uncomfortable.

I know people who would watch Lovers Rock and find it repetitive and dull. I felt a little too far removed from its world for it to speak to me specifically, but I still found I could appreciate it. It was always compelling, if occasionally mystifying. In the end, we are told it’s “For the lovers and the rockers.” These are specific kinds of lovers and rockers, maybe not quite the conventional definition many of us have for those words today. If nothing else, Lovers Rock is a great example of how specific representation can still be accessible. The more a piece of art tries to be everything to all people, the more bland and pointless it becomes. This is a film that does not have that problem and is better for it.

Dancing to their own beat: lovers and rockers.

Overall: B