MLK/FBI

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

Sam Pollard’s MLK/FBI is a fascinating specimen of documentary filmmaking, in terms of its own inevitable biases, and the myth of objectivity. These are ideas that can be applied to any documentary film, of course, but it seems a surprise to me how much it could be argued that the FBI is let off the hook here.

He is only heard a few times, but one of the interview subjects is former Director of the FBI James Comey, who is heard multiple times referring to the period of the FBI’s well-documented surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr. as '“the darkest period” of the FBI’s history. Never mind that this is the man who arguably cost Hillary Clinton the 2016 presidential election by pointlessly announcing the reopening of the email investigation only two weeks before the election—a detail understandably left out of this film for lack of relevance there, but it still undermines his credibility as any spokesman for when the FBI’s history might be tainted. In the long history of the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation, both that and the surveillance of King are but two examples among countless examples of the FBI’s “dark history.” This isn’t even a matter much up for debate, and yet MLK/FBI entirely sidesteps the other historical atrocities the FBI has committed, thus barely falling short of making the case on its own, that the 1950s and 1960s were the worst times for the FBI.

We also get multiple instances of interview subjects referring to how differently Martin Luther King looked “from the FBI’s point of view.” It skirts very oddly close to empathy for this organization, although to be fair the film is far more interested in the point of view of King himself. It’s just that the pains the film takes to view the FBI itself objectively are strained, and fruitless: the FBI was (and possibly still is) very much the bad guy here, and this film would have been improved by characterizing it as such.

That is really my only true criticism of MLK/FBI, though I would contend it to be a notable one. This film is otherwise a deeply compelling and provocative look at one of the most significant American leaders of the past century, aided in large part by certain cinematic choices and subtle artistic flourishes. The entire film is presented in black and white, almost exclusively of archival footage as the interview subjects’ commentary runs over it. The names of the people speaking appear onscreen to identify them, but none of the subjects are seen until the end credits begin, and even then only briefly. Even those clips are in black and white, a choice that makes sense given that the vast majority of the imagery we are used to from King’s time is in black and white.

A great deal of attention is paid to what here the film refers to benignly as King’s “non-monogamy.” One thing MLK/FBI is very successful at is re-contextualizing this well-documented element of Martin Luther Ling Jr.’s personal and private life, which was quite literally recorded by the FBI via wiretaps and bugs in his home and in hotel rooms. The lengths to which the FBI went, the amount of time it spent in efforts to discredit him as this amoral hypocrite, is not a matter of rumor but of documented historical fact. What is less clear is how his wife, Coretta Scott King, felt about it. It’s notable that this film looks upon King’s many sexual dalliances—a host of which was edited together onto a tape and sent to King, his wife. and others close to him—with a completely neutral eye; even I can remember being told years ago about how Martin Luther King wasn’t a complete saint, “he was a womanizer.” But viewed from the lens of the 2020s, how much do we know about whether that couple simply had some kind of understanding? More importantly, how is it anyone’s business but there’s?

In hindsight, J. Edgar Hoover’s obsession with “revealing” Martin Luther King as “the most notorious liar in the country” (a direct quote which made many headlines) is just another example of misplaced moral superiority, never mind the clear racism that motivated all fervent opposition to King. But this opposition bled over into those who would otherwise be his allies, as even other civil rights leaders spoke out against him when, only a year before his death, King dared to speak out against the Vietnam War as a clear double standard in American foreign policy. His work at the end of his life focusing on poverty in America is unfortunately not what he is most remembered for, but perhaps it should be.

Near the end of MLK/FBI, which is available to stream on VOD for $6.99 (well worth the price), the original footage is shown of Martin Luther King saying, “When white Americans tell the Negro to lift himself up by his bootstraps, they don’t look over the legacy of slavery and segregation. Now, I believe we ought to do all we can and seek to lift ourselves by our own bootstraps. It’s all right to tell a man to lift himself up by his bootstraps, but it is cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself up by his bootstraps.” This cuts to the heart of King’s aim to end poverty, and how deeply racism, white supremacy, and Black poverty are linked. This is what the U.S. government did not want to be held accountable for then—nor does it now, fully half a century later—and is the very reason the FBI sought to vilify him. MLK/FBI illustrates how successful they were in that endeavor in his time, making him far more controversial than current depictions would make him seem. But, at least, in the long run it was a PR battle that the FBI lost.

Nothing can make even a complicated man less of an icon once he is an icon.

Overall: B+

SYVLIE'S LOVE

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

Syvlie’s Love is very much an old-school, standard love story, right down to its mid-twentieth century period setting. And, ironically, that’s what makes it special. How often do you see fairly standardized romances in which the primary characters happen to be Black, particularly set in the fifties and sixties? Honestly, this type of movie isn’t typically what I immediately go for, but I’m sure glad it exists. I can only presume plenty of others are as well.

Inevitably plenty of others aren’t, for varyingly stupid reasons. It’s no surprise that the user scores on sites like MetaCritic.com and RottenTomatoes.com are notably lower than their aggregate review scores, although the difference is still narrower than it might have been just a few years ago. And this gets into my favorite thing about Sylvie’s Love: this is not a fantasy in which history worked differently and in Black people’s favor, as in the Netflix series Bridgerton (which gets no hate from me, for the record; I very much enjoy it). Instead, even though the characters acknowledge its existence, this is a movie in which marginalization has nothing to do with the story it’s telling.

In fact, Sylvie’s Love allows its characters to enjoy successes in historical context, which were unusual but still plausible. Furthermore, it is surprisingly feminist, as one of the road blocks for the central couple is Sylvie’s ambition as a TV producer, and Robert—gasp!—not wanting their relationship to get in the way of her success. In fact, both characters make choices that postpone their inevitable union not with selfishness as in so many other movies, but with selflessness.

Nnamdi Asomugha plays Robert, and pulls double duty as one of the movie’s many producers. Tessa Thompson steps into the role of Sylvie, as we first meet her briefly in 1963 and then the story flashes back to her young adulthood five years earlier, in 1953. She has a fiancé who is away traveling; Robert is part of a jazz band soon set to leave for a gig in Paris. And so it goes with these sorts of romances: multiple barriers to these two people getting together even though they are in love with each other, until one day they get past those barriers. For Sylvie and Robert, it takes many years, which only adds to the romance, to which writer-director Eugene Ashe lends a subtly sweet, comfortingly mellow tone.

We return to that opening scene from 1963 about halfway through the film, at which point the two lovebirds find themselves facing an all new set of barriers. It’s all pretty contrived, honestly, but it’ll still work just as well as any other romance for the type of viewer who is interested in such things.

I keep thinking of the oft-repeated notion of Black people having to work twice as hard, or be twice as excellent, as their white counterparts in order to achieve the same success. And while I hesitate to call Sylvie’s Love “mediocre”—it’s a step above mediocre—it still follows the same formulaic story beats as countless movies that came before it. I certainly can’t speak to how difficult it might have been to get made, but it’s here, it exists, and it offers a kind of representation not seen before. This movie in particular is no more “excellent” than any other romance, but its existence still means something. It seems a step in the right direction when plenty of viewers might react with an “Eh” (I lean closer to that), and yet plenty of others might still be into it. We’re slowly getting to a point where a variety of films can get made with diverse casts without it having to be either exploitation or tragedy porn.

Granted, a lot is more difficult to gauge in a world with no actual box office revenue to speak of. There’s no real way to decide whether this movies is a “success,” and that’s the case with virtually any movie in 2020 or 2021, unless it miraculously generates a ton of buzz on social media. All I can say is, this movie is right there, on Prime Video, and if you love romances, it’s well worth watching. Its characters are just regular people, who exist in a regular movie, living and loving. I can’t call it a romance for the ages, but it’s certainly a romance for our time.

Isn’t it romantic?

Overall: B

DEREK DELGAUDIO'S IN & OF ITSELF

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

“We are al the unreliable narrators of each other’s stories,” says magician Derek DelGaudio, in his stage show In & of Itself, previously seen in 560 live performances Off Broadway, and seen in a skillfully edited recording of these shows on Hulu as of this weekend. This line had an immediately profound impact on me, and I suspect I will remember it for a long time to come, if not for the rest of my life.

And that is the greatest trick of this show, really, in that being a magician, Delgaudio’s entire presentation hinges on illusion, in the literal sense: one might even call it deception. And yet, he uses these tricks to elicit some of the most emotionally honest reactions I have ever seen on film, or in live theater for that matter. What a strange dichotomy. In retrospect, it leaves one to wonder about the degree our emotions have been entirely manipulated. But I would be lying if I said I was not deeply moved by this show.

It’s easy to be suspicious. I spent a significant amount of time watching this and thinking, How the fuck is he doing that? And the same thought is clearly moving through the minds in the audience. When I say people are quite justifiably awestruck by what Delgaudio is doing, I don’t mean that in the typical sense of illusionist or magic shows. This isn’t just straightforward magic tricks. DelGaudio’s entire show is flexing under the weight of its many heavy metaphors, challenging viewers to reexamine the very definition of identity, how they see themselves, and how they see others.

Honestly, the less you know about this show going in, the better. I have never seen any show, or movie, with a more apropos title, it is so very much its own thing. (Side note: if you go searching for it on Hulu, his name is included in the full title, so it’s best searched first with a D rather than an I: Derek DelGaudio’s In & of Itself.) Regardless, how well it works will be entirely dependent on how open you are to what DelGaudio is offering. I must admit, after seeing many people in the audience get very emotional, some of them crying, at one point even DelGaudio cries a little. And in that particular moment, I found myself thinking about those 560 performances, many of which are partially featured in this film. Did he cry every single time? To what degree is that just another performance?

Might it have been DelGaudio’s very intention to have some of us asking ourselves such questions?

And trust me when I say, some of the stuff in In & of Itself is literally jaw-dropping. It’s hard to imagine the emotional intensity that must have filled the room for the people there in person. This filmed version is directed by the legendary Frank Oz, who chooses to include brief but quite memorable clips of famous people who happened to be in the audience, also deeply emotionally affected, like Tim Gunn or Bill Gates. The makeup of the audience is a key part of this documentary filmed version of the show, with a succession of different people from different nights chosen for the same task, edited together. This provides an unforgettable picture of DelGaudio’s uniformity of effect.

It’s hard to recommend a film like this without giving too much away. But, the less detail revealed, the more it sounds like just another magic show. It really couldn’t be further from that. Or could it? Perhaps this is just another magician after all, and the degree to which we convince ourselves otherwise is the greatest illusion of all. To that I say: so what? It’s stunningly impressive either way.

Nothing you see here prepares you in any way for what you are in for.

Overall: A-

AMMONITE

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

I wonder if there’s a more overtly lesbian-themed title that could have been given to Ammonite. The term refers to a group of extinct molluscs closely related to today’s octopi, squids and cuttlefish. So, maybe . . . Cuttlepussy? Okay, I admit that’s a little much. That sounds a little like a James Bond movie, and this is about as far from that as it gets. Except of course that it’s a British film.

Ammonite is much more romantic, and thus befitting this memorable love story written and directed by Francis Lee, who also wrote and directed the wonderful gay farm worker love story God’s Own Country in 2017. Evidently after gaining such critical acclaim for the earlier film, Lee wanted to give the ladies a crack at a same-sex love story. This time around features much more famous movie stars: Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan. They are also two consummate performers, and they ground the story, which ultimately becomes very erotic, with palpable chemistry.

Ammonite is mostly Winslet’s movie, however. This is Mary Anning’s story, which Ronan’s Charlotte Merchison moves in and out of. Mary is older, well established in her life as an paleontologist who, in nineteenth century England, made seminal discoveries ultimately credited to men. She lives in the south coast of England in a place called Lyme, barely scraping by selling cleaned-up fossils from the nearby beach to tourists and occasionally much larger discoveries to scientists who take her work back to London. It’s when a man interested in learning from her arrives with Charlotte, his wife, that the two women meet. Charlotte falls ill and then Mary finds herself nursing her in recovery.

Francis Lee makes a lot of curious decisions here, as both Mary Anning and Charlotte Murchison were both real, historical figures, known to be friends but with no evidence of them having been lovers. Also, the real Murchison was eleven years older than Anning, whereas Kate Winslet is 19 years older than Saoirse Ronan. It seems to me this story would have been just as effective, and perhaps even more so, had these characters been fully fictionalized but in the same era and respective circumstances. Why use real women from history and then apply such radical fictionalizations of their actual lives?

All that aside, Ammonite is well worth watching. You might call it this year’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire, albeit not quite as close to a masterful work of art. Ammonite is much grittier, about a single working class woman who never married and lives with her mother (Gemma Jones), and gets a visit from a much younger and more well-to do woman. Mary spends a lot of time getting very dirty on wet beaches, and Winslet plays her with the gruffness of a hermit with few social skills. The opening scenes are devoid of dialogue, following her around as she rolls up her sleeves and dives into her work. Once people start talking, Mary immediately proves to be an unusually direct woman indeed. Particularly for the 1840s, this is rather fun to watch.

Even once Charlotte arrives, she is even quieter than Mary for quite some time, as at first she feels abandoned there, prescribed rest by a doctor while her husband must travel abroad. This allows the relationship between the two women to develop at a gradual but fully organic pace, romance not sparking until about halfway through the movie. Then, Ammonite features at least two sex scenes between them that are fairly graphic. Knowing neither of these actors are actually lesbians, I do find myself curious as to how lesbian viewers might take in those sex scenes. Do they seem authentic? I’ve never had lesbian sex so I couldn’t say for sure. At least there’s no “scissoring.” And to Ammonite’s credit, even though it has a male director, its sex scenes were reportedly choreographed by the stars themselves, and shot with an all-female crew in the room.

The sex scenes are indeed pretty steamy, and the one place in the film where the slightly shaky, hand-held cinematography works best. Its unconventionally ambiguous ending, which takes us to places we don’t expect—both figuratively and literally—sticks with you. Ammonite has a certain lack of polish, but it stands firm on the strength of its writing and particularly its performances. This is a period piece with production design that feels lived-in rather than overdressed, a uniquely transporting romantic love story in spite of what’s easy to nitpick..

Let’s see what latent homosexual tendencies we can dig up.

Overall: B+

ONE NIGHT IN MIAMI

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

One Night in Miami has shifted my thinking about the phrase “Black Power.” Not that I had any negative thoughts about it before, but this film has shown me that my conceptualization of it was . . . limited. Until now, I always thought of it as symbolic, aspirational, a unifying but abstract concept, a thoroughly justifiable goal but still a rallying cry. I never thought to think of it as literally power given to Black people, or perhaps more to the point, power that Black people have, and use. Which was pretty doofy of me.

This is a film about four Black legends, inspired by a night they actually did spend together in Miami (hence the title): Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir), Cassius Clay (Eli Goree), NFL fullback Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge), and singer Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.). The through line seems to be the idea of them as towering American figures, and how that brings to them obligation to fight for all Black people, as the Civil Rights Movement rages on. Malcolm is especially concerned with Sam writing songs for more than just selling records to white buyers, and in the face of Sam’s defensiveness, Jim refers to all the other Black people in the country as compared to “what you have but take for granted.” Sam replies, “What’s that?” and Jim says, “Power.” After a beat, Sam says: “Black power.”

Fundamentally, that’s what One Night in Miami is about: not just the existence of powerful Black people, but what they should be doing with it. It’s a conversation they’re having with each other, something no well-meaning white person has anything to contribute to, but it’s still an insightful conversation to overhear.

And don’t get me wrong—it’s not a lecture either. This film is adapted from a stage play by its original author, Kemp Powers, and as directed by Regina King—the most famous name attached to this film—it’s easily one of the best film adaptations of a play I have ever seen. Unlike, for instance, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, I never felt like I was just watching a play onscreen. I heard some people on a podcast recently talking about how easy it usually is to identify a film adaptation of a play: “No more than four locations, and a whole lot of talking.” Well, this film has plenty of locations, and even when the second half of the film essentially does take place in one hotel room, King makes it easy to forget that by moving the characters to many locations outside the room but nearby: on the hotel roof; at the hotel bar; even a brief scene inside a car in the parking lot. It never feels like the location is stationery, even though it essentially is.

There is indeed a whole lot of talking, but Powers’s dialogue is so well crafted, the talking alone propels the story forward on its own strength, with a density that provides a kind of inertia. There’s a lot of provocative food for thought here, no matter who the audience is. Regina King and Kemp Powers are both finding subversive ways to challenge, as with the scene early on when Jim visits a white man initially presented as “ a family friend” in a huge house that looks very much like a plantation. They have a very friendly conversation on the front porch, until the man (played by Beau Bridges) ends the conversation with a kind of casual bigotry that is no doubt as shocking to most white viewers as it is entirely expected by most Black viewers.

This is an important establishment of tone, a single example of what these characters—indeed, the actual people they are playing, and by extension the actors themselves—are up against. This is what they are talking about, sometimes arguing about, certainly engaged in spirited debate about: not the struggle itself, but what needs to be done about it, and how. Consider that this is set in 1964, and every single part of these discussions are as relevant today as they were half a century ago.

The way that One Night in Miami is edited is almost a bait and switch, in terms of it ultimately being a movie about an extended discussion. The many locations of scenes are concentrated in the first half, and particularly the first half hour: the four friends do not actually meet each other at the hotel until thirty minutes in. Prior to that, we meet most of them in their respective elements: Cassius Clay in the boxing ring; Sam Cooke onstage performing. We don’t get to see Jim playing football, but we do see a man bragging about Jim being the pride of the entire state of Georgia before dismissing him. As for Malcolm X, he is presented here as far more mannered, almost geeky as played by Kingsley Ben-Adir, than the iconic imagery made indelible by Denzel Washington in 1992. Perhaps that contrast is the point: Malcolm X was a depiction of the struggle itself; One Night in Miami is an exploration of how best to fight it.

And a great exploration it is. This film features four legendary figures looking deep into their souls and then baring them, in so doing inspiring anyone witness to it to do the same.

A singer, a boxer, a civil rights leader, and a football player walk into a hotel.

Overall: A-

Advance: PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN

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

Promising Young Woman isn’t quite the feminist revenge fantasy you think it is, but it’s close. One could argue it’s something better.

It’s certainly a fantastic showcase for Carey Mulligan, as Cassandra, the “young woman” of the title who is hell bent on avenging the death of her best friend, Nina. We never see or meet Nina in any way, as this is a story about Cassandra, and her obsession with what happened. Nina was also a classmate of Cassandra’s in college, when a man, with several witnesses, had sex with her while she was blackout drunk at a party. So now, Cassandra spends her weekends terrorizing random men as she pretends to be wasted at clubs until a man inevitably approaches her, then takes her home in the guise of helping her, and then attempts to take advantage of her. She then drops the drunken act at the last second, scaring the shit out of these men.

It’s easy not to feel bad for any of these men, of course. In the opening sequence, three men in a group are noticing Cassandra, hunched over over on a bench, making observations about her in generally douchey ways. Honestly, writer-director Emerald Fennell has them dial up that douchiness to 11, and more than once in Promising Young Woman it’s a little over the top. On the other hand, maybe it only comes across that way to me because I am a man who has never experienced a man’s world from a woman’s perspective. It’s easy to imagine women taking in this film in a very different way from many women, and that might just be subtly part of Fennell’s point.

Still, at times Fennell’s direction is less assured than it could be, though much of that can be forgiven in light of this being her directorial feature debut. (Fun fact: looking up Emerald Fennell, I was slightly thrown for a loop to discover she is the actor most recently seen as Camilla Parker Bowles in season four of The Crown.) Promising Young Woman starts off with its editing and many of its performances on slightly shaking ground, feeling a little off. It does not feel like something crafted with an expert hand—although very much to Carey Mulligan’s credit, the performances alone make this worth watching from the start.

Also, Promising Young Woman eventually finds its footing, in somewhat surprising ways. And its casting choices are fantastic, particularly with Bo Burnham as Ryan, her pediatrician love interest who serves as a charming distraction in the middle section of the story. Burnham is truly perfect as a guy who stands in as an exception to all the creeps. Or is he? The entire arc of the plot is elevated, in the end, by the surprising revelations about him and his place in the story, which make such questions less simple than they sound.

I was somewhat skeptical of the writing, for much longer than it took for the performances to win me over—a good portion of this movie plays like a surprisingly unique romantic comedy, complete with some great humor—until the final scenes, which tied the story together in ways that were impossible to see coming. And that’s even accounting for a genuinely shocking twist in the fate of Cassandra herself.

Promising Young Woman manages to seem at first unable to live up to its promise, before actually exceeding its potential in the end. It’s not quite finely tuned, but it certainly sticks the landing. Honestly the less known about what happens in this movie, the better. It’s a fascinating exploration of defiance in the face of toxic masculinity, especially given that no character actually utters the words “sexual assault” or “rape,” even though these are clearly the things Cassandra is avenging—on men in general, not just the one who assaulted Nina.

I kept thinking about how vulnerable Cassandra was in these situations she puts herself in, sober or not: any average man could easily overpower her, and she always ends these nights alone with them. It’s the shock of her manipulation that gives her power over them, though I’m not sure that realistically this practice could go on without violent incident for as long as her journal of dozens upon dozens of hash marks would suggest. She never physically harms any of these men herself, either; it’s all just an exercise in emotional terror. Until, of course, it isn’t.

What this all means is that Promising Young Woman surprises in all the right ways, at nearly every turn. And the parade of men Cassandra comes across are played by actors perfect for the parts: Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Adam Brody, New Girl’s Max Greenfield, GLOW’s Chris Lowell, Veep’s Sam Richardson (his being a Black man playing one of the creeps being . . . tricky), and more. These are on top of more prominent supporting parts played by the likes of Clancy Brown and Jennifer Coolidge (practically unrecognizable in brown hair) as Cassandra’s parents; Laverne Cox as her boss at the coffee shop where she works; Connie Britton as the Dean of her medical school (a great scene); and Alfred Molina as the lawyer who once defended rapists and is now racked with guilt. The casting choices are nearly perfect fits across the board.

None of them shines brighter than Carey Mulligan, however, as she truly grounds what might otherwise have been a shaky narrative with her performance. Promising Young Woman works as straight up entertainment, and could easily have been trite. But it has nuances not easily seen at first glance, many of them thanks to Mulligan’s confident portrayal of a woman who is, ultimately, mentally unstable. But she is also clever, as is Emerald Fennell, bringing it home in a way that offers real satisfaction.

This is a story ripe for examination.

Overall: B+

TENƎꓕ

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

What a long and strange journey this film has had, filled with unexpected twists and turns, and drama all its own. Someone could make a compelling movie just about the process of Tenet’s release. They could also start it at the end of the story and work their way back, so that it would be roughly as comprehensible as writer-director Christopher Nolan’s story.

I suppose I could do that, in a way, myself: I only just this week noticed the VOD cost of this movie had finally gone down to $5.99, which is the only reason I am reviewing it now, five months after its initial theatrical release—by far a record for my reviews. In the old world, I would regard a film that I had not reviewed when it was released five months ago something that had simply passed me by. In the present, I waited for its insane starting VOD price of $19.99, which happened a month ago, to go down. I’d never pay that much for a movie even in a theater, let alone to watch one at home, not even the one that is arguably the biggest cinema-related cultural flashpoint of the year 2020. By that measure it’s rivaled only by Wonder Woman 1984. By some measures, Tenet is a better movie. I suppose it depends on whether you’re approaching it head-on or in hindsight. Does that make sense?

Whether it makes sense is beside the point. In a way, for Christopher Nolan, senselessness seems to be the point. At least, with a dash of meta subtlety: the protagonist, played by John David Washington, is literally only ever called “Protagonist.” Early on, a woman we only ever see in this one scene is explaining how things work in this world, serving only as exposition, really: “Don’t try to understand it,” she says. “Feel it.” This line has been quoted in virtually every review already written about Tenet, but what else is there to say? For the viewer, taking that advice is a good idea.

I can say this much: Tenet flies by for a movie with a run time of two and a half hours, and that in spite of countless sequences (including the opening one) in which I found myself thinking, I have no idea what the fuck is going on. I’d call that an accomplishment, of sorts. Tenet is also improved by the mere presence of second-billed Robert Pattinson as Neil, in a rare case of speaking in his native British accent. I got several good laughs out of his performance, with its nice sprinkling of dry humor.

Tenet is also packed wall to wall with clever visual trickery, as its plotting plays with time just as extensively as Inception played with dream states. That said, Nolan seems convinced his being impressive with the “depth” of his ideas, and yet Tenet, when closely examined, turns out to be surprisingly lacking in substance. Instead, it’s packed with “temporal” mumbo jumbo, and in ways that are also surprisingly predictable. Granted, Nolan is an expert at execution, as his manner is novel, but he’s still playing with time travel, examining the very same “paradoxes” we’ve been considering for decades. Not once, but multiple times, the playing around with time results in later scenes moving once again through scenes we already went through earlier, just in an opposite direction. Nolan is either closing loops or demonstrating how they perpetuate, and in the end he just proves that Tenet really has nothing new to say.

There’s a moment when Neil offers a simple explanation of a complex idea in a ridiculously oversimplified way, and then he says, “Does your head hurt yet?” Um, if it does, then Protagonist should not be the one tasked with saving the universe. Speaking of which, Protagonist also guesses at one point that what the threat they are facing is nuclear holocaust, and he’s told it’s “something much worse.” What the hell could be much worse? Well, the threat to the existence of all humanity throughout time. Okay, I guess you could argue that’s worse—not that it matters to anyone now if it comes to that. I mean, if we’re all dead anyway, then who cares?

Which is all to say, the premise of Tenet is far from any reason to watch it. It’ll just come in one ear and out the other, or I guess in from a superficially thrilling present and out into a forgettable past. But, it has incredibly well shot action sequences, all of them with certain people and certain objects moving backward through time while others are simultaneously going forward. One great sequence involves the crashing of an airliner without it ever even taking flight; another features a freeway car chase with some cars going forward while others drive backward (through time!); the climactic sequence presents an elaborate gun battle made compelling only because of the “inverted time” elements.

I’ll tell you my personal favorite thing about Tenet. In a smaller but crucial supporting part, Dimple Kapadia, once a teen sex symbol of sorts in Bollywood in the seventies, plays a powerful woman who is an arms dealer in Mumbai. “Protagonist” must cross her path multiple times, in varying moments in time through which he moves. Only briefly are we introduced to her husband as the initially presumed arms dealer: “A masculine front in a man’s world has its uses,” she says, and her existence in this movie is a great subversion of gender expectations. (As a side note, it shouldn’t be significant that the Protagonist is a Black man whose race is never noted in any way, but it is. Another one of Tenet’s accomplishments is that, unlike in many period films, its “color blind” casting is not a distraction.)

By and large, Tenet is exciting but hollow: I am no scientist, but I can tell Christopher Nolan is a bit of a pretender when he plays with these complex concepts, and often kind of cops out: at the end of one scene, Neil begins to explain to the Protagonist’s quasi-love interest (Elizabeth Debicki), “All the laws of physics—” and then it abruptly cuts to the next scene. Tenet is filled with lines like this, which serve more as wild plot contrivances than anything remotely close to actual scientific insights.

To be fair, insights are not Tenet’s purpose anyway. Its purpose is simply to entertain, and that it absolutely achieves. It’s just occasionally distracting when you have to look away in order to roll your eyes.

Relax, it’s not as twisted as it looks.

Overall: B

PIECES OF A WOMAN

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

There are multiple levels of potential difficulty for viewers of Pieces of a Woman, an exploration of grief in the wake of a young mother losing her baby in childbirth. That alone is enough to be a kind of heaviness that some may not be down for. On top of that, the parents are played by a very good Vanessa Kirby, and an adequate Shia LaBeouf. So, in the case of LaBeouf, here we are tested with a case of how to separate “art” from “the artist,” given recent revelations of his abusive behavior. It doesn’t particularly help that in one scene he throws a blow-up exercise ball right into Vanessa Kirby’s face.

But, okay, let’s just say we can look past who Shia Labeouf is in real life, and take his character, Sean, at face value onscreen. Sean is racked with grief himself, and much of the story here explores his heartache as well. It strains his relationship with his wife, Martha, as anyone might expect. Complicating things for good measure is Martha’s casually passive-aggressive mother, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth is one character I found to be a bit of a needless distraction. She’s played by the legendary Ellen Burstyn, and very well, but did director Kornél Mundruczó think much about how old she is? She must be playing far younger than her actual age, because Burstyn just turned 88 in December. Vanessa Kirby was born in 1988, when Burstyn was 55 years old. She’s quite easily old enough to be her grandmother, and not an especially young one at that. Curiously, Elizabeth’s aging and early signs of dementia become a minor plot point, even though presumably we should be assuming Elizabeth is in her sixties; perhaps her seventies at the most.

Elizabeth also drives much of the plot overall, as she obsesses with using the in-home birth midwife, Eva (Molly Parker), as a scapegoat, someone to be “accountable” for the death of the baby. The story meanders toward and ending in a courtroom, which is the furthest thing from anyone’s mind during the birth scene itself.

I should mention that birth scene, though, because without it Pieces of a Woman would be a much lesser movie. It’s a single-shot, thirty minutes of intense storytelling that starts hopefully, gradually moves to shaking ground and finally winds up harrowing. It’s virtuoso filmmaking I wish the rest of the movie could have hoped to match. There is an emotional blowout much later in an extended dinner scene at Elizabeth’s house, but it also includes a monologue by Elizabeth that doesn’t quite ring true. She tells extraordinary details about how she survived her own nearly tragic birth, and all I could think was: she really never told her daughter this story before?

Pieces of a Woman also features comedian Iliza Shleshinger, unrecognizable as Martha’s sister, and Succession’s Sarah Snook as their lawyer cousin. The movie really belongs to Vanessa Kirby, though, who is up to the task. To its credit, this film effectively illustrates how grief can make people behave in often incomprehensible ways. There’s an incredibly awkward (in more ways than one) scene in which Sean is begging Martha to touch him, until they make a failed attempt at having sex. In another scene between Sean and cousin Suzanne, Sean, who builds bridges, gives a pretty succinct explanation in layman’s terms for the 1940 Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse.

Sean is from Seattle, but it takes until the courtroom sequence at the end for his and Martha’s home to be in Suffolk County, Massachussets—location of Boston—although apparently the movie was mostly shot in Montreal. I know I’m certainly in the minority as someone who thinks about these things, but production details aside, I can’t figure out why we needed that monologue about the bridge collapse. (Which, incidentally, occurred when Ellen Burstyn was eight years old! She was in Detroit.)

In any event, once that memorable birth sequence is over—all of which comes before the film’s title card, fully a quarter of the way through the movie—Pieces of a Woman meanders, just as much as I am with this review. It’s compelling enough, but in the end it leaves you wishing it had a bit more cohesion in its linear narrative. Although it’s held together with fairly loose ties, at least it rests on very strong performances.

This movie barely holds itself together. Which I guess is part of its intrigue.

Overall: B

Advance: THE DISSIDENT

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

The Dissident is a stunningly illuminating documentary that is by turns horrifying and dispiriting. You should watch it!

There is so much in this movie that should be common knowledge but isn’t, it’s shocking. But then, even though this is about the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashaggi at the direction of Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salmad (frequently referred to as “MBS”), we’re still talking about a country given unwarranted deference by the U.S. for decades, no matter how heinous their acts. This is the country most of the 9/11 terrorists came from, after all—a detail the film doesn’t even bother to note. President Donald Trump is given relatively little focus in this telling of the story, but then, director Bryan Fogel smartly focuses on arguably the most salient point there: Trump consistently took MBS’s word for it that he had nothing to do with Khashaggi’s assassination, and after Congress passed bipartisan legislation to stop sales of weapons to Saudi Arabia, Trump vetoed it.

But there is a lot more to this story, much of the focus of which is on video blogger Omar Abdulaziz, now living as a refugee in Montreal. Over a dozen of his friends and at least two of his brothers have been arrested in Saudia Arabia and to this day are being held with no formal charges filed against them. In between interview clips of Abdulaziz telling his story, Fogel’s camera follow him walking around the city, intercut with beautiful drone shots of the Montreal skyline. This film has an unusual mind for aesthetic quality, with a couple CGI animations thrown in with sleek designs of their own.

Perhaps the biggest takeaway from The Dissident is the level of power Saudi Arabia has over the same kind of “internet troll armies” now commonly associated with Russia. Russia is far from the only country in this business, and here the hundreds of Saudi government employees, each hired to create fifteen to twenty Twitter accounts and then flood any criticism of their government with pro-Saudi messaging and hashtags to drown them out, are referred to as “flies.” Abdulaziz gained the assistance of Khashaggi, himself living abroad from Saudia Arabia after criticizing the country’s leadership in his journalism, to counter these “flies,” with what they called “Army of the Bees.” This was a very organized, activist effort to counter the Saudia propaganda, which ultimately got their freedom-of-speech messaging an hashtags at the top of trending topics in the country.

This is precisely what threatened the Saudi government, and Khashaggi was targeted after being identified via Saudi hacking of Abdulaziz’s phone. Abdulaziz, a much younger man at the age of 27, clearly feels very guilty and responsible. It could be said that he is the greatest living connection to Khashaggi’s legacy, though, so the film’s large focus on him makes sense.

All of this ultimately functions as backstory to the gruesome assassination itself, of which an astounding amount of details are known, thanks to there being audio recordings of it. The entire story is astonishing, not least of which because the killing occurred in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. The recordings are something else, though, and although this film thankfully doesn’t feature any of it, it does throw text from complete transcripts on the screen. We’re talking about a man, a clearly decent man whose greatest goal was to give voice to the voiceless—he even says in one interview clip that he’s not even asking for democracy, just “the bare minimum” of allowing people to say what they think—who was killed by suffocation and then cut up with a bone saw. Transcripts reveal casual conversation between the killers as they perform the task.

There are some odd interviews with local Turkish law enforcement. One man in particular is shown twice noting that the killers were just hired goons who were “following orders.” What an odd throwback to the same kind of apologies made for Nazi guards in German concentration camps.

The Dissident certainly offers some insight into how Middle Eastern governments managed to suppress the freedoms and hopes borne of the so-called “Arab Spring” of the early 2010s: organized propaganda and systematic elimination of dissent. Saudi Arabia uses the same social media tools against those initial revolutionaries, with their own hundreds of hired goons, creating bogus accounts and tweets to create a false narrative that outshines and outpaces those of the activists. It’s curious how the conversation in the United States focuses so heavily on Russia, at the expense of other powerful countries doing the same thing. Imagine how many other governments are doing things like this and we just have no idea.

I’m not sure how many I could truly convince to watch The Dissident, but it really should be seen. This touches on much of what the much-discussed Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma covers, but with far greater finesse, real-world potential for global consequence, and narrative force. This is the film with a more effective illustration of the urgency we have of doing something about cybersecurity. And that’s not even the point of the flm; Bryan Fogel just set out to tell Jamal Khashaggi’s story. It’s a story worth telling and hearing, with widespread implications.

Speaking power to truth.

Overall: A-

I'M YOUR WOMAN

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

The crime genre can always use an injection of new perspectives, and I’m Your Woman certainly fits that bill—co-written and directed by a woman (Julia Hart), featuring a woman protagonist (Rachel Brosnahan). Jean, the main character, starts off naive, when she is suddenly thrust into a scenario in which she’s on the run after her criminal husband goes missing. But she learns quickly, and while Brosnahan conveys her fear and vulnerability with straightforward realism, she is a self-actualized woman who does what she has to when circumstances force her hand. This is not a woman who folds, even when terrified, and I love that about her, and about this movie.

We have long needed more movies like this, and we still do, but it’s heartening to see them getting made at least somewhat more frequently. This one has been available on Prime Video since December 11, and it is well worth watching. I’ve seen a few movies since which, looking back, I rather wish I had watched this one sooner instead.

The crime genre just isn’t that appealing to everyone on its own, especially over the holidays. There’s nothing “festive” about this movie. Well, the holidays are over now, so that’s perfect! You should start your new year with a very well-made film that, in so doing, supports women filmmakers. Not that it being directed and led by women is the reason to watch; the film is objectively good in its own right.

The editing in particular is subtly impressive. I’m Your Woman runs at roughly two hours, and it has no dull moments, even with no fewer than three sequences depicting Jean spending an extended amount of time just . . . waiting. First at a hotel as a temporary hideout; then to a house she’s taken to by a colleague of her husband’s; and finally to a cabin in the woods. In every case, the pacing still propels the story forward, never creating the same sense of tedium that Jean surely feels.

Julia Hart’s direction slyly doles out Jean’s story in bits and pieces as her present circumstances unfold, only adding to the tension and frequent suspense. When the film opens, Jean’s husband Eddie (Bill Heck) suddenly shows up at home with a baby, one Jean has never seen before, but Eddie still says “It’s our baby.” Said baby is with Jean for the majority of the rest of the movie. Eddie turns out to have surprising connections to the rest of the principal characters we eventually meet, offering the story a complexity without being contrived.

Hart—and, presumably, co-writer Jordan Horowitz—also fold in certain details, without which, I’m Your Woman would be a lot easier to criticize. American racism is far from the point of this story, but with multiple Black supporting characters, it would be foolish to pretend it isn’t there. Anrizé Kene plays Cal, the man sent to protect Jean, and when they in a car and confronted by a white police officer clearly suspicious of a Black man driving a car with a white woman and a white baby in it, a familiar tension comes into the picture that is both inevitable and unrelated to the story at hand.

Dynamics shift halfway through the film, when Cal has left Jean at his family cabin, and a while later she is met by Cal’s wife Teri (Marsha Stephanie Blake), his father (Frankie Faison), and his young son (Da’mauri Parks, in his first film role). All of them have some connection to Eddie that Jean is unaware of, painting a picture of her husband and his past she never knew, or never thought to examine.

I did find myself wondering how this movie might work if, say, the entire story were told from Teri’s perspective. Marsha Stephanie Blake only exists in the second hour of I’m Your Woman, but the entirety of her story might actually be more interesting. That said, Rachel Brosnahan is excellent as Jean, making it easy to forget she is also the title character in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, a radically different character, in both looks and demeanor.

A lot of I’m Your Woman is performed in hushed tones, making it a rather quiet film for much of the time, unless the baby is crying, or the three or so sequences featuring gunfire. One such scene takes place at a dance club Jean and Teri visit, in order to speak to its owner, and the panic that ensues is very well staged. That baby—and the little boy, for that matter—are frequently endangered, but no direct harm ever comes to them, which is both a relief and an added tension. The same could be said of Jean herself, actually, who keeps moving through chaos and life threatening scenarios unscathed, except perhaps for her emotional state.

This movie is an unusually great example of character development, given how different Jean is at the end from the beginning. It frequently puts her in states of tedium in between bursts of terrified excitement, but for us as viewers, there is never a dull moment, because this is storytelling at its best.

Turns out they’re both badasses, who knew?

Overall: B+