BLACK WIDOW

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

There’s something easily confusing for casual watchers of Marvel movies, when it comes to Black Widow. This movie is set after the events of Captain America: Civil War, which came out in 2016, and effectively sets Black Widow in 2016. That’s at least a couple of years before the events of Avengers: Infinity War, and seven years before the ultimate fate of the Black Widow character revealed in Avengers: Endgame. Just to spice things up a little, let’s throw in the fact that Endgame was released in 2019 but set in 2023; Black Widow is released in 2021 after an originally scheduled 2020 release due to a real-life pandemic; and the fact that although this is the first feature film dedicated to Black Widow, even though it’s the eighth MCU movie in which the character appears (ninth if you count another movie’s mid-credits sequence).

If you weren’t confused before, maybe you are now? I’ve only managed this level of understanding thanks to a couple of podcasts and a bit of online research. I maintain, however, that a movie should make itself clear without the need for extracurricular research, and nothing in the actual content of Black Widow makes this setting in the timeline clear—at least not to anyone without a photographic memory of the entire MCU timeline. The way I see it, this is a strike against both Black Widow and the broader Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Luckily, Black Widow still has a lot going for it. Namely, that it mostly works as a self-contained film, in that if you don’t even know it’s part of this far larger “cinematic universe,” that makes the movie arguably less confusing. Even more importantly, it’s just a lot of fun.

This is now the fourth superhero movie in recent years that focuses on a woman superhero, which is still a small enough number that it invites deeply unfair comparisons. Personally, I liked all the others about as well as any of the others, for different reasons in each case which averaged out to about the same quality of blockbuster cinema: the original Wonder Woman (2017) exceeded expectations before devolving into the same climactic battle with a bland villain we’ve seen in countless of these movies; Captain Marvel (2019) was fun but largely forgettable, save for a truly delightful alien cat; and although Wonder Woman 1984 (2020) was met with derision both wide and deep, I thought it was fine.

With the exceptions of a few threads among those three films that could be singled out as moving things forward in a positive way, particularly for representation of women in film, they also have something else in common: an undercurrent of mediocrity. Theres a key difference on this front with Black Widow that I love: it’s not just about one woman as the main character, nor is it just packed with badass women supporting characters who serve the story of the main hero. Black Widow is all of those things at once, and I can think of no other superhero movie that can claim the same.

I just love how prominently women play into every level of plotting in this movie. The central story revolves around the sisterly relationship between Natasha Romanoff (Black Widow) and Yelena, two trained assassins who learned at a young age that they were not really sisters and were just part of an artificially constructed American family of Russian spies. The quasi-sisters are played by (as we all know) Scarlett Johansson and the incomparable Florence Pugh. Pugh sits surprisingly comfortably in the blockbuster action role, after a series of memorable parts in often disturbing dramas. Honestly, given the changing nature of movie making in America, my greatest hope for Pugh is that she takes this large paycheck parts so that she can continue turning incredible dramatic performances in smaller budget films and still make a living.

The parents in the aforementioned Russian family are played by David Harbour and Rachel Weisz, both of whom play prominently in the story here, Harbour being a Russian “super soldier” largely regarded as that nation’s counterpart to Captain America. Whether they are meant to be seen as villainous or heroic, or at what point they cross over from one to the other, is a little muddled, but as with any movie like this, don’t think about it too much and you’ll be fine. For Harbour’s part, his performance is by far the hammiest in the entire film, and seems to be a bit polarizing among audiences. I actually found it entertaining.

There is also some clarity needed when it comes to “the villain” of Black Widow. Technically, it’s Ray Winstone as Dreykov, a Russian mastermind who has developed an army of exclusively young women assassins who are victims of his chemical brain alteration that allows for mind control. A lot of this stuff is both ridiculous and very James Bond, but that doesn’t distract from how fun the movie is. Anyway, the villain effectively is actually yet another woman, with the unfortunately hokey nameof “Taskmaster” (Olga Kurylenko). She is Dreykov’s prized pupil of mind control, programmed to learn the fighting style of anyone she fights.

As such, Black Widow’s two main heroes are women; their most challenging adversary is. woman; they are aided by a complicated but equally heroic mother figure (along with an exceptionally strong father figure, yay gender equality!); and several scenes feature a large group of mind-controlled woman assassins. The latter group is generally and predictably easily dispatched, but the point is this: where most blockbuster movies feature just a few key female characters—even if they are the protagonists—with the entire rest of the significant parts rounded out by men, Black Widow completely flips that script.

And maybe audiences are finally getting used to this idea? Both the original Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel were pointless victims of insane amounts of sexist backlash, and I haven’t seen anything like that in response to Black Widow. Presumably this is due to a host of factors, not least of which is the fact that audiences have been seeing Black Widow as a supporting character in other MCU movies already for a decade. The difference is that Black Widow really leans in with its casting of women (to be fair, the only women of color are among the mind controlled assassins, and none of them get any real lines, let alone anything even remotely like character development—but, one step at a time, I guess), and for once, it seems to be working with audiences.

Of course, none of that would be making much difference if the movie did not work on its own merits, and it does. Black Widow is far from perfect, it had multiple scenes of such jaw dropping implausibility that I literally rolled my eyes, and it puts Black Widow herself through so much turmoil that one has to wonder how any Avengers get any rest at all, even when they’re supposedly “taking a break.” The villain is once again obsessed with megalomaniacal goals of world domination, something I tired of long ago and is usually a reason for me to skip superhero movies. Except, I like to get tickets to movies that focus on women and minorities so I can add to the audience size and help prove that such movies do have an audience. In this case, it absolutely proved worth it, mostly thanks to a dazzling cast with real, across-the-board onscreen chemistry with each other.

Sister Act Redux

Overall: B+

WOLFGANG

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

I’m not even a foodie. I probably have one of the least refined palates around. But, much like my enduringly unconditional love of my hometown of Seattle won’t keep me from also loving it when someone else loves another place where they live, there is real joy in seeing someone engaged with their passion, doing what they love. Everyone has their thing, and few of us get to make that what we do for a living. The documentary Wolfgang, streaming currently on Disney+, leaves me feeling like Wolfgang Puck must be truly one of the luckiest people in the world.

It’s not like that hasn’t come without any price, of course. I’m actually glad director David Gelb makes it a point to mention these prices, but treats them with subtlety, and indicates that the relationships affected are left with continued care for him rather than resentment. His second wife, Barbara Lazaroff, with whom he had his first two children, eventually divorced him but is still listed as the cofounder of the Wolfgang Puck Food Company (now Wolfgang Puck Worldwide). Wolfgang’s intense focus on his restaurants and their expansion came at the expense of time with his children, but one of those first two kids, Byron, is the one of his now-four kids featured as an interviewee in this film. He appears wearing a chef’s jacket, indicated immediately that he followed in his father’s footsteps.

I can’t help but regard Wolfgang as an unusually well-made documentary film, as I tend to be fundamentally disinterested in cooking shows—but, this documentary about who amounts to the first-ever “celebrity chef” had me rapt from start to finish. This guy has a compelling story, having grown up in Austria with an abusive stepfather who told him “real men stay out of the kitchen.” From that perspective, Puck serves as a great role model for children of all genders.

There are moments when Wolfgang the film leans a little heavily into the celebration of the man who started the phenomenon of “celebrity chefs,” of which there are no countless. I’m not sure I’m on board with the insinuation that celebrity is worthwhile for its own sake. But, to Puck’s credit, while he clearly enjoys his unlikely and massive success, judging by this film anyway, he seems surprisingly grounded, a man of great personal and financial wealth who wound up just being a sweet, if still very busy, old man.

Wolfgang is packed with examples of ideas and products he apparently started. A wood stove in an open kitchen in the restaurant. The trendy restaurant location where A-list celebrities gather to see and be seen. A smoked salmon pizza. The “first chef since Chef Boyardee” to take his own dishes and turn them into branded frozen and canned food products. (I happen work for a local chain of natural foods grocery stores that sells his canned soups.) A lot of these examples are things we have long taken for granted, and it’s fascinating to see how what is now omnipresent was once an innnovation.

On the technical side, one of my favorite things about Wolfgang is the cinematography. I’m not sure I have ever seen an otherwise conventionally constructed documentary so well shot, with several scenes featuring smooth tracking shots, sometimes surrounding the subjects. There’s a sequence near the end where we get to see Wolfgang, his current wife, and all of their children gathered for a home cooked dinner, and it is at once a polished, seamless visual and an intimate portrait of family bonding over food.

The fact that I enjoyed this movie so much really says a lot for it, I think. I suspect bona fide foodies would enjoy it even more, as not only is Wolfgang’s life story, detailing his emigration from Austria to Los Angeles, a fascinating one, but you get to see a whole lot of the food he cooks. As a vegetarian, most of the shots of food don’t appeal to me at all. It most assuredly will to others. This is a guy who made it to the top for truly humble beginnings, through persistence and hard work. The American Dream is a pipe dream for most, but this is a guy who somehow managed to embody it.

On the menu: sizzling charisma.

Overall: B+

THE TOMORROW WAR

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

If you want to have any hope of really enjoying The Tomorrow War, don’t overthink it. In fact, just don’t think about it at all. Just let it wash over you, and don’t think about how much it outright steals from far better movies before it, from Aliens to Edge of Tomorrow. It also, bizarrely, has a lot in common with completely forgotten alien-invasion action movie Battle: Los Angeles, released ten years ago: it’s a “war movie” about a battle between humans and aliens, and . . . ten years from now, The Tomorrow War will be just as forgotten.

The Tomorrow War does deserve some credit over Battle: Los Angeles, at least. It gives a lot more screen time to the aliens—something it even has over Edge of Tomorrow (2014), even though that’s still a better movie. The Tomorrow War does shy away from some of the more stereotypical casting, with a majority of key supporting parts going to nonwhite actors and women. In particular, the relationship between Dan Forester (Chris Pratt) and his daughter (played by both Ryan Kiera Armstrong and Yvonne Stahovski) is one that far more typically would be between a man and his son in other movies. All that said, it seems worth pointing out that this movie’s hero protagonist remains a straight white guy, to whom all others ultimately defer. The one exception is his daughter, Muri, who is still one of many characters who orbit around him in regards to the plot.

In any event, The Tomorrow War is entertaining enough—for maybe an hour and 45 minutes, anyway—it’s just fundamentally unoriginal, from every angle. The funny thing is, the same could be said of every other movie cited so far to which it owes its existence. Of course, that is technically the case for virtually any movie. The key difference is that those other movies had a new take, or a new twist, on old tropes. Even the seminal 1996 blockbuster alien invasion movie Independence Day openly played with the old tropes it celebrated in a new way—and, ironically, that movie had a Black protagonist, and is the one movie of its ilk that gets specifically name checked in The Tomorrow War: “I’m just glad Will Smith isn’t alive to see this.”

There’s a lot to pick apart in The Tomorrow War if you feel like spending the time on it. For the most part, it would be a pointless endeavor. The people who are excited by it won’t find the nitpicking to be relevant, and those who aren’t excited by it won’t bother to watch it anyway. A few people out there might be asking the question, “Is it any good?” The best I can say in response to that is . . . it has some redeeming qualities.

It’s better than Battle: Los Angeles was, anyway. Even though that movie and this one have the same basic fundamental problem, which is an over-focus on military style battle sequences, lots of machine gun fire, against aliens who are incredibly difficult to kill. I quickly became desensitized to it. I found the jump into thirty years into the future to be the most interesting thing about it—a burning future Miami skyline is a cool visual—but then (spoiler alert!) the “climactic” sequence is stripped down to dullness, a battle in a present-day snowscape of the Arctic.

Honestly, the most interesting thing about The Tomorrow War is that it’s the first “blockbuster” movie of its genre to be released straight to streaming, in this case Prime Video, with no theatrical release at all. It’s hard to gauge the motivations behind these decisions these days, whether they stick to a traditional theatrical window before any streaming access, or do a dual release on both, or go strictly straight to streaming. This may be the first film of this high a profile and production to go with that last option in a post-COVID world. I find myself wondering: would I have preferred to have seen this in a theater? I can’t decide. I’m glad I didn’t spend extra money on a movie ticket, so, well, I guess that answers that question.

Will more people see it this way? That remains to be seen. The movie is far less likely to make as much money as it would have with a theatrical release in the past, I would think. I can’t stop going back to Battle: Los Angeles, to which this is more similar than any other movie, and that one made all of $85 million domestically, on a movie with a budget of $70 million. Its worldwide gross of nearly $212 million ultimately justified its existence, I guess. And, again: The Tomorrow War is a better movie than that one was, at least. And we live in a far different world of cinema today than we did ten years ago, when I don’t even have to tell you to save yourself the money and just wait for it to appear on streaming: this movie is already there. And if your expectations aren’t that high to begin with, and you just want an entertaining sci-fi action diversion, this movie will do the trick this week.

I mean, if you want to sit through 140 minutes of people shooting at aliens, anyway. This movie would have been much improved with at least thirty minutes trimmed from it, but then, with no theater showing turnover to worry about, streamers clearly aren’t as concerned about run time. I can tell you this much: I enjoyed this movie for what it was, flaws and all, for a good majority of it. But then, with maybe half an hour left to go, I just got bored with what was ultimately more of the same. Even on streamers, there are far better options available—even within the sci-fi genre! Granted, you may have already consumed the better options, so what then? I don’t know, read a book! Or, okay, go ahead and watch this movie, which isn’t terrible, but it sure isn’t great either.

Credit where credit is due: most of these people survive, at least. Maybe even all of them! I just can’t remember for sure in regards to one of them.

NO SUDDEN MOVE

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

What exactly defines a “noir,” anyway? I’ll freely admit I could be off base here, but when I think film noir I think 1940s, black and white, crime drama, maybe mystery. Lots of stark imagery, lots of shadows. I may have a narrow idea of what qualifies for the genre. I have long thought of Blade Runner as “future noir” because of its blend of crime drama and clear 1940s aesthetic influences, even though it was set decades into the future.

Hmm. “A genre of crime film or fiction characterized by cynicism, fatalism, and moral ambiguity.” Okay, fine. No Sudden Move definitely fits the bill.

Of course, so could countless other crime dramas, particularly ones—as this one does—that double as a period piece. What distinguishes No Sudden Move as a “noir film” as opposed to simply a crime drama that happens to be set in 1950s Detroit?

The literal French translation is black film. A curious point, given the story and setting here, Detroit at the height of its prominence in America, when it had 1.8 million people and was the fifth-largest city in the United States (behind, at the time, New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia and Los Angeles); the city ranks 14th today, having declined in population by nearly 64% over the past seventy years. Furthermore, several of the characters are Black, with Don Cheadle getting top billing. There’s something you don’t see in “classic noir,” but it certainly gives new meaning to the idea of film noir.

The rest of the principal cast is either Black or white, although one of them is Latino: Benicio del Toro, who gets second billing. He and Cheadle play Ronald and Curt, respectively, who are hired along with the young white guy Charlie (Kieran Culkin) to “babysit” a family at their house while the dad (David Harbour) is escorted to the office of his boss (Hugh Maguire) to steal an incriminating document about the automobile industry in his safe.

It’s quite clear that a lot of actors have great respect or Steven Soderbergh as a director, and are either eager or happy to take part in often large ensemble casts for his projects, regardless of the medium. Lately Soderbergh is using HBO as the conduit for his output, most recently with Let Them All Talk, starring Meryl Streep, Candice Bergen and Diane Wiest as old friends on a cruise. That movie and this one could not be more different, except that they serve as the latest example of how prolific and eclectic Soderbergh is and has long been. Plus—and this is key—they are the kinds of movies that get little support for major studio releases in movie theaters anymore, and so they get released direct to streaming.

This is almost certainly less lucrative for Soderbergh, but all evidence points to his being more creatively fulfilled. And when it comes to No Sudden Move, a whole lot of name actors seem to agree, with the cast also including the likes of Brendan Frasher (almost unrecognizable), John Hamm, Ray Liotta, Matt Damon, and even Noah Jupe as David Harbour’s teenage son.

If I had any particular criticism of this film, it would be that, as is typical of films of this type, the women aren’t given enough to do. A fair number of women get speaking parts, and No Sudden Move at the very least passes the Bechdel Test, and a key twist near the end involves one of the women and is impossible to see coming—all of which I appreciate. None of this changes the fact that every woman onscreen, including even Amy Seimetz as David Harbour’s wife, are fundamentally secondary not just to the plot, but to all of the men involved in it. I want to see a crime noir that is “modernized” in a way that gives women equal footing in the way the plot unfolds, rather than them just being angry or resentful about their husbands’ behaviors and personal associations.

That said, we take what we can get, and among the men at least, this is a hearteningly diverse cast. And the script, by Ed Solomon (Men In Black), brings all these characters together in uniquely satisfying ways. That “babysitting” job of the aforementioned family goes sideways very early on, and every turn that follows is just unpredictable enough to be not overdone, and the story remains consistently compelling from there to the end. When it comes to crime dramas, No Sudden Moves holds up to the tenets of the genre.

These two experience a lot of close calls.

Overall: B+

ZOLA

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

Do yourself a favor, save yourself the time, trouble, and money and just click here to read the original Twitter thread on which this movie Zola is based. The original tweets, first posted in 2015, have since been deleted from Twitter, but we all know now we can rely on someone saving screenshots. Just be sure not to make the same mistake I did and click the “Next” button, which actually takes you to a different, unrelated post. Just scroll down and you’ll see every screenshot, all 148 tweets, which frankly make for a far better experience than watching the movie.

I mean, the movie is . . . fine, I guess. The first tweet is verbatim the first line in the movie: “Y’all wanna. hear a story about why me & this bitch here fell out???????? It’s kind of long but full of suspense.” The thing is, that is absolutely an accurate description of the twitter thread. The movie, on the other hand, is neither long (86 minutes) but still manages to drag, or even remotely suspenseful. On the contrary, it’s unlike possibly any other movie I have ever seen, in that it is packed . . . with filler.

Zola could have made a truly fantastic, thirty-minute episode of, say, an anthology TV series about people’s crazy stories. Maybe even with a focus on sex workers’ crazy stories. Every one of the jaw dropping twists and turns in the story, countless though they are, could have been tightened up into that time frame. Maybe director and co-writer Janicza Bravo thought that would be too overwhelming to viewers? Except the whole point of that story is how chaotic it is.

It’s true that sometimes I complain about too much happening in a movie, and how it never takes time to breathe. The difference is, for maybe three quarters of its run time Zola is nothing but the breathing. We get slow shots of Zola (Taylour Paige) and her new stripper friend Stefani (Riley Keough, playing the young woman who in real life was named Jessica) putting on makeup in the same mirror together, or a montage of these two with Jessica’s boyfriend Derrek (Nicholas Braun) and who will turn out to be Stefani’s pimp (Colman Domingo), on their 20-hour drive to what Zola has been told is a lucrative dancing gig. There’s a scene where colored lines suddenly appear over Zola’s forehead as it otherwise fades to black, as though she’s having an out of body experience. There’s also a scene in a gas station bathroom with a crane shot from directly above, showing Zola and Stefani peeing in neighboring toilet stalls, passing toilet paper to each other under the wall. When that particular scene, which was very short, ended, I thought to myself, Why the fuck did I need to see that? I thought at first that I should give the movie the benefit of the doubt, and maybe something in the plotting will reveal it to be more relevant than it appeared. Instead, I’m still wondering.

The pimp’s name in the movie is X, and for some reason he is portrayed in a far more villainous fashion than he ever was in Zola’s original Twitter thread—as in, repeatedly threatening to Zola directly, as she gets roped into tagging along on Stefanie’s nights of doing sex work. More than once you wonder if X is going to physically assault her; the man is very menacing, in a way he was never portrayed in the original Twitter thread. Ironically, the end of the Twitter thread reveals that man to have been a horrible man indeed, to extremes actually never made explicit in the film: kidnapping of underage girls and links to murder. This, after the tweets portray Zola as being a lot more complicit in the weekend shenanigans than she is as a character in the film.

To be fair, the film begins with title cards that say “most of this is true,” basically acknowledging the artistic license it takes, and the vast majority of the major beats of the story are indeed lifted directed from the original account. (I immediately went to find that Twitter thread when I got home, just so I could find out.) There are some fascinating directions the film goes when it comes to racial dynamics, as Zola is a Black woman and Stefani is a white woman who oozes Black cultural appropriation, particularly with her “black accent.”

It can’t be denied that there is plenty to unpack with this film, ripe for discussion. It’s just poorly edited. Honestly, they could have taken a whole lot more artistic license and just added more stuff to make the film compelling on a consistent basis from beginning to end, maybe then simply saying “loosely based on a true story.” What we got instead, it’s like they were too concerned with being as close to the real story as possible, except that those 148 tweets cover an entire weekend, and if you’re going to adapt a written account of something into a feature film, you really need the full text to be more than just roughly 4500 words (that amounts to, say, nine pages).

I am intrigued by both of these main characters, both as they existed in real life and as they exist fictionalized on film. The women who portray them are more than competent (although to be honest, Nicholas Braun as possibly mentally ill boyfriend Derrek gives arguably the best performance), and make me want to know more about them and their bananas situation. Even as Zola goes back and forth in her resentment versus support of Stefani: at one point she retakes her photos for her, and reposts ads so she makes $500 per client instead of $100. None of these characters are perfect or simple or incapable of being their own brand of a mess, although I suppose I do think it’s cool that real-life Zola was so involved in making the film she got Executive Producer credit. I just think she would have been better served in a different medium.

The story is incredible, the movie isn’t.

Overall: C+

LUCA

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

Someone I follow on Twitter called Luca “Call Me By Your Name meets The Shape of Water,” and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about that. This movie is indeed about sea monsters, after all, two of which turn into young boys who form a relationship that seems, from the right angle, at least romantic-adjacent.

This is a Disney-Pixar film, after all, and rest assured that, in sharp contrast to those other two movies, there’s no fucking in this one. I mean, you might as well say this movie is “Call Me By Your Name meets Elisa Fucks a Fish.” Side note: this has to be the first review I have ever written of a movie for children in which I reference fucking not once, but twice. Oh wait, that makes three. This review is not for children!

I mean, of course it isn’t. No children give a shit what some 45-year-old looking for queer subtext thinks about some Disney movie they’re sure to find perfectly entertaining. I do have a bit of a flip-side suspicion here, though. I’m not sure it’s an accident that Disney opted to release Luca straight to Disney+ without even a limited theatrical release. I have to admit, by Pixar standards, or at least by the bar they set themselves decades ago, this one is comparatively . . . let’s say, slight. The story has what we might have called twenty years ago a bit of a “straight to video” quality.

That is, I suppose, unless you’re looking for the aforementioned queer coding. Whether that was any part of director and co-writer Enrico Casarosa’s intention is anybody’s guess, although if you happen to have seen Call Me By Your Name, especially considering this film’s Italian setting, it’s hard not to see some similarities. And then there’s the pretty direct reference, near the end, to how some humans will accept him and some of him won’t, but “he seems to know how to find the good ones.” If nothing else, it has a pure and sweet message about friendship and finding your tribe even if something about you makes you different.

And Luca is an undeniably sweet, often adorable little movie. It just doesn’t have the depth, or the expansive world building, that typically sets Pixar apart. These are sea creatures after all, and we spend some time in their underwater world, but there doesn’t seem to be much to their ecosystem—their habitat it exceedingly simple and surprisingly lacking in aquatic diversity. Finding Nemo, this is not. Curiously, when Luca transforms into human form on land and befriends a local girl, she ignites in him an interest in astronomy, with a couple fantasy sequences in celestial space—which, again, pale in comparison to the Pixar masterpiece WALL-E (which I like now even more than I did upon its release; that film aged into a modern classic). Even the very conceit of sea monsters turning into human form on land brings to mind The Little Mermaid, giving the story an overall sense of being derivative.

I can say this much: I enjoyed Luca more than I did the latest offering from Disney Animation Studios, Raya and the Last Dragon. Objectively speaking, I would say that and Luca average out to about the same level of quality, just for different reasons. Raya has better plotting and better artistic design; Luca has better voice performances and overall better animation sequences.

Speaking of the voice talents, Luca’s title character is played by Jacob Tremblay, who was nine in Room and is fourteen now, but was likely thirteen when voice recording took place. Speaking of which, knowing that Luca was made at home during the COVID-19 pandemic does make one wonder how much more expansive its world-building might have been had they managed to produce the film in the studio. Putting it in that context does make the film seem a bit more impressive.

Not that any of the kids who are the target audience are going to be thinking about that—nor are they going to care all that much that, for instance, Luca’s parents are voiced by Maya Rudolph an Jim Gaffigan, or that Sacha Baron Cohen shows up in a brief but amusing scene as the anglerfish-like Uncle Ugo. They’ll merely be sufficiently entertained. I’m not sure what makes an animated feature completely addictive to young children, as in a phenomenon like Frozen or Finding Nemo. I just know that Luca doesn’t have it. It’s above above average by Disney standards and fairly middle-of-the-road by Pixar standards, but it looks great and has its charms in the moment, fleeing as they might seem once the movie ends.

Don’t get them wet! No, this isn’t Gremlins. Is no one going to talk about how he has a glass of water?

Overall: B

RITA MORENO: JUST A GIRL WHO DECIDED TO GO FOR IT

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

When this documentary was being filmed, diretor Mariem Pérez Riera had camera access to Rita Moreno’s 87th birthday party. In the footage of the setup. Moreno says she’s been hosting costume parties for her birthday every year since she turned 77—that’s ten years, in what for most people would be twilight years but for Moreno seems to be as full of vitality as any other time in her life.

That was in 2018. Rita Moreno was born near the end of 1931, and as I write this, she would be 89. And if this film has anything to say about it, her life and career are extraordinary. Her first credited role was in 1950, when she was all of eighteen years old, and she soon had a contract with a film studio, her career owned and managed in the typical way of the time—her key difference being that she was Latina. In her present-day interviews in Just a Girl Who Decided to Go For It, Moreno reminisces about her naiveté at the start of her career, and the heinously forward way men in the industry spoke to her.

There’s a moment in this film when Moreno notes that fame is unpredictable: “It goes up and down,” she says. “Right now, it’s up.” She’s been around so long that someone like me can be middle-aged and still only have been alive for about two thirds of her career. Of course, anyone who knows anything about her knows about her Oscar-winning role as Anita in the 1961 movie musical West Side Story, easily the most iconic role of her career. What I didn’t know is that she had been working for eleven years by then, or that the role marked a seismic shift in her career trajectory, after years of being relegated to parts for countless nonwhite ethnicities that were not even Latina, let alone Puerto Rican.

She didn’t even have another major film role for most of the rest of the sixties, but it’s stated in this film that her career didn’t rise in the wake of that Oscar win, so much as expand. By 1977 she became only the third person to win an EGOT: an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony Award.

There’s a lot about Rita Moreno’s career I didn’t know about. For the most part, I knew her as Anita from West Side Story, and then as the grandmother Lydia on the Netflix reboot of One Day at a Time (2017-2020; highly recommend). I’ve never seen the HBO series Oz (1997-2003), but now that I know she played a nun on that show, I might finally have to check it out. Long before that, she had an on-again, off-again relationship with Marlon Brando for some seven years, and then costarred with him in the 1969 film The Night of the Following Day (which really doesn’t look that good). She costarred with Morgan Freeman through most of the seventies in the children’s series The Electric Company.

These few examples just scratch the surface of her seven-decade career, and with skilled editing this means there’s never a dull moment in the 90 minutes of Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It. It’s mostly contemporary interviews with her, but also features interviews with many of the people she’s worked with, and others who admire her. She’s amassed a large collection of awards, and at one she decides to get playful and make a T-shirt part of her outfit, which reads Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It, hence this film’s subtitle.

There’s always a predictable bias to films like this. Rita Moreno is a beloved figure, and Mariem Pérez Riera clearly has not interest in showing Moreno in anything but a flattering light. On the Sally Struthers episode of the WTF with Marc Maron podcast in April, when talking about working together in the 1985 gender-swapped stage production of The Odd Couple, Struthers described Moreno as “just a mean, difficult human being.” You’ll find no such sentiments here in this documentary—and it’s just as well. Bias or not, I only mention the Struthers criticism because it’s the only open resentment toward Moreno that I can find. Ironically, that actually reflects on Moreno pretty well.

And Moreno’s screen presence, even at 87, is straight up infectious. If only we could all have that much energy and be so full of life at that age. No one I have ever known to make it that age remained that mentally sharp. This woman has an incredible memory, an incredible life, and an incredible story. You don’t have to be any more intimately familiar with the whole arc of her career than I was to find it fascinating.

And the rest of you should just decide to go see this movie.

Advance: THE SPARKS BROTHERS

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

How have I never heard of this band, or duo—or duo who fronts various iterations of a band—until now? These guys have been around for ages: formed in 1967, first of twenty-five albums in 1971, the current year, 2021, is the fiftieth anniversary of their debut release, Halfnelson. The Sparks Brothers of the title are Ron and Russel Mael, aged 22 and 19 when they first formed as a music act, aged 75 and 72 today. And, judging by this Edgar Wright-directed documentary, their just-below-the-radar relevance to rotating generations of fans has remained fairly consistent over five decades.

It’s strange to discover artists who clearly, wildly influential for the first time so late in their career. This film will clearly hit differently for people who know who these guys are than it will or people like me, who didn’t even know they existed. I only know about this movie because I received an invite to a virtual advanced screening. (It opens in theaters tomorrow.) But as the promotional material states, they are “your favorite band’s favorite band.” I guess they don’t necessarily expect us to know about them: this film introduces them. It also features countless singers, actors, comedians and other personalities who are very familiar and eager to talk about them.

One thing that really struck me was the clear similarity with one of my own favorite pop duos, the Pet Shop Boys: also consisting of a singer and a synth player. Pet Shop Boys broke out in 1986, when Sparks had already been around for two decades. Sparks even veered into synth-heavy pop with one of their many creative left turns in 1979 with an album called No. 1 in Heaven (incidentally, produced by legend Giorgio Moroder, reigniting Sparks’s career the same way he did with Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories in 2013, thirty-four years later). A brief story is told in this film of Pet Shop Boys’s Niel Tennant being approached backstage at a show and asked, “Why don’t you acknowledge Sparks?” According to this account, Tennant was rather dismissive, which I found deeply disappointing.

I can’t even decide if I am likely to find Sparks’s music all that appealing. It’s their overall story that is so fascinating, here in one of the better music documentaries in recent memory. The editing and many artistic flourishes make it almost impossible to look away from the moment it starts, even if you’ve never heard of these guys. Edgar Wright goes through their story chronologically, basically album by album, and with 25 albums to date that’s a lot to cover. The final run time is two hours and fifteen minutes, quite long by documentary standards—but believe me, the time goes by quickly. There are no lulls in this narrative, as Sparks’s musical directions take regular wild turns, never in service of great commercial success and alway in service of creative fulfillment.

As a singer, Russell’s vocals make me think of an odd blend of Freddie Mercury and Monty Python, often high-pitched and androgynous in sound. As a composer and lyricist, much is made of Ron’s often comic sensibility—one of the interview subjects in the film is Weird Al Yankovic—something that evidently made it difficult for many to take them seriously as artists early in their career. And if The Sparks Brothers the film is your introduction to them, diving into that massive back catalog can be daunting. But, there’s something else this film makes clear: their career moves so many wildly different musical directions, it’s nearly guaranteed you won’t possibly like all of their stuff. And yet, they have so much of it, you could probably cherry pick the stuff you do like and still have a good amount to explore.

It can be almost surreal, seeing clips from the vast archive of footage of these brothers performing, and the countless other artists they bring to mind. It’s easy to think about it backwards, as though they are the ones being influenced. But these guys are true originals, with every seemingly recognizable reference point pre-dating whatever you think it’s referencing by several years. I’m amazed the two evidently have gotten along working so closely together all this time. It makes you wonder if they’re even human. There’s not a hint of resentment or animosity between them; they respect each other and work well together, and are widely, deeply respected by countless others in their industry.

Early on in the film, one interview subject comments on how he almost doesn’t even want to watch this film, because the longstanding mystery of Sparks is a big part of their appeal. I would argue this film makes it worth dispelling at least some of the mystery. It’s all of 135 minutes out of fifty-four years, after all. These guys, and this film, are absolutely worth your attention, and when it’s done there’s still plenty of mystery to go around.

Russell and Ron, enduring weirdos.

Overall: B+

HOLLER

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

It would be easy to say Jessica Barden is to Holler as Jennifer Lawrence was to Winter’s Bone (2010). The comparisons are apt, and I wouldn’t mind seeing Barden ascend to great heights in the film industry. Previously seen in The End of the F***ing World, a British series available on Netflix, Barden’s performance as a young woman struggling to break out of industrial Ohio becomes much more impressive when you discover she’s British.

The industry is very different now, though, and there’s no telling where a young actor’s career will go. Holler has a lot in common with Winter’s Bone, both of them being about young women stoically doing what they have to do to scrape by in an environment complicated by poverty and a junkie parent. But, whereas Winter’s Bone took things to a bit more of an extreme, Holler is a more even-handed look at working class struggles in the Midwest. Specifically white working class struggles, it should be noted.

Ruth (Barden) is barely reaching her goal of graduating high school, living with her brother Blaze (Gus Halper), struggling to keep up with the rent in a house left behind by their mother, who has been given the choice of county jail for thirty days or a rehab clinic. Writer-director Nicole Riegel offers a strong debut feature film here, creating a nuanced portrait of a specific world. She seems to take the idea of “less is more” to heart, making it clear that the opioid crisis is a big part of what weighs on this community by only referencing it once: “That damn doctor” kept prescribing pills to Ruth and Blaze’s mom, after she injured herself at a factory job.

Much more is made of the disappearing manufacturing sector in this part of the country, with a sprinkling of pointed excerpts from Donald Trump speeches about bringing them jobs, heard on car radios. None of the characters here pay him much mind when his words can be heard; they neither celebrate nor demonize him. Perhaps the point is that they are simply trying to live their lives, preoccupied with things like eviction notices, utilities being turned off, or looking for another job when the factory closes.

Ruth and Blaze scrape up bits of cash scrapping metal and selling it. This is how they meet Hark (Austin Amelio), who lures them into far more lucrative but much more illegal scrapping, making their lives a lot more dangerous in the process. I watched a lot of Holler fearing something terrible will happen to one of these characters, although it’s possible this was never part of Riegel’s intentions. I’ve just been conditioned by years of movies teaching me to expect such things. And something terrible does happen, just not directly to either of them. We don’t have to see our protagonists endure deep trauma to understand the risks they’ve put themselves in. The tricky question is how much risk is worth giving Beth a chance to leave this town and go to college, in spite of the people at her school having no real faith in her future prospects.

Holler is the rare movie shot almost entirely with hand-held cameras where I found myself fairly impressed with the cinematography. The combination of the camera work and the editing contributes significantly to a uniquely downbeat tone. The performances are pretty deadpan across the board, which is slightly to the film’s detriment, as it denies the characters the chance to be fully realized. Still, the relative slow burn of the plotting is surprisingly effective in the end, as I found Holler to be increasingly compelling as it went along. Riegel offers us characters we can empathize with even when they make bad, or in some cases even sinister, decisions. This is a world I don’t exist in, but even if the characters don’t come across as fully realized, the world they inhabit does.

Ruth assesses her life circumstances.

Overall: B

IN THE HEIGHTS

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

It’s been a long while since we got a mainstream movie musical release that was so much fun. It’s arguably unfair to hold it to the standard of live theater—I always say movies should be judged by their own merits, after all—but I still found myself regularly thinking about how much more exciting In the Heights almost certainly would been to see live on Broadway; I never did see a stage production of it. That said, adapting a play for the screen in a way that makes the movie even close to equally worthy in its own right is notoriously difficult, and I can certainly say this much: In the Heights the movie stands on its own.

Is it an instant classic? Will it endure in audience before for decades to come, in the same vein as The Sound of Music or the original West Side Story? Not even close. It’s easy to see this movie being part of the 2021 Oscar conversation, which takes us into next year, but will people still be talking much about In the Heights even two years from now? I’d be very surprised. But, does a movie have to be an instant classic to be a hell of a great time? Certainly not. This is a movie that’s having a moment, and its time is now. I absolutely encourage everyone to revel in it.

And there is much to love about it. When it comes to the filming of song and dance numbers, cinematography and editing are key; far too often choreography gets shot and cut together in a way that makes it impossible to see the achievement in choreography. It’s exactly the same principle with action movies: if you can’t get a clear picture of the movement, then what’s the point? In In the Heights, although the editing even here is occasionally too rapid-fire for my taste, there are just enough wide shots to truly wow you with the intricacy of synchronized and intricately laid out choreography. Many of these shots are in the New York neighborhood streets of the title. One memorably electric sequence takes place at a public pool, the camera moving in and around crowded swimmers, at one point even going under the water, culminating in a richly charismatic rap by supporting actor Gregory Diaz IV, leading a group of waders in synchronized slaps of the water. The kind of planning and execution that goes into this is deeply impressive.

I do have to wonder how much of what we see onscreen in this movie is augmented by special effects. In another memorable shot, our lead character, Usnavi (a spectacularly well cast Anthony Ramos) is seen rapping through the window of his corner store, the crowd on the street dancing in the reflection. This is clearly an effects shot—otherwise you’d see cameras and crew in the reflection of the window—but it is a memorable and effective one.

In the Heights is based on the Tony-winning musical stage play by Lin-Manuel Miranda (who pops up a few times here as a fringe character, selling snow cones), originally produced some eight years prior to Hamilton. Here it is adapted by Quiara Alegría Hudes, the first feature film she has written, and directed by Jon M. Chu (Crazy Rich Asians). It examines love of community as well as heritage, here being the mostly Latino population of Washington Heights in Manhattan, and a pretty diverse array of ethnic backgrounds within South and Central America, and largely the Caribbean. It looks at gentrification and residents of a beloved neighborhood getting priced out, which means there is a fairly sad undercurrent to all the joyful celebrations seen onscreen.

The one non-Latino principal character is Benny, played by Corey Hawkins, previously seen as Dr. Dre in Straight Outta Compton and a bunch of other films that arguably make him the most recognizable actor in In the Heights. Well, except, for some, maybe Jimmy Smits, who plays frustrated father to Nina (Leslie Grace), who is quitting college at Stanford due to the isolation from her community. She also happens to be Benny’s love interest, their romance being the B plot which oddly never gets any definitive resolution by the end of the film.

For Usnavi’s part, he has eyes for aspiring fashion designer Vanessa (Melissa Barrera), who faces her own uphill battle facing stereotypes as she works on her ambitions. Between these two romances, familial tensions between Nina and her father, and “Abuela Claudia” (Olga Merediz) playing matriarch to the community as businesses get priced out of the neighborhood, there’s a whole lot going on in this movie. It’s a wonder they managed to cut it down to 143 minutes. The music is always great, but the level of narrative urgency varies a bit, what with all the layers of story that need to be conveyed. The public pool sequence is the best, but there are others in the film that might also qualify as showstoppers, and collectively make this movie worth seeing—particularly in a theater.

And, not to worry: the story here is one, ultimately, of triumph, of characters successfully adapting to a changing environment. A lot is made of how the neighborhood Usnavi knows and loves is “disappearing,” and if you think about it deeply enough, there won’t be anything he can do about that in the end. But for now at least, he and his family and friends and neighbors—and you—can feel pretty great about the world and their place in it, humming associated melodies all the way home.

If you must join a crowd, you could do worse than this one.

Overall: B+