WORTH

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

I very much liked Worth, even though I watched it with a huge amount of cynicism: how much of this is Hollywood fantasy, I wonder? And I mean that in an unusually literal way, because this movie is about as far fro “fantasy” as a genre as it could possibly be—it’s much more of a legal procedural, and an often rather sad one at that. (It has that, as well as its very straightforward tone, in common with 2015’s Spotlight, in which Michael Keaton and Stanley Tucci previously costarred.) What I’m talking about here, more specifically, is artistic license. Would the high-profile lawyer tasked with deciding the amount of money that should be offered the families of victims in 9/11 really be someone with such a deep moral compass?

Maybe he did. Who knows? It’s just that, in the post-Donald Trump age, in the middle of a pandemic in which literally millions of people are willfully ignoring the plight of their fellow Americans, it’s really difficult to imagine. Maybe that’s what makes Worth precisely the kind of movie we need right now. To a large degree, this whole movie is a two-hour lesson in empathy.

Indeed, among the many films that have now been made about or connected to the 9/11 terrorist attacks that occurred twenty years ago this month, Worth may very well be the best one made to date. It’s far from a masterpiece, it certainly has its imperfections, but it is also unusually affecting and effective. Maybe most importantly, it avoids any of the “disaster movie” trappings of some other films about the event, and moves briskly in the opposite direction. This isn’t about the attacks themselves, but about their long-lasting effectis, particularly the grief of the victims’ survivors.

I realize that makes it a hard sell. This isn’t the most uplifting experience. But, it’s a useful one, and an illuminating one. This movie illustrates how things are at once more complex than they first seem, but also that some solutions are simpler than we might want to admit. If you like more mature, “adult” dramas, this film is a great choice—and a ridiculously accessible one, available streaming on Netflix.

Rare is the film that addresses such sensitive subjects this gracefully. Even the requisite scene in which the 9/11 attacks are actually happening is effectively subtle: Michael Keaton’s Ken Feinberg slowly coming to the realization while riding a commuter train. We don’t even see the planes hit the building, but rather the smoke billowing into the sky in the distance as seen through his train window. Director Sara Colangelo does inject just a few clips of archival footage of the people of New York walking around in the ash of the fallen towers. But, we don’t see the planes hit them, or the towers actually falling. Even twenty years ago, Colangelo seems to understand that we have no need to relieve that collective trauma. We saw more than enough of that stuff many years ago.

What we see, instead, are many vignettes—one of which starts the film—of victims’ family members, talking about the loved ones they lost. It’s true, you’re going to want tissues handy when you watch this. The whole plot of Worth is about Feinberg’s firm, with the help of lawyers Camille Biros (Amy Ryan), Priya Khundi (Shunori Ramanathan) and more, trying to meet a Congressional deadline to get 80% of the potential claimants to sign on to the September 11th Victim Compensation Fun. Feinberg struggles for much of the film, to present the idea to all of these individuals in a way that comes across as empathetic rather than callous.

This leads me to my one burning question that Worth does not answer. Early on, this fund is presented as a necessary contingency to ward off potential lawsuits that could “sink the economy.” How true is that, I wonder? If there were no September 11 Victims Compensation Fund, and a bunch of victims’ families filed suit, against the airlines or the government or whoever, would it really have that cataclysmic effect on the U.S. economy? I suppose, maybe—we already know the terrorist attack events themselves severely hobbled the economy on their own. Still, it would be interesting to find out how plausible that scenario is, this idea that the Compensation Fund was a needed contingency lest the U.S. suffer a crash of the economy. This movie offers no concrete basis for the argument; characters just state it as though fact.

And, to be clear, the plot arc of Worth follows some Hollywood formula, with a bit of standard emotional manipulation. But, in its defense—and this movie is greatly deserving of defense—the most emotionally effective moments were not the ones with a character’s last-minute change of heart, or the triumph of meeting a critical deadline. Instead, it’s the individual stories, about the people who died on September 11 and their families. Worth includes an impressively large number of these details, all of them moving, and we know they still represent but a fraction of the thousands affected.

Feinberg finds a pseudo-nemesis in Charles Wolf (played by Tucci), whose argument is that the way the fund is initially (and for quite some time) designed is unjust. On a basic level, Worth is about the process of treating these people on a case by case basis, as individuals, rather than as numbers—and coming to a point where the fund is, as Wolf puts it, not perfect, but just. Worth is such an effective exercise in compassion and empathy, difficult as it sometimes is, we would all be better off if more of us gave movies like this the attention they deserve.

It’s a lot of talking, a fair amount of crying, and it’s more engaging than it looks.

Overall: B+

SHANG-CHI AND THE LEGEND OF THE TEN RINGS

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

I spent several years actively avoiding superhero movies, which sometimes feel actively designed by Marvel Studios to be a punishment of sorts should you try to venture back into their “cinematic universe” without having seen everything. The thing is “everything” is a lot—and increasingly so as time goes on: Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings marks the twenty-fifth MCU film since this universe they all share was created in 2008. It’s pretty tempting to say that’s just too many. Who has time for this shit?

Well, to be fair, these movies work a lot better when thy barely acknowledge the events of the other films, if at all. Thankfully, this is done sparingly in Shang-Chi; a single passing reference to Thanos snapping half the universe out of existence is easily missed if you’re not paying attention. On the other hand, it depends on how you look at it: Ben Kingsley returns for a supporting role here as Trevor Slattery, who was originally seen in 2013’s Iron Man 3, one of the least memorable of the MCU films. Do we need to go back and re-watch old MCU movies to “bone up” now? I would argue no: Kingsley’s part is delightful on its own terms here, even if you can’t quite remember where Slattery originated.

Shang-Chi has a lot of other stuff going for it, anyway. That’s the point I’m getting at, really: my disillusionment with superhero movies seems to be healing a bit, not because the genre is inherently great, but because filmmakers are finding ways to make them better. Instead of movie after movie just adhering to the same tired story arcs, writers and directors are expanding on them. And in the current “phase,” diversity is justifying itself by example. It’s not just one white guy after another anymore—we’re spreading across continents: Black Panther took us to Africa; Shang-Chi takes us to Asia (specifically China). All we need now is a Marvel movie about a Latino superhero with deep familial roots somewhere in South America. Or better yet, an Indigenous superhero.

Of course, much like Black Panther to Black audiences, what Shang-Chi is likely to represent to Asian audiences should probably not be underestimated. Until now, the only high-profile mainstream film in which all of the leads were Asian was Crazy Rich Asians (which, incidentally, came out the same year as Black Panther). A lot of unfair representative responsibility and criticism was heaped on that film, for that very reason. Well, guess what? Now we have Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, and it being of a completely different genre notwithstanding, it is an objectively better film.

Okay, sure, Shang-Chi does still get a little bogged down in its climactic battle sequence, far too busy and far too reliant on barely visually comprehensible CGI. (Once again, I find myself noticing flaws in the computer animation, certain that these visuals will look dated within the decade. There remains something to be said for practical effects, or at least practical effects well integrated with CGI touchups.) This movie also literally moves into another dimension, featuring an action sequence on the streets of San Francisco early on, only to later move to Macao and then to another dimension and then never returning. We find ourselves in a world with magical creatures, bat-like demon creatures, and dragons. It lends an air of the traditional fantasy genre, almost more so than the superhero genre. I suppose it’s a kind of mythology either way.

And I am at a disadvantage here, being so little versed in Chinese mythology and folklore. To what degree are the magical creatures we see here authentic to those sources? Black Panther had been famous for its authentically African-influenced design; one would hope Shang-Chi would have similarly authentically Asian influences. A giant dragon that appears in the third act, as well as some truly fantastic and adorably rendered giant Chinese lions, all look very much like what you would typically see in Chinese New Year celebrations. The giant demon soul-sucker, though … that one, I have no idea.

As you might imagine, Shang-Chi features several martial-arts-heavy battle sequences, which bear a passing resemblance to the battles from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and other films of its ilk. This is clearly not an accident, and these scenes are very well choreographed. In fact, they are consistently very exciting, much more so than, for instance, a runaway bus on the hills of San Francisco. And because the title character (played with just the right amount of charisma by Simu Liu) and his sister Xu Xialing (Meng'er Zhang) are the children of both a power-hungry man who has used the magical Ten Rings to live over a thousand years, and a woman from a village in another dimension accessed via a magical forest, their physics-defying movements don’t especially pose a problem.

The story details here are indeed fairly complex, and its team of script writers does an unusually skilled job of weaving them into the plot in a fairly organic way, not to mention presenting an origin story without it feeling like one. We even get Awkwafina as Katy, Shang-Chi’s longtime friend and comic sidekick. In retrospect she doesn’t ever prove to be vital to the story at all, but her presence is always fun. At least this time, as opposed to Raya and the Last Dragon, she is well cast and has good chemistry with her cast mates.

In any event, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings is great fun from start to finish, in a way that actually makes me look forward to seeing more movies like it. After I spent several years actively resenting superhero films, that’s saying a lot.

It’s not as confused as they look!

Overall: B+

TOGETHER

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

I don’t think anyone would be faulted for being skeptical of a two-person movie both set in and directly addressing the COVID-19 pandemic. The movie makes no explicit claim to be about this, but we are still talking about collective trauma, the likes of which we have not experienced on a broad cultural level since 9/11—an event, incidentally, which occurred 20 years ago this month, and about which no particularly successful mainstream movie has ever directly addressed in the same way. A few movies did try, but even those were a few years later, and the public was not especially interested in reliving it.

And here we are now, with Together, a movie that sets its starkly frank examination of a long-term relationship within the context of stay-home orders in the UK, released while the pandemic rages on, and I watched it in a nearly-empty movie theater (literally there was one other person in there besides myself), with a mask on, while the characters onscreen talked about the strain the pandemic is putting on their relationship. For them, the pandemic is in its early stages. They have no idea that I will be hearing about it from them, breaking the third wall and speaking directly to me, fully eighteen months later.

And yet? I find myself stunned by how well Together actually works. It’s not perfect—I’ll get to that—but still, it really, really works. This is a challenge for any movie in which the characters remain within the same space for the full duration of the film in the best of circumstances, but from the opening scene, co-directors Stephen Daldry (The Hours) and Justin Martin, working from a crackling script by Dennis Kelly, have co-leads James McAvoy and Sharon Horgan speaking to each other and to us so effectively, it’s like watching a riveting two-person play.

Again: a play adapted into a movie, in which the setting never changes, rarely works either. This one is not adapted from a play, but the constraint is the same; with the exception of occasional interstitial shots of their neighborhood showing empty streets, the camera never leaves the inside of their house. This is a recipe for boredom, and yet I could not look away.

It would be naive to call Together a reflection of any kind of “universal” experience, except that what these characters go through is quite specifically the same as what millions—billions—around the globe experienced. It does get specific to the UK, and there are moments when Together reads like a personal indictment against the way the UK government handled the pandemic, particularly in the beginning. I’m a little bit more prone to empathy—sure, there is no question that thousands and maybe millions of lives could have been saved had action been taken sooner, but this was also a wildly new experience for all of us, and particularly in the beginning, no one knew for certain what the right choices even were.

It’s with all this as a backdrop that we watch a relationship between McAvoy and Horgan’s relationship evolved, from dread at the prospect of having to spend all their time at home together after already logging many years in which to stoke deep resentments and hatred, to slowly realizing over the next year that they’re in denial about how much they actually still love each other. It’s both sweet and brutal, and what I love about it is how it’s a largely unsentimental love story, one about the machinations of truly long term commitment, rather than the idealism of young love. There is no “happily ever after” here, but rather “maybe we’re not quite as miserable as we thought.”

And, to be clear, a whole lot of Together is quite funny. It’s also at times deeply serious, and, somewhat to my surprise, an effective way to process the aforementioned collective trauma of this pandemic, which we really don’t talk about enough. I found the experience almost shockingly therapeutic.

And yes, at times, brutal. There’s a scene in this movie in which Horgan’s character processes the loss of her mother, and having to say goodbye to her in the hospital over FaceTime while pulled over to the side of the road in her car. The scene is gut wrenching, and I cried. And I cried. This scene unlocked some dormant grief of my own, after having lost my own mother last year. My mom’s death had nothing to do with COVID, but my grief was still affected by it—as was that of anyone who lost a loved one over the past year and a half, for any reason. I didn’t just cry when I watched Sharon Horgan detail the unfairness of her mother dying alone. For a few seconds, I wept. I hadn’t cried like this at a movie in a good twenty years, and never for such a deeply, viscerally personal reason.

It’s easy to imagine Together having a similar affect on many others. This makes it hard to imagine anyone taking my advice to see it. Is it too soon for a movie like this? I would argue it’s not. For me, it was like an emotional breakthrough.

And I haven’t even yet mentioned the stupendous performances of both James McAvoy an Sharon Horgan, who have great chemistry both as vicious bickerers and as a couple rediscovering how much they care about each other. The writing is great, and their performances still elevate it. My one real complaint would be their young son, who exists as a plot contrivance and for most of the film just moves wordlessly around the background of each scene, like an afterthought. The kid, played by Samuel Logan, literally has no lines until just a couple in the last ten minutes or so of the film. Together would have been better off either with a more capable child actor who could be a part of actual character development, or with no child at all and a better reason given for this middle-aged couple to have stayed together so long after their relationship has seemingly soured.

Setting the child aside, though, Together is an incredible construction of compelling dialogue, interspersed with fantastic—if occasionally soap-boxy—monologues. This could have been just a movie about a small family dealing with pandemic lockdowns, or it could have been just a movie about a charismatic couple’s crumbling yet barely salvageable relationship. The fact that it is both should way it down to the point of intolerability, and still it succeeds against all odds. You probably still won’t watch it, and I totally get it, and yet I am compelled to say I can’t recommend it enough.

You won’t believe how hard it is to look away.

Overall: B+

BOB ROSS: HAPPY ACCIDENTS, BETRAYAL & GREED

Directing: B-
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B

The new Netflix documentary Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal & Greed might be a better experience if you only watch about the first half of it, when director Joshua Rofé fouses on when the famed PBS painter was still alive. As it stands, once I finished the whole film, I found myself thinking mostly about how it was not quite the movie I wanted it to be.

To be fair, the subtitle itself makes things pretty clear: this is a story that either injects or reveals drama in Ross’s legacy, depending on how you look at it. Ross and his wife partnered with another couple, Annette and Walt Kowalski, who are positioned definitively by Rofé here as villains. And maybe they are villains, who knows? The trouble with Bob Ross is that it provides a definitively biased side to the story, with a halfhearted attempt at “fairness” by specifying how they reached out to the Kowalskis, who declined to be interviewed. We learn at the end of the film that the Kowalskis “reached out” after the film was completed, and dispute any claims to their acting counter to Ross’s interests.

Beyond that, we don’t get any of their story. The unfortunate result is that Bob Ross feels rather like a film version of character assassination, a sort of vengeance, against the Kowalskis, who are characterized as litigious monsters, so intimidating that “more than a dozen” potential subjects declined to be interviewed for the film for fear of them.

And, again: maybe they are. This film makes a compelling case that Ross’s will specified that he wanted his empire to be left to his brother and his son Steve, who gets the most air time in this film. Steve’s uncle, who had barely more than half controlling interest, sold it to the Kowalskis, and Steve gets no part of the millions earned by the Kowalskis selling products capitalizing on the Bob Ross likeness.

I’m just over here thinking . . . who cares? Does this story really justify a documentary feature? Does anyone with fond memories of watching Bob Ross on The Joy of Painting thirty years ago really need those memories tainted by this exercise in bitterness? Rofé is trying to build intrigue in a story that has very little, like this is some great big reveal that Bob Ross had associates who were apparently assholes. You want to see a genuinely shocking and infuriating documentary, something that will truly make your jaw drop? Watch Collective. It’s streaming on Hulu.

Bob Ross, on the other hand, is streaming on Netflix, which of course has more subscribers, and is already on their top ten list. I’m sure plenty of (probably mostly older) people are watching this movie and totally moved by it. “I won’t buy any Bob Ross products!” they’ll say, even though they never bought any to begin with. I’m just not sure what kind of difference this movie is making, aside from offering a version of closure to his son and a few close friends. I’d much rather have just watched a documentary about Bob Ross’s life before his death, and about how his public access art instruction show became a minor cultural phenomenon. And really, that’s what about half this movie is. So, maybe go ahead and watch this and just turn it off once it gets to the part where he passed away in 1995.

The Joy of Painting eventually dissipates, apparently.

Overall: B-

REMINISCENCE

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

I basically wasted two hours watching Reminiscence in the movie theater. It’s also available streaming on HBO Max, and I wouldn’t even recommend you watch it there. You’ll still wish you could get those two hours back. Well, if you have any taste or sense of quality, anyway.

This movie really strains to be what I like to call “future noir,” a genre both introduced and perfected by Blade Runner in 1982. Many films since have tried and failed to replicate (no pun intended—bit of an inside joke there) it, this one merely being the latest. It takes an old-school mystery plot and grafts it onto a quasi-apocalyptic future setting. In this case, it’s Miami after significant sea level rise.

A lot of the wide shots of the city are reminiscent (ha!) of the sea level rise depicted in the Manhattan of the 2001 Spielberg film A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. You may notice that when it comes to being derivative, there is a bit of a pattern here. And the renditions of all Miami’s skyscrapers wading in waters about two stories deep is a compelling one; in fact the most exciting shot in the whole movie is the opening one, starting with a wide shot from out over the sea, closing in until we’ve reached a section of the city where streets are only partially flooded with a few inches of water.

But, this world as presented by writer-director Lisa Joy, here with her feature film directorial debut, suffers from the same thing as the worlds in all those other Blade Runner rip-offs: it doesn’t feel sufficiently lived in. It’s more like a Sims version of a dystopian city—which, by the way, considering it’s Miami, has a curious and glaring lack of Hispanic characters. Oh, it has a couple, in very small, supporting parts. But they serve as little more than tokens when taking in the broad representation of the city, in a story that, of course, mostly centers white characters. Granted, the biggest part besides that of Hugh Jackman in the lead is Thandiwe Newton, but that doesn’t change the incongruity of a movie with such a large focus on a city whose population is 70% Hispanic or Latino, which treats that demographic as little more than window dressing. Or are we to assume the majority of them disappeared in this vision of the future?

That brings me to my biggest nitpick, which is that so many of the details of this world are just plain dumb. In several scenes on the streets where there is standing water on the road but not on the sidewalks, for some reason people are walking in the middle of the street and not on the sidewalk. I suppose that might be thought of as more“cinematic,” except that there is no logic in it. There’s also a battle scene in an old school band room, with instruments left by empty chairs as if the class once had to leave very quickly, presumably back when, as is mentioned several times, “the waves came.” But if the waves came, wouldn’t they have washed away the guitars and violins? Judging by this production design, the students all had to rush out in time for the room to fill with water like a slow stream from a corner faucet.

Hugh Jackson plays Nick Bannister, a guy who not only spends far too much time with hackneyed voiceover narration, but who makes a living selling time in a contraption that lets people relive the memories of their choice. (Shades of Strange Days meets Inception here.) Versions of this contraption, which for some reason necessitates stripping to your underwear and getting into a glass tube of water with a device clamped to your head, are also used to interrogate criminal suspects. Everything about how this whole process works, and especially the hardware necessary, comes across as wildly unrealistic: nothing of this sort would ever take up so much physical space. It even includes a giant circular platform over which a holographic projection of the memories can be seen by Nick, even though they aren’t even his own memories and he’s not attached to any of the apparatus. It’s all designed with cinematic aesthetics in mind, with no regard for practical realism. Memory is already well known to be wildly malleable and deeply unreliable; in what universe would these projections be so vivid it’s like watching a movie of what’s going on in someone’s head?

No one expects science fiction to be strictly accurate; given the “fiction” part, that would be impossible. But it still has to start from a jumping-off point of known truths, which Reminiscence seems to discard completely.

I’d try to share more about the plot, but on top of all this, Lisa Joy’s script tries way too hard to do way too much, using hollow dialogue in a delivery that often comes across as unrehearsed. Suffice it to say that a mysterious woman in the form of Rebecca Ferguson appears, and is the catalyst for Nick’s obsession after they have a three-month affair and then she disappears. Joy plays with the notion of memory as these scenes unfold in varying moments in the story’s timeline, a device that could be exciting and clever with a better story and actually has been done better by other filmmakers playing with memory and the perception of time.

Reminiscence feels like a first draft that somehow got filmed without any revisions or notes. And okay, so there is a lot of justified resentment out there for studio executives turning movies into something written by committee, but there also has to be a happy medium. Because if this movie is one person’s true vision, it’s a wildly underdeveloped one. This one could have used a pointer or ten.

Behold, the only compelling part of the movie.

Overall: C

RESPECT

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

As always a biopic is tricky. How can you cram someone’s entire life into just two hours—or even, much more commonly these days, two and a half hours? It’s always better to take a particularly notable moment in someone’s life and make a movie out of that. Consider the fantastic 2006 film The Queen, which was about Queen Elizabeth II but narrowed the focus down to the aftermath of Princess Diana’s death. When it comes to biographical representation in film, the more specific, the better.

Respect attempts to have it both ways, ending its story at the time of Aretha Franklin’s career-high recording of the gospel album Amazing Grace in 1972. (There was an accompanying documentary film crew at that recording, but the film was not finished and released until 2018.) This leaves the last five decades of Ms. Franklin’s life untold—but, given that the film begins with her at age ten, it still crams the first thirty years of her life into a run time of 145 minutes. It’s still too much.

And granted, we all know Aretha Franklin easily earned her status as a legend, which means there’s a lot about her that’s worth telling. Some of it, Respect somewhat frustratingly glosses over, such as the shocking fact that she had her first child at the age of twelve, and her second at fourteen, with this film never making clear who the father was—she never told anyone who the father was. Some handwritten wills discovered in 2019 name someone as a father, about whom still little is known, but as they have evidently not been authenticated, Respect sidesteps offering any clarity on the matter.

Given the mystery surrounding the paternity of those first two children, this makes sense—but then, there’s also Ms. Franklin’s relationship with her minister father, C. L. Franklin (an excellent Forest Whitaker). First-time feature film director Liesel Tommy—with a script by Tracey Scott Wilson, both of them women of color—appropriately depicts this as a complicated relationship, but here also completely sidesteps the quite obvious question of how he handled his daughter getting pregnant so young, not just once but twice. We literally never see them even discuss it.

Instead, we see C. L. Frankling immediately hostile toward Ted White (Marlon Wayans), who would become Ms. Franklin’s first husband. White later fully warrants this hostility, but the film doesn’t give us any reason to understand its immediacy as soon as his introductory scene. All we know is that C. L. hates him and Aretha is plainly attracted to him.

And, it seems, Ms. Frankling had many complicated relationships, including with Ted White, who was evidently an overbearing manager. At least she seems to have a healthy relationship with music producer Jerry Wexler, who helped her finally record some hit records several years into her career. Wexler is played by Marc Maron, a comedian and longtime favorite podcast host of mine. These are the only things that make his performance especially notable, and appropriately so: Respect is a film that rightly centralizes the Black characters and, even with Wexler being by far the biggest part for a white person, even he is fundamentally decentralized in the story—as he should be. Knowing who he is, though, it’s nice to see Maron playing a part so well, especially one that is further from his real-life self than anything else he’s ever done.

In any case, I spent a fair amount of time in Respect tying to identify the “hook,” or the arc of Ms. Franklin’s story being told her, as it spans so many years. The film finally manages it after some time, and once it does, it’s easier to appreciate the film as a whole. And for those of us who did not already know a lot about Aretha Franklin, you learn some pretty interesting stuff, perhaps most notably that Martin Luther King Jr. (played by Gilbert Glenn Brown) was a family friend. Ms Franklin is credited in the film for helping Dr. King and his activism, although none of her activism or charity work is ever directly depicted.

Broadly speaking, there’s a slightly disappointing aspect to the telling of Ms. Franklin’s story here, ultimately coming across as vaguely bland. What helps Respect rise above its fairly standard biopic storytelling is the performances, by far most significantly Jennifer Hudson in the lead role. Her screen presence here is not quite as electrifying and urgent as her Oscar-winning turn in Dreamgirls (2006), but she still delivers a performance worthy of another Oscar nomination, and is doubly impressive once you know she sang live on set.

The supporting performers are uniformly excellent as well, from Forest Whitaker and Marlon Wayans to smaller but notable parts with Mary J. Blige as Dinah Washington and a nearly unrecognizable Tituss Burgess as Reverend Dr. James Cleveland. All of them are still pushed aside, of course, by the presence of Hudson as Ms. Franklin, who reportedly told Hudson she wanted her to play her in the movie. Franklin’s music is iconic, and Respect not only features plenty of it, but several scenes depicting how their arrangements came to be. The sequence in which she and her sisters come up with the hook for the song “Respect” is especially fun.

Beyond that, Respect has its ups and downs, just like the life of the person whose story it tells, and just like any decent biopic. And if this movie isn’t exactly a masterpiece, at least it’s decent, and features great music.

A woman on a bumpy road to self-possession.

Overall: B

THE PROTÉGÉ

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

There’s a lot to love about The Protégé. Or at least, there’s a lot for me to love about it. I have long loved women who kick ass, and historically we’ve been treated to far too few of them, although they have increased in frequency in recent years. But this one offers layers particularly unusual: the protagonist is not just a woman of color, but maybe most importantly, she’s in her forties. She’s a middle-aged woman who kicks ass! Sign me up!

Maggie Q, who plays the titular character (also known as Anna), is 42. Okay, so production wrapped late last year, when she was still 41, and it began in January—with a predictable several month delay due to COVID-19—so onscreen, she’s either 40 or 41. Not that I need to be obsessed about this, but the film never specifies her age; it only shows flashbacks to her childhood in Vietnam, with a young actress whose age I found difficult to determine. 15? 12? Whatever the age, the opening scene is a flashback to 1991, after which we are told it’s “thirty years later” (with no hint at a pandemic in the present-day setting).

Whatever the case, it’s great to see an action movie featuring a middle-aged heroine. Okay, sure, we’ve already seen the likes of Helen Mirren—in her seventies—in multiple movies literally kicking ass and/or wielding a gun. But there’s a novelty quality to those parts, which are all supporting. She’s also white: in The Protégé, Maggie Q is the middle-aged, Vietnamese protagonist. I have no idea how necessary it really is to note this, but Maggie Q herself is multiracial, having been born and raised in Honolulu by a Vietnamese mother and a white father. It’s nice, furthermore, that this same ethnic heritage is reflected in Anna’s parents in the flashback scenes.

I haven’t even yet mentioned the other principal parts, including the assassin for whom Anna is the protégé, Moody, played by Samuel L. Jackson. Moody celebrates his 70th birthday at one part in the story. And then there’s rival assassin Rembrandt, played by 69-year-old Michael Keaton. Everybody’s old! There’s even a notable supporting part featuring 62-year-old Robert Patric, the T2 Terminator himself. (Funny that the flashbacks here are set the same year as Terminator 2’s release.)

I do find myself wondering, much as I clearly loved it, whether the veteran status of so many of these actors will leave wide audiences largely uninterested. Reviews of The Protégé thus far are decidedly mixed, and although I went to see it the night before its published release date, I was still at a 6:00 p.m. showing and there were about five people in the theater. I mean, that was much more comfortable in the middle of the latest surge in COVID cases (combined with my being masked and vaccinated), but didn’t seem to bode well for the film’s box office prospects.

Well, whatever. I quite enjoyed this movie. Sure, the “boilerplate” criticisms are valid, but the performers have real chemistry, slightly less so between Maggie Q and Samuel L. Jackson versus the delightful shared scenes between her and Keaton. And the plot did have a couple of plot twists I did not see coming, especially considering the way the story is presented in the marketing materials. This applies both to Anna’s relationship with Moody as her mentor, and where her relationship goes with Rembrandt.

And, “boilerplate” or not, it’s refreshing to see a movie ease into its story, and its action sequences. I’m not against an action movie opening with a bang, but this one opens with intrigue, and prioritizes character over action. This achieve the intended effect of us really caring about what’s at stake when the action sequences begin, and thankfully director Martin Campbell shoots the action in ways both exciting and coherent. You merely have to wait a little bit for the action, and once the movie gets to it, it’s worth the wait.

Admittedly, there was a few moments when I did wish the writing were a little better. Occasionally, the plot takes a turn both corny and a little obvious, and ironic element for a movie about supposedly ingenious assassins. At the end of the day, it’s still just an action movie. True, it’s one that would be far more likely to be utterly forgettable if all of its leads were in their twenties and thirties. It really is the casting here that sets it apart, and makes The Protégé worth a watch.

It’s less typical than it looks.

Overall: B+

FREE GUY

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

Free Guy is unexceptional, but fun. In a way, it feels like a sign of some level of return to “normalcy,” with yet another ultimately generic action comedy available this weekend. What it comes to the options we have today in particular, it gets the job done. I was adequately entertained.

I suppose this relatively indifferent approach might seem unfair to the millions of gamers out there who are part of a gargantuan group to which I do not belong, and their possible delight in the many “easter eggs” and in-references Free Guy offers them. That, in itself, is fair. This movie was quite definitively not made for me. I still thought it looked fun, though. I am not impervious to the ample charms of Ryan Reynolds. That even I still managed to have a good time is very much to this movie’s credit.

I keep thinking about its visual component—not just the CGI, of which there is a lot, but its overall aesthetic. Most of the story takes place within the world of a video game, and the visuals very much fit the part. I mean, at least based on my limited knowledge of gaming; I haven’t played any video game (aside from, say, Solitaire or Words with Friends) with any regularity since 1989. Still, the visual palate of Free Guy, which is convincingly rendered, packed with detail, and overall just really busy, feels very much of its time. This means that ten or twenty years from now, it will still look just like video game design did in 2020. Will that make it seem dated, or more sort of “retro” in feel? I say this as though any notable number of people will be re-watching Free Guy in 2030 or 2040. This is really just a movie made for its present moment, but at least it succeeds in that aim.

Some of the concept elements are fairly refreshing. Reynolds plays the titular Guy, an NPC (“Non Player Character”) usually existing as background in a given video game, who becomes self-aware. Of course, this is hardly a new concept, but whenever computer programs became “alive” in movies of the past (Electric Dreams, Short Circuit, The Terminator), they did so either via magic or freak power surges, or due to the fabled “singularity.” In this case, Guy has become self-aware by design: an algorithmic program that is designed to learn and grow and evolve. I’m not saying this is necessarily any more plausible than outright magic, but given the rapid growth of AI technology, it’s a hell of a lot more believable.

Guy falls for a player, Millie (Killing Eve’s Jodi Comer), who is searching for proof inside the game that the billionaire owner of the game’s parent company (played with a simmering intensity, but not quite as consistently funny as he was clearly going for, by Taika Waitit) stole the original programming designed by her, in part with partner Keys (Joe Keery). Millie and Keys are longtime friends clearly destined to realize they are meant for each other.

The idea that finding this proof of theft necessitates movement through the world of the video game, as in movies like TRON, is patently ridiculous, of course. But with a movie like this, ridiculousness is the point. The sensory overload of the world inside the video game was often a bit much for me, but clearly designed to replicate the random chaos of a game in which players are tasked with robbing and murdering and blowing shit up. When Guy decides he’ll “level up” by becoming a popular hero and confiscating other players’ guns, the messaging isn’t all that subtle. But, neither does it get beat over your head; Free Guy is much more concerned with being an unchallenging entertainment than it is with being preachy.

Besides, Ryan Reynolds’s “aw shucks” innocence as a bank teller who just wants to be nice to everyone, with a wide-eyed and childlike sensibility, is kind of irresistible. Free Guy would not be half as entertaining as it is without his lead performance. The countless cameos, many of them quick voice-over work for other NPCs, are just icing on the cake. Also, there’s a climactic battle between Guy and an “upgraded” but unfinished and therefore far beefier yet dumber version of himself, in which they manage to throw in weapons and tools from other famous franchises. This is the kind of thing that could easily play as misguided and stupid, but in the capable hands of director Shawn Levy, it’s easy to get a kick out of it.

That’s the overall gist of Free Guy, really. It’s an easy way to get a kick out of something for a couple of hours. You won’t continue caring much after it’s over, but that doesn’t detract from the fun you’ve had in the moment.

The only world he ever knew . . . was not what he thought it was!

Overall: B

FRENCH EXIT

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

French Exit makes me long of the days when it was even possible for a movie to become a cult classic—or in this case, a gay cult classic. Not that there’s anything inherently gay or queer here—but, it could certainly be argued, it has a unique sort of camp sensibility. If this movie had come out, say, thirty years ago, it could easily have found its place alongside movies like Grey Gardens or What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Do people under the age of thirty even know what those movies are?

Now, there are just too many movies to choose from. There are even too many objectively good movies to choose from, one after the other, so a gem like French Exit easily slips through the cultural cracks. And I might even be hard pressed to call French Exit “objectively” great as a film. Plenty of it is uneven, and the actors’ over-enunciating takes some getting used to. But, this is the rare film where, if it’s for you—and god knows, this isn’t for everyone—you’ll be powerless to its pull. I just could not help but love this movie.

It took me a little while, too. In its first twenty minutes or so, I found myself drifting into my own thoughts, then distracted by what seemed like clunky dialogue. A scene in which Lucas Hedges speaks to Imogen Poots in quasi-deadpan tones that brought to mind a regional theater production in which the actors are trying too hard. But, then something magical happened, at around the 25-minute mark, when this movie completely turned me around on it. There are countless scenes in which, incredibly, it managed to be sort of . . . unhinged, but in a subtle way. How can any movie pull such a thing off? This one does it.

Hedges and Poots play would-be lovers Malcom and Susan, their intended engagement broken off indefinitely by Malcom’s eccentric (to say the least) mother, Frances—played by Michelle Pfeiffer, truly above all else, the reason to watch this movie. It must b said, however, that it’s not just her. Pfeiffer and Hedges are almost reliably wonderful in whatever part they play, but countless supporting players in this movie are also sheer delights. Take, for instance, Frences’s lonely neighbor after she moves to Paris to spend what little money she has left. Valerie Mahaffey plays Madame Reynard with a tightly wound comic sensibility that I just could not get enough of.

Did I mention a cat also plays prominently in the story? This movie would be utterly delightful even without “Small Frank,” whose wild significance to the plot I won’t spoil here, but to say his presence enhances the experience would be an understatement. Of course, that’s just so long as you can lose yourself in an odd movie like this, about a socially clueless widow and her grown son living in a friend’s Parisian apartment with little regard to how quickly the very last of their fortune is being whittled away. I’m not sure if “odd” is even the right word for it. This movie’s sensibility is somewhere in the space between “eccentric” and “quirky,” but with a decidedly dark bent to it. In other words, director Azazel Jacobs and writer Patrick DeWitt (adapting from his novel of the same name) somehow knew to make a movie custom made just for me.

Will you feel the same way? Odds are, probably not. But some of you might! I certainly want to share it, and I urge you to watch this film, currently available for about six dollars VOD.

And, sure, some of it makes no sense. Okay, maybe a lot of it. Its deceptively hilarious script makes up for a lot, such as how insanely easily Frances manages to “sneak” her cat through customs after she gets off the boat in France. Or the way Frances finds the fortune teller from the boat with the use of a Parisian private detective, and for reasons that never get adequately explained, they both wind up staying several nights with Frances and Malcolm in the same apartment. This movie is so much fun, you hardly care.

Still, it all comes back to Michelle Pfeiffer. Performances like this are what the word “iconic” was made for. That word is so overused it has lost all meaning, but Pfeiffer brings it full circle. I haven’t loved her so much in a movie since she played Catwoman nearly—let me check my notes—thirty years ago. This woman is a national treasure, she commands attention, and so does this charmingly peculiar movie.

You won’t believe how much you’ll love hanging out with these people.

Overall: B+

NINE DAYS

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

Depending on your level of patience for slow pacing, you might think the new film Nine Days feels like it lasts about that long.

This movie has a lot in it that’s ripe for discussion, but I do think how slow it is will be a challenge for most. It was reportedly a “Sundance Festival Favorite” last year, but let’s face it, few movies that qualify for such a distinction translate into widespread success outside the film festival context. This is that kind of movie. I can see it easily debated among academics, but calling that a great compliment is dubious at best.

Admittedly, Nine Days feels very thematically dense, and yet its themes largely flew over my head. That doesn’t mean I didn’t like it. I just found myself sometimes wondering what the point was. This is a film about “candidates” getting interviewed over the course of—you guesses it!—nine days to see which one of them gets to be born and live a rich life. I’m not sure it’s supposed to be reincarnation, per se; like many of its ideas, Nine Days lacks clarification there.

Only two of the characters are known for sure to have ever been alive before, including our protagonist, the interviewer, named Will (Winston Duke). When we are introduced to Will at the beginning of the film. he is spending a lot of time watching people on a wall full of old TV monitors, taking notes. It takes several minutes for us to piece together that he is watching the lives of his previous “selections.” He is particularly focused on one named Amanda, whose point of view is quite literally the opening shots of the film.

There’s a lot that writer-director Edson Oda does with the filmmaking here that could easily have fallen on its face, and yet works surprisingly well. Those TV monitors, each representing someone’s life living on Earth, is a point-of-view shot, as though we are looking out through their eyes from inside their head. One has to wonder how much of that footage was shot, because it is impressively assembled, and succeeds in its intended effect.

There’s never any explanation of exactly where it is that all these people are, although it’s clearly not the dimension we live in. Early on, a character asks if they are dead, and Will clarifies that it’s best not to think of it as dead or alive. What is it, then? I suppose this world, in an isolated house on a beach, is in some sense a kind of purgatory. Who is Will working for? There’s a guy named Kyo (Benedict Wong) who seems to serve as some level of overseer, although he functions really just as a companion, who usually just hangs out and is sometimes argumentative. We are meant to understand Kyo is someone who has never been alive.

Besides Wong, and Tony Hale as one of the “candidates,” the ensemble cast consists of mostly unrecognizable faces, which serves the story well. My struggle with that story is that I can’t quite figure out what it’s trying to say, unless I want to take it very literally and come away with a somewhat incongruous late sequence that’s all about not taking life’s precious moments for granted. Honestly, a lot of Nine Days feels like far more effort than necessary for the story being told. Why does the framing device have to be so complicated?

And yet, there is something uniquely soothing about its tone. I’m also impressed by its exclusively practical production. There are no special effects to speak of, aside from when candidates occasionally dissipate. Otherwise, it’s all done on set, including elaborate setups that Will constructs like a carpenter, to create “a moment” that candidates liked from all that TV monitor footage.

It must be said, also, that every single performance in this film is terrific. There’s a peculiar moment early on when Will tells one of the candidates that they are in a place where emotions are not felt as “deeply” as they get felt when one is alive. And yet, the characters themselves prove over time to be brimming with emotion, especially when faced with rejection, as only one of them will be selected for life. Oda does a good job of drawing multdimensional, nuanced and distinct personalities among then all, especially Emma (Zazie Beets), a wide-eyed innocent who confounds Will with her almost defiantly evasive answers to his questions.

His questions are very specific. Will presents candidates with scenarios and then asks them what they would do in that situation. The responses are both varied and plausible. Once the candidates are whittled down to two, one of them you see coming a mile away and the other is a bit more of a surprise. Nine Days does get a lot more compelling as it goes along, but it takes its sweet time getting there, as Will spends his days making old-school VCR recordings of moments in his previous selections’ lives, on actual videocassettes. I could never quite decide what to make of these peculiar design choices, with Will working with real-world technological tools but exclusively ones that are long outdated.

Such is the case with much of Nine Days: I don’t quite know what to make of it. Except that the acting is excellent. And maybe someone smarter than me could watch it and help me get a handle on precisely what it’s trying to say. Will goes through a distinct emotional arc of his own, second guessing himself after a tragic turn in Amanda’s life, and eventually has something akin to an emotional breakdown of his own, after being quite pointedly deadpan for a very long time. There are occasionally sudden bursts of emotion in this movie, but most of the time it moves on a very even keel, which if nothing else I have to admit, I found oddly comforting.

If you’re looking for meaning . . . maybe it’s here, maybe it isn’t.

Overall: B