THE HAND OF GOD

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

The Hand of God is surprisingly straightforward for a Paolo Sorrentino film, especially compared to his other works in recent years, from The Great Beauty (2013) to Youth (2015) to the HBO miniseries The Young Pope. Sorrentino’s work tends to veer into the realm of fever dream, with widely varying effect. I have a tendency to be drawn to his stylistic flourishes, but to be a bit mystified by the resulting elusive narratives.

This movie, however, if not an outright recreation of Sorrentino’s youth, was reportedly “inspired” by it. His young protagonist, Fabietto (Filippo Scotti), does not share his name, but clearly represents him. It is a matter of public record that Sorrentino’s own parents died in a tragic carbon monoxide poisoning accident when he was seventeen, and this is the pivotal moment for Fabietto in The Hand of God as well.

Both before and after this incident, rather than the more typical stylization—although Sorrentino still takes a few brief stylistic detours, as he evidently can’t help himself—The Hand of God is an exercise in immersion, mostly into Fabietto’s daily life. In the first half or so of the movie, it’s just a pleasantly relaxed immersion into the close-knit world of his extended family. There’s a wide array of characters just as there are in any family, and we see how Fabietto’s parents love each other even in spite of some intermittent marital problems.

Fabietto also has a warm and supportive older brother, Marchino (Marlon Joubert), and they share a room together Marchino is an aspiring actor, and Fabietto an aspiring filmmaker—another of many clear parallels to Sorrentino himself. They have an uncle with a wife named Patrizia (Luisa Ranieri) they both have the hots for, she’s young and beautiful and is the first character we see when the film opens, waiting for a bus in a rather revealing dress. Here is where Sorrentino is characteristically oblique in his approach, as we do not meet Fabietto until he happens to be tagging along with his parents as they come over at Patrizia’s request because her husband is irate irrationally convinced she has been turning tricks as a whore.

This is our entry into Fabietto’s life and family, the opening sequence the closest to the fever-dream quality of Sorrentino’s other work. It has some deeply memorable imagery, such as Patrizia’s tour through a crumbling mansion to see a “little monk,” passing though a huge room with a gigantic, working chandelier standing tilted on the floor rather than hanging from the ceiling.

This is where I struggle with Sorrentino, who has a knack for memorably beautiful visuals but too much of the time I don’t necessarily know what the hell it means, or if I should take it at face value. Such elements are few in The Hand of God—the title a reference to the late, famous Argentinian soccer player Diego Maradona’s goal in the 1986 World Cup. Maradona plays for the team in Fabietto’s hometown of Naples, and he felt he had to be at the game—thought to be the reason he escaped the same fate as his parents.

I did find myself wondering how many of the notable things that happen to Fabietto actually happened to Sorrentino in his youth. There is one particularly bizarre sequence near the end of the film involving his loss of virginity to the old lady “baroness” who lives in the apartment upstairs. This is clearly a callback to an earlier scene in which Fabietto’s father advises him to “take whatever comes" and lose his virginity at the first opportunity, no matter how ugly the girl may be. And then, the one genuine sex scene in this film is between a teenage boy and an elderly woman. Curiously, the way the scene plays out, it’s less gross than it is just plain bizarre. But, on brand for Sorrentino, I suppose.

The Hand of God is available streaming on Netflix on December 15. Maybe you can watch it then and judge for yourself. I saw it as part of an Italian film series by SIFF Cinema, and more than anything I was just thrilled I was finally able to see a movie at The Egyptian again, finally, post-pandemic. The movie itself has its merits, and is more accessible than Sorrentino’s other work tends to be, but that still leaves it more impenetrable than most movies.

A pleasant life careening toward a tragic turn.

Overall: B

PASSING

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

I’m dying to know what Black people think of Passing, the stunning directorial debut by Rebecca Hall, available on Netflix today. Even to say that seems a little delicate, from me, a white person, who knows full well that Black people are not a monolith: surely reactions and opinions are as widely varied as the Black community itself. Still, reactions from Black audiences are going to hold more weight, for obvious reasons: this is a movie about a light-skinned Black woman “passing” as white in New York City in the 1920s.

And what of Black critics? I need to seek out movie reviewers of color. The ones I tend to recognize and gravitate toward are too uniformly white. This film has an incredibly high rating of 83 on MetaCritic—”must-see,” by their metrics—but the majority of the critics making up that average are going to be white. Whenever there is a movie about Black people or the Black experience, I rather wish there were a “Black Metacritic,” so I could see how they feel about their own representation on film, at least on average. Granted, it can be argued that this “on average” angle is itself problematic. I need to seek out individual movie critics of color, find the ones whose writing speaks to me, and keep up with their content.

As things stand now, I can only go by my own reaction, which is to be truly, deeply impressed with this film—especially knowing Rebecca Hall, an actor from films like Vicky Cristina Barcelona and the 2016 indie Christine in which she played the real-life news anchor who shot herself on camera, has never directed a feature film before. These movies she’s acted in, have been largely fine but far from masterpieces (she was most recently in Godzilla vs. Kong earlier this year), and would certainly not make anyone think her career was headed toward the creation of a near masterpiece. Maybe she got tired of assisting others in the production of mediocrity, and concluded she could do better herself.

If that’s the case, then she was more right than can hardly be believed. Still, I can’t help but be skeptical of her position as a white woman directing and writing a movie about Black people. Is she truly credible as the storyteller here? Hall is the daughter of opera singer Maria Ewing, whose father was African American, Native American and Scottish. This lineage is reportedly what makes Passing “deeply personal” to Hall, which on the surface is perfectly understandable. On the other hand, I can’t help but think about the embarrassing history of clearly white people adorning themselves with dream catchers because they are “one-eighth Native American.” To be fair, I have seen no evidence of Hall personally appropriating Black culture.

The flip side of this is how the white majority in 1920s America would have regarded Rebecca Hall’s mother—or, arguably, Hall herself, were her ancestry known. The idea of “passing” was not likely lost on Hall’s grandfather, or on her mother. This may make Hall uniquely suited to telling this story—or at least, as was actually the case, adapting the 1929 novel of the same name by Nella Larsen, a multiracial woman with an Afro-Caribbean father. I had never heard of this novel before this film, but it must be a fascinating read, especially from someone actually living in the time it was set.

I haven’t even gotten to the many layers and deep nuances of the film adaptation of Passing itself, which has a tone, a vibe if you will, I have not felt since the phenomenal 2002 Todd Haynes film Far From Heaven, one of my all-time favorite films. That film also examined race, this time in the context of the 1950s, but it was still from a white viewpoint. Passing is very much a Black story—in fact, it’s not even directly about the woman “passing” as white, Clare (Ruth Negga). It’s much more about her childhood friend Irene (Tessa Thimpson), and how she struggles with all the implications of Clare living her everyday life as a white woman—right down to marrying an unsuspecting and comfortably racist white man (Alexander Skarsgård) and having a child with him.

Irene is the protagonist, a woman who, in the subtly attention-grabbing opening scene, finds herself “passing” almost by accident while shopping in higher-end stores of New York, tilting her large hat to obscure her face just enough. From the start, the dialogue is highly stylized, meticulously crafted, exquisitely written. Combine that with incredible performances nearly across the board and stunning black and white cinematography by Eduard Grau (A Single Man), and Passing is practically impossible for any cinephile, anyone with an appreciation for film as art, to resist.

And then there’s the unusual privilege enjoyed by Irene, and her doctor husband Brian (André Holland), and the added layers of classism seen just within the Black community here. There is clear allusion to colorism here, a topic I will leave to the Black community as I have no relevant “takes” on that from my position; suffice it to say, Irene and Brian have a housekeeper of their own, and how much darker her skin is, is clearly not an accident.

Passing ultimately tracks the rekindled friendship between Irene and Clare, and how shaken Irene is by the direction Clare’s life has taken. This all leads to a truly unexpected and deliberately ambiguous ending. This movie was so gorgeously shot I truly wish I could have seen it in a theater (it did get an Oscar-qualifying limited release ion October 27), but at this moment I was rather glad I was seeing it on Netflix: I had to rewind it two or three times in an attempt to figure out what I was seeing. I’m not convinced that particular ambiguity was essential, but, when it comes to how fantastic I found the movie otherwise, it was also immaterial.

I could not pretend to know what the average viewer will feel about Passing, although its high critical acclaim is unsurprising. Either way, this is a movie that must be seen.

A beautiful portrait of emotional and moral ambivalence.

Ovrall: A

LAST NIGHT IN SOHO

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

Thomasin McKenzie still needs a truly high profile role that spreads far and wide her astounding talent. She first impressed with her incredible performance as a teenager living off the grid with her dad in Portland, Oregon in Leave No Trace (2018), a very good movie that not enough people saw. She’s impressive enough as a young British woman headed off to fashion school in London in Last Night in Soho that she is quite convincingly just a mousy English girl—she doesn’t turn any heads, which is precisely what the role calls for. If only people knew, in the case of both these films, that she is neither American nor British; McKenzie was actually born in, and started her acting career in, New Zealand. You would just never know it in these other roles because she’s simply that good—and she’s still all of twenty-one years old.

Her performance is easily the best thing about Last Night in Soho, which is, to its credit I guess, as entertaining as it is confusing. Director Edgar Wright is famous for his delightfully cheeky comedies like Shaun of the Dead (2004) and Hot Fuzz (2007), but although Last Night in Soho tracks with his affection for tweaking genres, it’s also much more straightforward than his usual work. There is no satire, or comedy of any kind, here. Instead, he mixes a heavy sense of sixties nostalgia, arguably misplaced as nostalgia often tends to be, with straight up horror. This movie does offer a pretty significant twist within its last half an hour or so, although I can’t quite decide whether I like it. It’s clever, but maybe too much so.

Furthermore, the conceit lacks clarity. Thomasin McKenzie plays Eloise, the young woman overwhelmed by her new arrival to London, which this movie literally calls “a bad place.” There’s no romanticizing the big city here. After she finds student housing untenable, she moves into a room for rent in a large old house in the old red light district. As soon as she moved into this house, and meets its old lady landlord (Diana Rigg, whom you may recognize as Olenna “Tell Cersei it was me” Tyrell from Game of Thrones), I kind of wished the movie had just started at that point. Edgar Wright spends quite a bit of time on Ellie and her grandmother (Rita Tushingham), then on Ellie and her classmates, spending far more energy than necessary on the establishment of their characters.

And then, we discover, this house Ellie has moved into is haunted—in a sense. Each time Ellie falls asleep, she is transported to 1960s Soho, and she follows the story of a young aspiring performer named Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy, her talents honestly fairly wasted in this part, aside from her looking stunning most of the time). How her story unfolds in such a linear fashion, picking up where it left off each time Ellie goes back to bed, makes little sense. And when we first meet Sandie, Ellie sees her reflection in a mirror, suggesting she is playing the part of Sandie in these visions. Except that she ultimately exists in these visions as separate from her, sometimes as another reflection in a mirror—sometimes actually mirroring Sandie’s movements, sometimes not—and other times just standing in the same room. Whatever the rules are to how these “visions of the past” work have no consistency, and I found it distracting.

There’s plenty I still liked about Last Night in Soho, though. It looks fantastic. It has very impressive editing, when sometimes we see Taylor-Joy onscreen and sometimes we see McKenzie, within the same scene in which they are embodying the same person. The issue I have there is the complete absence of explanation for what’s happening to Ellie. Is she being possessed? It doesn’t seem so. Then what is happening to her, exactly? It’s not even like it’s just a haunted house, as these visions follow Ellie to other parts of London (or at least Soho). It’s a lot easier for me to appreciate a film when it has a through line of logic.

We do get a key supporting part by Terence Stamp, always a welcome presence. That man is 83 years old now and I’m beginning to wonder how many more good movie roles we’ll get out of him. His exit from the movie is disappointingly unceremonious, and the story would have benefited from at least a brief follow-up.

Last Night In Soho is like a minor emotional roller coaster, in that it skates close to tediousness, and then becomes compelling, and then offers a climactic twist that gets you thinking it was worth the wait. Once the twist settles into its own clarity, though, it leaves a bit to be desired. I do love that this is ultimately a story about women, and women make up all but just a couple of notable speaking parts. That alone makes it worth supporting, especially considering the movie isn’t bad; it just falls short of its potential. If nothing else, it should easily satisfy horror fans without a penchant for critical thinking.

Sandie reflects on her life choices.

Overall: B

ETERNALS

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

Is Eternals any good? Reviews are decidedly mixed, with instant detractors calling it a misfire or a dud . . . I wouldn’t go that far. It’s not great either, but it’s better than that. I suppose one thing the movie has going for it is low expectations, because for me the movie thus exceeded them.

Bear in mind, this is an entirely new story in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with a concept particularly vast in scope, downright Biblical—it begins with title cards that essentially reference the beginning of time, like an alternate version of Genesis. No need for me to explain it; it’s just a bunch of made-up jargon. Suffice it to say that these ten entities are the titular “Eternals,” immortal except apparently not as we discover in this story, tasked with helping humanity along in their grand plan of evolution.

Tasked by whom? Hell, I don’t remember the name of the being, nor do I know whether he’s supposed to be a god. One of the “celestials,” I think? Trust me on this one: if you go into Eternals with no working knowledge of the Marvel Comics source material, the backstory here is very complicated. I mean, the Eternals themselves are effectively gods, and they answer to what are effectively gods, and they apparently have more power than the superheroes who make up the Avengers who are also effectively (and a few of them are literally) gods. How does this hierarchy get decided, anyway?

The Avengers get one mention in this movie. Bizarrely, two DC comics superheroes—Superman and Batman—get more mentions, which I found confusing. And even though they clearly exist in the same universe, there is no interaction between Eternals and any of the standard Marvel superheroes. How would they reconcile that, anyway? Thor and Loki are gods, right? Eternals—spoiler alert!—are ultimately revealed not to be gods, but they might as well be. They hold sway over the literal destiny of the entire planet, and have been actively involved for thousands of years. We see several flashbacks to key points in Eternals history contextualized within ancient human history.

When “deviants” were mentioned in the trailer to Eternals, I thought I knew what they were talking about. There are also “deviants” in the Marvel series on Disney+, Loki. I was sure they must be one and the same—they’re all within the MCU, right? Well, apparently not. The “deviants” are these grotesque monster-creatures in Eternals, one of whom quickly evolves into a verbal humanoid as he absorbs the powers of the couple of Eternals he (it?) defeats. They exist exclusively as part of the backstory in just this movie, related to the birth and rebirth of “celestials,” the process of which leaves the fate of humanity in the balance. For most of Eternals, these are the villains the Eternals are battling.

Until their team fractures, and they begin battling each other, and that is when Eternals actually starts to get interesting. Until then, unfortunately, the previously exciting choice of Chloé Zhao as director proves fundamentally inconsequential. Nomadland, this is not. Zhao is the latest in a string of small movie directors who, after only one or two projects, gets thrust upon a gargantuan blockbuster project. At least with someone like Gareth Edwards, whose 2010 indie Monsters had a sense of scale and wonder well translated to Godzilla (2014), subpar as that movie was—in fact, Eternals is a better movie than Godzilla. That still doesn’t mean Zhao was the best choice, or that her talents are allowed to reach their full potential there.

There are moments within the first half hour or so of Eternals that feel almost like a bad omen, particularly with some of the actors’ delivery. These are ten great actors portraying the ten Eternals, and there’s no reason for any of their line readings to feel unrehearsed. This may be less the fault of the actors themselves than of the director and the editor.

Once the story gets going, though, so long as you can ignore the nitpicky details with which I started this review, Eternals becomes surprisingly entertaining—and it features a lot of well written humor, which lands well. This is especially the case with the storyline of Kingo, played by Kumail Nanjiani, who is re-introduced in the present day as a huge Bollywood star for over a century. (Kingo has a clever explanation for this which I won’t spoil.) There are much bigger movie stars in Eternals than Nanjiani, but his physical transformation into superhero buffness for the film granted him arguably the most shared press. An extra fun detail is veteran comic Indian actor Harish Patel, who gets a significant supporting role as Kingo’s longtime “valet.”

The other nine Eternals are played by the likes of Angelina Jolie; Salma Hayek (who plays the leader of the ten); Brian Tyree Henry; British Asian actor Gemma Chan; Richard Madden; South Korean actor Ma Dong-seok; The Walking Dead’s Lauren Ridloff; The Killing of a Sacred Deer’s Barry Keoghan (after roles like that, it’s impressive that guy manages not to be creepy here); and 15-year-old Lia McHugh, who plays an Eternal stuck for eternity as a teenager—something that gets a sort of clever fix by the end of this film, in the event of any sequels in which she would be noticeably older.

That list of actors does elicit the question: is Eternals the most broadly diverse Marvel movie made to date? Or even superhero movie, for that matter? One might want to mention Black Panther, except that has (completely appropriate) focus on Black characters as the majority of its cast, with a couple white people in principal supporting parts. The ten principals in Eternals represent people, or at least ancestry, from five of the six populated continents; I don’t believe any are from or have heritage from South America, but Salma Hayek is, of course, Mexican, so there is Latin representation. Of the ten principals, only four are unambiguously white, which is arguably still over-representative in a global context, but is certainly unusual in a U.S. context. If nothing else, it should help with the worldwide box office, particularly when it comes to actors actually from places like South Korea or India or Mexico.

This sort of both organic and careful curating of actors for the film can perhaps be at least party attributed to Zhao, in which case her involvement certainly made the movie better than it might otherwise have been. It just doesn’t have any identifying features that make the broad arc of the story feel like it couldn’t have been directed by anyone, who just happened to be competent. I want Zhao to be able to make movies that clearly have a singular touch. And at the end of the day, its many redeeming qualities notwithstanding, Eternals is just another, overlong, comic book movie. At least it’s engaging and entertaining, a fun time at the movies. I just wanted it to be more special than it is, that’s all.

Alright everybody hold that pose!

SPENCER

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

Finally, true cinema in 2021 has arrived. I’m not talking about giant, blockbuster epics—who do have their place—but about dramatic works of art, of the sort that, even as a drama, demands to be seen on the big screen.

I fully lost myself in Spencer, the latest by Jackie director Pablo Larraín. I thoroughly loved that movie as well, and the two films make great companion pieces, showcasing astonishing performances by its lead actresses. Arguably more so in the case of Kristen Stewart, who has come such a long way from her Twilight days, and completely disappears into the role of Princess Diana. Natalie Portman’s depiction of Jaqueline Kennedy was somewhat maligned, which I never really agreed with, but I cannot see any room for such nitpicking in the case of Stewart. To accept her completely as Diana onscreen is completely effortless.

Furthermore, the two films have similar tones and styles, yet retain a uniqueness that makes them each their own entity. Spencer, for one, is an immersion into the lives of British royalty—over the course of a three-day Christmas family gathering. This is always the strength of the best biographical films, wherein the focus is on a brief period, or even a particular moment, in a historical figure’s life, rather than an attempt to encompass their entire lifetime.

And the script, by Steven Knight, is an exquisite piece of work, taking a snapshot of a weekend in Diana’s life, ten years into her relationship with Prince Charles—that puts them in about 1991—and still somehow reflecting the vast universe of obsession and scandal surrounding them. This is rarely done overtly, and when it is, it’s done briefly, as in the moment Diana steps outside for a mass of paparazzi cameras.

Larraín’s camera consistently follows Diana in gliding tracking shots, by turns capturing the expanse of the grounds and the opulence of the country house where they are staying for the holiday. Every frame is gorgeous, most of them prominently featuring Kristen Stewart as Diana, perfectly lit. It’s funny how screen depictions of certain events or concepts often come in twos, and the pretty high-profile depiction of Princes Diana by Emma Corrin in season four of Netflix’s The Crown just happened in the fall of 2020, all of one year ago. Corrin’s performance was excellent in its own right, and she has a closer facial resemblance to the actual Princess Di, but something about Stewart’s Performance thoroughly transcends and surface dissimilarities. Her performance is so amazing, so beyond all expectations, if she does not get nominated for an Oscar, there is no justice in this world. She could easily win the award.

All of the character parts surrounding Stewart are comparatively minor, with just a few family members getting one or two key scenes—Stella Gonet, as Queen Elizabeth, gets all of two scenes with any real dialogue, one of them just featuring her on the television delivering her annual Christmas address. In the other, though, she offers Diana a surprising bit of empathy, before pivoting to a reminder of the cold realities of each of their positions in this family. The most significant supporting role goes to Timothy Spall, here looking aged and almost shockingly thin after his years as Peter Pettigrew in the Harry Potter series, playing a key person in the house staff struggling with the mandate to rein Diana in. Indeed, most of the people around Diana in Spencer (that title referencing her maiden name, a symbol of a past she pines for) seem genuinely to care about her. It’s just that how much they can empathize is stymied by their sense of duty to the cultural strictures that keep any of them from really finding any happiness. They are inured to it, however, having grown up with it; Diana, even ten years in, cannot reconcile these challenges with the comparative freedoms she knew in her youth.

A fair amount of media representation has existed in recent years regarding Diana’s bulimia, but never before has anyone so carefully depicted her depression, and by extension, her mental illness. Diana’s often erratic behavior is difficult to control, made doubly frustrating by the strict expectations of protocol and tradition. We can find ways to dismiss her struggles within the context of objectively insane amounts of privilege, but Spencer refuses to let us forget how any existence in that exclusive world can be a genuine prison all its own. Larraín is brilliantly capturing Diana’s desperate feelings of loneliness and emotional isolation. There is a sad poetry to the overall presentation in Spencer, which features such beauty, including on the part of Diana herself, her face, her exquisite outfits, every detail of that beauty just being another link in the fencing of her cage.

Spencer reminds me a bit of another movie I love, The Hours, with its utter watchability in spite of its overall tone of melancholy. I could probably watch this movie again and again. The same won’t be the same for others, but this is one of those movies that feels like it was custom made just for me. I just plain loved it.

She’s a complicated woman who will win you over.

Overall: A

MASS

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

One of the many amazing things about Mass is among the most surprising, in that is is neither adapted from a play, nor was it shot during any COVID lockdowns—and yet, it would be easy to assume one or the other, or both: a good eighty percent of the film takes place in one room in the back of a small neighborhood church, only four people ever onscreen, having very heavy and difficult conversation, shot in real time.

The only other people ever even seen onscreen are the two employees of the church that is hosting this meeting, and the social worker who has brokered the meeting. This movie has all of seven speaking parts. For most of its 111-minute runtime, there are only four.

This would make a great “secret screening” at film festivals, where people walk in truly and completely blind. I’d love to tell you right now: just go see this movie. Don’t find out anything about it at all, just sit down and watch it. Except that this is a review, and by definition I have to tell you something.

Besides, some people might like some fair warning, because this is some heavy shit. Expertly directed and brilliantly acted, heavy shit. Martha Plimpton and Jason Isaacs are the parents of a teenage son who was killed six years ago in a high school mass shooting incident (hence the title). Ann Dowd and Reed Birney are the parents of the teenage boy who perpetrated the shooting, killing ten others and then himself. The parents of the victim, who have been in regular correspondence over time in spite of other parents filing lawsuits in which these two never wanted to participate, have requested this meeting with the parents of the perpetrator, in hopes of achieving some kind of closure.

Mass, then, is an impressively realized, unique examination of, not just grief, but grief in many forms. There is much to be said about the demonization of the parents of a child murderer, and writer-director Fran Kranz gets deep into it. Kranz is a guy with 74 acting credits, and that Mass is his directorial debut is truly stunning.

He’s also provided a film that is deeply deserving of awards recognition, and I fear it will get none, because of its very difficult subject matter. I can tell you to watch this all I want, but if you don’t want to go through multiple emotional gut punches you’re not going to want to. The young woman welcoming these two couples into her church provides a box of tissue in this nondescript room, and tissues should be provided at every seat in the theater. Okay, so, realistically, the vast majority of the people who actually do watch this movie will do so later in their homes. So, just be sure to keep the Kleenex handy.

Incidentally, I still found the theatrical experience of this film enhanced it. For all intents and purposes, it’s like just watching a play, but miraculously, it’s well presented onscreen, and never feels like the clunky movie most stage adaptations end up being. You’re too absorbed in their conversation to care. And in a movie theater, that’s the only place where complete immersion is possible. Even though it’s several minutes into the movie before the two couples actually meet and sit down at this generic round banquet table, and another several minutes after they begin talking in private that the conversation makes clear how these two couples are connected.

All four of the principal actors are phenomenal, but I only want to single out Ann Dowd in that she so often plays women who walk a fine line between warm and creepy, it’s nice to see her here playing a woman who, but for the fact that her son killed ten people in cold blood, is so . . . normal. She really feels like a nice old lady you might encounter at the church down the road. All of them do, really. All of these characters are ordinary people who extraordinarily terrible circumstances thrust upon them. And, in terms of performance, all four of them get multiple moments to shine. Reed Birney, the least well known of the four actors, is also the least showy, but his restraint and subtlety is just as impressive.

Kranz’s writing is also exquisite. By definition with a presentation like this, there has to be a great deal of exposition—the whole movie is nothing but dialogue. It never feels like exposition, though, and a vast array of details are revealed to the story of how they all got here, just through the organic unfolding of their gut wrenching, yet riveting conversations. There’s no getting around the fact that Mass, as an incisively indirect examination of gun violence in America, is in no way fun, but there’s also no escaping the fact that it’s easily one of the best films of the year. I just hope enough people see it to give it the attention it deserves.

This is literally the entire movie, and it’s still great.

Overall: A-

THE FRENCH DISPATCH

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

The anthology film as a genre has a storied history—and a varied one as well, which often applies to the several stories within the one film as well. And so it goes with The Fench Dispatch, Wes Anderson’s first foray into the genre, although one could argue that “Wes Anderson” is a genre unto itself, all aesthetics and dioramas, and that element remains at the forefront.

This is Anderson’s ninth feature film as director since his debut with Bottle Rocket in 1996, and in many regards, The French Dispatch is a return to form—in that it’s far more concerned with the exactness of screen presentation than it is with, say, character development. His last film, The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), was entertaining enough to render it Anderson’s greatest box office success to date; prior to that, Moonrise Kingdom (2012) might actually be my favorite of his films.

The odd thing about The French Dispatch—originally slated for release over a year ago, delayed due to COVID—is how much potential it could have had if one of its many stories were simply expanded into its own feature film. My feelings about each of the five stories—three longer ones and two shorter ones—vary, although to be fair, they can’t vary too wildly considering the consistency of visual style. Say what you want about Wes Anderson, you certainly can’t say his films are anything like any other. When it comes to having a unique vision, this guy is the real deal. The issue, I suppose, is how much his singular vision threads so consistently through all of his films. It might not be unfair to say that once you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.

But, there are always degrees. Anderson’s films often spend so much time on the theatricality of their screen presentation—and moments of The French Dispatch take theatricality to a quite literal level—they often leave little time or energy to the dimensions of their characters. This was what I liked about Moonrise Kingdom, which allowed for some fleshing out of character. The stories in The French Dispatch are further constrained by their shorter run times.

And: The French Dispatch is seriously stacked with movie stars. This has been happening in Anderson’s films for a while, but none of his previous films hold a candle to this one, which features a separate ensemble cast in five different vignettes, making it basically five times more of an ensemble cast. Who even gets top billing, anyway? No one, apparently: the poster, while featuring an image packed with maybe a hundred people, doesn’t even bother listing actor names in the credits. That said, it does arrange the characters roughly by row, and these ones are up front: Owen Wilson, Tilda Swinton, Benicio Del Toro, Adrien Brody, Bill Murray, Jeffrey Wright, Timothée Chalomet, Frances McDormand. Just behind them include the likes to Lois Smith, French actress Léa Seydoux (who was in Blue Is the Warmest Color as well the last two Bond films), Bob Balaban, and Mathieu Amalric (also from a Bond film, having played the villain in Quantum of Solace—he also appeared in The Grand Budapest Hotel). Other surprisingly famous people you have to struggle to find include Willem Dafoe, Elisabeth Moss, Christoph Waltz, Liev Schreiber, Edward Norton, Henry Winkler, Saoirse Ronan, Jason Schwartzman—the list goes on and on.

It may interest some to note that the full title of this film is The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun, and it is very much Anderson’s homage to The New Yorker. Thus, it’s easy to imagine huge fans of The New Yorker will be potentially delighted by this film. This conceit is what actually connects the separate stories, as they are representative of three earlier stories of said publication, reprinted in a farewell issue after its publisher (Bill Murray) dies. The two shorter “stories” that make up this film are from the point of view of the staff of this publication, first a brief telling of another story, and then a sort of brief memorial. (One of the five “ensemble casts” is of the magazine’s staff; four of them serving as voice-over narrator as tellers of their separate stories: Owen Wilson, Tilda Swinton, Frances McDormand, and Jeffrey Wright.) At least two of the stories are reportedly either inspired by or based on real stories published in The New Yorker.

I always enjoy articles from The New Yorker whenever I get around to reading them, so I guess I like The New Yorker fine—I just don’t have a nuanced knowledge of its style and history. There’s a lot of layered meaning in the presentation here, some of it arguably, if subtly, meta, and a lot of it difficult for me to grasp. I felt like there was a lot of narrative threads connecting in many ways that I was not catching. Wes Anderson is the kind of filmmaker who takes the idea of “no accidents onscreen” to the extreme. Everything about the camera work, the production design, and especially the blocking, is so exact that it borders on losing some of its art.

I did quite enjoy Revisions to a Maifesto, in any case—the one in which Frances McDormand and Timothée Chalamet are revolutionaries who wind up having a brief affair. The Concrete Masterpiece, the first of the three longer stories, about a convicted murderer (Del Toro) selling his paintings of the prison guard (Seydoux) to an overzealous art dealer (Brody), was moderately amusing. The Private Dining Room of the Police Commissioner, in which the title character (Amalric) has his son kidnapped by criminals (Norton, and others) for ransom, was entertaining but visually convoluted.

Basically, the same could be said of The French Dispatch as could be said of virtually any Wes Anderson film: if you like his other movies, you’ll like this one. As a rule, I like them fine.

Quick, name all these actors!

Overall: B

DUNE

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

It goes without saying that there’s a lot riding on Denis Villeneuve’s Dune, the latest literary adaptation of a novel beloved for decades. Frank Herbert’s original novel, the first in a series of six (not counting a further sixteen co-written by Herbert’s son Brian and Kevin J. Anderson, with still more to come), was published in 1965. Previous attempts at screen adaptations include a notorious feature film flop by David Lynch in 1984, and a Syfy miniseries in 2000. Legions of nerds love this property. No fewer than three people I spoke with earlier today were excited just to hear that I was going to see this movie.

And here’s the thing. I have never read the novel, descriptions of which make it honestly sound tedious. Nor have I seen the 1984 film, descriptions of which make it sound horrible. I didn’t even know a miniseries ever existed until this week. Thus, as always, I can only speak to how the 2021 Dune stands on its own merits, which of course is how I believe it should be judged anyway. I still had great interest in this Dune, simply because of its director, who has proven time and again (Prisoners, Sicario, Arrival, Blade Runner 2049) that his films are not to be missed.

I just can’t decide the degree to which I feel the same way about Dune. It depends, ironically, on your knowledge of and affection for the property itself. I have a feeling people who already love the Dune story and mythology will be pleased. It should be noted that this adaptation of the first novel only covers half of it; all the marketing materials just call it Dune, but the title card makes it explicit: Dune - Part One. Villeneuve is in pre-production for Part Two and only agreed to make the film if he could do it in two parts.

I’m glad he did. This is a completely different universe from ours, and fully realized—the run time of this film is two hours and 35 minutes, which never drags. There’s a lot to pack in here, but it never feels packed; allowing this adaptation to be of only the first half, and giving it that run time, simply allows the world it presents to breathe. “Epic” is a wildly overused word anymore, but this movie is an epic in every sense of the word. Every frame elicits a sense of grandeur.

I have to admit, though, that Dune just didn’t speak to me the way I wanted it to—certainly not the way Villeneuve’s previous films have (with the notably odd and incoherent exception of Enemy). It clearly does speak the way I wanted it to, to others; my husband loved it and immediately said he wants to read the novel. It’s also arguably nonsensical to assess this movie as a complete entity at all—because it isn’t complete, by definition. It even ends fairly abruptly, as though right in the middle of the story, because that’s indeed exactly where it is. My feelings about this film may differ significantly once Part Two is released. As it is, this very review is rather like reviewing any other movie after only watching the first hour. On the other hand, there was a similar experience with Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill films, and in that case I had been much more enthralled with Volume I than I had been with Volume II. Still, I did not know that until I had seen both films.

And besides, Dune takes its time, letting the story unfold gradually, in ways I constantly wish other movies would. There are indeed very thrilling set pieces, but this film is comparatively meditative in its first half. It’s all story establishment and world building, as we meet Paul (Timothée Chalamet) and his parents (Oscar Isaac and Rebecca Ferguson), rulers of their home world. And we are taken to other worlds and introduced to a stunning array of other key characters from across their universe, played by countless A-list actors (Josh Brolin, Jason Momoa, Javier Bardem, Stellan Skarsgård, Dave Bautista, Charlotte Rampling, Zendaya, Chen Chang). More often than not, a movie this packed with star power crushes under the weight of it and deflates into the realm of mediocrity. Dune is far from mediocre, however.

It’s certainly a technical marvel. A whole lot of it is set in desert landscapes (consider the title), in light of which it’s remarkable how stunning it is to look at most of the time. Otherworldly creatures and vehicles, notably gargantuan sand worms, are seen sparingly and thus very effectively. There’s also a fun mode of transportation that is basically a helicopter designed like a dragonfly. The effects are seamlessly blended into practical sets, and never call attention to themselves, instead always existing in service of the story.

The story, incidentally, is pretty typical for fantasy epics: Paul is identified as a messiah, a fate he predictably resists, until—spoiler alert!—he begins to accept his destiny. It remains unclear to me exactly what he’s meant to deliver to this universe as a messiah, and related details were consistently difficult for me to follow, but such considerations are secondary. What Villeneuve truly succeeds at here is establishment of a unique tone, in a broadly realized alternate universe, unlike any other, except perhaps the source material. It may not have been quite what I wanted it to be, but I can still see it as something it needed to be, and appreciate it for what it is. I will certainly be right back to see Part Two once it finally comes out.

Rebecca Ferguson, Zendaya, Javier Bardem, and Timothée Chalamet, striking a pose on a desert rock.

Overall: B+

THE RESCUE

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

There’s a clip in The Rescue of a European newscaster saying, “You’d have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by this.” He might as well be talking about this movie itself, which is a bit of an emotional roller coaster—far more than most documentaries. I can think of a couple of other documentaries that were as tense or as suspenseful, rare qualities on their own for the genre, but I’m hard pressed to think of another one that combines those with anxiety, occasional terror, and compassion and relief.

In other words, The Rescue kind of freaked me out. Its co-directors, Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, are no strangers to documenting extremes: they also co-directed the 2018 film Free Solo, about a guy climbing 3,000 feet up El Capitan with no gear. The Rescue is a better movie, though, because there’s a key difference: the guy in Free Solo was putting his life at risk for the thrill of it. The Rescue tells the story of dozens of people putting their lives at risk to rescue a young soccer team and their coach stranded in mostly flooded caves in northern Thailand.

If you paid any attention to the news at all, you likely heard about this story. The ordeal lasted 18 days, and the 12 young boys and their coach weren’t even found, confirmed still alive, until nine days into that stretch. It was another week before they came up with a horrifying plan, which itself lasted three days, to get them all out of there. In the end, what they were faced a terrible choice: either risk some of their lives, or guarantee that within days they would all drown and die.

I’m not particularly claustrophobic, but . . . damn. So much of this story involves cave divers maneuvering through incredibly tight, water-filled caves, in scenarios I have a hard time imagining I could ever deal with. This is the kind of thing that could make anyone panic. And if you don’t vividly recall the way the story ended in the news, this film quite effectively keeps you on the edge of your seat, sometimes with your heart in your throat.

There has been some criticism of The Rescue because some of the diving footage was reenacted by the actual divers who were there. Why this matters escapes me, and the footage they get from this is used well—it seems logical that they would not have had a camera going in the middle of desperate swimming and crawling through tight underwater spaces with zero visibility. This footage effectively illuminates the big picture, and gives a visual sense of the spaces they were navigating. The Rescue also makes use of rare footage actually taken at the scene, but it makes sense that there would not be enough of it to flesh out a visual representation of these harrowing eighteen days.

The rescue was a truly international effort, fully acknowledging the hundreds of people involved in the rescue. That said, the Chinese get a passing acknowledgment, and The Rescue as a film gives particular focus to the group of cave diving hobbyists, all of them British, Australian or otherwise European, who just happened to have the skills needed in this one instance that no one else had. At least, that’s the way this movie presents the story. I’m a little unsure of the necessity of featuring three or four of the recreational cave divers talking about being bullied as kids, but, whatever.

There’s a ton of detail to this story, with many twists and turns, over an increasingly hopeless amount of time, with an astonishing conclusion. There are also many angles from which to approach this story, and The Rescue covers a lot of them, weaving them together with its own assured skill. There’s not much more you could ask of a film of this sort.

This is one of the more open spaces.

Overall: B+

THE LAST DUEL

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

If you watch The Last Duel, it may become clear how easy it becomes to debate “what it’s about.” There’s a line from the film that really sticks with me, in which Ben Affleck’s supporting character, Pierre d'Alençon, says, “Simple minds don’t understand such nuances.” Such will be the case, no doubt, with many people who watch this movie—which is layered with nuance, much of which will be lost on certain audiences.

It’s the three-act structure which provides the solid ground on which the narrative stands, each one telling “the truth” according to each of the three main players: Sir Jean de Carrouges (Matt Damon); Lady Marguerite (Jodie Comer), husband to Sir Jean; and Jacques Le Gris (Adam Driver), friend and then enemy to Jean, and accused of rape by Lady Marguerite. Being 14th century France, this becomes a case of Sir Jean’s word against Jacques’s, because of course, the word of the woman means nothing.

Much can be discussed about the very choice of subject matter here, the spreading characterization of The Last Duel as a “14th century #MeToo movie,” but there’s much more at play here than that. There’s also the perfectly fair criticism that two thirds of this movie whose story hinges around the rape of a woman still centers the points of view of men. To me, though, that misses the point: this isn’t a movie about rape so much as it is a movie about the insidiousness of literally centuries of patriarchy, and how men have long been culturally conditioned to delude themselves in regards to their relationships with women. Many people lose sight of the fact that misogyny harms men as well as women, and in a very subtle way, that is the point this movie is making.

Indeed, whether or not Lady Marguerite was raped is never presented as any mystery. The answer to that question is clear—not just from her own point of view, but even from that of Jacques, all while he still sincerely believes their sex was consensual. The man went to his death truly believing that. But, having a “sincerely held belief” does not mean you aren’t still wrong.

The second and third acts—or “chapters” as they are called in title cards—each build upon the last, including several scenes already seen, just presented from a different point of view. Subtle things change, such as whether Lady Marguerite kicks off her shoes as a signal of desire as she goes ahead of Jacques up a staircase, or her shoes merely falls off as she scrambles up the stairs away from him in terror. There’s even the idea of exactly how “noble” Sir Jean is, whether his moral conviction is about defending the honor of his wife, or defending his own pride and standing in society. He’s a lot nicer to Lady Marguerite in his “truth” than in hers, wherein his is much rougher about getting assurances that she’s telling the truth.

It gets tricky, the idea of recommending a movie whose entire plot hinges on the act of rape, particularly to women. I’m not sure I could, in good conscience, recommend this movie to women. The “revelations” about how men have been for centuries aren’t exactly going to be news to any woman; they’re not going to learn anything new from this movie. But, there are some men who might. The Last Duel is surprisingly insightful about the male point of view, and it takes no pains to be flattering about it. That, if nothing else, is refreshing.

Beyond that, The Last Duel is compulsively watchable, in a way that surprises. It’s also worth noting that it was co-written not just by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck—their first such collaboration since Good Will Hunting—but also Can You Ever Forgive Me? co-writer Nicole Holofcener, specifically for an authentic female perspective. Which is to say, this movie gives equal time to the male perspectives, but it is clearly on the woman’s side.

There’s a point in the movie at which Sir Jean’s mother (Harriet Walter, well cast) says to Lady Marguerite, “The truth does not matter!” Ironically, even as it illustrates how “truth” is manipulated depending on who is telling it, The Last Duel makes clear how much the truth really does matter. Then again, there’s that pesky 14th-century notion that whoever wins the duel to the death, challenged by Sir Jean against Jacques, it is “ordained by god” and thus proves that person was the one telling the truth. This movie is based on real events, so you can easily look up who wins, but still: what if Jacques wins? In that case, society would have just accepted that he was the one telling the truth. (And, as a relevant reminder, given that Jacques believes what he is saying, from his perspective, he is telling the truth.) This is a society, after all, who believes conception is only possible if sex is pleasurable, and thus a rape cannot produce a pregnancy.

If nothing else, The Last Duel provides a lot to unpack. It’s a movie ripe for discussion, which certainly has its appeal for many. I enjoyed it more than much of the media coverage might have led me to expect, but it would seem that’s because this is one of those rare movies so easily misinterpreted, or at least interpreted in countless different ways. There’s no harm in healthy debate, and that may very well have been the intent behind this movie.

Straddling that fine line between serious discussion and pop entertainment.

Overall: B+