EMPIRE OF LIGHT

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

It’s rather depressing when a movie that largely depicts the magic of cinema tanks at the box office. There’s a sad sort of irony, also, when the cinema house featured prominently in Empire of Light—itself called the Empire Cinema—is partially derelict out of lack of use. A new employee is given a tour which winds up including an upper level, with two screening rooms no longer in use, now drafty from broken windows and filled with random pigeons.

I don’t think this was writer-director Sam Mendes’s intention, but it made me wistful. Or, I suppose, like I’ve gotten old: increasing numbers of people feel that their huge at-home TV screens make for a perfectly adequate home theater experience. But that is not the same immersive experience as seeing a film on the much larger screen, occupying your entire field of vision, in a movie theater. It’s kind of funny, then, that empire of Light’s protagonist, Hilary (Olivia Colman, excellent as always), ultimately watches a film alone in her theater—barely a smaller number than the whopping four people I was among when I saw this.

All that said, “the power of cinema” isn’t really what Empire of Light is about. It’s just one example of an escape Hilary learns, as a woman with fairly severe mental illness. (At one point she’s is told to her face “You’re a schizophrenic,” but we never see that as an official diagnosis.) Hilary is a fictionalized woman at the center of a wholly invented story, but a character very directly based on Mendes’s mother, who suffered the same.

This is a movie with evenly mixed reviews, and the more I consider it, the more I see why. There’s a sort of triad of story elements, including Hilary’s mental illness; her friendship and quasi-romance with a far younger, Black coworker named Stephen (Michael Ward); and the political backdrop of increasing racial violence in an early-eighties, Margaret Thatcher-era Britain. These three threads never quite fully connect with each other. Somehow, that doesn’t make me like the movie any less, perhaps because of its strong performances, and a quietly sentimental tone that worked for me.

It certainly doesn’t work for everyone, and Empire of Light’s sentimentality is a common complaint against it. What’s wrong with sentiment, at least on its face? Mendes and his actors never give us anything especially overwrought. And over time, we see Hilary and Stephen developing deep empathy for each other, and their respective struggles with their place in the world. I’m not really sure what the point is of the racial element, whether Mendes is trying to equate dealing with racism with dealing with mental illness. And I won’t deny that I became slightly uncomfortable with the consummation of their relationship, just because he is so dramatically younger than her. But maybe that doesn’t matter. They’re both adults. I mean, barely: Stephen is applying to go to college.

It’s provocative, and I do see value in being challenged. There’s a moral question there, although Mendes never really directly explores it. There’s a sort of sad comfort in the tone of this film. A subtle kind of melancholy, that is somehow inviting. There’s a lot that doesn’t quite come together, but I enjoyed the experience.

This film reportedly was written during covid lockdowns. It feels like it, to an extent. It could be argued Sam Mendes needed a bit more quarantine time to flesh out and then connect his ideas and themes. The story of a mentally ill middle-aged woman works better than that of a young Black man facing racist brutality. Mashing the two together is a bit odd, and yet Colman and Ward have real chemistry together. Ward has a generally sunny disposition onscreen as Stephen, and a charismatic screen presence. Odd though it may be, seeing them together is a pleasant experience. A fair assessment of this film as a whole.

A brief moment of fireworks in an otherwise quiet movie.

Overall: B

WHITE NOISE

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

White Noise is kind of all over the place, so it would be fitting for me to start with the end—not just the end, but the end credits. I don’t want to spoil anything, so I won’t say exactly what it is, but I will say that a sequence that lasts the entirety of the credits, which doesn’t quite match the tone of any of the rest of the movie, might be the most fun five minutes or so I’ve spent at the movies all year. I guess that’s one way to get you to sit through the end of the credits. Although you certainly won’t be reading the credtis.

This is a distinct turn in the career of writer-director Noah Baumbach, who here is adapting live action from another source material for the first time. I find myself wondering if the original novel, by Don DeLillo, had the same liberal sprinkling of humor, which I can only call . . . Baumbachian. White Noise is an odd jumble of genres, split into three parts, the middle of which, about an airborne toxic event, is notably Spielbergian in tone and presentation, with tonal notes of both Close Encounters of the Third Kind and War of the Worlds. It’s like we’re suddenly thrust into a disaster movie, but only for its middle third. It basically goes from dramedy to horror and then back again to dramedy.

And the thing is, although this airborne toxic event is easily the most memorable thing about White Noise, that’s not directly what it’s about. What it is about, exactly, I am struggling to wrap my brain around. I might be tempted to ask the same question of “Why?” that I did Bones and All, except that in this case I was truly hooked on this thing I could not quite understand, and in the end, thoroughly delighted. I suppose marrying horror with drama and comedy is much more my speed than marrying horror with romance.

This is not your typical horror movie either, however. There is something far more existential, thematically, going on with White Noise. Much of it has to do with the human quest to stop fearing death, and how that is perhaps a fool’s errand. That gets to the heart of this film, or at least closer to it, than the disaster on its face.

It doesn’t hurt that it is also frequently quite funny, in ways that only Noah Baumbach can be. There have been times I have found his work self-consciously “quirky,” but that’s never really the vibe here, even though sometimes the humor is subtly absurd. All I can say, I guess, is that this movie speaks to me. I would be delighted to watch it again, and revel in the chance to gain greater insight into its intentions.

Reviews of White Noise have been mixed, and I can see why. Some might see this movie and say, “What the hell are they talking about?” Even I sometimes thought exactly that, but was happy to leave the question unanswered just because of how much I dug its vibe. This is largely thanks to its leads, Adam Driver looking pudgier than ever as a middle-aged scholar of Hitler Studies, and Baumbach mainstay Greta Gerwig as his emotionally struggling wife. It is noted at one point that they are each on their fourth spouse, only one of the four children between them actually produced by the two of them together. The three older kids are incredibly well cast, each of them vital parts of the plot and, as actors, very much up to the task.

Don Cheadle plays a colleague at “College on the Hill,” a man with twin obsessions with car crashes in cinema, and Elvis Presley. They have discussions, and in one case a sort of duet college lecture, that draws parallels between the slavish devotion to Elvis and the slavish devotion to Hitler. It felt like it had real import to the themes of this movie, but I never quite understood it.

There are big tonal shifts, giving White Noise an air of a cross between Steven Spielberg, Richard Linklater, the Coen Brothers, maybe even a dash of Robert Altman with its penchant for overlapping dialogue in group or crowd settings. I happen to love all of these directors, and each of these tones somehow work, so I’m into it. One of the final sequences, the most Coen Brothers-esque, takes place in a Catholic emergency room with surprisingly faithless nuns. I found it hilarious.

What I couldn’t tell you, in the end, is quite how it all fits together. I can only tell you I loved the experience. I wish the same for you.

I kind of wanted the entire movie to be about this.

Overall: B+

BONES AND ALL

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

I left Bones and All unable to decide what to make of it. I’m still feeling that way, to a degree. Maybe I would feel differently, or have more conviction, about it after a rewatch, maybe after some time has gone by. I’m not sure I’ll ever want to watch this movie again. The closest I can get to sincerely complimenting it is to acknowledge that it’s not just fucked up, but fucked up in a way we’ve never seen in cinema before.

It also could be argued that some innovations are entirely unnecessary. Indeed, one of the questions I keep coming back to is: why? Luca Guadagnino, who directed and wrote this adaptation of the novel by Camille DeAngelis, has married two very disparate genres: tender love story, and horror. But why?

Maybe because there was something more obviously valuable to the story as it existed in the novel. I can’t speak to that, as I’ve never read it. And when it comes to Guadagnino, that guy is all over the place: Call My By Your Name (2017) was a modern masterpiece of queer cinema; he followed that up a year later with Suspiria, which was a wild mess. Then, in 2020, he gave us the immersive and deeply ambiguous limited series We Are Who We Are, which absolutely was not for everyone but really spoke to me.

Maybe it’s just when Guadagnino shifts into horror that he no longer speaks to me. He has a unique sensibility that, when married to the horror genre, just puts me off. And what purpose does it serve for us to see a tender love story about cannibals? It’s possible there is an allegorical element here, except that I fail to see any need for allegory when we live in a time when it’s easier and more effective just to be straightforward.

Guadagnino hires very talented actors, and then doesn’t seem to direct them very much. And clearly there is loyalty to him here: Timothée Chalamet was previously in Call Me By Your Name; we also get a single scene each from Michael Stuhlbarg (also in Call Me By Your Name, here stunningly reinvented as a redneck) and Chloë Sevigny (previously in We Are Who We Are). The talented actors command the screen regardless, and are often unrecognizable in this film—I did not realize the nomadic and vaguely sinister old man and would-be cannibal mentor was Mark Rylance until I viewed the credits. Other, less significant characters, though, are portrayed by actors whose deliveries feel just barely this side of unrehearsed. There is a naturalistic looseness to Guadagnino’s approach that works spectacularly some of the time, and not at all at other times.

The primary protagonist is Maren (Taylor Russell), a teenager only just turned 18, at which point her heretofore stunningly protective father (André Holland) finally abandons her, no longer able to cope with the responsibility of moving them to a new town every time she bites off a friend’s finger.

There is a curious establishment of rules in the universe of this film, where cannibals have a kind of sixth sense about each other. More specifically, they can recognize each other’s scent, which is how the creepy old man finds Maren to begin with. He teaches her how to recognize and use their smell, as well as some rules to live by that he’s established for himself. Eventually it becomes clear there is an invisible minority that the public at large cannot see, but they have ways of recognizing each other.

But then Maren meets Lee (Chalamet), and she’s more interested in being taught by him. A friendship blooms, and eventually romance too. It’s all very tender and sweet, except they are feeding on the corpses of fellow human beings in the meantime. This scenario doesn’t lay out any moral dubiousness, instead revealing elements of self-loathing and guilt over the things they are compelled to do. This all feels very on the nose as a metaphor for, say, queer people in the closet, especially at the time this is set (the 1980s). Except that cannibalism actually is literally grotesque, and I don’t know what any of this really has to offer the year 2022.

It’s entirely possible I am missing something. As it is, I kind of just don’t get it. I was fully engaged and consistently intrigued by this film, but I can’t say it enriched me in any way. Does it offer any useful insights? Is it actually entertaining? An older couple sitting in my same aisle got up and left the theater after the first onscreen feeding. Honestly they likely had a better time of the following two hours than I did, or at least had an easier time making sense of it.

Oh did I mention this movie features cannibalism as an act of love and mercy?

Overall: B-

THE INSPECTION

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

In a surprising way, The Inspection justifies not just the existence of the U.S. Military, but the way it treats its recruits. Without ever saying these exact words, writer-director Elegance Bratton seems to be telegraphing that the US Marines teaches discipline, cultivates strength, and builds character—all the typical platitudes that at best I have mixed feelings about.

Billed as “inspired by true events,” those events were lived by Bratton himself, having joined the Marines after a decade of being homeless, that period following his mother kicking him out of their home for being gay. Jeremy Pope, here in his first starring role after all of two other feature film roles to date (he also had roles in the TV series Hollywood and Pose, and is a multiple-Tony-nominated Broadway actor), plays the fictionalized lead by the name of Ellis French. This is a fantastic acting choice, not just because he’s an out Gay Black man himself, but because of his subtle recognizability as one, without ever quite being coded as such onscreen. Pope can switch from uncomfortably insecure to steely resolve with aplomb.

I suppose you could call this a “gay Black G.I. Jane,” although that would be an oversimplification. Still, The Inspection is about a deeply marginalized character proving himself within constraints of the U.S. military that are challenging at best and barbaric at worst. There is a scene in which Ellis is conducting a test of his ability to save a drowning man, the man in the water being his gleefully bullying training instructor (Bokeem Woodbine), who literally drowns him. Only the subversive empathy of fellow instructor Rosales (Raúl Castillo) ultimately saves him.

So this is both the strength and the challenge of The Inspection, in that in one scene to the next, you have no idea how Ellis will be treated, and the uncertainty is what characterizes Ellis, to a degree at least, as an abused child. By the time Ellis is actually making a pass at Rosales (a moment scene in the film’s trailer), you are horrified for him.

Presumably these sorts of things actually happened in Elegance Bratton’s experience, or else why would he put them in the script? Still, this was behavior I truly could not understand: a gay man trying to keep under the radar in boot camp, still fantasizing about his fellow recruits while showering with them? I feel certain I would be so terrified of any such thing that I’d be rendered literally impotent in that scenario, but then, what do I know? I have never even showered communally with straight men, much less been in the military.

That said, the narrative trajectory of The Recruit is satisfying in its relative unpredictability. In past movies of this sort, Ellis’s sexuality would be a much more potent plot point, something kept hidden until a climactic reveal of some kind. Here, his sexuality becomes clear early on, and although it remains a central conflict in the story—being a major part of his endurance of harassment from all sides—it never becomes a movie about shame. Ellis knows who he is; he just feels like this is his only option for any kind of future.

Granted, there is a key conflict regarding Ellis’s sexuality, and that has to do with his mother’s rejection of him, and her burning resentment after he returns to her apartment asking for his birth certificate. Ellis’s mother is played by Gabrielle Union, who is great in all of about three notable scenes. I wonder if securing her as a name actor helped get the film financed, because otherwise Union’s ample talents are greater than what this role allows her to do.

Bratton dedicates this film to his mother, who reportedly passed away shortly before its release. Clearly The Inspection exists more as an exercise for Bratton to process his relationship with his mother, than as a straightforward story about a gay Black man in boot camp. Whatever the motivations, the movie works, and I was moved by it, even as I failed to see the necessity of not only the treatment of this one recruit, but all of them.

Jeremy Pope shines as a great actor with vast potential.

Overall: B+

VIOLENT NIGHT

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

There’s a maybe five-minute sequence in Violent Night that is essentially an ultraviolent version of Home Alone. There’s a little Black girl instead of Macaulay Culkin, and the booby traps are more severe than those that Kevin set—although truthfully not by a wide margin; Home Alone, while still hilarious, rather downplays the severity of the injuries the traps would actually inflict. In Violent Night, instead, people actually die. Lots of them. What’s more: Violent Night is so shameless in its ripping off Home Alone in this sequence, it comes long after the movie gets literally name checked by young Trudy Lightstone. Call it “Chekov’s movie reference.”

The thing is, that five-minute sequence is by far the best part of Violent Night, giving me several good belly laughs, and I rather wish the whole movie had been centered around that. The whole story would have been much improved just being an R-rated, ultra-violent update on Home Alone, 32 years later, as thought that holiday classic were crossed with, say, Kill Bill. Now that would have been a blast.

There is a particular problem with Violent Night, you see, and that is its tonal schizophrenia. Some scenes are very violent and also very funny. Some scenes are very violent just for the sake of violence, without being funny, as though script writers Pat Casey and Josh Miller were using the sight of David Harbour in a Santa suit as a crutch—somehow, we’re meant to stay amused just because literal Santa Claus is dispatching countless nameless goons with a sledgehammer he calls “The Skullcrusher.” I mean, sure, that’s kind of funny. For a minute or two.

Violent Night works incredibly well when it has its wits about, which is unfortunately not all of the time. And, sure, even Home Alone was treacly and sentimental, ostensibly about “wholesome family values” even though in the end it wasn’t really—but it still worked because it had its narrative priorities in order, saving the violent gags for the extended, hilarious climactic sequence at the end. Violent Night, on the other hand, whips back and forth all through the movie, between bloody fights and an ultra-rich family learning the value of each other while being held hostage by a team of criminals headed by “Mr. Scrooge” (John Leguizamo).

Anyone familiar with the truly fantastic and hilarious—and thus far superior—1988 Bill Murray vehicle Scrooged will instantly be reminded of that film’s opening sequence, which turned out to be a preview for a network TV action movie with Santa Claus as its main character, called The Night the Reindeer Died. The whole point there was exaggerated ridiculousness as the result of crass holiday consumerism, and now, in 2022, we basically have that sketch gag stretched out into a feature film. I’ll give 2022 movie this much credit, at least: Violent Night is a far better title. I bet the writers of that fake trailer from Scrooged are kicking themselves now.

Ironically, David Harbour’s Santa Claus in Violent Night is a drunken mess largely because of disillusionment about what consumerist zombies modern children have become. And yet, what does Violent Night itself represent, really?

I won’t lie: I found Violent Night fun enough. That Home Alone booby trap sequence single handedly heightened my impression of the entire movie, if only to keep me from relegating it to utter mediocrity. Now I would just call it . . . relatively mediocre.

David Harbour is inspired casting as Santa Claus, notwithstanding how easy it is to argue he isn’t fat enough. At worst, he’s “stocky”—a clear choice to make him a badass former ancient warrior. Odd that we should learn that about him but not how the hell he actually became Santa. Also strange that he should be riddled with “Christmas magic” and yet so easily maimed and bloody. This is sort of like making Die Hard as an actual Christmas movie. Still not nearly as good though.

The little girl, by the way, is played winningly by Leah Brady; she’s visiting her very rich grandmother’s estate with her otherwise estranged parents (Alexis Louder and Alex Hassell). It’s pretty fun to see Beverly D’Angelo as ultra-rich-bitch Grandma Gertrude Lightstone, although even her character, like all the other adults, exist only to serve the plot purpose of vapid people barely worth protecting or saving.

I just wish Violent Night could make up its mind between earnestness and self-parody. Nearly half the movie is incongruously earnest, as though we are watching a wholesome holiday movie, even though that’s not what it is at all. None of it fits, and a movie like this really only works if it never takes itself seriously.

David Harbour never does, at least, and so the movie is at least slightly better for it. Even the subplot of little Trudy being vindicated in her belief in Santa Claus could have worked in a movie that held its conviction of utter silliness. Instead, director Tommy Wirkola seems to want Violent Night to offer something for everybody, even though that’s just never how movies like this work. In the end, it just means the audience who comes for the cartoonish violence rendered more amusing by the involvement of Santa Claus will spend every other sequence just waiting for the action to start again.

The more tedious scenes might have worked better if it had more cleverly written humor, but with a few notable exceptions, the gags in this movie are low-hanging fruit. Someone needs to try this exercise again, and do it right, or at least better. Flesh out the young-child-as-action-hero angle. Call it Scrooge Hard, or something. Home Explode? I don’t know, we can workshop it. Unfortunately there’s no better action-Christmas-movie title than Violent Night. I just wish it got more than halfway to living up to it.

While visions of skullcrusher hammers danced in their heads

Overall: B-

STRANGE WORLD

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

I can just imagine the “anti-woke” mob reacting to Strange World, and how it seemingly checks off all the boxes, making it by far the most pointedly diverse animated feature they have ever made. “Pointedly” can itself be a loaded word, however, because the thing is, within this movie’s premise, the diversity makes literal logical sense: these characters live in a utopian society. The only way that could be true, from global point of view at least, is if several races and sexualities are represented among its population—even if the land of Avalonia is a relatively small, isolated community surrounded by mountains.

Some may argue that Disney Animation Studios is playing with fire, featuring a central character who is an out, gay teenager—much less a multiracial one. Sixteen-year-old Ethan Clade (voiced by eighteen-year-old Jaboukie Young-White, who would have to have been seventeen or maybe even sixteen when recording) has a Black mom, named Meridian (Gabrielle Union), and a White dad named Searcher (Jake Gyllenhaal). He also has a paternal grandfather named Jaeger (Dennis Quaid), and when Jaeger starts asking Ethan if he has a “special someone,” I instinctively braced myself for homophobic judgment from an old White man. Notably, what Jaeger does instead is try to teach Ethan how to impress his crush by showing off. Ethan’s response? “That sounds like a pretty toxic way to start a relationship.”

Which is to say, it’s not as though Strange World is without conflict. It just doesn’t have the types you expect. It doesn’t even have any villain, or even a single hero; it has flawed and wonderful, individual people trying to make their way in the world. The world they inhabit just happens to be a fantastical one—even more so when, in an expedition to find out why the green-electric crops they grow that powers their utopian society finds them deep underground, where every single thing that exists is alive. Eventually, you realize the real premise of this movie is a modern update on the eighties film Innerspace, in which a guy explores the inside of a human body in a microscopic little ship.

Without spoiling too much, I’ll say that it isn’t a human body this time, and actually, the widely diverse cast of characters—including an Asian woman community leader voiced by Lucy Liu and an (also possibly gay) Indian character voiced by Karan Soni—are part of a much larger metaphor Strange World is making. This theme of the film, revealed more clearly as it goes along, has a lot to do with the global community and, as Ethan himself notes when trying to play a specific kind of card game with both his father and his grandfather, “living harmoniously with their environment.” In truth, it’s a little on the nose, even more than I realized: the crop the Clades grow which powers their community gives everything it touches a green shock of electricity. We’re clearly meant to take the idea of “green power” quite literally there.

This isn’t a bad theme, per se, so long as there is finesse in execution, which unfortunately, Strange World somewhat lacks. The script, by Qui Nguyen (who also co-directs, with Don Hall), leans heavily on father-son relationships: Jaeger’s obsession with Searcher continuing his legacy as an explorer, and then Searcher’s similar obsession with Ethan being a homebody farmer just like him. This is the only real source of interpersonal conflict, all of it pretty rote and retreading countless similar relationships in other movies.

What does truly make Strange World worth watching, particularly on the big screen, is its fantastic, and fantastically imaginative, animation. It never reaches the heights of Pixar’s excellence, but it’s fully absorbing nonetheless. The strange under-world of living plants and animals and land masses is a delight to exist in once the Clade family gets there, and the adventurous plot, such as it is, gets much more exciting at that point as well. They are surrounded by organisms they cannot identify, or infer what is a threat to them and what isn’t.

I must also commend the animators in their rendering of Ethan himself. I was genuinely impressed with how he has a recognizably, but subtly, queer vibe. And it’s done without ever resorting to any kind of stereotypes. I cannot help but come back to the diversity of the film’s characters overall: setting aside the fact that its inclusion represents something more nuanced than just “checking boxes,” there remains the fact that, for instance, multiracial families actually exist. When do they ever see themselves in media like this? And then, there is a moment of chaste affection between two gay teenagers that genuinely moved me, just to see it. The world is a much different place than when I was sixteen.

Strange World’s actual subversive message is about the literal world itself, and how it needs to be saved from destruction by the fully diverse spectrum of people who live on it. It even goes so far as to represent how this threat to the very biosphere (though that word is never used in the film) is the result of well-intentioned actions thought to be in humanity’s best interests. As in, it’s nobody’s fault really, but we see the problem now and need to correct it.

It’s just the telling of that particular message that’s a little clumsy, thrown together with the parallel theme of familial legacy. The script could have used a great deal of finessing—this more than anything being why this movie has flopped at the box office—but Strange World is fun to watch anyway, a visual feast.

Ethan talks to the most fun character in the movie, “Splat.”

Overall: B

DEVOTION

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

Does a movie have to be profound to be great? This is a relevant question, easy to forget, at least for me, where I tend to approach how I regard a movie from the bottom up: its baseline is far from greatness, which is what it has to prove. I had this experience with the 2004 film Sideways, which didn’t exactly blow me away, but when I realized I could think of nothing wrong with it, I still gave it a solid A. I still stand by that.

Devotion is a wildly different film, and yet I had a similar experience with it. The crticial consensus seems to be definitively mixed, and I went to see it mostly just because I love going to see the movies and I try to see everything I even might enjoy, and I expected to like it fine. And then, it significantly exceeded my expectations.

It strikes me as relevant that the “critical consensus” is still majority-White, and that remains a salient fact. I wish it were easier to seek out critical voices from the same marginalized groups represented in a given film—which is, admittedly, a flimsy and arguably lazy thing for me to say. If it’s really that important to me, I should dig into some research and start bookmarking the websites of relevant reviewers whose opinions I respect.

It should also be noted, however, that the audience score at rottentomatoes.com is 92%, a site notorious for racist user-review bombing, and earned an audience rating of A- according to CinemaScore. I have no idea what the demographic makeup is of these groups, but that strikes me as less relevant; in any case, I am far more aligned with audiences than with critics on this one. I thoroughly enjoyed this movie.

So why, then, is it underperforming so dramatically? Although it feels respectable for it to be ranked #4 at the box office over this weekend, it has earned all of $9 million so far, which is literally a tenth of its budget. This movie deserves better than that.

And in a season of gratitude, I must say: thank heavens for that $90 million budget, which director J.D. Dillard used to maximum effect. It would be easy to compare this film to this year’s other aviator movie, box office juggernaut Top Gun Maverick, which is indisputably far more impressive on a technical level, and earned every penny of its earnings on its own terms. Incidentally, the trailer for Devotion, quite understandably, ran before showings of Top Gun Maverick, which means everyone and their mother saw the trailer to this movie. Maybe people think just one aviator movie was enough for this year? Well, if you bother to see Devotion you’ll discover such an assumption to be incorrect. Because not only does Devotion also justify itself on its own terms, it also features its own impressive fighter pilot flight sequences, with its own impressively integrated special effects—so impressive, in fact, that you hardly notice there are any visual effects at all. People forget that sometimes that’s exactly what makes them impressive, particularly when the use of effects serve only to move the story forward.

I am convinced audiences would be won over by Devotion if they just gave it a chance. This may be a conventionally paced “inspired by a true story” quasi-biopic, but the way I see it, that is very much its strength. This is about the bond formed between Jesse and Tom, two aviators during the Korean War, one of them Black and one of them White, and when it comes to depictions of Jesse’s challenges and Tom’s white guilt, between Jesse’s guarded emotional defenses and Tom’s willingness to listen when it’s most critical, this is the rare movie that does these things right.

Tom is played by Glen Powell, who incidentally also played Hangman in Top Gun Maverick, and his casting represents the “blandly handsome White guy” as much as anyone could. And that’s fine, because Jesse is played by the singularly talented Jonathan Majors, who popped in a breakout role in The Last Black Man In San Francisco, and later carried the HBO series Lovecraft Country—he was also recently introduced as the latest Marvel ultra-villain in the Disney+ series Loki. He is excellent in Devotion, proving himself a worthy leading man who, again, deserves more eyes on his performances than he’s getting.

All of Devotion is set in 1950, just five years after the end of the second World War and thus the same amount of time into the Cold War; the settings, always on or near a Navy aircraft carrier, move from Rhode Island to France to Korea. Jesse has a wife and daughter back home (Christina Jackson is also great as wife Daisy), scared and hopeful as this group of aviators is deployed to Korea at the start of that war, which doesn’t even happen until roughly the third act. And this is where the more thrilling flight sequences occur, which I must stress are worth the wait. There are POV shots from cockpits showing Chinese soldiers scattering across snowy forest hillsides that look very real, and whether there is any CG element to this or it was done with a large number of extras, either way it is visually impressive.

Perhaps most importantly, Devotion is about the bond of friendship, depicted with only just the right amount of sentimentality, and not about spectacle, although it has some of that too. These movies are also worth seeing, and still better experienced in a movie theater. By the end, you might just be weeping—I was—because of the attention to detail, not just in its technical achievements but in the representation of its relationships. This is the kind of movie I often find myself waiting and longing for, in which the director gives the story time to breathe. You really come to know these characters, and thus deeply care about them. And in the end, I left the theater caring about them far more than expected from what clearly looks to many to be a conventional film just like many others. The truth is, Devotion is in a class of its own.

Exceeds expectations even when you already expect it to be good.

Overall: A-

THE FABELMANS

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

There is a metatextual element to The Fabelmans that goes much deeper than the surface, something consistently more subtle than its more obvious parts—although the obvious parts can be pretty fun. As in, when young Sammy Fabelman makes a promise not to betray a schoolmate’s secret, “Unless I make a movie about it.” This line gets a big laugh because we are watching the very movie he’s talking about, and in lesser hands, this would be unbearable hokum. Not in the hands of Steven Spielberg, who here might just have made his crowning achievement.

I would never argue that The Fabelmans is Spielberg’s best film. I would, however, argue that it’s his best in twenty years, and a truly great late-career film, on par with Scorsese’s The Irishman. This is merely a matter of taste, but as someone with more of a penchant for warmth than for depth, between the two films, I prefer this one. Besides, whereas The Irishman deals with looking at your past with longing and regret, The Fabelmans, quite openly Spielberg’s most personal film, is much more concerned with love, forgiveness, and most of all, passion.

The passion part is what makes this movie work, in spite of some opening scenes that feel slightly forced and contrived. I am convinced, however, that not even those elements are an accident, and this film takes its time in deliberately winning over the viewer. There is no question that The Fabelmans is largely revisionist even as it is deeply autobiographical (written by Spielberg himself—his first feature film writing credit since 2001’s A.I.: Artificial Intelligence—and cowritten by Tony Kushner), and that is is absolutely designed to be emotionally manipulative.

But that is precisely the point. Sammy Fabelman, the film’s clear stand-in for Steven Spielberg himself as a child, grows up learning not just how to make movies, but how to shoot and edit them in ways that elicit a desired emotion from his audience. This movie itself is doing exactly what we are seeing Sammy learn how to do. A lot of this film has a visual quality that lies in the space between “dreamlike” and what can only be described as “Spielbergian,” and as such perfectly illustrates the experience of wistfulness and nostalgia.

Even the things that are quite on the nose must be very deliberate, as in the name of this family, “Fabelman.” Sammy is depicted by two impossibly beautiful, wide-eyed young boy actors, first as a child by Mateo Zoryan, and then as a teenager by Gabriel LaBelle, and both are excellent, but they also represent a longstanding tradition of casting actors who are far better looking than their real-life counterparts.

In the meantime, after literally decades of commentary on how Spielberg’s parents’ divorce has informed his art, Sammy’s parents are played by Paul Dano and Michelle Williams, with Seth Rogen as the mom’s slow-burn alternate love interest, also the dad’s best friend. All three of these actors here are playing characters unlike any other they have ever played; Dano in particular is an interesting choice, as he so often plays unsettling characters. Not so here: he’s just a nice-guy dad and husband, very busy with work but otherwise understanding to a fault, unable to stop loving a wife who still loves him, but loves someone else more. This may be the most straightforward role I have ever seen Seth Rogen play, and with very little physical alteration aside from a close-cropped haircut and a pair of glasses, he nearly disappears in the part.

Michelle Williams is the standout, though, as a woman desperately trying to be happy in a situation that on paper should not be miserable, but there are emotions just under the surface that are beyond her control. Especially as the film goes on, it seems inevitable she will be an Oscar contender.

It must also be noted, however, that Gabriel Labelle carries the movie incredibly well, from the moment he appears onscreen as the teenage Sammy, until the ending sequence, in which he meets a famous film director in Hollywood, which takes a turn that is quite literally Lynchian. And still, somehow, Spielberg maintains a consistency of tone that has long been one of his many cinematic touchstones.

So often I comment on a film’s run time, and The Fabelmans, it should be noted, is 2 hours and 31 minutes long. And yet, here is the mark of a great filmmaker: it does not feel that long at all. I was fully absorbed by this movie from start to finish, even as I found myself able to contemplate Spielberg’s choices. Judd Hirsch shows up as Sammy’s great uncle, and is not in the film for long, and yet even his performance is impossible to forget. Unlike, say, countless superhero movies of this length, nothing here feels like it could have, or should have, been cut.

At age 75, clearly Spielberg is a lot closer to the end of his career than to its beginning. He no doubt has several movies left in him, but one can easily understand why he might have wanted to get this one done well before anything might force him to slow down. Nearly thirty years ago, he won his first Best Picture Oscar for Schindler’s List, which was clearly deeply personal to him as a Jewish man. This film, on the other hand, is deeply personal to him as a family man, as someone with a kind of all-encompassing empathy rarely found. You can feel the love he has for his parents, even as he dramatizes some of their less flattering behaviors toward each other. Even more keenly, you can feel the passion he had, and has, for filmmaking—and the respect his parents developed for that passion.

You get the sense that The Fabelmans is a bit of an idealized version of the Spielberg story, here rendered as the Fabelman story, but this movie’s very existence proves how he wouldn’t have it any other way. I wouldn’t either.

There is always more to the story, but the Spielberg version is a treat.

Overal: A-

GLASS ONION: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY

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

Is Glass Onion as good as Knives Out? Not quite—but that was to be expected, the typical nature of a sequel. But, is it almost as good as Knives Out? Actually, yes. And do I hope Rian Johnson and Daniel Craig team up for more “Benoit Blanc” mysteries two or three more times? Absolutely!

Because, make no mistake: Glass Onion may not quite match the acting pedigree of its predecessor—which, frankly, has some effect on its performances—it’s still a hell of a good time. I had a blast, and even look forward to watching it again.

I can’t really decide whether I find it disappointing that this movie is getting a strict one-week theatrical release, starting today, with its Netflix release exactly one month from now, on December 23. This is a very different approach from its predecessor, this offering being much more definitively “a Netflix movie.” But, such is the state of the film industry: it could easily be argued that this is the most appropriate approach for a movie of this sort. Viewers aplenty will thoroughly enjoy the film on a streamer in a month, and movie theatre purists like myself are satisfied for now.

I loved seeing this in the theater, but do I have any reason to insist you see it in the same way? Not really. I’ll watch it again at home with my husband next month. The level of “prestige” a film is perceived to have depending on its medium of release is changing.

I will say this: some might think Glass Onion is less, say, “sophisticated” than Knives Out was, even in light of both films’ similar streaks of wit. Glass Onion seems more inclined to lean into its cornier humor, but a bit knowingly so. This was but one of many things I really enjoyed about it.

Here’s my only real nitpick. Glass Onion not only fully acknowledges the pandemic, but is literally set in 2020, a curious choice on writer-director Rian Johnson’s part. One wonders if he came up with the idea during lockdowns, as it feels a little like a “covid movie,” the nine principal characters spending the vast majority of the film alone together on a secluded island. Only one scene features a genuine crowd of people, all of them at a huge party inside a woman’s house, and it is played for laughs: “Oh, they’re all part of my pod.”

That’s not the nitpick, though. Eight guests, all but one of them friends and colleagues of billionaire Miles Bron (Edward Norton), are invited to this weekend island getaway. And then, shortly after the slightly jarring sight of these characters wearing face masks—to Johnson’s credit, each character’s differing level of care in wearing them properly effectively illustrates their personalities—they are each somehow immunized by a random guy walking to each of them in turn and shooting something into their throats with a sort of gun. “Immunize” isn’t even a word used; the guy just says, “You don’t have to wear your mask anymore. You’re good.” Huh? I’m not sure why we couldn’t just get some throwaway line about having all of them take a covid test, which would have been far more realistic. I suppose Johnson’ felt this would be more “cinematic,” and to be fair, we regularly forgive far less plausible things in movies. Nevertheless, I found it distractingly dumb.

That was the only such moment for me, though. Johnson is proving to be a master at whodunnit storytelling, always with the clever misdirects. You go into this movie primed to think, and fully expecting, Miles Bron to be the murder victim. Then, there is a second-act time shift so sudden the only thing it’s missing is a record scratch, and we get to see a whole lot of what we just saw, from different characters’ perspectives. And plot turns are still left after that, all of them satisfying. This movie offers plenty of what we expect of it, just in surprising flavors.

A lot of these murder mysteries are very easy to figure out, at least for the viewers trying to figure it out. I am not one of those people; I like to give myself over to the story, without making any effort to solve the mystery myself. I only get annoyed when the answer is so obvious I can see it without even trying. That never happens with “Knives Out Mysteries,” and I think even the people who usually figure out the answers will find it a fun challenge.

Some media attention has been given to the fact that Glass Onion makes Benoit Blanc’s sexuality more explicit, although it’s brief and surprisingly subtle. The brief moment when we see Blanc's partner is one of a few delightful cameos in this movie. (Two of the others, seen onscreen during a Zoom call with Blanc in the bathtub, I won’t spoil, except to say they are both the very last roles of two legendary figures, one of them a kind of heartwarming in-joke.) I don’t know how others will take Blanc’s costume design in this movie, but as a gay man myself, I kind of loved its “old-school gay” aesthetic, complete with neckerchiefs.

As for the rest of the characters invited to the island, they are played by a brand new ensemble of name actors, including Janelle Monáe (maybe the best-cast of the bunch), Kate Hudson, Dave Bautista, Kathryn Hahn, and Leslie Odom Jr., along with Jessica Henwick as Hudson’s assistant and Madelyn Cline as Bautista’s girlfiend, amusingly named “Whiskey.” That’s not to mention the heavy sprinkling of cameos, several of them people playing themselves, and I won’t spoil who they are.

I get the feeling a lot of these people simply jumped at the chance to appear in a Rian Johnson movie, and particularly “A Knives Out Mystery,” largely on the strength of Knives Out. As naturally they would: Johnson is very good not just at casting, but for assembling an ensemble with effective chemistry. These movies are doubly impressive for their re-watchability even once you know the answer to their central mysteries. Which is to say, Glass Onion has no unattained aspirations, aiming only to be a delight from beginning to end, and that is a promise on which it delivers.

I suppose you’re all wondering why I gathered you here today.

Overall: B+

THE MENU

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

It’s too bad we can’t all see The Menu not knowing literally anything about it at all. The experience would be far more fun, and this movie is fun regardless—but something gets lost in all that is revealed in the trailer. In all likelihood, had I had the opportunity to sit down in a movie theater, completely oblivious to anything except the fact that I was about to see a movie, and then saw this—I’d give it a higher rating. This would be the perfect contender for one of those “secret screenings” at film festivals.

Of course, they can’t all be like that, or else how could anyone sell it? We have to know something, right, to get people interested? The best marketers can do in this case, I suppose, is edit a trailer in a way that misdirects expectations a bit. This is the closest I’ll come to spoiling anything: the clear suggestion made by the trailer, as to what’s happening amongst this group of filthy rich diners at an exclusive, ridiculously high-end restaurant on a secluded island, is not exactly where this story is headed.

And the thing is, if the less you know the better, what else can I tell you? Well, I’ve already noted the premise. And you can expect a diverse, ensemble cast, with Anya Talor-Joy as the protagonist, Nicholas Hoult as the obsessive food snob who brought her as his date, and Ralph Fiennes as the, let’s say, morally dubious chef. A smattering of recognizable faces show up among the dozen or so other diners, all of whom are carried to the island in a small passenger ferry, including John Leguizamo, Reed Birney, Janet McTeer, and—a delightful surprise—Judith Light, among others. Several of them are recognizable character actors you’ll find yourself wondering what show or movie you’ve seen them in.

And this is what I liked best about The Menu: even when you start thinking you know where things are headed, in the middle of the movie’s narrative, you don’t. At one point I was really afraid we were headed for some kind of The Game-style ending in which we find out the protagonist is the only one being played. I was much relieved to find that fear unfounded. When the proceedings start to become severe, they really are as severe as they seem. Just not in the way you’re expecting if you’ve been taken in by this film’s marketing.

Now, is there any reason to rush into theaters to see this? Honestly, no. I’m all for keeping the movie theater industry afloat, and for achieving that goal through more than just CGI blockbuster extravaganzas, but some movies still serve their purpose just as well on your TV at home. As fun as The Menu is—and I definitively had fun—this is still one such example. The best I can suggest is to make a note of this film’s title, wait until you find it available on a streamer, and then turn it on without finding out anything more about it. You won’t regret it, especially if you’re inclined to roll your eyes at deeply pretentious discussions about food.

The menu tells a story. Just not quite the one you’re expecting.

Overall: B