POLITE SOCIETY

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

If you’re looking for an uber-specific niche interest in your moviegoing entertainment, look no further than Polite Society, which fuses Bollywood with martial arts as performed by Brits of South Asian descent. It’s west-meets-east-meets-further-east-meets-west again.

And I had a great time. I suppose I should also be clear: this movie is cheesy as hell, to a degree that I made a conscious decision to look past. Sometimes, it’s downright cartoonish.

This is clearly intentional on the part of writer-director Nida Manzoor, in a feature film debut she isn’t taking any more seriously than she wants us to. Don’t get me wrong—she also plainly wanted to do a good job. But, the job she had at hand was farcical, and for the most part it succeeds on that front. The performances are winning; the action and choreography are delightful. I just would have liked the plotting to be a bit more clever.

At least there is believable love and affection between sisters Ria (Priya Kansara) and Lena (Ritu Arya), who both not only have unusually creative dreams for themselves, but they also have parents who indulge them far more than any of their parents’ peers do their own children. Ria is the youngest, still in high school, making YouTube videos of the moves she learns in martial arts class as she dreams of becoming a stuntwoman. Lena, the eldest, has dropped out of high school because she’s convinced herself she isn’t talented enough.

With Lena’s life adrift and without direction, she gets easily lured into a quasi-arranged marriage with handsome Salim (Akshay Khanna), who has an uncomfortably intimate relationship with his cartoonishly villainous mother, Raheela (Nimra Bucha). Much of Polite Society is spent with Ria plotting to break up this engagement between Salim and her sister, in increasingly ridiculous ways—including a sequence in which not only Ria, but one of her two schoolmates infiltrates Salim’s gym dressed as a man. (In one memorable shot, we see a bunch of naked butts in a locker room.)

This is real “Looney Tunes” stuff, which is where Polite Society slightly stumbles, as it relies on cheesy physical gags as opposed to wit. What makes it worth giving into the utter silliness, however, is when Nida Manzoor kicks it up a notch with at least one choreographed wedding dance lip syncing to a Bollywood song (where Ria found the time to rehearse with several backup dancers is unclear), and multiple sequences with martial arts choreography usually reserved for straight up action movies, but here featuring women in beautifully colorful saris. Seeing all these martial arts moves combined with flowing scarves and swirling dresses is a memorably charming touch.

Ria’s consistent practice in her martial arts class provides a plausible explanation for her skill—as well as her struggles, particularly with a spin kick—or, more accurately, “Chekov’s spin kick,” which we see her fail at several times early on. Lena proves to be equally competent at fighting, though, and we see less of anything to explain that. And of course, through most of the film, Ria is outmatched by Raheela, but Raheela is such a cartoon villain that having her be great at everything—until she ultimately gets bested—is practically mandatory.

I guess you could say: I wanted to feel the vibe with Polite Society more than I really did, at least on average. There’s some potential there that doesn’t quite get met. I’m always down with silliness, but I like it better when married with cleverness, which this film has a bit of, but it skirts the line between cleverness and cheesy tropes a bit too much of the time.

It wouldn’t be nearly as good as it still manages to be without the actors, though. It’s fun to watch Nimra Bucha chew up the scenery, and Priya Kansara and Ritu Arya have great chemistry as sisters. Best of all—and this remains an important point, something that makes Polite Society stand out in the best way—this is a movie about women, about sisterhood, directed, written, and shot by women. There are also men in key crew roles (most notably editor Robbie Morrison), but many of the key roles behind the scenes are filled by women, and nearly all the roles onscreen are women. The only real exceptions are Ria’s father, who is only in a few scenes; and Salim, who is given far less depth as a character than any of the many women surrounding him.

Which is to say, there’s a lot to delight in what Polite Society has to offer. It’s also largely mindless, yet well executed fun. Which people of all genders have the right to do! Not everything has to be a masterpiece; in fact, most things don’t. And this one is certainly unique, which is the greatest thing it has going for it.

Sisters are kicking it for themselves.

Overall: B

RENFIELD

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

Renfield goes from zero to a hundred in about five minutes. That may not be much for a car, but for a a movie, it’s a bit much. It took me about another five minutes to lose my patience with it.

Nicolas Cage has basically made a career of phoning it in, which is ironic for an actor of his proven talents. The guys clearly likes to work, and he gets work plenty, having become one of the most prolific actors alive. I’m not convinced, however, that at this stage in his career he’s much interested in being challenged. In virtually every role, it’s like the director just points his camera at him and lets him do whatever he wants. I’m sure that’s plenty fun for him. For the rest of us, it’s a mixed bag at best.

Here he plays Dracula, in a comedy-horror that leans on the gore for its humor, much like last month’s Cocaine Bear did. The crucial differences are that Cocaine Bear had better dialogue—albeit not by a wide margin—and, perhaps more importantly, better pacing. That movie actually knew how to built tension, ridiculous though it may have been. Renfield just dives right into the wild action sequences, making it more manic than anything else. This movie feels more cocaine-fueled than Cocaine Bear did.

The protagonist, narrator, and title character is Dracula’s “familiar,” or his centuries-old slave, here played by Nicholas Hoult. Somehow he winds up becoming friends with a local New Orleans police officer played by Awkafina, as the only cop in the city who isn’t corrupt. I wonder how the City of New Orleans feels about this depiction.

In director Chris McKay’s version of this story, Renfield gains “a tiny fraction” of Dracula’s power by . . . eating bugs. At first I thought they had to be some kind of special bugs, but no, they can be any average bug. This would include the ants from a young boy’s ant farm. Renfield eats an insect, and suddenly he has superhuman powers.

The script for this movie feels like something no one bothered to proofread. To make matters worse, the editor and makeup artists were evidently entirely unconcerned with continuitiy. Renfield can fight off a whole crowd of attackers, literally make them explode in a fountain of blood and guts, and then emerge without any of it all over him, or even on him at all.

The most disappointing thing about Renfield is that is premise is actually compelling: Renfield is learning he is in a codependent relationship with Dracula, and must figure out how to break free of it—after a ridiculous amount of cartoonish violence, of course. This movie has a few amusing moments, but they almost feel like accidents. It’s not just that I want to write it off as dumb, because even a dumb movie can be well made in the right hands. This movie, on the other hand, is bereft of wit.

There’s a certain infectiousness to how much fun everyone is clearly having, I suppose. There’s even clear intent in how cartoonish it is. And yet: it’s just way too cartoonish, every plot point so wildly contrived it’s genuinely annoying, a complete waste of Shohreh Aghdashloo and Ben Schwartz as local mafia villains, who are so devoid of nuance they literally talk about how much they love violence and evil.

I’m sure some people will be entertained by Renfield. Those people have no standards and no taste. Okay, maybe that’s a little harsh. A more generous read on this movie would be that it’s an homage to mediocrity. The run time is merely 93 minutes and I was more than ready for it to be over after thirty. Why couldn’t they hire whoever cut the trailer to edit the movie? The trailer was far more entertaining, even upon repeat viewings. That is the trick with trailers, though: to dress up a bad movie as something you want to see. It worked on me. I guess you can take this as fair warning: don’t bother with this inept and rote attempt at subverting genre,

Nicolas Cage chews up the scenery, his costars, and any chance of wit.

Overall: C-

HOW TO BLOW UP A PIPELINE

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

Is it sad, or is it a relief, that the powers that be clearly feel no threat at the existence of How to Blow Up a Pipeline? It can be both at once, I suppose. The title can’t be taken too literally—we don’t see any cohesive instructions onscreen. It seems readily apparent that both instruction and inspiration can be found elsewhere. I can’t speak to the Andreas Malm book on which it’s based. Either way, not nearly as many people will see this film as it deserves, and its themes will be preaching to small choirs across the country, who nod their heads in faux “solidarity” while they all go back to the systems in their lives that brought us here.

That’s not a judgement, just a statement. How to Blow Up a Pipeline, as a film, is a statement. Its ensemble cast of characters is a diverse group of young idealists, who have a legitimate claim when they say their destructive acts are done in self-defense. This film is very much in league with the 2020 Kim Stanley Robinson novel The Ministry for the Future, in which, among a multitude of other events, “drone clusters” are used to clog dozens of commercial airplanes around the world on the same day, in an effort to frighten the population into avoiding such a carbon-heavy mode of transportation. The actions of How to Blow Up a Pipeline exist on a far smaller scale, but I have a feeling both are prescient. The longer establishment entities do nothing about climate change, the more radical the responses will become. The same is happening with gun violence protests right now, and climate action is close behind.

Which is to say, How to Blow Up a Pipeline currently exists largely under the radar, but the type of action it depicts won’t for long. These characters all have plausible, real-world motivations for what they do, from the young woman (American Honey’s Sasha Lane) with Leukemia as a result of growing up near a chemical refinery, to the Texas father and husband (Jake Weary) who has been forced out of his home by “eminent domain” to make way for the construction of the titular oil pipeline.

These two wind up as part of an activist—or terrorist, depending on your angle of view—group through a series of degrees of separation, including Marcus Scribner as a member of a documentary crew recording the displaced Texas family’s story; Ariela Barer as best friend to Sasha Lane, having grown up together in the same neighborhood; Jayme Lawson as Lane’s reluctant participant girlfriend; Euphoria’s Lukas Gage as a Portland protester and Kristine Froseth as his girlfriend who may or may not be acting as informant to the FBI; and Forrest Goodluck as the disaffected North Dakotan who has taught himself bomb assembly.

Most of How to Blow Up a Pipeline is very procedural, effectively tense thanks to the urgency of Daniel Goldhaber’s direction, and we meet all these people right as they are kicking their plan into action. We then see them follow it through to its conclusion, and the only time we really learn anything about them on an individual level is as, every ten or fifteen minutes, they each get a turn with a flashback that fleshes out each of their motives.

And this movie is clearly on their side, even when one or two of them argues against their tactics. The point that taking action within the system isn’t working is valid. These young adults know that what they’re doing is dangerous, that cutting off a vital line to literal power will hurt the livelihoods of people not that different from them. The specific plan carried out here is sound, and once its conclusion is reached, there’s an undeniable thrill to it.

There are moments when it feels a bit like the dialogue lacks depth. But then you remember how young, and to varying degrees desperate, these kids are. This is how such people would actually be talking to each other. The narrative thread wraps itself up a little too cleanly for plausibility, but that is also how movie making works: if you want a point to get made, you make it by also creating solid entertainment. How to Blow Up a Pipleline works very well on both tracks.

Hmm well I guess that’s how you do it.

Overall: B+

AIR

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

There’s a reason Air isn’t called Air Jordan, and it’s because this movie is not about Michael Jordan. Director Ben Affleck and debut feature writer Alex Convery are actually fairly pointed about this, having cast Damian Delano Young as Jordan, only showing him onscreen briefly, even in scenes where he’s an essential member of the group present, and granting him maybe one actual line of dialogue.

This is actually the story of Nike. Nike the shoe, Nike the brand. Maybe it’s the story of the company’s second wind, the thing that catapulted it into the global business stratosphere: how Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon) convinced Michael Jordan to sign a historically lucrative endorsement deal, by going through his mother, Deloris (Viola Davis). The whole thing is set in 1984, which the movie never, ever lets you forget, from its production design to its costume design to its soundtrack.

All of that dressing makes Air seem a whole lot cooler than it really is. If Air proves anything, it’s that it’s never the story itself that makes a story great, but how it’s told. To be clear: this is. movie about a basketball endorsement deal, and I am a person that should never particularly interest. And yet, I was fully engaged—even though it could be argued this film is just a two-hour commercial for shoes, and shoes that have no need for any extra marketing. And yet: a good story is a good story, and it can in the right hands it can be a great story.

I hestiate to call this story great. It’s just far better than anyone could reasonably have expected it to be, especially after a trailer was released that made it look like a standard-issue TV movie that would have been right at home on HBO twenty or thirty years ago. The performances are solid yet fairly unremarkable all around. Side note: it’s curious that no one seems to be giving Matt Damon any shit for wearing a fat suit for this part. Maybe it’s just because this is still a mid-tier movie, not really an awards contender, so no one is coming out of the woodwork to declare it overrated. Then again, it’s early yet. And Viola Davis in particular is very good here, but then, she always is.

Affleck cast himself as Nike CEO Phil Knight, and his depiction here is how I learned he was apparently known for resting his bare feet upon his desk. I can only imagine directing oneself in a film to be a difficult task, and here he’s . . . fine. I’ll say his directing is better than his performance. Because I still kind of can’t believe how entertaining I found this movie. The cast is a comfortable hang, from atypical parts for both Chris Tucker and Marlon Wayans, to Jason Bateman as a bit of a hit-or-miss marketer, to Matthew Maher as the designer of the shoe.

Not that I’ll ever go out of my way to watch it again. But, not every good movie has to be rewatchable. Would I recommend it? Well, there’s a lot to recommend it, actually. If you have particular interest in basketball and basketball history, the commercial angle here notwithstanding, you’d probably enjoy Air. If you like Ben Affleck or Matt Damon or Viola Davis, that alone would sufficiently recommend it. If you’re a fan of shoes, and particularly the lore and history of Nike, the same applies. Maybe that’s what gives this movie broad appeal, it’s many points of entry.

If you’re fairly indifferent to all of those things, however, you’d be fine skipping it. I can’t say I’d have missed anything all that special had I never watched this movie. Having decided to see it, on the other hand, I did find myself pleasantly surprised by it.

Sometimes you just have to talk to the right people.

Overall: B

A THOUSAND AND ONE

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

The film industry has such a long history of churning out mediocrity and retreads of the same tired concepts, there are times when one wonders if it’s even possible for anyone to come up with anything original anymore. And then, every once in a while, a film comes along with such a singular vision that it can restore faith in the power and potential of cinema.

A Thousand and One is one of those films. Rarely does such a vividly drawn portrait so effectively occupy the gray areas of life and history. In this case, writer-director A.V. Rockwell proves to be such a talent with a first feature film that I can’t even say she has potential. She’s already realized it. I can only say that I already breathlessly await whatever she makes next, and if she doesn’t have a vastly accomplished career ahead of her, we will have all been criminally deprived.

I loved everything about this movie, which is set in New York City in three different parts: 1994, 2001, and 2005. Rockwell isn’t so much interested in specific pivotal moments in New York historty—no mention of 9/11 here—as she is painting a portrait of a city in flux, bringing changes that do no favors to the characters on whom she focuses. A Thousand and One, whose title refers to the apartment number where young mother Inez (Teyana Taylor, a revelation of rough screen chemistry) and her son Terry live, is packed with establishing shots of Manhattan and Harlem, many of them high drone shots, for once never used to show off. Each shot serves the story here, giving us a sense of place, along with carefully curated clips of mayor speeches of the time. We hear pontifications on so-called “improving people’s lives,” while we see, for instance, a young teen Terry become subject to the city’s infamous “stop and frisk” program.

It’s rare that I am this impressed by a film’s overall casting, but it must be called out here. Terry is depicted by three different young actors: Aaron Kingsley Adetola as him at six years old; Aven Courtey at thirteen; Josiah Cross at seventeen. Each actor has a distinct manner and presence, and yet they perfectly complement each other as the same character at different ages, different stages of his development as a quiet, withdrawn young man, almost embarrassed by his own intellect. I was deeply impressed by all of them.

Still, Teyana Taylor is the star performer here, from the jump as a young mother who, instead of leaving her son to the foster care system, takes him home with her shortly after her release from jail. We learn she is 22 years old, and as an older woman gives her a break and rents a room to her, she admonishes her to “act like an adult.” All I could think about is how young 22 really is. Inez makes decisions that are very bad on paper, but are easy to empathize with.

And then: while we rightly expect the abduction of the young boy to bring quickly tragic consequences—we actually see Terry grow up with her. Over time, the building begins to crumble with age. The single White character with any real lines is a new landlord who is deceptively helpful at first, ultimately telling Inez she’ll need to “clear out” for a month or two in order for the necessary repairs to get done.

Near the end, A Thousand and One takes a shocking turn that I truly did not see coming, and which poses a sudden challenge to that aforementioned easy empathy. Things aren’t quite as surprisingly simple as it seemed to be, for eleven years. It’s rare that a film covering such a time span is so precisely well told, but editors Sabine Hoffman (Passing) and Kristan Sprague (Judas and the Black Messiah) are masters of their craft.

This film features characters audiences never get to see in cinema, lived-in neighborhoods of Black communities with multidimensional individuals as compelling as they are flawed, earnest and uncertainly principled, both products of and transcendent of their environments. Terry finds himself with a stepfather who is clearly much older than Inez, named Lucky (William Catlett), who makes some very common mistakes but is never villainized. He is only ever nurturing toward Terry, and you can’t help but root for the relationships between all three of these characters to work out in one way or another.

Out of everyone, it’s Inez who comes closest to being a villain, and yet we seem to understand every decision she makes, even potentially dangerous ones. A Thousand and One isn’t quite a tale of redemption, but rather one of hard-won love and affection. “Damaged people don’t know how to love each other,” Inez says to Lucky. “That’s all.” Except there’s more love around her than she realizes, and plenty to go around for films like this one.

Broken people try to keep their creations intact.

Overall: A

LINOLEUM

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

Linoleum is my kind of mystery. What’s going on with Cameron (Jim Gaffigan)? He’s just checking his mail, minding his own business, and suddenly a red sports car falls out of the sky onto the street next to him. He walks around, and the person inside the smashed car looks uncannily like a younger version of him.

Cameron is also the host of a struggling children’s show, focused on science. It’s very low-fi, which gives it an undeniable charm, and we are subject to a great many fun clips from it—including the opening scene. We shift from there to the falling car in short order, with pleasant cinematography and clever editing, and we immediately wonder if this film is going to be playing with time or space or both, or perhaps the supernatural.

I won’t spoil it. Linoleum is best experienced, I suspect, the way I experienced it: knowing almost nothing about the content or the tone. I’ll tell you this: Gaffigan is competent in not one, but two parts; Rhea Seehorn is lovely as his frustrated wife; Katelyn Nacon charms as his daughter, Nora; Gabriel Rush is a bit stoic as Nora’s love interest. Roger Hendricks Simon plays the elder man we are clearly meant to assume is Cameron’s father, ailing with dementia. Curiously, when asked “Who are you?” Cameron doesn’t say, “I’m your son,” but rather, “You know me.” If you clock that, you’ll know something odd is afoot.

And you wouldn’t be wrong. By the end of Linoleum, how all these characters are connected is revealed to be something different from how it initially appeared—both confused and clicking pieces together, making everything make sense. I was somewhat relieved by this ending, actually, as I can’t imagine everything seen prior to be as satisfying in any other way.

Linoleum is a special kind of movie that has a peculiar charm threaded through its melancholy. It’s sort of an exercise in blending nostalgia and wistfulness, a longing for great times that can no longer be. Writer-director Colin West offers a slightly abstract portrait of complicated love and longing, revealing how simple seemingly complex things can be, and vice versa. “It’s not that simple” is a line uttered several times, always clear that it really is.

There is a running theme of unrealized dreams in this movie, with Cameron mentioning how he always wanted to do “something fantastic.” This film itself is something fantastic, in the literal sense of the word. It doesn’t seem to be getting much traction in theaters, and I can only hope it will soon on one streamer or another. I found it quite lovely, and surprisingly moving.

It will take you to unexpected places you’ll be glad you went.

Overall: B+

JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 4

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

It may surprise you to learn that the John Wick franchise has a key commonality with the Toy Story franchise. Who knew! Namely, the both had the surprise of a third installment that was the best in the series, followed by a fourth that was . . . fine, but still begged the question: did we really need it?

To be fair, I am out of step with the critical consensus on the John Wick films. Going by their respective MetaScores, John Wick Chapter 4 is the best in the series (MetaScore 78), followed by 2017’s John Wick: Chapter 2 (75), then 2019’s John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum (73), with the 2014 original ranking last (68).

What I seem to have forgotten is that I gave every single one of these movies the exact same grade: a solid B. Fully acknowledging that I did actually enjoy this film, I must also admit that I got at least moderately duped by the critical hype in regards to Chapter 4.

What I found myself thinking about while watching this film was, it’s really just more of the same. This isn’t even the first installment for which it may actually be worth watching for the cinematography and production design alone. These movies are very pretty to look at, and Chapter 4 continues that tradition.

The action itself, though? There’s only so much you can do with so-called “gun fu,” mixing martial arts with gun battles. A lot of people die in this movie, nearly all of them faceless and expendable, like red shirts in old Star Trek episodes. Then suddenly you’ll see Keanu Reeves standing in front of red neon and next to a blossoming cherry tree and you can’t help but think, Whoa—that’s beautiful!

There’s one new element here that comes with mixed results, however: the special effects. Several of the shots in Chapter 4 have the unmistakable quality of barely-off, visual artificiality. And we’re talking about pretty common sights. A sunrise. Traffic. I’ll admit the extended sequence with Wick battling assassins in between passing cars on Paris’s Place Charles de Gaulle is gripping and fun, but also: you can tell a lot of those cars weren’t really there.

Speaking of which, that sequence feeds into the many questions I have about this film. Would regular traffic just keep passing by in such heavy thickness during an obvious gunfight between countless men? Why does no one seem to care that this is happening?

The same happens in a packed nightclub, in which a bunch of would-be assassins come at John Wick with guns, knives, even axes. The dancers move a bit out of their way, but otherwise just keep on dancing. There does come a point at which the crowd finally panics and clears out, but only after many minutes of carnage, and with no clear trigger point (so to speak).

At least the Osaka hotel where the first extended action sequence takes place is conscientiously (or “discreetly,” as Hiroyuki Sanada’s character Shimazu puts it) evacuated. This sequence moves from room to room, each one a carefully curated work of art, featuring glass patterns and neon outlines. There’s no denying how cool it looks.

That seems to be where the logical action ends, though. In a climactic scene involving an old-school duel, it’s sunrise in front of a church, two guys attempting multiple times to shoot each other to death. Where are this church’s caretakers, anyway? I suppose we are to assume the “High Table” is so globally powerful they can be sure everyone who needs to hear it should keep a wide berth. Or maybe they don’t care? I don’t know.

Just before the duel in front of the church, John Wick Chapter 4 becomes almost self-aware in its ridiculousness, and is still legitimately entertaining on its own merits. Wick battles would-be assassins up a long, concrete staircase for several minutes, only to wind up thrown all the way back own them again. Of course, this rampant gunfire the likes of which does not tend to be encountered outside of a war zone apparently does nothing to rouse any of the sleeping neigbors. Maybe the French are just all really deep sleepers.

I’m fully aware that all of this is beside the point in any John Wick movie. Other critics have stated that the plot, such as it is, doesn’t matter in the slightest. This seems ironic to me, as I found myself engaged by the plot, even though the whole shtick of countless assassins coming at our hero because of a frequently increased bounty was just done in the previous installment. These movies never really have anything new to say. They just attempt to up the ante on the action set pieces to varying degrees of effect. There is a fun sequence in a building undergoing renovations, in which the camera glides with a birds-eye view over the walls as John Wick makes his way from room to room. I wonder how many people will remember Steven Spielberg doing the exact same thing, with greater visual wit, twenty years ago in Minority Report.

In spite of this movie’s many flaws, and its truly excessive 169-minute length, I still found myself invested in its characters—not just John Wick himself, but the few key supporting characters, both friend and foe, a couple of them shifting from one to the other. This franchise famously started with a man seeking revenge for the murder of his dog, and the dog lovers should be happy to learn that another dog character figures prominently here. It even gets used as a pivot point in the plot. It’s a little contrived, but you know, come on. This is a John Wick movie.

I suppose that could be the tag line: Come on. It’s a John Wick movie. What else do you need to know, really? I can nitpick all I want, especially about this really being the same as any other superhero movie, with our protagonist taking astonishing beatings and consistently just getting right back up again, limping a couple of times and then seemingly fully recovered in seconds. These movies are all of them action fantasies, which is what we come to them for, and they provide what the viewers want.

Oh did I mention he wears a bulletproof suit?

Overall: B

EMILY

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

I’m not sure much could be said to sway potential viewers either way regarding Emily, which is a fairly standard, and competent, period piece about a famous writer from the 19th century—in this case, Emily Brontë. As written and directed by longtime actor Frances O’Connor, in her feature directorial debut, I found myself both engaged, and wondering—maybe she should write and direct a couple of sequels about Emily’s also-famous writer sisters, Charlotte Brontë (who wrote Jane Eyre) and Anne Brontë (who wrote Agnes Grey).

Emily, along with second-born and only son Branwell, was a middle child, a black sheep of the family, and very much depicted as such in Emily. She’s the one who wrote Wuthering Heights, but it is very late into the film before Frances O’Connor gets to that. As portrayed, rather convincingly, by Emma Mackey, we are meant to understand she is an oddball, so “different” that people in town talk about her, although she never struck me as all that strange. I suppose it makes sense that the bar for such things would have been very different in the mid-nineteenth century.

Ultimately, Emily is a love story, on multiple fronts: the love between her and her aspiring-writer brother (Fionn Whitehead); the fictionalized love between her and morally conflicted preacher William Weightman (a dashingly handsome Oliver Jackson-Cohen). On both fronts this movie offers a lot: heartsickness, betrayal. On some levels the same goes for Emily’s relationship with sister Charlotte, who judges her for the “base” content of her novel.

To this movie’s credit, it made me think maybe I should re-read Wuthering Heights. I’ve read it at least once, but not since I was in school, and I really can’t remember any of it at all. Not that I would get any genuine insights from this film going into it, what with its many fictional liberties.

Not that I’m complaining. No one is claiming this is a true story, and Emily stands as solid, if hardly groundbreaking, storytelling on its own merits. There is something a bit uneven about the cinematography by Nanu Segal, offering many striking images of English countryside in various states of weather sprinkled alongside a lot of pointlessly shaky handheld camera shots. I suppose this is meant to evoke Emily’s volatile state of mind.

Emily’s sister criticizes her book by dismissing it as full of selfish characters who only ever think of themselves. I’m not sure if that is also supposed to be a self-assessment by Emily itself, but it seems to come close. I wouldn’t write it off for that reason, though. I wouldn’t write it off at all. I just wouldn’t particularly recommend it to anyone not already into period pieces either.

The performances are solid, the movie is fine, the costumes are nice.

Overall: B

COCAINE BEAR

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

If you enjoyed the 2019 alligator-monster movie Crawl, then you’ll certainly enjoy Cocaine Bear.

I did, and I certainly did.

Both films have a very similar sensibility, with a healthy self-awareness that never takes itself too seriously, plenty of hilarious gore, and a sprinkling of genuine suspense. To be fair, Crawl has a bit more of the suspense and Cocoaine Bear has a bit more of a subtle wink at its audience.

It does seem to make a difference that Cocaine Bear was directed by none other than . . . Elizabeth Banks. Wait, what? This is her third feature film as director, but the others were Pitch Perfect 2 and Charlie’s Angels. Those movies have their own metatextual layers, with varying success: Cocaine Bear seems to be where she has hit her stride. Banks knows exactly what kind of movie she’s making, and exactly what audiences expect from it.

Too often, a movie like this tries to hard to mix the comedy and absurdity with sweetness and earnestness (see: Violent Night). Banks, along with writer Jimmy Warden, knows there’s no need for that shit. Instead, we get Keri Russell yelling “I’m a mom!” before intercepting a tossed rifle.

That’s not to say the characters in this movie are complete caricatures. Cocaine Bear successfully walks a fine line, offering characters that are real enough and with distinct personalities, all of them converging from disparate narrative threads onto a mountainous area of the woods where a bunch of duffle bags full of cocaine were tossed out of an airplane. What none of them know, but all of them discover eventually, is that a bear discovered the coke and ate a bunch of it, turning it into a ravenous killer.

This story is “inspired by true events,” although to say it takes liberties would be an understatement—liberties all taken in the best way. That said, “murdurino” listeners of the wildly popular My Favorite Murder podcast minisodes, in which the hosts read stories sent in my listeners, will be very familiar with the original story. Fan favorite Nick Terry even animated their retelling of it. They take very similar, truly hilarious liberties with the story, which Elizabeth Banks is effectively doing on a grander scale.

I expected to enjoy Cocaine Bear just based on its absurd premise, and yet it actually exceeded my expectations. I thought this would be a B-minus at best, and yet still a good time. But the movie we’ve actually got is surprisingly well executed, with a stacked cast, in addition to Keri Russell: Solo: A Star Wars Story’s Alden Erenreich as a depressed criminal with a conscience; O'Shea Jackson Jr. as his exasperated cohort; Isiah Whitlock Jr. as a cop on their tail; Margo Martindale as a park ranger with a trigger finger; a wildly unrecognizable Jesse Tyler Ferguson as a “wildlife expert” who is the object of her crush; even Ray Liotta, in his final film role, plays Erenreich’s drug dealer dad. (The film is dedicated to his memory.)

All the performances are great, by actors who know what kind of movie they are in and are having a blast. What it all comes down to, though, really, is the bear itself, who also takes up a perfect amount of screen time—never overdone, never gone too long. The thing is quite clearly CGI rendered, but for a movie with a paltry $35 million budget, it’s actually fairly impressive. This movie is of an ilk that has never been known to be visually groundbreaking. As long as the effects aren’t hilariously bad, then the film can succeed on its own terms. And boy, does this one succeed.

The key, really, is its lack of earnestness. There is a bit of sweetness, but only in ways that serve the movie’s purpose, which is to entertain and amuse. I laughed a lot, and at consistently regular intervals. That was clearly the goal. This movie’s promise is quite straightforward, and it delivers.

The biggest coke head you’ll ever come across.

Overall: B+

GODLAND

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

I learned some new things about Iceland after watching Godland, a film about a Danish priest who travels across late-19th-century Iceland toward a settlement where he intends to build a church. According to one of the characters, another native of Denmark, no trees grow in Iceland. The winters are too harsh. Apparently this isn’t quite true, at least not currently. Possibly these settlers made this assumption of the island based on where their settlement was.

Often a movie like Godland is a bit of a struggle for those of us with no working knowledge of European history. Writer-director Hlynur Pálmason seems to assume some such knowledge among his audience, which makes sense given the languages spoken in the film are limited to Danish and Icelandic—quite pointedly so: we get the title card in both languages, in successive shots. This later proves relevant, as the priest, Lucas (Elliott Crosset Hove), speaks Danish but does not know Icelandic, and is paired with an Icelandic-speaking guide, Ragnar (Ingvar Sigurðsson), who leads him across the island. In the comparatively sparse moments of actual dialogue, their language barrier is a regular challenge.

I did not know, however, until checking Wikipedia after I got home that, at the time this film is set, Iceland was a Danish territory. with whom Iceland apparently shares historic ties dating back centuries. Watching Godland, a non-Scandinavian might feel like they’re missing some historical context, as there are clear tensions between the principal Dane and the principal Icelander. Where these tensions comes from, exactly, are never clear. This film is very much a slow burn, but eventually people do pretty horrible things to each other. Before the worst of it, there is a moment when Lucas screams “you brainless swine!” at Ragnar, who we are meant to think does not understand him.

I have to admit, however, I was mystified by this. It occurs well after Lucas falls deliriously ill on his cross-island journey, and it is Ragnar who brings him to safety. You’d think Lucas might feel some level of guilt after this, but instead there is a scene in which Ragnar seems to express guilt, that comes out of nowhere. In short, I found it difficult to understand the actions and motivations of these characters.

In the opening titles, we are told that Godland is inspired by the true story of old photos found in a wooden box in Iceland, thought to be the earliest photo record of that landscape. It turns out that story itself is every bit as much a fiction as the film, underscoring the need never to take any “based on a true story” claims a face value. In any case, Lucas lugs his heavy, primitive camera equipment along with him, having his subjects sit completely still for a good ten seconds every time he takes a photo.

And, indeed, the visual appreciation for the Icelandic landscapes, of which a surprisingly diverse array is featured, is the most that Godland has going for it. For a film this slow, a 143-minute run time is a good half an hour too long, but at least it’s nearly always beautiful to look at. The characters go from damp sea shore to verdant hills to molten lava to a vast expanse of ice and snow, all of it gorgeous.

There’s something very odd about Elliott Crosset Hove as Lucas, though. He is stoic, yet always appears extraordinarily tightly wound, a look that defaults on a piercing stare that barely falls short of bug-eyed. He is one of the coldest parishioners ever seen on film.

In the second half of Godland, Lucas wakes up recovered from his sickness, in a house run by a man and his two daughters in the settlement of his destination. Locals already have construction of the church underway. Lucas seems to develop a connection with the eldest daughter, Anna (Vic Carmen Sonne), but as with virtually every relationship in this film, theirs never goes anywhere particularly concrete. This settlement is near the sea, so when Lucas is well enough to converse again, he is asked why he trekked across the island when he could have just sailed there—a logical question. Lucas responds that he wanted to photograph and get to know the land and the people. The head of this household, Carl (Jacob Lohmann), quite rightly points out there were hardly any people around to get to know. And besides, if there had been, Lucas missed them because he was ill. All of this just comes together as interconnected threads of character action in Godland that ultimately serves no purpose.

Godland is an immersive experience, I’ll give it that. And I have a distinct feeling that there are multiple layers of depth to the storytelling here that I just failed to grasp. I kind of enjoyed the nearly-square aspect ratio clearly meant to evoke the photographs Lucas is taking, but otherwise I found this film to have a curiously uninviting narrative, keeping at least a certain segment of its audience at a distinct remove. It may be that, even with subtitles, a lot simply gets lost in translation.

It’s hard to love a movie when you really don’t like the guy at the center of it.

Overall: B-