MATERIALISTS

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

Materialists follows the expected beats of a romance. It goes where you expect it to go, because that is what audiences that go to movies like this come to see. It also slowly becomes much more than its genre trappings, revealing a depth that is probably much more than typical audiences bargained for. In some ways, it even subverts the genre, even as it adheres to its basic rules. We know who the protagonist is meant to be with, and we know who she will end up with.

The marketing makes Materialists seem much more typical a romantic film than it really is. Indeed, had anyone else written and directed it, I’d have taken one look at the trailer and said: “Bleh.” But this was made by Celine Song, who also wrote and directed last year’s sublime Past Lives. Materialists is the kind of sophomore effort that typically brings far more mainstream fare, and that is clearly what the marketers want you to think. But Celine Song smuggles in a shocking amount of cynicism and subtle commentary—on romantic cinema, and on romance itself. This remains unchanged even after the expected note of hopefulness it ends on.

Song’s approach is something I deeply respect. She can be counted on to do something different, as in the opening sequence, which features what we later learn to be the first two cave people who ever married. It’s a serene setting, we hear birds chirping, we see an exchange of flowers and tools. I had no idea what to expect, and kept wondering if something jarring was about to happen. Were they going suddenly get attacked by a bear? What? Instead, they simply lean their heads into each other tenderly, and then a hard cut to the title card, over modern-day New York City.

Lucy is a professional matchmaker with a string of proud successes, yet deliberately living her life as a single woman. To play this part, Song cast Dakota Johnson, an actor with talent and potential but who only really succeeds when paired with the right director. Celine Song could not be more right for her; she’s exceptionally well cast here. I was invested in Lucy as a character, even though she treats romance like “math” (a word she uses frequently) and has such an aversion to low income that she’s convinced herself she’s waiting for a filthy rich man to marry.

Enter Pedro Pascal, borderline overexposed at the moment, as Harry, who has earned millions in “private equity,” as he reveals to Lucy while hitting on her at his brother’s wedding, where the bride was also Lucy’s client. Implausibly—again with the typical story beats—Lucy also runs into her old boyfriend, John (Chris Evans), during her first conversation with Harry. Thus, much as in Past Lives, we get a love triangle of sorts, though it plays out much more differently.

There is still an unusually contemplative tone to Materialists, which I appreciated. There’s a real shallowness to Lucy’s approach to matchmaking, and this feels very deliberate, at times pointed. Lucy is very aware of her own shallowness and harbors a great deal of self-loathing. One of the many things I loved about this film is how there is no competition of jealousy between the two men. There is a minor twist to Harry’s arc, but it humanizes him rather than making him the villain. In fact, Song tells this story entirely from the point of view of the women in it—Lucy’s most of all, but also the others at her matchmaking firm (particularly her boss (Marin Ireland), and one client she’s struggling to find a match for (Zoe Winters).

Admittedly I have some mixed feelings about the subplot involving this client, Sophie, who gets assaulted by a man she was match with by Lucy. This isn’t exactly a spoiler, because not only do we never see the assault onscreen—Lucy gets told about it after the fact—but Celine Song doesn’t even cast any actor to play him: we never once see him onscreen. This is a wise choice much more typical of a woman filmmaker, but I am also not sure how I feel about its inclusion as a subplot at all. Maybe it’s about the inherent dangers of the dating world, and the thoughtless ways they can be disregarded. On the other hand, Sophie herself is used as a plot device to reveal the kindness Lucy actually has deep inside her.

One wonders how much Celine Song herself even thought about these nuances, the way audiences could easily argue back and forth as to whether the film itself is cynical and materialistic, or if it’s a commentary on these things. Honestly, I just found myself deeply engaged with the story, between all three of these characters, largely because of Song’s phenomenally layered writing. It’s lovely to see Chris Evans again in a part that’s not Captain America, and it’s especially nice to see actual grown-up actors in a romance for grown-ups (Pascal, Evans, and Johnson are 50, 44, and 35, respectively—a pretty wide age rang in which the woman is predictably the youngest, sure, but even she’s now ten years past her Fifty Shades of Grey breakout).

In any case, I was taken in by the romance of Materialists, its effectiveness augmented by excellent writing, competent performances, and Shabier Kirchner’s cinematography, which is far more beautiful than a film like this has any need to be. But therein lie its success, with many parts of it being better than they need to be. Song is not cashing in here, she is sharing an authentic vision every bit as much as she did with her previous film. If I had to choose I’d pretty easily say Past Lives was better, even though I have given them both the same overall grade—but a film need only be judged in its own context, on its own merits. Materialists takes all the familiarities of the romance genre and enhances them.

This is one in which Dakota Johnson is actually good!

Overall: A-

THE PHOENICIAN SCHEME

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

Wes Anderson is nothing if not singular, unique, a director who long ago became an instantly recognizable brand. You need take only one step into a cinema universe to know that it’s his. No one else makes movies even remotely like his.

He is also remarkably consistent. To any extent that he varies, he simply moves from good to delightful and back. Sometimes, the over-reliance on detailed dioramas for his production design is a distraction from the story he is ostensibly telling. Sometimes, the design and story work perfectly in tandem, as in 2023’s Asteroid City, which I found to be his most delightful film since 2012’s Moonrise Kingdom. In fact, I was so taken with Asteroid City that this new film, The Phoenician Scheme, suffers a bit by comparison. I do wonder if anyone who hasn’t seen Asteroid City might be more inclined to enjoy The Phoenician Scheme. That indeed seemed to be the case with the companion I saw the film with today.

I just didn’t find the story to be as compelling. Sure, the opening sequence is an attention-grabber: Zsa-zsa Korda (Benicio Del Toro) is experiencing the latest in a long line of assassination attempts, during which a copassenger on a plane is blown in half. Of course, being a Wes Anderson film, this is done with a trick of editing and set decoration, with a quick flash and cut to the passenger left in his seat only from the waist down, with a large splatter of blood on the wall behind him. It’s noteworthy that there is more violence in this than any Wes Anderson film before it, giving it a distinct flavor even in the context of his aesthetic. But it’s still all done with a sense of on-set practical effects, like an ornately staged play on camera.

The Phoenician Scheme has separate parts that are far more interesting than the film is on the whole. Korda is a morally dubious and wildly resilient character, surviving assassination attempts so many times that he now takes it for granted—both the continued attempts on his life, and his “habit” of surviving them. What I can’t quite decide is how well Benicio Del Toro fits into Wes Anderson’s universe. He plays Korda with a gravelly American accent, which is both impressive and the source of some cognitive dissonance if you’ve seen him in many other films.

Broadly speaking, The Phoenician Scheme focuses on a father-daughter relationship, between Korda and a 21-year-old nun named Liesl (Mia Threapleton, Kate Winslet’s 24-year-old daughter). Anderson stages his scenes so meticulously, it’s tempting to find the performances of his actors lacking in some way. On the contrary, by and large they are impressive in the context of these unusual demands. Things like camera position and blocking are far more important in Wes Anderson films than in most others, making it sometimes feel like diorama positioning is more important than nuance. Every character in these movies stands very still and delivers a deadpan performance—and still, Del Toro and Threapleton offer surprisingly credible deliveries as estranged family members.

The most delightful performance is that of Michael Cera, who, without spoiling anything, gives two different performances as the same character. He’s perfectly cast and a perfect fit for Anderson; it makes you wonder why he hasn’t been in a bunch of Anderson’s films already. Beyond these three, once again we get a cavalcade of stars in bit parts, some of them shockingly brief: Tom Hanks (who had a larger part in Asteroid City), Bryan Cranston (ditto), Scarlett Johansson, Jeffrey Wright, Benedict Cumberbatch, Riz Ahmed, Hope Davis, F. Murray Abraham, even Bill Murray. Willem Dafoe is onscreen for literally a matter of seconds, you could check the time on your watch and miss him. One of The Phoenician Scheme’s minor wrinkles is the widely varied nature of how well cast these actors are in the parts they play—Jeffrey Wright is amazing in almost anything, but not so much here; Benedict Cumberbatch completely disappears in his part, both physically and through performance. The tiny part Bill Murray plays is an effectively clever joke unto itself.

The plot here, though, was the thing I found difficult to lock into. Korda plays an unscrupulous industrialist meeting different investors in turn to convince them to help fill the gap of a budget shortfall—for what, I could never quite retain. It had something to do with using slave labor in Phoenicia (hence the title), and provides fodder for Liesl to judge Korda’s moral shortcomings, even as she considers his offer to make her sole heir of his estate—why, when he has nine other children, all of them sons, is never quite clear, even though she immediate asks him directly: “Why?” He brushes such questions aside, evidently Anderson’s means of doing the same. It does allow her, however, to accompany him with all his visits with investors, allowing for a succession of very Andersonian, if unusually but cleverly violent, set pieces.

I am not the father of a daughter, so there could be some lack of relatability for me there. The Phoenician Scheme has a definite arc for these two characters, giving them far more dimension, both individually and in relation to each other, than you might expect. The plotting is so complex that it requires a lot of setup and exposition, and yet most of the time you just marvel at the artistry of how every scene is designed and framed. Wes Anderson is a true original, and so is this film, even among his own filmography. There’s just also a bit of unevenness in execution, particularly in both the story editing and the casting. I could argue that Michael Cera’s performance alone is worth the price of admission, though, and Threapleton’s comes close as well. Del Toro didn’t quite compel me as much here, and he’s in nearly every scene. This makes The Phoenician Scheme somewhat of a mixed bag, but on average a fine time at the movies.

Hey I’m going to start icing my wine in my bathroom’s bidet too!

Overall: B

SIFF Advance: TWINLESS

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

Twinless is about an unlikely friendship that occurs between two guys, one straight and one gay, after they meet in a support group for people grieving the loss of a twin. That is the log line of the film, and it remains an accurate descriptor from beginning to end, albeit deceptively so: Without spoiling anything, I will say that a major twist occurs in the second act, and it was one I found deeply disappointing. I wanted this to be an exploration of an unlikely friendship under these circumstances, but not only do the circumstances change—we discover them to have been different all along. This allows for some profound conflict between the two lead characters, but does the conflict have to be that profound? I would argue that it doesn’t, and that it changes what makes their connection compelling in the first place.

And yet, here’s the thing: I was utterly charmed, and sometimes deeply moved, by Twinless in spite of this disappointment. It’s a big thing, but it’s still the only thing I didn’t like about this film. And it should be noted that writer-director James Sweeney, who has been developing this script for a solid ten years, has written his characters with such dimension, depth, and authenticity, it goes a long way toward making up for that one disappointment. Sweeney himself plays the gay character, Dennis, and it’s always impressive when a director can star in his own film and actually pull it off. It could be argued that Dennis is borderline psychotic, at least judging by his behavior, and still he’s undeniably empathetic, even when it becomes unclear whether he deserves empathy.

The crucial element of Twinless, however, is Dylan O’Brien, previously best known for Young-Adult roles like Thomas in The Maze Runner or Stiles in the television series Teen Wolf. Now in his early thirties, he’s making a new name for himself in indie cinema, and nowhere more impressively than here in Twinless, as Roman, who is grieving the loss of his identical twin brother, Rocky. O’Brien’s performance is amazing in this movie, the one thing that most recommends it.

There is a relatively short flashback sequence in which O’Brien also plays the twin brother, Rocky—the gay one. This makes the second film in short order featuring a non-twin actor playing twins onscreen, and although the movies share nothing in common otherwise, it still invites mention of Sinners, in which Michael B. Jordan does the same. The key difference is that Jordan plays opposite himself in a great deal of Sinners, in ways that are often disctracting because we know, and can tell, that there were never two of him actually on camera at the same time. Sweeney deftly sidesteps this problem by making Roman and Rocky estranged, and never showing the two characters onscreen at the same time.

There’s also the fact of Roman and Rocky’s diverging sexualities, though—something that becomes a key plot point, and one very well handled. This does mean that O’Brien, a straight man, spends some time playing a gay man, which is something many often argue should not be done. While I agree broadly that gay actors should be given gay parts, I am also not militant about this, and believe context and circumstance always matter. It’s certainly relevant that Sweeney himself is gay, and he was the one giving direction on these performances, reportedly with some reticence on O’Brien’s part to get too far into depicting effeminacy. The minor miracle of Twinless is that O’Brien’s performance is incredible, both as Roman and as Rocky—they may be technically identical, but they have distinct mannerisms and appearances (choice of clothing, facial hair) that make then feel like wholly different people. In the Rocky flashback scenes, it took me a while to realize it was even the same actor.

The central theme of Twinless is loneliness, and though it is contextualized with the specificity of losing a built-in best friend that often comes with being a twin, it also transcends that specificity. Dennis is lonely for different reasons, and these two guys are dealing with their loneliness in very different ways, but have found each other as a means of, if not filling that hole, then covering it up a bit.

Twinless also has great, well-rounded characters, particularly Marcie (Aisling Franciosi), the receptionist at Dennis’s work who Roman starts dating after he accompanies Dennis to her Halloween party. Dennis has spent a lot of time making wildly inaccurate assumptions about Marcie, which makes it easy for us as viewers to do the same, to see her as a sweet but incredibly naive woman. She actually is sweet, but not naive, and it turns out she won’t stand for anyone’s bullshit—certainly not Dennis’s, and not Roman’s either. In addition to Franciosi, Gilmore Girls’s Lauren Graham is a welcome presence in just a few scenes as Roman and Rocky’s mother, playing tensions with Roman as they both navigate the loss of a loved one. In a scene when both Marcie and Dennis go home with Roman for Christmas, Marcie, ever the understanding one, tolerates their inevitable arguing with grace, explaining to the less-understanding Dennis, “I think they’re grieving.”

I haven’t said much yet about how funny Twinless is, with both a unique sensibility and a unique sense of humor. This film is very much a dramedy, and I would indeed recommend having tissues handy. It also has a keen understanding of how people deal with grief in very different ways, and may hit differently if you have lost someone very close to you, twin or not. But it also has some incredibly effective humor, often cutting through the grief in the best way. It’s often uncomfortable, but I hesitate to call Twinless “cringe comedy,” as it rarely truly made me squirm in my seat (not usually my favorite kind of humor). It could also be said that a gay character pining after a straight guy he can’t have is a bit overdone, but again, Sweeney effectively makes it his own, creating a truly singular story. Were it not for the one thing that genuinely disappointed me, I would probably be saying I adored this movie, to a similar degree that I adored films like All of Us Strangers or National Anthem. But, reconciliation through disappointment—also a major theme of Twinless—has its own deep and lasting value.

They don’t have their twins but they have each other: a complicated but compelling story of connection between a straight man and a gay man.

Overall: B+

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - THE FINAL RECKONING

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

If you’re a Gen-Xer feeling nostalgic for movies featuring Tom Cruise in his underwear, then boy, is this your lucky weekend! He spends a lot of time in his underwear in Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning. I can only assume he’s eager for us all to see how fit he still is at the age of 62. With a net worth of nearly $900 million, this guy can surely afford all the necessary personal trainers and nutritionists he might need, and still I shudder to think of the time and effort that must go into maintaining a body like that. Plus, he needs that body for all the stunt work he famously does himself. I’m 49 and I can barely get up from a sitting position without groaning in pain.

Still, I’m a little stuck on the screentime Cruise spends in nothing but tight boxer briefs in this movie. At first, Ethan Hunt is running on a treadmill to prepare for a deep sea dive. Of course one of many expendable villains attacks him, and we get a fight scene entirely choreographed with Cruise in his boxer briefs. It’s like the Mission: Impossible version of the fight scene in Eastern Promises, except Cruise doesn't have the courage to go totally naked. Don’t be such a coward, Tom! You’re known for movie stunts, after all—why not truly shock everyone by going full frontal? Maybe his scrotum is the only part of his body with enough wrinkles to make him actually look his age.

A few scenes later, Ethan strips down again, this time as part of his narrow escape from a crashed submarine rolling off an ocean floor cliff. This is how we get the iconic shot of him in the fetal position, floating toward any iced-over ocean surface. Admittedly, it’s a beautiful shot, and all that bare skin effectively adds to the visual impact. This is, in fact, one of the things that impressed me most about The Final Reckoning—Fraser Taggart’s cinematography. Taggart has only four feature film credits as Cinematographer, but his last one was 2023’s Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning (Part One in 2023; now just Dead Reckoning since they changed their mind about the name of this year’s movie, its own release date delayed several times, the final delay due to the 2023 actors’ strike). There are two different signature set pieces in The Final Reckoning, and the biplane chase is clearly getting the most attention. But I was most wowed by the rolling ocean-floor submarine sequence, in which Ethan is in and out of water depending on the compartment he’s in, and water flowing from one compartment to another is what causes the submarine to tilt. This sequence has a great deal of fantastic camera work, the angle we see frequently off kilter from what is actually up or down for Ethan, giving us a visceral sense of his own spatial confusion. The missiles that also roll around or fall into the water just to complicate things is icing on the cake.

This is, after all, what we come to Mission: Impossible movies for. It wasn’t so much the case in the franchise’s early years—the first Mission: Impossible was released in 1996, and although it did have some enduringly famous set pieces of its own (the wire heist; the leap from an exploding helecopter to a train—honestly the dumbest looking stunt in the entire franchise), it spent a lot more time on spycraft and, particularly in the wire heist scene, suspense. As the films have gone on, now 29 years of them, on average they have gotten better as they went. Mission: Impossible II was the most forgettable, and then, for me at least, Dead Reckoning was the first since then to dip slightly.

And this is where I seem to break from the critical consensus—people really loved Dead Reckoning two years ago, but while I still found it very entertaining, I also found it overlong (2 hours and 43 minutes is about 40 minutes too many) and too reliant on rehashing set piece concepts from earlier movies. What’s more, the visual effects during the train crash scene were too obviously CGI, to a degree not as noticeable since the aforementioned helicopter explosion in the first film.

Thus, I find myself surprised at how the critical consensus on The Final Reckoning is less enthusiastic, and yet I found myself enjoying it more. To me, this film is closer to a return to form—utterly preposterous story, sure, but the set pieces are genuinely amazing, worth the price of admission on their own. What’s more, much like Dead Reckoning, Christopher McQuarrie (who has now directed the last four of these movies) doesn’t bother wasting any of the best action on the cold open, which here has smaller stakes than in earlier films. It still opens with a clever escape, but it’s just a taste of what’s to come, a sign of better storytelling.

Granted, The Final Reckoning is also overlong (2 hours and 49 minutes is about 45 minutes too many), evidently to allow enough space for its convoluted plotting. As in the last film, this one lacks any villain with personality, because the villain is AI, or rather “The Entity,” which is somehow breaching global nations’ nuclear arsenals one by one, with the threat of igniting a nuclear war that will annihilate humanity. We do get U.S. cabinet discussions about “strategic strikes” against eight targets worldwide, as if that has any rationale at all when it would make the planet uninhabitable. Notwithstanding the objective idiocy of the premise of these movies, it’s still nice to fantasize about Angela Bassett as the U.S. President rather than the genuine dipshit president we actually have. Bassett effortlessly commands respect, at least.

The Final Reckoning works overtime to tie all the previous films together, just as Dead Reckoning did; this time we get yet another key character returning from the first film from 1996. As always, we get unlikely heroes, and Ethan loses someone he has long cared about. Given the nature of this entire franchise, the writing is serviceable but never what we come for; what it delivers are true thrills beautifully shot (my one cinematgraphy complaint being how frequently characters stand in just the right spot for just their eyes not to be in shadow). It may be too long, but it’s never dull.

McQuarrie and Cruise do give us a somewhat curious ending this go-round, something that feels very much by design: long running characters get their own moment onscreen, as if sayiny goodbye. But the story ends with nothing preventing a return to this universe of endless stunts yet again, except maybe Tom Cruise’s age. His physical prowess is still incredible, but he can only maintain that for so much longer. Maybe the next Mission: Impossible will finally find someone to pass the baton to, even if Cruise returns in something more of a supporting role. The possibilities are endless, and there’s no reason not to think this franchise will be too.

Ethan Hunt covered from head to toe—but it doesn’t last long!

Overall: B+

THINGS LIKE THIS

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

Things Like This is an awfully bland and forgettable title for a movie premise with real promise: it’s a romantic comedy about two young men who fall in love in New York City, and one of them just happens to be fat.

I use the word “happens” loosely, because this is the first of many flaws in the execution of this film. The trailer makes it look like it’s just about two guys who don’t have their lives together, and falling in love with each other eventually helps them figure their shit out. It seemed refreshing to see a fat guy get cast in one of the lead roles, and in the trailer, his fatness is never even mentioned. And here’s the weirdest part: his fatnesss is incidental to the romance int his movie—and yet, in the opening scene, Zack Anthony (Max Talisman) is verbally dressed down by a hookup he’s just had sex with, telling him how he finds him unattractive. Zack’s response is to eat cake frosting straight out of a can. What the hell is this shit? There is almost none of this through the rest of the movie, so why make it a part of setting the stage, in the very first scene?

Things do not exactly get better from there, unless you want to count the few moments of genuine sweetness. Zack meets his love interest at a party, and the other guy’s name is also Zack—Zack Mandel. Mandel is played by Joey Pollari, and I hate that I have to say this since he’s the one “conventionally attractive” major character in the movie, but he’s also the only one with a natural screen presence, the only one with an unforced or unself-conscious delivery. The one critical thing he doesn’t have is chemistry with Talisman as the other Zack. They might have found someone he did have chemistry with had they been able to spend much time on, say, chemistry reads, but this film quite clearly did not have the budget for that.

To be fair, there is a sense that Talisman might have fared better under a different director. But the thing is, he is the star, and the director, and the writer. Which means he made the choice to cast and write himself as the fat guy who not only loves to eat right after sex (that alone isn’t so bad, I guess), but also defiantly eats cake frosting when made to feel bad about himself. These are choices I find frankly baffling.

Beyond that, Things Like This is utterly predictable, in ways that are inherently disappointing, because it didn’t have to be—it being a romantic comedy notwithstanding. Overall, the script has a vibe of being a first draft. (Realistically, it was not the first draft, which means I shudder to think what the actual first draft was like.) There’s a deeply dramatic, emotional scene on Zack Anthony’s apartment building rooftop, where Zack Mandel freaks out and breaks things off because of fear he’ll screw it up. This is a pretty universal feeling, sure, but the way the scene plays, this early in the film as well as this early in their relationship, the clear expectation of our emotional investment as viewers is entirely unearned.

Zack Mandel works for a talent agency where his boss is a complete caricature, where his friend is thinly drawn at best. Zack Anthony is a struggling writer looking to get a book about vampires published. One of Things Like This’s few accomplishments is giving Zack the confidence to say “I’m really good” about his own writing without coming across as insufferable. Nevertheless, there is a scene in which Mandel tells Anthony the plot of his book, and while Mandel says it sounds really cool, I just thought: this book sounds dumb as shit! It would never get published, but in the world of this bizarro movie—spoiler alert!—a book publisher almost immediately offers him what, to Zack Anthony at least, is a shocking amount of money.

There’s a climactic scene in which Zack Anthony sings a song (of course) in order to win over Zack Mandel, and Talisman has some genuine vocal talent. Honestly, even his performance as Zack Anthony might have been honed into something convincing in the hands of a director other than himself. Bringing another writer also wouldn’t have hurt. He must have been desperate to cover many jobs in order to get this movie made, but sadly, the final product just leaves you wondering how this movie got made. Even the outtakes that play during the end credits fall flat, a bunch of clips that make no real impact and simply intensify the mystery of their own existence.

There are many problems with Things Like This, but the fundamental one is the one-dimensional nature of nearly all of its characters. There’s earnestness here, even occasionally effective sweetness (I quite liked the winter scene in the park when they first kiss, albeit after some truly clunky dialogue), but no depth. There is always a sense that there is some depth around, somewhere, but this movie is always out of it.

A deceptively sweet image of characters who have no idea how contrived they are.

Overall: C

FRIENDSHIP

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

My experience with deeply awkward movies is very similar to that with horror movies. I spend a lot of time covering my face, unable to look at the screen. I might peek through my fingers. This is how I spent a lot of the time watching Friendship.

And, much like with horror movies, I am typically loathe to subject myself to such experiences, or certainly to recommend them to others. I make exceptions for films that transcend the genre. I suppose that makes Friendship the Exorcist of awkward-relationship movies. Except the comparison, made my many others already, to Fatal Attraction is far more apt. Nobody boils a pet in this movie, but there is a scene in which you become terrified that the obsessed character might actually kill somebody.

Marketing a film like Friendship is clearly a tricky task. I sat through the trailer to this at many other movies, always wondering at all the pull quotes from critics talking about how funny it is, while only showing clips that make it look like a disturbing thriller about someone who is increasingly unhinged. It was a very incongruous juxtaposition, and if nothing else, I knew to expect painful awkwardness—and found myself having little interest. But then the movie I was going to see tonight was revealed to have terrible reviews, so I looked over what the other options were. I couldn’t even remember what Friendship was by merely seeing the title on the theater schedule, but I looked it up and was surprised to discover it getting pretty positive attention.

So, my movie companion and I thought: what the hell, why not? Let’s pivot to this other movie where we have no idea whether we’ll be into it or not. I did come across the phrase “the Fatal Attraction of male bonding comedies,” though, and that piqued my interest immediately. That should have been used as the logline.

And, lo and behold Friendship actually is hilarious, the kind of movie that twenty years ago would have quickly gained a cult following. People familiar with Tim Robinson, and particularly his Netflix sketch comedy show I Think You Should Leave (which, full disclosure, I have never watched, may not be so surprised by this. But he is by far the best thing about Friendship, turning in an amazing performance as Craig, the socially awkward app developer who forms an unlikely friendship with his new neighbor.

The neighbor, Austin (Paul Rudd), is a local weatherman with his own insecurities, the kind of guy you wouldn’t particularly want to hang out with either but who feels like a straight up everyman compared to Craig. Craig’s wife, Tami (Kate Mara), encourages him to accept Austin’s invitation to come over for a drink. Tami has her own things to deal with, such as a fledgeling floral business and an almost-uncomfortably intimate relationship with their teenage son (Jack Dylan Grazer, previously the lead in the deeply underrated HBO limited series We Are Who We Are).

When Craig and Austin first hang out, it’s just the two of them, and Austin manages to take the awkwardness in stride. It’s when he gets invited to a group hangout with Austin’s other friends that the awkwardness begins to go truly sideways. The plot then follows a familiar arc, but it feels fresh because of the context: an obsessive man-crush taken up too many notches. Craig starts calling Austin too frequently, he shows up unannounced at inappropriate times and places, and tries to emulate some of Austin’s reckless but cool behavior, but at which Craig is deeply inept.

Rudd is well cast as the weatherman whose own social skills lack any genuine depth. But Robinson is the one who truly shines here, the single source of a great many uniquely fantastic comic moments. The parade of expressions that flash across Craig’s face is a delight unto its own, as he reacts with confusion, then suppresses it with quick denial. Robinson can be skillfully subtle one moment, then singularly over the top the next. Truly, I laughed far more at Friendship than I expected to.

Some people love the emotional turn of laughter through tears, What Friendship has to offer is laughter through suspense, a nagging sense of danger, such as when Craig goes to deliver one of the many packages that keeps getting delivered to his house by mistake, and then finds himself causally walking through Austin’s unlocked home. We don’t even know if Austin is there. And when Craig finds something truly dangerous in Austin’s office, we know Chekhov has been paged. This pays off spectacularly later.

Friendship pays off, in all senses of the phrase. This is a delicate performance walking a delicate line, and a quite impressive one at that. Offering a familiar story arc that still manages not to be predictable is no small feat. It’s all in the details, and the best details are in Tim Robinson’s performance, which is both weird and nuanced. We’ve all been in group settings with that one guy who has no idea he’s the oddball no one really likes but no one wants to hurt his feelings. If you haven’t, then maybe you’re that guy. Friendship gives us all a lot to think about.

Letting the dangerous naïveté blossom in Friendship.

Overall: B+

FIGHT OR FLIGHT

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

Fight or Flight is dumb as shit, and it’s also a blast. Because you know what? This is actually a movie with integrity. It knows what it is, it tells you what it is, and then delivers exactly what it promises. There are no pretenses here, and that is precisely what makes a movie like this work.

In less sensible hands, there would be an attempt to shoehorn some kind of unearned empathy for the characters, some sense of earnestness or wholesome sweetness—a dad just trying to show up for his little girl, or whatever. Nobody’s here for that shit! This is something first-time feature director James Madigan understands. Madigon previously worked for many years on visual effects, for the likes of Iorn Man 2 or Bill & Ted Face the Music. He’s also worked as Second Unit or Assistant Director, on films like Insurgent and The Meg. It would be tempting to say that he’s being forced to slum it here with his first feature directorial gig, except that clearly given the right opportunity, this guy knows how to deliver.

He’s also got the perfect star in Josh Hartnett, now starring in two films in as many years that qualify as slightly-elevated trash—the other one being Trap, the M. Night Shyamalan film that has its own dumb charms but ultimately fails to live up to its own promise. Fight or Flight is actually a better movie, never bothering with misguided plot turns and instead staying the course on its own pulpiness.

To be clear, there are definite lulls in Fight or Flight. But they are reliably brief, as this movie never wastes time getting to the delightfully ridiculous. Lucas (Hartnett) is a disgraced FBI agent being given a chance at redemption when he is the only person close enough to follow an elusive criminal onto a plane from Bangkok to San Francisco. Here’s the fun twist on the premise, something thankfully established early on so it’s never used as a predictable “reveal”—the “ghost,” as the elusive person is called, has a $10 million bounty on their head, and when their flight itinerary is leaked, we wind up with a large plane packed with assassins.

Who needs snakes? Hitmen (and hitwomen) will do just fine. In fact, there’s a line between straight up garbage and well-crafted trash. Fight or Flight works because it operates on its own terms, as opposed to pre-emotive fan service. The more ridiculous it got, the more fun I had—even when assassins found weapons that would never actually make their way on such a plane. I guess in some cases having characters search luggage in the cargo hold is a convenient trick. One particular weapon, which I won’t spoil even though the trailer does, effectively tops everything seen up to that point, ratcheting up the mayhem exponentially.

Fight or Flight frequently cuts back to predictably dubious agents on the ground, played by Kate Sackhoff and Julian Kostov, who are a bit wasted here. On the plane, British-Indian actor Charithra Chandran is a relative standout in a key role, ultimately holding her own in all of the in-flight hand-to-hand combat that would never really work in the confines of an airplane mid-flight. But who cares? No one is coming to a movie like this for plausibility. You want to see gushing bloodshed and dismemberment, which Fight or Flight has in spades. As well as many other weapons.

I giggled my way through this movie, tickled pink at its cartoon violence, the airplane setting giving it a seemingly novel spin akin to the much higher-profile 2022 film Bullet Train—but without the pointless indulgence in so-called character development. Fight or Flight has a perfectly respectable runtime of 102 minutes, because it knows we have no need to know that much about who these characters are. By the end, the script does throw in some token morality about slave labor used to manufacture our electronics, a plot concept so undercooked it’s barely noticeable. At least it’s heavily loaded with clever takes on implausible fight choreography, the only thing any of us have come here for, and which the crew is happy to serve.

The Not So Friendly Skies

Overall: B

THE ACCOUNTANT²

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

The Accountant 2 is the kind of movie that makes me glad I have a monthly AMC subscription—I’m paying the same no matter how good or bad the movie is. Of course, my husband decided to join me for this one, which meant I did pay $15.21 for his ticket. I can’t say it was especially worth it.

When I saw The Accountant in 2016, I was quite pleasantly surprised by it, especially given its evenly mixed reviews. The circumstances were preposterous and the depictions of autism by non-autistic people dubious—but still, I found the characters charming, especially Ben Affleck as Christian, the title character who is a cross between Rain Man and Rambo, and who launders money through, you guessed it, an accounting business.

There’s no actual CPA accounting in The Accounting 2. So much for truth in advertising! The closest we get is the clever superscript “2” in the title design. At least that makes more sense than 33 years ago when some genius unveiled the title design for Alien³. “Alien cubed”? I don’t remember seeing a xenomorph packing around a pocket protector. At least Affleck’s Christian is actually pretty square. Honestly that title design is the most clever thing about The Accountant 2.

How many movies do we need about human trafficking, anyway? I’m all for making the focus of this film the relationship between Christian and his brother, Braxton (Jon Bernthal), but is this really the context we have to put it in? An argument could be made that this film is particularly timely, what with its empathetic depictions of undocumented migrants, particularly those who get taken advantage of by actual criminals. I have no complaints about that. I just wish this movie were better.

It’s strange to me that the critical consensus on The Accountant was evenly mixed, the critical consensus on The Accountant 2 moves slightly toward mixed-positive. The first film is definitively better, and the second one brings back all but one of the first film’s principal characters, evidently just for nostalgia’s sake (J.K. Simmons as Ray King; Cynthia Addai-Robinson as Marybeth Medina; Alison Wright as the faceless voice on Christian’s phone), though some of them don’t last long. The exception is Anna Kendrick, the one principal character who does not return. Reportedly this is because of a desire to focus on the brothers’ relationship rather than have a romantic interest. I also applaud the disinclination to include romance only for its own sake.

The Accountant 2 takes way too long to get to the aforementioned relationship between the brothers, though, the first act front loaded with plot mechanics. This is at the expense of what made Christian interesting in the first place. Instead of humanizing him, we just get more of Christian’s ticks alienating people, or more pointedly, annoying his brother. It also introduces this thing called “acquired savant syndrome,” in which extraordinary skills are developed quickly after a brain injury. Enter Anaïs (Daniella Pineda), whose post-trauma skill is being one hell of an assassin.

I did find Anaïs relatively compelling, even as she proved to be a key part of convoluted story threads related to a specific family of migrants. But that’s just because I have a thing for women who kick ass, even if (and sometimes especially when) they are villainous. In the end, though, there is not enough interaction between her and the characters we care most about, and she isn’t even present in a climactic sequence involving a two-man shootout with countless men at a Juarez prison camp where they are holding kidnapped children captive. This sequence is just like those in countless other movies, and I just got bored.

I’d have liked The Accountant 2 if it had leaned more into the dynamics of Christian’s limited number of relationships. But even his budding “buddy” relationship with his brother takes a definitive backseat to both the plot and the action, which is largely rote. The same could be said of the first film, but that one had its priorities straight, helping us get to know who Christian is. The Accountant 2 doesn’t allow us to get to know him any better, and instead ultimately has him start breaking out of comfort zones in ways the first film would have us believe are highly implausible. And that movie was highly improbable to begin with. Reuniting with this character could have been a good thing if only it felt like it was building on a strong foundation, but the foundation was shaky to begin with, rendering this a sequel that’s ultimately fruitless.

Is the stiffness all our hidden guns or it it our personalities?

Overall: C+

THUNDERBOLTS*

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

Thunderbolts*, like countless other Marvel Studios films before it, is both overlong and overstuffed, trying to do too much, because even after years of being exhausted by it, these movies still expect to trade on audiences’ intricate knowledge of every other wild thing that has ever happened in now-33 films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Who has time for that shit?

Furthermore, there are no aliens in this movie. I only mention this because there are aliens in other MCU movies, and this one has a very brief, single line that references “when the aliens came.” But what if you’re watching this movie and you’ve never seen any of those other, “alien” ones? You’d just be left thinking: Huh?

None of the original Avengers are in Thunderbolts* either (spoiler alert!). What happened to them all, anyway? How many years ago was that? Some sacrificed themselves, I think? Some simply retired, like, to a farm or something? I honestly don’t remember, and it’s because frankly I don’t care. I’m just over here waiting for another one of the rare MCU films that actually manages a successful pivot, like Black Panther or Logan. I even liked Black Widow more than I expected to—even if it’s not quite in the same league as the aforementioned films—which is the very reason I found myself interested in Thunderbolts*, which serves as a quasi-sequel. Florence Pugh and David Harbour both return as Yelena Belva and Alexei Shastakov (“The Red Guardian”), and they are delightful characters.

They do get a bit darker here, as the themes of this film, as directed by Jake Shreier, takes a bit of a left turn into metaphors for mental health and depression. As someone who does not live with depression, I cannot truly speak to how successful the film is at this. It’s easy to imagine some people feeling like it trivializes their experiences and their struggles. Others might find it makes them feel seen. The inevitable climactic battle here takes place inside the mind of a supervillain who is a huge danger to himself and the world, but is also deeply empathetic—an unusual choice that I appreciate. Even when it doesn’t fully work, I can always respect a big swing.

Of course, the plotting also gets unnecessarily convoluted. But, if it results in by far the biggest role in an MCU film by Julia Louis-Dreyfus as the perennially dubious CIA Director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, I’m all for it. Thunderbolts* could have taken a few action sequence cuts and added more of Valentina. Nobody would have complained.

Not that I have any major complaints about Thunderbolts* as it stands. This ragtag team of misfit criminals-turned-heroes, which along with Yelena and Alexei, includes Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), John Walker (Wyatt Russell), Antonia Dreykov (Olga Kurylenko), Ava Starr (Hannah John-Kamen), and maybe also Robert Reynolds (Lewis Pullman), have chemistry. They get conveniently thrown together when Valentina sends them all to assassinate each other in a giant vault on top of a mountain where she plans to incinerate all the evidence of a shady operation which, naturally, ultimately produces our supervillain.

As for the supervillain, comic book readers will likely recall why he is referred to as both “Sentry” and “The Void.” It’s easy to feel ambivalent about this character, and it’s difficult to gauge how deliberately Schreier makes that part of the point. I will say this: after countless superhero movies following the exact same beats over and over, in which a CGI-laden mega-battle occurs to save the entire planet or the entire galaxy or hell, even the universe (how about multiverses!), it’s refreshing to see one of these movies dial back the stakes and ground them, even if in this case they are largely wrapped in uncertainly executed metaphorical psychology.

Whatever turns it takes, Thunderbolts* is consistently and undeniably fun. It’s a bit drab visually, lots of shades of grey in its color palate (perhaps a deliberate choice for characters who struggle between inner light and inner darkness), and the visual effects are serviceable. Black Widow was a better movie, and the absence of Scarlett Johansson is keenly felt, but it’s also nice to spend more time with a couple of other great characters is introduced to us. The new characters feel a bit expendable overall, really, but it’s the presence of the special ones that at least slightly tips the scales in its favor.

*Made you look!

SINNERS

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

Apparently I’m a White guy who just doesn’t get it. Or at least, I didn’t at first. The deeply allegorical nature of Sinners had to be spelled out to me. A friend spelled it out, in a way that made it click for me: this is an allegory about the vampiric nature of White communities, and how they appropriate other cultures, specifically Black culture.

It’s also much more nuanced than that, of course. The line that has stayed with me perhaps the most vividly is when a vampire who has been frozen in youth for decades approaches an old man, a man who is near the end of a decades-long career singing the blues, and offers him eternal life as an alternative to dying of old age. The blues singer, actually a key character from the film just much later in life, replies: “I think I’ve seen enough of this place.” Someone in the theater shouted at the screen: “No kidding!”

Most of the action in Sinners takes place over the course of a single day, the exciting stuff deep into the film, when twins Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan) mount the opening night of a barn converted into a juke joint in 1930s Mississippi. It may be a surprise to learn that I kept thinking about Jurassic Park, which follows a very similar narrative arc: the solid first half is nothing but setup, the second half nothing but thrilling payoff. Indeed, very little of consequence seems to be happening in the first half of Sinners, in which we spend a lot of time getting introduced to characters and learning back stories. Most notable among them are those of Smoke and Stack, who have returned after seven years in Chicago—which turned out not to be the bastion of Black freedom it was cracked up to be. “Might as well play with the devil you know,” they say.

One of the twins reconnects with an old flame, Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), with whom he once had a baby who died as an infant. The other pushes away his old flame, Mary (Hailee Seinfeld), in his mind for her own protection—she’s found a “rich White husband” (a character we never meet), but by 1930s standards, she exists in a liminal racial space, due to her grandfather having been half-Black.

There’s a lot of music in Sinners, and I am happy to report that the excellent soundtrack is available, either for purchase or on a music streaming service near you. It features a lot of blues, with Irish folk music sprinkled in—writer-director Ryan Coogler, here producing his first original, non-franchise feature film since his 2013 breakthrough Fruitvale Station, has real skill for using music to both uplift and unnerve. It feels a bit pointed that the primary vampire villain in this film, a local White guy named Remmick (Jack O’Connell), sings an Irish jig in the creepiest way imaginable, several Black characters who have been turned stumble-dancing in a circle around him. This isn’t so much a judgment of traditional Irish culture—which, notably, the Black characters in Sinners openly appreciate—but rather a commentary on the very existence of rich culture actually available to White people, particularly at that time, but it’s still not enough for them. They must also consume the culture surrounding them.

Many characters we meet, get to know, and come to care about in Sinners are eventually turned into monsters. This is very much the point. It also includes two Asian-American characters, a married couple who run a general store and a grocery store on opposite sides of the same street in the local town. There’s probably a lot to unpack regarding the way these characters interact with the Black community here, but I’ll just go ahead and leave that packed, as it isn’t my bag to mess with. There is also a memorable scene, when we first see Remmick, that features members of the Choctaw Nation, having chased him to the home of a White couple he manipulates into inviting them into their home.

This, again, is rather far into the runtime of Sinners, which clocks in at 137 minutes. This is a bit longer than necessary; the aforementioned formula would have been just as effective were the two halves just an hour each. Coogler also takes a couple of moments to show off the special effects, especially as it pertains to Michael B. Jordan playing twins. Around the time we see them for the first time, we see them pass a cigarette between each other’s fingers, and the CGI effects are obvious. Mind you, I’ll never complain about getting to see more of Michael B. Jordan, but would it not have been simpler just to cast a pair of actual twins?

Coogler is an undeniable talent, though, and plenty of people are clearly eager to work for him—in this case, including Delroy Lindo as pianist Delta Slim, and even legendary blues singer Buddy Guy as the aforementioned blue singer character nearing the end of his career. Sinners is overflowing with acting talent, and one wonders how much of the film’s roughly $100 budget went to paying them—the visual effects could have used a bit more of that budget.

However it got made, I have a strong feeling that Sinners would be particularly rewarding upon rewatch. Much is made of how music can conjure both darkness and light, and within the context of ancestral wisdom, from the past and into the future. A particularly great scene liberalizes this, when the performance of a blues song morphs into other genres—both that resulted in the invention of the blues, and what later would not have existed without it. Coogler’s cinematographer, Autumn Durald Arkapaw, swoops and weaves the camera through the revelry in the juke joint full of people forgetting their pain for just a moment, lost in the music, nameless characters passing here and there, in the dress and playing the instruments of cultures from different times and different continents, from Africa to America and from centuries past to the Great Depression, and on to the eras of rap and hiphop. Sinners references many times, places and cultures that have come and gone in specific ways I personally have no power to put my finger on, but on a thematic level, I can at least appreciate that something profound is at work.

Brace yourselves—for something both familiar and unprecedented.

Overall: B+