ROBOT DREAMS

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

Robot Dreams is an utterly delightful, adorable animated feature without any dialogue and with an undercurrent of melancholy. It’s about friendship, love, and a meditation on the transient nature of relationships. It’s uniquely lush in spite of being almost exclusively set in cityscapes, with dark lines around rounded shapes filled with vividly solid colors that somehow combine to create a visual warmth.

Everything about it invites and envelopes you, even as the story takes unexpected turns. This is a universe filled with anthropomorphized animal characters, packed with endlessly charming visual details. “Dog,” the protagonist, wags his little tail any time something makes him happy or excited. He reads a copy of Stephen King’s Pet Sematary when he crawls into bed at night, making us wonder what a society of animals keeps as pets (which we never do actually see).

I am certain I could watch this movie again and discover many charming details I missed the first time around. One of my favorites is when Dog and Robot take a row boat ride in a lake, amongst many others doing the same. One other boat with two companions contains an elephant and a mouse, the elephant weighing down one end of the boat so heavily that the mouse is pushed high into the air at the other end.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. “Robot” is our other main character, a companion Dog has ordered through the mail via a number provided in a television ad. “Are you alone?” the ad copy onscreen reads, and we have already gleaned that Dog is lonely. This was where I first noticed the penchant for background detail in Robot Dreams, actually: as Dog eats his TV dinner alone in his apartment, we can see through his window and again through the window of an apartment across the street, an affectionate couple (a cow and a giraffe, if I remember right) snuggling on a couch in front of their own TV, feeding each other popcorn.

These are details we, as viewers of the movie, notice first. But then Dog notices, and he longs for something of the same in his own life. Enter Robot, who never exists as a character to provoke any thoughts about robotics or AI or anything particularly science-fiction in tone or theme. He’s more like a platonic mail-order bride, and in the end he doesn’t even have any particular personality defects that might cause tension in Dog and Robot’s relationsip. In the end, it’s more about how things can change even between people who never love each other less, but due to circumstances beyond their control. It’s the unhappy accidents of life itself that get in the way.

Robot Dreams is an unrated film, but if it were to get an MPA rating, logically it would get at least PG—not because of vulgarity or violence, which this film really has none of whatsoever, but just because it could be a bit sad for small children. There’s a moment in Robot’s journey, something that happens to him, that broke my heart. And I’m 48 years old.

Well before that, though, we just watch an extended sequence of scenes with Dog and Robot’s blossoming relationship. They walk to the park, go roller skating, and go to the beach. This goes on long enough that I found myself wondering how and when some kind of conflict will enter the story, as there is no story without one. And this is one of the many great things about Robot Dreams: it checks off the obligatory story beats, but always in unexpected ways. In this instance, Dog and Robot get separated at the beach because neither of them realized Robot would rust if he went swimming. He is rusted frozen on the sand, too heavy for Dog to drag away after they have napped clear through evening, and the door through the fence barrier to the beach not only closes at the end of the day, but until the next spring! Dog is dragged away by a cop for trespassing, given no chance to try and repair and retrieve Robot, who then spends the entire winter under snow and ice, quite literally dreaming of ways he might get reunited with Dog (hence the film’s title).

Dog marks the date he can go back (June 1), but in the meantime is forced to go on with his life. He’s still lonely, he tries to make friends, with varying but never complete success. By the time June 1 actually comes around, circumstances have changed significantly for both of them. I won’t spoil it except to assure that Robot does not stay stuck in the sand forever, and this is actually part of their diverging fates that take Robot Dreams to its surprisingly bittersweet conclusion. It’s not often that a film ends with its characters not unhappy, but perhaps fated with a lifetime of wistful yearning for what could have been.

Through all of it, the story is told almost exclusively in a visual manner, the closest to any dialogue being characters snickering or hollering out, “Hey!” I suppose you could say Robot Dreams thus features “voice acting,” although not in a way that particularly showcases anyone’s talent. The story and the animation are what make this the wonderful movie that it is, along with the soundtrack: the only time we hear actual words being vocalized is in song, tunes played on the soundtrack or from a character playing a cassette tape.

Director and co-writer Pablo Berger sets the story in 1980s New York, a plainly deliberate choice that adds to the nostalgic tone. Everything seen onscreen is a celebration of what we see, right down to the teenage animal punks who flip off Robot as he walks by them (oh wait, I guess that one moment could be seen as a “vulgarity,” even though even that plays with charm). Many shots feature the twin towers of the old World Trade Center in the background, always lovingly rendered, just like everything else we see onscreen. This is a movie that loves New York, and all of the characters in it. It loves Dog and it loves Robot, and it loves all the characters they meet along their respective journeys. It loves the art of storytelling and it loves animation in all its forms, and perhaps most of all, it loves us: the people watching the movie.

Robot and Dog swim in a sea of innovative storytelling devices.

Overall: A

MAXXXINE

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

There was a time when actresses famous or their roles in horror films were called “Scream Queens,” and that is indeed what the title character in MaXXXine aspires to be—even though no one ever uses the phrase in the film. As it happens, Mia Goth has carved out a similar niche for herself, although it exists a few steps to the side of “Scream Queen.” I’m not sure what similar title we could give her—Feature Eater? Picture Witcher? Wackadoodle Chicken Noodle? We can worship it.

One thing that’s for certain is that Mia Goth has a vibe. And it’s one of a woman barely feigning stability. Such is the case as Maxine Mix, a porn star attempting to break into Hollywood in 1985 with the backdrop of the Night Stalker serial killer. People close to Maxine keep dying, and it’s made clear early on that the homicide detectives investigating suspect someone besides the serial killer, just trying to make the murders look like the work of the Night Stalker.

This is all fertile ground for a fun homage to eighties slasher flicks, replete with a banger soundtrack of mid-eighties pop hits. (Frustratingly, movies like this never assemble the featured pop tracks into soundtrack albums anymore; search for the title on your music streamer of choice and all you’ll get is the motion picture score. Boring!) And, for a little while, MaXXXine really is fun, with a protagonist who is delightfully damaged and demented.

We’re made to expect that Maxine can handle herself even in the face of danger. In arguably the most memorable scene in the film, she turns the tables on a would-be attacker in a dark alley, forces him to strip naked at gunpoint, and forces him to suck on the barrel of the gun before she does something kind of hilariously grotesque to him. And there was something I really liked about this scene, the way it flips the script on so many of those old slasher movies with helpless women victims: here, it’s the man who is degraded onscreen, the woman with the agency. It has the exact same exploitative vibe, just with the gender roles reversed.

But, strangely, I’d have to say that’s where MaXXXine peaks, although there’s another pretty great scene involving a man trapped in a car getting compacted. MaXXXine has nearly all the elements you’re looking for in a movie of this sort—except that it presents itself as something with more depth than what it’s imitating, and in the end, it actually doesn’t.

As time goes on, and we get hints of Maxine’s secret past, our protagonist proves to be more helpless than you might expect—resourceful for sure, but she gets out of multiple scrapes only with the assistance of others, mostly men. And when her secret past is revealed and becomes an integral part of a climactic sequence around the Hollywood sign, it’s all fairly disappointing. I wanted more out of this movie, which starts out with an inventive spirit and then just gets lazy with it.

On the upside, MaXXXine still has a compellingly retro-moody tone, and more importantly, very good performances, particularly by Goth, and by Elizabeth Debicki as a ruthlessly ambitious film director. Several other actors are a bit wasted, though: Bobby Cannavale and Michelle Monaghan as the two relatively dull detectives; Kevin Bacon as a dirtbag private investigator; Giancarlo Esposito as a shady agent. I just wish the script were better. For all its retro neon-mood recreations, this film still feels very much a product of its time, when homage runs rampant without anything new to say.

I don’t know if she’ll blow you away but she might cock your gun.

Overall: B-

KINDS OF KINDNESS

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

I don’t quite know where to start with Kinds of Kindness, which itself is rather on-brand for director ad co-writer Yorgos Lanthimos, who previously brought us Poor Things (2023) and The Favourite (2018) and The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) and The Lobster (2016). This is a guy with a knack for making movies I find more compelling with each time I watch them, which was especially the case with his last two movies. The key difference with Kinds of Kindness is that I found it plenty compelling, if fucked up in that specifically Lanthimos way, but not in a way I can imagine going out of my way to watch it again.

This is his first feature that is an anthology, which largely explains its 164-minute run time. It features three separate short films, with titles that make less sense as they go on: The Death of R.M.F.; R.M.F. is Flying; R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich. Spoiler alert! No one flies in the second short and no one eats a sandwich in the third. Or maybe they do and I missed it? I learned later that this film features a post-credit sequence, although based on the description it doesn’t sound like I missed much. That’s the thing with Lanthimos’s work, though: it’s easy to miss what you’re missing.

It should be noted, it was several minutes into the first of the film’s three chapters before I even began to get an inkling as to what the hell was going on. To say a Yorgos Lanthimos film isn’t for everybody is to state the obvious, but his more recent films have been a lot more mainstream in their writing and construction, whereas this film harkens back to his earlier work, at times obtuse and frequently fucked up. He also kinds of pulls one over on us from the very beginning, with “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” by Eurythmics playing over the opening distributor logos—the kind of thing you typically find at the start of stylized blockbusters, an indicator that you’re about to have the very kind of blast you came for. It then cuts to the titular R.M.F.—the only character who forms any kind of connective thread through all three chapters—walking into an opulent home where a character played by Margaret Qualley opens the door in a sort of miniskirt version of a robe, and invites him in. We hear her have a relatively disjointed conversation over the phone, about R.M.F., but are otherwise given very little in the way of context clues.

Qualley, like all of the other principal actors, appears in all three chapters, in each one playing a different character. With the exception of Yorgos Stefanakos as R.M.F. in all three chapters, the others include Emma Stone as three different characters, along with Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Hong Chau, Mamoudou Athie, and in much smaller parts, Joe Alwyn. It would take too much time and space to get into a number of characters three times the number of these seven actors; suffice it to say that The Death of R.M.F. involves Plemons as an employee with a cult-like devotion to an employer played by Dafoe; R.M.F. is Flying involves Plemons as a husband deeply suspicious that the wife (Stone) who has returned after being marooned on an island is not really her; and R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich involves a literal cult led by both Dafoe and Chau, in which Plemons and Stone are searching for a miraculous healer.

None of these brief synopses do any one of the short films justice, in which odd details abound. Each of them exist in a universe that is just removed from the real world, one that somehow normalizes things that are deeply disturbing, from consensual murder to self-mutilation to the rape of an unconscious woman. That very last one was something I stumbled over immediately: Lanthimos finding ways to cross boundaries in a disturbing way is a signature move, but I found that one entirely unnecessary, and kept waiting for a narrative turn that somehow justified its inclusion, which never came. It would be misleading to try and argue that the scene is shot in a way that is not gratuitous, because its very inclusion is gratuitous.

The entire film is otherwise compelling, if that counts for anything, in which case your mileage may vary. I would say Kinds of Kindness is strictly for the die-hard Lanthimos fans, of which I am one—even though some arguably misguided choices also make this his weakest feature film in at least a decade. Overall, it feels very much like an exercise in artistic self-expression borne of opportunity Lanthimos eagerly took in the wake of relative commercial and massive critical success. Kinds of Kindness will only go so far on either front, but it still has this uniquely odd element that you just can’t look away from.

For instance, somehow the largely deadpan dialogue delivery actually works for it rather than against it: it feels like rote delivery with directorial intent, as opposed to actually bad acting. This applies mostly to the plethora of supporting players, though: across all three chapters, Plemons, Stone, Dafoe and Chau are all excellent as always. Whether it was them or the actors in smaller parts, though, I found myself wondering how many of them read the script and were eager to be the vessels of this director’s brilliant vision, or if they were just grateful to have gotten some acting work.

I will give Kinds of Kindness a large amount of credit for its deft execution of endings, at least. R.M.F. is Flying ends in a way that is truly wild, something some people will find so ridiculous as to justify completely dismissing it—and I found it hilarious. R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich ends in a way that is deliciously poetic irony, and I got a good belly laugh out of it.

It would seem, indeed, that Kinds of Kindness is intended as a unique brand of black comedy. It’s not that funny, but if you’ve got a truly black sense of humor, it has moments that will hit just right. It depends entirely whether or not you are part of the strictly limited club of people who are on the same wavelength.

I didn’t even get around the subtle queerness woven throughout the three chapters of this film.

Overall: B

A QUIET PLACE: DAY ONE

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

A Quiet Place: Day One is a serviceable science fiction thriller, which suffers by standing in the shadow of John Krasinski’s original and great A Quiet Place (2018), and its sequel that was nearly as good, A Quiet Place Part II (2021). The sequel has its own incredibly exciting opening sequence set during “Day One,” and it has more finesse than all of A Quiet Place: Day One, except that it’s just fun to return to this world, now in the setting of New York City.

We get opening title cards telling us what decibel the average noise level of New York City is, and that it’s equivalent to “a constant scream.” This is never spelled out explicitly. but the subtle implication is that this makes New York the primary target area of these predatory alien creatures that prey on anybody that makes noise.

I was relatively entertained by this movie, but I do have a lot of nitpick questions—at least one of which actually extends back to the opening scenes of the 2018 original film. In that movie, we see abandoned stacks of what look like the New York Post, with ironically screaming headlines that read, IT’S SOUND! At what silent printing press were these newspapers printed, I wonder?

In Day One, the discovery of how the alien creatures hunt happens astonishingly quickly. It’s set on the first day, right? No, wait—spoiler alert!—it does go through at least Day Two. The primary character we follow here is Samira, a terminally ill woman played by Lupita Nyong'o. She’s been granted a field trip into the city from her hospice clinic, and this is when the alien meteorites start crashing to the ground, and then mayhem ensues when the creators attack. Samira is blown against a glass wall by the force of an explosion and knocked unconscious. When she wakes up, apparently by magic, every human alive already understands that the way to protect themselves is to be quiet. Helicopters flying overhead shout through megaphones that “the attackers” can’t go into the water. All of this was apparently ascertained in a matter of hours, during which everyone alive would just be in a state of panic.

I have a lot of questions about these alien creatures, which apparently have no idea how much they owe their very existence to the Alien franchise. The predatory animal behaviors and reproductive practices of the “xenomorphs” in that franchise are made clear early on, though, and they make sense. The creatures in A Quiet Place hunt based on sound, that much is clear—but, to what end? We see them slash through people and snatch them, but we never see them eat people. Are people food to these things, or what? What bought them to Earth to begin with, anyway? How did they travel through space? Who designed the spacecraft, if all these guys know how to do is attack humans?

Day One is the first of these films not to be directed by John Krasinski, although he does get a story credit on the script. This film is otherwise written and directed by Michael Sarnoski, whose previous feature film was Pig, an unusually great acting showcase for late-career Nicolas Cage. The script here gives us an unprecedented glimpse into the alien creatures’ natural behaviors, a scene in which they pull open what look like eggs of some sort. But instead of hatching, the creatures open these pods and feast on their contents. We are given no context for this at all, no sense of what is actually happening there or why.

By the way, Samira has a cat, which she takes around with her everywhere, on a leash. The cat’s name is Frodo, and apparently Frodo is one of those rare cats, quite conveniently, who never meows. He runs off during chaos more than once, but he never gets lost. He’s less a cat than a convenient plot device. He captivates a random dude named Eric (Joseph Quinn) who winds up being the second lead of the film.

It doesn’t sound like I enjoyed this movie very much, does it? This is one of those movies I’m not sorry to have seen, that engages me just as much as it means to, but at which I cannot help but ask a great many nitpicky questions. It’s amusing to think of Samira, whose terminal illness changes the stakes of her fate as compared to everyone else around her, on a quest through New York City for one last meal of Patsy’s Pizza. Samira, Eric and Frodo walk deeper into the abandoned city while the other people still alive are making their way toward boats evacuating the city.

Among these people is Henri, the character played by Djimon Hounsou who was also featured in A Quiet Place Part II, the one clear strand of connective tissue between this and the previous two films. He even talks a bit about the boat evacuation in Part II, though a lot of what plays out in Day One doesn’t quite match the descriptions provided by characters in the other, definitively better movies.

A Quiet Place: Day One features a lot more action sequences than the other films, which relied much more on suspense—but, Day One also ratchets up the tension effectively in its own way. I did find myself wondering why we should care about these particular characters as opposed to anyone else barely escaping the city with their life. I suppose the terminal illness is a relatively clever conceit, in how it drastically changes the character’s motivations.

Ultimately, though, I’d have to say that A Quiet Place: Day One is really only for the franchise diehards. I never saw the first two films in theaters because I was afraid to; I literally saw them both for the first time only last month—and then was incredibly impressed by both of them. If you’ve never seen the others and you start with this one, it would just be a compelling but standard alien invasion action thriller, albeit with very good performances. If you have seen the other films, you’ll spend a lot of time thinking about how much better they both were.

The star making performances in this film are by Nico and Schnitzel, who play Frodo the cat.

THE BIKERIDERS

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

The Bikeriders has an odd, very unusual thing working against it—which is Austin Butler. And not because he’s bad, but because well, frankly, he’s too beautiful. It becomes a liability to suspension of disbelief. This is a story about a Chicago motorcycle gang in the sixties, and with Butler’s pretty face taking up so much of the screen space, it doesn’t feel that far from a biker gang in which one of them is a beauty queen.

It’s probably safe to assume Austin Butler himself would not be pleased to hear this. He has already made a name for himself in which he fully immerses himself into wildly divergent roles, from Elvis to Dune Part Two—so much so that, indeed, I have actually taken to seeing him in movies solely for the chance to see him act. Indeed, it’s the sole reason I decided to see The Bikeriders at all: because I love Austin Butler as an actor. It’s ironic that it should be his beauty that becomes the movie’s greatest liability.

I mean, Butler himself and director Jeff Nichols seem to think that the way to make his Benny character more “rugged” is just to give him some facial scruff. Well, he’s got piercing blue eyes, perfectly quaffed hair, and most incongruously, perfectly straight and shiny-white teeth. He’s also a 6-foot tall, perfectly lean, 32-year-old man. How is a little scruff going to combat any of this to make him fit in with all these other scruffy bike riders who look like they haven’t showered in a week?

So here’s the other thing about The Bikeriders, which, as a story, is fine. There’s nothing inherently wrong with it, and honestly the distraction of Austin Butler’s appearance is the only thing that qualifies as a real liability—others might argue the same of either Jodie Comer’s or Tom Hardy’s accents, but on those points, I disagree. The performances, across the board, are actually phenomenal. It’s a level of talent that seems wasted on a story this unremarkable.

The narrative point of view comes from Comer’s character, Kathy, who winds up marrying Benny. She undergoes several interviews with a photo journalist played by Mike Faist (previously seen as Riff in the wonderful 2021 Spielberg adaptation of West Side Story), thus becoming the film’s voiceover narration. The Bikeriders is “inspired by” a book of the same name, and Comer’s vocal performance, with a very distinctive Midwestern accent not used by anyone else in the film, is reportedly uncannily similar to that of the real Kathy the character is based on. Some people are distracted by it; for me, it works.

The leader of The Vandals, the motorcycle club Benny is an eternally stoic member of, is named Johnny and played by Tom Hardy, an actor with similarly immersive methods. His vocal performance is also a pointed choice, giving Johnny a very working-class Chicago accent that is pitched at a slightly higher register. These three characters form a sort of love triangle that is mostly lacking in animosity, the struggle mostly being between Johnny and Kathy vying for Benny’s time and loyalty.

I won’t go so far as to say The Bikeriders bored me, but there were times when it got close. I’d love to see performances this great, from these specific people, perhaps even together as they do have chemistry, in a better story. I just didn’t care that much about the fate of this motorcycle club, the dark arc of which has already long been a matter of public record and told many times, if not about this specific club. It’s a strange thing, for there to be so many great things about a movie, but if the script isn’t quite there, the rest of it doesn’t make as much of a difference as you’d hope. Ultimately The Bikeriders is a film showcasing a ton of talent, but is definitively less than the sum of its parts.

He’s pretty to look at: which was all I could think about.

Overall: B

GHOSTLIGHT

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

Ghostlight is the kind of movie whose excellence comes at you gradually. In the beginning, it’s just a small family, two middle-aged parents dealing with the exasperating antics of a teenager, who is facing expulsion from school for her behavior, but if some cards are played right she might get only suspension.

The great thing about it is what seems at first to be so unremarkable about them all. Daisy (Katherine Mallen Kupferer) is not the precociously eloquent teenager seen in most films like this. She’s clearly genuinely smart, but the ways she acts out, the things she says, are meant only to disrupt, and since that takes little actual effort to do, what actually comes out of her mouth is often just plain dumb. She punctuates her mouthiness with annoyingly unnecessary profanity.

Her parents, construction worker Dan (Keith Kupferer) and teacher Sharon (Tara Mallen), actually aren’t that much different. They don’t resort to profanity, but resort to other things that are just as unhealthy, such as Dan’s violent outbursts or Sharon barely managing to communicate with either of them. The script, by Kelly O'Sullivan, takes some time to reveal exactly what this family’s damage is, and since the story unfolds this way I won’t spoil it here. Suffice it to say that they suffered a horrible tragedy, and they are actively engaged in a lawsuit against another family in response to it. This would qualify as another unhealthy approach to dealing with their trauma.

The real hook of the story here is Dan’s random invitation to join a local community theater troupe, which is putting on a production of Romeo & Juliet. He meets an ex-professional actor who is around his age, Rita (Dolly de Leon) when first she asks him to try keeping the noise down with his construction work. But later, after she witnesses one of his outbursts, she explains to him that “You looked like someone who might like to be someone else. For a while.”

Dan’s organic integration into this play, in which they are forced into the backward yet somehow charming representation of teenage leads played by middle-aged actors, proves to be a way for him to process his deeply repressed emotions.

It only occurred to me just now to consider how often Shakespeare’s work featured a “play within a play,” and eventually we see a fair amount of this Romeo & Juliet in production in this film: another play within a play. Clearly a concept that dates back four hundred years, but here co-directors Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson do something very different with it: we see the performance of this play acting in real time as a visceral metaphor for the grief the actors themselves are going through. To see the nuance performed in this context, particularly on the part of Keith Kupferer, is breathtaking. Shakespeare’s writing alone is moving enough, and on top of that we see Dan finally acknowledging his own grief in his delivery of it.

In another person’s hands, the performance of Romeo and Juliet by older actors might come off as corny or cheap. Here, it’s deeply moving. So, yes, Ghostlight is in its way a tearjerker, but it has plenty of levity as well. I got several good laughs out of this movie. But whether it’s comical or tragic, there’s an unusually grounded representation of these characters, all of whom look, and act, like regular people. No one in this film looks like a movie star, and that is as it should be; if they did, it wouldn’t work. This especially applies to the rest of the characters rounding out the cast of the Romeo & Juliet production, most of them older people pursuing theater as a hobby. There’s a couple of younger men too, because when it comes to community theater, it takes all kinds. But without a younger woman, Rita gets the part of Juliet, simply because she gave the best read at her audition.

Ghostlight is secretly one of the best films of the year, because it feels like a “small movie” and yet it’s so much bigger once you wade into its gentle waves of emotional resonance. It exists in a cocoon of fondness for its own characters, no matter how flawed they are, and it’s impossible not to feel warmed by it.

A genuinely new take on Romeo & Juliet is an impressive achievement indeed.

Overall: A

THELMA

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

The marketing for Thelma would have you believe that it’s “The Beekeeper with senior citizens.” Both movies are about the seeking of retribution for criminals scamming an old lady out of her money. The key difference is that although Thelma features the old lady herself setting off to get her money back (as opposed to outright revenge, another critical clarification), it’s also firmly grounded in reality. Viewers might be surprised to find the degree to which Thelma leans into the challenges of getting really old.

It’s also genuinely funny, and incredibly sweet, something very much enhanced by the casting of real, genuinely old people rather than younger actors playing old. June Squibb, a revelation at age 83 when she was featured in the 2012 Alexander Payne film Nebraska, is now 94. That she can so successfully carry a film at this age is an inspiration, something that made me think of Rita Moreno, who is now 92. Those two should star in something together—they’re much closer in age than Moreno was to her costars in 80 or Brady.

There are multiple other elderly actors in Thelma, but the most notable of them is Richard Roundtree, who died last fall at the age of 81. There’s something bittersweet about these great roles that occasionally come along for older actors, that are about the perils of aging, and then they die shortly after production. Roundtree’s character, Ben, is an old friend of Thelma’s with whom she has not been in touch since he made the wise choice to move into assisted living—something Thelma is obstinately refusing to do because she can’t let go of her independence.

These are not new themes, of course, but in the hands of writer-director Josh Margolin, who reveals in the end credits the real Thelma who clearly inspired this film, we get a genuinely fresh take. Not a whole lot actually happens in Thelma because it takes so long for them to get accomplished: Thelma retrieves the address where she was tricked into sending $10,000 by someone impersonating her grandson on the phone, and makes it her mission to go there and get it back. She no longer drives, and so she attempts to steal the scooter owned by Ben. Ben attempts to thwart her, but cannot stop her, and so they ride on it together across town.

All the while, they successfully avoid the family looking for her: most notably her young adult grandson, Daniel. And I really must shout out 24-year-old actor Fred Hechinger, who gives an astonishingly authentic performance as a uniquely anxious young man who deeply loves his grandma. I have never seen him before, but would still say he was superbly cast in this part—as were Parker Posey and Clark Gregg as his hovering parents, giving a clue as to how Daniel grew up like this. Only Thelma treats Daniel like she takes it for granted that he’s going to be fine, and he’s too young to worry about whether or not he will be.

To be fair to Daniel’s parents, they clearly love him dearly, just as they do Thelma, who plays Posey’s mother. Thelma convinces Daniel to drive her to the assisted living facility where Ben lives, and when Thelma and Ben disappear, Daniel beats himself up for losing her. There’s a key scene where Daniel is angry with himself about this, calling himself a “stupid little bitch,” and Hechinger’s performance is so nuanced and vulnerable, it’s genuinely heartbreaking.

To be clear, Thelma moves in and out of such heavy tones, alternating with genuinely lighthearted, almost always incredibly sweet, and occasionally hilarious moments. Most of the time spent with Daniel and Thelma together, Daniel is just sweetly worrying that Thelma is safe. But then, of course, she and Ben speed off out of the assisted living home on Ben’s scooter, turning Thelma into a sort of road movie.

After a few requisite plot turns, they do make it to a point where they can confront the person who scammed her out of her money—and it’s another elderly man, played by Malcolm McDowell. He also has a young man cohort, and there is a moment during the confrontation where Thelma sort of opens the young man’s eyes in a way that’s far too easy and contrived. It was the one time in the entire film when something happened and I immediately thought: well, that was dumb. Few movies are perfect, I guess.

That said, few comedies are as beautifully shot as Thelma is, here by cinematographer David Bolen. In a way, Thelma is greater than the sum of its parts, as so few films with a premise like this would place such quality on elements of filmmaking that others could get away with phoning in. The script is far deeper and more layered than you might realize even until considering it in retrospect, it looks fantastic, and the performances are great. Thelma is a bittersweet experience that leans into the sweet part, in all the best ways.

You’ll want to keep your eye on these two.

Overall: A-

TUESDAY

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

It can be astonishing when something comes along that is utterly original, unlike anything you have ever seen before—sometimes, to the point that it comes close to inexplicable. Since when does Death manifest itself as a deep, scratchy-throated parrot, anyway? Ever since Daina Oniunas-Pusic thought to write and direct Tuesday, I guess.

Maybe it’s just that the black cloaked figure with a scythe has long since played out. Tuesday offers no explanation whatsoever as to the use of a parrot instead, but rather, presents him as a character with challenges and internal struggles like anyone else. Not even that is a particularly novel approach, but how it gets contextualized here certainly is.

Death can be tiny, and he can grow to a giant size, a detail that becomes a surprising plot point later on in the film. When we first see him, he is so tiny he is nestled into the corner of a man’s eye, something we don’t even realize for the few seconds it takes the camera to pan out. This is part of an opening montage that makes it quite unclear what the tone of the film is going to be, in which we see Death release random people around the world from their pain, waving his wing over them.

I had a peculiar experience with this film on a number of fronts. I never saw a trailer for Tuesday, and chose to go see it based on a fairly high MetaCritic score of 70, and a brief synopsis I found both odd and compelling: a mother and teenage daughter must confront Death when it arrives in the form of a talking bird. That honestly sounds a bit whimsical, possibly bordering on corny, but late-career Julia Louis-Dreyfus has made some very interesting choices, tending to be in movie projects that are both a bit off the beaten path and reliably entertaining.

All that said, when Tuesday opened on a shot of Earth from outer space and the ominous sounds of countless people longing for death, shifting between voices like the movement of a radio dial, for a minute I wondered if I had gone into the wrong theater. Is this a horror movie? Not quite. Is it a comedy? Definitely not, even though it has a through line of irreverence that gives it several genuinely funny moments. Is it ultimately a tear jerker? Definitely yes, but still in a way that leaves Tuesday a movie that defies categorization. It’s sort of a sad mood piece with a surprising amount of humor. You don’t see that every day.

“Tuesday” is actually the title character, the terminally ill teenage girl played by Lola Petticrew, who Death (voiced by Arinzé Kene) is summoned to visit by the sounds of her wheezing, evidently indicating that tonight is her time. But rather than freaking out when the bird appears on the table in her backyard, Tuesday suddenly launches into a joke, an earnestly cute one that involves penguins in the back of a car and actually made me laugh. (I did wonder how that would play on rewatch, when the punch line is already known.)

Death is disarmed by this, which causes him to hesitate, and then agree to wait until Zora, Tuesday’s mother, gets home.

This is where Julia Louis-Dreyfus comes in, as she is perfectly cast in the role, which becomes more significant as the story plays out. She is more than anything what makes Tuesday worth seeing. Ultimately, Tuesday is a movie about accepting the inevitability and ubiquity of death. It just uses a wild premise and some very odd turns to get us there, a journey you might have mixed feelings about on the way but in the end you’ll be glad you went on.

Given how low the budget for Tuesday clearly was, Daina Oniunas-Pusic does a lot with very little, focusing most of the movie on all of two characters, with one supporting character, an in-house nurse (Leah Harvey) as a third who comes and goes. Oniunas-Pusic manages to use subtle cues and sparingly used special effects to render the apocalyptic consequences when Death is taken out of commission for a while—thanks to some jarringly inventive tactics on the part of Zora, who cannot cope. In a way, Tuesday is a demonstration that our very universe does not work if death does not happen in it.

As is often the case, it’s the terminally ill person who accepts their fate, and the people who love them who cannot. When Zora meets Death, she isn’t freaked out by a magical bird so much as the knowledge that he is there to take her daughter away. Zora then quite understandably acts out of desperation, ultimately only prolonging the inevitable.

As odd as this movie is, I can see it being deeply moving to anyone who lost a loved one, particularly one gone before it should have been their time. It has far more depth and far more nuance than its simple premise might suggest. And Louis-Dreyfus gives a magnificent performance, by turns funny and heartbreaking. It may be a challenge to open your mind to it at first, but if you can manage it, you’ll be glad you did.

No, this isn’t a family comedy: it’s an exploration of our emotional connection to Death (which is also a bird).

INSIDE OUT 2

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

Here is the most important thing you need to know about Inside Out 2, a very fun movie: absolutely do not rewatch the original Inside Out from 2015 soon before going. The original was such a spectacular film, holding up astoundingly well on rewatch even nearly a decade later, having that film fresh in your mind will only taint your experience of watching the sequel.

There is an inescapable, inherent flaw in revisiting a universe that was so wildly imaginative and inventive. The wildness and inventiveness is already established, so it cannot wow you in the same way. It’s impossible, because you are not visiting any place new. On the contrary, you are simply returning to something familiar, if (in my case, anyway) beloved. It’s a comforting and warm journey, to be sure, but it still suffers from the trappings of even the best of sequels.

To be fair, it is possible to top an original film with a sequel—Pixar did it in 2010 with Toy Story 3, after all. But for that to happen, to overcome the issue of returning to a world that cannot be fully fresh, you have to have an amazing script. In the case of Toy Story, it also improved upon the computer animation technology. That film had both as major advantages, largely because its iconic toy characters were brought to an entirely new environment.

That is a key difference with Inside Out 2, which has neither a better script (because how could you improve on perfection) nor a new environment—we are still visiting the inside of young Riley’s head, the one key difference being that now she is hitting puberty. The headquarters of her brain are demolished by a wrecking crew, and the one truly new element are the new emotions brought in as new characters: Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser), Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos), and by far most significantly, Anxiety (Maya Hawke).

And this is to say: Inside Out 2 definitely still has its clever conceits, such as when the original five emotion characters are banished to the back of Riley’s mind, thus becoming “suppressed emotions” who then have to go on a long journey, both to retrieve Riley’s fragile sense of self, and to bring it back to Headquarters. The primary characters of Joy, Sadness and Anger are still voiced by Amy Poehler, Phyllis Smith and Lewis Black respectively, but Fear and Disgust are now voiced by Tony Hale and Liza Lapira. Honestly, the loss of Bill Hader and Mindy Kaling isn’t that big a deal; these are just animated characters, after all, and these voices in particular are not distinctive enough to make the characters seem all that different.

What is different is the pacing, where Inside Out 2 rushes through enough of its plot points and packs in enough new characters that, even though at 96 minutes it’s actually a minute longer than the original, it feels shorter. In the first act of the film, I felt like it wasn’t quite giving us enough space to breathe in the story chugging along—although, to be fair, that’s kind of how it feels to be a young teenager, with changes coming hard and fast and without warning.

Another particularly new element in Inside Out 2, which I have mixed feelings about, is the far greater time sitting in the deep awkwardness that comes with a 13-year-old trying to make new friends while lacking the sophistication to realize she’s hurting the friends she’s leaving behind. Most of the film takes place over a stay at hockey camp, where Riley encounters an older player she worships, and yearns to make the team as a Freshman the next school year. She makes some very bad decisions, mostly at the behest of misguided Anxiety while her initial, core emotions struggle to make their way back out of the back of her mind.

I do love the structure of how all of this plays out, and it should be stressed that, while the first half of the film is both solidly entertaining and a variation on familiar themes, it eventually finds its way into a uniquely profound emotional space. I cried a lot more than I expected to at the end of this movie, not because it was sad (as many Pixar films infamously are) but simply because it was so moving, as we watch Riley become a complex, nuanced person.

And that brings us around to this point: the original Inside Out was thematically inaccessible to very young children, and Inside Out 2 is even more so. Both will likely entertain young children regardless, just because of its colorful and sometimes wacky characters, but the sophistication of the storytelling will only register to adult viewers, and possibly some teenage ones. There’s a gag in this film about a character named Nostalgia, rendered as a sweet old lady, who keeps coming out before any of the other emotions want them to. There may be some unintentional symbolism there in terms of the life of Pixar itself, which has now lasted far beyond its glory days, with a record in the past decade or so that’s far spottier than would have seemed possible in the first 15 years of its history.

What this means is, Inside Out 2 is a high quality film for “late-stage Pixar,” but pales in comparison to the vast heights of its early years. Pixar was far ahead of the curve for ages, the only studio consistently churning out reliably excellent content, but now the rest of the industry has caught up with them, both with writers and with impressive animation. The very existence of this film is an invitation to feel nostalgic for a better time, but it was still an invitation I was happy to accept.

Mind the button that brings a nuclear level of change … in a movie that isn’t that different.

Overall: B+

HIT MAN

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

It’s been a dismal June so far for theatrical wide releases, and I’ll have to include the end of May in that: May 31 had no major movie releases at all, less because of the inevitable shift of moviegoing habits in a post-covid world—although that’s certainly part of it—than because of countless postponements after last year’s writer and actor strikes. And for the record: any movie studio crying about the sad state of box office returns so far this year has only themselves to blame, as they could have accepted the unions’ quite reasonable demands from the start instead of digging in their heels for months in 2023.

So, here we are. This weekend, there actually are theatrical wide releases—a couple of them—it’s just just that I don’t personally have any interest in them. If you thought you might come here for my take on Bad Boys Ride or Die, you were mistaken. (I don’t flatter myself that any of you particularly did, mind you. Still, I’d have to be actually getting paid for it to write a review of that movie, in which I would likely write much about my undampened distaste for Will Smith. And even if Smith had never slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars, I’d have little faith that his new film was any good, given 2020’s Bad Boys for Life certainly wasn’t.) The other is The Watchers, by Ishana Shyamalan, which is clearly “M. Night Lite,” and: no thank you.

What to do in the absence of anything worth seeing in theaters, then? Something I haven’t done in five months: turn to a streamer—specifically, Netflix—for a significant release to watch and review. And releases like this going to streamers instead of theaters, at least some of the time, is clearly here to stay. There is no question that five years ago, a film starring Glen Powell, cowritten by Glen Powell and Richard Linklater, and directed by Richard Linklater—this is the guy who gave us Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise, School of Rock, and Boyhood—would have gotten wide release in theaters. It was indeed five years ago when his last live action narrative feature got a wide release, and that one wasn’t even particularly good.

Admittedly I found something immediate to get past about Hit Man—which was originally set to be released around the same time as The Killer (also on Netflix!), ostensibly similarly themed but a very, very different movie. The visual vibe of the movie, I can’t quite put my finger on it precisely, except to say that it feels a little . . . low-rent. A bit like a “TV movie,” to be honest. And yet, as the story unfolds, it somehow fits: both as a Richard Linklater film in particular, and as part of the film’s knowingly yet deeply subtle cornball tone.

Unlike The Killer, and hundreds of other films before it, Hit Man openly acknowledges that “hit men” as we think of them in pop culture are a myth: “Hit men don’t really exist,” says Powell’s title character, Gary Johnson. But Gary has been hired by the New Orleans police department to pose as the “hit men” would-be murderers expect to see, in sting operations to arrest them before the kill can actually happen. And this is a side gig: Gary’s day job is as a psychology and philosophy professor, scenes of which provide fertile ground for scenes exploring the nature of identity, which fall just short of metatextual.

It takes a while for the real crux of the story to take hold: after helping arrest several would-be criminals, Gary, in one of the many disguises he’s thrown himself into with this job (many of which are subtly but very effectively funny), comes across a young woman who is meeting him about killing her asshole husband. But this time, seeing a young, beautiful, and seemingly very vulnerable woman named Madison (all of it expertly played by Adria Arjona; hopefully with a great career ahead of her), Gary—as “Ron”—convinces her to change her mind, much to the consternation of the NOPD.

There are too many fantastic plot turns that ensue from there, so I won’t spoil them. Just do yourself a favor and watch the movie on Netflix. Viewers should be forewarned about one thing, though: I truly don’t know why anyone is listing this movie under “action” as a genre. Crime and comedy, sure; but action—there is none to speak of in this movie. If you have any familiarity with Richard Linklater whatsoever, you’d know not to expect it, as his films are all constructed around dialogue. We see a literal gun onscreen maybe once, and in neither case does it even get fired.

And yet: people do get killed in this movie. This is the genius of Richard Linklater, if you know how to appreciate his specific brand of art. Hit Man has some uniquely clever story turns, if not outright plot twists, and they are quite satisfying. He has an impressive knack for economy of storytelling, particularly on a budget: consider the police officer Jasper (Austin Amelio), a thorn in the NOPD’s side due to his suspension after violent excessive force on some teenagers, an incident that was caught on tape. This information is only ever revealed through well-written dialogue you barely even register as expositional, and (thankfully) we never see the video footage—although the Police Chief does hold up his phone at one point while talking about it, while his phone isn’t even on.

Jasper inevitably becomes a crucial plot point himself, worming his way in between Gary and Madison. Jasper is a deeply annoying douchebag of a man, which is a credit to how Austin Amelio plays him, which makes his fate by the end of the film, thematically complex as it is, deeply satisfying. Just about all the performances are great in Hit Man, but none are as great as Glen Powell’s, an undeniably handsome man who manages to be believably dorky as a professor and then convincingly hot as “Ron,” who is the guy Madison is into. Still, the montage of character disguises Gary takes on is great fun.

Hit Man on the whole is just a fun hang, an impressive achievement for a film in which little more than talking and plotting actually takes place onscreen. I suppose we could argue that’s what makes this perfect for a streamer release—there are no special effects and no action set pieces to make anyone insist it should be seen on the big screen. I would counter that there’s something to be said for seeing a fun movie of any sort with an audience, where there can be a sense of collective enjoyment. On the other hand, no theatrical release would have the breadth of reach that Netflix now does, and it does make me happy to think how many people will see, and likely enjoy, this movie.

This is the most action you’ll see in this movie—but it’s still really fun I swear!

Overall: B+