KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN

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

I can’t quite decide what to make of Kiss of the Spider Woman, which is a 2025 movie musical adaptation of a 1993 stage musical adaptation of a 1976 novel that was already adapted into a 1985 film drama. This much I can say with confidence: this new film is not going to make much in box office revenue, and it’s certainly not going to be remembered the way the 1985 film was—or even, in all likelihood, the 1993 stage musical was. This movie is going to come and go, less forgotten than widely ignored.

It’s too bad, because the movie isn’t bad. It’s just also unremarkable, save perhaps for some of the performances. It seems Jennifer Lopez can’t catch a break when it comes to her film career—she rightfully garnered awards buzz for the 2019 film Hustlers, but nothnig really came of it; she’s been doing her best ever since. Here she plays the title character, which is ironic on two levels: she represents a character in a fantasy escape from the Argentinian prison “real world of the film,” but the title character isn’t even the main character of that fantasy. On the plus side, she also plays Aurora, the heroine of the movie musical whose story is being told by prisoner Luis Molina (Tonatiuh), to his cellmate Valentin (Diego Luna).

A huge element of this story is that Music is gay, and Valentin is straight—or, so it would seem from the start. There’s a lot about the evolution of queer identity politics since the seventies that this film does not bother to acknowledge, most notably Luis’s desire to be a woman. Even without the very vocabulary to articular trans identity, Kiss of the Spider Woman manages to give no solid indication of whether we should fundamentally regard Luis as a man or a woman (or even neither). From the context of the script, one could even assume we’re meant to think of Luis as a gay man who simply lionizes women. This remains the case even when, predictably and inevitably, we get to what amounts to a dream sequence—and a beautiful one—featuring Luis as a woman (or Tonatiuh, who is openly queer, in drag).

And then there is the relationship that evolves between these two characters, which leans hard into a direction I wasn’t quite expecting. And what are the implications, then, of Valentin’s identity and sexuality? Perhaps the ambiguity is the point, but turning this story into a musical strips it of much of its nuance, leaning further instead into the escapist fantasy that Luis regales Valentin with. Valentin begins by judging the story’s stereotypes and tropes, and he’s not exactly wrong. But, he also eventually gets into the story, which the film we are watching cuts back and forth between, and eventually finds that even this story has some twists he did not quite expect.

The 1985 film adaptation starred William Hurt as Luis and Raul Julia as Valentin, and was critically adored. I may watch it soon, but I made the right choice not watching it just before seeing this new adaptation, which almost certainly would only suffer for it. The lush colors of the production design in the movie-within-a-movie (that being what makes this a musical) are well executed, and Jennifer Lopez in particular is fitted into several beautifully designed dresses. The choreography may have been hard work to execute but just looks all right onscreen, and here is the kicker considering the musical genre: the music itself is merely fine. Not bad; it serves its purpose—but the music itself is what makes or breaks a musical, and there’s not a single iconic tune to be found here. I can’t remember a single line right now, and I saw the film a couple of hours ago.

Lopez delivers the songs flawlessly, though. Diego Luna is great as ever, though I have some slight ambivalence about Tonatiuh’s performance. Tonatiuh being openly queer doesn’t change how exaggerated Luis’s effeminate demeanor feels, especially when we first meet them. It may very well that this is in keeping with the tradition of this story—maybe this is how Luis is described in the novel; maybe it’s how Luis is performed onstage. But, like most people who see this movie, I don’t have those comparison points at hand, and it feels here like a character trait that gets over-indulged, as though trying to telegraph to the back of the house that this person is queer.

Still, Kiss of the Spider Woman has some pointedly timely story elements, most significant among them being the setting of the final stage of Argentinian dictatorship—and some pointed reflections of where others in the world may be headed. Again, none of this has any time or space to be fully fleshed out because of all that gets reserved for song-and-dance routines. In the end, Kiss of the Spider Woman is a movie with something to say but an inability to say it with clarity.

Looks like Diego Luna has eyes for Jenny from the Block,

Overall: B

ARE WE GOOD?

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

To some people, Marc Maron is endearingly aggravated. To other people, he isn’t. It’s pretty safe to say the former camp will enjoy the documentary Are We Good? It’s probably even safe to say the late director Lynn Shelton would have enjoyed this film, although it likely never would have been made without her, and it certainly would have been a completely different movie had she not died suddenly of acute myeloid leukemia all of two months into the pandemic.

And herein lies the key difference between fans of Marc Maron and people who don’t know him, and how Are We Good? is likely to hit. I was barely familiar with Maron as a standup comic before he started his podcast WTF with Marc Maron in 2009, and I didn’t even learn about the podcast until maybe around 2013. But I had certainly been listening to his twice-weekly podcast for several years by the time Maron was still recording the regular solo intro to his scheduled podcast episode, only days after Shelton’s death. It was heartbreaking to listen to, but in keeping with Maron’s penchant for holding his heart on his sleeve, in ways that ran the gamut of emotions.

The kind of cool trick that director Steven Feinartz does with Are We Good? is show us how Shelton and Maron fell for each other to begin with. An actor friend, as one of several talking heads in this film, refers to Maron as “endearingly fussy,” and says that the more aggravated Maron got, the more it made Shelton laugh. It’s difficult to watch this film and not think about what could have been for these two, who were friends for several years, and then finally allowed themselves to fall into each other. Fans of Marc Maron know well the kind of relationship history he has, and this is one that felt like it could have been the one that truly stuck.

As such, Are We Good? follows two narrative tracks: Maron’s relationship with Lynn Shelton, and particularly how he navigated the grief in the wake of losing her—often in real time, on-camera, and much of it being worked out onstage—and the overall arc of Maron’s career as both a comedian and a podcast host. If you know anything about Maron you know how the podcast was borne of desperation when his comedy career was stalled, and how over just a few short years it both reinvented and reignited his career.

On the other hand, if you know Marc Maron, there’s really nothing to learn from Are We Good? that you didn’t already know. It’s just a pleasant, fun hang with a guy who feel like you know because of this 21st-century concept called parasocial relationships. So what if you don’t know Marc Maron? In that case, this film isn’t really made with you as its target audience. I suppose it’s just as well; the film got special one-night screenings across the country on only October 5 and October 8. I have no idea where it will be found going forward, though presumably it will stream somewhere,

I will say this: Are We Good? is a unique and engaging exploration of grief, how there’s no wrong way to deal with it, and how it affected one of the most lovable straight men who ever existed. That could be the entry point for people unfamiliar with his work. This is a movie squarely aimed at the familiar, however, and while it’s by turns moving and entertaining (and occasionally genuinely funny), it’s fairly short on insight. You’ll get much more out of watching Maron’s own comedy specials, particularly the most recent couple of them (which can be streamed on HBO Max).

I had a good time. I’m glad I went out to see it. But it also left me eager to re-watch the comedy specials, which are far more rightly constructed and have a more clearly defined narrative arc. This illustrates the difference between a comic who has truly honed the skill of his craft, and a documentary filmmaker who is just pretty good at it.

I guess the answer is: yeah, pretty good.

Overall: B

ANEMONE

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

If you like gorgeous cinematography above all else, then Anemone might work for you. I tend to give different aspects of filmmaking equal weight, perhaps when I often shouldn’t, and I was quite taken with much of the visuals in this film. Never mind the stunnig shots of stormy skies or the birds-eye shots of verdant forests—cinematographer Ben Fordesman (Love Lies Bleeding) manages even to shoot the head and face of a young woman in a nondescript bedroom beautifully. The thing is with Anemone, it’s the story more than anything that is a challenge to penetrate.

I spent much of the story feeling like director and co-writer Ronan Day-Lewis was being very intentional about how I had no idea exactly what the hell was going on. This was less compelling than it was frustrating, but to the credit of both Ronan and his father Daniel Day-Lewis, who came out of retirement to both co-write and star in his son’s movie, things actually do gel narratively by the end. It just takes a while to get there.

I’m not sure how much of a compliment it is to say about a film that it rewards patience. Patience shouldn’t necessarily be tested in film, depending on the story and the point of view I suppose. Reasonable people could disagree on the matter in this case. The key selling point for Anemone is actually behind the scenes: the heartwarming story of the man widely regarded as the best actor alive, coming out of retirement to help his 27-year-old son make his first feature film. You might be surprised to find Daniel also apparently came out of retirement so he could deliver an extended monologue about taking laxatives so he could deliberately shit all over a pedophile priest.

“Did you believe that?” asks Ray, his character, after finishing telling the tale to his brother, Jim (Sean Bean). This feels kind of like the most pertinent question about the film overall, which spends a lot of time on both visual and narrative abstractions—a couple of pointedly surreal dream sequences, and a lot of caginess regarding these brothers’ past involvement in “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland. After a great deal of time in the film, eventually we learn that Ray is a deeply emotionally scarred man who abandoned his wife, Nessa (Samantha Morton) and their son, Brian (Samuel Bottomley) some twenty years ago and has been living in a cabin so deep in the woods there isn’t even road access ever since. I kept wondering about the inevitability of land development eventually reaching this cabin.

With the exception of a couple of brief scenes in pubs, or of Nessa at her emergency call center job, these four characters are the only ones we ever see in Anemone, which presumably kept production costs down. We get several scenes of Nessa and Brian in their home, coming to terms with how much trouble Brian is in after an antagonistic comment by some other unnamed kid set him off to the point where he beat him nearly to death. We get regular visual reminders of this by close-ups of Brian’s scabbed knuckles. Brian does get a visit by a surprisingly empathetic friend, Hattie (Safia Oakley-Green). Meanwhile, Jim, the brother who was also left behind and helped Nessa raise Brian, has gone off to find Ray in an effort to convince him to come back and help Brian move on from his own pain by providing some answers that have been denied him his whole life.

A lot of stock is put into this idea, and it’s one I was never fully sold on. The return of Brian’s absent father with his own fucked-up past will magically turn things right for Brian’s future? When it comes to suspension of disbelief, the suspension’s strength isn’t holding all that well.

And Anemone is very vague about the connection to The Troubles in these people's past, even with one more Ray monologue about a very specific, very violent incident that was clearly a decisive factor in his becoming a hermit in the woods. Daniel Day-Lewis is very good in this film, but no one could credibly say it comes close to his best performances; he commands attention far more gracefully in what previously had been his last role, Phantom Thread (2017), an objectively superior film on all fronts (except, perhaps, cinematography).

Incidentally, Daniel Day-Lewis is not the only thing Anemone has in common with other Paul Thomas Anderson films. There’s a thrilling sequence of a storm with giant hail stones that very much brought to mind the plague-of-frogs sequence in the 1999 film Magnolia—right down to the sequence of shots depicting each character reacting to the freak occurrence. There are many recognizable influences at play in Ronan Day-Lewis’s film, but that doesn’t preclude his obvious talent either. Much as Daniel Day-Lewis is rightly beloved, I am left more eager to see what Ronan might do next on his own.

Oh, brother!

Overall: B

ELEANOR THE GREAT

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

Every day we still have June Squibb with us is a gift. She’ll be 96 years old next month, and as Eleanor the Great was shot in early 2024, she would have been 94 then—the exact age as her character, the title character. Squibb seems to be following in the footsteps of Betty White, who was born 7 years before her, and whose final live action role was in 2018, at the age of 95. It’s amazing these women were, or are, able to keep working at that age.

The thing is, thanks to The Golden Girls, I knew who Betty White was for the last 35 years of her life. I never really knew who June Squibb was until her Oscar-nominated role in Alexander Payne’s 2013 film Nebraska (the only Oscar nomination Squibb ever got, incidentally). I totally forgot she also had a part in one of Payne’s previous films, About Schmidt (2002). Squibb was 84 years old and 73 years old when those two movies were released, respectively. Which is to say: I have only ever known Squibb onscreen as an old lady—albeit a consistently compelling one. It seems worth noting that she has over a hundred acting credits, dating back as far as 1985—when she was 55. She previously worked exclusively in live theater, starting in the late fifties.

The truth is, all of the aforementioned films are better than Eleanor the Great, but that has nothing to do with June Squibb, who is far and away the best thing about it; the film could have easily collapsed under someone else in the lead role. The greatest distinction of Eleanor the Great is actually that it’s the feature directorial debut of Scarlett Johansson, and to put it diplomatically, Johansson has potential but could use some more practice.

Johansson’s status as a superstar can easily overshadow some of the more interesting things about this production, such as how script writer Tory Kamen very loosely based the Eleanor character on her own grandmother, Elinore. It should be stressed, however, that the real-life Elinore never lied about being a Holocaust survivor. That’s something Squibb’s Eleanor does, and it’s the basic premise of the film.

Eleanor the Great is also about grief, though, and as such will have a lot that’s very relatable to those of us who have lost someone very close to us. The story here is often a bit clunky in the telling, but it does have some insightful themes about how, as one character very directly puts it, grief can make us very selfish. It’s often said that everyone deals with grief in their own way, and there is no wrong way, but Eleanor might serve as an argument that there’s at least one wrong way. Maybe don’t sit in on a Holocaust survivors’ support group and tell someone else’s story as your own.

To be fair, every step of the way, we can empathize with the decisions Eleanor makes, even when we know they’re wrong. She lived with her best friend, Bessie (Rita Zohar), as two widows for 11 years before Bessie passes away. When Eleanor’s daughter Lisa (Jessica Hecht) moves her from Florida back to her native New York, Eleanor reluctantly goes to a social event only to get mistaken for someone looking for the Holocaust survivors’ group. Eleanor even starts to apologize when she realizes she’s in the wrong place, but another person in the group, mistaking Eleanor’s apology for simple nervousness, urges her to stay and tell her story. And, she does. Except she tells Bessie’s story.

Knowing this premise, I really expected Eleanor the Great to be about Eleanor getting to know the others in the survivors group—who are cast, incidentally, by real Holocaust survivors. I might even have preferred that. Instead, there’s a young girl sitting in on the group, Nina (an excellent Erin Kellyman), working on a story for her college journalism class. It’s Nina who takes an interest in Eleanor’s story (why none of the other people in the group would be as compelling to her, I’m not sure), and the subsequent story that unfolds is much more about Eleanor and Nina getting to know each other. The standard story arc of conflict and resolution exists between those two.

One of Eleanor the Great’s many implausible details is how Nina’s father, Roger (Chiwetel Ejiofor), happens to be the TV news journalist both Eleanor and Bessie were big fans of. He also happens to be grieving the loss of a loved one, his wife—and thus Nina is grieving the loss of her mother, and this is something over which Nina and Eleanor bond. The resulting complication of their budding friendship is undeniably fascinating, as everything the two of them bond over is sincere and genuine, even though the thing that brought them together in the first place was a pretty significant lie.

Eleanor the Great is a movie unlike any other, I’ll give it that. It’s far from perfect, but there’s a lot to like about it. Certain technical decisions are distracting to the point of taking you out of the movie—such as the staging of Eleanor’s visit to Nina’s class, in which she begins speaking with no formal introduction, and the class applauds after she finishes speaking without any clear indication that’s she done. This sequence plays a lot like a slightly stylized scene in a stage play, and it’s a bit incongruous. There’s a few somewhat baffling choices like this in the movie.

Still, it’s June Squibb who is the glue who holds everything together, and if there is any one reason to see this film, it’s her. Chiwetel Ejiofor is well-established as a great actor but not given a whole lot to showcase it here; Erin Kellyman as Nina is far more memorable. A whole lot of the actors in smaller parts deliver their lines with a bit of an amateur vibe. I guess I’ll give the people who were actual Holocaust survivors a pass on that, but it’s still something that offsets the balance of performance overall.

In the end, Eleanor the Great is about both grief and forgiveness, and it ultimately works thanks to June Squibb, especially once Eleanor has moved to New York and is an amusing crank about this new phase in her life. If you’re a fan of Squibb, you’ll have a good time—and you’ll want to have a few tissues handy.

Eleanor and her charming little sucker, Nina.

Overall: B

SPINAL TAP II: THE END CONTINUES

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

I keep rewatching the original films shortly before their “legasequel” comes out, and still hoping the new film will meet my expectations. Why do I keep doing this? What was the definition of insanity again?

Spinal Tap II: The End Continues is far from bad—it just falls far short of the brilliance of the original 1984 film, This Is Spinal Tap, which launched an entire genre of filmmaking. To say it broke a mold would be an understatement, given the trick it pulled off at the time of convincing many people it was a real documentary about a hard rock band. Not only could no other movie in the same vein manage the same trick, but certainly no one’s going to fall for that in a sequel. Not even one released 41 years later.

It could be said that The End Continues is running on fumes, riding the coattails of that original film. It could also be said that’s sort of the point. There’s also a lot, however, that director Rob Reiner (who also directed the first film) brings to the table in a fresh way. This isn’t just about nostalgia, but a bit of a new angle. The first film reflected some ridiculous truths about the music industry, and this one reflects on aging in that industry.

Back in 1984, Christopher Guest, who co-wrote both of these films and also plays Nigel the guitar player, was 36 years old. He’s 77 now. The same goes for Michael MkKean, who plays the lead singer, David. Harry Shearer, who plays Derek the bass player, is 81 now; he was 40 when the first film was released in 1984. Rob Reiner, who inserts himself even more into the sequel than he did the first film, is 81 now. He’s the first one of these characters we see, and after a mildly amusing reference to “all this exposition,” that scene ends with a physical gag that does’t really work. There are moments in this film that feel like really old people trying to be as funny as they used to be.

To be fair, the actual talent on display remains undiminished. A big part of what makes Spinal Tap work is that the actors are both deeply skilled improvisors and accomplished musicians. The lyrics may be ridiculous, but they’re still making actual music, and actually harmonizing. Well, when they’re not singing out of key due to rustiness, anyway.

I do find myself wondering if I might like The End Continues better re-watching it after a fair amount of time has passed. That was basically my experience with This Is Spinal Tap. The degree to which these movies are edited down from what must be endless footage is incredibly impressive, as is these actors’ dedication to their characters. The trick they pull off is giving them all nuance even as they’re all on the spectrum between outrageous and stupid.

I just wished I had laughed more. Don’t get me wrong, I laughed pretty hard a few times. But a lot of The End Continues feels like it’s trying to keep me in stitches while I simply manage a relatively consistent chuckle. I did enjoy the way this film continues the running gag of the band’s long history of drummers who have died, this time hiring a young woman, Didi Crockett (professional battle drummer Valerie Franco), for the band’s one-time gig that is also their first time performing in 15 years. It’s this performance that serves as the climax to which the narrative is working toward, but I’ll only say this of Didi: make certain you stick around to the very end of the credits. This won’t be hard, as just as with the first film, more clips roll through the entirety of the credits. I actually found this to be the funniest part of the movie.

The legacy of this, I guess we can now call it a “franchise,” is also on full display in The End Continues thanks to a ton of high-profile cameos, two of which (Paul McCartney and Elton John) are already revealed in the trailer. A couple other very famous singers appear briefly in a TikTok video, and a couple of characters played by people in the first film who only later became famous also appear very briefly. This is all undeniably fun, but I don’t know how necessary it is. Spinal Tap has plenty notoriety on their own without stunt casting being brought in to validate them. Although McCartney has one line that did make me laugh pretty hard, less because of it being a particularly original joke than because of his delivery. Elton John gets far more screen time but isn’t quite as funny, though there is a sight gag near the end that I got a kick out of.

I had a good time at Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, and it comes together well enough to justify its own existence. The first film gained a cult following in an era where cult success was still possible; this new one is expected to underperform at the box office. And why wouldn’t it? Its very existence is a reference to an original property from four decades ago, and people as old as the people in it don’t go to the movies much. It’ll be interesting to see what kind of life The End Continues has on streaming platforms, but it’s unlikely to light a fire there either.

When it comes down to it, this is a movie made for the people who were already fans. It’ll hardly feel like a revelation or innovation in the “mockumentary” genre the first film started, but for fans, it won’t disappoint either.

Want to make old people look old? Put an iPad in front of them!

Overall: B

DOWNTON ABBEY: THE GRAND FINALE

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

Downton Abbey is nothing if not consistent. All three of these movies exist as little more than feature length episodes of the British historical drama series that aired on ITV in the UK between 2010 and 2015, and on PBS in the U.S. between 2011 and 2016. It is arguably writer Julian Fellowes’s crowning achievement, at least in terms of success and durability, though it was clearly an idea expanded from his own 2001 film Gosford Park, his best work thanks to direction in that case by Robert Altman. Fellowes is now 76 and still plenty busy, with his work on HBO’s The Gilded Age, an inferior series that owes its life to Downton Abbey and is nevertheless still addictive in its passive-aggressive cattiness in period grandeur.

It’s all fundamentally the same, really: soapy stories of ensemble casts of characters whose lives intersect between the upstairs and the downstairs of grand houses. And what is there to say about how good it is otherwise, really? If you’re into this sort of thing then you’re into it for the long haul, and if you’r not into it, you have no reason to care. Why would you watch The Grand Finale if you haven’t been watching the show for 15 years, or at the very least have seen the previous two films?

And these films, as a trilogy, serve a dual purpose. All of them exist as a nostalgic revisitation to the world a beloved TV series, and also to provide grand closure that only the cinema can provide: when the first film was released in 2019, it was a means of giving all these many characters a chance to shine on the silver screen. That was the only thing that was different, really, as it otherwise felt like simply stepping into the cozy comfort of a world fans had loved so much. It was more of the same with Downton Abbey: A New Age in 2022, except that it also served as a more definitive goodbye to one of its more iconic characters The Grand Finale now rolls in to be the definitive goodbye to every one of them. Mind you, this was already after the series killed off so many beloved main characters it was like Game of Thrones without the blood and gore—spoiler alert, we get flashes of each one of them in the closing scene of this new movie.

And here I am, a sucker for it all, every time. Downton Abbey is not now, nor has it ever been, great. What it has always been was fun, with its constant stream of pleasantly polite banter. The stakes are never very high, and the closest thing to a villain in this latest iteration is basically dispatched hardly more than halfway through the movie. Of greatest concern, always, is how these deeply traditional Brits reckon with changing social and moral attitudes of the 1920s—or, in this case, the first year of the thirties. It’s ironic how Downton Abbey is always ostensibly about cresting waves of the future while simultaneously being a period piece told in always the comfortably same way.

In this final story about the Crawley family and their array of service workers, the biggest deal is Lady Mary’s (Michelle Dockery) divorce—from a man never actually seen in this movie. This makes Mary a social pariah, and naturally the Crawleys band together to support her, and ultimately change local attitudes about divorced women in the process. Lady Mary’s other struggle is with her father, Robert (Hugh Bonneville), who has stated Lady is ready to take over control of Downton but is having difficulty letting go. Meanwhile, there are plenty of other subplots as always, including a visit from Noël Coward (Arty Froushan), who arrives with his friend Guy Dexter (Dominic West), who is in a secret romance with Thomas Barrow (Robert James-Collier). A scene in which Barrow, no longer working as a servant at Downton, is invited to join the group upstairs in front of the rest of the workers downstairs is particularly delightful.

There are other sendoffs: Mr. Carson (Jim Carter) is retiring as the family’s butler, also having difficulty letting go; Mrs. Patmore (Lesley Nicol) is shortly after doing the same as the longtime cook of the house. There isn’t even time to get to all the other characters, but I will mention Paul Giamatti as Harold, brother to Cora (Elizabeth McGovern) and brother-in-law to Robert, who has been hoodwinked out of most of his and Cora’s family’s wealth. This all leads to inevitable discussions of tightening budgets and figuring out ways to move on—including Robert and Cora moving out of the main Downtown house, which makes no sense to me. The house is gargantuan, why can’t Lady Mary take control of the house and still allow them to live there? (Cue some English aristocrat gasping and dropping their tea at such a preposterous idea.)

I have to admit, a runtime of 123 minutes is impressively tight given these countless narrative threads—as was the case with both the first and second movies (122 minutes and 124 minutes, respectively). Just as it had as a TV series, Downton Abbey runs like clockwork as a film series. Should we even believe that this is truly the end? Will this be the historical drama version of the Friday the 13th movies? If Julian Fellowes comes back with a fourth film the subtitle should be Violet Lives. Except they’d have to re-cast Maggie Smith, who sadly passed away just last year. So never mind on that. Maybe this really is the end.

The Grand Finale is admittedly a little misleading, in that it’s just as “grand” as it’s ever been but not particularly exciting. There’s no “going out with a bang” with Downton, and at one point Robert even utters the quote “So this is the way the world ends, not with a bang but with a whimper.” I wouldn’t exactly call The Grand Finale a “whimper” either, but it is pretty stolid. It does effectively tug at the heartstrings in the end, and I am not above admitting I got misty-eyed in the closing scene. Downton Abbey was never long on thrills, but it was dependable, in both its writing and its performances. It gave you reasons to love its many characters, and never gave you any reason to stop. In the end, this movie serves as a two-hour cinematic hug goodbye.

Now let’s all gather round and hear basically the same story yet again. Because we love it!

Overall: B

HONEY DON'T

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

Honey Don’t is a very peculiar film, in that the mixed-bad reviews are hardly unjustified, and yet I found the experience of watching it to be a surprisingly enjoyable one. It’s the kind of movie that, in another time, could have easily become a gay cult hit—it fits neatly into the “lesbian noir” genre, after all, and has a deeply subtle but pervasive camp sensibility to it. There’s a lot in it that might go over the heads of mainstream audiences but which gay audiences might appreciate. Plus, the lead character, private investigator Honey O’Donahue (a wonderful Margaret Qualley), is gay.

So are multiple other characters: local cop MG Falcone (Aubrey Plaza), with whom Honey has a fling; Mr. Siegfried (Billy Eichner, criminally underused), who has hired Honey to investigate who his boyfriend is having an affair with; and Collegian (Christian Antidormi), Siegfried’s boyfriend who meets a delightfully dark fate that I won’t spoil here. That fate, however, is very directly tied to Hector (Puerto Rican actor and singer Jacnier), who has an illicit sort of employment with local Reverend Drew Devlin (Chris Evans, always fun to see in parts that are not Captain America).

It doesn’t take long for bodies to start piling up, in ways that are both amusing and decidedly Coen-esque—this is another film directed by Joel Coen but without his brother Joel, here co-written by Ethan and his wife Tricia Cooke, and this may be the Coen film made by one without the other that I have enjoyed the most. That doesn’t make it the best, per se; I just enjoyed its oddball mix of noir and queer sensibility. I kept thinking of the 2021 film French Exit, which I enjoyed in a very similar way. That’s a different movie, except that it also has its own (much more overt) camp sensibility, also easy to have a blast with in spite of its obvious flaws.

There’s something to be said for casting. Margaret Qualley has such great onscreen charisma she carries Honey Don’t through what otherwise would be lulls in the plot. Charlie Day plays a local detective who is charming enough to make up for his clueless declarations of “You always say that!” when he hits on Honey and she tells him “I like girls.” Evans hits the perfect notes in his performance of an oversexed minister who keeps doing ministry even in bed.

It’s in the plot threads that Honey Don’t is likely to lose people. This movie is all of 89 minutes long, and is a rare case of one you find yourself wishing had been longer. It ends with multiple narrative threads that neither get any satisfying resolution, nor do they appear to have any connection to one another. It’s difficult to say which does more to make or break a movie, the script or the editing, but it feels a lot like both are at fault with this one.

At least the charismatic actors are also shot well, giving this a slight feel of older, better Coen Brothers movies (and the opening credits have a particularly fun and clever design). As the story goes along, as long as you’re not thinking too hard about what the hell is going on, it’s easy to have a great time. It’s tempting to say Honey Don’t is ultimately a failure, except for the parts I enjoyed so much—the actors, the cinematography, the subtle notes of camp. I would recommend it only to a very particular group—queer people who love a knowingly, esoterically ironic point of view. It’s pretty cool that Ethan Coen went in that direction, if nothing else.

It’s no masterpiece, but it’s fun to watch!

Overall: B

28 YEARS LATER

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

There is a lot that makes 28 Years Later stand apart from its two predecessors, the breakthrough 28 Days Later from 2002, which was a watershed moment for zombies (they’re fast now!) as well as the horror genre overall; and 28 Weeks Later from 2007, which was arguably even better. Now, 18 years after the last film, 28 Years Later does some surprisingly deft genre blending, easing into some dramatic territory, and it’s something I really respect. I will also be very up front about this, though: this film just isn’t as good as the previous two.

It does make one wonder, though, how anyone going in blind to this film might digest it, with none of the baggage of films that changed cinema history in mind. It’s certainly not critical to understanding what’s going on in this story, especially since, as all of these movies do, it opens in flashback to the outbreak of the “Rage” virus (a term I don’t recall any character saying in this film, come to think of it). In this case, we are introduced to a young boy who narrowly escapes the “infected.” The character shows up again in the very last scene of the film, serving as narrative bookends—neither of which land especially well. The rest of the movie in between is far better.

I really must say something more about that final scene. I won’t spoil what happens, except to say that the character has become someone I think of now as “Parkour Altar Boy.” If you think that sounds painfully corny and stupid, you would be right. Indeed, the scene offers a tonal turn that makes no sense whatsoever, and left me just thinking: What the fuck is this? Truly, my overall opinion of this film would be higher if not for that one scene, which truly knocked the entire enterprise down a peg, and has the unfortunate distinction of serving as its final note.

After we flash-forward from the opening sequence, to 28 years later, and until that closing scene, the characters we follow are entirely unrelated: Alfie Williams is excellent in his feature film debut as Spike, the 12-year-old embarking on a rite of passage in his isolated, island community. After decades of the entire island of Great Britain being under strict quarantine—anyone who steps foot on it is not allowed to leave—a smaller island has sustained a community that sporadically ventures to the mainland via a heavily fortified tidal causeway. Spike is now being escorted by his dad, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), to the mainland to experience his first kills of infected.

Here we already arrive at Nitpick Corner. I rewatched the previous two films in recent weeks to prepare for this new release, and my biggest complaint about both films was the astonishingly stupid decisions the characters kept making. To 28 Years Later’s credit, there’s not nearly as much of that, as there is far more logic to character behavior this time around—which also allows for a pretty funny sequence in which a shipwrecked Swedish soldier (Edvin Ryding) tries to explain to a confused Spike what life in his home country, which is clearly just like ours in the real world today, is like. Not only has Spike never seen a smartphone, he doesn’t even know what a radio is (although that seems implausible). There remains a lot of unanswered questions, such as the first film’s establishment of the ability to starve infected to death, and yet now the infected seem to be thriving.

They also seem to have adapted and evolved, in some cases in very odd ways. The trailer to 28 Years Later is cut to suggest there are now giant swamp-monster infected, as well as a possibly sinister psycho played by Ralph Fiennes. Both suggestions are very misleading, and the “exciting twist” of this third installment isn’t so much a new direction with “fast zombies” as a new population of slow, bloated zombies that look like giant baby dolls that just dug themselves out of their own graves. Also they love to eat earthworms (or shoelaces, in a pinch).

I suspected at first that Spike and Jamie would get stuck on the mainland and have to fend for themselves, maybe survive and maybe not, for the entire movie. They do make it back to the island, albeit barely—thanks to a beautifully shot, harrowing nighttime sequence in which they barely escape a giant one of the infected. (Who is naked, by the way, as are all the infected in this movie. You’ve never seen so much zombie dong.) But, Spike also has a mother, Isla (Jodie Comer), who is clearly unwell with increasingly frequent spells of confusion, in a community with no doctors. When Spike learns there is a doctor not far away on the mainland, he slips Isla across the causeway in search of the doctor, even though Jamie insists he’s insane.

Dr. Kelson is indeed a nut, weirdly obsessed with death and collecting human bones and skulls to fashion into giant towers. He’s had a lot of time on his hands, I guess. Anyway, of course Kelson is not quite what he seems. Ralph Fiennes plays Kelson in a way that injects 28 Years Later with a welcome new energy, although he’s really only present in roughly the final third. The narrative shifts from focusing on Spike’s relationship with his father to that with his mother, and eventually there are people in the theater audibly sniffling. “Horror tearjerker” was a new direction I was not expecting.

Director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland worked together on 28 Days Later in 2002, and they re-team here, to mostly satisfying success. “Mostly” is the operative word there. They bring welcome new ideas to the franchise, most notably that death can be beautiful even in a post-apocaplyptic world. Maybe not fully fleshed out, but whatever. A whole lot of 28 Years Later is uniquely compelling. I just wish it didn’t end with a narrative choice that was utterly baffling.

Here we are, guests of a very stable and very normal person.

Overall: B

JANE AUSTEN WRECKED MY LIFE

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

Who decided on this English translation of Jane Austen a gâché ma vie, I wonder? That’s the original, French title of this film, and when you ask Google to translate, it comes up with Jane Austen Ruined My Life. That’s a better title, no? Am I wrong here? If you remove every word except gâché, however, it translates as spoiled. Should the title have been Jane Austen Spoiled My Life? I should note that I do not speak French at all, and for all I know, gâché is closer colloquially to wrecked in American English than to ruined. I have no idea! I’m really glad we had this talk, I think we really accomplished something here today.

Did writer-director Laura Piani, though? That’s the real question here, because I feel a little ambivalent about this film. It seems to have genuinely charmed a lot of critics. Right now I am kind of leaning toward the title Jane Austen Muted My Evening.

I mean: it’s fine. I have no major complaints. Well, except that I could get little sense of Piani’s direction, and I often could not tell if the characters here lacked any naturalism or if it’s just a vibe of French sensibility that is foreign to me. The characters interact with each other with an unusually comfortable familiarity, which ironically radiated off the screen to me as awkward.

Here’s a burning question. Are Parisians big on book stores? The one where Agathe (Camille Rutherford) works appears to be thriving. Apparently, this is one of the things in Jane Austen Wrecked My Life that is real: the French love books. In fact, the bookstore where Agathe works, Shakespeare and Company, is very real—an English-language bookstore that has been open in Paris since 1951. I wish I had known that while I was actually watching the movie. I’d have paid more attention during the many book store scenes. I remain a little annoyed by the seemingly haphazard way they put books on the shelves. Is there no order in this store?

Agathe works with her best friend, Félix (Pablo Pauly), who indulges Agathe in her obsession with Jane Austen novels. She is also a writer, an insecure one who writers “cheap romances” (as one writing teacher puts it), but Félix submitted her unfinished chapters to the Jane Austen residency without telling her. After much resistance, Félix convinces her to go. This place is located in the middle of the woods somewhere in England, and the sweet old lady running the place speaks French fluently—as does her grown son she send to pick up Agathe, Oliver (Charlie Anson). These are British actors and characters, and Agathe of course speaks English fluently, so Jane Austen Wrecked My Life has dialogue pretty evenly mixed between the two languages.

Here we get to the Great Question: should Agathe be with Félix, or with Oliver? The story here plays out in a way transparently meant to mirror Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy from Pride and Prejudice. Ironically, when Agathe and Félix first meet, he has a prejudice against Austen’s work, calling it “overrated.” We already know Agathe has deep pride in Austen’s work.

It’s all pleasant enough, although Agathe longs for the “poetic spark” of novels that she finds lacking in reality—and most of the time, I kind of felt the same way about this movie. The one exception, and a notable one at that, is when the Jane Austen Residency puts on a ball, with everyone wearing the clothing of Austen’s era, and doing the same English Country dancing. At this point, Félix has surprised Agathe with a visit, the day after she actually has discovered a spark with Oliver, and here she moves from dancing with one, to dancing to the other, and back. This sequence is dazzling in its execution, the moment when Jane Austen Wrecked My Life actually sidesteps into the realm of movie magic. I rather wish more of the rest of the movie were like it.

As it is, Jane Austen Wrecked My Life is sprinkled with subtle charms, including Oliver’s dad evidently slipping into the kind of giddy dementia that has him gardening with nothing on from the waist down. I’ll probably forget this movie entirely within a week, as it blossoms in moments but utterly wilts in the shadow of the work that inspired it, but it’s still a nice memory for the short time it will last.

That moment when magic happens.

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