THE MOMENT

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

Listen, I’m nearly 50 years old now. Anyone who has been reading the movie reviews the more than 21 years I have been posting regularly would be for the most part as old or older. It should come as no surprise that I barely even know who Charli XCX is—even though she’s been actively making pop music for 13 years. As in, since she was 20 and since I was 36. I was well plugged out of the pop music zeitgeist by then, unless you count Kesha I suppose. And it was a year after Kesha released her second album that I even started paying attention to her.

Okay, what’s my point, then? The Moment follows a long tradition of pop stars using their music career as a launch pad into the movie business. Until last year, she only had a couple of parts and a couple animation voice acting gigs. The key difference with The Moment and any pop singer movie vehicle in the past is that here, Charli XCX not only plays herself, but in a documentary style. Anyone not in the know might actually only gradually realize it’s not actually real. This is something it very much has in common with its direct cinematic ancestor, This Is Spinal Tap, which was released eight years before Charli XCX was even born. That movie was hysterically funny, particularly in its time—when it had its own moment. The Moment has moments that are well-observed and very funny. But, I could hardly go so far as to call it hysterical.

As such, for me The Moment was kind of a mixed bag. I wonder if it plays any differently to her fans, who know all of her music and whatever her real story is? It’s clearly very much a product of its time, and casually reflects how pop stars make their money performing and not from music sales—something that has been the case for basically Chari XCX’s entire career. This makes all the people in her orbit approach her, and their own careers in relation to her, differently than they might have ten or twenty or forty years ago. What The Moment illustrates very effectively and vividly is that the industry remains as ridiculous as it ever was.

It’s a fascinating exercise to watch a pop star play herself in such a straight way. She’s not really satirizing herself, and plays most of the scenes straight. It’s everyone and everything around her that is heightened, and exaggerated—or is it? You get the feeling that most of this stuff is inspired by things she has actually witnessed in the wild. I would believe it. Charli XCX spends most of the movie either responding to everyone around her with a varying mix of frustration, exasperation, and befuddlement.

To get very specific, The Moment focuses on—and is literally a reference to—the whole “Brat Summer” phenomenon of 2024. (I barely knew what it was while it was happening.) This film is an alternate reality in which a documentary crew follows Charli XCX as she prepares for the tour in support of the Brat album. In this fictionalized world, her label (Atlantic Records, which is her actual label and gets name checked multiple times in the film) and other industry people are desperate to keep “Brat Summer” going as long as possible, if not forever. They bring in a douchey concert film director (Alexander Skarsgård—hey, at least he’s my age! which is astounding considering how hot he is) who ultimately takes over and strips the concert’s artistic vision of any of its soul, alienating the people who were helping her stay true to herself in the process.

I do have a particular nitpick about this, and that is director and co-writer Aidan Zamiri’s apparent inability to fully commit to the bit. There are passing references to the camera crew following Charli around, but there are countless scenes in which no documentary camera crew would ever actually have access or be privy to the conversations we see. This is a key difference from any of the Christopher Guest mockumentary films, which quite earnestly stay true to the “documentary” gimmick. It’s an inconsistency of style that I found distracting.

What I did find fairly impressive was the acting. The Moment is a film full of people onscreen who understood the assignment, and that includes Charli XCX—who, by the way, is credited as having the “original idea”—more than any of them. Charli has a choice to make by the end of the film regarding her artistic integrity, and there is a pretty clear difference between the fictionalized version of Charli and the real-world version of her.

When The Moment has humor that lands, it really lands—it got some good laughs out of me. They were just fewer and further between than a movie like this really needs. The story unfolds with incisive cleverness, but the tone goes a bit back and forth, and would have been helped by more frequently pointed humor. I had a good time; it just wasn’t quite the party I wanted it to be.

Charli XCX is just along for the ride. Or is she the one driving?

Overall: B

SHELTER

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

Much like Gerard Butler in his B-movie quality disaster flicks, Jason Statham has really carved out his niche in January-release action thrillers. It all started with the surprisingly fun The Beekeeper, which set the standard in 2024 thanks to its self-awareness as revenge trash, which somehow made it good. Now, last year’s A Working Man failed to meet that standard by being far too self-serious and thereby sucking out any chance of fun. (Also that one was actually released in March, but its original release date before being postponed was in January so I’ve decided it counts. Plus it still very much has that forgettable-January-action-thriller vibe. It should have been released in January.) With Shelter, we get a movie that sits kind of in the middle: it’s not as self-aware or quite as fun as The Beekeeper, but neither is it as gravely self-serious as A Working Man. It does have its comedic moments, thanks to a charming performance by a 14-year-old Bodhi Rae Breathnach. This plus Statham’s typical no-nonsense violence makes Shelter just compelling enough.

2026 is shaping up to be a banner year for early releases that are far better than anyone would reasonably expect them to be. Sam Raimi’s Send Help is the best example of this and the one film of this ilk most deserving of recommendation, but Nia DaCosta’s 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple would also qualify. Shelter is perhaps the weakest of these examples by just a slight margin, but it could also be argued that it makes the strongest case for delivering exactly what you expect of it. In any case, January and February have long been referred to as “Dumpuary” for good reason, but some filmmakers are figuring out how to make movies that fit into the genres usually reserved for this time of year but that are also actually good.

To be fair, Shelter is hardly great, but no one is expecting greatness from it, which is a key element of movies made not just simply to entertain, but to entertain simply. Statham’s previous two films featured his protagonist characters on a revenge quest, but this time director Ric Roman Waugh (who, as it happens, also directed the original Gerard Butler B-movie disaster flick Greenland) and writer Ward Parry give him a new twist this year: he’s still on a quest, but now he’s aiming to protect her from a British government that considers her a “loose end” in the framing of him as a former shadow MI6 agent.

The story and character motivations are pretty simple. Mason (Statham) has been exiled on a remote island, in hiding from a government that won’t forgive him for refusing to kill an innocent man who had worked as an informant. A man who once served with him regularly brings supplies out to him from the mainland, and has started bringing his niece, Jesse (Breathnach), along with him. And this is how Mason and Jesse meet, as she delivers the crates of supplies by rowboat from the main boat to the shore, but gets stranded on the island with him thanks to a severe rainstorm. A surprising amount of time is spent on these two alone on the island together, as Mason helps nurse Jesse’s injured ankle back to health. But when Mason is forced to take a boat to the mainland himself in order to get needed medical supplies, the British government’s far-ranging surveillance state picks him up on one of the infinite number of cameras they have access to (in this case, in the background of a TikTok video—topical!). And now, with the government alerted to his location, they descend upon the island, and this is when the action can kick into high gear.

But, does it? I’ll be fair and say there is plenty of action on Shelter, but given the kind of movie this is, I kind of wanted a little more. This movie lingers on its quiet periods a bit more than necessary. This clearly isn’t high art, so let’s just get on with what we’ve come here for. That said, a lot of the violence that does happen is pretty problematic—Shelter is wildly cavalier about collateral damage. It never seems to matter to Mason that the people he’s attacking often likely have no idea that he doesn’t really deserve what they’re attempting to do to him, and he dispatches countless numbers of them, like Star Trek “red shirts.” There is one singular villain in the hired assassin (Bally Gill) sent to kill both Mason and Jesse by the head of the shadow group Mason was once a part of (played by Bill Nighy), and we do get one moment when Mason asks him, in the middle of their climactic fight, “Do you even know why you’re doing this?” His answer: “It doesn’t matter.” Oh, he must have been reading the studio notes. This movie is less interested in providing Mason the answer to that question than in giving Mason a reason to kill everyone that gets in his way in cinematically clever ways.

I still enjoyed this movie, I want to make clear—again, it has no pretensions about what kind of movie it is. I did find it distracting how often a character would be driving a car and looking at the passenger, or at their phone, a recklessly long amount of time without looking at the road. This happens three or four times. Eyes on the road, people! I know you’re probably actually on a soundstage, but that’s no excuse.

These nitpicks would make Shelter far less fun to watch if not for the solid casting of Jason Statham, who was born to play these roles in his fifties, and Bodhi Rae Breathnach, who has easy chemistry with him (she also plays the older daughter in Hamnet, proving she has versatility as a young actor). Shelter isn’t going to blow anyone away or even exceed anyone’s expectations, but it will deliver on its promise as a B-grade action thriller.

You’ll root for this odd couple in an action movie that is just fine.

Overall: B

THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATER

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

There’s a lot to love about The Chronology of Water, Kristen Stewart’s feature directorial debut. I just didn’t love all of it. I can see how it might work in its entirety for other people, but its endlessly quick and random cuts in the editing grew tiresome for me, as did the incessant voiceover, poetic as it might be.

Stewart also wrote the script, adapting from the memoir of the same name by Lidia Yuknavitch. This makes it a little harder to groan at yet another movie about someone working through astonishing traumas, as it’s based on real-life events. Suffice it to say that Lidia’s father is a deeply horrible person. Maybe the source text does a better job of explaining the logic in this, but I found myself astonished to find Lidia, and her older sister Claudia, kept him in their lives even after they grew up. Trust me, based on everything we see here, he deserves to be discarded and forgotten.

I suppose I could just be speaking from my own experience as a survivor of child sexual abuse—something that is not even quite clear is going on in The Chronology of Water for a while. Stewart presents a highly stylized story, shots in all awkward angles or extreme close-ups. Lidia doesn’t even state plainly to anyone that her father was sexually abusive until the last act of the film. We all deal with trauma in specific and individual ways, I guess, and this was how Lidia did it—first by finding the release of self-reflection through writing, and later, apparently, through the dreamlike lens of fractured memories. Or at least that’s the way it’s filtered through Kristen Stewart’s lenses.

The Chronology of Water begins with quite a stretch of this kind of dreamily fractured presentation, dialogue either minimal or nonexistent. It tested my patience a little, to be honest. There comes a point where an actual narrative comes int focus, but it’s some time before that happens. I get what this movie is going for, I guess—there’s a sense of being inside Lidia’s mind, prone to addiction and self-destruction, repressed memories brought back by specific triggers. There’s a challenge to this experience, and your mileage may vary when it comes to its effectiveness.

For me, what saves The Chronology of Water is the performances. Imogen Poots is a revelation as Lidia, unsurpassed by any other performance in awards contention this year. Thora Birch is incredible, and slightly underused, as Claudia, Lidia’s revered older sister who leaves home to save herself even though it means leaving Lidia behind. There’s a curious element to the relationship to these sisters, where you might expect Lidia to grow up resenting her for leaving her in the sights of their disgustingly horrid father, but it is established early on how Lidia worships Claudia—”You were mythic to me,” she later tells her. It would seem that never quite went away.

As you might imagine, water figures prominently in the story here, though I still left the movie not quite understanding the phrasing. But, Lidia is a competitive swimmer, who is offered multiple partial scholarships, all of which her father (played by Michael Epp, an unsettling combination of handsome and creepy) dismisses by declaring it means she’s “not good enough.” Eventually her mother (Susannah Flood), who is usually totally checked out, comes through and gets her off to college. “I almost loved her,” Lidia says, in voiceover. But after Lidia squanders her potential as a swimmer with drug and alcohol abuse, she eventually finds writing as an outlet, and the plot turns yet again. There are several scenes with Jim Belushi as novelist and mentor Ken Kesey, and he is also fantastic.

To Kristen Stewart’s credit, a whole lot of detail gets packed into 128 minutes, and it manages not to feel overstuffed—occasionally difficult to follow, but the broader arcs are easier to register. The performances in this film are the strongest argument for seeing it, and that consistency across the cast is an indicator of Stewart’s talents. I have to admit, I really sold her short back in the Twilight days. (To be fair, it’s still true that her performances were shit in those movies.) This is a woman who has truly broadened her horizons and effectively diversified what she has to offer—and, in the right hands, is actually an amazing actor herself (consider Spencer, my favorite film of 2021). Clearly she knows what great acting is, and can coax it out of others.

It’s the technical stuff I’m less convinced by. It’s not incompetence, to be clear: it’s easy to tell that all the choices here are very intentional and thought through. They just made much of The Chronology of Water, particularly in the beginning, feel inaccessible. I felt pretty detached from this movie for the first quarter or so of it, and that’s more than enough time to lose a lot of people. I’m hesitant to say you should stick it out, but in the end I was glad I did.

Imogen Poots is amazing in this movie that is otherwise a bit of a mixed bag.

Overall: B

THE TESTAMENT OF ANN LEE

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

The Testament of Ann Lee is a musical like none other. It’s almost like a musical on a technicality: it has people breaking out into song, for sure, but nothing lyrical or catchy. Instead, it repurposes actual, 18th-century Shaker hymns. The voices, especially that of Amanda Seyfried as the title character, are angelic. But, they are only ever used as a tool to convey deep piety and faith. There is even dancing, but in a sort of physical version of speaking in tongues—the faithful allowing the spirit to move them.

There is a curious and fascinating element to this film, in that it never casts judgment on Ann Lee or her followers. One might even be tempted to call her a cult leader, but we only see the story through her experiences. This is a woman who bore four children, all of whom died before reaching the age of one. The one sex scene that is included features Ann Lee and her husband, Abraham (Christopher Abbott), is early in their marriage, and completely devoid of tenderness or sensuality. Abraham is weirdly obsessed with a ritualistic act in which he whacks Ann Lee on the ass with a sort of broom of switches. It’s unclear to me whether there was some genuinely devotional aspect to this, or if he was just looking for an excuse to engage in a particular kink.

Whatever the case, Ann Lee clearly does not enjoy sex—whether because she’s never had it with her own pleasure in mind or because she’s simply not into it at all is perhaps an open question—and, as she allows herself to become the prophet of a religious movement, she makes celibacy a central tenet of their belief. You cannot be close to go when engaging in the pleasures of the flesh, that sort of thing. I would argue the opposite, but whatever. My life experience is nothing like this woman’s.

There’s something very odd, and detached, almost impenetrable, about The Testament of Ann Lee. It feels like the kind of “high minded” film that regular filmgoers just aren’t going to get. I felt like I barely got it myself. It has an excellent lead performance in Amanda Seyfried, solid performances among the rest of the cast, scenes that are very well shot, beautifully performed music that is otherwise fairly inaccessible to modern audiences. It’s the story itself that seems to aspire to greatness without quite getting there. I can easily imagine a select few people finding this film to be an amazing experience, but I could never fully connect with it.

This may just be a personal thing. While director Mona Fastvold, who cowrote the script with The Brutalist’s Brady Corbet, never cast judgement on the “Shakers” (so named because of how they dance in religious ecstasy), neither do they explicitly endorse them. The story is narrated, a little too much for my taste, by Ann Lee’s close friend Mary (Thomasin McKenzie), with clear reverence for her. We also see Ann Lee’s rise as a religious figure, from Manchester to New York, looked upon by Abraham with utter befuddlement. There’s a scene in which he demands she perform her wifely duties and I feared it would take a dark turn, which thankfully it doesn’t—although what he then does right in front of her is not much better. We’re clearly not meant to be on his side, but I never felt compelled to take her side either, at least not as a religious figure claiming to be the Second Coming of Christ in female form.

This is simply a telling of her story. Ann Lee certainly does suffer some serious hardships, over many years, from the deaths of all her infant children to a horrifying and degrading attack by neighboring locals in New England. There are suggestions of Ann Lee being a witch, but only somewhat in passing. I won’t spoil the age to which she lived, even though it’s a matter of historical record, but I found myself surprised by it. This is a film that follows her from childhood to her death, making it quite definitively a biopic. I’m not a huge fan of life-spanning biopics, and even here it seems like huge swaths of her life get gleaned over. And yet, clocking in at 137 minutes, the style of the storytelling often makes it feel like a bit of a slog.

Much of The Testament of Ann Lee is like an immersion into her psyche. Sometimes a religious-themed film is something conservative Christians can take as an extension of their own faith, but that does not seem likely here. I think Ann Lee is likely to be as alienating to faithful Christians as she would be to those of us who practice no religion at all. This is still a compelling idea, given that the movement she led is a variation on longstanding Christian beliefs from her own culture. It’s so insulated in this way that this film barely touches on her disdain for slavery when she witnesses it for the first time in New York, and we see just one shot of Shakers interacting with an Indigenous man. Surely there are countless nuanced implications here, especially considering this was a group of White people migrating from Britain to the “New World,” but Fastvold isn’t much interested in examining them.

This is all about Ann Lee, and her unquestioning faith in God—her God, anyway. She’s careful to state that people should join them of their own free will, but should they break the rules, they are cast out. One wonders if Ann Lee had a mental health disorder. It’s impossible to say, as this was so long ago that The Testament of Ann Lee essentially amounts of speculative fiction. A fair amount of that speculation is fascinating to me from an intellectual standpoint, but as narrative storytelling I found it to be just slightly less than the sum of its parts.

Overall: B

28 YEARS LATER: THE BONE TEMPLE

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

Lest we forget, after four movies, there are technically no zombies in 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple. They’re called the infected. And by this film, they are almost incidental. They’re just a normal part of the landscape, something the skilled survivors on the abandoned island of Great Britain dispatch with dispassionate ease—good guys and bad guys alike.

Although Alex Garland wrote and directed 28 Years Later, released just last June, and returning after having written the original 2002 Danny Boyle film 28 Days Later (I guess we’re all expected to just ignore 28 Weeks Later, released in 2007 and written and directed by neither of them—but still pretty good), Garland once again only wrote the script for The Bone Temple; the director now is Nia DaCosta, who directed Candyman in 2021, giving her horror bona fides, as well as The Marvels in 2023, giving her, let’s say, attempted-blockbuster bona fides. It would seem that The Bone Temple is DaCosta’s most critically acclaimed work to date by a healthy margin, and I would say she’s suited well enough for the project.

I found last year’s 28 Years Later to be compelling but flawed, with very high highs (including some stellar cinematography) and some very low lows, including the coda at the end which I still maintain was dumb as shit, when young Spike (the excellent Aflie Williams) is saved from attacking infected by a group of kids doing parkour off of rocks. The only appropriate response to that was: What the fuck is this shit? DaCosta evidently understands that, and opts not to show the “Fingers” gang doing any parkour in The Bone Temple, thank God.

In the opening scene this time around, Spike is forced into a fight to the death with one of the Fingers, and strikes a lucky blow to a main artery in a young man’s thigh. Aflie Williams is still very good in this film, but isn’t given very much more to do than look understandably terrified, forced into this gang of psychotics as an option barely better than dealing with the infected.

The flashy parts go to the two biggest names in the cast: Ralph Fiennes, who returns as Ian, the iodine-covered doctor who has built a shrine to the dead out of all their many skulls; and Jack O'Connell (previously seen as Remmick in Sinners—this guy knows from unhinged) as “Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal,” the leader of the Fingers and effectively a Satanist cult leader. Personally, I prefer the playful Satanists who use freedom of religion laws to expose Christian hypocrisy, but those guys wouldn’t fit in a 28 movie. This is horror, after all. We need at least one scene in which multiple victims are skinned alive just for the fun of it.

O’Connell really digs into a meaty part as a truly horrifying, human villain; the flip side of this coin is Fiennes, who really goes for it as Dr. Ian Kelson, taking the character’s nuttiness a step or two further than he did in the last film. It’s nice to see really talented actors having fun, especially when we get a subtle but unmistakable This Is Spinal Tap reference.

That said, last year’s 28 Years Later spent a whole lot more time on effective world building, placing us squarely in a place abandoned to these horrors for three decades, but with indicators of how life has moved on around the rest of the world, as well as some fascinating evolutionary changes to the infected. It had some truly funny moments that are noticeably absent here; The Bone Temple leans much harder into the gory-horror aspect of the storytelling of these movies. That doesn’t make it any worse, per se; I just prefer a nice sprinkling of humor. Still, I would have preferred a bit more of the world building as well, and this film sticks mostly to how horrible some of the survivors are—a well-worn idea that the original 28 Days Later already presented with far greater finesse.

We do once again get Chi Lewis-Parry with a giant prosthetic schlong as an “alfa infected,” which you might like to know if you’re into that sort of thing. We get no more evolutionary changes of the infected, but instead Dr. Ian Kelson makes some advances in the possibility of treatment—a concurrent narrative thread with Spike’s harrowing experience with the Fingers, through roughly the first half of the film.

The Bone Temple is also beautifully shot, though—not quite as stunningly as some of the sequences in 28 Years Later, but close. Cinematographer Sean Bobbit treats us to several fantastically composed overhead shots of Ian’s Bone Temple, particularly after he lights it up for a climactic sequence that is delightfully weird and features Iron Maiden’s “The Number of the Beast.” The story concludes in this setting, with multiple sudden double-crosses that are pretty exciting, and in the context of a horror film like this, deeply satisfying.

The Bone Temple does have its own coda, and although it clearly sets up the next film (not likely to be released for a few years, as this one is not yet even in production), I feel fairly neutral about it, the surprising cameo it features notwithstanding. At the very least, it’s far better than the coda to 28 Years Later, which was so dumb it really dragged down an otherwise pretty great experience overall. In the end, albeit for different reasons, I feel the same about this movie as I did about the last one: a horror movie whose memorable performances and great cinematography don’t quite elevate it from being simply a solid B movie.

Take me to church!

Overall: B

THE SECRET AGENT

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

Those Brazilians, man. They sure know how to convince the world that their movie is significant, worthy of attention, and worthy of awards. The did it with I’m Still Here—a much better film, in my opinion—last year, and they’re doing it again with The Secret Agent this year. The thing is, I’m not fully convinced. Sure, this is a competently made film, but it also takes some truly bizarre turns, and it overall strikes me as compelling but flawed.

More importantly, The Secret Agent clocks in at 161 minutes, and I cannot see any reason why that was necessary. There is a climactic sequence that is genuinely exciting, the kind of crime thriller stuff you love to see in the cinema—but it happens after a solid two hours of languid plotting. I hesitate to say it was worth the wait.

I don’t even fully understand the title. How is Armondo (Wagner Moura) an “agent,” exactly? Does going into hiding from government officials who have put out a hit on youn make you a “secret agent”? This title suggests a spy thriller, but Armondo doesn’t spend any time spying. Granted, he does assume different identities, and depending on the circumstance he is known as Fernando. (To muck things up even further, Armondo also has a young son, Fernando, who we later see in flash-forward to present day, and the adult Fernando is also played by Moura.)

Don’t get me wrong, I actually liked The Secret Agent. I just have a lot of nitpicks, and enough of them to leave me mystified as to the idea that was one of the year’s best films. For example: there’s a single tonal shift that is so wild a departure from the seriousness of the rest of the film that I found it to be a true “What the fuck?” moment. It has to do with a running subplot about a severed human leg, first discovered swallowed inside a shark, and later snatched by local law enforcement and dumped into a river. We cut back to our regular programming for a while, and then, seemingly out of nowhere, the narrative jumps to the leg washed up on a riverbank, and it suddenly twitches on its own. It’s alive! Suddenly we’re in a park with a bunch of late-night public sex going on, both straight and gay. In one of the latter cases, a guy on his knees giving head is completely naked—like, what? did he just walk there from home without his clothes? or did he completely strip and toss his clothes aside in the park just to give head? This really isn’t how these things go down. Anyway, this severed leg with a bloody stump at about mid-thigh just goes on the rampage, hurling itself through the air to kick all the horny park patrons in the face, leaving them screaming and bloody.

I was stupefied. To be fair, I suppose, this sequence jumps to the group of people being protected in secret, Armando among them, reading this account from the local newspaper, cracking up at how the story is written as though this really happened. It turning out to be a sort of fantasy sequence notwithstanding, it’s a whiplash-inducing shift in tone.

There’s a lot of the rest of The Secret Agent that I quite liked; I might even be more inclined to think of it as a Great Movie if it simply cut out that attack-leg sequence altogether, and cut the rest of it to maybe half an hour shorter. The acting is solid, especially Wagner Moura himself, as a man achieving an outward calm while clearly often being deeply frightened. In the opening sequence, which I would argue is itself overlong, Armondo is stopping for gas after days of travel, and there’s a random dead body covered by cardboard in the dry dirt nearby. Armondo is clearly unsettled by this, but he also needs gas. This effectively sets the stage for what it’s like for him to navigate his native country of Brazil in 1977, during their military dictatorship.

We then spend a lot of time meeting a lot of characters, including a duo of hired assassins, stepfather and stepson Augusto and Bobbi, played by Roney Villela and Gabriel Leone, respectively. This is most notable to me only in that I hope to see more of Gabriel Leone because holy hell is he gorgeous. I guess it doesn’t hurt that he’s also a pretty good actor. On the flip side, there is also a cat with two faces that hangs out in the building where the people being sheltered are staying, and while I get the symbolism of duality, it’s a pretty unsettling sight.

There are also the local police chief in Recife, the northernmost major city in Brazil (it’s near the easternmost point of South America), and the chief’s henchmen; the guy who hires Armando to pretend to be a desk worker when a sham of a deposition is held in a space only made up to be the police station; several of the other workers in this space that is also an archive office; the Jewish holocaust survivor the chief harasses; Armando’s fellow political refugees also under protection; the government officials who hire the hitmen; and the father of Armando’s late wife who runs a local cinema—too many characters to name. I suppose I can credit the slow plotting for how easy it actually is to keep all of these characters straight.

Mind you, I am fully open to the idea that The Secret Agent really is some masterpiece and it’s just not for me, because I don’t get it, and I am unable to—because I am not Brazilian, and the only history I glean from that country is through movies like this. Even the wild leg sequence could be explained as an illustration of the ridiculous ways the media of the time was used to obfuscate otherwise blatant corruption. I just found some of the depiction of queerness in it to be a bit misinformed, and the narrative contextualization of the entire sequence to be inadequate. But, that’s just me. I feel confident that the average movie watcher will be bored to tears by this film, and plenty of film snobs will hail it as a masterpiece. I don’t quite fall into either camp, in that I clearly have a lot of notes, but I’m not sorry I saw it.

I guess the secret is exactly what kind of agent he is.

Overall: B

AVATAR: FIRE AND ASH

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

I think James Cameron wants the Avatar films to be the 21st-century equivalent of the Star Wars films—a modern mythology, with the same cultural impact as well as staying power. (Some might argue that Marvel already achieved this, but their moves are not going to have the same staying power.) Cameron is such a directorial megalomaniac, he’s probably convinced these films already have that status. He would be wrong.

To be fair. it had long been widely understood that it is a mistake to underestimate James Cameron. But these movies can only run on their own steam for so long. Avatar was a monumental technical achievement in 2009, and was worthy of its Best Picture nomination (although it would have been a crime had it won). The same could be said, actually, of Avatar: The Way of Water, the sequel Cameron took 13 years to make because he was waiting for technology to advance enough so it could achieve his aims. And it’s worth repeating that The Way of Water was so stunning on a visual level, it arguably moved visual effects forward for the entire industry in a way no other film has since Jurassic Park.

So here is where we run into Avatar: Fire and Ash, only three years after the last one—usually a pretty standard duration between films and their sequels, but we all know the Avatar franchise is a different beast altogether. And the criticisms of this film as being entertaining but repetitive are fundamentally valid. With one notable exception, the characters are all the same as they were in the last film, and the things that happen onscreen offer us very little that’s new. Okay, there are some very cool new Panodorian creatures, including giant floating beasts that pull ships for travel, and vicious squid-like creatures that live in the oceans.

None of them feature as actual characters, though. The only beasts who do are the Tulkun, the highly intelligent whale-like creatures that featured prominently in The Way of Water, and do again here. And so does Quaritch (Stephen Long). And so does Captain Mick Scoresby (Brendan Cowell), who—spoiler alert!—did not die in The Way of Water after all. I walked out of this movie saying that if this series has taught us anything, it’s that any onscreen “death” cannot be trusted. More than one character in Fire and Ash meets an end that is one way or another is left ambiguous. But even if it were unambiguous, would it matter? This is a world in which “sky people” (humans from Earth) can be transformed into Na’vi and there can be an Avatar-maculate conception, after all.

Side note on the Tulkun whales: who the hell does their piercings and tattoos, anyway?

All of this is to say: if you’re looking for a 2025 blockbuster with endless opportunity for nitpicking, I present to you Avatar: Fire and Ash. I’ve barely scratched the surface here, but it’s worth mentioning that this has a franchise-record runtime of three hours and 17 minutes (exceeding The Way of Water by five minutes), and it is far less successful than its predecessor at justifying its own length. The Way of Water is easily broken up into three parts, the middle of which is world-building that easily wowed audiences; the last of which is a truly thrilling succession of action sequences. Fire and Ash attempts to building on that foundation, but does far less world-building, overindulges on action sequences, and at the sacrifice of character development.

To be fair, I was still perfectly happy to have gone to see this movie, as many of its action sequences are indeed thrilling. The visual effects are nearly as stunning as they were in the previous film; the inevitable downside to this coming out only three years later is that it’s unable to offer us anything truly novel on that front. The visual effects are the reason to see any of these movies, though, and they are what sets these films apart from others that use 3D as a cheap trick. Cameron knows how to make 3D worth the effort, and this is an extremely rare case in which I was also thrilled to see it in that format. That said, while the creature and Na’vi designs are exceptional, there are still moments when characters leap long distances and don’t quite move the way they should. It’s very subtle, but still gives them a hint of looking like video game characters rather than a believable character in a richly built universe.

In addition to Quaritch, who is really growing stale as an antagonist in all three of these movies, Fire and Ash does give us one new major villain: Varang (Oona Chaplin), leader of the Ash People, a clan of Na’vi whose forests have been decimated by a nearby volcano. This is a compelling addition to this world, especially the idea of warring clans on Pandora whose beefs actually have nothing to do with the Sky People. Except the Ash People’s motives, and especially Varang’s, are never clearly defined, and as a people they are given far less nuance than the Na’vi. At least we can understand the Na’vi as a narrative example of cultural appropriation. The Ash People are just angry and sadistic, and read a little too much like so-called “savages” of the Old West who are thought to commit unspeakable horrors against outsiders for no discernible reason.

I wish Varang had more depth as a character, and certainly more autonomy. Here she’s just hungry for the power of Sky People’s military guns, and that hunger is easily manipulated by Quaritch. Thank Eywa we have the likes of Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) and Kiri (Sigourney Weaver, a 76-year-old woman again doing motion-capture as a teenager) and Ronal (Kate Winslet) to serve as women characters who actually have some dimension. At least Fire and Ash passes the Bechdel Test.

Most of the time in Fire and Ash, though, there are just battles raging. One after the other, and this with multiple subplots that don’t all feel necessary. Maybe Cameron feels all of these narrative threads are vital for what’s to come in future sequels, but I’m not sure how much that matters. Kiri’s power to lock in with Eywa stayed mysterious through all of The Way of Water, and gets some further expansion and explanation here—some of which is legitimately dumb. I suppose that could be the tagline for Avatar as a franchise: “great action epics, some of which is legitimately dumb.”

Fire and Ash does bring Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) back around to his status as “Toruk Makto,” the legendary leader who unites the clans—his Leonopteryx, the giant bird-like creature he rides, is a loyal friend who is to a degree a creature-character in these films, as are, to a lesser degree, the banshees ridden by all the other Na’vi. None of this changes the problematic trope this title represents. When we hear the line, “Toruk Makto is coming!”—what I heard was: “White Savior is coming!” (Just because Jake was transformed into a blue-skinned human/Na’vi hybrid does not change what he represents in the narrative.)

And yet. And yet! This is how it is with all Avatar movies: they are riddled with flaws, particularly in the writing but also increasingly in the plotting and even the editing—but the things that are actually great about them make the flaws easier to overlook. Is that right? Perhaps not. Does James Cameron even understand a nuanced discussion of these things? I have my doubts. Is the man still a master at delivering mesmerizing entertainment? Absolutely. There is no question that I was on the edge of my seat and dazzled by Fire and Ash a whole lot of the time. I can’t say I was ever bored, in spite of the bloated runtime. What still defines this film more than anything, however, is this franchise’s diminishing returns. We can only hope that Avatar 4 will offer us something genuinely new, but being the fourth film in a series makes that a pretty tall order. It may be that we underestimate James Cameron at our own peril, but it’s starting to feel like he’s getting tired.

Overall: B

JAY KELLY

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

There was a time, thirty-odd years ago, when there was a recognizable element of a “made for TV” movie. Later, twenty-odd years ago, we got a higher level of movie on TV, usually originals made for premium cable channels. Still later yet, maybe ten years ago, we moved into a recognizable original movie made for streaming platforms—largely but not limited to Netflix. There are slight variances in all of these examples, but what they all have in common is a certain tone, a certain level of production value, a certain quality of the writing. All of it was at least one step down, sometimes more, from the level of quality you might expect in a theatrical release.

Enter Jay Kelly, which feels very much like a prototypical “Netflix Original” of the 2020s era. And don’t get me wrong, there are always exceptions—indeed, in their days, there were also exceptional made-for-TV movies and premium-channel originals. But when enough of these things get made, they kind of fall into a recognizable average, and that’s the space Jay Kelly exists in. It’s a decent enough movie, but just not quite good enough to feel like it would have been worth seeing in a theater.

I realize I’m speaking like a person out of time, given the wildly changing movie landscape, the siloed nature of audience interests, and even how many truly terrible movies you can actually still see in theaters. But Jay Kelly is trying to provide the kind of “movie for adults” that used to be moderately successful in cinemas and just don’t exist there anymore. But it also falls short of what the best of those sorts of movies used to provide when they were given a chance to thrive.

And there is an unforeseen downside to the touted tendency of Netflix to give filmmakers total freedom to make whatever they want, to create a “pure vision.” It turns out, sometimes studio notes are actually good, and unchecked indulgence isn’t always all that great. In this case, it’s director and co-writer Noah Baumbach, who previously brought many Oscar nominations to a Netflix Original with Marriage Story (2019), a much better film than Jay Kelly. There was a couple of years there where Netflix was helping shepherd filmmakers to near-masterpieces.

It’s too bad, because Jay Kelly had a lot of potential, starring George Clooney in the title role as a movie star in the twilight years of his career, looking back on his life with melancholy, loneliness and regret. His manager, Ron (Adam Sandler), is a long-suffering and thankless friend who Jay rarely sees as anything other than someone he pays. The same goes for his publicist, Liz (Laura Dean), and to a bit of a lesser degree, his hairstylist, Candy (Emily Mortimer, who co-wrote the script with Baumbach). A bunch of other recognizable faces show up: Jim Broadbent as Jay’s longtime professional mentor; Billy Crudup as Jay’s old acting school buddy; Patrick Wilson as another actor managed by Ron; even Greta Gerwig as Ron’s wife—and it’s lovely to see Gerwig in front of the camera again, even if relatively briefly.

The trouble is, the script for Jay Kelly is often unnecessarily obvious, garnished with some clunky exposition, as when Ron and Liz talk about the night 19 years ago when she left him at the Eiffel Tower. They tell each other things that fill us in on the story but would never be the level of detail people would actually say to each other when recalling a shared memory.

I feel like I understand what Jay Kelly is going for, about a man both running from himself and afraid to actually be himself (it’s mentioned more than once how hard that is to do). It just misses the mark a bit. The performances are decent across the board, and Clooney is well cast in this role, even if it’s a very odd choice for a tribute event for Jay to feature retrospective clips from his film career that are all clips from George Clooney’s actual film career. What exactly are we doing here? One might assume this is a meta commentary on Clooney’s own life—right down to the first-consonant sounds of both first and last names—except for how clearly and fully fictionalized Jay Kelly and his life are. Not enough of Jay Kelly makes us think about the real-life George Clooney until this moment, and this retrospective of his career makes us think only about George Clooney and not enough about Jay.

Baumbach also makes a consistent choice regarding Jay’s reminiscences, where he will walk through a doorway into another room that turns out to be one of his memories. I always found these moments awkward and not especially well executed. In one scene, he calls one of his two grown daughters on the phone, and suddenly the daughter is walking with him through the woods—an unnecessarily foggy woods, mind you—and speaking to him face to face, even though we are to understand they are actually on the phone. I just felt Jay Kelly would have worked better without all these odd transitional flourishes.

It took a bit of time, but Jay Kelly did ultimately hold my interest; there are too many really good actors in it for it not to. That said, I have long far preferred Adam Sandler as a dramatic actor to his mostly-awful comedies, but while he is decent in Jay Kelly, his performance here falls far short of the incredibly dynamic screen presence he had in films like Punch-Drunk Love (2002) or Uncut Gems (2019).

Again, this all comes back to the unchecked freedom now characteristic of, particularly Netflix Original films. It increasingly brings with it a kind of looseness that does not necessarily serve the movie. Jay Kelly has a very compelling premise and pretty solid performances, but it also would have benefitted from polishing, maybe even a bit of trimming. It has a satisfying trajectory of story beats, but this is not a movie that needed to be 132 minutes long. It features no dramatic catharsis that makes it feel worth the time investment.

Or: maybe it’s worth having on at home, and that’s exactly the point. My counterpoint, I suppose, is that this approach has done nothing over time but lower our standards. It was fine, I guess. Okay let’s watch another blandly effective entertainment that’s Up Next!

Jay Kelly, George Clooney, then and now: an actor reflects.

Overall: B

ETERNITY

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

I really enjoyed Eternity, but I also have a lot of nitpicks. Let’s go through them all!

But let’s back up a step, to the premise, which is that our three main characters spend time in a place called “Junction,” where they have as long as a week to decide a single environment (or world, or universe, whatever you want to call it) in which to spend eternity. The twist, and the whole reason for this story, is that Joan (Elizabeth Olsen) is also faced with another agonizing decision: whether to spend eternity with the first husband, Luke (Callum Turmer), who died in the Korean war, or her second husband, Larry (Miles Teller), with whom Joan enjoyed 65 years of happy marriage.

The first death we see is Larry’s, and it’s the circumstances of this death that is my first major nitpick. It happens at a gender reveal party for one of their great grandchildren. A gender reveal party? Really? To be fair, the script, by Patrick Cunnane and director David Freyne, passingly acknowledges how stupid these parties are: “People die at these things!” says Larry as an old man, played by Barry Primus (Joan as an old woman is played by Betty Buckley). There is even a bit of a callback to this gag when a later couple met in Junction is revealed to have been killed in a freak accident at a gender reveal party. Still, the deliberately inoffensive jokes aside, the use of a gender reveal party in the opening sequence of this film both reflects and participates in the preposterous normalization of "gender reveal” parties. These things are both pointless and blithely presumptuous, and might as well be called “Genital Identification Parties.” But nobody in this movie dares say that.

We learn on the car ride to the party, before Larry dies, that Joan has cancer, and is waiting until after the party to tell the rest of the family. When Larry wakes up in Junction, he’s the first character we follow there, and at first the story is just from his perspective. But, we already know that Joan is not far behind, and basically the second act involves a shift in perspective to hers. Not long after that, we learn that Luke has been waiting for Joan in Junction for the past 67 years.

The rules of how things work in Junction are both undeniably entertaining and often nonsensical. This film clearly owes its existence to the widely loved (I always thought it was just fine) 1991 Albert Brooks film Defending Your Life, except instead of a character pleading his case for having lived a life worthy of spending eternity in a better place, here characters merely have to choose where to spend eternity—and in this case, with whom.

Why time means anything in Junction at all escapes me, but it very much does: “clients” are assigned an Afterlife Coordinator (“AC”) as a guide to help them choose, but they get one week in which to do it. The people who work these jobs in Junction, whether they are ACs or janitors or bartenders, are people who have chosen, for various reasons, not to go to any eternity at all. Some of them just enjoy helping others and that gives them a feeling of purpose. Some are waiting for their beloved to arrive, as in Luke, who has waited there for 67 years. It’s a little weird that measurements of time should be so important in Junction when it means nothing in eternity, but whatever.

The thing is, in the film Eternity, it’s all the scenes that take place in Junction that are really fun and compelling—and, crucially, contains all of the surprisingly effective humor in this film. Now, it also makes no sense that the system here should be so modeled on capitalism, with representatives from countless “Worlds” trying to sell it to people passing through Junction—not with money, but just simple persuasion, I guess. We see characters walking past countless booths (or in some cases, watching commercials) for different “Worlds,” from Paris Land to Smokers World to 1920s Germany “with 100% less Nazis.” Larry’s inclination is toward Beach World, and Joan’s is toward Mountain Town—basically the same argument they had in the car on the way to the party. I loved seeing all these examples of eternities, and when I saw booths for Queer World and Studio 54 World side by side, I thought: I’d have a hard time choosing between those two. That said, why does this system only have a selection of offerings created by someone else? Can’t we just create one of our own? What if I want to spend eternity in Andrew-Garfield-and-Timothée-Chalamet-Sandwich World?

Junction is also made much more fun by the supporting characters who are Larry’s and Joan’s ACs, respectively: Anna (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) and Ryan (John Early). These two are very invested in their clients but also have a sexual past together, which is an odd turn in this film given how openly and obviously queer John Early is. He does marvel at the handsomeness of Luke, a running gag in the script, but he later explains to Anna that he could never do polyamory because “I am a one-woman man.” Oh really, John Early? The oddest thing about that exchange is that it is the one time in Eternity that polyamory is brought up, and it’s only within the context of Ryan and Anna’s relationship. Why does no one ever bring up the idea to Joan, Larry and Luke? Couldn’t they at least test out Polyamory World?

It seems like that’s the only thing that could be a suitable compromise for all three of them. Why should Joan have to choose? Isn’t eternity supposed to be the place they choose in which they’ll be happiest? This script does, amusingly, acknowledge how one eternity could quickly get tedious: enforcement officials are constantly running down people trying to escape the eternity they have chosen, one of whom shouts, “Museum World is so boring!” But would not any eternity be so? Whether it’s an eternity at the beach or in the mountains?

Indeed, there’s a ton of detail in Eternity that is really easy to pick apart, not least of which is the fair amount of time spent in different eternities in the second half of the film. These scenes are constructed so that characters can reflect on whether or not they made the right choice, but when the backdrop is just serene mountains or an inexplicably overcrowded beach (why would there be a limit on the amount of beach that can be shared for eternity?), Eternity, as a film, instantly just becomes far less interesting, compelling, or fun. It’s less fun without Early or Randolph around. And the technique for rendering the “Archive” building in each Eternity where characters can view replayed memories from their lives is mystifying: they see themselves as tangible people, but in a sort of diorama box with the environment of these memories rendered in large hand drawn backdrops. I can’t tell if this was a legitimately artistic choice or if it was a production cost saving measure. It sure felt like the latter,

Eternity is the kind of movie that is undeniably entertaining but also does not stand up to even the slightest bit of scrutiny. I laughed a lot the entire time the film was set at Junction, from the many sight gags to the delightful performances of both Da’Vine Joy Randolph and John Early. This made me happy to have seen this movie even though none of it really makes any sense.

Overall: B

SISU: ROAD TO REVENGE

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

Sisu: Road to Revenge opens so similarly to the original 2022 Finnish film Sisu that, for a brief moment, I thought I had misunderstood something and somehow found myself at a rerelease of that film. The first thing you see is a title card offering the definition of the word Sisu: “a Finnish word that cannot be translated. It means a white-knuckled form of courage and unimaginable determination. Sisu manifests itself when all hope is lost.” And in both films, this is followed by voiceover narration as we see an animated map of Europe—in the case of Sisu, we learn it is 1944 as the Second World War is coming to an end; in Sisu: Road to Revenge, it is two years later, 1946, shortly after the end of the war. We learn of the land area of Finland that was ceded to the Soviet Union, forcing nearly half a million Finnish people to relocate—and that this was the homeland of our hero, Aatami (Jorma Tommila).

Once these introductory scenes are out of the way, the two films then move forward in fairly different ways. In Sisu, it began with quiet serenity while Aatami prospects for gold, ultimately interrupted with approaching Nazi carnage. In Road to Revenge, we see Aatami driving a huge truck across the border, where he finds the home of his family who was murdered by a Soviet Red Army officer. He commences with dismantling the lumber of the house, marking the pieces as needed for reassembly, and stacks it on the bed of the aforementioned huge truck.

You could say there is a sort of serenity to this early sequence as well, except that writer-director Jalmari Helander, who wrote and directed both of these movies, moves through it much more quickly. And, just as in the first film, sequences are divided up into “chapters,” most of which last no longer than a single set piece.

And here is where I really get to the point: what surprises me most about Sisu: Road to Revenge is how it’s gotten a more positive response, from both critics and audiences, than the first film. The best I can guess is that people find the action sequences, and the delightfully inventive violence that defines both films, to be even more exciting than before. For me, though, there’s something about the time the first film takes before shifting gears, and the specific tone from an international perspective that gave it a novelty that by definition cannot exist with a sequel.

There’s a bit of an irony in how I would call this a rare instance of it being actually advisable to watch the original film right before going right into watching the sequel. Because even though the films are set two years apart, they very much feel like the same movie. Helander reportedly was very deliberate in keeping the run times of these films at a tight ninety minutes because he is “not a fan of 3-hour epics” (according to IMDb.com). And yet, you could easily watch these two films back to back for a solid three hours and feel like you’re watching a single, epic story of wildly implausible but deeply entertaining revenge violence.

Indeed, in Road to Revenge, we do get a villain as the character who murdered Aatami’s family—Red Army officer Yeagor Dragunov, played by American actor Stephen Lang. This actor is the guy perhaps most notably recognized as the primary villain in both Avatar and Avatar: The Way of Water, except in those movies he’s super jacked, and in Road to Revenge, his character having just been released from a prison in Siberia, he’s pretty scrawny—almost emaciated. But, the Soviets are eager to dispatch this mysterious man who has killed hundreds of men, and so they release Dragunov to “clean up the mess he made.” This leads to an inevitable showdown.

Both Sisu movies make the curious choice of shooting nearly all the dialogue in English—evidently as a means of broadening the audience potential of a film out of Finland. Lang gets by far the most lines in Road to Revenge, presumably meant to be in Russian but performed, evidently for our sake, in English. A lot of his lines are super contrived or outright stupid, to such an extent that they would have played better in Russian with English subtitles. As an evident nod of respect to Helander’s homeland, any dialogue by Finnish characters is indeed performed in Finnish with English subtitles. In Road to Revenge, this only occurs with two lines at the end of the film. Even then, Aatami himself says nothing, as a defining characteristic of both of these films is that he is a man of few words. He says only a couple of lines at the end of the original Sisu; he makes it through the entirety of Road to Revenge without saying anything at all.

Mind you, it’s pretty easy to say that if you liked Sisu, you will certainly like Sisu: Road to Revenge—especially as the latter gets to the action a lot more swiftly, as is par for the course with sequels like this. There’s a pretty great chase sequence with Aatami and several armored men on motorcycles that is basically Indiana Jones meets Mad Max. As always, Aatami sustains a great deal of injury, but a big part of the point of these films is how the blind desire for vengeance is what keeps him alive even in the direst of circumstances, even as he regularly achieves the humanly impossible, let alone the implausible.

Sisu is basically Finland’s version of a superhero franchise, albeit one that feels as though it was filtered through the sensibility of Quentin Tarantino. There are moments in Sisu that are quite emotional, though, and it never lets us forget that Aatami is still grieving the lost of his entire family at the hands of the enemy. This man does not see Nazis or Soviets as individuals, but as parts of a collective entity who wronged him. This makes it easy to root for his often gruesome killing of soldier after soldier. This happens in Road to Revenge, but of course, all as part of his path to Dragonov. This culminates in a pretty fun sequence of Aatami hacking and gunning his way through cars of men on a train headed back to Siberia.

A quick note on the special effects: some of it is very impressive in this movie, particularly wide shots of fighter jets attempting to gun down Aatami in his truck full of lumber. Other times, it’s very obvious CGI, such as the wide shots of the aforementioned train traveling through the night. At least it’s never overtly bad, and its use only ever serves the story, such as it is. This is a movie made to satisfy viewer bloodlust, and on that level, it delivers with a clever hand.

You missed a spot!

Overall: B