I LOVE BOOSTERS

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

I Love Boosters is only the second feature film by writer-director-producer Boots Riley; the first came eight years ago, Sorry to Bother You, a movie I struggled to connect to or make sense of. I Love Boosters is largely more of the same, but at least I can make slightly more sense of it. “Slightly” is the operative word here.

Riley is clearly a guy with a thing for gonzo excess. In this film, Keke Palmer, Naomi Ackie, and Taylour Paige play Corvette, Sade, and Mariah, respectively, also known as the Velvet Gang, the “Boosters” of the title—people who shoplift from high-end fashion outlet stores and resell them at a discount price. They quickly get the attention of the billionair fashion maven and Metro Designer outlet stores owner Christie Smith, played by a perfectly cast Demi Moore, who, along with her 2024 film The Substance, is really going for it with out-there roles in her sixties.

Moore is hardly the only fun casting choice in I Love Boosters, though. Don Cheadle shows up totally unrecognizable as Dr. Jack, a guy selling a pyramid scheme. Will Poulter is pitch-perfect as Grayson, the snooty manager at the Metro Designer store where Corvette, Sade, and Mariah manage to get jobs in an elaborate plan to boost its clothing. Eric André gets barely more than cameo time as a character credited as “Futuristic Police Tank Cop.” And while we’re on the subject of credited character names, LaKeith Stanfield plays “Pinky Ring Guy,” and I can’t even remember anything about a pinky ring; only that at one point one of the women says “He looks like sex”—and she’s right: LaKeith Stanfield need only stand still and stare at the camera to put a stir in the loins of viewers of any gender. (I guess I’ll take this moment also to name-check Jason Ritter as “Upstanding Community Member”; Kara Young as “Crying Black Mother”; and Jermaine Fowler as “Based Young Dude.” These characters all show up on news feeds offering backward talking points in defense of billionaires and corporations.)

I Love Boosters is surreal to the nth degree, to the point where the Velvet Gang are soon joined by Jianhu (Poppy Liu), a Chinese factory worker who steals two prototypes of a device with three different functions, depending on the setting: “Teleporter,” “Situational Accelorator,” or “deconstruction,” which renders anything it’s aimed at into the elements that made it. The plot is so wildly convoluted it would take an age to describe it all, but suffice it to say that the corporation is using this prototype to send product from China to the U.S. to save on shipping costs, but Jianhu teleports herself to the U.S. to start sucking all the Metro Designer outlet merchandise through the teleporter and right back to China.

This is where I Love Boosters has a lot in common with Sorry to Bother You, in which low-level workers are revealed to be literal “work horses.” The metaphor there was very on the nose, and much going on in I Love Boosters is moving in that same direction. Boots Riley throws in a lot of stuff about seemingly disparate groups of people actually fighting the same cause, and sets quite a lot of scenes in the Chinese factory where they are assembling the fashion. I’d say that there’s something ironic about the money spent to make a movie like this, using studios that arguably represent the very thing the movie is purportedly speaking out against, but this movie was made with a budget of $20 million and has grossed less than $5. Maybe Boots Riley knows what he’s doing, wasting production studio money!

I Love Boosters even features a bizarre, surrealist turn rather similar to the “work horses” of his previous film, just this time with a group of characters running after the Velvet Gang as stop-motion bodies of nothing but muscle and bone—complete with dangling, skinless penises—after being forced to shed their “suits,” which turns out to be their actual skin. This isn’t even the most memorable image in the movie; that would involve “Pinky Ring Guy,” who turns out to be way more than a guy wearing a pinkie ring, and is featured in the single most unfortgettably wild and hilariously disgusting scene in the movie. (It might also affect how much you agree that he “looks like sex.”)

This is a movie packed with gags, a ton of them visual, from Christie Smith’s office being in a leaning high-rise to the outfits worn by the Velvet Gang designed to contain all the clothes they’re boosting. A lot of the time, the gags work. A fair amount of the time, they kind of don’t. If there’s any signature trait to Boots Riley feature films—all two of them—it’s that they go in countless different wild directions and struggle to come together as a coherent narrative. I suppose a movie like this can work if you know what the very specific vibe is, and what it’s going for. I’m still not quite sure what I Love Boosters is going for exactly, but I picked up on the vibe. It worked better for me than Sorry to Bother You, but kind of barely. These movies are a lot, and you need to be ready for that. If you are then you’ll have a good time.

I Like Boosters Enough

STAR WARS: THE MANDALORIAN AND GROGU

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

Gather around, younglings. Let me tell you of a time very different from the one we currently live in. A time when a new Star Wars feature film release elicited palpable excitement. I’m not even talking about the prehistoric times of 1999, 2002, and 2005, when the Prequel Trilogy caused a global sensation in anticipation alone—only to disappoint millions (and yet delight viewers who were as young then as we were when the Original Trilogy was released). I’m talking just last decade—as recently as 2019, the appearance of the Lucasfilm Ltd logo elictited whoops from audiences. It’s worth noting that that was a full seven years after Disney bought Lucasfilm. But, it was at the end of their wildly misguided choice to flood the market with five feature films in as many years.

When I sat down to watch The Mandalorian and Grogu in a local theater, it was the first time I experienced that opening Lucasfilm Ltd logo and found it met with . . . silence. Everyone’s tired now. Star Wars is your parents’ franchise. The heyday has long since passed.

And yet: in a way, this helps The Mandalorian and Grogu, which is about as much fun as you can hope for with a feature film based on a television series, which was itself part of a broad franchise universe. It leans too heavily on action and is light on character development, but I have to say, most of the time the action is a blast.

There are many who act as though a lot is riding on this movie, and I’m not really convinced of that. I went in hoping for a good time that had no promise and no need to reinvent the wheel (or hyperdrive), and that’s precisely what I got. Perhaps more importantly, it gives a ton of screen time to that achingly cute character once known as “Baby Yoda” but whose name is actually Grogu, and it turns out that cuteness goes a long way. Even with a ton of screen time, Grogu never overstays his welcome. (For his part, Pedro Pascal gets one sequence without his all-important helmet on; they can’t have a star in one of the title roles without ever showing his money maker.) Having four new Anzellans, the small humanoid creatures who specialize in fixing things, doesn’t hurt either. The Anzellan Babu Frik was the best thing in The Rise of Skywalker, otherwise the one Star Wars movie to get worse with each viewing, and we didn’t get enough of him. We get plenty more of his kind in The Mandalorian and Grogu and it is always welcome.

All that said, there are elements of The Mandalorian and Grogu that are a bit of a mixed bag—namely, some of the casting. It’s bad enough that the opening sequence features several throwaway characters giving genuinely bad line readings, but this may be the worst I have ever seen Sigourney Weaver perform onscreen. It’s as though they just used the first take for every line she delivered, apparently having learned them just beforehand. How many science fiction franchises does Sigourney Weaver need to be in, anyway? Are Alien and Avatar not enough? Now she’s not only getting greedy, but apparently getting lazy. She genuinely feels out of place here.

The character around whom the plot turns is Rotta the Hut, a CGI character voiced by Jeremy Allen White, in a deepened voice that renders it unrecognizable. In which case, what was the point of casting him? At least Martin Scorsese’s voice is recognizable as Hugo Durant, a monkey-like character with four arms, odd a casting choice as that may be.

It’s somewhat of a miracle that Pedro Pascal is one of the few characters whose actual face we almost never see but who doesn’t seem like he’s phoning it in. Just as had been the case in the television series (but it should be stressed: you need not have seen the TV show to understand or enjoy this movie), there remains a delightful chemistry between him and the tiny puppet character—thank all the gods in the galaxy they never pivoted to rendering him fully in CGI—and that is truly the engine of this story, the reason to watch.

The Mandalorian and Grogu offers nothing particularly new, it doesn’t move the franchise forward in any real way, but it does prove it’s still viable. People may not be excited about this movie the way they were with previous ones, but this movie makes it easy to imagine one coming along that captures the public’s imagination again. Given the indelible nature of both the Mandalorian and Grogu as characters, it could easily be argued that this is better than Solo: A Star Wars Story, which made the mistake of making a Han Solo movie without Harrison Ford in it. The Mandalorian and Grogu has more potential for lasting impact, and is a fairly effective palate cleanser even seven years after The Rise of Skywalker squandered all the thrilling potential that came with The Last Jedi.

I do find myself curious about the way they title these movies. It feels a little like Lucasfilm backed themselves into a corner by retroactively making all official titles of any film in a trilogy start with the words “Star Wars,” and then making the subtitle to all standalone films “A Star Wars Story.” Except this new one is a standalone story and its official title is apparently Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu. Are they just sticking with “Star Wars” as the beginning of all feature films now and scrapping “A Star Wars Story”? Make up your minds!

The Mandalorian and Grogu heralds a clearly transitional time in Star Wars franchise history, which has had high highs and low lows, and a few movies, like this one, which are just fine. I kind of wish some of the special effects were better; occasionally movement onscreen is weirdly jerky. Other times, the picture rendered onscreen is stunning. Rotta the Hut is pretty standard-looking as CGI characters go, which qualifies as a disappointment: Star Wars is supposed to stand apart in these areas. If it’s not exceptional with its visual effects, how can it be exceptional at all?

Thankfully, none of these things drag the movie down to any fatal measure. The truth is, in spite of its clear flaws, I genuinely had a blast watching this movie. I got a good many laughs out of it, and I can easily imagine enjoying subsequent viewings. It doesn’t feature a story with enough depth to make it a new classic, but it holds its own among the other decent offerings in the franchise.

This far into a franchise’s history, this movie gives us just enough of exactly what we want.

Overall: B

OBSESSION

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

Everything’s a riff on a riff on a riff anymore, but I suppose the thing that still makes the difference is whether it’s done well. I have to admit that Obsession kind of exceeded my expectations. Granted, I went in with the bar pretty low—I knew this film got positive reviews, but as a rule the horror genre just isn’t my jam. I don’t tend to be impressed unless the movie is great enough to transcend the horror genre. I’d be hard pressed to say Obsession manages that, but it’s got a specific enough vibe to make it stand apart in a surprisingly compelling way.

We’re now 124 years from the original W.W. Jacobs horror short story The Monkey’s Paw, but we’re still not done seeing variations on its premise. You could spend a week listing off all the stories people have written about a wish gone horribly wrong because it wasn’t worded quite right or the person making the wish didn’t think it through. Plenty of people have already compared Obsession to Big, the 1988 comedy in which a kid wishes to be “big” and gets more than he bargained for by turning into Tom Hanks. Obsession is a little bit like if Big and The Exorcist had a baby.

The other thing Obsession has in common with countless other films is a character changed or possessed by powers beyond their control. Writer-director Curry Barker offers a bit of a fresh twist on this by having the possessed character turn out to be the victim as much as the villain, someone conscious of what’s happening to her but still unable to do anything about it.

In fact, you could have a fun debate about this movie: is the protagonist, a young man named Bear (a truly fantastic Michael Johnston) really the villain? We learn in very economic storytelling in the first few scenes that he’s got a huge crush on a woman in his friend group, Nikki (an increasingly unsettling Inde Navarrette), but is too scared to share his true feelings. He goes to a store to find her a replacement for a lost crystal necklace, and finds a product called a “One Wish Willow.” The instructions are to snap it in half and make one wish, and in a moment of panicked desperation Bear does this and says, “I wish Nikki loved me more than anyone in the world.”

You can imagine where this heads, and it heads there surprisingly quickly, underscoring the immediacy of the wish’s effect. I went into this movie expecting a sprinkling of comedy, and I have to say, there was only a couple of times I chuckled, and that was only out of nervousness. Barker is good at unraveling tension, especially as Nikki becomes more and more unhinged. And yet, when she literally says to Bear, “It’s all your fault,” she’s actually right. And because he’s spent so much time being in love with her, Bear even spends a fair amount of time selfishly convincing himself he can somehow make it work.

I won’t spoil what happens thereafter, but it feels worth warning the animal lovers that Bear’s cat, who is dead the moment we see it onscreen, factors significantly into the plot, and in no good ways. The best I can say is that it turns out to have been Bear’s own mistake that Sandy, the cat, has died; it somehow got into his mess of pills, presumably for his plethora of anxieties. How a cat would have gotten into pills with a secure lid while also eating its own food remains a mystery, but whatever. Maybe Bear just didn’t replace the lid well enough and then it fell from the counter? These are oddly laid out details, and we merely find the cat lying on the floor next to its own vomit and cat food spread around the floor mixed with pills. And this all happens before Bear even makes his wish, so I suppose we’re meant to see his judgment has been impaired by the trauma. This doesn’t stop him from jumping at the chance to attend Trivia Night when he learns Nikki will be there. You’ll have to watch the movie to find out how Sandy figures into the story thereafter.

There are two other people in Bear’s friend group, all of whom work at a music store run by a middle-aged man played by Andy Richter, the most random appearance of a single semi-famous face in the movie. Megan Lawless plays Sarah, the store owner’s daughter who has her own unrequited feelings for Bear. And then there’s Ian (Cooper Tomlinson), the most annoying of them all, a guy who is never truly listening when people need him to. This friend group winds up with a lot more going on between more of them than it seems at first, and I’m not sure all of that was necessary, but I guess it’s a way to thicken the plot.

When it all comes down to it, Obsession is a relatively predictable riff on The Monkey’s Paw, but it has enough fresh twists to it to make it worth a look if you’re into these kinds of movies. The performances elevate the otherwise fairly average material, and certainly some of the dialogue, especially in the beginning when things come across as a bit more contrived. When things turn creepy, though, they turn genuinely unsettling, and eventually we learn that is the case for both Bear and Nikki, who find themselves in a metaphysical bind with no solutions—or at least, no pleasant ones. Obsession gets pretty gruesome in its second half, and should delight the audiences who are coming for exactly that—not to mention the jump-scares that I never particularly enjoy.

But hey, if nothing else, Obsession is everything it promises to be, and Curry Barker and his cast deserve credit for that. This is the kind of movie I usually actively avoid, and I feel like I’m paying it a compliment by saying I don’t regret having seen it.

Hey dipshit, be careful what you wish for!

Overall: B

SIFF Advance: BODY BLOW

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

Body Blow is currently merely on the festival circuit, and thus far responses have been pretty mixed. I would argue that it practically invents the “camp noir” genre, though presumably there have already been other films released that fit the genre. Either way, detractors of Body Blow clearly just don’t get what it’s going for. This film is far from perfect, but it does strike the perfect balance in tone, right down to how it might as well have been titled Twink Fatale, except that even for this movie that title would have been a little over the top. Then again, the one onscreen murder scene in this film is the precise moment when Body Blow ascends to the point of high camp. And it’s kind of what made the movie work.

Mind you, this is a movie that falls apart with any close examination. The plot, as written by director Dean Francis, is so convoluted I often found it hard to ascertain why what I saw onscreen was happening. Some of it clicks together by the end, but not everything Francis attempts to wrap up in a bloody bow is quite fully contained in the package.

Speaking of packages—hooray for segues!—lead actor Tim Pocock’s figures prominently, albeit without a great deal of sense. (Side note: I don’t know if that guy’s last name was just a coincidence, but it sure got a smattering of giggles from the audience I was in.) His character, a Sydney cop named Aiden, is obsessed with the idea that not masturbating makes him both stronger and a better cop. In the opening scene, we hear the voiceover of a podcast he’s listening to, a guy with an American accept (also: coincidence?), is extolling the virtues of what we later learn is part of the “no fap” movement. Aiden eventually takes this to the extreme of buying a chastity cage for his penis—something we get several shots of him in, otherwise nude. I found myself wondering how the Motion Picture Association sets parameters for this, because it’s clearly not “full frontal” if we never see his penis, it’s rather unusual to see an actor’s testicles, however smooshed a cock cage might make them. Is this similar to it being okay to see nearly all of a woman’s breasts so long as only the nipple's are covered?

This cock-cage subplot is amusing—as is the fact that Aiden keeps chickens in his backyard, including roosters, even though you don’t need roosters in order for hens to keep laying eggs—but never feels vital to the plot. This involves Aiden’s introduction to Cody (Tom Rodgers), a guy who takes his identity as a twink so seriously that his car’s vanity plate just reads TWINK (the final shot of which is satisfyingly gruesome, incidentally). Cody is sort of a “kept boy” at the drag club run by a villainous drag queen played by Australian cabaret performer Paul Capsis. I don’t know how famous Capsis is in Australia, but this is the kind of part any drag queen worth their salt would love the play, yet Capsis doesn’t quite bite into the role the way you might hope, and his multiple club-host performances in the film fall a little flat.

It’s Tim Pocock and Tom Rodgers who make Body Blow worth watching (though Sacha Horler as Steel, the dirty lesbian cop and Aiden’s superior, has a bit of onscreen charisma of her own). I can’t pretend Body Blow was everything I wanted it to be, but it gave me plenty to work with, in that it features effectively knowing film noir tropes; it has a hot gay 40-year-old cop; it has a hot gay twink; I am also gay; and I have a pulse. That said, it also has a cinematographer (Franc Biffone) who clearly understood what the director was going for, and it has an 80s-synth-style score by a composer (Andreas Dominguez) who gave the vibe something you might find on a sonic highway connecting Priscilla, Queen of the Desert with the original Blade Runner.

Tone can really make or break a film, and this is where Body Blow nails it, staying impressively consistent with its very specific sensibility. The pacing is measured but never completely drags (so to speak), and this is in keeping with neo-noir storytelling. There’s a dangerous attraction between a copy and a young beauty, there are multiple levels of betrayal, and there are backyard cocks. Flaws aside, Body Blow is a film that truly stands apart, which makes it imperfectly exceptional. It’s not for everyone and it’s not meant to be, but I for one sit square in the crosshairs of its target audience, and I do love it for that.

This movie has a lot of entendres.

Overall: B

BLUE HERON

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

Blue Heron is an “art film” that, on the surface at least, really takes itself seriously as such a thing. It predictably delights critics, regular movie-goers only somewhat less so, a statement that basically ignores the legions of people who rightly assume this movie isn’t for them and so they don’t watch it at all. As is often the case in scenarios like this, I fall generally somewhere in the middle.

I wanted to love this movie, but I just couldn’t quite connect with it. Maybe it’s because of my own issues with memory, which Blue Heron explores in a unique way, as it presents the family life of Hungarian immigrants who have recently moved to Vancouver Island as remembered by the one girl, Sasha (Eylul Guven), among four children. She and two of the boys all seem quite close in age, approaching preteens but a couple of years away from it, give or take. The eldest, however, is Jeremy (Edik Beddoes, blond and with glasses that, while they are given a logical explanation, make him look a bit like a teenage Jeffrey Dahmer), is 14 years old, and the entire reason for the telling of this story.

The first half or so of Blue Heron is almost radically naturalistic, with effectively complementary cinematography by Maya Bankovic. It’s a series of vignettes that offer random slices of their everyday lives, seemingly somewhere between pleasant and innocuous at first. Very gradually, Jeremy is revealed to be a bit of a nuisance, acting out, causing trouble, being generally annoying. In the first example of this, he is seen laying down on their front porch as though dead, for so long that the neighbors call his parents, according to his father, to report that their “son is dead on the front porch.” But, over time, Jeremy’s antics evolve into things a bit more alarming and sinister, his behavior increasingly sociopathic. He gets arrested for shoplifting, a crime he never once shows any remorse for doing. He climbs onto the roof of the house and freaks his parents out as he refuses to come back down. In one example, his mom is woken up in the middle of the night by the sound of a window breaking, and she finds that Jeremy has cut his hand badly on it.

There seem to be dual ideas intermingling in the presentation of Blue Heron: what could possibly be the best option for a truly uncontrollable child in a world with very few genuinely workable options; and how the reconstruction of that story is complicated by memory itself.

In the far more naturalistic first half of the film, which is presented with an almost documentary-like quality while also being something close to dreamlike at times, I was much more taken with it, even as there seemed to be no real plot to speak of. We never actually see Jeremy do any truly horrible things; mostly we see him just being occasionally annoying. His parents, played by Iringó Réti and Ádám Tompa, are characterized as doing the best they can while also contending with the needs of three other children and their own lives separate from them. The father spends a lot of time on a nineties-era Mac computer (because these sequences are set in the late nineties), and we never know exactly what he’s doing on it. Does he work from home, even in that era? What the hell is he doing? At one point he sets Sasha on his knees and shows her how to draw and color a picture using the mouse.

And all the while, Sasha is observing. About halfway through Blue Heron, there is an abrupt jump forward twenty years, and we see Sasha as an adult (Amy Zimmer). She’s now a filmmaker, and hosting a focus group in which she asks how a case like Jeremy’s might be handled differently today. There is a pointed comment about how resources are scarce for kids like Jeremy even now.

It took me a minute to even realize the time had jumped forward. I thought: Wait a minute. She’s holding an iPhone. Indeed, this turns out to be the very iPhone she’s shown recording her childhood hometown with in the opening scene, before it jumps back to the nineties. From here, though, Blue Heron gets sort of meta, and certainly confusing if you’re not paying the right kind of attention. She drives to her old house, presses “record” on her phone and hides it in her purse, and then suddenly she goes to the front door to announce she’s making a health visit. Except, it’s her father, the same age (and same actor) as in the flashbacks, who interacts with her as though she’s the social worker she remembers having visited when she was a child. Part of this sequence we have already seen, with Sasha as a little girl and a different actor playing the social worker. And by the end of this sequence, Adult Sasha walks out of the room and Young Sasha walks in, having just been eavesdropping through the door.

Perhaps other viewers will find this very obvious, but my experience with it was a film that turned toward the inaccessible, toward something a bit obtuse. Given the notoriously unreliable nature of memory, I can see the reasoning behind it. I just can’t decide if it actually works.

It also gradually becomes clear that this is really Sasha’s story, and not Jeremy’s, and about how memory complicates a fraught history. It’s noted that sometimes Jeremy was scary and sometimes he was sweet, and this is precisely how we experience him in the first half of the film. This is also reportedly a largely autobiographical account of writer-director Sophy Romvari’s own experiences. It would seem that she was more interested in how memory affects her perception of family history, than she was in simply writing something more straightforward that, in a fictionalized world at least, might have provided some closure. I’d have been more interested in the latter, but it takes all kinds, I guess.

Hey I don’t remember any blue herons!

Overall: B

MOTHER MARY

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

Both Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel seem to be having A Moment this year, albeit to different degrees. Coel has had two film releases this year, all of one month apart—the first being The Christophers, the second being Mother Mary. As for Hathaway, though she has been working steadily all along, the last lead performance of hers that got any notable attention was for the fascinating film Colossal in 2016, and that was not a very big movie. And after languishing in a sort of obscurity, at least relative to her earlier success, this year she has five films coming out—and, due to my own life circumstances, I happened to see both of the first two, two days in a row this week: The Devil Wears Prada 2 and Mother Mary, even though the latter was released in my local market one week prior.

I managed to see Mother Mary in its last day in theaters, which I really wanted to do because of Hathaway’s role as the title character, a hugely successful pop star, with pop songs she actually performs—quite well—herself, written by Jack Antonoff and Charli XCX. I downloaded the EP of her seven songs recorded for the film, with Anne Hathaway herself listed as the artist and the album title Mother Mary: Greatest Hits. I like it a lot, and assumed it would enhance the viewing experience of the film to have familiarized myself with the songs first. Now, I’m not sure it really mattered—just as I’m not sure if it makes a difference if you eventually just watch this film on a streamer rather than in theaters (a predictable inevitability: this film grossed $2.4 million in its three weeks of theatrical release). It turns out Mother Mary spends most of its time as a dialogue-heavy two-hander, with just two people talking in a room.

Mother Mary is directed by David Lowery, and if you are familiar with his work, in spite of his resume being surprisingly varied (he directed both the wonderful 2016 remake of Pete’s Dragon and the perfectly pleasant 2018 film The Old Man & the Gun, both of which starred Robert Redford), then you know to be unsurprised when his films turn out to be very challenging and weird (he also directed both A Ghost Story in 2017 and The Green Knight in 2021). Mother Mary is much more in the vein of his more challenging films, in that it’s frustratingly tedious until it becomes compellingly baffling. In short, Lowery is a director with an established history of films I can’t understand, to the point of utter frustration, only for them to find some way to pull me in by the end. I know nobody in particular I would recommend his more challenging films to, and yet they are consistently films I can imagine gaining greater appreciation for myself, upon repeat viewings.

Mother Mary opens with Anne Hathaway as the title character, performing onstage to an adoring audience, with backup dancers. The pop music is super catchy from the start, so you might reasonably assume the music would play a significant role in the film. But, by the time the opening sequence is over, Mother Mary is rushing into the house of her former costume designer, Sam (Coel), insisting that she needs to design her a dress. There follows a lot of completely straightforward, unstylized scenes of dialogue between just the two of them, albeit with some scenes of Sam’s assistant, Hilda (Eurphoria’s Hunter Schafer), peppered in. It’s maybe halfway through the film before things predictably turn weird, and we find out that Mother Mary is now possessed with the spirit (rendered as a red fabric) that Sam had some time before expelled.

It seems Mother Mary is mostly about friendship, how it can be excruciatingly intimate and then devastatingly strained, and how the baggage of those strained connections can weigh on those affected. Honestly, this is my first pass at what that red-fabric-spirit represents as a metaphor, because in true David Lowery style, he never makes this explicitly clear. Even though Mother Mary and Sam literally talk about whether or not what they’re speaking is metaphor.

Mother Mary eases back into stylistic flourishes as these two regale each other with their respective experiences with this ethereal spirit, with no human personality or clear intention. We just know that it enters and exits Mother Mary’s body through open wounds. And I must say, there are certain scenes with this floating red-fabric-spirit in a black void that are hauntingly beautiful—and also some scenes in which it is rendered with surprisingly janky, herky-jerky visual effects. Lowery is usually known for great visuals, so I don’t know what the deal is there. Anyway, as they tell each other’s stories, one of them will open a door in Sam’s huge warehouse of fabrics, or turn their head, the camera will turn, and suddenly they are looking upon the flashback we transition to.

The more the film shifts in this manner, the more cuts we get back to Mother Mary’s stage performances. It’s worth noting that there has been some debate as to what real-life pop star most inspired Mother Mary, and to be it’s preposterous to think there is any debate at all: it’s clearly Lady Gaga. Mother Mary comes onstage in a high-waisted one-piece very reminiscent of many Lady Gaga costumes, at one point complete with a staff reminiscent of the “disco stick” from Lady Gaga’s “Lovegame” video. There’s even Sam’s brief mention of Mother Mary once arriving at an event “wearing nothing but freshly poured honey,” a clear nod to Lady Gaga’s infamous “meat dress.” And finally, what star besides Lady Gaga even has a pop persona in quite the same vein as “Mother Mary?” This would be why Sam’s signature element of her costume designs for Mother Mary are her so-called “halos,” a pretty obvious nod to the very name—and something we can easily imagine Lady Gaga having done if she were Mother Mary instead.

Mother Mary even seems to be at a similar stage in her career, with Sam referencing the biggest hits “between 2003 and 2015,” indicating Mother Mary is at least 20 years in, past the height of her career but still important to legions of fans. (Lady Gaga broke out in 2008, but 18 years is still pretty close.) I rather wish more of the movie focused on Mother Mary’s career, actually, or at least on her music and its effects. The EP title Mother Mary: Greatest Hits has a sort of meta amusement to it, because these tracks are really fun but hardly timeless; this would never be the collection of songs on anyone’s career-retrospective of hits, but are serviceable as a fictional version of one. It helps that Hathaway is surprisingly adept at performing them—she sang live on set—which is another reason I wish more screen time was given to the music.

The most unfortunate thing about Mother Mary is that Anne Hathaway’s EP is far more fun than the movie, which has a somewhat awkward ebb and flow between compelling and tedious (Lowery is increasingly revealing this to be his trademark). There’s something about it that keeps it in mind for me, though, and once again I suspect it may benefit from another viewing, especially now that I know where it eventually goes. If nothing else, the acting is excellent: Hathaway is an undeniable star and actually convincing as a pop icon; Coel’s performance is as stupendous as ever, and always the biggest reason to keep watching the scenes that don’t take place onstage. I may not quite be able to make heads or tails of the story, but how it’s told onscreen, even when veering into the objectively ridiculous, keeps me invested.

Sam has conditions for accepting Mother Mary’s apology for the ways in which this movie alienates its less perceptive viewers.

Overall: B

THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA 2

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

There’s a moment, relatively near the end of The Devil Wears Prada 2, when Miranda Priestly says, “I just love working, don’t you?” This is the line that is staying with me the most, as I wonder whether the meta aspect of it was at all intentional: the line is delivered by Meryl Streep, who might as well also be speaking for herself and her acting career. It serves as an explanation, beyond the obvious paycheck (Streep was paid a reported $7 million to reprise this role), for why she would bother with revisiting this role a solid 20 years later.

In 2006, the original The Devil Wears Prada came roughly 30 years into Meryl Streep’s career, and it became by some distance the most successful movie she was in—a record broken only by the ridiculous Mamma Mia! only two years later, in 2008. No role in her career has ever been more iconic than that of Miranda Priestly, however, as she singlehandedly turned what otherwise would have been a cinematic piece of mediocrity into a wildly rewatchable entertainment.

So how does the sequel stack up? In context, in its time, I’d say it roughly matches the original—with some elements that fall short. But, the original also had elements that fell short; they were just different. And, even 20 years on, we love these characters too much not to have a pretty good time. They brought back all of the heavy hitters, after all: Streep, of course; Anne Hathaway as Andy Sachs, now much more grown and confident; Stanley Tucchi as Miranda’s long-suffering professional sidekick; and Emily Blunt as Emily Charlton, now working leverage against Runway Magazine as the largest advertiser at Dior (the product placement and fashion cameos are, predictably, off the charts). Even Tracie Thomas returns as Andy’s best friend Lily—something I took way too long to clock, mostly because, while she still looks objectively great, she looks more naturally aged by 20 years than any of the other major actors do.

It’s worth noting that the original The Devil Wears Prada had things going for it that this film does not, most notably the notoriety of its source material: it was based on the 2003 novel of the same name by Lauren Weisberger, in which the Miranda Priestly character was widely known to be a thinly veiled representation of Anna Wintour. The speculation surrounding these facts fed the buzz around the film, although Meryl Streep came in and truly created a unique character quite distinct from Wintour. It’s probably telling that Weisberger wrote two sequels, but The Devil Wears Prada 2 is not based on either of them; both films’ scripts were written by Aline Brosh McKenna, but this time the story is entirely original.

Well, not entirely—it still has a credit that states it’s “based on characters created by Lauren Weisberger,” after all. It even slightly pokes fun at that, with a character scoffing at the idea of writing a book about a boss you don’t like. And, much like the previous film, a lot of the story is pretty contrived—especially the setup now that forces all of these same people back together. In the opening scene, Andy and all of her newspaper journalist colleagues are fired via text while she’s accepting an award for her work, and coincidentally Runway is experiencing a PR disaster. Andy, now a respected journalist, is offered a job at double her previous salary in an effort to restore credibility to the magazine.

Much of Andy’s and Miranda’s reintroduction is pretty entertaining, in that Miranda doesn’t (or maybe pretends she doesn’t) remember her. Streep’s acting is great as always, but I found her characterization in this film somewhat curious, in that she is uncharacteristically more personable than she was before, even as she’s being rude to people (and particularly to Andy). I don’t know if this was meant to be an indication of how she’s changed a little over the years or what. That said, The Devil Wears Prada 2 spends a lot of time acknowledging how the world, and especially both journalism and fashion, have changed over these past 20 years. This would include regular corporate workplace norms, as there is a funny running bit about how Miranda has to choose her words more carefully now to avoid HR interference.

What love interests there are, are different this time around—fine by me, as Andy’s boyfriend from the first film, while very cute, was pretty dull as a character. This time she has a meet-cute with an Australian played by Patrick Brammall, and he’s moderately more interesting than the first guy, if distractingly performative with his eyebrows. Emily, for her part, is seeing a billionaire played by Justin Theroux, who also happens to be the ex-husband of Sasha Barnes, rendered significantly wealthy in her own right, a desired target for an interview with Runway after some years of reclusiveness. Sasha is played by Lucy Liu, a very interesting actor in a part that gives her virtually nothing interesting to work with.

Miranda is now married to a guy played by Kenneth Branagh; B. J. Novak plays the incurious heir to Runway’s parent company; even Lady Gaga makes a special appearance as herself (performing an original song, which, to be honest, sounds like a generic version of Lady Gaga—it turns out she recorded four original songs for the soundtrack). To say this film has a stacked cast would be an understatement, although it could be argued it was the first film that transformed about four of them into the stars that they are.

I was feeling kind of indifferent to the story for much of this movie, but still taken by the characters; this is how “lega-sequels” successfully traffic in nostalgia. It does have some similar beats to the first film, in terms of the tensions between Andy and Miranda; Andy trying and awkwardly failing to impress Miranda; Miranda finally deigning to be impressed. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t taken with the movie by the time it was ending, though. These movies never made grand promises, just modest ones, which they deliver on. I still left the theater with a warm and appreciative smile.

The gang strikes an uneasy pose in a new and rapidly changing world.

Overall: B

NORMAL

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

I guess Normal is an apropos title for a movie like this, in spite of how clearly it wants to present itself as a curio. The writing is pat throughout; there are turns you can see coming a mile away; this is a movie that could have been made by countless interchangeable filmmakers. And yet? I actually had a good time. With a movie like this, as long as it’s not actively bad, all you need is to give yourself over to all that it aspires to be, which is honestly not much more than mindless entertainment, and you find yourself having a blast.

This is hardly even the first B-grade action movie Bob Odenkirk has done—that would have been the surprisingly fun 2021 film Nobody, in which he established himself as an unlikely, aged action hero, this generation’s Liam Neeson. The kind of funny thing is that Neeson and Odenkirk are 10 years apart in age, yet Neeson’s late-career action period started with Taken in 2008, when he announced to the world at age 56 that he had “a very particular set of skills.” Alas, when Odenkirk reasserted himself as an action hero at the age of 59, he wasn’t gifted with lines anywhere near as famous.

He pulled in a $57.5 million worldwide box office on that movie, though—chump change compared to Taken’s $226.8 million gross, sure, but it’s good to keep in mind that Nobody was released when covid was still keeping audiences out of theaters, its gross was on a $16 million budget. It came as little surprise, then, when—just like with Taken—Nobody 2 was released four years later, in 2025. Alas, it proved to be diminishing returns; that movie wasn’t even that good of a time.

Thus, I somewhat feared that Normal would continue that downward trajectory, given that it clearly exists square in the same vein as the Nobody movies: an older guy who proves surprisingly adept against violently challenging odds. In this case, Odenkirk plays Ulysses Richardson, who has been hired as interim Sheriff after the previous one died of supposed cardiac arrest in the freezing Minnesota winter. The town where he reports to work is called Normal, because of course it is, and something predictably sinister is going on there.

The most surprising part of Normal is the extent to which the Japanese Yakuza figures into the story—the opening scene is in Yokyo, and for a minute I thought maybe I had wandered into the wrong movie. How this ties into the town of Normal is a bit unnecessarily convoluted, and I have mixed feelings about the universally one-dimensional way in which every single Japanese character in this film is written.

I won’t spoil how the Yakuza turn out to be connected with this town, except to say that it gives director Ben Wheatley and script writer Derek Kolstad (Odenkirk himself is also given story credit) an excuse to treat the locals in a way similar to the townspeople of the 2007 Edgar Wright film Hot Fuzz, albeit with far less wit. I will admit to being well amused by a whole lot that happens in Normal, but it tended to be more because of the cleverly over-the-top violence (at times it gets about halfway toward Cocaine Bear, which I really dug), not because of any particularly well-written dialogue.

There are multiple characters, in fact, who are weirdly underused. The inciting incident is an attempted bank robbery by a young couple, played by Reena Jolly and Brendan Fletcher, but that was evidently the only thing these characters were created for. I was relatively compelled by them, especially when Ulysses finds himself needing to team up with them, but their departure from the story is weirdly anticlimactic. I really hoped they would return to be part of the inevitable climactic battle, nut, no such luck. And then there’s the always-welcome Henry Winkler as Mayor Kibner, who is dispatched shockingly early in the film.

But as long as Odenkirk is onscreen, you’re having some fun. He clearly has fun making these movies, and as long as he’s getting paid, more power to him I guess. It feels a bit like there’s a threshold of sort to these films, which need to have a magic balance of dumbness and cleverness, a sensibility that is at least partly self-aware and a refusal to take themselves too seriously. These sorts of movies are a very particular brand of stupid, but the better ones have a delicate knack for effective entertainment. Normal just barely tips into the better side of them.

Another example of effectively dumb fun.

Overall: B

TWO PROSECUTORS

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

I didn’t get too far into Two Prosecutors before I got a sense of where it was headed. This was hardly a surprise, or a spoiler; this film is about a man navigating the rampant corruption of 1937 Soviet Russia—or “Stalin’s Great Terror,” as the film puts it. It’s fascinating how many films we have gotten over the decades about Nazi Germany, and the comparatively few we have gotten about Stalinist Russia. It’s also ironic, given that Stalin’s regime killed more people than Hitler. Which is to say, in Two Prosecutors, the young prosecutor Kornyev, played by Alexander Kuznetsov, is headed nowhere good, as he investigates the treatment of prisoners in his district.

He only manages to meet with one such prisoner, a very old man named Stepniak (Aleksandr Filippenko) who has been falsely imprisoned and by some miracle managed to get a note out of the prison. Not having been provided any writing utensils, he wrote the note in his own blood. Come to think of it, he sure did manage neat and tidy writing in blood with no writing utensils.

Fully the first half of Two Prosecutors follows Kornyev as he is stalled at every turn, making his way through the maze of the prison where Stepniak is being held. He waits, and he waits—and so do we. I got the feeling that Ukranian director and co-writer Sergey Loznitsa’s intent was to make us quite literally feel Kornyev’s frustration. And I’ve got to say: it worked. Two Prosecutors has a glacial pace the likes of which I have not experienced in ages, and is sure to alienate any casual movie watcher.

Of course, this is not a film for the casual movie-goer. It exists to challenge, and force us to confront the dangers of fascism in the most mundane of environments—and how the mundane can be used to mask horrors. This is a movie about a man who is increasingly brave as he insists on doing the right thing, and following the letter of the law, and we know far before the end that he will only be punished for it. I was reminded of the end of the far more exciting All Quiet on the Western Front: all that effort, for this?

After Kornyev finally meets his prisoner and is a first-hand witness to how horribly the NKVD (the abbreviation for the agency that translates as People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs) treats the countless people they arrest without cause, the second half of Two Prosecutors has Kornyev traveling to Moscow to meet with the Prosecutor General—hence the film’s title. Here he walks the labyrinthine halls of government offices rather than those of a prison, but he is stalled in exactly the same way. And we once again spend what feels like an eternity, waiting with him.

It would be one thing if it were just the waiting, but nearly every character is ridiculously stoic. Neither Kornyev nor anyone whose path he crosses has any personality to speak of. The guy who finally grants him permission to visit Stepniak in prison does laugh at his own joke, with a sort of mirthless glee. Once Kornyev finally gets his meeting with the Prosector General, the Prosecutor General listens to Kornyev’s litany of allegations with nary a facial expression. Then he provides him with a train ticket ride home in a train car that’s quite the contrast to the crowded car he traveled to Moscow in. On his ride home, he meets two engineers already sharing the room he’s put in, and these guys are the only characters in the movie who exude a modicum of warmth. And you should know instantly not to trust that.

Two Prosecutors is drab, dull, and bleak—all with clear intentionality. I have a hard time deciding what to make of it, overall. It kind of won me over in the end, as I got a sense of what it was doing. Nevertheless, I do not recommend watching this when you haven’t had enough sleep. You’re guaranteed to nod off, just as Kornyev himself does on more than one occasion.

Yep, this movie has Two Prosecutors in it.

SIRĀT

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

As I consider Sirât, the Spanish nominee for Best International Feature, I keep thinking of the 2021 film from Mexico, New Order, which was so deeply nihilistic it left me baffled, bordering on angry. There is no question that Sirât is a better film, and yet I am not convinced there was any more of a point to it. Sirât is far more subtle with themes that New Order beat us over the head with, but I still could not in good conscience recommend it to anybody.

Some truly horrible things happen in Sirât. I went in already knowing the first horrible thing that happens; I just did not know exactly when or how it would occur. I can’t say knowing about it ahead of time made it any less horrible to witness, this scene alone left me deeply rattled, mostly because it comes out of nowhere during what is otherwise a perfectly normal scenario: people working together to change the tire on a traveling bus on fairly treacherous Moroccan desert mountain roads. What I was not prepared for was how things sort of settle a bit after that, only for things to get even worse.

This is a film clearly working in broad, existential and spiritual metaphor, even though on the surface everything is very grounded in reality. It is explained to us in an opening title card that Sirât refers to the Islamic theological idea of a bridge one must cross, “thinner than a hair and sharper than a sword,” over hell and into Paradise. The faithful will cross successfully and the sinful will descend into hell. Now, I know next to nothing about Islamic belief, so it’s not only conceivable but likely that my Western mind lacks a certain understanding of nuance here. (Although, side note: after reading a few other reactions to this film, it’s clear there are people from the region who feel director and co-writer Oliver Laxe is dabbling with real-life geopolitcal tensions he has no business playing with.)

All I know is, not only do the characters in Sirât have horrible things happen to them, but they happen at random and without any directed malice. These are all perfectly decent people, basically minding their own business and helping others in whatever ways they can, and tragedy befalls them out of nowhere. The only pattern to be found is the quick succession of sudden horrors befalling this one group of people.

I’m not eager to tell anyone else to sit through this movie, which I found compelling until I found it by turns horrifying and deeply stressful, but I still won’t spoil specifics. I’ll just say that it begins with Luis (Sergi López), a middle-aged man, and his son, Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona), milling about a desert rave in Morocco, handing out flyers and looking for Luis’s older child, Esteban’s sister. We never do find out how long she’s been missing (except that it’s been a long time) or why she’s apparently lost; these two only know that she frequents these desert raves.

The rave music figures prominently in the plot of Sirât. I haven’t been to a rave since college, so my impression of them is that they occur overnight in dark lofts or basements, packed with young people on relatively harmless drugs and surrendering to the beats. This was roughly thirty years ago, so clearly I don’t know what the fuck is going on now; a quick Google search indicates there is indeed a thriving desert rave scene in Morocco. It would seem these are still typically overnight affairs, but all of those seen in Sirât appear to be happening midday. This is the case during the opening credits identifying the principal characters other than Luis or Esteban, nonprofessional actors found for director Oliver Laxe and given the same character names as their real first names. After this, we don’t actually see the title, Sirât, until 30 minutes in.

By that point, Luis and Esteban, still desperate to find their lost family member, follow a small caravan of vehicles on their way to another rave after military has come and forced a rave to break up. We’ve already gotten very sporadic snippets on car radios about nations in the region descending into armed conflict, and it’s serious enough for citizens of the EU to be singled out for evacuation. The smaller group of ravers that Luis follows in his car have little interest in it, aside from a passing reference to “World War III” that doesn’t seem to be taking it very seriously, even though some of them appear to be seriously injured veterans themselves: one with a missing leg who walks on what looks like a repurposed crutch; another with a missing hand. There is another passing reference to them being “deserters” but with no further detail or contextualization.

I am reminded yet again of that other film, New Order, in which the narrative takes us into the thick of the violent chaos—in that case a senselessly violent overthrow of the elite by the underclass. In Sirât, we have a group of people who have deliberately separated themselves from the violent chaos, escaping into drugs and beats but otherwise pretty pacifistic. And unsettlingly terrible things happen to them anyway. And in the most straightforward sense, there is no rhyme or reason to it.

So this is where the intended takeaway is up for debate, I suppose. The final sequence in Sirât was so tense I could hardly handle it. They cross a lethally dangerous path, which some cross unscathed and others do not; presumably there is profound importance to the line, “I just crossed without thinking.” This is his response to how he made it work, while another did not succeed.

And in the end, this is all we know about any of these people: only that some of them have dedicated their lives to raves, and that Luis is looking for his daughter. We don’t hear anything about Esteban’s mother, or about any of the ravers’ lives up to this point, at least not beyond a vague reference to desertion. Earlier in the film, one of the ravers turns off the radio announcer detailing what’s going on in the country, presumably because all they want to do is shut out the realities of the wider world. Beyond that, Sirât simply follows a small group of people who either meet violent ends or barely miss violent ends. The image of the first incident is so simple in its horror, something we hear rather than see directly, is something I will not soon shake, even though it is only the shock of characters witnessing it that plays out onscreen.

There’s something doubly effective about the choice to use nonprofessional actors for this. Esteban in particular feels like just a regular, unremarkable kid who is naturally very well loved by his decent dad. Horrible shit can happen to any of us at any time. And yet, in the end I was still left with the question: okay, but why? It seems the absence of an answer to that question was the point of this movie, except the characters have no choice in the matter, but we do. My experience of Sirât was one of tension and stress that could have been avoided; watching this film was not a random thing that happened to me out of nowhere. Not putting yourself through it is also a choice you can make, and in spite of a lot of it being very well done—including a good amount of genuinely gorgeous cinematography—that’s the choice I would encourage.

Let’s all form a circle and talk about my deep ambivalence about this movie.

Overall: B