Tasveer Advance: HOOP LIKE THIS

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

What possible insight could I have about this movie? I mean, I watched it, largely due to happenstance, but it’s part of this year’s Tasveer Film Festival and it’s a new film so I’m reviewing it. But I should say right off the top that I am far from this film’s target audience: I am neither South Asian nor do I know the first thing about basketball. Okay, I suppose I know the first thing. You dribble the ball, right? That’s where my knowledge ends. I actually watched this movie thinking about how I have no idea how many points you get for making a basket, nor whether there are other ways to get points in the game. To say I am ignorant of this sport—okay, all sports—would be an understatement.

I gleaned this much: there is an annual tournament with the incredibly creative name of The Basketball Tournament, or “TBT” for short, for which the ultimate winner gets a cash prize of $1 million. Strike that—in 2026 it’s $2 million; but during the couple of years covered by this film, it was $1 million. It’s up the team to decide how that prize gets split up, but you can assume a roster of 12 players, a coach, and staff. Do TBT teams have staff? I have no idea! But if you assume a minimum of 13 people, then that $1 million works out to around $77,000 per person at most. No one discusses this in the documentary.

Anyway, the real subject of Hoop Like This is a very specific team called “India Rising,” comprised exclusively of either people from India or people of Indian descent from around the world—the Indian diaspora—and founded by Gautam Kapur (featured prominently) with the mission of showcasing South Asians in high-level basketball and breaking the stereotype that people of Indian descent are unathletic. India Rising is thus the first-ever Indian professional basketball team.

This film, directed by Shubhangi Shekhar, is broadly speaking a pretty standard sports documentary—the kind that is fine for people not already emotionally invested in its subject (like me) but perhaps a delight for people with direct relevance to it (South Asians; South Asian basketball players). I’m not sure how interested people who love basketball but don’t have much occasion to think about the ways it can be diversified will be, which is unfortunate (either for them, or for my own lack of imagination).

The stuff that interests me here are indeed the more cultural ideas—I am married to a person from India, so there is that angle of personal interest, albeit one that has never had any connection whatsoever to basketball. My husband sometimes watches American football, certainly gets invested in the World Cup (for soccer), and has a working knowledge of cricket—but has never been particularly compelled by basketball. There is a brief but fascinating detour in the film, though, in which Kapur visits India and learns that basketball was first introduced to the country by Canadian YMCA instructor T. Duncan Patton around 1893. It is thus argued that basketball is no more or less “Indian” than cricket.

Moving back to the present day, there are some amusing moments in which players kind of lean into their stereotypes, such as how something like half of them are doctors as a day job, and many of them have family members who own gas stations or drive taxis. We see one if them examining a teammate’s possibly-injured foot. That seems kind of convenient. We also get a few talking-head interviews with certain entertainers of South Asian descent, such as American actor/rapper/singer Utkarsh Ambudkar (Brittany Runs a Marathon, Blindspotting), or comedian and writer Nimesh Patel, among others. Between this and a lot of high-octane needle drops from presumably South Asian musicians, this all feels a bit like a means of upping the film’s “cool” factor. And, to a degree at least, it seems to work.

The period Hoop Like This covers is India Rising’s first and second years in TBT, when they suffered the loss of their very first game the first go-round . . . and then won their first game the second go-round. That second one serves as this film’s climax, as it was widely cited as the “biggest upset in TBT history,” when they defeated the No. 1 Seed and host Red Scare in Dayton. They were then eliminated in the second round, and I have already well established that I know next to nothing about basketball, but I suspect that would mean they still aren’t exactly the best team out there—but, Hoop Like This is quite deliberately not about that (and who would want it to be?), but rather about how they are gradually fulfilling their aforementioned mission, and proving that they can’t just be dismissed or written off.

We do learn that the team, in an effort to be more inclusive of all South Asians, has since been renamed the “Brown Ballers,” and I do wonder if I’m the only one who hears that and just thinks of brown people freeballing. The logo design is the same either way, with the word “Rising” or “Ballers” in standard red lettering at the bottom, below either “India” or “Brown” written in lettering shaped like iced mountain peaks with a basketball rising like the sun behind them. It’s clearly meant to evoke the Himalayas, but, I don’t know, maybe they should find a new marketing consultant. For a split second I wondered why they didn’t just call the film India Rising, until I realized that might only put forth wrong connotations—hence, perhaps, the change in the team name. Still, Hoop Like This is a pretty bland title.

When it all comes down to it, I’m not sure who to recommend this to, aside from South Asians with a marked interest in basketball (or even sports broadly), and maybe the people who love them. Professional sport does nothing for me, but there was enough here to make it a bit more interesting than expected.

Okay so what’s happening here? Is anyone scoring any points? Who designed those outfits?

Overall: B

THE SOCIAL RECKONING

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

Aaron Sorkin is a rightly celebrated screenwriter. This is the guy who wrote A Few Good Men, The American President, The West Wing, The Social Network, and Moneyball. His most recent four movies, however—Molly’s Game, The Trial of the Chicago Seven, Being the Ricardos, and The Social Reckoning—were both written and directed by Sorkin. You can tell at a glance what the issue is there: other directors have historically raised Sorkin’s work to the level of excellence. Sorkin manages to direct his own material to a level one or two steps below that.

So it is with The Social Reckoning, a follow-up to The Social Network sixteen years later, thus qualifying as a “lega-sequel.” Critics left and right constantly hail The Social Network as “a masterpiece,” and I’ve never been willing to go quite that far—it’s a really good movie that I gave an A-minus, but it’s not perfect. I still clearly did myself a favor by not rewatching it before seeing The Social Reckoning, in which both David Fincher’s direction and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s score are sorely missed.

It feels a little like Aaron Sorkin feels like he is the only one who can truly bring his visions to light, and he is mistaken. Parts of The Social Reckoning feel pointlessly heavy handed, and there’s a couple of editing choices that are genuinely baffling. Twice there are cuts to shots of only a set of people’s calves and feet walking on a sidewalk, with the audio deliberately going in and out. I don’t get it.

What I do get is the point of making this movie, though—I’m not really on board with the people saying the movie itself is pointless. Anything that keeps people talking about Facebook and its now-widely-known dangers is a good thing, however ineffectual it may ultimately be. “Based on a true story” movies don’t always have the intended impact when they are set less than two years before its release, and this one gets to within about five years ago. A lot of what was going on in the world then is still pretty vivid in our collective memory, and depictions of the covid years remains a tricky business. Yet again, we get shots with characters here and there wearing masks, but only just enough to jog our memory, and not nearly enough for it to be realistic. We have to keep seeing all these actors’ beautiful faces, right?

Covid is deeply relevant to this story, though, because it’s used as one of countless examples of Facebook being culpable in the spread of damaging misinformation. A brief but key scene is set in a grocery store (the one scene in which nearly everyone is actually wearing a mask), with a mask-less woman shouting at everyone “You’re a sheep!” And we all know she got this idea from Facebook.

Which is to say, of course, that The Social Reckoning is also often pretty on the nose. Is this movie actually providing any insight? I suppose it might be to some, who pay far more attention to movie entertainment than actual news, which sadly is most people—but most people seeing this movie aren’t necessarily going to care. I’d say you can just find the 17-part series The Facebook Files that was published in The Wall Street Journal in 2021 and the writing of which forms the basis of this film, but a) most of it is behind a paywall; and b) you wouldn’t likely read it even if it weren’t. (I haven’t read it, nor do I have a subscription to The Wall Street Journal.)

Still, by and large The Social Reckoning is pretty engaging, mostly because of being very well cast. This isn’t exactly a showcase for Mikey Madison, who plays the awkward and nerdy Facebook employee whistleblower Frances Haugen, but if you happened to see her in either the Scream reboot or her Oscar-winning performance in Anora, you’ll get a sense of her incredible versatility. This is a showcase for Jeremy Strong, whose performance as an almost sociopathic Mark Zuckerberg is almost worth the price of admission on its own. Nearly all of his scenes are set during a rehearsal for testifying before Congress, however, and we only get one scene in which Zuckerberg and Haugen are even in the same room (and they don’t even speak to each other). Sorkin’s choice to set this rehearsal on the same day the January 6 insurrection is one of several things that make this script feel a little over-written.

Jeremy Allen White is a great actor, but here he’s in a role—as Wall Street Journal investigative reporter Jeff Horwitz—that any competent actor could have played. The same could be said of Betty Gilpin, who plays Horwitz’s editor; or Bill Burr, who plays an evident frenemy of Zuckerberg’s implausibly brought into the rehearsals to help with crisis management. But, it’s still really fun to see them both.

In any case, The Social Reckoning is packed with performances that range from competent to quite memorable, and I’m not sorry I saw it. That’s a very different sentiment from being thrilled by it, I realize. Some of the writing choices are deeply contrived and corny, but I still left with a certain appreciation for the overall experience. I certainly hoped for better, but my highest praise for this movie is that it could have been a lot worse.

Watching pretty people look at Facebook internal documents is so exciting!

Overall: B

DIGGER

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

Digger opened five days ago, and it is already well-documented what a huge flop it is: made with a production budget of over $125 million and a marketing budget of around $100 million, it landed at #4 at the box office its opening weekend, grossing a paltry $8 million domestically and $23 million worldwide to date. This is a movie many media outlets are reporting needed to make $300 million in order to break even, and instead is Tom Cruise’s worst opening weekend in nearly two decades—likely longer in adjusted dollars, considering $8 million in 2007 was the equivalent of $13 million in 2026 dollars.

All of this is to say: Digger being not for everyone is the understatement of the year. Reactions have been sharply divided, to the point that word of mouth is actively working against it. It’s too bad, because there is a hell of a lot to say about this movie, and such conversations can be fun as hell. So: is Digger for me? I really couldn’t decide for a while. I actively thought about this while in the middle of watching the movie, which does not say much for it. And yet, I found it really stuck the landing in the end, on an unsettling note that was somehow both incredibly on the nose and subtle at the same time. There is no way of predicting this, especially in today’s siloed media consumption landscape, but this is a movie I can easily imagine being reclaimed sooner than later. It could be as soon as it releases on a streamer somewhere (it’s a Warner Brothers film, so probably HBO Max), or it could be a decade from now. Someone is going to discover this movie and wonder how they slept on it. The question is whether that someone will be in the company of significant number.

More than anything, because this movie is not for everyone, Digger has a marketing problem. For instance, let’s talk about that quite-obviously animatronic cat, which was featured prominently in the trailers. No context is given for why the cat looks and moves like that, and the result is something that seems to suggest the production skimped on budget and wound up with a pet that looked bafflingly artificial, given the state of visual effects capability today. And I don’t really know what the answer is here, as it would be a notable spoiler for the trailers to give context—maybe they should not have shown that cat in the trailers at all? Because the film itself does provide context to how that cat looks and moves, and it’s something that actually makes sense. But who would know that, watching the trailers? Whose boneheaded choice was this?

All that aside, I can’t say that Digger always worked for me, but it certainly worked better than I expected it to based on the reviews. This is perhaps one of the most critically polarizing films of the year, and usually a MetaCritic score of 46 is a reliable indicator that I will not like a movie. There are occasional exceptions, though, and this is one of them—fascinatingly, the user score on MetaCritic is a much more respectable 6.8 out of 10, so evidently I am not alone. (The user rating over on Letterboxed is a similarly respectable 3.8 out of 5 stars.) It’s worth noting that this is only among the few people who actually bothered to see the movie.

I just love what a swing Digger is—not that unusual for director and co-writer Alejandro G. Iñárritu (this guy directed both Birdman or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance and Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths; thankfully this movie’s title is shorter), but very unusual for Tom Cruise, who hasn’t taken a swing this big since his appearance in Tropic Thunder in 2008. I want him to keep taking swings like this, as it makes him a far more interesting actor. I was afraid the poor box office performance might scare him off such swings in his late-career years, but evidently he’s been defending Digger, which is a good thing.

Now, there are many big swings in Digger, and some of them work better than others. Cruise’s performance is excellent, especially considering he actually plays two characters—oil tycoon Digger Rockwell himself, and Curtis Markson, the actor playing Digger in a satirical play. This is where Digger leans hard into meta territory, something I love when done well, but the jury may be out on that point here. When the film suddenly shifts to the same actors we’ve been watching all along playing actors rehearsing a stage play, for a while it’s very confusing. It doesn’t help that clarity comes after these “actor” characters are suddenly arguing about whether this is a satire or a farce and whether it is funny. Up to that point, some of the comedy in Digger has landed well, but some of it also has very much not. I got several good laughs out of this movie, but also experienced multiple attempts at it that just fell flat. And if you are very directly asking us to consider whether what we are watching actually works as a satire, I’m not sure it’s actually working as intended. Or was that the point? Here Digger starts to get lost in its own convoluted plot machinations.

Digger has a sister, Emma, played by Sandra Hüller, an actor rightly celebrated as her profile has been raised in recent years. But this may be the worst performance I have ever seen her do, she spends so much time just shrieking at her brother, and it never quite feels genuine. Or was that a deliberate choice, and the actor playing Emma is not that great at her craft? It seems Iñárritu has built in a clever excuse for what appears to be subpar acting. The same can be said of John Goodman, as the idiotically bombastic President of the United States. His performance is so over the top it makes Digger himself—also an outsized character—seem subtle. And again, suddenly, we see the play actors discussing how different their play characterizations are from the real people they are playing, and how that is all part of the satirical intent.

There’s a lot going on on Digger though, and I have a feeling a lot of people are missing the point in what seems on the surface like a narrative mess, much like the characters themselves are missing the point of how they got themselves into the climate catastrophe that forms the basis of the story. There is a barely-detectable, unsettling truth seeping through Digger, about the hypocrisy of “advanced” societies reaping the benefits of the technology that they self-righteously deride as ignorantly self-destructive. There is a key scene in which Digger addresses a room full of world leaders prone to speaking out of both sides of their mouths, and again, much of what he says is very on the nose—and still, I listened to his screaming monologue about environmental hypocrisy and just found myself thinking: Well . . . he’s right.

I wonder what the carbon footprint of this movie’s production was, incidentally? Not that that’s part of Digger’s point either; this is not a movie that is preaching to its audience—if anything, it’s a skewer aimed at people prone to preaching to their audience. And there’s a lot in it that’s really fun, including Riz Ahmed as Digger’s Head of Environmental Safety, Dr. Ganesh, who seems to be a slightly stereotypical character at first but then proves to be satisfyingly nuanced. We also get Michael Stuhlbarg as the Vice President; Jesse Plemons in a ridiculous red wig as the play’s benefactor; and House of the Dragon’s Emma D’Arcy, who it took me a while to fully recognize in the part of Digger’s assistant.

There are some baffling choices in Digger that only come halfway around to making sense later, such as the scene in which Digger, the President and a host of other government officials are watching a live feed of environmental destruction in Europe, but the camera only ever shows the reactions of the people in the room and never what they are actually watching. Was this also a budget choice? Clearly not; we later see news feeds of the same destruction, rendered quite impressively. Was this a staging choice if we were to later consider how it would have been performed in a play? That idea also falls flat when you consider the extensive use of screen imagery in the play. I still don’t have an answer to this one.

Some of Digger may always remain a mystery. Some of it may become clearer after repeat viewings. Will I ever rewatch Digger? Probably, although I couldn’t say whether it will be any time soon. I can only say it had my undivided attention from its first moment; it veered dangerously close to losing me in the middle; and by the last scene, which is expertly staged and edited, I found myself surprisingly satisfied, if not exactly blown away.

There is so much more going on than you think,

Overall: B

FORGOTTEN ISLAND

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

I have mixed feelings about Forgotten Island. On the one hand, it ultimately proved surprisingly moving, and I loved its focus on friendship in a way that is universal but is rendered between two young girls—who are also young women in the movie. On the other hand, it almost buckles under the weight of its self-consciously frantic editing, like it’s made for kids raised on Instagram reels and has no self-confidence to hold attention any longer than your average algorithmic dopamine hit.

It was so bad that I nearly gave up on this movie halfway through. It had been fairly entertaining for a while, with relatively well-rounded characters and moderately clever humor. But then Jo (H.E.R.) and Raissa (Liza Soberano) get ported to the titular island, things quickly go antic, and a kind of fun way at first, but then it just becomes such a mess of action that my eyes started to glaze over. Why was I supposed to care about them again?

It’s too bad too, because there are so many cool things about Forgotten Island, which underneath its visual chaos has an understanding of universality through specficity. This is a story steeped in Filipino lore and mythology, with a bunch of specific mythological creatures. Filipino actor Manny Jacinto voices Bungi Tiyanak, a giant, three-eyed demon baby. Filipino singer Lea Salonga voices Manang, the bat-winged creature that can detatch itself at the torso. Jo Koy voices Datu, leader of the tree giants. The most prominent island character is voiced by Dave Franco (not Filipino), a “were-dog” named Raww, inspired the aspin, a mixed-breed dog of the Philippines. Unfortunately the script never quite comes to what exactly is going on with Raww, why he only occasionally turns into a human boy, and spends the rest of his time either as a humanoid dog or “full dog” whenever there’s a stick around.

The cast is diverse, but with a bent toward Filipino heritage: H.E.R. has a Filipina mother; Liza Soberano is American-born but largely grew up in the Philippines with her Filipino father. Jenny Slate (not Filipona) comes in to voice the quasi-villainous Batiba, a large, cat-like demon who steals memories. This forms the backbone of the story, written by Joel Crawfod (not Filipino) and Januel P. Mercado (American but with Filipino parents), both of whom also co-directed. Jo and Raissa strike a deal with Batiba in which they exchange memories in order to get back home, which turns out to be a bigger sacrifice than expected. As they desperately attempt to salvage their shared memories in a very well-executed climactic sequence, it would appear that these directors have perhaps seen Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind a few times. A valuable lesson here is that if you’re going to steal, steal from the best.

To be fair, Crawford and Mercado do make it their own. They just take a while to get there, or for them to fully bring us in through all the visual mess. That memory sequence had me thinking about my own friends-as-chosen family with tears streaming down my face, forcing to admit that okay, this movie isn’t bad—and then it jumps back into being pointlessly frantic.

It doesn’t really help that some of the humor is disappointingly witless, using pee and farts as tired punch lines. Raww gets kicked in the crotch and he says “My nards!” before you see him walking with a limp. How often animation so directly acknowledge the existence of testicles, I wonder? Will Raww one day be able to breed? Does Forgotten Island want me to be pondering these questions?

On the upside, Jo and Raissa represent friends who are flawed but deeply supportive of each other, one a talented artist and one so smart that she’s planning to attend college at CalTech in America. This is one of the sources of their unexpeceted tensions, as the two grow into young women and must decide on their individual paths forward. There’s a lot of depth to plumb in Forgotten Island, you just have to wade through a bunch of noise to get to it.

Clearly your mileage may vary.

Overall: B

PRIMETIME

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

It’s hard to put my finger on exactly how I feel about Primetime, which feels intentional. I went in expecting to feel pretty icky about it, from virtually every angle—and that’s nearly where I landed. What I didn’t quite expect was not being able to tell what this movie has to say about its subject, if anything. If it’s intended as a showcase for Robert Pattinson’s talents, it certainly succeeded there—but I left wishing I’d gotten a bit more.

Shouldn’t a movie about a show as exploitative as To Catch a Predator have something clear to say about it? There is so much to say about the actual television series, which aired twenty episodes between November 2004 and December 2007 (most of them just between February 2006 and July 2007), that it feels odd that Primetime has so much less to say. If nothing else, it reflects the moral bankruptcy of the entertainment industry as it blurred the line between “news” and entertainment—after all, To Catch a Predator was part of Dateline NBC, but was transparently more concerned with ratings than with actually catching child predators. When the most elaborate sting the show staged inevitably ends in a kind of tragedy no one can particularly feel good about, we see the show’s producer (a wonderful Merritt Wever) say to show presenter Chris Hansen (Pattinson), “I can make this work.”

What does something like this do to the “performers” who play the decoys, anyway? Skyler Gisondo plays “Decoy Dan,” the 23-year-old actor cast to impersonate boys as young as 13. Gisondo does a great job of conveying the wild emotions that must go through someone who sees a guy whip out his dick and spray whipped cream all over it. (This never actually happened on the show, by the way, although some did get caught completely naked.) This is indeed a wild situation to be in, being a young man impersonating a teenager, who then becomes subject to a genuinely pedophilic act—all of which is caught on camera. One wonders whether “Decoy Dan” needed therapy after this.

Director Lance Oppenheim’s film is thus ripe for examination of the psychological effects of all this, but what we get instead is something presented as a media satire. Is it really satire, though, if it’s inspired by things that actually happened? Just because Oppenheim is taking artistic license doesn’t mean he’s not reflecting real life here. Hollywood has a long history of films depicting a dystopian media future, and here we have something that winds up being pretty disgusting from all angles, and it happened two decades ago.

I haven’t even gotten to how many of these sting operations, which were done with the cooperation of local law enforcement, stink of entrapment. No one wants to be defending pedophiles, but there are proper ways to catch criminals, and this isn’t quite it. Among the many ways To Catch a Predator was criticized, Charlie Brooker wrote at the time, “When a TV show makes you feel sorry for potential child rapists, you know it's doing something wrong.” This is worth noting because in many cases, Primetime does exactly the same thing, and it does not seem to be commenting on the fact that To Catch a Predator was itself doing it. We see actors portraying the entrapped predators, and we feel conflicted because of how close we get to sympathizing with them.

And, to be clear, I do hold the controversial stance that even pedophiles should be treated humanely. There have been a couple of films in the past, most notably the 2004 Kevin Bacon film The Woodsman, that dared to challenge their audiences with this notion. It’s a provocative idea worthy of debate, and an idea not particularly explored in Primetime, which is far more concerned with Chris Hansen, his (fictional) producer Andie Bender, and their insatiable quest for ratings. These people don’t really care about the supposed righteousness of catching these predators, except that it is this idea of righteousness that brings in audience numbers. There are multiple scenes of fans talking to Hansen and saying things to him like, “You’re doing the Lord’s work.” Of course no one is considering the damage being done to the people actually doing this “work.”

There is a subplot involving The National Inquirer hounding Chris Hansen for comment on photos taken of him with a woman he had an affair with, a clearly juicy angle given his purported moral crusade—as if a simple affair is in any way equivalent to pedophilia. Primetime’s cinematographer, David Bolen, shoots a ton of the action in incredibly dark rooms, almost to the point of distraction. I know the show’s crew did a lot of its work in hiding, but if they are all in separate rooms, am I to believe they still kept the lights off? This combines with a heightened style of shooting to really drive home of the darkness at play. And yet, everything onscreen is designed to entertain us more than to elucidate us, which kind of makes Primetime guilty of the same thing To Catch a Predator was guilty of.

And I won’t deny it—I was very engaged by this movie, maybe even entertained, albeit at someone of a loss when it ended. The acting is excellent, especially on the part of Robert Pattinson but also Skyler Gisondo as “Decoy Dan,” as well as Merritt Wever. I just can’t come up with a purpose to this film that sits well—the same as any sane person would feel about To Catch a Predator. I’d have loved to be enlightened by this film in some way, and instead I was entertained. There are certainly some who feel that the publicly humiliating punishment of pedophiles is just and right as well as entertaining, but I’d rather we just find an efficient way to protect our children from them. Using them for entertainment is not it.

A media satire about a sickening subject, what fun!

Overall: B

RESIDENT EVIL

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

I might as well start off by saying that I am not the target audience for Resident Evil, per se. If this kind of movie is very much your jam, you will likely love it, and take anything I have to say about it from here on out with a grain of salt. Maybe don’t even keep reading. Go read something else! All the issues I have with this movie are my issues alone, and I am going to work through them now.

Now you are perhaps thinking I must have hated this movie, and I did not—far from it. There’s actually a great deal about it that I liked a lot. My major problem is that I fell prey to the hype—a rookie mistake that I keep making—and went in expecting this movie to be something it clearly is not. I thought I was going to experience something thrilling and exhilarating, and instead found myself sitting through a movie that is merely amusingly scary. Thanks to too many people I listened to talking about it, I expected Resident Evil to be both much funnier than it actually is, and far more action packed than it actually is. It spends much more time building tension, and when considering the creature effects, to me it occasionally came across like a cross between Alien (which gets very directly referenced, with bodily fluid burning through floors like acid) and Beetlejuice.

The genre lovers out there are raving about this Resident Evil—a kind of franchise reboot that, it turns out, is actually the eighth adaptation of the popular video game series that dates back a solid thirty years—and I kind of get it. I, on the other hand, am a film lover first, and while this Resident Evil is undeniably entertaining, it feels like at least a minor step down from director and co-writer Zach Cregger’s first two films, Barbarian and Weapons. Both of those films featured genuine innovations of the narrative form of cinema. Resident Evil certainly features fun tweaks to video-game-to-film adaptation conventions, but here is where I would argue “innovation” is a rather strong word.

When it all comes down to it, Resident Evil is just another zombie movie. Okay, so the zombies here have tentacles, and have a few other tricks up their sleeves. There are certain shots where creature design looks like the demogorgon from Stranger Things (itself a retro sensation without any original ideas) by way of Little Shop of Horrors. I realize most of the audience seeing Resident Evil will be far too young to even get that last reference. This Resident Evil has been characterized as “breaking all the rules,” and yet I can think of better movies that also broke the same rules.

But, again, if you love zombies, then this is a movie for you. To be fair, this film is still far better than most of the other zombie movies, and certainly horror movies, that have ever been made. Of course, given the genre we’re talking about here, it would not be inappropriate to say that the bar is in hell. Zach Cregger doesn’t have to do that much to be relatively impressive.

So here are the ways Resident Evil did impress me. After so many pointlessly over-indulgent movies racking up runtimes of increasingly more than two and a half hours, this one clocking in at 95 minutes—which means less than 90 minutes at the point the credits roll—is a genuine dream. I’ll give the movie this much: there is not a second wasted in it. Thrilling or not, it’s never boring, and it plays like The Odyssey if all the traveling vignettes were grotesque monsters that existed for their own sake.

And Austin Abrams, who also had a key supporting part in Weapons (the very distinct difference between the two showcasing his versatility of talent), deserves special mention. He is Bryan, the young man whose point of view we follow from the beginning until the end. He’s couriering a package, which he assumes to be an organ, to Raccoon City General Hospital, and you’ve got to hand it to him—the guy never loses that package. Abrams plays a guy with a grunt job running an extra errand for double pay very well, and his ineptitude with guns in real life is well observed. He even talks about how he only shoots guns in video games, one of the few references to gaming in the film that I actually clocked, out of presumably a bunch.

I wish I could say the same for the rest of the cast, except that it features fun casting in bit parts by players who are ultimately wasted in far too little screen time: Paul Walter Hauser; Griffin Newman; Severance’s Jack Cherry; True Detective: Night Country’s Kali Reis. Hauser in particular is saddled with some of the film’s clunkiest dialogue.

I do wish more horror movies would dispense with the backstories ostensibly added to give the characters more depth. People come to these movies to see horror and mayhem, not an examination of the characters’ psychological damage. This is often a fatal flaw, as in They Will Kill You from earlier this year: every time the movie returns to the sisters’ damaged past, the movie grinds to a halt. Mercifully, we get none of that shit in Resident Evil. We do get a minor backstory involving potentially life-altering news from Ryan’s girlfriend (who we only ever hear as a voice on the phone), but only in two brief scenes, and in the end it largely only builds up to one of the movie’s better punchlines.

In other words, there’s a lot for even me to enjoy in Resident Evil. It just doesn’t stack up to Cregger’s previous work. He was very open about wanting to pivot with this film and just do something super fun, and he clearly had fun making it. And I’m glad! I’m just not willing to go so far as to consider this movie anything special.

Something about that woman doesn’t feel right.

Overall: B

PRACTICAL MAGIC 2

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

There’s an oddly contemporary dissonance to whatever math there is supposed to be in the timeline of Practical Magic 2—which, as it happens, is based on the novel The Book of Magic by Alice Hoffman, itself a sequel to the original novel Practical Magic. These novels were published in 1995 and 2021, respectively; a 26-year gap—though the timelines in their stories were apparently roughly 20 years apart. Plus, The Book of Magic is the fourth in the Practical Magic series of books, but this is only the first film sequel to be made—28 years after the first. But, although specific ages of characters are never revealed in either film, we certainly know that Sandra Bullock, Nicole Kidman, Diane Wiest and Stockard Channing have aged 28 years—albeit with Bullock and Kidman having had work done, making them appear unnaturally younger than they actually are (this isn’t quite as much the case with Wiest and Channing, who are 78 and 82, respectively). Bullock and Kidman are now 62 and 59, respectively; but their characters’ two daughters, who were played by girls who were 10 and 7 years old in the 1998 film, are now played by 28-year-old Maisie Williams and 26-year-old Joey King. One of them was a toddler and the other not even born when the first film was released, but, I guess everyone is playing younger here across the board. (Incidentally, 46-year-old Lee Pace is playing Bullock’s love interest in this movie. Get it, Sandy!)

Anyway, realistically, Bullock and Kidman’s Sally and Gillian Owens sisters would realistically be contending with grandchildren closer to the age of the kids in the first film by now, but, whatever. In Practical Magic 2, Antonia (Maisie Williams) is a medical intern, and Kylie (Joey King) appears to be still in college—and falling in love with Gideon (Xolo Maridueña). Anyone familiar with the first film knows where this is going, which is the predictable concept around which the plots of both films revolve: the Owens family has been suffering a curse for generations, in which any men who fall in love with their women meet an untimely death.

I must admit, I have some questions. Does the Owens family never produce any male offspring? Evidently not. And why do we never learn anything at all about Sally and Gillian’s mother, except that she “died of a broken heart” because—of course—her husband met with an untimely death? The original Practical Magic ended happily with Sally mated with an Arizona cop played by Aidan Quinn, but by the time we’re seeing Practical Magic 2, we learn quickly that that character has also met with an untimely death. In response, Sally casts a spell to make her daughters forget about being witches and makes Gillian promise never to tell them. To call this contrived could be the understatement of the year, but we have to get a further storyline from somewhere, don’t we?

Again: whatever. Movies like Practical Magic are built to withstand nitpicks like this, because they exist only to charm audiences coming for fluff and magic. I have always thought the original film could have been better, but still had its charms; I’ve seen some reviewers of this sequel characterize it as lacking “the magic” of the original, evidently forgetting how the original played in its time. Practical Magic is more of exactly the same, which actually makes it the exceedingly rare “lega-sequel” that actually matches and lives up to its predecessor. Anyone fond of the original is just as likely to be fond of this one, particularly if you are fond of the older principals in the cast.

We don’t get broadly successful movies like this with so many main characters who are women, after all. And by all accounts, the fluff-and-magic of the movies honor the books on which they are based; there is no serious depth getting missed anywhere here. It does make a difference that characters this thinly drawn across the board are played by such deeply talented actors, without whom the film would easily pass by totally ignored.

When it comes to “witchy” stuff, these stories never got super deep into that, either. We see spells and hexes, and actually more onscreen magic than in the first film, with more involved and better (if not perfect) special effects as well. But, as always, this is about the generational relationships between aunts and nieces, and more importantly the bond between sisters. This is always rather slight in characterization, but it all still makes for perfectly pleasant entertainment. I’m not going to be rushing to rewatch this movie any time soon, but I always felt the same about the original, which I’ve probably seen at least four times now. I suppose that still averages out to once a decade. Still, when I inevitably go to watch it again another decade from now when craving something both nostalgic and witchy, I’ll probably inevitably double-feature it with this one. It’s just as good, after all, and as I already clearly demonstrated, it’s fun to overanalyze everyone’s respective ages. Youth is temporary, but nitpicking is eternal!

In any case, predictable pleasantness does not preclude having a good time. Practical Magic 2 is just as blandly cute as you’d expect or want from it.

A family reunion you’d actually want to attend.

Overall: B

THE SUN NEVER SETS

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

There’s a case to be made that The Sun Never Sets is a well-written and impressively nuanced drama about a modern love triangle, but there also remains the question: who wants to watch these people? I’m honestly at a bit of a loss as to what writer-director Joe Swanberg himself found compelling about these characters.

To be fair to Swanberg, I suppose, it’s certainly a well-observed account of two men vying for the same woman, who want to think of themselves as evolved, but still wind up being predictable jerks. Dakota Fanning’s Wendy has her own jerky moments, sure, but if we put it to a contest, both the guys are the clear winners.

The title of the film is a subtle nod to the setting of Anchorage, Alaska, where they have around 20 hours of daylight in the summer. Maybe it’s also a subtle metaphor for the nebulous state of Wendy’s relationships, one with Jack (Jake Johnson), a divorced father of two young kids who love her; the other with Chuck (Cory Michael Smith), a pilot ex-boyfriend who has been out of the state for three years and is suddenly back and seemingly changed—or is he? I don’t know if Jake Johnson got deliberately a bit more schlubby for the part of a middle-aged school coach or if Swanberg is just taking advantage of where he is right now, but he’s balanced out by Chuck’s fit outdoorsiness, and both characters provide plenty of pros and cons for Wendy to consider.

That said, everything that happens is Jack’s fault. He says so himself more than once, and he’s right. When we meet them, Wendy has her own place but regularly stays over at Jack’s house, where he is very set in his ways, and worries about Wendy committing to him when he has no interest in getting married again or having more kids. About this, Jack is also right. On the other hand, his insistence that they “take a break” so she can see what she might find out in the world before making a final decision about staying with him seems a little counterproductive, particularly in light of their having been together for two years. This does seem to strip Wendy of a little bit of credit in regards to knowing what she wants, and I find myself wondering how this story might have unfolded had it been written by a woman. Swanberg clearly knows how self-invovled men can be, but Dakota fanning is over here elevating a female lead part that is perhaps a bit underwritten on the page. It doesn’t even occur to Wendy that she might be throwing her life goals away by staying wth Jack until Jack insists on it.

Wendy goes on one date with a a friend she has no chemistry with but has had a longtime crush on her, and it’s pretty convenient, for plot purposes, when she runs into Chuck at the very bar at which she’s on this date. What a perfect time to run into an old flame who maybe might work after they themselves have spent some time apart!

I feel a bit of ambivalence about The Sun Never Sets, which is competently made, and, I suspect, succeeds at exactly what it sets out to do—frustrate us with the behavior of these people. Jack’s immediate second thoughts when Wendy starts spending time with Chuck are utterly predictable; he almost becomes a caricature of a jealous man–except that we’ve all known men who behave exactly this way. There’s a moment when Chuck says to Wendy, “I don’t want to be part of an open . . . thing,” and Wendy says she doesn’t either, and I thought: well shit, why not? Wendy doesn’t get all of her needs met by either of these guys, but she gets pretty much all of them met between both of them. Chuck will go on spontaneous camping trips that Jack has zero interest in, and Jack will go to Wendy’s friends’ art showings that Chuck has no interest in. Okay I take it back because I know exactly why not: neither of these guys are completely mature adults. They want to be, but they aren’t.

The Sun Never Sets provides plenty to ponder and discuss, I’ll give it that. Consider this: why does whether or not Wendy might one day decide she wants children have to factor so heavily in all these choices right now? Discuss! It could be argued that Jack is being weirdly paternalistic on this point, which really means she shouldn’t be with him to begin with.

I don’t have to like all the characters in a movie, but if it’s not something like a biting satire, it’s helpful to have at least one person to root for. Wendy, as a character, is just a fairly average young woman living her life in Alaska. These two guys she’s trying to decide between have no interest in truly sharing an equitable life with her. I regularly wanted to punch them both, but it’s also a relief that there is no scene in which they punch each other (in one scene, they kind of get halfway there).

I suppose it sort of sounds like I disliked this movie, which isn’t quite accurate. I didn’t love it, which is different. Aside from the somewhat flawed script, everything else about the movie is perfectly serviceable, and the performances are solid all around. These all feel like real people, particularly people you know, which does reflect a certain talent—the characters are drawn far more successfully than the plot unfolds. I was just glad to not be hanging out with them anymore when it ended.

Maybe next we can get a movie about a successful poly threesome in the Alaskan winter called The Sun Never Sets.

COYOTE VS. ACME

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

There will never be another Who Framed Roger Rabbit, though multiple attempts have been made over the 38 years since that movie marked a pivotal point in film history. They have consistently failed to replicate that success, but it could be argued that Coyote vs. Acme comes the closest. It’s not a very high bar to clear, really, but this script, by May December writer Samy Burch (sharing story credit with James Gunn and Jeremy Slater), is surprisingly clever, and delivers pretty consistent laughs and chuckles. It might give you just the right amount of tickle.

Are the inevitable comparisons to Who Framed Roger Rabbit unfair? Maybe, but that was a film that pushed the industry forward with unprecedented technical accomplishment while also being both visually and narratively inventive. Coyote vs. Acme is made in an almost identical style, with cartoon characters existing in real-world environments alongside human characters. It does not, however, push the industry forward or feature unprecedented technical accomplishments.

And no one’s asking it to, for the record. But it’s hard not to feel like just a little something is missing, mostly due to pacing that would have done well to inch a little closer to that of actual Warner Brothers cartoons. It doesn’t have to be wall-to-wall zany, but the pace could be picked up a bit. With just a little bit more energy—Will Forte’s lazy-loser personal accident lawyer character Kevin Avery doesn’t exactly help things on that front—and some punch-ups with more gags in every scene, this could have been a modern classic.

Instead, Coyote vs. Acme exists in movie lore more as the movie that fans brought back from the dead: director Dave Green shot this in 2022; Warner Brothers announced in 2023 that they were canceling release of the completed film in order to claim a $30 million tax credit; controversy ensued, and after a sale to independent film distributor Ketchup Entertainment, it now has a wide release, four years after principal photography wrapped.

Was it worth the wait? I can’t help but mention Who Framed Roger Rabbit again, because that is a special film with historic importance. I would be hard pressed to call Coyote vs. Acme special, but it’s undeniably fun, and I was happy to have seen it. This is a world in which the rules of cartoon character existence are not really explored; they just exist matter-of-factly alongside humans. They hold jobs, they have opinions, some of them (like, say, a single-minded coyote desperately trying to catch a Road Runner) have clear purpose. And they consistently sideswipe the audience with left-field cartoon gags.

This is essentially a “real world” with cartoon rules, in which Acme is a giant corporation whose products never work—at least, not when cartoons use them. You name it, Wile E. Coyote has used an Acme version of it in his attempts to catch the Road Runner, and if you’ve ever watched Road Runner cartoons, you know he always fails. Enter Kevin Avery, who takes on Coyote as a client and sues Acme for all their defective products. Eventually this becomes a cartoon version of a court drama, which brings its own set of absurdist gags (including Luis Guzmán as the judge). Witnesses include CEO Foghorn Leghorn (voiced by Eric Bauza, as one of ten different cartoon characters here) and Head of PR Tasmanian Devil (Jim Cummings); John Cena plays Acme lawyer Buddy Crane, in honestly kind of a nothing part that could have been given far more humor but is never all that funny.

It’s always a delight to see monotone queen Martha Kelly, though; she plays one of Avery’s law office staff somehow with more verve than anyone else in the room besides Coyote. Coyote vs. Acme would have benefitted from more compelling human characters for sure, but its commitment to old-school Warner Brothers cartoon silliness still makes it pretty entertaining. The animation itself isn’t anything new or impressive, but the integration into real-world footage is well done. I’m not sure anyone is going to remember this film years down the road, but they’ll have an undeniably good time while watching it.

Look at all those drawn faces.

Overall: B

MUTINY

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

Jason Statham and Gerard Butler should get together and do a movie about a survivalist ex-military man seeking vengeance against terrorists in the middle of a natural disaster. These guys have never worked together, but they have worked with multiple same directors: Ric Roman Waugh (Greenland, Shelter); Jean-François Richet (Plane, Mutiny). So what are they waiting for?

The idiocy of Greenland: Migration (also directed by Waugh) notwithstanding, I seem to have a thing for these guys’ movies—quite literal B-movies in every respect, I tend to give them solid B grades (spoiler alert: it’s what I give Mutiny), because they are exactly what they state themselves to be, and thus solidly deliver on expectations. Mutiny is merely the latest in a line of these, the second by Statham this year alone, after Shelter. Last year we got A Working Man (the weakest of this recent stretch—not quite a B for that one); the year before that, the one that launched this stretch of Statham movies and still my favorite (albeit also getting a solid B): The Beekeeper.

I do wish the rest of these movies were more like The Beekeeper: self-aware, sprinkled with effective humor, leaning into its own preposterousness. I liked Mutiny a bit more than I expected, but was still slightly disappointed at its self-seriousness. We’re all here to see Jason Statham shoot a bunch of bad guys in the head, I get it, but would it hurt to make it a little more fun? I guess Statham is just cranking these out for a regular paycheck, and I don’t begrudge him that. I suppose my plea is more for the directors and writers. Beekeeper writer Kurt Wimmer has not written any of these other movies, and someone needs to pick up the phone and call him again. Apparently he wrote The Beekeeper 2, coming out next year, so that’s promising, at least.

As for Mutiny, I’ll give Jean-François Richet credit for pacing, and maybe most surprising of all, restraint. There is plenty of engaging action in this movie, but it’s not wall-to-wall with it; we actually get some semblance of a story. Statham’s ex-cop, Cole Reed, has been working for shipping company magnate Tibu Campallo (Ramon Tikaram) for five years, and they’ve become close friends. Reed is even declared “family” by Campallo, who is retiring and handing the company off to his son, Kameron Campallo (Chaneil Kular). While Reed is driving Tibu home, they are ambushed—the first exciting action sequence in the film—and the rest of the film follows Reed’s quest for vengeance against the perpetrators.

Most of this happens on a container ship, making Mutiny feel like Captain Phillips if it were a dumb action movie. It’s not like we’ve never seen action sequences among shipping containers before, but having it be the setting of three quarters of the movie does lend it a small bit of novelty. We also get one female lead, Angie Ellis (Annabelle Wallis), a KMG employee forced to report to this ship at the last minute who is evidently the only crew member not in on the whole human trafficking scheme that is ultimately revealed. As the sole female principal cast member, Mutiny is far from passing the Bechdel test, but I’ll give the movie points for not putting romance anywhere in the story, and for making Ellis herself an ex-Navy woman who is more than capable and never needs saving.

So really, we get to watch Statham and Wallis kick a bunch of guys’ asses for a bit more than an hour, all on a container ship. It’s what I expected from this movie, it’s what I wanted, and it’s what it gave me. There’s also the primary villain in the ship’s captain, Marko Madsen (Roland Møller), who might be taking orders from a guy orchestrating all this, but he’s also the guy we all know Statham will have a final, climactic square-off with. Sure, this could just be called “Die Hard on a container ship,” but formulas are followed because they work.

It’s when people try to get too cute or complicated with formulas when they stop working. That’s where these movies smartly refuse to go. They are clearly mid-tier, mid-budget, and employ mid-level movie stars, but a movie like Mutiny is truly making the most of what it has to work with, sometimes slightly clever with its action sequences but never getting out over its skis with that cleverness. Statham’s final hand-to-hand battle is not wildly inventive, but is just inventive enough, as with the rest of the movie, to keep you inching closer to the edge of your seat. It’s why I keep going to these movies, even though they aren’t great—they’re not just good enough, but consistently so. If “working class action” is its own subgenre, Jason Statham was born to play in it.

Okay, fine: this makes her look like a woman in need of protecting. Blame the people who selected available screen shots! These two are equally capable of kicking ass, take my word for it.

Overall: B