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

THE MOMENT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Overall: B

SHELTER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Overall: B

THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Overall: B

THE TESTAMENT OF ANN LEE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Overall: B