THE FLASH

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

When it comes to The Flash, we have to start with Ezra Miller, less because of their relatively competent performance and more because the great life lesson we must all learn from them, apparently, is that nonbinary people can also be massive creeps. Gone are the days of arguing for “separating the art from the artist,” and rightly so: no film exists in a vacuum, nor has it ever. This is why I can no longer stomach watching any film featuring Mel Gibson or Kevin Spacey or Woody Allen. The defenses and justifications just don’t work anymore.

Where does it end, you might ask, when Hollywood is packed with creeps? Do we just avoid all movies altogether? Setting aside the fact that there are degrees of severity (as well as redemption), and the fact that such a question is arguably disingenuous, ideally it ends with people like this no longer being given chance after chance while their behavior remains unchanged.

Your next logical question might be why the hell I went to see this movie, especially if I tell you I already went in with my expectations in the basement, and the answer is simple: I couldn’t help myself. That’s a lame answer, sure. Sometimes people are lame.

I never would have bothered with this movie were it not for the knowledge that Michael Keaton was returning to reprise his role as Batman, for the first time in thirty-one years. Like many people, I feel that Keaton has always been the best of all live-action Batmen, and my all-time favorite movie since my teens has been Batman Returns (1992), which I have seen more times than any other film. By extension, I have a similar, if less passionate, fondness for its predecessor, Batman (1989), which was helmed by the same director (Tim Burton). It is from that earlier Batman that The Flash takes all of its visual references, which is a delight if you’re An Old like me, and maybe pointless for anyone half my age or younger, brought up on endless iterations of the same superhero dreck that, unfortunately, this film also is.

If you were to split The Flash into three acts, both the first and the third are mind-numbingly busy with CGI chaos. (Not to mention witless: in the opening sequence we see a bunch of babies slide out the window of a collapsing building, just so we can hear it called a “baby shower.” Don’t worry about the babies, though: not only do they—spoiler alert—get saved, but they aren’t real!) I have to admit, however, that I found a whole lot of the second act genuinely delightful, as it successfully traded on nostalgia for a time when high-profile, blockbuster superhero movies were still a novelty, only came out every few years, and were elevated by deeply creative, practical production design. Oh, right: and they also had good scripts.

The second act is when we meet Bruce Wayne as played by Michael Keaton, now 71 years old (Jesus, this means he was younger than I am now in Batman Returns), an alternate-timeline version of The Flash’s mentor after Barry discovers his powers allows him to travel through time and attempt to save his dead mother. For a good twenty minutes or so, I was charmed by all the visual callbacks: from Keaton’s very face, to the dusty bat cave, to the Batmobile with the exact same design as in the 1989 film. Even when Barry and his younger, alternate-timeline self (we’ll get back to that) first walk into Wayne Manor, they find themselves in the exact room from the 1989 film when Robert Wuhl as Alexander Knox says to Kim Basinger as Vicki Vale, “Check this out. He must have been King of the Wicker People.”

Later, we even get a jolt of recognition when Batman trots out the Batwing aircraft, which ultimately plays heavily in the story, which quickly becomes a huge mess. The Flash is trying to cheat its way into the long-overused “alternate universes” plot device, which has been used extremely well in Everything Everywhere All at Once and the animated “Spider-verse” films, but hardly any of the far-too-many others. This one might as well be called The Flash and the Multiverse of Numbness. (Granted, the same could have been said for that Dr. Strange sequel.)

Both the opening sequence and the needlessly endless climactic sequence in The Flash are typical examples of what I have complaining about average superhero movies now for years: incoherent action extravaganzas laden with CGI that looks either unfinished or cheap. I am also not a huge fan of packing too many different superheroes into one movie, and this one definitely has too many. If the middle act could have been the whole movie, I’d have liked it a lot more. But, instead of getting the Michael Keaton Batman treatment he deserves, we get him grafted onto a movie with not one, but two Barry Allens. What the hell happened to all these arguments that meeting yourself in an alternate timeline could be cataclysmic? Well, I guess that’s just . . . part of an alternate timeline. How convenient! Here, The Flash and The Flash practically become frat bros. If it were me, and especially if I looked like Ezra Miller, I’d be too distracted from saving the world by all the time spent fucking myself, but I suppose that’s another conversation.

I haven’t even gotten to the cameo by Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman, or Michael Shannon truly phoning it in as General Zod, or Sasha Calle as Supergirl in a part that is completely devoid of any real meaning or gravitas, and ultimately just leaves her rendered in CGI flying around punching people like a cartoon. That’s what these movies are, increasingly literally: dumb animated features. They’re cartoons.

Even the Michael Keaton of it all, that being the best part of this movie by a mile, has diminishing returns. It’s like takin a hit of drugs when we hear Michael Keaton utter the famous words, “I’m Batman.” Did we also need a pointed close-up of him saying, “You wanna get nuts? Let’s get nuts”? No, we did not. In the end, The Flash attempts to tug at our heartstrings with visual references most of the young audience won’t even get, such as a brief CGI rendering of Nicolas Cage as Superman in the movie that never got made—I almost said “famously,” but this happened back in the nineties. Who is going to remember a movie from the nineties that never even happened, let alone give a shit?

The bottom line is, The Flash is a shit sandwich with a moderately tasty center, except what’s the point of a tasty center in a shit sandwich? I suppose we could call the two Ezra Millers in it the buns. There are some nice shots of their butt in that suit, for what it’s worth. And for the record I am separating the art from the buttocks.

Ezra Miller, Ezra Miller, and Saha Calle give us multiple dimensions of mediocrity.

Overall: C

INFINITY POOL

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

There comes a moment in Infinity Pool when Mia Goth’s Gabi, who has been toying with Alexander Skarsgård’s vacationing author James all along, pulls out a bad review of James’s one published novel, which did not sell well. She reads it aloud to him, emphasizing a passage that leans on how pretentious the novel was.

She might as well have been describing this movie, which spends all of its time attempting to convince us it has something to say while it actually says nothing.

This is a film by Brandon Cronenberg, son of David Cronenberg, who released his own subpar movie last summer. I guess you could say the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, except that with Infinity Pool, Brandon elicits very good performances in a story that fails to justify itself. I spent two hours watching this film, not bored per se, but keeping an open mind: maybe something will eventually tie everything together impressively. No such luck. The movie ends with a narrative thud. It’s not the greatest thing when a movie ends and you just think, That’s it?

It could be argued that the most interesting thing about this movie is that it features an orgy with people wearing deeply disturbing, disfigured-face masks. Except that the orgy is both an overly stylized fever dream of a scene and somehow still a bit dull.

Here’s the potential in the premise of Infinity Pool: James leaves the resort compound against the advice of the people who run it, or an excursion out in the fictional European island country they are visiting. When he accidentally hits a local man with his car and kills him, they discover the country has a tradition of a family’s firstborn son killing anyone who kills a member of their family—apparently for any reason, accident or not. But to maintain their tourism industry, they have this incredible side hustle where they make “doubles” (basically clones, though that word is never used in the script) to be sacrificed. The double is given all the same memories, and for reasons never even close to explained, the original people must be present to witness. What must that be like, then, to see a copy of your own self murdered? This is the kind of existential theme that is the makings of a rich text, for which Brandon Cronenberg offers no useful illumination.

Instead, we get Mia Goth as Gabi, an effectively creepy and manipulative woman from the start, beginning with one of the oddest hand job scenes ever put onscreen. You want to see some urine and then some semen splatter onto some beach pebbles? This is your movie!

James’s wife, also on this vacation and the breadwinner as the daughter of a successful publisher who we are told detests James, is played by Cleopatra Coleman. She has a notable presence through about half the movie, until she decides she’s had enough of the wild shit happening in this country and up and goes home. Coleman is good in a thankless role that completely wastes her. There is never even any sexual tension, as evidently Em remains oblivious to Gabi’s advances.

I knew there would be some kind of plot twist in Infinity Pool, and it comes along maybe three quarters of the way through the story. It’s disappointingly minor as twists go, and not particularly satisfying. Infinity Pool offers plenty of sex and violence and depravity, I guess maybe as commentary on the excesses of wealth: all these people can afford to pay for doubles to be sacrificed for their own sins, over and over again. The thing is, Brandon Cronenberg is what the kids these days call a “nepo baby,” and is plenty wealthy in his own right, which inevitably skews his perspective. It lands differently when someone with more than their fair share of advantages attempts commentary on the pitfalls of privilege. In this case, it’s kind of just a tedious mess.

Get over yourselves already.

Overall: C

SAINT OMER

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

Maybe Saint Omer just isn’t for me. What possible insight could I, a gay White American man, have about a film depicting the trial of an immigrant African French woman who killed her baby, also directed by a French woman of African descent? My knowledge of problematic French colonialist history is limited at best, and my best frame of reference is my own complicated relationship with my own mother, which bears no resemblance whatsoever to what is depicted onscreen here. There’s a lot of Venn diagrams that can be built here, where the circles just overlap at all.

All of that is to say: I’m a little insecure about judging this film, which critics by and large seem to be tripping over themselves to declare a stunningly brilliant piece of work, and I seem completely unable to see it. I went searching for what few reviews panned it, and predictably, they are generally White men. Are there any women who hated this movie? I found one, and then realized she was also White. Dammit! It would be a lot easier to feel vindicated in my distaste for this film if I could find any women of color who felt the same way. (To be fair, working women critics of color are hard to find overall, let alone any who also could not connect with the same film that failed to move me.)

How much general audiences like this movie also varies depending on the source. At Rotten Tomatoes, the “tomatometer” score is 95%; the audience score 25%. Over at IMDb.com, the average rating of this film is 7/10—pretty high by that site’s usual user rating standards. As you can tell, I’m eager to decipher whether I somehow missed something everyone else is managing to see in this film.

And I have to tell you, it bored me half to death. And not because of the subject matter, which is compelling (if not salacious) by definition, but because of the way the movie is shot, edited, and acted. Everything about how this film is put together put me off.

It took me a while even to understand why director and co-writer Alice Diop chose this structure: although the film is ostensibly about the incomprehensible act of a woman leaving her baby to die on a beach at high tide—that being based on a true event—the protagonist here is Rama (Kayije Kagame), a novelist who is attending the trial of Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda) with the idea of it informing her work. Saint Omer (the title is a reference to a town in France, where the trial is taking place) is sprinkled with brief flashbacks of Rama as a young girl, unable to connect with her blank-faced, stoic mother. It takes a while to realize we met this same mother, in the present day, during one of the opening scenes, when Rama visits her family, standing awkwardly and not chatting or connecting with anyone.

I was mystified enough by that introduction to Rama, but still keeping an open mind and being patient. The setting shifts to the French courtroom, where a good majority of the film takes place, and finally something interesting happens: this is when we meet Laurence, learn that she is charged with infanticide, and most bizarre of all, she both admits to killing the baby—that part is never a mystery—and pleads not guilty. And then Alice Diop trains her largely stationery camera on extended shots of the judge, or the defendant, or Rama, during jury selection, preliminary questions, and more.

And it goes on. And on. And on. And on. This wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for the delivery of the actors, which consistently stops just short of deadpan. The characters nearly always speak softly, as though it’s just the normal way all humans talk, even though it isn’t. This is not to say there are never any displays of emotion—the prosecuting attorney is increasingly frustrated with Laurence’s demonstrably inconsistent testimony, and there’s a moment, during the rare time we see her in her hotel room rather than in the courtroom, when Rama breaks down weeping.

The cinematography is rudimentary at best, and it’s possible I hated that most of all, the way the camera moves very slowly in straight lines back and forth or up and down, if it moves at all. I spent a long time wondering why the hell we were spending so much time watching Laurence’s testimony rather than, say, seeing her story in flashbacks. What the hell happened to “show, don’t tell”? This movie is almost nothing but “telling,” rendering it one of the least cinematic films I have seen in ages. And then I realized: this movie is “showing,” by telling the story, ultimately, of how attending this trial and witnessing the aforementioned testimony is affecting Rama. Mind you, Rama is never revealed to have any direct connection to the defendant or her crime, although more gets revealed to explain her interest.

I can’t help but wonder if I am being unfair to this film—a feeling I have only because of its otherwise universal critical acclaim—but I can only be honest about my personal experience with it. When the film ended, after what felt like an eternity of tedium, I felt sweet relief.

I’m just as bored as all these people look.

Overall: C

BABYLON

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

The first thing you need to know about BABYLON is that it is three hours and nine minutes long. You should then be asking yourself whether the film justifies its own length, and the answer is no.

Within the first ten minutes, we see a man get shit on by an elephant, and we see another man get pissed on by a woman. Both of these things have been widely reported, so if you have paid any attention whatsoever to the press coverage of these movies, you might think you already knew these things. Except, I don’t think you understand. There’s a close-up shot of an elephant’s asshole, dilating, and it sprays a firehose of shit right at the camera, before it cuts to the man, getting doused by an elephant-shit waterfall. What I’m trying to say is, there is a lot of elephant shit. And then, minutes later, in the back room of a wild party that takes up the bulk of the first thirty minutes of the movie—the party to which the aforementioned elephant is being delivered, that’s how wild it is—a woman is straddling a naked fat man lying on his back on the floor, and she pisses all over his belly, then penguin-walks forward and pisses all over his face. What I’m trying to say is, there is a lot of piss (although, I suppose it should be noted, less of the piss than the elephant shit).

One might be relieved to learn that these sorts of things do not make up the rest of the movie, but that does not mean it’s all uphill from there. Regardless, it still begs the question: are these things you really want to see? Does this sound fun to you? I did not find it particularly fun.

I’m tempted to say I can’t decide what writer-director Damien Chazelle is playing at, except that I think I get it: this is about the wild excesses of “classic” Hollywood, from the waning days of the silent era. The self-indulgent excess of this movie itself is very much the point. I won’t go so far as to call it “kink shaming,” but the choice of an extremely fat man is clearly a conscious choice, one meant to remove most of us from any kind of actual titillation. The pissing scene just as much as the elephant shit scene is meant to disgust us. So much is going on in that party—random fucking, several fleeting gimpses of full frontal nudity of both sexes—we are meant to be overwhelmed by the idea of BABYLON as a film that directly references Singin’ in the Rain multiple times, and in so doing makes us understand that BABYLON is the same movie if it were made by unrepentant deviants.

BABYLON even follows many of the same story beats. It just stretches them out over an eternity, so that a solid two hours pass before we are even introduced to Tobey Maguire as a yellow-toothed gangster who escorts us through multiple underground levels of dungeons that, according to many interpretations anyway, are meant to be the “circles of movie hell.” I just saw it as a random diversion in a movie packed with random diversions, brought to me well after I had long since tired of diversions.

There are far too many things happening in BABYLON to count, and I spent an inordinate amount of time focusing on elephant shit and golden showers. The thing is, Chazelle has to have included those things for a reason, and they are the things that leave the most lasting impressions, even through the two and a half hours that follow them.

Brad Pitt, who plays Jack Conrad, a former silent movie star now aging and struggling to succeed in the era of sound, does have a line far later in the film that I found the most unforgettable. He is asked how the movie he just starred in is, and he assesses it as “a giant swing at mediocrity.” If that doesn’t describe BABYLON perfectly, I don’t know what does.

There’s another conversation between Jack and gossip writer Elinor St. John (Jean Smart), in which she attempts to console him by noting how his circumstance is one among many to be experienced by countless other actors for decades to come, maybe forever: “It’s bigger than you,” she says. This is one of many moments where BABYLON gets into a love of cinema, its timeless nature, blah blah blah. She even notes that countless other people will have this exact same conversation. I saw that as a metaphor for BABYLON itself, which covers well-trodden ground with every thematic layer it purports to have.

With every single thing BABYLON has to say, it’s like: yeah. We get it. We’ve been through this already. Maybe to Damien Chazelle that’s the point, but there also comes a point where a dead horse can only be beat for so long. And it’s after this point that our primary protagonist, Manny Torres (Diego Calva), literally goes to the movies to see Singin’ in the Rain some twenty years after the previous events depicted, and recognizes everything that happens in it as what happened to him and all the people he knew, just sanitized, made more “wholesome,” and certainly whitewashed. It’s meant to be a moment of grand poignancy, but it came far after I had lost my patience—and that occurred before the title card (which comes up thirty minutes in).

I haven’t even mentioned Margot Robbie yet. As Nellie LaRoy, she is effectively the co-star of this film, alongside Diego Calva (with Brad Pitt in what is essentially a supporting role). She finagles her way into Hollywood filmmaking and quickly becomes a star, while Manny is rising through the ranks behind the camera. Virtually everything that happens to the awful-voiced actress in Singin’ in the Rain happens to Nellie, just in far dirtier, grittier and more dangerous ways. Robbie is a great talent who actually kind of gets swallowed up by the excesses of this movie, given how easy it is—as I have just demonstrated—to talk about countless things in the film before even mentioning her.

I went to BABYLON really wanting to love it. Damien Chazelle has made films I consider to be truly great. This one, though, feels like the last, desperate attempt of an auteur throwing all of his unused ideas into a movie, as though terrified no one will ever allow him to make another one. The sad irony is that none of those ideas were particularly original.

Paul Thomas Anderson did everything this movie tries to do better 25 years ago in Boogie Nights.

Overall: C

MEMORIA

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

“I think I’m going crazy,” says Tilda Swinton’s character, Jessica, in the middle of Memoria, and I felt like she’d read my mind. It was a subtle moment of realization, as literally everything in this movie is so subtle that, until the very end, it’s as though literally nothing is happening, which means this moment was also one of the most exciting things to happen during it. Given what happens at the end, which I guess I won’t spoil even though it hardly matters for multiple reasons (I’ll get to that), I suppose it qualifies as the second-most exciting thing to happen in the movie. I can’t say that reflects on it all that positively.

I’m sure the writer and director, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, a Thai filmmaker directing a British star in a movie set in Colombia, did not have any intention for Jessica to have read my mind the way he did. Jessica thinks she’s going crazy because she keeps hearing a deep, resonant, metallic thud that sounds like it’s coming from “the core of the Earth,” and no one else can hear it. I think I’m going crazy because I sat through that whole movie wondering how the hell it garnered universal critical acclaim. I’m talking a score of 91 on Metacritic, where the “worst” review still got assigned a score of 70. At least the average user score there was a little more mixed, at 6.9, which—and this is rare—did make me feel better. At least I knew I wasn’t the only one baffled by this movie.

I took a look over at Rotten Tomatoes. “88% Fresh,” which in that case means 88% of reviewers liked it. Unlike MetaCritic, they don’t gauage how much they liked it, only that they liked it. It does also mean, though, that 12% of reviewers didn’t like it. Kurt Loder calls it “Virtually a parody of an awful art house movie.” Whew! I am not alone!

I debated whether to review this movie at all myself, actually. Why bother, if I am not going to recommend it to anyone? Plus, Weerasethakul is taking a compelling approach to this film’s release, which honestly is the most interesting thing about it: it’s only being released one city at a time, one scren at a time, so that at any given moment of it playing, it has only one single audience. It happens to be playing in Seattle this week, at the Egyptian Theater. It appears it will still be there next week. But, there is no plan to release it later in any way for home viewing. I don’t care. Don’t go see it. In the meantime, I still want to complain about it.

More specifically, and this is a new move for me, I want to respond to some of the many good things critics are saying about Memoria. Consider Mike D’Angelo, in his review for The AV Club, in which he writes, in part:

There’s something uniquely intense about hearing an entire audience remain utterly still during a movie’s transporting final minutes, afraid to cough or squeak their seat’s rusty springs or even breathe too loud, for fear of breaking the spell. Memoria inspires that kind of rapture.

The thing is, that for the most part quite accurately described my theatrical experience as well. Memoria is quite intentional in its deeply measured, literal quietness. In fact, it is preceded by a ten-minute “silent pre-show,” a slide show of sorts, of location photos intermittently overlaid with what look like doodle versions of concept art in white lines. The opening title cards of this "pre-show” indicate it to be a way for us to “transition” into the tone of the film itself, and then read, Enjoy our silence. I have to admit: the rather slow slide show proved to be effectively hypnotic—on the whole theater. It wasn’t quite as effective at holding that feeling of hypnosis through the entire film itself, at least for me. One guy got up about three quarters of the way through the film, and I wondered if he was just going to the bathroom or if he’d had enough of this movie in which almost nothing happens. Just because he was leaving, for whatever reason, I envied him. I wonder if I was truly somehow the only person in the theater who, in the last act, suddenly thought to myself, Oh my god, I am SO BORED.

Here’s Caroline Tsai from The Playlist, reviewing from its screening at Cannes:

A master of slow cinema, Weerasethakul takes his time with every shot; long stretches of time pass without any dialogue or movement. In so doing, the film inculcates a kind of hypersensitivity in its viewers, who become suddenly attuned to each flitting blade of grass or buzzing fly that enters the shot—as well as to their own posture and breathing.

Again: I can’t argue with any of that. What I don’t get is the idea that this is somehow a great cinema experience. The cinematography is one of my greatest criticisms of Memoria, actually, because those long shots are done with the camera usually stationery, or in rare cases, moving so slowly as to be barely perceptible. Literally, I would have enjoyed Memoria far more if the only change were that the camera moved at all.

Granted, that does give it a certain horror-tinged element, because more than once a scene occurs where that thud sound comes out of nowhere, breaking a long silence—as happens in the very opening scene—and I was so startled I jumped out of my chair. This means that in other scenes, the camera holding a stationery shot for what seems like an eternity, I was terrified of something suddenly scaring the shit out of me again. This happens late in the film with the camera pointing at a man evidently able to die temporarily, lying on his back in grass, his mouth slightly open, his eyes open and blank, for all intents and purposes a corpse. If any image from this movie haunts me, it will be that one.

Apparently, however, I am one of the few people who just doesn’t get it. I feel like something everyone else seems to understand is going over my head. It felt a lot like a truly terrible documentary I saw at the Seattle International Film Festival about seventeen years ago, in which the audience came fully expecting it to be great, so they responded as though it met those expectations, even though it hadn’t. To be fair, Memoria is still a decidedly better film than that one was, but that doesn’t mean Memoria is without its own frustrating pretentions.

And I found Memoria to be deeply frustrating. I was even fully on board, until maybe two thirds or so of the way into it. I’d be a lot happier with this movie if what was supposed to be going on actually came together in the end in a more coherent way. Instead, as Jessica seems to be getting closer to answers regarding this mysterious thud sounds she keeps hearing at very erratic intervals (it’s usually once in a given day, or between long periods; then, during a dinner scene with her sister’s family, she hears it several times during a single conversation—and I struggled to glean whether it was related to the conversational topic at hand, about a secluded society that does not want to be touched by modern people or inventions; I think maybe it was), I found it only got more confusing. If it’s getting harder, rather than easier, for me to figure out what the hell is going on while a movie is moving toward wrapping up, I struggle to call that a success.

Still, I feel like I kind of get what Apichatpong is going for, which is a deeply immersive, sensory experience. By that measure, Memoria succeeds with flying colors. When it comes to the connection he seems to be making between sound and memory (hence the title, presumably), what passes for a plot here really lacks clarity. It felt to me like Apichatpong elevates the importance of the immersive experience over a story, which is what most of us go to the movies for, however innovatively it might be told. I would argue the two are of equal importance, and as such, when the movie finally ended, I felt relief more than anything.

Can you hear it? The sound of my utter boredom?

Overall: C

TITANE

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

The one question running through my mind through the entirety of Titane was: why? I’ve had some time to think about it, and I have yet to come up with an answer to that question.

It’s certainly not boring, I’ll give it that much. It’s about all I’m willing to give it. Well, except that the acting is adequate, I suppose. The editing is slightly better. The director is a woman, at least; that’s something I am always prone to support. Julia Ducournau’s previous feature film effort as both writer and director, Raw (2016), was a film I did enjoy. It had a cleverly bent premise, in which a vegetarian gets a taste for blood and then becomes a murderous cannibal. Judging by Titane, “body horror” as a genre is apparently Ducanau’s thing.

With Titane, however, I struggle to find a point or a purpose, other than that genre for the sake of itself. I mean, I can just imagine the intellectuals finding all the “deeper meaning” in this film that supposedly flew over my head, but I have officially lost my patience. If I can’t easily find an answer to why this particular story is being told to me, I am just left annoyed.

How much can I tell about this movie without spoiling it? How many of you will watch it anyway? This is a relatively obscure French film, albeit one with apparently the “biggest US debut by a Palme d’Or winner in 17 years.” That is evidently a pretty low bar, though. The movie has made about half a million dollars. I’m still left wondering how much it matters.

I’ll tell you this: the first half of the movie features an exotic dancer, Alexia (Agathe Rousselle) straight up murdering people, often with the metal stick she uses to keep her hair up. She is quickly identified as a wanted suspect, literally referred to as a serial killer. Many of these murders are rather graphic. In the second half of the film, she disguises herself as the long missing son of a firefighter (Vincent Lindon), and develops a familial bond with him, although there are moments that are borderline incestuous. From his perspective, anyway.

Through all of this, Alexia experience a rapidly developing pregnancy from . . . a car. I mean, fuck it, I’ll spoil it: Alexia fucks a car. We basically already saw Cameron Diaz fuck a car in The Counselor (2013), but this movie ups the ante with a subsequent pregnancy—with what appears to be motor oil as the amniotic fluid.

Julie Ducaournau effectively, one might even say amazingly, makes the pregnancy the “B plot,” as Vincent deludes himself into believing Alexia really is his son, while the young firefighters who work under him plainly see that Alexia is not who she’s pretending to be. She spends a lot of time binding her breasts, and over time even her expanding belly, and it gets into vaguely uncomfortable territory when it comes to movies featuring characters crossdressing for nefarious reasons.

Such considerations are vasty overshadowed, of course, by the wild shit happening in the movie otherwise. What the hell is this baby going to look like? Alexia has a titanium plate in her head, the result of a terrible car accident she could easily be blamed for as a young girl, irritating her dad from the backseat in the opening sequence of the film. Even as a little girl Alexia is definitively creepy, a little shit, and when she leaves the hospital after her surgery we see her kiss and hug the car. Cut to her dancing in a club amongst exotic dancers who gyrate against and on cars inside a giant warehouse. I suppose we’re meant to understand Alexia has a lifelong car fetish, although Titane doesn’t ever make that idea particularly explicit. Except when she’s somehow literally impregnated by one, I suppose. I’m pretty sure we even see the car reach sexual climax, which was new.

The effect of the titanium plate is never given true clarity, either. Is that what makes her psychotic? And why does she pause and actually find herself caring for an unwilling to slaughter Vincent? I really don’t understand any of it. We do eventually find out what her baby looks like, which winds up somehow being simultaneously bizarre and somewhat disappointing.

it would sure be interesting to be privy to some psychoanalysis of Julie Ducournau. I suspect it would be more satisfying than watching this movie was. Raw at least succeeded in the evident purpose of grossing us out. All I really got out of Titane was an hour and forty-five minutes of thinking, What the fuck? We never see Alexia bleed, although we regularly see her leaking motor oil, out of tears in the skin of her belly revealing more shiny metal underneath, or even leaking out of her nipples. Her body goes through a lot of abuses, much of it self-inflicted in her attempt to make herself look like Vincent’s missing son. I had to turn away from the screen a lot.

I was just relieved when I could turn away one last time and leave the building.

Apparently they don’t make automotive condoms.

Overall: C

REMINISCENCE

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

I basically wasted two hours watching Reminiscence in the movie theater. It’s also available streaming on HBO Max, and I wouldn’t even recommend you watch it there. You’ll still wish you could get those two hours back. Well, if you have any taste or sense of quality, anyway.

This movie really strains to be what I like to call “future noir,” a genre both introduced and perfected by Blade Runner in 1982. Many films since have tried and failed to replicate (no pun intended—bit of an inside joke there) it, this one merely being the latest. It takes an old-school mystery plot and grafts it onto a quasi-apocalyptic future setting. In this case, it’s Miami after significant sea level rise.

A lot of the wide shots of the city are reminiscent (ha!) of the sea level rise depicted in the Manhattan of the 2001 Spielberg film A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. You may notice that when it comes to being derivative, there is a bit of a pattern here. And the renditions of all Miami’s skyscrapers wading in waters about two stories deep is a compelling one; in fact the most exciting shot in the whole movie is the opening one, starting with a wide shot from out over the sea, closing in until we’ve reached a section of the city where streets are only partially flooded with a few inches of water.

But, this world as presented by writer-director Lisa Joy, here with her feature film directorial debut, suffers from the same thing as the worlds in all those other Blade Runner rip-offs: it doesn’t feel sufficiently lived in. It’s more like a Sims version of a dystopian city—which, by the way, considering it’s Miami, has a curious and glaring lack of Hispanic characters. Oh, it has a couple, in very small, supporting parts. But they serve as little more than tokens when taking in the broad representation of the city, in a story that, of course, mostly centers white characters. Granted, the biggest part besides that of Hugh Jackman in the lead is Thandiwe Newton, but that doesn’t change the incongruity of a movie with such a large focus on a city whose population is 70% Hispanic or Latino, which treats that demographic as little more than window dressing. Or are we to assume the majority of them disappeared in this vision of the future?

That brings me to my biggest nitpick, which is that so many of the details of this world are just plain dumb. In several scenes on the streets where there is standing water on the road but not on the sidewalks, for some reason people are walking in the middle of the street and not on the sidewalk. I suppose that might be thought of as more“cinematic,” except that there is no logic in it. There’s also a battle scene in an old school band room, with instruments left by empty chairs as if the class once had to leave very quickly, presumably back when, as is mentioned several times, “the waves came.” But if the waves came, wouldn’t they have washed away the guitars and violins? Judging by this production design, the students all had to rush out in time for the room to fill with water like a slow stream from a corner faucet.

Hugh Jackson plays Nick Bannister, a guy who not only spends far too much time with hackneyed voiceover narration, but who makes a living selling time in a contraption that lets people relive the memories of their choice. (Shades of Strange Days meets Inception here.) Versions of this contraption, which for some reason necessitates stripping to your underwear and getting into a glass tube of water with a device clamped to your head, are also used to interrogate criminal suspects. Everything about how this whole process works, and especially the hardware necessary, comes across as wildly unrealistic: nothing of this sort would ever take up so much physical space. It even includes a giant circular platform over which a holographic projection of the memories can be seen by Nick, even though they aren’t even his own memories and he’s not attached to any of the apparatus. It’s all designed with cinematic aesthetics in mind, with no regard for practical realism. Memory is already well known to be wildly malleable and deeply unreliable; in what universe would these projections be so vivid it’s like watching a movie of what’s going on in someone’s head?

No one expects science fiction to be strictly accurate; given the “fiction” part, that would be impossible. But it still has to start from a jumping-off point of known truths, which Reminiscence seems to discard completely.

I’d try to share more about the plot, but on top of all this, Lisa Joy’s script tries way too hard to do way too much, using hollow dialogue in a delivery that often comes across as unrehearsed. Suffice it to say that a mysterious woman in the form of Rebecca Ferguson appears, and is the catalyst for Nick’s obsession after they have a three-month affair and then she disappears. Joy plays with the notion of memory as these scenes unfold in varying moments in the story’s timeline, a device that could be exciting and clever with a better story and actually has been done better by other filmmakers playing with memory and the perception of time.

Reminiscence feels like a first draft that somehow got filmed without any revisions or notes. And okay, so there is a lot of justified resentment out there for studio executives turning movies into something written by committee, but there also has to be a happy medium. Because if this movie is one person’s true vision, it’s a wildly underdeveloped one. This one could have used a pointer or ten.

Behold, the only compelling part of the movie.

Overall: C

NEW ORDER

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

The longer I think about the Mexican film New Order, playing in theaters now, the less I like it, or even think there was any point to it. The movie is both intentionally and effectively unsettling, until the events unfolding desensitize you into not caring about any of the people onscreen—just as the oppressive forces taking over Mexico City don’t care about anyone.

I just . . . don’t get it. This film has gotten decidedly mixed reviews, with many appropriate comparisons to Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite (2019), which takes a similar thematic look at class warfare. Any favorable comparison is outright preposterous, however; Parasite has an invigoratingly inventive narrative, is incredibly entertaining, and has something to say. None of these things can be said of New Order, really.

Writer-director Michel Franco has a particularly literal take on the concept of class warfare. The film begins at the wedding of a young couple at their wealthy parents’ home, increasingly frequent hints and references to a working class uprising occurring around the city and getting progressively closer to them. There are offhand comments about how they should have postponed the wedding, met with dismissive reactions.

Franco focuses on this young couple and their parents as the primary characters, plus the woman who heads the house staff, and her son. The focus is decidedly on the wealthy family though, and maybe a third of the way through the film, the rioters scale the walls of the property, and overtake everyone there.

They aren’t nice about it. If there’s any pertinent idea to take away from New Order, it’s that many people talk endlessly about “revolution” without acknowledging how inevitably violent a genuine revolution would be. One of the uprising men enters the property with a gun, and his response to pleading is just to blithely shoot the person. There’s a lot of this.

Franco clearly wants us to be thinking about the income gap, as many of the house staff gleefully take part in the looting of the house almost immediately. Several people are summarily executed as soon as they hand over their valuables. Men, women, children, a pregnant woman, you name it and you’ll see that person get shot in this movie. The tone is oddly neutral as all of this is observed, and we get little in the way of backstory or any of these characters.

My biggest problem with New Order might be that no one in it is particularly characterized as a good person. The one possible exception is the young bride, who might be the character we find ourselves rooting for in a different, better movie. Instead, we’re subjected to witnessing her kidnapped by armed militia, humiliated, in one scene sexually assaulted. It really just gets worse from there, and we are never given any hint that she’ll get out of her predicament. And this film doesn’t seem to have any real moral point of view on what we’re watching, or even necessarily want us to feel for her. All that’s left, really, is nihilism.

I don’t consider having sympathetic characters in a movie a requirement. But if all of your characters are either morally bankrupt or headed there, your movie should at least have something to say. I still have no idea what I was supposed to take away from this movie, which is oddly casual in its persistent violence.

It’s also confusing. Eventually, I lost all sense of who really had control of the country. There was the working class uprising, but then the society gets overrun with military—if this was an excuse for the military to stage a coup, then why does the film switch to focusing on masked soldiers in fatigues without bringing up the working class rioters to begin with? Are they one and the same? The young bride (only ever seen in a bright red pantsuit, incidentally; never in an actual wedding dress) is taken hostage by militia members, and I could never distinguish between them and the Mexican military, or figure out whether they were indeed different. At first I thought it was the fed-up working class who kidnapped her, but then they are seen doing horrible things to her and to other rich people being held for ransom. Is this what we’re supposed to expect from the oppressed and downtrodden? The camera cuts away just before we might otherwise see them pulling down some guy’s pants and using an electric prod to shock his asshole. Why we even need to see that much, I have no idea.

It’s one thing when stuff like this a depiction of historical events that should be learned from, but New Order is a fantasy—one not far from our reality, admittedly, but it’s still all just a made up story. And why? What are we getting from a story like this? Does Franco just want to assert that it doesn’t matter what “side” you’re on, you’re capable of the basest, most horrific acts against your fellow humans? That doesn’t make for a very pleasant trip to the movie theater, I can tell you that much. Spoiler alert: nearly every character you’re introduced to in this movie is dead by the end. The best I can say about this movie is that you won’t have related much with any one of these people, but by the end you’ll be left with a bleak view of humanity. If that’s your thing, knock yourself out—but I rather hope I forget all about this movie sooner than later.

I’ve heard about party crashers but this is a little much.

Overall: C

MALCOLM & MARIE

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

“You’re hyperbolic!” snaps Marie, at one point in this movie that is, ironically, maybe the most pretentious I have ever seen. Malcolm & Marie feels like an experiment that failed spectacularly, a worthwhile exercise that should never have been taken any further than just that: an exercise. It’s among the first mainstream films to have been written, produced, directed and completed during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, with only two characters ever seen onscreen and shot in a single location. With all that extra time on his hands, you;d think writer-director Sam Levinson could have developed this abysmal script into something that no longer felt like a first draft.

This movie is all over the place. It has a couple of strong points. Much like Levinson’s previous and far better film, Assassination Nation (2018), the cinematography is one of the best things about it. There are some truly beautiful shots. Malcom & Marie is also shot entirely in black and white, evidently to narrow the focus on the two performers. The problem this time is that shooting this endless string of drivel in black and white only adds another layer of pretension.

At least with this film Levinson managed to snag a couple of bona fide stars: John David Washington and Zendaya as the title characters, a couple returned from a movie premiere. They spend the rest of the night mostly fighting over unbearably stupid shit. I won’t lie, occasionally I did see my own relationship in the petty ways these two went out of their way to hurt each other. The difference is, my husband and I are never this articulate when we’re shouting at each other, nor are we ever shouting about high-minded philosophy of “art.”

Malcolm is the director of the aforementioned film whose premiere they have returned from, you see. I kept wondering if the nonsense coming out of his mouth, about making film, or about his frustrations with certain things film critics focus on, was just Levinson using a character and a film to air his own grievances. Who knows? It’s impossible to tell when it’s already taking a herculean effort just not to tune out the bickering.

What I cannot figure out is who this movie is for. Fans of the actors? People merely interested in seeing how filmmaking can work (or can’t work) in the midst of pandemic-related restrictions? Maybe just rubber-neckers eager to witness a disaster? Why this had to go on for 106 minutes, I’ll never know. After being relatively intrigued for the first third or so of the movie, I lost my patience with it 34 minutes in. I am convinced my stamina in this regard was greater than most.

The acting is good. I’m seeing some people, even harsh critics of the film, saying the acting is “brilliant,” but I just don’t see how that’s possible with dialogue this contrived, between two characters who are both so deeply unlikable. Even great actors can’t save this bizarrely slick ode to self-indulgence. The concept here could have been executed with finesse, if not for Levinson’s decision to make the characters Hollywood insiders, offering commentary on Hollywood. This is supposed to be a so-called “romantic reckoning,” which could be done far more effectively without all that “Hollywood” crap. Maybe this is a “write what you know” approach. It feels like Levinson doesn’t know enough about script revision.

What a wasted opportunity. Malcom & Marie could have been made with just as few people, and with a better script, still been compelling enough to make you forget it was made under unprecedented limitations. But it’s not like movies with only two characters or set in one location have never been made before; in the past, occasionally it was a gimmick for its own sake. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t, but the point is, it can work. There’s no reason this couldn’t have. Instead, Malcom & Marie seems to exist solely to keep otherwise bored filmmakers busy. Some talented people have squandered their talent here, but at least they got some work. Good for them, I guess.

Take it from me, whatever depth you see here is an illusion.

Overall: C

LITTLE

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

If I weren’t so OCD about seeing any movie from beginning to end if I am going to write a review of it, I would have gotten up and left Little halfway through. This movie has elements that elevate it — most notably the performances — but, unfortunately, really nothing redeems its truly awful script.

Directed and co-written by Tina Gordon, whose only other directorial feature credit is a 2013 film I never saw (or heard of) called Peeples, Little is written in a way that suggests Gordon herself was never actually a child, or maybe she’s of an alien race that never experiences childhood, and is now making her best guess as to what it’s like. The premise is essentially a rehash of the 1988 Tom Hanks film Big, just inverted in several ways: the protagonist is a black woman instead of a white man; and instead of wishing to be “big,” a sassy preteen girl with magic powers she doesn’t even know she has wishes for a horrible woman to be “little.”

So far so good, right? Anyone in their right mind would be on board so far. This sounds fun! And, to be totally fair, it must be noted that the principal actors are great. Regina Hall plays the grown Jordan Sanders, an uber-successful businesswoman who owns her own business developing apps. She lends a relatable charm and vulnerability to her hardened nastiness, even if it’s patently undeveloped in the writing.

And that’s the fatal flaw in this movie, really — none of the characters have any true dimension. The script, packed wall to wall with painfully corny platitudes about “putting up walls” and “being yourself”, is downright embarrassing. But, Issa Rae brightens every scene she’s in as April, Jordan’s assistant. And Marsai Martin is so great as “little” Jordan, she almost makes this movie watchable. Almost.

This ineptly executed story is not the fault of any of the actors, however — and Marsai Martin leaves the deepest impression. I sincerely hope to see more of her in other, better movies. It’s no less than she deserves. We already know Regina Hall and Issa Rae are great. If Little were a better movie, Marsai Martin would break out as a revelation.

But, it’s not often that I am in a movie theatre and literally find myself thinking, Oh my god, this is bad. If it weren’t for the undeniable charisma of the actors, I would freely expect this to qualify as the worst movie I saw all year. It may yet retain that distinction. Its ignorance of how humans actually interact and how life really goes is kind of breathtaking. Sure, you expect a certain level of such things in light comedies. But this one has a level of moralizing so clichéd it might put you to sleep. In fact, it did literally that to one guy in the theatre I was in. I envied his unconsciousness.

The very title is weirdly misleading, incidentally. “Little” Jordan is a grown woman in the body of a 13-year-old. Little has this alternate-dimension idea that any kid in middle school would actually refer to themselves as “little.” The title might work if the kid were, say, six years old. Not even adults in the real world call 13-year-olds — literal teenagers — “little kids.”

In other words, nothing in Little makes any sense. It has occasionally enjoyable moments, and surely plenty of people will enjoy it far more than I did. That doesn’t change how fundamentally dumb it is. One scene after the next strains suspension of disbelief, distracting in its contrived “cuteness.” It can’t even pick a tone, or decide whether it’s a kids’ movie or meant for adults, veering between Jordan “learning how to be nice” as she deals with the middle school she has to go back to, and Jordan otherwise dealing with very adult concerns.

Little is a big mess.

If only we could see them in a better movie.

Overall: C