ROOFMAN

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

Roofman is an old-school, classic case of the trailer being wildly misleading from the actual vibe of the full film. The trailer is cut to make it look like a lot of fun, an entertaining comedy with maybe even a bit of action in it. Really none of that is the case. In fact, Roofman is a surprisingly melancholy film, when all is said and done.

It also can’t seem to decide on any coherent ethical center. The title character, whose name is also Jeffrey, or John when in disguise, is presented as a lovable family man who just can’t seem to get effective criminal behavior down. And, as played by Channing Tatum, Jeffrey is undeniably charismatic—which, we are told, was very much the case with the real-life person and story on which this film is based. Much is made of how “nice” Jeffrey is to the victims he locks into the walk-in freezer when he’s robbing McDonalds by—you guessed it—breaking through the rooftops. But I was out on Jeffrey almost from the very start. I’m supposed to empathize with a sharply observant guy who would easily get a great job if he just got his shit together, but instead decides to commit forty-five counts of armed robbery? Get real.

Furthermore, Jeffrey is recently divorced and has three children: a six-year-old daughter, Becky (Alissa Marie Pearson), and twin infants. The infants are never more than an afterthought, but the opening scenes have Jeffrey desperately trying to connect with Becky. But then, after Jeffrey is convicted, sent to prison, escapes prison, holes up in a local Toys “R” Us, and stupidly hides in plain sight while dating a local church congregant with two daughters of her own, Roofman might as well be suddenly saying: “Becky who?” It’s very odd, how Jeffrey inserts himself into this family, falls for the single mom who also works at the Toys “R” Us, Leigh (Kirsten Dunst) as well as her daughters Lindsey (Lily Collias) and Dee (Kennedy Moyer), all after making one passing reference to the existence of his own children, which he never brings up again.

At least, not onscreen—another odd element to the trailer is how if features scenes not featured in the final cut of the film. There’s a shot in the trailer showing Leigh saying to Jeffrey, “Tell me what’s going on—right now.” Now, to be fair, this is a very common practice and has been for ages; I can still remember the shot of Laura Dern tearing a prehistoric leaf off a plant in the trailer for Jurassic Park, and that shot not being in the film. But usually these changes are harmless. In this case we go in expecting a pointed confrontation between the two leads, and in the end, the way Jeffrey’s inevitable downfall is portrayed as something very passive on the part of Leigh. This is just one of several disappointing elements of the final product of this film.

And it’s too bad, because the story is still relatively engaging, the performances are solid, and Tatum and Dunst have real chemistry. One wonders whether Roofman could have been better than average before essential elements somehow got lost in the edit. There are certainly several other heavy-hitting actors in supporting parts that don’t amount to much, chief of them LeKeith Stanfield as Jeffrey’s army buddy friend, Steve. Stanfield has a proven record of great performances (Judas and the Black Messiah, Uncut Gems, even the opening sequence of Get Out—I could go on), and he’s just not given enough to chew on here. He deserves better than this. But so do Peter Dinklage as Mitch, the Toys “R” Us store manager; Ben Mendelsohn as the church pastor and Uzo Aduba as his wife; even Juno Temple as Steve’s girlfriend. This is a cast far more stellar than the mediocrity of the film would have you expect, which leads one to wonder how different the original script, by Derek Cianfrance (who also directed) and Kirt Gunn, was from the final edit. It’s worth noting that Cianfrance has written excellent scripts in the past, including Blue Valentine (2010), The Place Beyond the Pines (2013), and even a story credit on Sound of Metal (2019).

So what the hell happened with Roofman? Should we just blame the editor, Mikkel E.G. Nielsen? That’s probably unfair; he edited great films too, including both The Banshees of Inisherin (2022) and Sound of Metal. Maybe we should think of Roofman as a mystery movie, just in a very unique way: the mystery is how so many great and talented people got together to make a not-great movie. It’s not like that’s without precedent either, to be fair.

There’s another mark against Roofman, which I’m not sure anyone involved truly thought about: the misguided choice to present a deeply unethical man as a sympathetic hero. Sure, empathy is always a good thing, and that is something I actually feel very strongly about. But there’s a vast difference between empathizing with an unethical person and actively rooting for them in their unethical pursuits. Roofman doesn’t strictly do that, but it’s a bit of hair splitting to say so, when the movie never lands on true clarity regarding the matter. At best, it skirts around it.

Maybe Jeffrey Manchester actually is a fascinating, fun guy. And maybe a much more effective approach would have been to make a documentary about him. The end credits of Roofman features a bunch of archival news footage of people who actually knew him, and victims of actual robberies, talking about how nice he was to them. This is genuinely the most compelling part of the film, which is otherwise moderately entertaining but manages to spend more energy on that than exactly how wrong it is for him to be doing all these things.

Yes, we see you, giving a good performance in a barely-okay movie!

Overall: B-

THE BALTIMORONS

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

I’ve seen The Baltimorons described as “cringe comedy,” and I suppose that’s what it is—but it also feels like an unfair act of pigeonholing. This is a movie that is utterly and completely itself, in spite of all the other things you could call it: a May-December romance, a Christmas movie, a single-day story, etc. The thing is, The Baltimorons works incredibly well as all of these things.

Set over the course of Christmas Eve, Cliff slips on the stairs while taking his potato pecan casserole to his future-in-laws’ house for dinner, and knocks out a tooth when he bashes his face into the door frame. He calls all over town to find a dentist that’s open, and the one who picks up is Didi, who only reveals her office was actually closed when she shows up and lets Cliff in.

I should note that the May-December aspect here has Cliff as the younger one and Didi as the older one. We never learn the characters’ names, but Cliff is played by 36-year-old Michael Strassner; Didi by 66-year-old Liz Larsen. That’s a pretty wide spread, sure, but the gender inverse of what has historically been seen onscreen, and at least Cliff is clearly well past his youth. These things actually make a difference, and the casting of The Baltimorons is one of its greatest strengths: Strassner and Larsen have incredible screen chemistry, and their characters really work together.

Most crucially, the day that unfolds before them takes them many unexpected places, but it always feels organic. This is thanks to the skill and talent of director and co-writer Jay Duplass, as well as Strassner himself, who co-wrote the script with Duplass. Strassner is an alumnus of The Groudlings, which clearly informs the improv sketch comedy background of his character (“The Baltimorons” is the name of the improv troupe Cliff used to be in).

The improv background doesn’t even come into focus until well into the film, as we get Cliff, a sweet guy who also has plenty of fuckups under his belt but has also been sober for six months, entering the dentist office of Didi, who has just learned her ex-husband eloped with his newer, much younger wife and turned their Christmas Eve dinner into a wedding reception, thereby co-opting Didi’s Christmas Eve dinner plans. Cliff overhears the breaking of this news as he makes a wrong turn looking for the bathroom, and insists on taking her out to dinner as a thank-you for fixing his tooth.

That’s a pretty specific reveal, I realize, but this happens so early in The Baltimorons that it’s not any kind of spoiler. What follows is a series of events, some a bit more plausible than others but none so unrealistic that you don’t buy it, that keep these two hanging out even after multiple moments of what they both believe to be a parting. They wind up all over Baltimore, in cars and at the aforementioned Christmas Eve reception and at an improv show and on a boat and even briefly at a jail.

All of this makes The Baltimorons sound like a wild ride, which it really isn’t. It’s more sweet than anything, even in a key scene in which Cliff is very reluctantly pressured into performing improv and Didi finds herself on stage with him. I suppose this is where the “cringe comedy” idea comes in, because there are so many moments that feel like things may be headed to a very bad place—but it never is. It’s more like a lot of near-misses, which packs The Baltimorons with a lot of feeling of relief. But also laughter: I laughed quite a lot at this movie. I also found myself touched by its unusually sincere sweetness, to a point that I even got a bit teary-eyed. This is the kind of movie that really works on the softies.

If I had any one true criticism, it would be the subplot of Cliff’s betrothal to his girlfriend, Brittany (Olivia Luccardi). It’s fine, I guess; and it does provide some context for people who care about Cliff being worried about him because of his past precariousness of emotional state. Still, it felt a little like a plot contrivance to create a clearer-cut barrier to Cliff and Didi’s connection, and the way they meet and their age differences are plenty barriers enough. Every scene with both Cliff and Didi onscreen is far more compelling than any with Brittany onscreen, which I spent just wanting Cliff’s story to return to Didi. That just underscores what a great duo these two are, though, and I would recommend The Baltomorons to anyone who loves being utterly charmed by the movies.

Sometimes you just find yourself having to “yes-and.”

Overall: B+

SPINAL TAP II: THE END CONTINUES

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

I keep rewatching the original films shortly before their “legasequel” comes out, and still hoping the new film will meet my expectations. Why do I keep doing this? What was the definition of insanity again?

Spinal Tap II: The End Continues is far from bad—it just falls far short of the brilliance of the original 1984 film, This Is Spinal Tap, which launched an entire genre of filmmaking. To say it broke a mold would be an understatement, given the trick it pulled off at the time of convincing many people it was a real documentary about a hard rock band. Not only could no other movie in the same vein manage the same trick, but certainly no one’s going to fall for that in a sequel. Not even one released 41 years later.

It could be said that The End Continues is running on fumes, riding the coattails of that original film. It could also be said that’s sort of the point. There’s also a lot, however, that director Rob Reiner (who also directed the first film) brings to the table in a fresh way. This isn’t just about nostalgia, but a bit of a new angle. The first film reflected some ridiculous truths about the music industry, and this one reflects on aging in that industry.

Back in 1984, Christopher Guest, who co-wrote both of these films and also plays Nigel the guitar player, was 36 years old. He’s 77 now. The same goes for Michael MkKean, who plays the lead singer, David. Harry Shearer, who plays Derek the bass player, is 81 now; he was 40 when the first film was released in 1984. Rob Reiner, who inserts himself even more into the sequel than he did the first film, is 81 now. He’s the first one of these characters we see, and after a mildly amusing reference to “all this exposition,” that scene ends with a physical gag that does’t really work. There are moments in this film that feel like really old people trying to be as funny as they used to be.

To be fair, the actual talent on display remains undiminished. A big part of what makes Spinal Tap work is that the actors are both deeply skilled improvisors and accomplished musicians. The lyrics may be ridiculous, but they’re still making actual music, and actually harmonizing. Well, when they’re not singing out of key due to rustiness, anyway.

I do find myself wondering if I might like The End Continues better re-watching it after a fair amount of time has passed. That was basically my experience with This Is Spinal Tap. The degree to which these movies are edited down from what must be endless footage is incredibly impressive, as is these actors’ dedication to their characters. The trick they pull off is giving them all nuance even as they’re all on the spectrum between outrageous and stupid.

I just wished I had laughed more. Don’t get me wrong, I laughed pretty hard a few times. But a lot of The End Continues feels like it’s trying to keep me in stitches while I simply manage a relatively consistent chuckle. I did enjoy the way this film continues the running gag of the band’s long history of drummers who have died, this time hiring a young woman, Didi Crockett (professional battle drummer Valerie Franco), for the band’s one-time gig that is also their first time performing in 15 years. It’s this performance that serves as the climax to which the narrative is working toward, but I’ll only say this of Didi: make certain you stick around to the very end of the credits. This won’t be hard, as just as with the first film, more clips roll through the entirety of the credits. I actually found this to be the funniest part of the movie.

The legacy of this, I guess we can now call it a “franchise,” is also on full display in The End Continues thanks to a ton of high-profile cameos, two of which (Paul McCartney and Elton John) are already revealed in the trailer. A couple other very famous singers appear briefly in a TikTok video, and a couple of characters played by people in the first film who only later became famous also appear very briefly. This is all undeniably fun, but I don’t know how necessary it is. Spinal Tap has plenty notoriety on their own without stunt casting being brought in to validate them. Although McCartney has one line that did make me laugh pretty hard, less because of it being a particularly original joke than because of his delivery. Elton John gets far more screen time but isn’t quite as funny, though there is a sight gag near the end that I got a kick out of.

I had a good time at Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, and it comes together well enough to justify its own existence. The first film gained a cult following in an era where cult success was still possible; this new one is expected to underperform at the box office. And why wouldn’t it? Its very existence is a reference to an original property from four decades ago, and people as old as the people in it don’t go to the movies much. It’ll be interesting to see what kind of life The End Continues has on streaming platforms, but it’s unlikely to light a fire there either.

When it comes down to it, this is a movie made for the people who were already fans. It’ll hardly feel like a revelation or innovation in the “mockumentary” genre the first film started, but for fans, it won’t disappoint either.

Want to make old people look old? Put an iPad in front of them!

Overall: B

THE ROSES

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

The Roses starts out strong, with a lot of promise, and then it kind of . . . peters out. The whole point of this movie is to be entertained by a warring couple who let things get out of hand in a divorce, and ironically, the flashback scene of when they first met is possibly the most entertaining in the movie. It certainly establishes Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch as having undeniable chemistry, as Ivy and Theo Rose.

And then, The Roses takes way too long to get on with what we came to this movie for. The runtime is 105 minutes, and it’s not until well into the second half that we even see this couple truly start to sour on each other.

I get what director Jay Roach and writer Tony McNamara are trying to do, I guess. They do a fairly impressive job of presenting characters who are both empathetic in their own ways. I’m just not convinced it needed to take well over half the movie to get there. The poster goes out of its way to note that this movie is “from the director of Meet the Parents and the writer of Poor Things,” apparently to underscore one movie that was far more successful than this one has any hope to be, and another one that had far greater depth and wit and humor.

As it happens, The Roses is based on a 1981 novel called The War of the Roses by Warren Adler—which the 1989 film The War of the Roses, starring Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner, was also based on. Crediting both films as simply based on the novel saves this new one, on a bit of a technicality, from being considered a “remake”—it’s simply another adaptation. The first film, directed by Danny DeVito, was a much more pointedly dark comedy and therefore much more my jam; I enjoyed The Roses okay but would be much more inclined to recommend you simply seek out The War of the Roses from 1989 and watch that.

In the first film, the couple is a lot less verbally vicious, and the focus is more on their curdling resentments that evolve into sabotage and comic violence. This new The Roses spends so much time on the success of the first ten years of the Roses’ marriage that I became convinced it would not end on the same comic but deeply dark note the first film ended on. I won’t spoil the ending here, but I will say this: it surprised me, but also managed to be somewhat ambiguous in a way that allows the movie to have its cake and eat it too. I left the theater saying I prefer that movies have more balls than this.

Theo Rose is a successful architect and Ivy Rose runs a local seafood restaurant too far off the main road to be successful—plus she’s called it “We’ve Got Crabs,” one of this movie’s attempts at wit that doesn’t quite land. Theo loses his job after a signature building he designed, with a structure atop it meant to evoke a sail, collapses in the middle of a freak rainstorm. I should ask my architect friend how plausible this scenario is, because I found it hard to believe—but, the sequence itself has its share of both effective humor and thrill to it. The humor then gets undercut by the amount of time Theo spends afterward obsessing over the video that gets re-edited to music and then goes viral, a plot detail now wildly overused.

On the same night, the main road closed, a bunch of drivers are diverted to We’ve Got Crabs, and this includes a local food critic who reviews the restaurant. The review is so glowing that by the next day the restaurant is overwhelmed with customers, and within weeks Ivy is being flown to San Francisco to hang out with famous chefs.

This is where things turn for the Roses: Ivy becomes the great success and the publicly disgraced Theo can’t get work. Breadwinning and parental roles are swapped, and differing opinions about parenting are a big part of brewing tensions. Although I will say, for the record, I’m with Ivy on this one: kids should be allowed to have fun—the clarifier here is that there should be moderation in all things, and Ivy just wants to be the “fun parent” and Theo is excessively regimented with the kids. Speaking of which, while Ivy and Theo are relatively well-rounded characters, their relationship with the two kids is never fleshed out in a satisfactory way. Having them move to the other coast in Miami on a fitness scholarship at the age of thirteen is a little weird. As is both kids’ all-in subscription to their dad’s fitness obsession.

This does, however, get the kids out of the way so that we can get to the Roses’ climactic battle—but not before they meet with Ivy’s lawyer, played by Allison Janney, yet another thing The Roses takes too long to get to, because as always Janney is great. Theo hires neighbor friend Barry (Andy Samberg) as his lawyer, and the running gag of Barry’s wife Amy coming on to a reliably disinterested Theo never quite works either. Amy is played by a game and entertaining Kate McKinnon, but given Theo’s lack of interest, Amy just comes across as inexplicably oversexed and it never really works, even feels like it fits with the rest of the movie.

Instead of peppering the entertaining battles through the movie, The Roses builds up to a climactic battle between the two leads. There’s a sort of montage of one-upmanship, including a dinner party that I hoped to get more out of, until a final blowout between Ivy and Theo in the house—which Theo designed and built, but Ivy paid for, thus being the one thing each of them refuses to give up. This sequence is pretty entertaining, until it becomes almost cartoonish (in what world would a woman who works as a chef “learn AI” and create a deep-fake video in one evening?). I do like how the falling living room chandelier is a nod to the first The War of the Roses from 1989. But, the 1989 sequence is far better, and any nods in this movie are just gestures to things already done better. You might as well just go watch the other movie instead.

Theo and Ivy make a mess of things in The Roses.

Overall: B-

SPLITSVILLE

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

Splitsville takes romantic comedy into a peculiarly unusual direction, contextualizing it with the concept of open relationships in a way that may not be for everyone. Broadly speaking, it worked for me. I laughed more than I do at most contemporary romantic comedies. I may need to spend some time thinking about exactly how non-monogamy is explored in this movie, and everything ties up a little too neatly in the end, and in a way some may feel negates the idea that people can do non-monogamy successfully. I’ll let other people get into the debate about that, though, because I was as entertained as I hoped to be and therefore got what I wanted out of this movie.

That doesn’t mean some of it is a little tricky. Let’s start with Dakota Johnson, the biggest star in the cast, and an actor who seems to embody characters who exist in the same universe no matter which movie they’re in. I would not say Johnson is the most versatile of actors, and yet there is something undeniably compelling about her screen presence. There’s something almost ethereal about her, which you wouldn’t think would work in the part of Julie, a thirtysomething mom unhappy in her marriage, and yet here we are. At least she lives in an incredibly nice house with floor-to-ceiling windows and a pool thanks to being married to a very successful husband, Paul (Michael Angelo Covino), so her elegant and very-Dakota-Johnson fashion choices seem to fit.

The story actually revolves around Carey (Kyle Marvin), who happens to be Paul’s best friend. Carey works as a private school gym teacher, and I suppose the private school is meant to indicate how Carey can work as a gym teacher and still be close friends with a wealthy property developer without any class differences causing awkward tensions. In the opening scene, Carey and his wife Ashley (Adria Arjona) are on their way to a weekend getaway, and after witnessing a freak accident on the road, Ashley declares she wants out of the marriage.

In a comically extended sequence, Carey bails out of the car and runs to the home of Julie and Paul, where talk of divorce leads to the revelation that Julie and Paul are not monogamous. I won’t spoil where things go from there, but I will say that these characters consistently justify their open relationships in ways that seem a bit regressive: “If you make the bad thing not bad, then it’s okay.” This seems logical on the surface, except that Splitsville spends its time suggesting that non-monogamy will inevitably lead to problems—which is to say, non-monogamy is inherently bad—rather than acknowledging that it actually works for some people.

To be fair, it also doesn’t work for a lot of people. Spoiler alert: when Carey takes Julie and Paul’s news as a revelation and proposes it to Ashley as an idea for saving their marriage, it doesn’t work. Especially considering who Carey decides to have sex with. All this is to say, the idea not working out for characters like these is still valid. I would just like to see a movie in which people have open relationships and it’s not the major challenge for them all to overcome.

And, to clarify, non-monogamy does work, for all of these characters, for quite a long stretch of Splitsville. It works until it doesn’t. Or it may never have happened at all. Things get complicated, of course–especially when sex and romance does a bit of merry-go-round movement around this foursome. Declarations of not feeling jealous are made, and petty jealousies are quickly revealed. One might even say predictably—though a fight sequence that occurs between Carey and Paul at Paul’s house, destroying furniture and windows and more, is exceedingly well staged and quite entertaining. These are characters who have trained on certain defensive moves, so they both get some good ones in, but they are also both crippled by rage and sadness, which makes them fumble a great deal, lending the scene some realism. They spend more time damaging the house than they do each other, although they still do plenty of that.

There’s a lot of great dialogue in Splitsville, sometimes just short of Aaron Sorkin-esque. This is a movie with both compelling ideas and compelling performances. I do have some technical nitpicks, though, such as the multiple sequences with the camera swooshing back and forth around one or the other of their houses, as a means of communicating the plot. At Carey and Ashley’s house, we see how Carey amasses a group of friends out of Ashley’s growing number of ex-lovers (and these guys—and one woman, though we never see her—run the scale of plausibility as characters). In another scene, we glide through the many rooms of Paul and Julie’s house during a birthday party for their son. In one moment of the extended cut, a guy the kid barely knows arrives at the door while the party is in full swing, and as he’s let in and the camera moves past him, we hear the man walking while bellowing “Feliz Cumpleaños,” as if that would happen. Everyone sings “Happy Birthday” together, hello!

As I said, these are nitpicks. A pretty big one is the decision to hire a “mentalist” rather than a magician or clown or the kid’s birthday, and he’s played by Succession’s Nicholas Braun. This is played as a comic thread of the many things going on in the scene, and it just doesn’t quite fit with the rest of the movie, nor is it ever very funny.

The rest of the movie is, though. Your mileage will vary with Splitsville, but it got pretty far with me. Nitpicks notwithstanding, I had a really good time with it.

Two couples get messy, and then clean up their messes, in Splitsville.

Overall: B+

HONEY DON'T

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

Honey Don’t is a very peculiar film, in that the mixed-bad reviews are hardly unjustified, and yet I found the experience of watching it to be a surprisingly enjoyable one. It’s the kind of movie that, in another time, could have easily become a gay cult hit—it fits neatly into the “lesbian noir” genre, after all, and has a deeply subtle but pervasive camp sensibility to it. There’s a lot in it that might go over the heads of mainstream audiences but which gay audiences might appreciate. Plus, the lead character, private investigator Honey O’Donahue (a wonderful Margaret Qualley), is gay.

So are multiple other characters: local cop MG Falcone (Aubrey Plaza), with whom Honey has a fling; Mr. Siegfried (Billy Eichner, criminally underused), who has hired Honey to investigate who his boyfriend is having an affair with; and Collegian (Christian Antidormi), Siegfried’s boyfriend who meets a delightfully dark fate that I won’t spoil here. That fate, however, is very directly tied to Hector (Puerto Rican actor and singer Jacnier), who has an illicit sort of employment with local Reverend Drew Devlin (Chris Evans, always fun to see in parts that are not Captain America).

It doesn’t take long for bodies to start piling up, in ways that are both amusing and decidedly Coen-esque—this is another film directed by Joel Coen but without his brother Joel, here co-written by Ethan and his wife Tricia Cooke, and this may be the Coen film made by one without the other that I have enjoyed the most. That doesn’t make it the best, per se; I just enjoyed its oddball mix of noir and queer sensibility. I kept thinking of the 2021 film French Exit, which I enjoyed in a very similar way. That’s a different movie, except that it also has its own (much more overt) camp sensibility, also easy to have a blast with in spite of its obvious flaws.

There’s something to be said for casting. Margaret Qualley has such great onscreen charisma she carries Honey Don’t through what otherwise would be lulls in the plot. Charlie Day plays a local detective who is charming enough to make up for his clueless declarations of “You always say that!” when he hits on Honey and she tells him “I like girls.” Evans hits the perfect notes in his performance of an oversexed minister who keeps doing ministry even in bed.

It’s in the plot threads that Honey Don’t is likely to lose people. This movie is all of 89 minutes long, and is a rare case of one you find yourself wishing had been longer. It ends with multiple narrative threads that neither get any satisfying resolution, nor do they appear to have any connection to one another. It’s difficult to say which does more to make or break a movie, the script or the editing, but it feels a lot like both are at fault with this one.

At least the charismatic actors are also shot well, giving this a slight feel of older, better Coen Brothers movies (and the opening credits have a particularly fun and clever design). As the story goes along, as long as you’re not thinking too hard about what the hell is going on, it’s easy to have a great time. It’s tempting to say Honey Don’t is ultimately a failure, except for the parts I enjoyed so much—the actors, the cinematography, the subtle notes of camp. I would recommend it only to a very particular group—queer people who love a knowingly, esoterically ironic point of view. It’s pretty cool that Ethan Coen went in that direction, if nothing else.

It’s no masterpiece, but it’s fun to watch!

Overall: B

OH, HI!

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

I’m feeling pretty ambivalent about this movie.

In 1992, Stephen King published a novel called Gerald’s Game, in which a woman spends most of the story stranded and tied to her bed, her husband dead on the floor after she induces a heart attack by kicking him in the nuts when he ignores her pleas to stop. I only bring this up because in the new movie Oh, Hi!, director and co-writer Sophie Brooks takes the basic premise of Gerald’s Game, swaps the genders, and turns it into a comedy.

Is it all that funny? Not really. I think I got a good, laugh-out-loud moment out of it one time. I kind of got a kick out of David Cross as the oddball neighbor who exists just this side of creepy. Even his performance is odd, though: in his first scene, in which he shows up, standing stiffly, at the lakeside admonishing the two main characters not to have sex in the lake—which they aren’t doing—his eyes appear fixed on nothing, so at first I thought he was playing a blind man. Then he shows up in another scene in which it’s clear he can see just fine.

Semi-ironic side note: one of the very minor subplots of Oh, Hi! is that Isaac (Logan Lerman), the male lead, is reading Blindness by Portuguese novelist José Saramago—a novel I found narratively compelling but a very difficult read due to its use of dashes instead of quotation marks for dialogue. Isaac never says anything about this, although he does get frustrated by two other character asking why the novel is called Blindness Blindness Blindness because of the visual design of the title on the book cover repeating the word. The second time that happened I did get a good chuckle, so I’ll give this movie credit for that.

Two other key differences between Oh, Hi! and Gerald’s Game is that Oh, Hi! isn’t in the least bit rapey—thank God—and nobody dies. Isaac does fear or his life, though, and for good reason. Iris (Molly Gordon), his girlfriend-or-is-she, is clearly mentally unwell, and when Isaac reveals he’s not looking or a relationship while still tied to a bed (let that be a lesson to us all: never share your disappointing feelings about your relationship while in handcuffs), Iris refuses to un-cuff him, and instead somehow convinces herself she can convince him to stay with him by refusing to let him free for twelve hours.

Two other characters come into the mix, about halfway through: realizing she is in far too deep, she calls in reinforcements from her good friend Max (Geraldine Viswanathan), who shows up with her own boyfriend, Kenny (John Reynolds), in tow. Mind you, Isaac and Iris are renting a secluded getaway house in the country, which is why Steve the oddball neighbor is the only other person around, and allows for a primary cast of only four for ninety percent of the film’s runtime. In any case, Kenny is vaguely described as having law expertise, and once he comes into the house and sees that there is a captive upstairs who none of them has immediately freed, they are all potentially looking at jail time.

The performances are decent all around, and both Logan Lerman and especially Molly Gordon make the most of the material they are given. It’s the material itself that I am ambivalent about. I didn’t feel active contempt for this movie as I watched it, and generally the characters are compelling enough—with the exception of Iris, and given she is the central character, that’s a pretty big problem. Who was asking for a movie about a psychotic young woman who can’t handle that the guy she’s dating just isn’t that into her?

Oh, Hi! plays like it wants us to empathize with Isaac and Iris equally, and I take issue with that. Gordon may give a nuanced performance as Iris, but Iris is not nearly as nuanced a character as Sophie Brooks clearly wants us to think she is. And having Isaac soften to Iris after being literally held captive by her for so long that she has to hold a bowl for him to pee into—am I the only one who thinks that’s batshit insane? I can’t decide if I just don’t understand Millennials or if logically Isaac would actually go straight to the police the minute he had the opportunity.

I won’t spoil how Oh, Hi! ends, but I will say it ends with frustrating ambiguity. I’m not against empathy for even the worst kinds of people, in fact I very much believe in and encourage it—but not to the point of unhealthiness, and certainly not without justice. Oh, Hi! just feels a little like it doesn’t have a deep enough understanding of these things.

“It’s not that deep,” you might say. Sure, okay. I could also say that I’d like this movie a lot more, even with nothing else changed, it it were a lot funnier. But Brooks is trying to imbue the story with a certain kind of pathos, which is incongruous to the proceedings. Even a deeper backstory than the random bits of information we get on these two leads would have been helpful. In the end, I just left this movie moderately entertained at best and frustrated at worst. I was tempted to say “eternally frustrated,” except that I’ll probably forget this movie by next week.

It’s amazing how far out of hands things get when two of the hands are cuffed.

Overall: B-

M3GAN 2.0

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

I go to the movie so often, I often have to sit through trailers to the same movie so many times that, even if I am interested in the movie, I get deeply sick of the trailer. MEGAN 2.0 was a prime example of this, and it also means I committed a great deal of that trailer to memory—against my will. There’s M3GAN breaking through a giant doll box to strangle a man. There’s M3GAN saying to rival robot AMELIA (“Autonomous Military Engagement Logistics and Infiltration Android”), “I’ll make you a deal. You can kill Gemma, but don’t touch Cady,” before an exasperated Gemma (Allison Williams) snaps, “M3gan!” (She pronounces the 3 as an “e.”) And best of all, there’s the obviously-gay stan in a blonde wig who says, “I don’t care if she did kill four people. She is a smoking’ hot warrior princess!”

Except: none of these slips from the trailer are actually in the theatrically released cut of the movie. This is fairly common, as editing of the full film typically isn’t done when trailers are cut. But it seems particularly egregious here—some of the most fun stuff used to sell us on the movie isn’t even in the movie. Are we supposed to wait around for a “director’s cut,” or what? Of this?

The original M3GAN (2022) got surprisingly good reviews. I thought it was fine. To be fair, it seems to work better as a re-watch: I watched it again to refresh my memory before going to see this sequel, and I think I enjoyed it more the second time around. I still stand by the solid B I gave it. M3GAN 2.0 isn’t faring quite as well with critics. It is objectively less-good than its predecessor, but let’s be real: not by a huge margin. There is some bonkers-ridiculous shit that happens in this movie (in what universe would an obvious home invasion turn out to be the FBI coming in with a search warrant? Well—this one!), and yet: I still found myself having a pretty good time in spite of it all.

Perhaps the most obvious thing about M3GAN 2.0 is its existence as a reaction to an original film that found far greater success than anyone expected, thanks to a sneakily campy tone that did not fully reveal itself until the second half of the movie. Now, not only is most of the principal cast returning (including Violet McGraw as Cady, now three years older), but so are the writers (Aleka Cooper and James Wan) and the director, Gerard Johnstone. The only difference there is that this time around Johnstone is also getting a writer credit. And what every one of these people are trying to do is transparently to catch lightning in a bottle. This predictably proves impossible, mostly because it can no longer be sly about its subtle camp—and yet, it does get closer than you might expect.

They also go very obviously for a Terminator 2 version of M3GAN, where the character who was the lethal villain in the original film is brought back to become the hero, and fight against a more advanced villain. To 2.0’s credit, M3GAN the character remains pretty threatening and sinister well after getting re-introduced into this new story. The greater threat now is AMELIA, this one an android played fully by a real human (Ivanna Sakhno, perfection the art of not-blinking). It also takes a page from the Alien franchise, dialing down the horror from the original film and leaning into action.

You may be sensing a theme here, in that there aren’t really any original ideas to be found. There’s still joy in the project, and that is still to be found in the tone: M3GAN’s bitchy attitude; some of her tone deaf decisions (there’s a scene of her singing a song to Gemma at the wrong moment and I got a kick out of it); even the multiple choices clearly mirroring similar moments in the first film. Some of it lands better than others; when we get a M3GAN dance at an unexpected moment in this movie, it doesn’t work anywhere near as it did the first time around precisely because now we’re expecting it, waiting for it to happen.

Part of what made M3GAN work as well as it did—to the extent that it did work—was the character’s very size: she’s small for a girl, big for a doll, but still quite obviously a doll. This time, when Gemma redesigns her, M3GAN says “Make me taller.” This makes her a bit less effective as an amusingly creepy doll, but at least she remains markedly shorter than any of the adult humans around.

No one expects a movie like this to be plausible, but some of this stuff threatens suspension of disbelief, even by M3GAN standards. If she can construct an entire basement lair complete with wall screens and furnishings, why in the world would she need Gemma and her colleagues to help construct her an upgraded body? But whatever, when she and AMELIA are fighting, it’s fun—especially AMELIA’s cleverly gruesome kills. The action is actually used more sparingly than it needs to be, but the restraint on that front actually helps it work.

I suppose there can also be too much restraint, though. The original film was a perfect length at 102 minutes. M3GAN 2.0 is a solid two hours, which, for a movie like this, is . . . not perfect. There’s actually more to enjoy than you might expect in this film, but the flip side is how it can give you too much of a good thing. The marketers of this movie clearly attempted to capitalize on a character that instantly became a camp icon, but such things never land exactly as desired when you have to work so hard at it.

It works well enough, though. M3GAN 2.0 is mostly ridiculous and stupid, and these are things the movie knows about itself, which made it easier for me to just enjoy it for what it is, which is postmodern horror with a lot of deliberately weird humor. Even as it turned out definitively less good than the original, I kind of hope they make a M3GAN 3.0. And you never know, the next one could be better! We just won’t talk about the inevitable downsides of planned obsolescence.

You’re gonna let me finish no matter how long it takes!

Overall: B-

SIFF Advance: TWINLESS

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

Twinless is about an unlikely friendship that occurs between two guys, one straight and one gay, after they meet in a support group for people grieving the loss of a twin. That is the log line of the film, and it remains an accurate descriptor from beginning to end, albeit deceptively so: Without spoiling anything, I will say that a major twist occurs in the second act, and it was one I found deeply disappointing. I wanted this to be an exploration of an unlikely friendship under these circumstances, but not only do the circumstances change—we discover them to have been different all along. This allows for some profound conflict between the two lead characters, but does the conflict have to be that profound? I would argue that it doesn’t, and that it changes what makes their connection compelling in the first place.

And yet, here’s the thing: I was utterly charmed, and sometimes deeply moved, by Twinless in spite of this disappointment. It’s a big thing, but it’s still the only thing I didn’t like about this film. And it should be noted that writer-director James Sweeney, who has been developing this script for a solid ten years, has written his characters with such dimension, depth, and authenticity, it goes a long way toward making up for that one disappointment. Sweeney himself plays the gay character, Dennis, and it’s always impressive when a director can star in his own film and actually pull it off. It could be argued that Dennis is borderline psychotic, at least judging by his behavior, and still he’s undeniably empathetic, even when it becomes unclear whether he deserves empathy.

The crucial element of Twinless, however, is Dylan O’Brien, previously best known for Young-Adult roles like Thomas in The Maze Runner or Stiles in the television series Teen Wolf. Now in his early thirties, he’s making a new name for himself in indie cinema, and nowhere more impressively than here in Twinless, as Roman, who is grieving the loss of his identical twin brother, Rocky. O’Brien’s performance is amazing in this movie, the one thing that most recommends it.

There is a relatively short flashback sequence in which O’Brien also plays the twin brother, Rocky—the gay one. This makes the second film in short order featuring a non-twin actor playing twins onscreen, and although the movies share nothing in common otherwise, it still invites mention of Sinners, in which Michael B. Jordan does the same. The key difference is that Jordan plays opposite himself in a great deal of Sinners, in ways that are often disctracting because we know, and can tell, that there were never two of him actually on camera at the same time. Sweeney deftly sidesteps this problem by making Roman and Rocky estranged, and never showing the two characters onscreen at the same time.

There’s also the fact of Roman and Rocky’s diverging sexualities, though—something that becomes a key plot point, and one very well handled. This does mean that O’Brien, a straight man, spends some time playing a gay man, which is something many often argue should not be done. While I agree broadly that gay actors should be given gay parts, I am also not militant about this, and believe context and circumstance always matter. It’s certainly relevant that Sweeney himself is gay, and he was the one giving direction on these performances, reportedly with some reticence on O’Brien’s part to get too far into depicting effeminacy. The minor miracle of Twinless is that O’Brien’s performance is incredible, both as Roman and as Rocky—they may be technically identical, but they have distinct mannerisms and appearances (choice of clothing, facial hair) that make then feel like wholly different people. In the Rocky flashback scenes, it took me a while to realize it was even the same actor.

The central theme of Twinless is loneliness, and though it is contextualized with the specificity of losing a built-in best friend that often comes with being a twin, it also transcends that specificity. Dennis is lonely for different reasons, and these two guys are dealing with their loneliness in very different ways, but have found each other as a means of, if not filling that hole, then covering it up a bit.

Twinless also has great, well-rounded characters, particularly Marcie (Aisling Franciosi), the receptionist at Dennis’s work who Roman starts dating after he accompanies Dennis to her Halloween party. Dennis has spent a lot of time making wildly inaccurate assumptions about Marcie, which makes it easy for us as viewers to do the same, to see her as a sweet but incredibly naive woman. She actually is sweet, but not naive, and it turns out she won’t stand for anyone’s bullshit—certainly not Dennis’s, and not Roman’s either. In addition to Franciosi, Gilmore Girls’s Lauren Graham is a welcome presence in just a few scenes as Roman and Rocky’s mother, playing tensions with Roman as they both navigate the loss of a loved one. In a scene when both Marcie and Dennis go home with Roman for Christmas, Marcie, ever the understanding one, tolerates their inevitable arguing with grace, explaining to the less-understanding Dennis, “I think they’re grieving.”

I haven’t said much yet about how funny Twinless is, with both a unique sensibility and a unique sense of humor. This film is very much a dramedy, and I would indeed recommend having tissues handy. It also has a keen understanding of how people deal with grief in very different ways, and may hit differently if you have lost someone very close to you, twin or not. But it also has some incredibly effective humor, often cutting through the grief in the best way. It’s often uncomfortable, but I hesitate to call Twinless “cringe comedy,” as it rarely truly made me squirm in my seat (not usually my favorite kind of humor). It could also be said that a gay character pining after a straight guy he can’t have is a bit overdone, but again, Sweeney effectively makes it his own, creating a truly singular story. Were it not for the one thing that genuinely disappointed me, I would probably be saying I adored this movie, to a similar degree that I adored films like All of Us Strangers or National Anthem. But, reconciliation through disappointment—also a major theme of Twinless—has its own deep and lasting value.

They don’t have their twins but they have each other: a complicated but compelling story of connection between a straight man and a gay man.

Overall: B+

FRIENDSHIP

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

My experience with deeply awkward movies is very similar to that with horror movies. I spend a lot of time covering my face, unable to look at the screen. I might peek through my fingers. This is how I spent a lot of the time watching Friendship.

And, much like with horror movies, I am typically loathe to subject myself to such experiences, or certainly to recommend them to others. I make exceptions for films that transcend the genre. I suppose that makes Friendship the Exorcist of awkward-relationship movies. Except the comparison, made my many others already, to Fatal Attraction is far more apt. Nobody boils a pet in this movie, but there is a scene in which you become terrified that the obsessed character might actually kill somebody.

Marketing a film like Friendship is clearly a tricky task. I sat through the trailer to this at many other movies, always wondering at all the pull quotes from critics talking about how funny it is, while only showing clips that make it look like a disturbing thriller about someone who is increasingly unhinged. It was a very incongruous juxtaposition, and if nothing else, I knew to expect painful awkwardness—and found myself having little interest. But then the movie I was going to see tonight was revealed to have terrible reviews, so I looked over what the other options were. I couldn’t even remember what Friendship was by merely seeing the title on the theater schedule, but I looked it up and was surprised to discover it getting pretty positive attention.

So, my movie companion and I thought: what the hell, why not? Let’s pivot to this other movie where we have no idea whether we’ll be into it or not. I did come across the phrase “the Fatal Attraction of male bonding comedies,” though, and that piqued my interest immediately. That should have been used as the logline.

And, lo and behold Friendship actually is hilarious, the kind of movie that twenty years ago would have quickly gained a cult following. People familiar with Tim Robinson, and particularly his Netflix sketch comedy show I Think You Should Leave (which, full disclosure, I have never watched, may not be so surprised by this. But he is by far the best thing about Friendship, turning in an amazing performance as Craig, the socially awkward app developer who forms an unlikely friendship with his new neighbor.

The neighbor, Austin (Paul Rudd), is a local weatherman with his own insecurities, the kind of guy you wouldn’t particularly want to hang out with either but who feels like a straight up everyman compared to Craig. Craig’s wife, Tami (Kate Mara), encourages him to accept Austin’s invitation to come over for a drink. Tami has her own things to deal with, such as a fledgeling floral business and an almost-uncomfortably intimate relationship with their teenage son (Jack Dylan Grazer, previously the lead in the deeply underrated HBO limited series We Are Who We Are).

When Craig and Austin first hang out, it’s just the two of them, and Austin manages to take the awkwardness in stride. It’s when he gets invited to a group hangout with Austin’s other friends that the awkwardness begins to go truly sideways. The plot then follows a familiar arc, but it feels fresh because of the context: an obsessive man-crush taken up too many notches. Craig starts calling Austin too frequently, he shows up unannounced at inappropriate times and places, and tries to emulate some of Austin’s reckless but cool behavior, but at which Craig is deeply inept.

Rudd is well cast as the weatherman whose own social skills lack any genuine depth. But Robinson is the one who truly shines here, the single source of a great many uniquely fantastic comic moments. The parade of expressions that flash across Craig’s face is a delight unto its own, as he reacts with confusion, then suppresses it with quick denial. Robinson can be skillfully subtle one moment, then singularly over the top the next. Truly, I laughed far more at Friendship than I expected to.

Some people love the emotional turn of laughter through tears, What Friendship has to offer is laughter through suspense, a nagging sense of danger, such as when Craig goes to deliver one of the many packages that keeps getting delivered to his house by mistake, and then finds himself causally walking through Austin’s unlocked home. We don’t even know if Austin is there. And when Craig finds something truly dangerous in Austin’s office, we know Chekhov has been paged. This pays off spectacularly later.

Friendship pays off, in all senses of the phrase. This is a delicate performance walking a delicate line, and a quite impressive one at that. Offering a familiar story arc that still manages not to be predictable is no small feat. It’s all in the details, and the best details are in Tim Robinson’s performance, which is both weird and nuanced. We’ve all been in group settings with that one guy who has no idea he’s the oddball no one really likes but no one wants to hurt his feelings. If you haven’t, then maybe you’re that guy. Friendship gives us all a lot to think about.

Letting the dangerous naïveté blossom in Friendship.

Overall: B+