NO OTHER CHOICE

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

No Other Choice is so much of a piece with the 2019 Best Picture winner Parasite, the comparisons are inevitable. It would seem that darkly comic examinations of South Korean capitalism—most of which can be applied globally—are part of an evergreen idea.

I’m not sure which of the two movies is objectively “better,” but Parasite certainly has the gigantic advantage of having come first. Setting aside its Best Picture win and the fact that No Other Choice has no such hopes, had No Other Choice been released in 2019 and Parasite released now, we might very well be having this exact same conversation, just in reverse.

It could be said that No Other Choice is more cynical. Multiple murders happen in this movie, and ultimately without consequence. It’s all in service of getting the good job: Man-su (a fantastic Lee Byung-hun) has been laid off after 25 years working at a specialty paper manufacturer, and takes increasingly desperate measures to pull ahead of three competitors for a similar job at another company.

What I love about these measures is how unpredictable they are. Just like Bong Joon Ho, famed Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook (who also co-wrote) has a very specific sensibility to his storytelling, the kind of thing it’s easy to see being ruined by any attempt at an American remake. And before any of the real action starts, we get to know Man-su’s family: a wife, Mi-ri (Son Ye-jin), who proves both refreshingly complex and surprisingly loyal; a teenage stepson he’s been raising with her since he was 2, Si-one (Woo Seung Kim); and a young cello prodigy daughter who doesn’t speak much, Ri-one (So Yul Choi). They even have two dogs, named Si-two and Ri-two—hence the “ones” of the children’s names.

This is a family of very fully realized characters, who are all very used to the comforts of the life Man-su’s career has brought them. Man-su is convinced he’ll have another job in three months, and 13 months later, he’s working at a Costco-like warehouse. There’s a very odd scene in which he evidently quits that job in order to chase a mid-afternoon opportunity, and he’s forced to strip out of his work jumpsuit and stand on the loading dock in his tank top and boxer shorts. Unless there’s something I am missing about Korean culture, that seemed a little over the top.

Granted, Man-su is enagaged in multiple attempts at murder not long after this, so I’m not sure how fair it is to judge this film for being “over the top.” There’s a lot of humor at play here, and, also much like Parasite, it doesn’t come on strong until pretty far into the movie—particularly a tussle between Man-su, his first competitor applicant, and that man’s frustrated wife, all tumbling comically over each other in their living room and wrestling for sole control of a pistol. A key difference is that Parasite had delightful plot twists no one could see coming; No Other Choice, by contrast, leans a bit more into hijinks.

That said, No Other Choice makes clear that there is some irony in its title: Man-su, and multiple others, have plenty more choices than they will admit to, even as they resort to what seem to be life-or-death measures—until that’s actually what they become. There’s a scene where Man-su verbally berates Goo Beom-mo (Lee Sung-min), his first target, for his stubbornness in refusing to look for reasonable alternatives, and he could just as well be speaking to himself.

That first attempt goes to some wild places, involving everything from surprise infidelity to a snake that may or may not be poisonous. But whether it’s Goo Beom-mo, or Ko Si-jo (Cha Seung-won), another laid-off worker now reduced to selling shoes, or social media influencer Choi Seon-chul (Park Hee-soon), all of Man-su’s targets are presented with full stories of their own, sometimes deeply flawed but always easy to empathize with in their own situations. This is perhaps part of the point: the job market is a cutthroat world, and sometimes you have to turn into a sociopath to get ahead.

There are some technical things that really make No Other Choice stand out, though, particularly some beautiful and clever cinematography. There’s a memorable shot of Man-su parking his car on a street surrounded by fall foliage, and another incredible shot of people’s reflections in an iPad screen while the screen pages are being slid to the side with someone’s finger. This makes for a movie that is often as fun just to look at as it is to engage with.

In years past, No Other Choice would be about a downtrodden, unemployed guy we can’t help but root for. Man-su is a peculiar character in that you are absolutely compelled by him, but whether you’re rooting for him gets much more complicated as the story unfolds. This is a family who, by the end, we slowly realize are living their lives as though the ends justify the means. The means is often quite entertaining to us, but deep down it’s a cynical reflection of what unchecked capitalism actually does to people.

I mean, there are lots of choices here.

Overall: B+

THE MASTERMIND

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

I find myself thinking maybe I appreciate The Mastermind more in retrospect, once I have allowed it to settle a bit, but I keep coming back to this pertinent question: does that matter? It doesn’t change my experience of sitting through this movie, which occurred in three stages. First, I thought: this is a very compelling premise; this seems fun. Then, I thought: is anything going to happen in this movie that makes sitting through it worth the effort? Finally, I thought: holy Christ, I’m bored.

If you’re a fan of writer-director Kelly Reichardt, you might reasonably argue that this is a me problem and not the movie’s problem. Might is the operative word there. I quite liked Reichardt’s film First Cow (filmed in late 2018; in theaters for one week in March 2020 but pulled due to covid; available on VOD when I reviewed it in late summer 2020), about a cook and a Chinese immigrant scheming to steal milk from the first cow in Oregon Territory.

But Reichardt definitely has a particular style of filmmaking, with long, quiet shots that are perhaps better suited to period pieces from the Old West. The Mastermind is also a period piece, but in a very different way: this one is set in 1970, first in Framingham, Massachusetts and then through several other states. This movie answers the question: “What if Kelly Reichardt made an art heist movie?” It turns out the answer is: “You may not want to sit through it.”

Josh O’Connor is a great actor, and he’s very good in The Mastermind, but I credit him for that far more than I do anything else in this movie. His James Blaine Mooney is an unemployed, married father of two, and he cooks up a scheme to steal four priceless paintings from a local art museum where his parents are members. His choices are all varying levels of foolish from moment one, and the heist sequence itself, in which he enlists the help of two other guys, is far and away the most exciting in the movie—and the fact that even this sequence is pointedly quiet (they are in a museum, after all) says all you really need to know about this movie.

But, you know. I have to write this review.

There’s a different scene that says the most about my personal reaction to this film. James takes the paintings, each carefully protected inside a fabric pouch sewn together by his wife, Terri (Licorice Pizza’s Alana Haim—also talented, but utterly wasted in this part), and slid into slots inside a homemade wooden box case, out to a farm shed for hiding. Reichardt lingers on James’s every move in this scene, even though all it involves is using a ladder to take the paintings up to a hiding spot in the rafters. But he has to pull the sliding lid off the box case; take the paintings up the ladder two at a time; carefully take the box case itself up the ladder; put the paintings back in their slots inside the box case; replace the lid on the box case; then slide the box to the side and cover it in hay. We see all of this happen in real time, and I can understand the intention here, as we’re observing the efforts this guy is going to for what we can see clearly is going to have no payoff making it worthwhile.

The least a movie like this can do for us, though, is to give us a payoff that makes sitting through a deadeningly dull sequence like that worthwhile. At that point in the film, I was still giving The Mastermind the benefit of the doubt: surely this is a foreshadowing of something yet to come that will somehow make all of this satisfying? Not so much. The narrative does return to this location later, and I’ll grant that it happens in an unexpected way. But it’s also definitively anticlimactic. And that’s the takeaway from this entire movie.

James’s accomplices in the robbery come and go in relatively short order, especially Ronnie (Javion Allen), who is a loose canon and surprises the trio by bringing a gun to the heist, thereby making it an armed robbery. I had very mixed feelings about the casting of a Black man in this part, given that he’s basically the guy who ruins what otherwise might have worked out for these other criminals. He’s the one guy who is immediately incompetent, he’s the one guy with a gun, he’s the one guy who gets physically violent with anyone during the ordeal, and he’s the one guy who gets arrested and then coerced into ratting on the others. I certainly don’t blame Javion Allen for simply getting work—and God knows I can’t speak for how he felt about the implications of the part—but from my perspective, this all seemed a little on the nose, particularly for a movie, and a director, which otherwise traffic in subtleties.

A whole lot of The Mastermind is not so much about James figuring out how to get away with what he’s done, but following him as he’s on the run (hence the aforementioned multiple states), trying to outrun what is clearly inevitable for him. To be sort of fair, this film could also have been titled The Hubris of Mediocre White Men, and O’Connor plays the part perfectly. I just felt in the end that his talents were misused here.

We get a lot of other great actors in supporting parts, including Bill Camp and Hope Davis as James’s parents. James makes a brief stop at the home of friends in the country, played by John Magaro, and Gaby Hoffman without a drop of makeup on, making her almost unrecognizable. Hoffman does a lot with very little screen time, but as great as the cast is, none of them could save The Mastermind from being dreadfully dull at worst and tedious at best. The final moment of the film, when James is becoming dangerously desperate, has an almost flippantly amusing quality to it, leaving you to think: all of that, for this? That is clearly the point, but it was a point I left the theater feeling unenriched by.

Okay, James. Get on with it!

Overall: C+

ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER

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

The more I think about One Battle After Another, the more impressed I am with it. This is the sign of a great movie. I didn’t have the wherewithal to think about whether it was a Great Movie while I was watching it, because I was too absorbed by it. I wouldn’t even say I was blown away by it, per se—and I mean that as a compliment. I was simply invested in every single character onscreen. I only had the bandwidth to reflect on it once it was over, and then, after some time, it gradually dawned on me: that was an amazing movie.

Everything that’s amazing about it is done subtly—not something that writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson is exactly known for. Many of his films, particularly early ones like Boogie Nights or Magnolia or Punch-Drunk Love, throw a lot onscreen that amounts to showing off. And don’t get me wrong, it works: those are all objectively great movies, top-tier in the PTA canon. Not that much of his output can qualify as bottom-tier—the only one of his films I did not particularly like was Inherent Vice (2014). Licorice Pizza (2021) got rave reviews and I thought it was very good but without the usual P.T. Anderson impact, and his debut feature film, Hard Eight, is fine. Just about any of his seven other feature films, though, you could reasonably call a masterwork. How often does a director come along like that?

Anderson does have a signature style, both in writing and in look—if you look deep enough. Many of his movies are truly like no other, and yet they all have a connective tissue to them. As such, One Battle After Another feels like the culmination of his life’s work. It might be his crowning achievement. He’s only 55 years old, though. Imagine what more we might get out of him over the next twenty, maybe even thirty years. It’s thrilling just to think about. Maybe he’ll give us a dud or two, who knows? I expect it will be worth it. This is a guy who takes huge swings, over and over, and nearly every time it pays off.

And how to even talk about One Battle After Another in a way that effectively illustrates its greatness? This is a movie about America, told through three different ethnic lenses: Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio), the once-revolutionary White guy who has long since given up; Willa (Chase Infiniti), the daughter he’s had with Perfidia (Teyana Taylor), a Black woman with a passion that cannot be domesticated; and Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio Del Toro), Willa’s Latino karate sensei who has his own immigrant-underground-railroad going on.

There’s a bit of yin-and-yang with the Whiteness in this film, Bob being counterbalanced by Col. Stephen J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn, as committed to the part as ever), who is eager to join the White-supremacist “Christmas Adventures Club,” but also has a conflicted attraction to Perfidia—who may or may not have similarly conflicted feelings about him. Lockjaw is one of the most compelling and layered villains to come along in cinema in a long time, and I will only say that there’s a pointed poetic justice to his ultimate fate.

It feels important to note that a great deal of time is spent on Bob and Perfidia (and, to a degree, fellow revolutionary Deandra, played by Regina Hall) many years in the past, their hunger for both revolution and each other, and the ultimate consummation of their relationship and what would appear to be the resulting offspring—and then, time jumps forward, and little Willa is sixteen years old.

The “French 75,” the name these revolutionaries have given themselves, is loosely based on the revolutionary spirit of the 1960s, particularly as detailed in the 1990 Thomas Pynchon novel Vineland—which is credited here as “inspiring” One Battle After Another, rather than being an outright adaptation of it. In this film, however, these revolutionaries are clearly grafted onto a 21st-century world, with no other added commentary: we get no context clues about what the French 75’s numerous bombings or bank robberies did to American culture. We only see that these things happen; this group exists; and they are in active pursuit by law enforcement. It is perhaps telling that this stuff does not necessarily feel out of place being decontextualized to the modern era.

The story does’t even take off until the jump forward to Willa as a 16-year-old. Her mother disappeared when she was a baby; her father spends his time frying his brain with weed. But a sudden turn of events has Colonel Lockjaw going after both Joe and Willa for the first time since her infancy, and the motivations here all come back to his obsession with his own Whiteness. A reactivation of communications between current and former members of the French 75 creates a lot of comic moments when Joe can’t remember all the communication passwords he’s supposed to have had memorized for the past sixteen years.

Nothing goes in the direction you expect it to in One Battle After Another—another hallmark of Paul Thomas Anderson films. You root for the characters, and you fear for them; sometimes they get out of scrapes and sometimes they don’t. Whatever is going on, the runtime of two hours and 41 minutes flies by, thanks to a kinetic energy that never abates. It has this in common with Magnolia, the only P.T. Anderson film that was longer. One Battle After Another is less stylized and far less high-concept; the characters here are much more grounded, making them more plausible and real. All of these things tie together into what amounts to the best film of the year so far.

One Battle After Another is so good you’ll be convinced by a 25-year-old-actor playing a 16-year-old character.

Overall: A

CAUGHT STEALING

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

Thank god Darren Aronofsky finally made a movie I can get behind again.

I became an Aronofsky loyalist after The Wrestler (2008) and Black Swan (2010), having already caught my attention with Pi (1998) and Requiem for a Dream (2000). The Fountain (2006), released between those two pairs of great movies, was fine, but not great, indicating that Aronofsky was not quite infallible—but then he seemed to double down on that notion with two genuine duds, mother! (2017), which was so awful it made me angry; and The Whale (2022), which won Brendan Fraser his Best Actor Oscar but was a wildly insensitive story about morbid obesity, played by someone who was not obese (don’t even get me started on the stupid double entendre of the title). The only Darren Aronofsky featurre film I haven’t mentioned here is Noah (2014), the one film of his I never bothered to see because it was such a wild departure, was based on a story in the Bible, and was poorly reviewed to boot.

It does mean, however, that Darren Aronofsky has not quite stayed consistent as a director who has earned my loyalty based on his name alone. For a while there I thought he had that status, along the same lines as the Coen Brothers or Pedro Almodóvar or Christopher Nolan. And then his most recent movies went from not worth seeing to dreadful to barely tolerable, so when the trailers began running for Caught Stealing, I could only be cautiously optimistic at best.

This time, the optimism paid off. The one thing I’ll give Aronofsky credit for when it comes to every one of his movies is that everything he makes is unlike anything else he’s ever made—and yet you can find his sensibility somewhere deep in all of them. Caught Stealing isn’t quite a comedy, but it has several funny moments, making it the closest thing to a comedy he’s ever made. He clearly has both a sense of humor and a soft spot, as evidenced by the almost-incongruously cute animation element of the closing credits.

Caught Stealing is more of a farce, albeit one with plenty of gritty violence in it. My favorite thing about it is the lead character, Hank (Austin Butler, excellent as always), is a regular-guy bartender living in 1998 New York City, and although he gets caught up in extraordinary circumstances, he’s no action hero. After being hospitalized by goons looking for his punk Brit neighbor Russ (a nearly-unrecognizable Matt Smith), Hank freely admits to police Detective Roman (Regina King, in a part that takes one of this movie’s many surprising turns) that he’s really scared. Eventually Hank steps up and does heroic acts, but only when he’s otherwise out of any conventional options, and never with any “alpha male” energy. This is a guy who’s vulnerable, who cries, who gets physically hurt—quite badly.

I won’t be the first to mention the violence in Caught Stealing, the knowledge of which had me going in with the expectation that I may be unsettled by it. The trailers make it look almost comic. It’s certainly startling at times, but very much to the credit of both Aronofsky and script writer Charlie Huston, the violence is only ever in service of the story and the character development.

Almost every character is given more dimension than their screen time would lead you to expect; virtually every actor in this film brings something more to what’s merely written on the page. This is particularly the case with Zoë Kravitz as Yvonne, Hank’s love interest, in spite of getting disappointingly little screen time (for justifiable reason, in terms of plotting); and both Liev Schreiber and Vincent D’Onofrio as Hasidic mafia brothers Lipa and Shmully. There is a brief detour to their mother’s place with Carol Kane that is a delight, but then Carol Kane is always a delight.

The less you know about Caught Stealing going into it, actually, the better. Not all the characters are what they seem, and some of the characters turn out to be what they seem but also helpful in surprising ways. Certain characters that would live to the end in other movies don’t here, and others that you fear for make it out okay. There’s a feeling of randomness to all these characters’ fates, but in a way that’s surprisingly satisfying. Most critically, Caught Stealing is utterly unpredictable, perhaps because people are often utterly predictable.

I will mention there is a cat. Bud the Cat, played by a remarkably chill cat named Tonic, is part of the inciting incident—Russ the neighbor asks Hank to look after Bud when he has to go home to the UK for a family emergency. Russ is tied up with all these criminals, and Hank simply has the bad luck of being in the way when the goons (including one named Colorado, played by Bad Bunny) come looking for him. Other key plot elements include the kitty litter, a fake plastic poop, and a literal key.

Caught Stealing even features character development between Hank and Bud the Cat, which is the sweetest part of the movie, even though I have a hard time believing a cat would just chill inside his open carrier whether he happens to be between a driver and an airbag, or on the beach at Coney Island. Regardless, I’m a big fan of Bud the Cat, and also a big fan of Caught Stealing.

Tonic stars in Caught Stealing.

Overall: B+

THE ACCOUNTANT²

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

The Accountant 2 is the kind of movie that makes me glad I have a monthly AMC subscription—I’m paying the same no matter how good or bad the movie is. Of course, my husband decided to join me for this one, which meant I did pay $15.21 for his ticket. I can’t say it was especially worth it.

When I saw The Accountant in 2016, I was quite pleasantly surprised by it, especially given its evenly mixed reviews. The circumstances were preposterous and the depictions of autism by non-autistic people dubious—but still, I found the characters charming, especially Ben Affleck as Christian, the title character who is a cross between Rain Man and Rambo, and who launders money through, you guessed it, an accounting business.

There’s no actual CPA accounting in The Accounting 2. So much for truth in advertising! The closest we get is the clever superscript “2” in the title design. At least that makes more sense than 33 years ago when some genius unveiled the title design for Alien³. “Alien cubed”? I don’t remember seeing a xenomorph packing around a pocket protector. At least Affleck’s Christian is actually pretty square. Honestly that title design is the most clever thing about The Accountant 2.

How many movies do we need about human trafficking, anyway? I’m all for making the focus of this film the relationship between Christian and his brother, Braxton (Jon Bernthal), but is this really the context we have to put it in? An argument could be made that this film is particularly timely, what with its empathetic depictions of undocumented migrants, particularly those who get taken advantage of by actual criminals. I have no complaints about that. I just wish this movie were better.

It’s strange to me that the critical consensus on The Accountant was evenly mixed, the critical consensus on The Accountant 2 moves slightly toward mixed-positive. The first film is definitively better, and the second one brings back all but one of the first film’s principal characters, evidently just for nostalgia’s sake (J.K. Simmons as Ray King; Cynthia Addai-Robinson as Marybeth Medina; Alison Wright as the faceless voice on Christian’s phone), though some of them don’t last long. The exception is Anna Kendrick, the one principal character who does not return. Reportedly this is because of a desire to focus on the brothers’ relationship rather than have a romantic interest. I also applaud the disinclination to include romance only for its own sake.

The Accountant 2 takes way too long to get to the aforementioned relationship between the brothers, though, the first act front loaded with plot mechanics. This is at the expense of what made Christian interesting in the first place. Instead of humanizing him, we just get more of Christian’s ticks alienating people, or more pointedly, annoying his brother. It also introduces this thing called “acquired savant syndrome,” in which extraordinary skills are developed quickly after a brain injury. Enter Anaïs (Daniella Pineda), whose post-trauma skill is being one hell of an assassin.

I did find Anaïs relatively compelling, even as she proved to be a key part of convoluted story threads related to a specific family of migrants. But that’s just because I have a thing for women who kick ass, even if (and sometimes especially when) they are villainous. In the end, though, there is not enough interaction between her and the characters we care most about, and she isn’t even present in a climactic sequence involving a two-man shootout with countless men at a Juarez prison camp where they are holding kidnapped children captive. This sequence is just like those in countless other movies, and I just got bored.

I’d have liked The Accountant 2 if it had leaned more into the dynamics of Christian’s limited number of relationships. But even his budding “buddy” relationship with his brother takes a definitive backseat to both the plot and the action, which is largely rote. The same could be said of the first film, but that one had its priorities straight, helping us get to know who Christian is. The Accountant 2 doesn’t allow us to get to know him any better, and instead ultimately has him start breaking out of comfort zones in ways the first film would have us believe are highly implausible. And that movie was highly improbable to begin with. Reuniting with this character could have been a good thing if only it felt like it was building on a strong foundation, but the foundation was shaky to begin with, rendering this a sequel that’s ultimately fruitless.

Is the stiffness all our hidden guns or it it our personalities?

Overall: C+

REBEL RIDGE

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

Rebel Ridge is not like other thrillers, and not just because it just gets better as it goes on. This is the kind of movie I wish I could have seen in a theater, except the fact that it was released on Netflix this week instead is precisely why we are able to experience a purity of writer-director Jeremy Saulnier’s vision. Such is the contradictory state of the modern film industry, where certain compromises must be made in order to produce the highest quality product—at least this way a lot more people are apt to see this, a film that absolutely deserves your attention. I went into this expectng to enjoy it, and still it significantly exceeded my expectations.

What’s so great about it, I imagine you wondering. Where do I start? With the premise: a Black man, Terry Richmond (a stupendously controlled Aaron Pierre) is railroaded by local small-town Southern law enforcement when they knock him over on his bike, find a large amount of money on him, decide to declare it suspected drug money, and seize it. The rest of the film is an extended riff on the revenge thriller genre, and although it takes its time, the way Saulnier innovates the narrative really is a thrill to watch. We’ll come back to that.

Because we have to come back to how it starts: with a real thing, an actually-legal practice called civil asset forfeiture. As stated by Summer (AnnaSophia Robb), a helpful clerk Terry encounters, “Your property has no civil rights.” Law enforcement can take whatever is yours, keep it for as long as they want, and in many cases even sell it. This is a longstanding practice, often abused by local police departments to make up for budget shortfalls. Anyone watching Rebel Ridge may watch this play out in its opening scene and feel incredulous that it feels too unrealistic—but this is one of those things where truth is wilder than fiction. This shit actually happens, and you rightly feel infuriated on Terry’s behalf.

There are countless stories and countless ways in which civil asset forfeiture fucks people over. In Terry’s case, the reason he has all this cash is because he sold a car and is taking it in to post bail for his cousin, who has been detained for possession. Terry is facing a sort of countdown because there is a plan to transfer his cousin to a prison where he faces a lethal threat from a gang he testified against.

All of this is just setup. The thrill of the story is in seeing Terry get thwarted at enough turns to make him desperate, and force him to take drastic action. But here’s where the narrative innovation comes in: this is not Rambo. Spoiler alert, Terry never kills anyone in this movie. I can only think of one death at all, and it’s not part of any of the scenes of hand-to-hand combat. Among the many things that make Rebel Ridge stand out is that, while we do get some pretty significant injuries in an excellent climactic battle scene, all of the combat in it is nonlethal. And still it’s just as thrilling as the best-choreographed gun battles in other movies—in many cases more so. Just watching him disarm his opponents, over and over again, is incredibly cool.

It should be noted, however, that Rebel Ridge is still much more suspense thriller than it is action movie. There’s a lot of plot, which Saulnier simmers expertly. It may test some viewers’ patience, but I would argue such people are missing the point, not understanding what this movie is and should be. There’s a difference between “lackluster” and “restrained.” In another writer’s or another director’s hands, this could quickly go over the top. We’ve been served more than enough decades’ worth of those movies already.

Saulnier gives the story the time and space to breathe, allowing us to understand Terry’s motivations—and, as it happens, those of the local police upending his life (and the lives of countless others) for their own gain. They are headed by Police Chief Sandy Burnne, played by Don Johnson in a bit of perfectly inspired casting. Although Terry faces off with many different cops, several of whom get their own showcase of narrative thread—particularly Zsane Jhe as an officer caught in the cross-combat at the police station—ultimately this is a battle of wills between Terry and Chief Burnne.

Summer proves to be a much more significant part of the story as it unfolds, with many different turns you won’t ever see coming—she’s the very reason Terry returns to the town he’s been told to stay away from, at the halfway point. Rebel Ridge could be thought of as two one-hour episodes, but still they fit together exceptionally well. I do have some slightly mixed feelings about how Summer is handled as a character, particularly when it comes to agency. But, she remains a compellingly competent character drawn with dimension.

In any case, I was rapt and on the edge of my seat from start to finish watching Rebel Ridge. A significant amount of that could be attributed to the affectingly ambient score by brother-musicians Brooke and Will Blair. There simply isn’t any major misstep anywhere in the production of this movie, with exceptional direction, writing and performances. Much as it pains me to admit it, sometimes one of the best movies of the year is actually a streaming release. I would still argue Rebel Ridge would play better in a movie theater, but we’ll take great cinema wherever we can get it, from the screening room to the living room.

There are many more tensions at play than what’s first noticed in any given frame.

Overall: A-

MAXXXINE

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

There was a time when actresses famous or their roles in horror films were called “Scream Queens,” and that is indeed what the title character in MaXXXine aspires to be—even though no one ever uses the phrase in the film. As it happens, Mia Goth has carved out a similar niche for herself, although it exists a few steps to the side of “Scream Queen.” I’m not sure what similar title we could give her—Feature Eater? Picture Witcher? Wackadoodle Chicken Noodle? We can worship it.

One thing that’s for certain is that Mia Goth has a vibe. And it’s one of a woman barely feigning stability. Such is the case as Maxine Mix, a porn star attempting to break into Hollywood in 1985 with the backdrop of the Night Stalker serial killer. People close to Maxine keep dying, and it’s made clear early on that the homicide detectives investigating suspect someone besides the serial killer, just trying to make the murders look like the work of the Night Stalker.

This is all fertile ground for a fun homage to eighties slasher flicks, replete with a banger soundtrack of mid-eighties pop hits. (Frustratingly, movies like this never assemble the featured pop tracks into soundtrack albums anymore; search for the title on your music streamer of choice and all you’ll get is the motion picture score. Boring!) And, for a little while, MaXXXine really is fun, with a protagonist who is delightfully damaged and demented.

We’re made to expect that Maxine can handle herself even in the face of danger. In arguably the most memorable scene in the film, she turns the tables on a would-be attacker in a dark alley, forces him to strip naked at gunpoint, and forces him to suck on the barrel of the gun before she does something kind of hilariously grotesque to him. And there was something I really liked about this scene, the way it flips the script on so many of those old slasher movies with helpless women victims: here, it’s the man who is degraded onscreen, the woman with the agency. It has the exact same exploitative vibe, just with the gender roles reversed.

But, strangely, I’d have to say that’s where MaXXXine peaks, although there’s another pretty great scene involving a man trapped in a car getting compacted. MaXXXine has nearly all the elements you’re looking for in a movie of this sort—except that it presents itself as something with more depth than what it’s imitating, and in the end, it actually doesn’t.

As time goes on, and we get hints of Maxine’s secret past, our protagonist proves to be more helpless than you might expect—resourceful for sure, but she gets out of multiple scrapes only with the assistance of others, mostly men. And when her secret past is revealed and becomes an integral part of a climactic sequence around the Hollywood sign, it’s all fairly disappointing. I wanted more out of this movie, which starts out with an inventive spirit and then just gets lazy with it.

On the upside, MaXXXine still has a compellingly retro-moody tone, and more importantly, very good performances, particularly by Goth, and by Elizabeth Debicki as a ruthlessly ambitious film director. Several other actors are a bit wasted, though: Bobby Cannavale and Michelle Monaghan as the two relatively dull detectives; Kevin Bacon as a dirtbag private investigator; Giancarlo Esposito as a shady agent. I just wish the script were better. For all its retro neon-mood recreations, this film still feels very much a product of its time, when homage runs rampant without anything new to say.

I don’t know if she’ll blow you away but she might cock your gun.

Overall: B-

HIT MAN

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

It’s been a dismal June so far for theatrical wide releases, and I’ll have to include the end of May in that: May 31 had no major movie releases at all, less because of the inevitable shift of moviegoing habits in a post-covid world—although that’s certainly part of it—than because of countless postponements after last year’s writer and actor strikes. And for the record: any movie studio crying about the sad state of box office returns so far this year has only themselves to blame, as they could have accepted the unions’ quite reasonable demands from the start instead of digging in their heels for months in 2023.

So, here we are. This weekend, there actually are theatrical wide releases—a couple of them—it’s just just that I don’t personally have any interest in them. If you thought you might come here for my take on Bad Boys Ride or Die, you were mistaken. (I don’t flatter myself that any of you particularly did, mind you. Still, I’d have to be actually getting paid for it to write a review of that movie, in which I would likely write much about my undampened distaste for Will Smith. And even if Smith had never slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars, I’d have little faith that his new film was any good, given 2020’s Bad Boys for Life certainly wasn’t.) The other is The Watchers, by Ishana Shyamalan, which is clearly “M. Night Lite,” and: no thank you.

What to do in the absence of anything worth seeing in theaters, then? Something I haven’t done in five months: turn to a streamer—specifically, Netflix—for a significant release to watch and review. And releases like this going to streamers instead of theaters, at least some of the time, is clearly here to stay. There is no question that five years ago, a film starring Glen Powell, cowritten by Glen Powell and Richard Linklater, and directed by Richard Linklater—this is the guy who gave us Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise, School of Rock, and Boyhood—would have gotten wide release in theaters. It was indeed five years ago when his last live action narrative feature got a wide release, and that one wasn’t even particularly good.

Admittedly I found something immediate to get past about Hit Man—which was originally set to be released around the same time as The Killer (also on Netflix!), ostensibly similarly themed but a very, very different movie. The visual vibe of the movie, I can’t quite put my finger on it precisely, except to say that it feels a little . . . low-rent. A bit like a “TV movie,” to be honest. And yet, as the story unfolds, it somehow fits: both as a Richard Linklater film in particular, and as part of the film’s knowingly yet deeply subtle cornball tone.

Unlike The Killer, and hundreds of other films before it, Hit Man openly acknowledges that “hit men” as we think of them in pop culture are a myth: “Hit men don’t really exist,” says Powell’s title character, Gary Johnson. But Gary has been hired by the New Orleans police department to pose as the “hit men” would-be murderers expect to see, in sting operations to arrest them before the kill can actually happen. And this is a side gig: Gary’s day job is as a psychology and philosophy professor, scenes of which provide fertile ground for scenes exploring the nature of identity, which fall just short of metatextual.

It takes a while for the real crux of the story to take hold: after helping arrest several would-be criminals, Gary, in one of the many disguises he’s thrown himself into with this job (many of which are subtly but very effectively funny), comes across a young woman who is meeting him about killing her asshole husband. But this time, seeing a young, beautiful, and seemingly very vulnerable woman named Madison (all of it expertly played by Adria Arjona; hopefully with a great career ahead of her), Gary—as “Ron”—convinces her to change her mind, much to the consternation of the NOPD.

There are too many fantastic plot turns that ensue from there, so I won’t spoil them. Just do yourself a favor and watch the movie on Netflix. Viewers should be forewarned about one thing, though: I truly don’t know why anyone is listing this movie under “action” as a genre. Crime and comedy, sure; but action—there is none to speak of in this movie. If you have any familiarity with Richard Linklater whatsoever, you’d know not to expect it, as his films are all constructed around dialogue. We see a literal gun onscreen maybe once, and in neither case does it even get fired.

And yet: people do get killed in this movie. This is the genius of Richard Linklater, if you know how to appreciate his specific brand of art. Hit Man has some uniquely clever story turns, if not outright plot twists, and they are quite satisfying. He has an impressive knack for economy of storytelling, particularly on a budget: consider the police officer Jasper (Austin Amelio), a thorn in the NOPD’s side due to his suspension after violent excessive force on some teenagers, an incident that was caught on tape. This information is only ever revealed through well-written dialogue you barely even register as expositional, and (thankfully) we never see the video footage—although the Police Chief does hold up his phone at one point while talking about it, while his phone isn’t even on.

Jasper inevitably becomes a crucial plot point himself, worming his way in between Gary and Madison. Jasper is a deeply annoying douchebag of a man, which is a credit to how Austin Amelio plays him, which makes his fate by the end of the film, thematically complex as it is, deeply satisfying. Just about all the performances are great in Hit Man, but none are as great as Glen Powell’s, an undeniably handsome man who manages to be believably dorky as a professor and then convincingly hot as “Ron,” who is the guy Madison is into. Still, the montage of character disguises Gary takes on is great fun.

Hit Man on the whole is just a fun hang, an impressive achievement for a film in which little more than talking and plotting actually takes place onscreen. I suppose we could argue that’s what makes this perfect for a streamer release—there are no special effects and no action set pieces to make anyone insist it should be seen on the big screen. I would counter that there’s something to be said for seeing a fun movie of any sort with an audience, where there can be a sense of collective enjoyment. On the other hand, no theatrical release would have the breadth of reach that Netflix now does, and it does make me happy to think how many people will see, and likely enjoy, this movie.

This is the most action you’ll see in this movie—but it’s still really fun I swear!

Overall: B+

LOVE LIES BLEEDING

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

As 21st-century noirs go, Love Lies Bleeding is pretty great—until it takes an inexplicably wild swing at the end. I would recommend this film, but I would have to warn you about that at the same time. I won’t spoil what happens, except to say it’s somewhat debatable whether what happens is something we are meant to believe is actually happening, or if it’s a character fantasy. I am not averse to wild swings as a concept, mind you; I just want them to be clear in their purpose or what they represent, which is really lacking here—in spite of several allusions to it earlier in the film, which only make at least that much sense in retrospect. Without the wild turn at the end, I might have felt confident that this could be one of the year’s best movies.

It could be argued that, so far at least, it still is. There’s a lot of far worse stuff out there, after all. It’s just that there’s a sequence of maybe five minutes in this movie that really straddles the line between subversive and bafflingly weird.

All that aside, Love Lies Bleeding is a dark, twisted, violent, lesbian romance thriller that is absolutely worth a look. It’s beautifully shot in New Mexico, starting with an opening shot that we only realize well into the story later was the camera lifting out of a ravine that plays into the plot. And it’s edited with a unique sort of precision, moving the plot forward without any excess bloat while keeping the pace at a steady clip. Best of all, it’s exceptionally well cast, with Kristen Stewart as gym manager Lou, who falls for mysterious body builder Jackie, played actual body builder Katy O'Brian, wandering in from out of town. They both get increasingly mixed up with Lou’s gun range owner and insect enthusiast dad Lou Sr (Ed Harris, with both his telltale bald head and a ring of hair that is nuts-long, and somehow it fits the character.)

We learn early on that Lou doesn’t speak to her father, and one of many refreshing elements of Love Lies Bleeding is that this estrangement has nothing to do with Lou’s sexuality—evidently he couldn’t give half a shit about that. I expected some kind of cathartic confrontation between Lou and her father by the end, but much of the story goes by without giving a sense of any catharsis coming with an earned payoff. This is where director and co-writer Rose Glass’s expert construction of the story comes in, because eventually we get just enough revealed about Lou’s dark history with her father, and we understand perfectly why she doesn’t speak to him.

In the meantime, both Lou and Jackie find themselves suffering the consequences of impulsive, violent mistakes. It should be noted that, in at least two scenes, something pretty gruesome occurs. In the first, we see the same shockingly horrid wound so many times, it begins to feel like Rose Glass is toying with us. She’s certainly having fun with this movie: the comic moments are few and far between, but when they do come, they are pretty hilarious.

And that’s the bottom line with Love Lies Bleeding: this is a postmodern take on film noir, with its own sensibility, in a world that is dark and dangerous and yet you love being witness to it. It takes a brief detour into “Wait, what?” territory that I could have lived without—but then immediately reeled me right back in with one final bit of humor, and then a bit of interpretive dance over the end credits. You kind of have to be there. Just because it isn’t perfect doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go there.

I don’t know if you’ll root for them exactly but you’ll still want to know where they’re going.

Overall: B+

THE KILLER

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

The Killer could also have been called The Assassin’s Odyssey. It’s presented in a series of “Chapters,” each in a different location where the title character (Michael Fassbender) makes a kill. Or, as in the case of the deliberately tedious opening sequence, attempts to make a kill. His botched hit makes for the entire premise of the film: he stupidly heads home, stupidly waits an extra night, discovers his girlfriend severely injured in Santo Domingo, and spends the rest of the film hunting down all of those responsible for harming her.

I’m hard pressed to find this plot to be exceptional or memorable, except that, ironically, it is exceptionally and memorably executed. In spite of it veering on being self-satisfied, the editing, and particularly the sound editing are consistently clever. This is a David Fincher film released as a Netflix movie on November 10, after a theatrical release limited enough that I was not able to see it theatrically—and I found myself, watching it at home, rather wishing I had seen it in a theater. The sound editing alone would have made it a much better, certainly more immersive experience.

It’s an objectively fun watch even at home, at least once it gets past that opening scene, hanging out with The Killer in an abandoned WeWork office, waiting out the right time to shoot a mark in a building across the street, and truly overwhelming us with voiceover narration. Voiceover is often pointless and lazy, but it proves to have a point here, coming from an unreliable narrator with a penchant for self-delusion. I was bracing myself for the voiceover to overwhelm the entire film, but mercifully, it’s used comparatively sparingly once that first shot is missed. It’s the inciting incident, and it comes roughly 15 minutes into the film.

The locations of each “Chapter” span the globe and virtually every corner of the States: Paris, Santo Domingo, New Orleans, Florida, New York, Chicago. Each has a vibe distinct from all the others. Only one—Florida—proves to feature a legitimate action sequence, with his mark getting the job on The Killer after he’s crept into his house in the middle of the night. And to be clear, the sequence is tense, and thrilling to watch, with excellent fight choreography.

This is what I like most about The Killer: each change of scenery is given room to breathe, all the while with The Killer not so much getting character development, as gradually revealing his subtle ineptitude. This is a guy who exudes confidence, and then regularly makes preventable mistakes. Much as I lapped up the crackling energy of the Floridian house fight, my favorite of all the hits we follow The Killer on is the one in New York, where he catches up with the one woman on his list. Even when the movie is already quite good, Tilda Swinton manages to elevate anything she’s in. Her sequence is the one with real dialogue, a verbal sparring partner with Michael Fassbender who not only matches his talents but exceeds them.

It seems a lot more common for a film to run out of steam, its second half being the weaker half. The Killer achieves the inverse of this, in fact with each scene being better than the last. That opening scene left me skeptical, but by the time The Killer meets up with “The Lawyer” (Charles Parnell) and fatally ropes in his secretary (Kerry O’Malley), revealing to us some bullshit about empathy in his inner monologue, it becomes clear that The Killer is not your standard hitman movie.

I wasn’t quite as satisfied as I wanted to be by the end of this movie, essentially a series of creatively violent vignettes. So many of the preceding scenes so far exceeded my expectations, though, I’m willing to let it go. Everything builds effectively on what came before it, and the destination being a bit hollow means less when the journey is the point.

You want your sociopaths to be at least competent.

Overall: B+