SENTIMENTAL VALUE

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

Anyone with a thing for juicy family dramas should look no further than Sentimental Value, Norwegian director Joachim Trier’s follow-up to his similarly excellent The Worst Person in the World (2021). The person he cast in the starring role is also the same in both films: the wonderful Renate Reinsve, here playing Nora Borg, an accomplished stage actress in Oslo, where she lives in a home that has been in her family for generations.

If I had any minor nitpick about Sentimental Value, it would be how no one ever talks about the hugeness of this house, which appears to have three stories and an unspecified but certainly large number of rooms. The generational history is discussed as far back as Nora’s great great grandparents, but I don’t recall any family iteration being larger than a family of four: two parents and two kids. Clearly more recent generations aquired the house through inheritance; maybe earlier generations actually made it a multi-generational home? I kept wondering how the hell any of them kept it clean. None of these generations are shown with a housekeeper.

Surely it would make sense that such a house would be easier to afford in the era of World War II—today, in the United States at least, this house would have been converted into an apartment complex long ago. Granted, this is Norway, and a lot of things work differently there—although the simple tenets of capitalism infect every corner of the globe. And, to be sure: this house figures prominently in the plot of Sentimental Value, a beautiful repository for collective memory and generational trauma, from Nora’s grandmother’s Nazi imprisonment and subsequent suicide inside the house, to Nora and her sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, also excellent) witnessing the volatility of their parents’ marriage until their father, Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård), leaves and spends the better part of the rest of their lives estranged from them.

Sentimental Value opens shortly after the death of Nora and Agnes’s mother, a character we really never get to know. This is about their relationship with their father, a once-famous director who has not made a film in 15 years. But, he has now written an incredible script, with the lead part tailor made for Nora, who wants nothing to do with it. Searching for other options, Gustav turns to an American actress he meets at a local film festival: Rachel Kemp, played by Elle Fanning in a really tricky part that she nails. Rachel is curious about the deep sadness of the suicidal character she’s playing, and Gustave has to tell her more than once that it’s not about his mother. Meanwhile, he asks Rachel to dye her hair the same color as Nora. (And incidentally, Elle Fanning and Renate Reinsve bear an uncanny resemblance. If not for the different accents, they could more believably play sisters than the sisters we actually see onscreen here.)

What Gustav has written is highly fictionalized but still has clear similarities to his own life and family—and this is where we return, yet again, to the house. Gustav wants to shoot the film in the family home. He also wants to use his young grandson, Erik (Øyvind Hesjedal Loven, the only cast member who is clearly not a practiced actor, just like the character), in the production—just like he once did Agnes, in a previous World War II-era film. Agnes was a great screen presence at the time, but did not pursue acting as a career as Nora did. Gustav, ever the undependable dad, complains of his dislike for live theater, and so never comes to Nora’s plays.

All of this comes together in a plot that is complex but never difficult to follow, and perhaps may even be a bit slowly paced for some viewers. It’s worth noting that although this is a family drama about two sisters with deep resentment toward their father, there are no histrionics here, no scene made for an Oscar clip. Where other movies of this sort go for familial cruelty, this one leans more heavily into a kind of benign neglect. There’s something about Stellan Skarsgård’s performance, though, that still elicits empathy. Few people can convey subtly tortured interiority like Stellan Skarsgård.

Gustav is a man who can’t help who he is, and doesn’t really know how to change—certainly not now at the age of 70. But, over time he uses this new script of his to convey how he has an uncanny understanding of Nora in particular, the daughter he wrote it for. In the end, it is through their art that they finally find a way to connect, and this is the subtle but very sweet note on which the story ends. Sentimental Value takes a sort of scenic route through its themes, never exactly a thrill of an experience but one with a finesse that stays with you.

A father-daughter relationship not quite like others you’ve seen.

Overall: A-

TRAIN DREAMS

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

Who knew that Train Dreams had such a connection to Spokane, Washington—the city where I grew up? Set mostly in the Idaho panhandle over decades starting in 1917, Robert Granier (Joel Edgerton) works mostly in the logging industry, but spends a short time on the Spokane International Railway, and he later takes the train for visits into Spokane. There is a brief sequence, very late in the film, of Robert walking the streets of downtown Spokane, passing old buildings I remember vividly from my teenage years. There’s a glimpse of the clocktower on the Review building, which has stood since 1891—somewhere in the vicinity of when Robert was born. The sequence is set in the 1960s, and Robert has a brief exchange with a woman on the street as they watch live footage of the Earth from outer space on a TV in a store window. The sequence also features a barely-seen glimpse of the 16-story Washington Trust Financial Center, which was not built until 1973, but I guess I’ll forgive the movie for that.

As is typical of film productions, most of the filming of Train Dreams was not quite where it was actually set. Aside from the brief excursion to Spokane, which is located about 22 miles from the state line with Idaho, all the scenes with Robert and his wife Gladys (Felicity Jones) are set in Idaho. There are many scenes of Robert working industry logging jobs far from home, but this still must be mostly in Idaho; we are told very early on that Robert never makes it further east than a few miles into Montana. These sequences feature deeply lush greenery that is very believable as Northern Idaho, where I have spent a lot of time. Nearly all of this film, however, was shot in Eastern Washington. The Inland Northwest is the Inland Northwest, I guess.

We get seldom enough film production oner here where I now live in Seattle; Spokane’s history with mainstream film is even spottier, with truly great films set there being rare indeed. Train Dreams represents a truly unusual circumstance in which I am jealous of their access to theatrical release: Train Dreams was just released today on Netflix, which was the only way I was able to watch it. As far as I can find, this film got no theatrical release in my local market at all. Netflix did their eternally frustrating thing with Oscar-worthy productions, giving it a limited release in order for it to qualify. I guess they took pity on Spokane, allowing locals to see it as it is best experienced: it’s currently playing there at the Magic Lantern Theatre.

And I do wish I could have seen this in a theater, it is so beautifully shot. Robert Grainier spends a lot of time onscreen doing timber industry jobs, mostly chopping down trees, and sometimes barely avoiding tragic ends from falling limbs or sometimes entire trees. Indeed he witnesses the deaths of other workers several times. The train of the title is somewhat misleading, given how much more time is spent with timber. But, during a job on the railroad, he witnesses the casual killing of a Chinese railroad worker, and this haunts him for the rest of his life, often in his dreams.

It should be noted that Train Dreams is very quiet, meditative, and a kind of gradual easing into sorrow. One might even spend some of the first half of the film wondering what the point is, as we simply see scenes from Robert’s younger days, the way he happens upon the woman he falls in love with without actively searching for her. They build a house together, Gladys raises chickens, and has their baby. I knew going in that Train Dreams is largely about grief—this seems to be a very popular motif in film of recent years—and that had to mean Robert was destined to lose his family. I kept wondering how it would happen and what level of horror would accompany it. This is, indeed, a turning point in the story with true horror from Robert’s point of view, especially with no definitive closure as to the specifics. I’ll just say that, at the very least, from the audience perspective, at least this particular loss is not the result of any human cruelty. It’s closer to the indifference of nature.

In any event, Robert is left alone, and director and co-writer Clint Bentley—who also directed and co-wrote last year’s spectacular Sing Sing—very effectively conveys a potent loneliness in this man, for basically the rest of the film. That is, until, for one brief moment, he experience a genuine moment of connection. It is brief indeed, but also spectacularly executed: it’s a deeply moving moment, and one that brought tears to my eyes without employing any of the typical “sad movie” tricks.

Train Dreams is the odd kind of movie that has a melancholic tone that somehow also has a comfort to it. In the wake of the horrid scene with the Chinese railroad worker, Robert regularly encounters people who offer him understanding and kindness. There are three such key characters as the story unfolds: an annoyingly talkative shirking but kind old man played by William H. Macy; a local Native shopkeeper who looks after Robert in his deepest throes of grief, played by Nathaniel Arcand; and a kind of hermit kindred spirit in a forestry worker played by Kerry Condon. In a scene where they share some tea and have an unusually heartfelt conversation, the forestry worker reveals she also recently lost her husband, and when Robert asks if he sounds crazy, she astutely notes that when something like this happens, nothing you do is crazy. At the end of this exchange, she observes that they are “just waiting to see what we’ve been left here for,” and that line has really stuck with me.

Robert does also encounter other people who treat him with callousness, particularly younger colleagues as he begins to realize he is aging out of the manual work of timber. Still, he lives his entire life as a quiet, stoic man who really never changes, except perhaps in that brief moment near the end. But sometimes it’s only a brief moment that can make all the difference, and it was indeed the moment that opened up my love for this quietly beautiful movie.

Robert keeps walking the path set out before him.

Overall: A-

DIE MY LOVE

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

Die My Love is very much in conversation with If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. The key difference is that If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is much more straightforwardly about motherhood; Die My Love is about a mentally ill woman who also happens to be a mother.

Granted, in what is arguably Die My Love’s best scene, Jennifer Lawrence’s Grace character chats with another mother at the party who specifically mentions post-natal depression, which would suggest that is specifically what this film is about. What’s curious about this is how Grace, for the most part, seems to have no problem with motherhood itself, or her baby. Indeed, at one point she says of her baby, “He’s perfect. It’s everything else that’s fucked.” But, perhaps that is the point: depression is not marked by logic. Furthermore, many of Grace’s frustrations actually make sense: her husband, Jackson (Robert Pattinson) has suddenly lost his sexual appetite for Grace, even though Grace’s sex drive has not waned. And Jackson travels for work, leaving Grace to feel crushing boredom as a stay-at-home mom.

It’s worth noting that Die My Love is directed by a woman (We Need to Talk About Kevin’s Lynne Ramsay), and co-written by two women (Lynne Ramsay and Lady Macbeth’s Alice Birch, along with Small Things Like These’s Enda Walsh, who curiously gets top billing among the writers). Maybe there is something about Die My Love that is just impossible to understand if you have never been pregnant or given birth to a child. Except, I must admit, I found If I Had Legs I’d Kick You to be much more coherent, even with its sometimes abstract style, and certainly more substantive in content.

Die My Love takes a far less linear approach, jumping back and forth in time, from the beginnings of Grace and Jackson’s relationship, to the period shortly after the birth of their child. The film leans so far into its nonlinear structure that, when it moves to a wedding sequence, I assumed it was a flashback to before the child was born. But, then you see the baby at the wedding. And this occurs well after many things happen that any reasonable person would think maybe these two should break up.

To be clear, Die My Love is very much about Grace’s mental illness—but within the context of her relationship with Jackson. Jackson is understandably befuddled by Grace’s crazy behaviors, but he’s also kind of an asshole. Shortly after the birth of the child, he’s not very locked into parenthood, and seems to operate under the assumption that Grace will assume all such responsibilities. And any guy who brings a dog home as a surprise to a spouse already dealing with a toddler is an asshole in my book. That dog, who is immediately quite literally an incessantly whiny bitch, becomes a significant plot point. Usually the audience wants to side with the dog in any movie, but I’m not so sure in this case. The dog can’t really be blamed. I blame Jackson, who expects Grace to take care of it, and certainly never bothers to train it.

It’s a bit difficult to parse, with Grace, how much of her erratic behavior can be attributed to innate mental illness and how much is a result of her crushing boredom spending all of her days with no one but a toddler—with the exception of a mysterious figure she has an affair with, played by LaKeith Standfield. Stanfield is an incredibly gifted actor and he keeps getting cast in parts that waste his talents, including this one. There is a single scene that reveals Stanfield’s character’s own life, and although it gives him some dimension, it does nothing to broaden his context or purpose in Grace’s life beyond sexual release.

Grace, for her part, does some wild shit—not least of which is approaching Stanfield’s character when she sees him with his wife and their wheelchair user daughter in a store parking lot. She has a propensity for injuring herself in truly startling ways, such as hurling herself through a sliding glass door, in a desperate attempt for attention from her husband. Grace’s mental illness is quite apparent far earlier than anyone does anything about it. You’d think smashing through a sliding glass door would be a pretty big red flag, but Grace does at least two more things at least as dangerous, if not more so, before she is taken to get any professional help.

To be fair, I suppose, not everyone understands when things are truly critical under these sorts of circumstances. And god knows, Jackson isn’t the most understanding person in Grace’s life. In fact, it’s Jackson’s mother, Pam (an always-wonderful Sissy Spacek), who is the only person who grants Grace any true empathy or understanding. Even she tells Grace, “Everyone goes a little loopy in the first year.” Grace doesn’t understand at first that Pam is talking about motherhood, and even when it becomes clear she avoids the issue by cutting her visit short.

The performances are excellent all around, but there is something about Ramsay’s style that leaves me a bit ambivalent about Die My Love, which falls a bit short on coherence and is long on metaphor that lacks full clarity. Again, perhaps people who have actually given birth will see some clarity here, but this was the sort of thing that If I Had Legs I’d Kick You did far better. I understood the frustration and desperation in that film thanks to Rose Byrne’s breathtaking performance. Jennifer Lawrence is also excellent, but I also kind of didn’t get it. I suppose that may be the point. With metal illness, there isn’t a lot to “get.” Die My Love, then, is a film that spends more time demonstrating that fact than giving us reason to empathize with Grace.

Die My Love is also pretty grim and hopeless, especially as it pertains to Grace, even after she has gone in and out of a mental health facility. Ramsay gives us no clean answers, no neatly tied bows to the story, and I respect that. There is even a dark beauty to the metaphorical forest fire that ends the film. There’s a peculiar dissonance to an artistic beauty that also conveys a deep sense of despair, and that might just be what you leave this film feeling.

It looks like the baby is trying as hard as we are to make sense of his mother’s behavior.

Overall: B

IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT

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

I wonder if I’m over here on Weirdo Island, thinking about Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho while watching Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident? There is almost no thematic connection between these two films, although Psycho features a serial killer and It Was Just an Accident features a near-murder. What the two films have in common are their unusual narrative structure, particularly an opening, extended sequence leading us to think one person is the main character, only to find out it’s actually another person. Indeed, the first character is even attacked by the second.

We are first introduced to a nuclear family, driving through the night: a seemingly loving husband and father (Ebrahim Azizi) with his wife in the passenger seat and pop music-loving young daughter in the back seat. The cinematography is fascinating here, as it appears to be a simple mounting of the camera on the dashboard, and a lot happens in a single shot—including other cars passing, in one case with several barking dogs chasing in the other direction. Within moments, we hear the bump of an animal being hit, and the man stops the car, gets out, and investigates. The camera never shows the animal—this technique is repeated later in the film in a pointed way—but we do see bits of the man’s shadow, a view of city lights on the hills in the distance behind him, as he drags the animal out of the street. He returns to the car, and the little girl’s chipper attitude has soured. “You killed it,” she says. And the mother tries to console her. It was just an accident.

Shortly thereafter, this family’s car breaks down, and the man asks for help from men in a nearby home. This is where the perspective suddenly shifts, to another man, Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), who is hiding on the second level of the home, out of sight. Panache’s camera only ever sticks with Vahid for the rest of the film, and it’s quite a lot time before we have any idea why. This includes Vahid following the man back to his home, and following him the next day to the place his car is towed to for repair. In his own van, Vahid creeps up on him in the street, opens the passenger door hard against him, and then knocks him out with a shovel.

All of this is essentially the first act. What follows is an unsettling sort of road trip story, Vahid eventually gathering several more characters: Shiva (Mariam Afshari), a woman working as a wedding photographer; Goli and Ali (Hadis Pakbaten and Majid Panahi), the engaged couple getting their pictures taken; and Hamid (Mohamad Ali Elyashmehr), Shiva’s former partner. what is gradually revealed is that nearly all of these people, with the one exception of Ali, were once arrested by the Iranian regime, and tortured for months by a man with an identifiable limp due to a prosthetic leg named Eghbal—and they are all varying levels of convinced that the man we met at the start of the film is this man.

It may seem that I have revealed a lot of detail about this film, but believe it or not, that is all mostly the setup. It does take a good deal of time to get through, but it’s how we get here: the way Panahi, who also wrote the script, explores the psychological effects of a deeply oppressive and authoritarian regime. The man who might be Eghbal easily plants a seed of doubt in Vahid’s mind as to whether he’s got the right guy, which is why he goes on an odyssey of sorts, gathering acquaintances who had also been arrested in the hopes that they can confirm the man’s identity, even though they were all blindfolded the entire time they were held captive and never actually saw him. They heard him, they felt him, they smelled him. For some, the familiarity they find is not quite convincing enough. For others, it’s triggering to the point of instantaneous rage. For all of them, it’s maddening.

Eventually all of them are traveling the city in Vahid’s van, maybe-Eghbal’s drugged, bound and unconscious body locked in a trunk that is curiously the perfect size for a grown man. There’s a number of exterior, urban shots of this cast with said van, and I often wondered how this film was made. Much like the similarly excellent The Seed of the Sacred Fig, directed and written by Mohammad Rasoulof and opened earlier this year, this was filmed in secret in Iran. Indeed, Panahi and Rasoulof are just two of many artists who have been arrested in the past for speaking out against Iran’s authoritarian regime.

And the roving band of characters in It Was Just an Accident have many of their own conversations about it. They talk and they argue, they debate and they yell—often about the tension between desire for vengeance and what it means to become just as violent and cruel as your oppressors. Many of their exchanges bring to mind parallel points of view here at home in the United States. This is less a reflection of cross-cultural commentary than of universal tensions among different societies. We eventually find nearly all these characters pushed to the emotional brink in one way or another, and It Was Just an Accident proves sneakily unsettling in the end. Panahi often holds a shot for a very long time, always with purpose, and especially in the very last shot of the film, which calls into question whether Vahid did the right thing in the end, or indeed what the point of any of it was. This makes It Was Just an Accident sound pretty bleak, and I suppose it is. It also paints a vivid picture of what authoritarianism does to the regular people subjected to it.

Overall: A-

A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE

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

All my life, I had this vision the thirty minutes or so it might take for a nuclear missile to reach the United States, and how I would spend those last moments, counting down the clock to obliteration. This vision always presupposed knowledge of the oncoming missile at the moment of its launch, giving time for us to . . . what? Prepare? Well, A House of Dynamite, directed by Kathryn Bigelow (Zero Dark Thirty) and written by Noah Oppenheim (Jackie), and streaming on Netflix now, has completely disabused me of this notion.

Once people even realize a missile is on its way, the countdown has already begun. And these are government and military employees with high security clearance, far removed from average citizens. These people have to spend precious minutes ascertaining whether the threat is even real. It occurred to me, while watching A House of Dynamite, that I really should have considered this long ago: the people spending all that time making decisions first on what's real and then on the select few who get whisked to some version of safety—they're not spending any time sending credible warnings to the masses. Hell, in this movie they spend several of those crucial minutes just ascertaining what the target is. In all likelihood, as is what happens in this movie, anyone just living their lives in a target city would simply be obliterated before they had any idea what hit them.

Is there a strange comfort in that? Maybe there is. One could argue it's not the worst way to go, with no fear or panic preceding it.

And that's a ton of what we see in A House of Dynamite: a huge, ensemble cast of characters having the reality of impending cataclysm settle in. A missile launch is detected, and in the first moments, everyone is blasé about it. They keep track of the trajectory, and realize it's not slowing down and it's headed for us. It soon enough becomes clear that in the best case scenario, ten million Americans are killed instantly and global destabilization ensues—and that is if we don’t fire any retaliatory shots.

There’s a fascinating angle to this film, in that the aforementioned 30 minutes are not enough to ascertain who fired the shot and thus who we should even fire against. Quick discussions are had about preemptive strikes against we could reasonably expect to take advantage of the situation. But Bigelow and Oppenheim never provide us with any of those answers—not what country the missile is coming from; not whether the bomb even detonates (sometimes the don’t, we’re told); not what the President decides about whether to launch our own strikes. This is the Cath-22 of the modern age, not quite as good as that classic film but with much to recommend on its own—because this is about the questions themselves, not the answers. This is about moral dilemmas under the deepest of pressures.

The three-part stucture of A House of Dynamite is arguably a bit of a gimmick: it’s told in real-time, from the moment of detection to the moment of impact, three times over: first in the Situation Room in communication with The Pentagon and Fort Greely, where attempts at ground-based interceptors will be lauched; then at United States Strategic Command (STRATCOM) in Nebraska; and then, inevitably, from the White House. Each of these chapters showcases separate groups of the ensemble cast, all of them interacting with each other: among the many familiar faces are Rebecca Ferguson as a Situation Room senior officer; Anthony Ramos as the commander at Fort Greely; Tracy Letts as the warmongering commander at STRATCOM; Jarred Harris as the Secretary of Defense; and Idris Elba as the President. In many cases, we first see important characters as only a face in one among many screens like an emergency Zoom meeting, then shift to the perspective of the room they are in, in another chapter.

Kathryn Bigelow unfolds this story in a very straightforward, procedural style, much like her multiple previous films set in wartime, but even more procedural in this case. The few moments that characters pause to show emotion are all the more effective. All of this doesn’t allow for a great deal of character development, but that is entirely beside the point: this is about making choices in the face of urgency. And side note, this is maybe not the best movie to watch about such a scenario with the current people actually in charge in Washington, D.C. This is unsettling shit, not the least because it quite pointedly reminds us that while things like climate change have long rivaled it as an existential threat, the nuclear threat to the world is very real and still goes on.

There are precious few genuinely amusing moments in A House of Dynamite, but one of them is when the President himself says how this phrase, “a house full of dyanmite,” was something he “heard on a podcast.” It’s something that feels both on the nose and very plausible. For the most part, these are just a whole bunch of regular people caught up in extraordinary circumstances. Even those who are on evacuation lists among all connected staff across these agencies can feel arbitrary. One character is extracted even though she’s only been in the position for a few months. “Why does she get to go and we don’t?” another woman asks. A fair question. Who in their right mind could expect things to be fair in these moments? But who in these moments would be in their right mind?

I feel a little ambivalent about what purpose this film serves, exactly—I found it to be riveting and unsettling, but to what end? It opened my eyes to at least one stark reality, I guess: not only would I not have any hope of escape from this sort of attack, but in a targeted city I wouldn’t even know it was coming. Surely Seattle would be on the list of targets. Whew! What a relief!

Yeah, you heard that right. It’s time to put you head between your knees and kiss your ass goodbye.

Overall: B+

IF I HAD LEGS I'D KICK YOU

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

You don’t want to know what a childless man thinks about If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. Not even an empathetic girly-man has thoughts of any true relevance, although that’s less because of the “girly” than still because of being childless. It’s possible no one of any gender who does not have children can truly relate to what’s going on in this movie. So why are you reading this, then? Go find a review by someone who actually knows what they’re talking about!

. . . Okay. Are they gone? It’s just us now. We can still talk about movie making, right? Maybe skip the wondering questions about how easily some people might be triggered by this movie, or how anyone who is easily triggered might want to steer clear of this movie? After all—trigger warning!—this movie features themes of both suicide and child abandonment (by multiple characters, no less). Oh, wait. I just put those questions right here. Crap!

Here’s what I can tell you with actual authority: If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is deeply stressful, from beginning to end. There have been many comparisons to Uncut Gems because they are apt: the main character is in every frame, and the camera’s point of view leads our desire, with increasing desperation, for this character to make anything but the bad, worst choice. In this case, it’s Linda, a married mother who is at the end of her rope as she cares for a sick child while her husband is away for work for weeks at a time.

Here is the most important thing you should know about this: Linda is played by Rose Byrne, who gives a breathtaking performance. She absolutely should be in the Best Actress Oscar conversation—and reportedly, thankfully, she is, for now at least. The challenge, maybe, is getting enough people to see this incredible film with its stunningly versatile lead actor. I think writer-director Mary Bronstein should also be in the Oscar conversation, but she is, alas, a lot less so.

I knew I was going to be into this movie from its opening sequence, in which Linda brings her child home, the child is first to notice flooding on the bathroom floor, and when Linda moves into another room to investigate, she sees water leaking through the ceiling—and then a giant hole suddenly bursts through, gushing water all over the room. The camera pulls into the darkness of the hole, until the screen goes black, except for some curved streaks of light that suggest an ultrasound. It’s very unclear whether this is actually a dream or not, and this is when the opening titles appear. And this was where I was immediately locked in: This is my kind of movie.

Bronstein makes a lot of stylistic choices that are both very unusual and work almost shockingly well. The child is never named, and until the very end, we never even see her, even though she is often in the scene, and we hear her. Like any normal child, she talks a great deal and nags her bedraggled mom about trivial things. It’s just that they also have conversations about when and how a tube will be removed, and how much food she needs to eat so she can gain enough weight for doctors to allow it to happen. We never learn the exact nature of the child’s health condition, except that it requires a great deal of maintenance by her mother, refilling bags of liquid and making sure machinery is beeping in ways that are not alarming.

Bronstein is on record about her choice to keep the child out of frame at all times: because this is Linda’s story and not the child’s, and because the natural instinct is always for the viewer to empathize with the child first, Bronstein doesn’t even give us that opportunity. Not only is the focus exclusively on Linda, but Byrne is shot frequently in uncomfortable close-ups. I have seen this technique many times in film, and I often kind of hate it. Here it works, because it underlines the claustrophobic feeling of Linda’s entire life. And this is one of the many amazing things about If I Had Legs I’d Kick You: not one other character is shown being empathetic toward her—not her husband (Christian Slater, the one casting choice that’s somewhat distracting, because after hearing him on several hostile phone calls you don’t actually see him until the end); not her doctor (played by Bronstein herself); not even her own therapist (a part Bronstein write specifically for Conan O’Brien, who accepted and gives a solid performance in his first-ever serious role). For the most part, they actually have good reason to be exasperated rather than empathetic with her. And yet, Bronstein has crafted a story with such delicate skill that we, as the viewer, cannot help but empathize with her.

And Linda does some very bad things. She makes bad choices, mostly because she can’t take the pressure anymore. That hole in her ceiling turns out not to be a dream, but a real incident that results in her having to live in a hotel with her daughter—in a unit with a thanklessly nice neighbor played by A$AP Rocky. Linda is herself a therapist, making the very odd choice of getting therapy treatment from a colleague at her own practice, and we see three different clients who all have problems that seem trivial compared to Linda’s. Or, maybe they aren’t—but this is how Linda is seeing them, which is not the best professional position to be in. One particular client (Danielle Macdonald) becomes the source of one of the many things that go terribly wrong for Linda.

It would seem the central theme of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is the inherent guilt of being a mother, particularly one who can never feel like she’s not underwater. Linda even says at one point, “I’m not supposed to be a mom!” We can tell she loves her daughter, but she also feels overwhelmed, and has no support network, although it’s hard to tell whether there might have been a network that she just sabotaged with her own behavior. The question is whether she’ll ultimately just give up, and there is a sequence in this film where that is harrowingly unclear. “I’ll be better” is something daughter and mother say to each other at different times, and it’s perhaps not an accident that they don’t say “I’ll get better.”

This is a film that ends on the kind of hopeful note that comes with a ton of baggage. I’ll be thinking about this one for a long time, and that’s a good thing. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is constantly harrowing, sometimes darkly funny, heartbreaking and uniquely humane.

Rose Byrne gives arguably the best performance of her career.

Overall: A-

SPRINGSTEEN: DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE

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

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere is an unconventional biopic in a multitude of ways, not least of which is it’s definitively, pointedly unexciting. This is a movie about three things: the making of Bruce Springsteen’s 1982 album, Nebraska, one of the lesser-known albums of his 53-year career; depression; and childhood trauma.

This film really leans into the childhood trauma part, opening with a flashback to Bruce at 8 years old, with his parents played by Stephen Graham and Gabby Hoffman. This era of his life, always presented in black and white, is returned to consistently throughout the film. As we return to Bruce as an adult, dating a composite-character woman (Odessa Young) we never particularly care about, Springsteen is working on this album we are clearly meant to understand is informed by these childhood memories. It’s a bunch of acoustic songs, a major departure from his previous rock albums, and Springsteen is very particular about how it’s recorded, how it’s released, and how it’s marketed—which is to say, not at all.

At the end of the film, we get title cards informing us that even with no tour and no singles to support it, Nebraska still reached #3 on the album charts. It doesn’t bother to say that the album sold a million copies—an impressive number out of context to be sure, but his previous album, The River, sold five times that much; and his next album, Born in the U.S.A., sold 17 million, by far his greatest success and the 7th-best selling album of the eighties. To say that Nebraska was overshadowed by these other albums is an understatement, and it never would have sold nearly what it did without Springsteen’s other massive successes.

I had never listened to Nebraska myself. I’m listening to it literally as I write this. I have never been a Springsteen guy—I think he’s fine; he’s just not my thing—but, knowing I tend to like it when an artist does what a record executive in this film (played by David Krumholtz) calls “a folk album,” I expected to be into it. Well—it’s okay. My response to this album is about the same as my response to this film. Somewhat similarly, I noted with last year’s Bob Dylan Biopic—a far better film than this one—A Complete Unknown that I was never a Dylan guy either. I did like Timothée Chalamet’s singing performance as Bob Dylan, though; in fact I preferred that to the real Dylan. Jeremy Allen White does a pretty spot-on performance as Bruce Springsteen, including performance. But I also prefer Timothée Chalamet-as-Bob-Dylan to this.

At least A Complete Unknown, and several other music biopics before it, had moments of thrilling musical electricity. Such things are beside the point with Deliver Me From Nowhere, which is about a deeply personal album that clearly was, and clearly still is, very important to Springsteen. He was reportedly on set every day, which indicates that this film is similarly important to him. This is probably not the story most of his diehard fans would be interested in, but it’s the story he wants them to know. It’s also very drab and melancholy.

If you approach Deliver Me From Nowhere from the perspective of childhood trauma and adult depression, it becomes quite unconventional for a biopic and a fascinating examination of something rarely discussed in this context. On the other hand, the extent of this relationship with Bruce’s alcoholic father, and especially with his protective mother, is never given a great deal of depth, even with the large number of flashbacks. Most of this movie is just Bruce quietly moving through his life, recording a studio album that baffles his record label, and dwelling on these memories.

Jeremy Allen White does a very good job in the part, and Jeremy Strong gives a fine performance as his manager and friend Jon Landau, if not necessarily one that seems to justify his notorious method acting approach. Paul Walter Hauser appears as a guy helping Bruce with the recording, and Marc Maron as a studio engineer is so underused that in the first several scenes in which he appears he doesn’t even speak. At least he got to hang out and chat with Springsteen on set, seven years after Springsteen opened up about his struggles with depression on Maron’s WTF with Marc Maron podcast.

I’m all for cinematic examinations of trauma and depression, if they’re done well. They just don’t make for a very exciting music biopic, which, a bit ironically, the marketers of Bruce Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere basically promised. I find myself wondering if studio executives responded to the final product of this film the way executives did to the Nebraska albums: what are we supposed to do with this? Throw it to the wall and see if it sticks, I guess.

Deliver me to something more exciting.

Overall: B-

BLUE MOON

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

Lorenz Hart, the lyricist who was composer Richard Rogers’s professional partner for 24 years, was about five feet tall. So this was a big sticking point for me with Blue Moon, in which 5’10” Ethan Hawke was cast to play the part. This is a film directed by Richard Linklater, which by definition means it’s a low budget film, and really none of the ways in which Hawke is made to look like a small man look real or authentic. It’s a constant distraction. Are there really no talented short actors who could have been cast? Where’s Joe Pesci when you need him? Being way too old now, I guess. And too Italian-American. Lorenz Hart was Jewish.

They accomplished the physical transformation, reportedly, with “old stagecraft” techniques, including camera angles and forced-perspective similar to how they made the Hobbits look smaller in the Lord of the Rings films. At least those films also had spectacular special effects to distract from when these camera angles might otherwise be noticeable. The real issue with Hawke, however, is that he still has the proportions of a much taller man. When you see his hands, or even his head, in the same frame as those of another character, they look strangely large for how small a man he was supposed to be.

I really found all of this difficult to get past, making Blue Moon one of the most distractible films of Richard Linklater’s career. It’s also very much like a stage play, having been written by Robert Kaplow, whose only previous screenplay credit is the 2008 film Me and Orson Welles. There have been other exceptions, but this is a rare case of Linklater directing someone else’s work. And with the singular exception of an opening flashback of Hart’s death in an alley eight months later, the entirety of the film is set in a single bar, on the opening night of Rogers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!

This is a transitional moment, the opening night of Rogers and Hammrstein’s first collaboration—and, essentially, the nail in the coffin of Rogers and Hart’s collaboration. Hart did contribute five songs to one more Hammerstein musical before his death, but that was it. On this night, in this movie, Hart sits at the bar, chatting up everyone who will listen: the bartender, Eddie (Bobby Cannavale); the bar pianist and aspiring composer, Morty (Joanh Lees); the writer E.B. White (Patrick Kennedy) who happens to be sitting at a nearby table; Richard Rogers himself (Andrew Scott) once the show has ended and the cast and crew has come here for a celebration; and Hart’s biggest obsession, Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley).

Hart’s sexuality is a constant touch point in this script, because of this obsession with Elizabeth, with whom Hart spent a weekend some months ago. Given that Hart at one point literally and unironically calls himself “a cocksucker,” I suppose we could call him bisexual. Hawke does play him with well-observed nuance, giving him a subtly queer vibe that still does not take away our belief in his desire for Elizabeth. Hawke is an objectively good actor, but given that he is neither queer nor short, there are multiple distractions to his very existence in the part.

Blue Moon is getting widely positive reviews, and for the record, I did like it. I just did not find it exceptional. Even for a Richard Linklater movie—and that’s saying a lot—Hart talks too much. I can’t fathom the number of lines Hawke memorized for this, and most of the time he’s engaging even when the character is being frequently deluded. But there still came a point at which Hart yammered on for so long at that bar that I thought: all right, enough! Shut up!

Hart spends a lot of time criticizing the writing in Oklahoma!—right down to the inclusion of that exclamation point—and then, predictably, fawning over every part of it to both Rogers and Hammerstein once they actually arrive. Blue Moon gets some energy injected into it once the crowd arrives, as at least then all the talking makes sense. Until then, it’s a seemingly endless scene in a sparsely attended bar that feels a tad overwritten. Margaret Qualley feels slightly anachronistic, out of time, in this movie, but still has undeniable screen presence. Andrew Scott seems capable of feeling comfortably at home in just about any part he’s in.

It’s a solid cast, and for a movie that seems tailor made to be tedious and dull, I was never bored. I did spend some time wondering when it could go somewhere or get to a point, but this is a hallmark of Richard Linklater movies (especially ones he actually writes), with varying degrees of success. It’s possible this one is just a tad past its time. How many people going to the movies today know who Rogers and Hammerstein were, let alone what musicals they made together? And they were a far more famous duo than Rogers and Hart ever were. Perhaps that’s why the small mess of a man Lorenz Hart was gets a bit of love here. It’s too bad he’s just as forgotten as soon as this movie’s over. Like his career, though, it was pretty good while it lasted.

To call this a towering achievement would be misleading.

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+

AFTER THE HUNT

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

Is it regressive to say that even though his character predictably turns out to be pretty much a slime ball, Andrew Garfield is my favorite part of After the Hunt because he’s so hot? I suppose it is, but “I’m just a simple man,” as his Hank says at a key point in the film when saying such a thing makes him sound like an utter dipshit. He could sure stand to lose the beard, though.

Luca Guadagnino is a director, and a man, of curious choices. He knows how to shoot a man in a way that accentuates his thighs—something he did a great deal with the tennis players in last year’s fantastic Challengers. He does the same with Andrew Garfield in After the Hunt, shooting him lounging in a bed wearing an open-button shirt and boxers. On the one hand, he seems to be trying to catch the interest of a clearly disinterested Yale colleague, Alma (Julia Roberts). On the other hand, the camera itself seems to be visually caressing those thighs. Is that for our benefit? Given the subject matter of this film, it’s maybe not the best time for it.

I just learned today that 54-year-old Guadagnino is in a long-term relationship with 38-year-old Italian director and screenwriter Ferdinando Cito Filomarino. I can’t help but wonder to what degree this might be relevant. Is that fair? Perhaps not. But a lot of things happen to characters in After the Hunt that are unfair. Some things are arguably very fair. More than one thing is clearly one or the other depending on the observer—both inside the movie and out. This is almost certainly what Guadagnino was going for.

I just wish it all tied together better in a cohesive narrative. Alma and Hank are both professors in the Yale philosophy department. This means we get a lot of conversations, in classrooms as well as at dinner parties, that are genuinely fascinating to listen to, even when they inevitably delve into generational differences in attitudes about ethics. A lot of the time, these discussions are pretty on the nose. I still found them engaging.

After the Hunt is a cinematic curiosity, in that it is deeply flawed and also ripe for discussion and intellectual debate. I can just imagine this movie itself being discussed in a university classroom. It could be a philosophy class or a film class, and I’d still love to be a fly on that wall. Well, as long as the participants weren’t complete idiots, anyway. One of the things this film makes unclear is whether it thinks educated youth today are idiots. What seems very clear is that it understands the point of view of the middle-aged people who are exasperated by them.

Alma is mentor to a student, Maggie (Ayo Edebiri), who leaves Alma’s dinner party the film opens with, with Alma’s longtime friend and colleague, Hank. We get a bit of an eyeful of Alma’s and Frank’s physical familiarity with each other, they way they put hands on each other’s thighs. There’s a moment when Hank grabs Maggie’s thigh, which is subtle but easy to clock. Later, clearly inebriated, Hank leaves the party at the same time as Maggie. We only learn after Maggie comes back to Alma’s apartment in the middle of a rain storm and gives a relatively vague accounting of what happened that they went to Maggie’s apartment together.

In another scene, particularly well-performed, Alma meets with Hank at an Indian restaurant, where he gives his side of the story. In neither case do we get a direct look at what actually happened, which is clearly deliberate. A similar choice was made, far more effectively, by writer-director Eva Victor in one of this year’s best movies, Sorry, Baby, which was also about university faculty. That movie was more about the effects of trauma, whereas After the Hunt is about how competing narratives play out in the public eye. With Hank, he pretty quickly comes across as a douche bag, but the narrative is still exploring ethical gray areas.

When movies don’t quite work, I often wonder about the editing. Guadagnino has loyalists now; there’s a key part with Chloë Sevigny, who previously appeared in Guadagnino’s wonderful HBO limited series We Are Who We Are, nearly unrecognizable as another professor. Alma’s husband, Frederik, is played by Michael Stuhlbarg, who played Timothée Chalamet’s deeply empathetic dad in the Guadagnino masterpiece Call Me By Your Name (2017). Stuhlbarg was perfectly cast in that film, but in After the Hunt Frederik is a long-tolerant husband with saintly patience. But Stuhlbarg plays him with an array of subtly quirky choices, none of which much align with the rest of the film. It feels as though these Guadagnino loyalists read a script they found deeply compelling but then had offbeat performance choices that were all met with “Sure, let’s try that!”

The one true exception is Julia Roberts herself, who gives her best performance in decades in this movie. It’s too bad it’s wasted on something that is thematically kind of a mess. Not only that, but there’s no denying the parallel themes between this and the incredible 2022 film TÁR, and let’s face it, underrated as Julia Roberts may be, she’s no Cate Blanchett. After the Hunt even tries its hand at sly humor, with basically zero success. The opening credits are all done in the font that Woody Allen used for his films for decades, even presented in exactly the same way, which practically screams “Look what I’m doing here!” But then the rest of the movie is completely different stylistically, to this attempt at “ironic whimsey” is wholly incongruous.

After the Hunt has many great scenes, and makes a great discussion piece, arguably even more so because of its clear and plentiful imperfections. With the exception of solid performances across the board, it just falls short in the end—quite literally, as the coda set five years later is utterly baffling. “You won” is the last line we hear, but we don’t have clarity on how the supposed winning happened. I left the theater thinking less about who won or lost than about exactly what game was being played.

Julia Roberts is stuck between ethics and loyalty, and I’m stuck between Hank’s dipshittery and Andrew Garfield’s hotness.

Overall: B-