HAMLET

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

It’s tricky business, these adaptations of Shakespeare plays where they transpose the setting to our modern world but keep the Shakespearean language intact. It’s a jarring experience, a high-concept idea now long since faded from novelty. I would argue that it only really works when the entire world is rendered fantastical, as in Bax Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet from 1996. Granted, even that film was met with mixed reviews, for largely similar reasons, but I would argue that a super-stylized version of a “modern setting” works better.

In the case of this new Hamlet, directed by Aneil Karia and with Michael Lesslie credited as co-writer with William Shakespeare (who was similarly credited as a writer on the 2015 version of Macbeth, which was not transposed to a modern setting), the “royal family” actually owns a real estate and development company called Elsinore Properties, and the setting is modern London. (“Elsinore” is the Danish city where the play is originally set.) Hamlet is played by Riz Ahmed, and he is a so-called “Prince” in a wealthy South Asian family, the parents of whom are consistently referred to awkwardly as “king” and “queen,” because Shakespeare.

Ahmed is onscreen virtually the entire runtime of Hamlet, and I am not convinced he was the best choice for the part. Karia’s approach is to have all of the actors deliver in a deeply naturalistic way, as though they were speaking contemporary English even though the language is straight up Shakespearean. As is usually the case with Shakespeare, I could barely follow what was going on based on the language alone; the delivery added to this challenge, and I could not quite make out a whole lot of what Ahmed was saying.

It’s not like this can’t be done, however. Both Morfydd Clark as Ophelia and Sheeba Chaddha as Hamlet’s mother Gertrude are quite good in their respective roles, and I found myself the most compelled when they were onscreen. Ahmed, on the other hand, delivers his entire “To Be or Not to Be” speech while behind the wheel of a car, driving recklessly down a highway, he shouts the lines like a lunatic: “To beeee! or not to beeee! That is the question!” This is a moment that veers dangerously close to being unintentionally funny.

This Hamlet is a mixed bag at best, adapting Shakespeare’s longest play, which when unabridged and performed onstage can run longer than four hours, into a film that clocks in at under two hours. Aneil Karia embellishes a lot of scenes with no dialogue as transitional flourishes, which can only mean even more of the original text was excised. The result is a number of highly dramatic and emotional exchanges between characters that feel unearned, a film constantly getting out over its skis. When Hamlet tells Ophelia to “get thee to a nunnery” in this adaptation, I hardly knew what the hell he was talking about; we saw Ophelia only a few times up to this point, and now we’re supposed to feel how she’s completely hurt and devastated?

There were a few choices I enjoyed, not least of which was the infusion of South Asian culture and music, even the play-within-a-play rendered as a sort of dark Bollywood dance number in the middle of a Hindu wedding. When Hamlet is first visited by the ghost of his father, his father actually delivers his Shakespearean lines in Hindi—a nice touch that the film could have used more of, but it’s the only time anything like that happens.

I haven’t even seen that many adaptations of Hamlet; the tragic deaths that occur in this film had me thinking to myself, I don’t remember any of this shit! I do remember snippets of other details though, such as the gravedigger scene that is not included in this film. I’ve seen a couple of the higher-profile adaptations of the late 20th century, such as Franco Zeffirelli’s Hamlet from 1990 with Mel Gibson in the title role, and Kenneth Branagh’s four-hour 1996 version in which he both directed and starred. This new version is clearly going for a “cool” factor that those others were not, but it’s difficult to hit that mark when the setting is now but you’re speaking like it’s 1599.

On the other hand, there are performers in this Hamlet who prove it can be done—that you can speak in Shakespearean language and still hold the audience’s attention, no matter how the setting is recontextualized. It’s Ahmed who consistently took me out of it, making subtle but distracting choices that just didn’t quite hit that authenticity sweet spot. Ahmed is a gifted actor who has really impressed me before (most notably in 2020’s The Sound of Metal), but here he feels a little like a square peg in a round hole.

There are several genuinely riveting scenes in this Hamlet, but they all feel disjointed from the rest of the narrative. It would be boneheaded to call any of the dialogue here “bad,” but someone also had to write stage directions, someone had to edit this, and the people who did managed to lower the material rather than elevate it. It’s true that I have a cursory familiarity with the Hamlet story at best, but what’s the point of a movie like this if you can’t follow it if you don’t already know the story through and through? Otherwise the entire enterprise just feels like indulgence.

Honestly, maybe this one should not have been.

Overall: C+

TWO PROSECUTORS

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

I didn’t get too far into Two Prosecutors before I got a sense of where it was headed. This was hardly a surprise, or a spoiler; this film is about a man navigating the rampant corruption of 1937 Soviet Russia—or “Stalin’s Great Terror,” as the film puts it. It’s fascinating how many films we have gotten over the decades about Nazi Germany, and the comparatively few we have gotten about Stalinist Russia. It’s also ironic, given that Stalin’s regime killed more people than Hitler. Which is to say, in Two Prosecutors, the young prosecutor Kornyev, played by Alexander Kuznetsov, is headed nowhere good, as he investigates the treatment of prisoners in his district.

He only manages to meet with one such prisoner, a very old man named Stepniak (Aleksandr Filippenko) who has been falsely imprisoned and by some miracle managed to get a note out of the prison. Not having been provided any writing utensils, he wrote the note in his own blood. Come to think of it, he sure did manage neat and tidy writing in blood with no writing utensils.

Fully the first half of Two Prosecutors follows Kornyev as he is stalled at every turn, making his way through the maze of the prison where Stepniak is being held. He waits, and he waits—and so do we. I got the feeling that Ukranian director and co-writer Sergey Loznitsa’s intent was to make us quite literally feel Kornyev’s frustration. And I’ve got to say: it worked. Two Prosecutors has a glacial pace the likes of which I have not experienced in ages, and is sure to alienate any casual movie watcher.

Of course, this is not a film for the casual movie-goer. It exists to challenge, and force us to confront the dangers of fascism in the most mundane of environments—and how the mundane can be used to mask horrors. This is a movie about a man who is increasingly brave as he insists on doing the right thing, and following the letter of the law, and we know far before the end that he will only be punished for it. I was reminded of the end of the far more exciting All Quiet on the Western Front: all that effort, for this?

After Kornyev finally meets his prisoner and is a first-hand witness to how horribly the NKVD (the abbreviation for the agency that translates as People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs) treats the countless people they arrest without cause, the second half of Two Prosecutors has Kornyev traveling to Moscow to meet with the Prosecutor General—hence the film’s title. Here he walks the labyrinthine halls of government offices rather than those of a prison, but he is stalled in exactly the same way. And we once again spend what feels like an eternity, waiting with him.

It would be one thing if it were just the waiting, but nearly every character is ridiculously stoic. Neither Kornyev nor anyone whose path he crosses has any personality to speak of. The guy who finally grants him permission to visit Stepniak in prison does laugh at his own joke, with a sort of mirthless glee. Once Kornyev finally gets his meeting with the Prosector General, the Prosecutor General listens to Kornyev’s litany of allegations with nary a facial expression. Then he provides him with a train ticket ride home in a train car that’s quite the contrast to the crowded car he traveled to Moscow in. On his ride home, he meets two engineers already sharing the room he’s put in, and these guys are the only characters in the movie who exude a modicum of warmth. And you should know instantly not to trust that.

Two Prosecutors is drab, dull, and bleak—all with clear intentionality. I have a hard time deciding what to make of it, overall. It kind of won me over in the end, as I got a sense of what it was doing. Nevertheless, I do not recommend watching this when you haven’t had enough sleep. You’re guaranteed to nod off, just as Kornyev himself does on more than one occasion.

Yep, this movie has Two Prosecutors in it.

THE DRAMA

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

The Drama is great entertainment for critical thinkers. If you don’t want to be challenged in any way, then this is maybe not for you—mindless entertainment, it is not. I mean, I suppose you could enjoy this movie okay without thinking too hard about what’s going on, or what it’s really about, but you won’t get much out of it that way. And this is clearly not for everyone; the critical consensus is mixed-positive at best. But it really worked for me.

And for me, it is mostly because of what it made me think about, the things it made me consider. And it’s hard to discuss this movie without revealing pretty critical spoilers. This much is revealed in the trailer: soon-to-be married couple Emma and Charlie (Zendaya and Robert Pattinson) are having dinner and wine with their couple-friends Rachel and Mike (Alana Haim and Mamoudou Athie), and after getting a little inebriated, they chose to share what was the worst thing each of them has ever done. Mind you, this was a mistake, and one I would certainly never make at a dinner with mixed company. But, without it, we wouldn’t have a movie.

The things they all share are pretty bad, each of them legitimately heinous, although in a couple of cases you might have to think a bit before realizing how bad it really was. But, it’s Emma who goes last, and her revelation is bad enough to suck the air out of the room. And the thing is, in retrospect, Emma doesn’t even answer the question correctly. Hers is the only answer that is not what she did do, but what she once planned to do but never went through with—at the age of 15, fifteen years ago. But, it’s how close she got to carrying it out that unsettles everyone, particularly Charlie, who is only learning of this within the week before their wedding.

And this brings up a host of questions that are equal parts compelling and unsettling. Does this mean Emma was truly capable of doing something so horrible? Does it mean she’s capable of it now? How much of who someone was as a teenager informs who they are now? The word “psychopath” gets casually tossed out a couple of times, and reasonable people could argue that it’s maybe not hyperbole.

It’s all of these “maybes” that makes The Drama work. It’s not without its flaws, and it leaves some pretty pertinent questions unanswered about Emma’s parents—one question Charlie even asks at one point, only to decide it’s the wrong time for it. So no answer ever comes.

Still, to call The Drama provocative would be an understatement. It could be the biggest conversation-starter of the year: what would you do in Charlie’s position? Learning something like this you never knew about a partner you’ve been with for three years? If anyone does a “movie club” the way people have book clubs, this would be a perfect choice for discussion. And I don’t mean the part about sharing what’s the worst thing you’ve ever done—seriously, just don’t do that—but regarding what you would do if the person you loved most shared the worst thing they’ve ever done, and it was way more than you bargained for.

Of course, Norwegian writer-director Kristoffer Borgli, whose previous film was the somewhat undercooked and definitely overrated Dream Scenario in 2023, ups the stakes by having this happen to a couple right when they’re about to get married. This puts a ton more pressure on them than they would otherwise have, and provides ample opportunity for—you guessed it!—drama. There’s a degree to which Charlie is spineless, and I have to respect Robert Pattinson for taking on roles like this. Neither he nor Emma seem to consider that no matter how inconvenient it might be, it would perhaps be for the best to postpone the wedding.

It’s probably also because of his emotional tailspin that Charlie does not insist that the only path forward is through couples therapy. Neither of them even think to mention it, which seems a little odd—especially in light of Charlie asking whether Emma had any therapy as a teenager (she did not, a further complicating factor).

And I haven’t even gotten into the plethora of narrative layers involved in The Drama, ranging from how often young women are violent, to the willfully ignorant privilege on the part of Rachel (pitch-perfectly performed by Alana Haim). There’s a lot of thematic intersectionality going on here, between gender and race, that is rich for the unpacking but easily glossed over by viewers not paying attention. And then there’s the thing Charlie brings up that I never considered but will now take a long time to forget, the idea that in addition to all the people out there who have committed heinous acts of violence, there must be an exponentially larger number of people out there who have seriously considered it, come incredibly close but never went through with it. What, exactly, do we think of that?

It’s certainly something to consider, as is this movie, which is something that will stay with me for some time. It ends in a surprisingly tidy way, after having no idea where the story would go, but it’s also deeply satisfying and moving. A film does not have to be a masterpiece to be effective at keeping your faith in the magic of cinema.

Overall: B+

SLANTED

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

Slanted has been widely referred to as “Mean Girls meets The Substance.” There is some accuracy to those comparisons, except that Slanted lacks the gonzo savagery of The Substance. And I really want to say it lacks the wit of Mean Girls, except that at the time I even thought Mean Girls was rather overrated, a warmed-over Heathers, which had far greater satyrical bite. This is precisely what Slanted is missing: satyrical bite.

I really wanted Slanted to go harder. A story about a high school girl who undergoes cosmetic—some say “trans-racial”—surgery to become White is some fertile ground for the kind of satire it’s going for. But Slanted is less biting satire, and a little more lower-rung Black Mirror. It does a pretty good job of reflecting the social and racial structure of America, but doesn’t go very deep into it. This kind of movie only really works if it makes you go deep. A bunch of White kids salting otherwise unadorned salads for lunch in synchronized movements isn’t really going to cut it.

There’s a very strange irony to this production as well. Writer-director Amy Wang is herself of Chinese descent, which bodes well for a movie about a Chinese-American family. She casts actors of Chinese descent to play characters of Chinese descent, particularly Shirley Chen, who plays the protagonist, Joan Huang, for the first third or so of the movie; also Joan’s parents, Sofia (Vivian Wu) and Roger (Fang Du). But these are the only characters—or actors—of Asian descent in the entire production, and once the surgery takes place, Joan renames herself “Jo Hunt” and is played for the rest of the movie by Mckenna Grace. The irony is that this is a film about the denial of racial and ethnic identity, made by a woman of Chinese descent, but the vast majority of the actors given work to play parts in the cast are pointedly conventionally—maybe even blandly—attractive White people. You know, the very people afforded the greatest opportunities in this society.

It even seems worth mentioning that Amy Wang is Asian-Australian—not, it must be noted, American. To be sure, there are other international directors out there with an astonishing ability to reflect deeply authentic, American characterizations. But Ang Lee, Amy Wang is not. Much of Slanted takes place in a high school environment that feels like a critique of what an outsider might thing American high school is like, based on countless other American movies they’ve seen. The “Mean Girls” vibe among the popular girls Joan/Jo is desperate to become friends with feel very contrived.

It’s the writing I have the biggest issue with in Slanted, which doesn’t even manage to be consistent. Joan is using an app to create White-faced filters on her phone called Ethnos, which clocks her heavy usage and then offers her a discount on their cosmetic services. Ethnos declares that they cannot do the full surgery without a parental signature due to her being a minor, but they’re perfectly happy to do a hair transplant without it—complete with masking her with gas to put her to sleep. We then see bloody spots where they begin pulling her black hair out. None of this requires parental consent?

I’m fully aware that Slanted is meant to be a fantasy world of subtle horrors, not something to be particularly concerned with realism. After all, when Jo’s face skin starts to droop, a significant plot point in the latter half of the film, Ethnos simply provides her with a cream and some tape. We see hands go to her face without the camera actually showing her face, and suddenly she looks normal again. The sticking point for me is that the parental consent is used only as a plot point in the process of Joan losing her parents’ trust; it otherwise has no point in the plot, if this guy’s going to do a hair transplant on a minor without parental consent anyway.

Where I really must give Wang her due is that the performances in Slanted are actually kind of astonishing. Shirley Chen is serviceable as Joan; it’s when Chen is replaced by Mckenna Grace that the cast truly impresses. Grace performs most of her role in English but does occasionally speak in Mandarin, and quite believably (not that I would have any idea how good or bad her accent is, mind you). Most significantly, even after Joan is no longer shown onscreen, but the character comes home and takes some time to convince Sofia and Roger that she’s actually their daughter, they’re still completely believable as a family. You never stop accepting that Jo is their daughter, even after she’s transformed into a White girl. This is a true testament to the performances of all three of them.

There is a bit of a plot twist that comes along that you can see easily see coming, but the performers involved, particularly Amelie Zilber as Olivia Hammond, the most popular girl in the school, also perform it well. Joan’s best friend, Brindha, is played by Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, from the Netflix series Never Have I Ever, and seems to exist simply to be a fellow Asian character who is not a member of Joan’s family. There is so much potential for a film like this to explore that it does not bother with, most significantly the intersection between White racism and the anti-Blackness of other races. Brindha is a young Brown woman who comes closest to representing the experience of anyone outside the Huang family who is also not White; the only Black people we see in this movie are extras used at the Ethnos clinic, and in one pivotal scene, a nameless and silent Black friend of Brindha’s who Jo is peer pressured into disinviting from a party. This feels like the very essence of Black tokenism.

If Slanted had any real curiosity about the diversity of American experience, even among insecure, White-supremacy-pilled people of all races and ethnicities, it might be easier to like. It’s perfectly fair to tell a story like this from the singular perspective of an Asian-American family, but then it brings in characters of other races and does them a narrative disservice. To be fair, Slanted still has its moments; I certainly got a good laugh out of Ethnos announcing new locations in “Richmond, Virginia; Pittsburgh, and Spokane.” If it spent a lot more time with pointed jabs like that and less time with a misguided undertone of melancholy and barely a hint of the “body horror” it seemed to promise, Slanted would have worked a lot better.

I see White people: this misguided irony of Slanted.

Overall: B-

SIRĀT

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

As I consider Sirât, the Spanish nominee for Best International Feature, I keep thinking of the 2021 film from Mexico, New Order, which was so deeply nihilistic it left me baffled, bordering on angry. There is no question that Sirât is a better film, and yet I am not convinced there was any more of a point to it. Sirât is far more subtle with themes that New Order beat us over the head with, but I still could not in good conscience recommend it to anybody.

Some truly horrible things happen in Sirât. I went in already knowing the first horrible thing that happens; I just did not know exactly when or how it would occur. I can’t say knowing about it ahead of time made it any less horrible to witness, this scene alone left me deeply rattled, mostly because it comes out of nowhere during what is otherwise a perfectly normal scenario: people working together to change the tire on a traveling bus on fairly treacherous Moroccan desert mountain roads. What I was not prepared for was how things sort of settle a bit after that, only for things to get even worse.

This is a film clearly working in broad, existential and spiritual metaphor, even though on the surface everything is very grounded in reality. It is explained to us in an opening title card that Sirât refers to the Islamic theological idea of a bridge one must cross, “thinner than a hair and sharper than a sword,” over hell and into Paradise. The faithful will cross successfully and the sinful will descend into hell. Now, I know next to nothing about Islamic belief, so it’s not only conceivable but likely that my Western mind lacks a certain understanding of nuance here. (Although, side note: after reading a few other reactions to this film, it’s clear there are people from the region who feel director and co-writer Oliver Laxe is dabbling with real-life geopolitcal tensions he has no business playing with.)

All I know is, not only do the characters in Sirât have horrible things happen to them, but they happen at random and without any directed malice. These are all perfectly decent people, basically minding their own business and helping others in whatever ways they can, and tragedy befalls them out of nowhere. The only pattern to be found is the quick succession of sudden horrors befalling this one group of people.

I’m not eager to tell anyone else to sit through this movie, which I found compelling until I found it by turns horrifying and deeply stressful, but I still won’t spoil specifics. I’ll just say that it begins with Luis (Sergi López), a middle-aged man, and his son, Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona), milling about a desert rave in Morocco, handing out flyers and looking for Luis’s older child, Esteban’s sister. We never do find out how long she’s been missing (except that it’s been a long time) or why she’s apparently lost; these two only know that she frequents these desert raves.

The rave music figures prominently in the plot of Sirât. I haven’t been to a rave since college, so my impression of them is that they occur overnight in dark lofts or basements, packed with young people on relatively harmless drugs and surrendering to the beats. This was roughly thirty years ago, so clearly I don’t know what the fuck is going on now; a quick Google search indicates there is indeed a thriving desert rave scene in Morocco. It would seem these are still typically overnight affairs, but all of those seen in Sirât appear to be happening midday. This is the case during the opening credits identifying the principal characters other than Luis or Esteban, nonprofessional actors found for director Oliver Laxe and given the same character names as their real first names. After this, we don’t actually see the title, Sirât, until 30 minutes in.

By that point, Luis and Esteban, still desperate to find their lost family member, follow a small caravan of vehicles on their way to another rave after military has come and forced a rave to break up. We’ve already gotten very sporadic snippets on car radios about nations in the region descending into armed conflict, and it’s serious enough for citizens of the EU to be singled out for evacuation. The smaller group of ravers that Luis follows in his car have little interest in it, aside from a passing reference to “World War III” that doesn’t seem to be taking it very seriously, even though some of them appear to be seriously injured veterans themselves: one with a missing leg who walks on what looks like a repurposed crutch; another with a missing hand. There is another passing reference to them being “deserters” but with no further detail or contextualization.

I am reminded yet again of that other film, New Order, in which the narrative takes us into the thick of the violent chaos—in that case a senselessly violent overthrow of the elite by the underclass. In Sirât, we have a group of people who have deliberately separated themselves from the violent chaos, escaping into drugs and beats but otherwise pretty pacifistic. And unsettlingly terrible things happen to them anyway. And in the most straightforward sense, there is no rhyme or reason to it.

So this is where the intended takeaway is up for debate, I suppose. The final sequence in Sirât was so tense I could hardly handle it. They cross a lethally dangerous path, which some cross unscathed and others do not; presumably there is profound importance to the line, “I just crossed without thinking.” This is his response to how he made it work, while another did not succeed.

And in the end, this is all we know about any of these people: only that some of them have dedicated their lives to raves, and that Luis is looking for his daughter. We don’t hear anything about Esteban’s mother, or about any of the ravers’ lives up to this point, at least not beyond a vague reference to desertion. Earlier in the film, one of the ravers turns off the radio announcer detailing what’s going on in the country, presumably because all they want to do is shut out the realities of the wider world. Beyond that, Sirât simply follows a small group of people who either meet violent ends or barely miss violent ends. The image of the first incident is so simple in its horror, something we hear rather than see directly, is something I will not soon shake, even though it is only the shock of characters witnessing it that plays out onscreen.

There’s something doubly effective about the choice to use nonprofessional actors for this. Esteban in particular feels like just a regular, unremarkable kid who is naturally very well loved by his decent dad. Horrible shit can happen to any of us at any time. And yet, in the end I was still left with the question: okay, but why? It seems the absence of an answer to that question was the point of this movie, except the characters have no choice in the matter, but we do. My experience of Sirât was one of tension and stress that could have been avoided; watching this film was not a random thing that happened to me out of nowhere. Not putting yourself through it is also a choice you can make, and in spite of a lot of it being very well done—including a good amount of genuinely gorgeous cinematography—that’s the choice I would encourage.

Let’s all form a circle and talk about my deep ambivalence about this movie.

Overall: B

THE PRESIDENT'S CAKE

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

Sometimes it’s worth just checking out what’s playing at your local movie theater, and looking up a movie you’ve never heard of. I had certainly never heard of The President’s Cake before doing this, when I also learned this was Iraq’s 2025 submission for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film. It’s Iraq’s 14th submission, in fact; the country has never secured a nomination—although The President’s Cake, which made the short list, came the closest.

I’m not certain I have ever even seen an Iraqi film before. According to my extensive movie watching records over on Letterboxd.com, I have only seen 11 other films in the Arabic language; only eight of them feature length. None were from Iraq, although I have seen several excellent films from Iran. I’m used to seeing subversive storytellers using film to reflect and expose the oppressive regime in Iran, but seeing something from an Iraqi perspective is both novel and new.

Not only that, but the story in The President’s Cake centers around children—in particular a 3rd-grade girl, Lamia (Baneen Ahmad Nayyef), whose name is drawn in class as the school’s chosen student to bake a cake for the president’s birthday. This is set in 1990, so the president was Saddam Hussein, the year he turned 53. The opening title cards inform us that the country is subject to UN-backed sanctions which significantly exacerbates the population’s poverty. Nevertheless, the entire country is required to celebrate his birthday every year, and a student in every school is chosen to bake a cake. We see Lamia’s teacher pass around a box into which all students must enter their name written on paper; one kid, who arrives late, must enter his name five times as punishment. One student’s name is drawn who has to clean the school; another must bring fruit; Lamia’s name is drawn for baking the cake.

The actual capability of each kid and their family evidently does not matter. When Lamia’s classmate and friend, Saeed (Sajad Mohamad Qasem), protests that he’ll be in the city with his father, the teacher notes that it is his “duty” to report anyone who disobeys, and mentions another family who was “dragged” for a similar infraction.

The President’s Cake is very impressively staged, as Lamia travels with Bibi (Waheed Thabet Khreibat), the grandmother who is taking care of her, to the city, ostensibly for ingredients. Lamia and Bibi live in a very rural area among marshes where Lamia commutes to school and back on what appear to be community canoes. Whether here or in the city they travel to, we see constant images of Saddam Hussein, in framed photos, paintings, even a wall mural pretty impressively rendered at the local school. The students are conditioned to shout things in their class like, “We sacrifice our blood and souls for you, Saddam!” In the city, the kids weave through both bazaars and crowded processions celebrating Hussein’s birthday.

Much of the film takes place in the city, where Lamia runs away after Bibi attempts to transfer custody of her to a friend, both due to her age and her inability to afford the cake ingredients. Lamia runs into Saeed, there pickpocketing with his disabled father. Both the marshes and the city are rendered in a way that feels deeply lived-in. In both environments the people are well aware of the state of the country but barely acknowledge it, just living their daily lives as they can. In one scene in the city, where the kids try everything from selling Lamia’s late father’s watch to offering labor to thievery in attempt to secure cake ingredients (eggs, flour, sugar, sugar, and baking powder), Lamia winds up in a coffee shop with a kind of jam band performing, the singer a young woman of some sophistication.

Lamia has a beloved rooster, which she has named Hindi, she’s brought with her. This seems like an unnecessary complication to a journey into the city, but I guess you can’t expect a 9-year-old to think logically. You might be right to worry about the fate of Hindi, who kind of has an adventure of his own. Lamia meets many people as she runs around the city, of course; sometimes they’re very kind and helpful, sometimes they’re clearly bad news. Sometimes you simply can’t tell.

There’s a few scenes in a hospital, and we meet people with injuries both their and elsewhere. There are casual references to being “bombed by the Americans.” Lamia and Saeed stick together for a while; they have conflict; they have resolution. All of this unfolds with the backdrop of everyday life in Iraq, with compulsory birthday celebrations happening and jets flying overhead. Lamia is too young to be concerned with geopolitics, or even war, until its effects come right up to her. All she knows is she wants to stay at home with her Bibi, and she needs ingredients to make a cake.

I don’t have a clue what life is like in Iraq today; it’s an entirely different universe from mine. But a film like The President’s Cake, even set 35 years ago, offers valuable insight into a culture and history that Americans were long encouraged to dismiss and dehumanize—to a large degree we still are. It doesn’t feel like writer-director Hasan Hadi made this film for that purpose, but rather to tell a deeply human story from the point of view of an average person who grew up in this historical context. It’s deeply affecting, and a truly impressive feature film debut.

The resilience of scrappy kids in The President’s Cake.

Overall: B+

MIDWINTER BREAK

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

I have kind of a thing for movies about older married couples who have been together for decades. Life isn’t all young love, you know—nor is it even all about new love (though I do also enjoy movies about older people who find love). I’m fully aware that the average moviegoer isn’t exactly demanding stories like this, and my being on the precipice of 50 years old is probably a factor here. So what? If any of you young whippersnappers don’t care about this then go read some other movie review!

Well, here’s the thing. Midwinter Break is still, unfortunately, kind of forgettable. We could start with the title itself. I saw the trailer to this movie several times, and still I often struggled to remember the name of it. Midwinter Break sounds like an off-brand version of the Vacation franchise, except trust me, nothing outrageous happens here.

What does happen is some very good acting. Ciarán Hinds and especially Lesley Manville effortlessly elevate what is otherwise pretty milquetoast material, about an older couple whose one child has long since moved out, they are set adrift in their lives together, and the absence of other family puts their conflicting spiritual beliefs into sharper relief. Stella buys tickets to Amsterdam as a Christmas present to Gerry, and they mean to go on an adventure together. You know, in midwinter.

I was very interested in the location shooting in Amsterdam, as I will be visiting there for the first time this summer (not in winter, thankfully). We do get several shots of Stella and Gerry walking along the canals, and one brief sequence of them walking through the Anne Frank House, which winds up becoming a relevant detail in one of their later conflicts about their respective approaches to religion. I’m not sure it’s the best reflection of the narrative onscreen that I found myself thinking, oh right: I definitely need to book timed tickets to the Anne Frank House before we get there.

To call Midwinter Break “meditative” would be an understatement. It’s filled with quiet, contemplative scenes. Early on, we just settle into Stella and Gerry’s quiet routine together, the comfortable way they coexist, though we see very quickly how Stella feels alienated and Gerry is a bit oblivious. She goes to Christmas mass without him, and she’s very devout; Gerry, for his part, basically puts up with her piousness, though he does also scoff a bit, something that naturally comes up later.

It’s not that I didn’t find Midwinter Break compelling, though I do think that with other actors it would really have been a drag. Plenty of viewers will likely find this a drag regardless. But director Polly Findlay gradually builds up the idea of a secret that Stella is living with, and it has to do with when she was once caught in crossfire during a siege in Belfast when she was pregnant. Eventually Stella delivers a long monologue about it to an expatriate fellow Irishwoman she’s met in Amsterdam, and Manville’s delivery, as always, is impeccable, even moving. Nevertheless, once the reveal we’ve been waiting for occurs, it’s hard not to think: that’s it?

Ultimately Midwinter Break is about the beginning of a long-term marriage unraveling, due to religious incompatibility, basically. Stella uses the word “spiritual,” but I would argue it’s more religious—the taking of comfort through religious ritual. It ends on a very subtly hopeful note, after an emotional exchange at the Amsterdam airport while they wait for their delayed flight in a snow storm—I do rather wish we could have seen more of the city to give this relatively drab story some more environmental character. Ultimately, Midwinter Break isn’t for everyone, but some, like me, might at the very least be moved by the performances.

This is a vacation we’re bound to forget.

Overall: B-

THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Overall: B

H IS FOR HAWK

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

One might be forgiven for watching H Is for Hawk and saying: We all experience grief, I get it! How many films in recent years have tackled the subject of grief, in one way or anther? And, across genres—countless horror films in particular, presented as “a metaphor” for grief. Grief, grief, grief! Bad grief, weird grief. Good grief!

Well, here’s the thing. I was much more taken with H Is for Hawk that I expected to be. And when it comes to grief, it really cannot be repeated too many times that everyone deals with grief in different ways, all of them correct. In this case, it’s quite the specific expression of grief: college professor and avid birder Helen (a wonderful Claire Foy) gets herself a goshawk to take care of as a massive distraction from dealing with the death of her beloved father (Brendan Gleeson, not given nearly enough screen time, most of which is in flashbacks of Helen’s memories). She lets the massive challenge of taking care of this bird of prey keep her from confronting her emotions, plummeting herself into a deep depression.

I went in thinking, based on the trailer, that this would be a story about a woman who adopts a bird and the experience helps her through her grief. But, it’s actually the opposite: she uses the bird as an excuse not to confront her grief. This does make for a pretty fascinating story, even as her mother (Lindsay Duncan), her brother (Josh Dylan), and especially her close friend Christina (Denise Gough, in quite the departure from her iconically villainous performance as Dedra in Andor) look on helplessly, and attempt to reach out to Helen with increasing futility.

This would all be compelling enough, honestly, but I must mention cinematographer Charlotte Bruus Christensen, because so much of H Is for Hawk is beautifully, stunningly shot. Helen spends a lot of time building trust with the hawk she pointlessly names Mabel, building up to taking her out to fields and forests where the bird can hunt. This film features several scenes of Mabel hunting, and they are absolutely incredible, with some shots defying the imagination. I cannot find any information on whether CGI was used in this film, only reports of the painstaking manners in which cameras were camouflaged to pick up the birds they used for filming. Several stunning shots are in perfect focus of the bird in flight, though, and one memorable shot has the camera trailing the bird in flight—I can’t imagine how they did that practically, but it absolutely looks real. For an indie British drama about a woman denying her grief, they went truly above and beyond with the visuals in this film, to a far greater degree than they needed to. But it left me deeply impressed.

The questions it raises about keeping wild animals in captivity is perhaps another story. H Is for Hawk is impressively frank and objective in how it avoids any anthropomorphization of a bird of prey, and even Helen as a character is quick to clarify that this is a species that does not feel affection. Helen holds no illusions about how Mabel feels about her, and I love that about how this story is told—but, Helen also allows herself to get far too attached to Mabel. There’s even a moment when Christina says to her, “I think you might be overidentifying with Mabel.” Helen responds by saying she’s certain she is not, even though she clearly is.

But, beyond all that—why buy the bird to begin with? When Helen buys the bird, she meets the seller on a pier, and Christine, who is with her, says, “This feels like a drug deal.” Indeed. Conversely, H Is for Hawk features a memorable scene in which Helen is giving a public talk about Mabel, and a dipshit young man attempts to take her to task for “killing for fun,” as if a natural predator is just hunting for kicks. Helen is memorably struck between defending the bird of prey hunt as a natural act and getting flustered due to her state of grief. But what I often thought about, and what the film does not ever directly address, is whether any of this is actually good for the bird itself.

I can’t say that affected my appreciation for the story being told here, however. To what degree a film like this might upset conservationists, I have no idea. My focus remains on the fact that Helen is making ill-advised choices in the thick of grieving the loss of her father, and this is done incredibly well. I am frankly not a fan of any birds, and this movie gave me a new appreciation for them, so there’s that. I suppose we could have a separate conversation about the ethics of how the birds were used in the filming of this movie, and arguably we should have just left the source text of Helen Macdonald’s autobiographical book of the same name at that. To my mind, I am only here to judge what is onscreen, and ultimately, H Is for Hawk just really worked for me.

Helen (Claire Foy) walks her unconscious distraction through the streets of Cambridge.

Overall: B+

THE TESTAMENT OF ANN LEE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Overall: B