LISA FRANKENSTEIN

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

The funniest thing about Lisa Frankenstein is its release date, nestled up against Valentine’s Day as though it’s a sweet romance. This is a romance between an eighties teen and a reanimated corpse.

It is amusing that Diablo Cody, who wrote the script, has a mind as bent as one that thinks up the absurdist, gross-out gags that are sprinkled throughout this film. Cody lives to defy stereotypes. Lisa Frankenstein was also directed by Zelda Williams, daughter of Robin Williams, setting the story the year she was born (1989). If this and her previous film, Kappa Kappa Die (2020) are any indication, she has a real taste for old-school camp. (There are even cop characters named Officer John, and Officer Waters.)

But, nailing the tone in a film like this is the real tricky part, and Williams doesn’t quite make it. We get introduced to our young heroine, Lisa (a lovely Kathryn Newton), her blithely affectionate stepsister Taffy (a bubbly Liza Soberano), her indifferent dad (Joe Chrest) and her weirdly cruel stepmother (Carla Gugino, chewing the contrived scenery), and establish ourselves in their slighty off-kilter world for just a bit too long before we ever even meet “The Creature.”

“The Creature” is played by Riverdale’s Cole Sprouse, who apparently took months of mime lessons for months to prepare for this role, in which he has (mostly) no lines. He does a fine job for what it is, but I’m not sure he couldn’t have done just as good a job without so much effort. He’s playing a man dead for at least a century or two, and Lisa Frankenstein does very little to explain his reanimation—Lisa is just a high school kid with a crush on the bust of his tombstone, who wishes to “be with him,” and then a sudden burst of lightning results in him showing up at her house.

This is a deliberate lack of depth, of course; it’s very much the point. Lisa Frankenstein is a cross between Heathers, Beetlejuice, and Mommy Dearest, but minus the depth, the cleverness, or the biting satire. Lisa Frankenstein has some cleverness, to be fair, and it’s all in service of camp, to varying degrees of success. I enjoyed it most when its humor is darkest, as with a great gag involving what amounts to a penis transplant.

There weren’t a lot of people in the theater when I went to see this, maybe twenty people—and yet, in spite of how critical I am of it, oddly, in the smattering of moments I found genuinely funny, I was the only person there laughing. That was an odd experience.

There is a very specific sensibility Zelda Williams is going for here, and mileage will definitely vary depending on what you’re looking for. I suppose it could be said that Lisa Frankenstein delivers on its promise; I just wanted a better promise. Its sort of “camp lite” aesthetic gets tired pretty quickly, and that happens before The Creature even shows up. There’s a physical journey he goes on, getting less and less gross as Lisa, an established seamstress of skill, systematically sews him up. Conversely, Lisa starts off withdrawn and then becomes sexily confident over time, but also oddly selfish, using The Creature for assistance with another boy who is her crush at school. I guess we’re supposed to feel bad for The Creature, except of course, he’s a reanimated corpse. I don’t know about you, but I’ll never have any interest in fucking an undead guy, I don’t care how cute he is.

In the end, Lisa Frankenstein has its fun, if tonally inconsistent, moments. The casting is very much in its favor, and I particularly look forward to seeing Kathryn Newton—who was also fantastic in Freaky (2021)—in other things. They make the most of the slightly undercooked ingredients they have to work with.

I guess it’s not terrible, as meet-cute body horror goes.

Overall: B-

RENFIELD

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

Renfield goes from zero to a hundred in about five minutes. That may not be much for a car, but for a a movie, it’s a bit much. It took me about another five minutes to lose my patience with it.

Nicolas Cage has basically made a career of phoning it in, which is ironic for an actor of his proven talents. The guys clearly likes to work, and he gets work plenty, having become one of the most prolific actors alive. I’m not convinced, however, that at this stage in his career he’s much interested in being challenged. In virtually every role, it’s like the director just points his camera at him and lets him do whatever he wants. I’m sure that’s plenty fun for him. For the rest of us, it’s a mixed bag at best.

Here he plays Dracula, in a comedy-horror that leans on the gore for its humor, much like last month’s Cocaine Bear did. The crucial differences are that Cocaine Bear had better dialogue—albeit not by a wide margin—and, perhaps more importantly, better pacing. That movie actually knew how to built tension, ridiculous though it may have been. Renfield just dives right into the wild action sequences, making it more manic than anything else. This movie feels more cocaine-fueled than Cocaine Bear did.

The protagonist, narrator, and title character is Dracula’s “familiar,” or his centuries-old slave, here played by Nicholas Hoult. Somehow he winds up becoming friends with a local New Orleans police officer played by Awkafina, as the only cop in the city who isn’t corrupt. I wonder how the City of New Orleans feels about this depiction.

In director Chris McKay’s version of this story, Renfield gains “a tiny fraction” of Dracula’s power by . . . eating bugs. At first I thought they had to be some kind of special bugs, but no, they can be any average bug. This would include the ants from a young boy’s ant farm. Renfield eats an insect, and suddenly he has superhuman powers.

The script for this movie feels like something no one bothered to proofread. To make matters worse, the editor and makeup artists were evidently entirely unconcerned with continuitiy. Renfield can fight off a whole crowd of attackers, literally make them explode in a fountain of blood and guts, and then emerge without any of it all over him, or even on him at all.

The most disappointing thing about Renfield is that is premise is actually compelling: Renfield is learning he is in a codependent relationship with Dracula, and must figure out how to break free of it—after a ridiculous amount of cartoonish violence, of course. This movie has a few amusing moments, but they almost feel like accidents. It’s not just that I want to write it off as dumb, because even a dumb movie can be well made in the right hands. This movie, on the other hand, is bereft of wit.

There’s a certain infectiousness to how much fun everyone is clearly having, I suppose. There’s even clear intent in how cartoonish it is. And yet: it’s just way too cartoonish, every plot point so wildly contrived it’s genuinely annoying, a complete waste of Shohreh Aghdashloo and Ben Schwartz as local mafia villains, who are so devoid of nuance they literally talk about how much they love violence and evil.

I’m sure some people will be entertained by Renfield. Those people have no standards and no taste. Okay, maybe that’s a little harsh. A more generous read on this movie would be that it’s an homage to mediocrity. The run time is merely 93 minutes and I was more than ready for it to be over after thirty. Why couldn’t they hire whoever cut the trailer to edit the movie? The trailer was far more entertaining, even upon repeat viewings. That is the trick with trailers, though: to dress up a bad movie as something you want to see. It worked on me. I guess you can take this as fair warning: don’t bother with this inept and rote attempt at subverting genre,

Nicolas Cage chews up the scenery, his costars, and any chance of wit.

Overall: C-

COCAINE BEAR

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

If you enjoyed the 2019 alligator-monster movie Crawl, then you’ll certainly enjoy Cocaine Bear.

I did, and I certainly did.

Both films have a very similar sensibility, with a healthy self-awareness that never takes itself too seriously, plenty of hilarious gore, and a sprinkling of genuine suspense. To be fair, Crawl has a bit more of the suspense and Cocoaine Bear has a bit more of a subtle wink at its audience.

It does seem to make a difference that Cocaine Bear was directed by none other than . . . Elizabeth Banks. Wait, what? This is her third feature film as director, but the others were Pitch Perfect 2 and Charlie’s Angels. Those movies have their own metatextual layers, with varying success: Cocaine Bear seems to be where she has hit her stride. Banks knows exactly what kind of movie she’s making, and exactly what audiences expect from it.

Too often, a movie like this tries to hard to mix the comedy and absurdity with sweetness and earnestness (see: Violent Night). Banks, along with writer Jimmy Warden, knows there’s no need for that shit. Instead, we get Keri Russell yelling “I’m a mom!” before intercepting a tossed rifle.

That’s not to say the characters in this movie are complete caricatures. Cocaine Bear successfully walks a fine line, offering characters that are real enough and with distinct personalities, all of them converging from disparate narrative threads onto a mountainous area of the woods where a bunch of duffle bags full of cocaine were tossed out of an airplane. What none of them know, but all of them discover eventually, is that a bear discovered the coke and ate a bunch of it, turning it into a ravenous killer.

This story is “inspired by true events,” although to say it takes liberties would be an understatement—liberties all taken in the best way. That said, “murdurino” listeners of the wildly popular My Favorite Murder podcast minisodes, in which the hosts read stories sent in my listeners, will be very familiar with the original story. Fan favorite Nick Terry even animated their retelling of it. They take very similar, truly hilarious liberties with the story, which Elizabeth Banks is effectively doing on a grander scale.

I expected to enjoy Cocaine Bear just based on its absurd premise, and yet it actually exceeded my expectations. I thought this would be a B-minus at best, and yet still a good time. But the movie we’ve actually got is surprisingly well executed, with a stacked cast, in addition to Keri Russell: Solo: A Star Wars Story’s Alden Erenreich as a depressed criminal with a conscience; O'Shea Jackson Jr. as his exasperated cohort; Isiah Whitlock Jr. as a cop on their tail; Margo Martindale as a park ranger with a trigger finger; a wildly unrecognizable Jesse Tyler Ferguson as a “wildlife expert” who is the object of her crush; even Ray Liotta, in his final film role, plays Erenreich’s drug dealer dad. (The film is dedicated to his memory.)

All the performances are great, by actors who know what kind of movie they are in and are having a blast. What it all comes down to, though, really, is the bear itself, who also takes up a perfect amount of screen time—never overdone, never gone too long. The thing is quite clearly CGI rendered, but for a movie with a paltry $35 million budget, it’s actually fairly impressive. This movie is of an ilk that has never been known to be visually groundbreaking. As long as the effects aren’t hilariously bad, then the film can succeed on its own terms. And boy, does this one succeed.

The key, really, is its lack of earnestness. There is a bit of sweetness, but only in ways that serve the movie’s purpose, which is to entertain and amuse. I laughed a lot, and at consistently regular intervals. That was clearly the goal. This movie’s promise is quite straightforward, and it delivers.

The biggest coke head you’ll ever come across.

Overall: B+

MEGAN

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

MEGAN answers the question you never thought to ask: What would Chucky be like if he had the brain of HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey? Or more specifically, if HAL 9000 were reincarnated as a 4’ tall, fashion-forward sorority girl?

Do people younger than forty even understand these references? 2001 was released 55 years ago and Child’s Play was released 35 years ago. Granted they both spawned sequels over the years, but if MEGAN proves anything, it’s that given enough time everything can be recycled.

Or is it M3GAN? Lead character Gemma (Allison Williams) informs us early on that it stands for Model 3 Generative Android. M3GAN is a lifelike doll with intuitive AI much more sophisticated than, but clearly modeled on, the Furby—which this film makes explicitly clear with an opening commercial for an incredibly similar toy developed by Gemma’s company. The TV spot is darkly funny, instantly setting the tone for the horror-comedy genre.

None of this is especially original, mind you. It’s all tried-and-true story tropes and concepts, given a slightly different twist. That said, I can’t deny the twist makes the movie fun, if wildly lacking in logic. (Where does M3GAN get all her fantastic outfits, anyway?) Not that any horror movie is particularly concerned with logic, nor is any horror movie audience.

I guess I’m just prone to nitpicking. MEGAN is set in Seattle, made clear by maybe three or four establishing wide shots of the city skyline; for locals, it would seem Gemma’s company offices are in the Columbia Center. We don’t see any recognizable part of Seattle otherwise, though; filming took place in Los Angeles and Auckland, New Zealand. How original!

Normally I give a lot more respect to films that give their story room to breathe, but the rules are different for horror, and MEGAN sure takes its time to get to the good stuff. I kept wondering what it would be like for someone sitting to watch this movie knowing nothing about it. They would spend at least twenty minutes thinking, What the hell is this about a kid (Violet McGraw, well cast) with a vaguely creepy doll-playmate? We spend an incredible amount of time with Gemma and her colleagues, trying to perfect this beta model robot doll while enduring their obnoxiously impatient boss (Ronny Chieng), before anything sinister is really even hinted at.

Once M3GAN becomes evidently self-aware, however, she becomes quite the fierce little bitch, instantly turning this film into something with the potential to become a cult favorite in a way no movie has in a long while. (She gets some choice lines, as when she finally turns on the child she’s been imprinted on: “You ungrateful little bitch!” Obviously she’s projecting.) I had been fairly neutral on this film when I first saw the trailer, although the bit showing M3GAN doing a little dance in a hallway before attacking someone—which became viral before the film was even released—did crack me up. I couldn’t tell if it was because the movie was unintentional camp.

What makes MEGAN work, as it happens, is how it deftly straddles the line of camp, offering plenty of satirical humor while also taking itself seriously as a horror film when appropriate. The script, by Akela Cooper (Malignant) from a story by James Wan (Annabelle Comes Home), could have stood a bit more sophistication, but in their defense—and thanks to first-time feature director Gerard Johnstone—this movie never falls short of what it promises to be. Which is to say: ridiculous in every respect, and also in all the right ways.

The doll herself, M3GAN, is actually played by two actors: 12-year-old Amie Donald provides the body and movements (under a just-short-of lifelike robot mask); 18-year-old Jenna Davis provides the voice. The voice is mostly digitally enhanced, but I wonder how much young Amie Donald got paid, given that usually there is less payment when an actor has no lines? M3GAN’s movements strike a perfect balance, though, between innocently youthful and creepily robotic.

Indeed, the production design of the title character is arguably the greatest contributor to this movie’s success—and it certainly works on its own terms. Overall MEGAN feels like a slightly undercooked effort, but in a way that could easily enhance its cult legacy in the long run. Once M3GAN goes on a murderous rampage, it’s really fun.

She’s got that killer look.

Overall: B

WHITE NOISE

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

White Noise is kind of all over the place, so it would be fitting for me to start with the end—not just the end, but the end credits. I don’t want to spoil anything, so I won’t say exactly what it is, but I will say that a sequence that lasts the entirety of the credits, which doesn’t quite match the tone of any of the rest of the movie, might be the most fun five minutes or so I’ve spent at the movies all year. I guess that’s one way to get you to sit through the end of the credits. Although you certainly won’t be reading the credtis.

This is a distinct turn in the career of writer-director Noah Baumbach, who here is adapting live action from another source material for the first time. I find myself wondering if the original novel, by Don DeLillo, had the same liberal sprinkling of humor, which I can only call . . . Baumbachian. White Noise is an odd jumble of genres, split into three parts, the middle of which, about an airborne toxic event, is notably Spielbergian in tone and presentation, with tonal notes of both Close Encounters of the Third Kind and War of the Worlds. It’s like we’re suddenly thrust into a disaster movie, but only for its middle third. It basically goes from dramedy to horror and then back again to dramedy.

And the thing is, although this airborne toxic event is easily the most memorable thing about White Noise, that’s not directly what it’s about. What it is about, exactly, I am struggling to wrap my brain around. I might be tempted to ask the same question of “Why?” that I did Bones and All, except that in this case I was truly hooked on this thing I could not quite understand, and in the end, thoroughly delighted. I suppose marrying horror with drama and comedy is much more my speed than marrying horror with romance.

This is not your typical horror movie either, however. There is something far more existential, thematically, going on with White Noise. Much of it has to do with the human quest to stop fearing death, and how that is perhaps a fool’s errand. That gets to the heart of this film, or at least closer to it, than the disaster on its face.

It doesn’t hurt that it is also frequently quite funny, in ways that only Noah Baumbach can be. There have been times I have found his work self-consciously “quirky,” but that’s never really the vibe here, even though sometimes the humor is subtly absurd. All I can say, I guess, is that this movie speaks to me. I would be delighted to watch it again, and revel in the chance to gain greater insight into its intentions.

Reviews of White Noise have been mixed, and I can see why. Some might see this movie and say, “What the hell are they talking about?” Even I sometimes thought exactly that, but was happy to leave the question unanswered just because of how much I dug its vibe. This is largely thanks to its leads, Adam Driver looking pudgier than ever as a middle-aged scholar of Hitler Studies, and Baumbach mainstay Greta Gerwig as his emotionally struggling wife. It is noted at one point that they are each on their fourth spouse, only one of the four children between them actually produced by the two of them together. The three older kids are incredibly well cast, each of them vital parts of the plot and, as actors, very much up to the task.

Don Cheadle plays a colleague at “College on the Hill,” a man with twin obsessions with car crashes in cinema, and Elvis Presley. They have discussions, and in one case a sort of duet college lecture, that draws parallels between the slavish devotion to Elvis and the slavish devotion to Hitler. It felt like it had real import to the themes of this movie, but I never quite understood it.

There are big tonal shifts, giving White Noise an air of a cross between Steven Spielberg, Richard Linklater, the Coen Brothers, maybe even a dash of Robert Altman with its penchant for overlapping dialogue in group or crowd settings. I happen to love all of these directors, and each of these tones somehow work, so I’m into it. One of the final sequences, the most Coen Brothers-esque, takes place in a Catholic emergency room with surprisingly faithless nuns. I found it hilarious.

What I couldn’t tell you, in the end, is quite how it all fits together. I can only tell you I loved the experience. I wish the same for you.

I kind of wanted the entire movie to be about this.

Overall: B+

BONES AND ALL

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

I left Bones and All unable to decide what to make of it. I’m still feeling that way, to a degree. Maybe I would feel differently, or have more conviction, about it after a rewatch, maybe after some time has gone by. I’m not sure I’ll ever want to watch this movie again. The closest I can get to sincerely complimenting it is to acknowledge that it’s not just fucked up, but fucked up in a way we’ve never seen in cinema before.

It also could be argued that some innovations are entirely unnecessary. Indeed, one of the questions I keep coming back to is: why? Luca Guadagnino, who directed and wrote this adaptation of the novel by Camille DeAngelis, has married two very disparate genres: tender love story, and horror. But why?

Maybe because there was something more obviously valuable to the story as it existed in the novel. I can’t speak to that, as I’ve never read it. And when it comes to Guadagnino, that guy is all over the place: Call My By Your Name (2017) was a modern masterpiece of queer cinema; he followed that up a year later with Suspiria, which was a wild mess. Then, in 2020, he gave us the immersive and deeply ambiguous limited series We Are Who We Are, which absolutely was not for everyone but really spoke to me.

Maybe it’s just when Guadagnino shifts into horror that he no longer speaks to me. He has a unique sensibility that, when married to the horror genre, just puts me off. And what purpose does it serve for us to see a tender love story about cannibals? It’s possible there is an allegorical element here, except that I fail to see any need for allegory when we live in a time when it’s easier and more effective just to be straightforward.

Guadagnino hires very talented actors, and then doesn’t seem to direct them very much. And clearly there is loyalty to him here: Timothée Chalamet was previously in Call Me By Your Name; we also get a single scene each from Michael Stuhlbarg (also in Call Me By Your Name, here stunningly reinvented as a redneck) and Chloë Sevigny (previously in We Are Who We Are). The talented actors command the screen regardless, and are often unrecognizable in this film—I did not realize the nomadic and vaguely sinister old man and would-be cannibal mentor was Mark Rylance until I viewed the credits. Other, less significant characters, though, are portrayed by actors whose deliveries feel just barely this side of unrehearsed. There is a naturalistic looseness to Guadagnino’s approach that works spectacularly some of the time, and not at all at other times.

The primary protagonist is Maren (Taylor Russell), a teenager only just turned 18, at which point her heretofore stunningly protective father (André Holland) finally abandons her, no longer able to cope with the responsibility of moving them to a new town every time she bites off a friend’s finger.

There is a curious establishment of rules in the universe of this film, where cannibals have a kind of sixth sense about each other. More specifically, they can recognize each other’s scent, which is how the creepy old man finds Maren to begin with. He teaches her how to recognize and use their smell, as well as some rules to live by that he’s established for himself. Eventually it becomes clear there is an invisible minority that the public at large cannot see, but they have ways of recognizing each other.

But then Maren meets Lee (Chalamet), and she’s more interested in being taught by him. A friendship blooms, and eventually romance too. It’s all very tender and sweet, except they are feeding on the corpses of fellow human beings in the meantime. This scenario doesn’t lay out any moral dubiousness, instead revealing elements of self-loathing and guilt over the things they are compelled to do. This all feels very on the nose as a metaphor for, say, queer people in the closet, especially at the time this is set (the 1980s). Except that cannibalism actually is literally grotesque, and I don’t know what any of this really has to offer the year 2022.

It’s entirely possible I am missing something. As it is, I kind of just don’t get it. I was fully engaged and consistently intrigued by this film, but I can’t say it enriched me in any way. Does it offer any useful insights? Is it actually entertaining? An older couple sitting in my same aisle got up and left the theater after the first onscreen feeding. Honestly they likely had a better time of the following two hours than I did, or at least had an easier time making sense of it.

Oh did I mention this movie features cannibalism as an act of love and mercy?

Overall: B-

THE MENU

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

It’s too bad we can’t all see The Menu not knowing literally anything about it at all. The experience would be far more fun, and this movie is fun regardless—but something gets lost in all that is revealed in the trailer. In all likelihood, had I had the opportunity to sit down in a movie theater, completely oblivious to anything except the fact that I was about to see a movie, and then saw this—I’d give it a higher rating. This would be the perfect contender for one of those “secret screenings” at film festivals.

Of course, they can’t all be like that, or else how could anyone sell it? We have to know something, right, to get people interested? The best marketers can do in this case, I suppose, is edit a trailer in a way that misdirects expectations a bit. This is the closest I’ll come to spoiling anything: the clear suggestion made by the trailer, as to what’s happening amongst this group of filthy rich diners at an exclusive, ridiculously high-end restaurant on a secluded island, is not exactly where this story is headed.

And the thing is, if the less you know the better, what else can I tell you? Well, I’ve already noted the premise. And you can expect a diverse, ensemble cast, with Anya Talor-Joy as the protagonist, Nicholas Hoult as the obsessive food snob who brought her as his date, and Ralph Fiennes as the, let’s say, morally dubious chef. A smattering of recognizable faces show up among the dozen or so other diners, all of whom are carried to the island in a small passenger ferry, including John Leguizamo, Reed Birney, Janet McTeer, and—a delightful surprise—Judith Light, among others. Several of them are recognizable character actors you’ll find yourself wondering what show or movie you’ve seen them in.

And this is what I liked best about The Menu: even when you start thinking you know where things are headed, in the middle of the movie’s narrative, you don’t. At one point I was really afraid we were headed for some kind of The Game-style ending in which we find out the protagonist is the only one being played. I was much relieved to find that fear unfounded. When the proceedings start to become severe, they really are as severe as they seem. Just not in the way you’re expecting if you’ve been taken in by this film’s marketing.

Now, is there any reason to rush into theaters to see this? Honestly, no. I’m all for keeping the movie theater industry afloat, and for achieving that goal through more than just CGI blockbuster extravaganzas, but some movies still serve their purpose just as well on your TV at home. As fun as The Menu is—and I definitively had fun—this is still one such example. The best I can suggest is to make a note of this film’s title, wait until you find it available on a streamer, and then turn it on without finding out anything more about it. You won’t regret it, especially if you’re inclined to roll your eyes at deeply pretentious discussions about food.

The menu tells a story. Just not quite the one you’re expecting.

Overall: B

NOPE

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

It’s entirely possible that there’s something I’m missing about Nope, that there’s something great about it that isn’t registering. I’m inclined to give Jordan Peele the benefit of the doubt because Get Out (2017) alone proved him to be a visionary writer and director. Us (2019) was a less coherent, but still compelling, follow-up with a truly stunning performance by its lead actor, Lupita Nyong’o.

It might be fair to say that Nope, Peele’s new film, indicates a consistency of diminishing returns. There was something profound about his previous two films, whether in its script or in its actors (or both), which I fail to identify this time around. The potential certainly seems to be there: early on in Nope, an eerie tone settles over the film, and suggests this could be the 21st-century answer to the Spielberg masterpiece Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Except . . . maybe not. Benevolence is clearly not what Jordan Peele is going for, nor is it ever. At 130 minutes, the pacing is slower than one might expect, and in the end, disparate threads I expected to come together in the end just remain unresolved. This may have been by design, but a sub plot about a chimpanzee rampage tragically killing people on the set of an old nineties sitcom—I just don’t get it. Maybe I will after I read some other reviews, a think piece here or there, and listen to some podcasts. Where my mind is right after seeing the film, though, is that I prefer films that provide some clarity on what the hell we’re seeing onscreen.

There’s a lot that happens in Nope that skirts logic. This is not to be confused with realism; a movie about a literally alien, otherworldly threat is unrealistic by definition. There are storytelling choices here that lack logic.

Which makes discussing Nope here much more of a challenge, because I don’t want to spoil anything critical, nor does anyone reading this (presumably). If Nope has any deeper value to me, it’s in the fact that I am now eager to learn what other people make of it. The trailer already reveals what appears to be a flying saucer, although “appears” is the key word there. I would be interested to learn what kind of research went into the design of that thing, which at times resembles a jellyfish, using the atmosphere the way a marine animal might move through water.

Nope is certainly unlike any other movie, or even any other Jordan Peel movie. In terms of what value that holds, I suppose your mileage may vary. It’s a mark in its favor, in my opinion. Daniel Kaluuya, returning after his starring role in Get Out, returns as a young man who has inherited his late father’s horse ranch, where they provide stunt horses for Hollywood productions. Keke Palmer plays his sister, who is barely interested in the business dealings of the ranch. With just a few scenes that are exceptions, the majority of Nope features either only these two, or a combination of them and three additional people: Brandon Perea as the alien-obsessed guy from the electronics store where they buy surveillance cameras; Steven Yuen as the local cowboy-entertainer who also happens to have been a child actor on the show with the chimp; and Michael Wincott as the cinematographer roped into helping them get the “impossible shot” of whatever they’re dealing with in the sky.

Kaluuya is one of the best actors working today, and yet his character here is so deadpan that it barely feels like he’s trying. Michael Wincott gives a similar performance, while Palmer and Yuen are a bit more animated. Yuen’s character is telegraphed to be key to the story, but in the end I cannot pinpoint how. The very opening scene is a reference to the chimp tragedy from the nineties, which would suggest it’s very important, but the narrative thread there winds up blowing away in the wind of that grey saucer thing.

In short, I don’t really understand Nope. What I can’t yet figure out is whether I should have, in light of its many redemptive elements: this movie is very effective at the suspense it establishes, and successfully creeped me out. It remains a fairly good time at the movies, with a plainly talented director and excellent actors, all of whom make unusual choices here, perhaps worth mulling over. Perhaps the most unusual thing about is that, in spite of my inability to settle on what to make of it, I want to recommend it, just so I can hear what others make of it. If that was specifically Jordan Peel’s intention, then maybe he really is a genius. Fuck if I know!

Sure.

Overall: B

CRIMES OF THE FUTURE

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

I don’t think David Cronenberg has a plausible grasp on what evolution really is. In his mind, it’s connected to the idea that a little boy could wind up with the ability to digest plastic, and so he treats us with an opening sequence in which said boy is literally eating a plastic wastebasket.

I have a very simple understanding of evolution, but even I know that it’s not an active process, but a passive one: it’s about elimination, the disappearance of traits that are no longer useful, thereby allowing the surviving useful traits to flourish. In the world of Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future, from a script he first wrote in the nineties and which still feels like it’s from that era, human bodies have begun randomly generating new organs with no known function. They have also stopped getting infections (one character marvels at how no one ever washes their hands anymore, blech), and people’s pain tolerance has skyrocketed, resulting in a trend of sort of sensual body mutilation just to get to the point of feeling something. And from an evolutionary perspective—ostensibly the perspective this film takes—absolutely none of that makes any sense whatsoever.

Science fiction works best when you can easily draw a logical line from what is known currently to the future being depicted—that is, when it has a sound scientific starting point. This was why Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey still wows audiences, and even why Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner still impresses. These depictions of a then-far future have anchors in the real worlds in which they were created. Crimes of the Future does not. Instead, it’s far more concerned with “body horror” wrapped in a cocoon of pretensions, the kind with which self-serious “art film aficionados” might have a heyday.

In terms of credit, I’ll give Cronenberg this much: he knows how to establish and maintain tone. Granted, his score composer on this film, Howard Shore, is doing much of the heavy lifting for him on this front. It’s only due to his synth-heavy, “haunting” score that an otherwise innocuous shot of a little boy milling about the beach is telegraphed as ominous. And not for nothing, but that score has its own echoes of Vangelis’s far superior score for Blade Runner.

Furthermore, Cronenberg is on record as having an incredibly hands-off approach to directing his actors, and it shows. He must have given them all one consistent note, though: everybody speak in halting, hushed tones! His “future” here is curiously unpopulated, the rare exterior shots depicting derelict, graffiti-riddled buildings on mostly empty streets. Yet, at the performance art events put on by the lead characters, Saul (Viggo Mortensen) and Caprice (Léa Seydoux), in which Caprice uses a repurposed old autopsy machine to extract his useless organs for a live audience, the audiences tend to be packed, all of them holding up recording devices of varying design (curiously, all of them a bit bulkier than one might imagine). But never noisy—they stand in rapt, silent attention.

There’s one exchange of dialogue I particularly liked. Saul says: “She said sex is surgery.” Caprice corrects him: “She said surgery is the new sex.” The latter is the basic premise of this film, but I’m much more interested in the implications of the former as an idea. I want someone to flesh out a sensual film from that idea. Maybe not David Cronenberg.

Trying and failing to find something of lasting interest in there.

Overall: C+

THE INNOCENTS

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

When we first meet Ida, the little blonde girl at the center of the Norwegian horror film The Innocents, it’s tempting to think she’s vaguely reminiscent of one of the Children of the Corn. That would be an oversimplification, though; there are no mindless monsters here. This film is unsettling in how its young children discover their supernatural powers, don’t quite understand them, an feel guilt about the damage done during what amounts to subtle tantrums. Well, sometimes they feel guilt.

Ida is a fascinating character, though, in that at first she seems like she might be the villain. She has an older, autistic sister named Anna, who appears not to feel pain and so Ida will pinch her just to amuse herself. Then, in the large apartment complex development their parents have moved them into, Ida befriends a boy named Ben, who is just discovering a telekinetic ability. Another little girl, Aisha, finds she can read the other kids’ minds.

The discovery and exploration of all these abilities is relatively innocent—hence the title—as they all also discover their abilities are somehow stronger in the presence of Anna. But, Ben soon discovers other abilities, and well, let’s just say he doesn’t tend to use them for good. This is where The Innocents really diverges from other films even remotely similar: Ida, who seems a little creepy in her own right at first, gradually discovers that she is in over her head with her relationship with Ben. What they do to a neighborhood cat together should on its own merit a severe warning to animal lovers who might want to watch this movie.

Writer-director Eskil Vogt—who also co-wrote last year’s widely acclaimed The Worst Person in the World—really takes the concept of a “slow burn” seriously. There is a couple of jump-scares, but not in the way you might expect; and the first third of the film in particular really takes its time, with quiet, extended cuts. If you come to this film with open-minded patience, then it has its rewards. If you’re into the kinds of rewards they are, anyway.

What I like most about The Innocents is how the story remains within the worlds of the children. The adults in their lives are mostly oblivious, whether or not they’re subjected to a child’s mind-control. None of these kids’ parents have any idea what’s going on between the kids themselves, which is typically the case even in the real world. This is less a point Vogt is making than it is something he takes advantage of in his storytelling.

There are some special effects in The Innocents, but to say they are used sparingly is an understatement. Whether or not this is the result of budget limitations, it’s ultimately effective. Even when effects are used, they are always subtle and brief. The purpose of this film seems to be less spectacle than it is sustained tension, of which there is plenty. And in another sign of different rules than a typical Hollywood movie, both adults and children alike—in addition to animals—can be potential victims.

The Innocents is not excessively disturbed, but it is unafraid to go in disturbing directions. I’ve seen scarier films and I have seen more deeply unsettling films, and yet this one is unsettling in a way, somewhat vague, but unlike any other. It took quite a while for it to really hook me in, but its ability to sustain a consistent tone is something I can respect.

Choose your friends wisely, kids.

Overall: B