WICKED: FOR GOOD

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

I think I made the right decision not rewatching last year’s Wicked: Part I right before seeing Wicked: For Good. It could only have made For Good more of a disappointment—because Part I was undeniably, unequivocally better. Not by a wide margin, mind you, but a distinct one. One is left wondering what justification there was in even splitting this story into two parts, aside from box office hopes. I actually rather enjoyed Part I, even though at 2 hours and 40 minutes, I still thought it was indefensibly long—based on the first half of the stage play, which was only 5 minutes shorter than the entire stage play (including the 15-minute intermission). Here, For Good clocks in at 2 hours and 18 minutes, which means director Jon M. Chu has given us a combined four 4 and 58 minutes adapted from what was originally 2 hours and 30 minutes of actual content.

Which begs the question: why not just adapt this into a far tighter, 3-hour entertainment spectacular? I think I already answered this, really. We have to bleed this property for all it’s worth, right? Indeed, it’s easy to forget how complex the history of Oz is, with the original L. Frank Baum novel having been published in 1900; that book being adapted into the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz; the original Gregory Maguire novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, a revisionist take on Baum’s characters, having been published in 1995; Stephen Schwartz’s stage musical Wicked having been first produced on Broadway in 2003; and then just last year, we got Wicked: Part I, the first half of Jon M. Chu’s film adaptation of the musical.

Every iteration of stories in this universe has had their devoted fanatics, of course—albeit none with more staying power than the 1939 film, which was enjoyed untouched for nearly 60 years, unless you count the bizarre 1985 film Return to Oz, which never garnered the same kind of devotion. I never read the original novel Wicked, and perhaps I should; I suspect I would like it better than the films—and to be clear, I do enjoy the films (and I particularly enjoy Part I). After seeing Wicked: For Good, which was a movie I wanted to be delightful but which was just fine, I rather wish I could see a direct film adaptation of Gregory Maguire’s novel, rather than a film adaptation of a stage musical adaptation of the novel, which by necessity strips an original story of much of its detail and nuance.

For Good spends a lot more time than Part I on drawing connections to The Wizard of Oz, right down to offering origin stories for the Cowardly Lion, the Tin Man, and the Scarecrow. In each case, the retconned explanation for their existence is a stretch at best, even in a world of magical characters. Dorothy even shows up here, sort of—she figures surprisingly prominently in the chain of events, but only as a shoehorned narrative device, often as a somewhat forced in-joke. It’s easy to imagine how this can work better in a stage production, in which our main characters refer to a Dorothy we never see except as a silhouette. Chu, on the other hand, gives us glimpses of her, either very briefly from behind or just parts of her body, which makes her feel much more real, and therefore inexplicably ignored.

A lot that was established, and even leaned on hard, in Part I gets little payoff here—particularly the existence of talking animals who are oppressed by the governing characters of Oz. There are only a few brief scenes with animals actually talking here, which is actually fine because this element was one of my least favorite parts of Part I. That’s a lot of effort for such little satisfaction of resolution, though. I did enjoy the arc of the flying monkeys, one of the elements I like in both films: their origins, who they were originally loyal to, and the manner in which their loyalty shifts to Elphaba. They also, collectively, make for some of the more memorable cinematic images in For Good.

And yes, there are some good songs in For Good, particularly “I Couldn’t Be Happier” and especially “For Good.” Again, though, they still pale in comparison to what we got in Part I (and, by all accounts, this is a common refrain about Act I versus Act II of the stage musical): “Dancing Through Life,” “Popular,” and especially “Defying Gravity,” which serves as the spectacular big finish of both the first act of the play and the first of these two films. Part I also featured delightful choreography, which is all but nonexistent in For Good. This film spends much more time on Oz’s society turning for the worse, and a reconciliation between Elphaba and Glinda that is ultimately tragic.

Part I was so enjoyable, though, that it creates a lot of goodwill that carries into For Good, in a way that I don’t think For Good would be able to sustain on its own. People went to see the first film multiple times, and there’s no way that’s going to happen as much, if at all, with For Good. But we still love these characters, who mean just as much to us now as before, thanks in large part to the production for both films having taken place at once. We feel the love and struggle between Elphaba and Glinda because Cynthia Eivo and Ariana Grande embody them, respectively, so wholly and fantastically, with such clearly genuine affection for each other. If there is any reason to see this movie, it’s the two of them.

Splitting Wicked into two films really does both films a disservice. Part I feels like a great start that we now know had no hope of living up to expectations; For Good is decent but inherently inferior. I had a fine time at the movies, but can’t imagine going out of my way to watch this again. Had this been adapted into a single film, it likely would have elicited a much more enduring affection.

I don’t know who they think they are!

Overall: B

KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN

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

I can’t quite decide what to make of Kiss of the Spider Woman, which is a 2025 movie musical adaptation of a 1993 stage musical adaptation of a 1976 novel that was already adapted into a 1985 film drama. This much I can say with confidence: this new film is not going to make much in box office revenue, and it’s certainly not going to be remembered the way the 1985 film was—or even, in all likelihood, the 1993 stage musical was. This movie is going to come and go, less forgotten than widely ignored.

It’s too bad, because the movie isn’t bad. It’s just also unremarkable, save perhaps for some of the performances. It seems Jennifer Lopez can’t catch a break when it comes to her film career—she rightfully garnered awards buzz for the 2019 film Hustlers, but nothnig really came of it; she’s been doing her best ever since. Here she plays the title character, which is ironic on two levels: she represents a character in a fantasy escape from the Argentinian prison “real world of the film,” but the title character isn’t even the main character of that fantasy. On the plus side, she also plays Aurora, the heroine of the movie musical whose story is being told by prisoner Luis Molina (Tonatiuh), to his cellmate Valentin (Diego Luna).

A huge element of this story is that Music is gay, and Valentin is straight—or, so it would seem from the start. There’s a lot about the evolution of queer identity politics since the seventies that this film does not bother to acknowledge, most notably Luis’s desire to be a woman. Even without the very vocabulary to articular trans identity, Kiss of the Spider Woman manages to give no solid indication of whether we should fundamentally regard Luis as a man or a woman (or even neither). From the context of the script, one could even assume we’re meant to think of Luis as a gay man who simply lionizes women. This remains the case even when, predictably and inevitably, we get to what amounts to a dream sequence—and a beautiful one—featuring Luis as a woman (or Tonatiuh, who is openly queer, in drag).

And then there is the relationship that evolves between these two characters, which leans hard into a direction I wasn’t quite expecting. And what are the implications, then, of Valentin’s identity and sexuality? Perhaps the ambiguity is the point, but turning this story into a musical strips it of much of its nuance, leaning further instead into the escapist fantasy that Luis regales Valentin with. Valentin begins by judging the story’s stereotypes and tropes, and he’s not exactly wrong. But, he also eventually gets into the story, which the film we are watching cuts back and forth between, and eventually finds that even this story has some twists he did not quite expect.

The 1985 film adaptation starred William Hurt as Luis and Raul Julia as Valentin, and was critically adored. I may watch it soon, but I made the right choice not watching it just before seeing this new adaptation, which almost certainly would only suffer for it. The lush colors of the production design in the movie-within-a-movie (that being what makes this a musical) are well executed, and Jennifer Lopez in particular is fitted into several beautifully designed dresses. The choreography may have been hard work to execute but just looks all right onscreen, and here is the kicker considering the musical genre: the music itself is merely fine. Not bad; it serves its purpose—but the music itself is what makes or breaks a musical, and there’s not a single iconic tune to be found here. I can’t remember a single line right now, and I saw the film a couple of hours ago.

Lopez delivers the songs flawlessly, though. Diego Luna is great as ever, though I have some slight ambivalence about Tonatiuh’s performance. Tonatiuh being openly queer doesn’t change how exaggerated Luis’s effeminate demeanor feels, especially when we first meet them. It may very well that this is in keeping with the tradition of this story—maybe this is how Luis is described in the novel; maybe it’s how Luis is performed onstage. But, like most people who see this movie, I don’t have those comparison points at hand, and it feels here like a character trait that gets over-indulged, as though trying to telegraph to the back of the house that this person is queer.

Still, Kiss of the Spider Woman has some pointedly timely story elements, most significant among them being the setting of the final stage of Argentinian dictatorship—and some pointed reflections of where others in the world may be headed. Again, none of this has any time or space to be fully fleshed out because of all that gets reserved for song-and-dance routines. In the end, Kiss of the Spider Woman is a movie with something to say but an inability to say it with clarity.

Looks like Diego Luna has eyes for Jenny from the Block,

Overall: B

BETTER MAN

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

I’m sure you’re all wondering: does anyone fuck Robbie-Williams-as-chimp in Better Man? Well, not onscreen. Someone gives him a hand job though!

Here’s the most impressive thing about Better Man, though: it has an astonishing ability to make you forget its wackadoodle premise: this is a biopic about British pop superstar Robbie Williams, except Robbie is the singular character rendered as a CGI chimpanzee. It’s a liberalization of two ideas at once: a pop star as a dancing monkey (okay, yes, I know, chimps aren’t monkeys, that’s not the point) and raving addict as an out of control animal. I’m not sure how well the layered metaphors work in the many scenes of Robbie as a child, mind you, detailing his love of his nan who openly accepts him flaws and all. He’s neither dancing nor out of control at that young an age, and all I could think of was how his mother must have reacted when she pushed a chimp through her hoo-ha.

Indeed, I really wondered how a movie like this would tackle sexuality. I’ll certainly give director and co-writer Michael Gracey this much credit: his does indeed write Robbie Williams as a sexual being—under normal circumstances it would make no sense not to—but he does it relatively subtly, only one scene being overtly sexual (the aforementioned hand job, from a fan at a meet and greet), and somehow, it actually works in the context of the narrative. I couldn’t tell you what the secret sauce was that he used, though; this is otherwise a pretty straightforward biopic story.

It’s also a fun one, most of the time. I had a good time. The trailers do not make this clear, but Better Man is also a musical in the classic sense, with Robbie breaking out into song as part of the narrative, in addition to the several we see him perform onstage in concert. Relatively early on there is a truly dazzling sequence, an almost seamless blend of on-camera choreography and blue screen, the camera swirling around Robbie as he moves from indoors to join a massive crowd of synchronized dancers out in the street. A particularly nice touch is when the crowd jumps, but just close enough to doing it at the same time so that their jumps form a quick rave from the front of the crowd to the back. It’s mesmerizing and incredibly entertaining, and I wish Better Man had more sequences like it.

What it does have far too much of is a focus on Robbie Williams’s self-loathing, with constant cutaways to other versions of himself in audiences, reacting back to him with everything from disapproving scowls to outright hateful screaming. This happens a lot, well past the point of it becoming tiresome, until finally in one fantasy sequence he jumps from the stage and engages in combat with them all, to the death. He even seems to kill is inner child, a choice that I could not quite wrap my brain around, aside from it perhaps representing the extremity of his suicidal ideation. I understand what Gracey is going for with this, but it is overwrought and overdone. This is on top of the many scenes we see of him excessively drinking and doing drugs. It seems worth mentioning yet again that it’s a chimp we see doing all these things. A chimp with a British accent—both motion capture and voice performance by English actor Jonno Davies (the voiceover narration and the music vocals are from Williams himself).

Then there’s the issue of the music. It should be noted that Robbie Williams, while a massive star elsewhere in the world, never broke through in the United States, and it’s not difficult to see why. I went to his official YouTube page, played the most-played music video posted there, and then fell asleep.

To be fair, contextualized in the film, Robbie Williams’s music is a lot more fun, though none of it made me eager to download the motion picture soundtrack. Better Man has several musical sequences and interludes that are undeniably infectious, all of them performed by a CGI chimp with a stunning amount of legit charisma, even when being depraved. Robbie Williams as a character in this movie is someone you connect with, you empathize with, and you root for. It’s kind of a stunning surprise, and makes you wonder whether it would even work as well if he were portrayed by a regular human. The plot beats are fairly by the numbers, after all, and the chimp-as-metaphor forces a kind of consideration that it would never manage otherwise.

What an odd, fun, deceptively conventional movie this is, wrapped in a wildly unconventional concept. It’s not nearly as provocative as it clearly wants you to think it is, but it will impress anyway, particularly how deeply expressive Robbie Williams’s CGI chimp face is, using FX technology that barely works but still works well, and at the same time will look dated in five years. Perhaps the same is the case for Better Man as a movie overall, but sometimes you only need a movie to work right now, and right now, this one works surprisingly well.

He’s not a monkey, get it straight!

Overall: B

THE END

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

I went in to The End really wanting to like it. The premise is right up my alley—a postapocalyptic musical about a family fraying at the seams after twenty years in an underground bunker. “Bunker” is a bit misleading; Tilda Swinton’s character, here credited only as “Mother,” has saved priceless pieces of art from the surface, and decorated all of their walls with them. We get many close-up shots of painted skies and clouds, the closest thing we get to seeing real versions of such things in the entire film.

I get that many details are completely irrelevant to the plot of this film, but there were so many that defied logic that I found it distracting. We never see any exterior walls to this structure this family lives in—Mother (Swinton), Father (Michael Shannon), Son (George MacKay), Friend (Bronagh Gallagher), Butler (Tim McInnerny), and Doctor (Lennie James). These six have been living in this self-sustaining underground home for over twenty years. We know this because it was twenty years ago the last time anyone tried to come after them from the surface.

But now, a stranger has managed to penetrate, and is found unconscious, no one with any idea how she got in. I watched the entire film thinking they were in cavernous snow caves, only to discover when I looked it up after getting home that, apparently, they are deep down a salt mine. Still, plenty of questions remain unanswered. All we know is, the group tentatively agrees to take the stranger in. She is played by Moses Ingram, credited here as “Girl.”

Over time, this young woman reveals that she is the last surviving member of her family, and she begs to stay with these people because she cannot survive on the surface. She sure looks well fed, though—not fat, but perfectly normal. You’d think she’d be as emaciated as she was desperate, but these are not details director and co-writer Joshua Oppenheimer is concerning himself with. Instead, the story focuses instead on how her presence gradually reveals how this wealthy family has spent decades both lying to each other and kidding themselves.

Normally, I would be really into this, except that The End spends a lot of its extended runtime—148 minutes—with very little actually happening, aside from them singing, to themselves or to each other. Oppenheimer’s choice to make the singing fully unironic is a bold one I can respect. The singing abilities run the gamut; neither Tilda Swinton or Michael Shannon are very good at it; George MacKay and Moses Ingram are much better at it. What’s more, the limited setting allows for little in the way of variety: we either see people sining inside a home amongst the paintings, or out in the salt caves.

I just couldn’t quite connect with The End, and not for lack of trying. This is like a quiet family drama where the family members happen to break out into song. And what of the music, then? It’s serviceable. It’s not bad, but neither is it particularly catchy or memorable. The accompanying orchestrations are pleasant. Much like Emilia Pérez, the point of making this a musical is never readily apparent. I would propose that this film would be both a more reasonable length and more compelling without the songs.

The performances are solid across the board—something we can reliably count on with both Tilda Swinton (her somewhat distracting dark haired wigs notwithstanding) and Michael Shannon. There is real depth to mine in these strained relationships. I just found myself preoccupied with unanswered questions, such as where they get the eggs they eat from, when we never see any live animals down there. And if the stranger could survive that long on the surface, why do these characters never go up there? Surely there’s stuff they could scavenge. But I guess they are all committed to their insulation, as is this largely impenetrable movie.

A talented cast offers music without passion.

Overall: B-

WICKED: PART I

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

Unlike the travesty that was Red One, Wicked is filled with actors who all know what movie they are in. They understood the assignment, and as a result this movie is poised to become the biggest movie musical sensation in five years—perhaps overtaking the surprising success of the 2017 live action remake of Beauty and the Beast. Although I liked even that one more than I expected to, I find myself rooting for Wicked’s success.

And this is in spite of fairly measured expectations going in. I did not expect to hate Wicked by any means, but I have never been among the rabid fans of the Broadway musical, which first opened in 2003; or certainly Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel on which it was based, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. I did find myself wondering how the filmmakers could justify giving a film based only on the first act of the play a runtime of two hours and 40 minutes, when the entire play—including intermission!—lasted all of five minutes more than that. But I’m here to tell you: Wicked Part I easily won me over, very early on, not in spite of but arguably because of how director Jon M. Chu (who also directed the wonderful and criminally underrated In the Heights) fleshed it out.

One of the biggest surprises, given how much the film is fleshing out the play, is that Part I features 11 songs, and all of them are from the Broadway play; reportedly the key difference is that, much like the rest of the story, several of the songs have been “altered and extended.” This, honestly, should comfort the diehards: it’s just more of exactly the thing you love.

As for me, my personal history with this property is practically nonexistent. I never read the novel. I did see the stage musical, once, on tour in 2009. I can’t remember anything about it. My vague recollection was that it was fine, but I didn’t quite see why people went crazy for it. This was why I went into this film, Wicked Part I, expecting it also to be fine, if maybe a little bloated. To my surprise, the film entirely justifies itself, and I was utterly charmed by it.

A huge piece of that success is the casting. Ariana Grande is stupendous as Galinda, later to be known as Glinda, the Good Witch of the North. She perfectly threads the needle between revoltingly self-centered and lovably clueless, delivering an over-the-top performance that is also packed with indelibly subtle touches. She is arguably the best thing about Wicked, except that this will inevitably, criminally, overshadow the deeply affecting and nuanced performance by Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba, later known to be the Wicked Witch of the West. This is the story of how two completely opposite personalities are first enemies and then become friends at Shiz University, in spite of Galinda’s blinding privilege and Elphaba’s lifetime of oppression for being different, having been inexplicably born with green skin.

There is obviously great potential for allegory here, which Chu doesn’t dig into quite as deeply as some might have liked—although, in contrast to Idina Menzel having originated the part on Broadway, one might read further meaning into the casting of Erivo, a Black woman, as Elphaba. Given the time elapsed since the play was first mounted, and the cultural landscape today, this is a change that makes more sense. (It would have made more sense in 2003 too.)

Wicked also features a far more directly allegorical subplot about animal characters who are the victims of a conspiracy to stop all animals from speaking. There is a goat professor character who is a key feature in this subplot—I struggled to identify the wildly familar voice being used for this CGI character rendered as a full-on goat who can talk (how the hell he does things like, say, get dressed in the morning, we just won’t talk about), and it turned out to be the great Peter Dinklage. In the Broadway play, the animals are portrayed by humans wearing fairly elaborate prosthetics, but they still presented as definitively humanoid; it follows that in the film, they would be entirely CGI creations. In any case, I found this subplot to be rather undercooked, more of a plot device for a wedge in Elphaba and Galinda’s friendship than the legitimate, front-facing concern it should be.

Speaking of the visual effects, it should be noted that this is Wicked’s weakest element. The universe of this film is invented with vivid imagination, I will give it that—it’s just rendered in plainly obvious visual artifice, with sometimes distracting glitchiness, such as how Elphaba’s movements hitch a bit when she’s seen flying on her broom. Even compared to the classic 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, one can’t help but be impressed by that film’s elaborately designed and colorful, practical sets, even by today’s standards. Much of the visuals in Wicked feel like shortcuts that did not demand the same kind of effort, even though a movie like this more than justifies such efforts.

What recommends Wicked is how much movie magic it still contains, in spite of that. The music is unbelievably catchy and easily elevates a script that could stand some greater depth. Far more importantly, the casting is spot-on across the board, starting with Ariana Grande and Erivo, who alone make the movie worth seeing, both for their shining, distinct personalities and their undeniable charisma as a pair. But the rest of the cast is wonderful too, from Michelle Yeoh as Madame Morrible, to Bridgerton’s Jonathan Bailey’s singularly charming turn as the prince Fiyero. There’s even a touch of unforced queerness among the supporting cast, most exemplified by Bown Yang as one of Galinda’s two biggest acolytes, which I very much appreciated.

Jeff Goldlbum, for his part, is serviceable as the Wizard of Oz; it’s a casting choice that works and makes sense, even though he’s just as Goldlbum-y as ever. I won’t say his singing is bad, but it certainly pales in comparison to the staggering singing talent surrounding him. And yes, original Broadway players Idina Menzel and Kristen Chenoweth do get concurrent cameos, in a scene that is quite funny. Finally, Marissa Bode is good as Ephaba’s sister, Nessarose, who is a wheelchair user, but I rather wish that character had been given more to do and meatier content to chew on. At least in this case they cast an actual wheelchair user to fill the role.

Wicked: Part II is set for release at this same time next year, and I am now looking forward to it far more than I expected to prior to seeing Part I. I still have mixed feelings about splitting film adaptations this way; on the one hand it feels like a choice motivated by profits alone, and on the other hand it can really allow a story with a lot going on to breathe. I find myself surprised to feel that nothing in Part I comes across as filler, and still some of it could have been better fleshed out. Given that this is an adaptation of a Broadway musical, it already has a clearly defined first and second half baked in. This film ends with an extended version of “Defying Gravity” and it is sensational, a great way to end the movie—in spite of one woman in the elevator after the screening I attended being quite miffed to have discovered only that night that this was only part I. Again: it just allows you to look forward to more of exactly the thing you love. In the meantime, just think of this as a year-long intermission.

Some of the best connections come from the most surprising places.

Overall: B+

EMLILA PÉREZ

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

There’s a lot going on in Emilia Pérez—some might argue too much. It’s a Mexican cartel movie; it’s a story about a trans woman’s self-actualization; it’s a musical. I kept wondering how this movie might most succinctly be encapsulated as a logline or an elevator pitch.

More than anything, the musical element is the easiest to be ambivalent about. I remain unsure as to what the point of it is. Never mind the somewhat dubious nature of Zoe Saldaña playing the protagonist when hers is not the trans character, within minutes we witness her as Mexico City defense attorney to crooks, Rita—who breaks into song while walking through the streets, providing some exposition in a fairly economical way. The crowded streets become part of an intricate ballet of modern dancers around her, with choreography that is undeniably impressive. Saldaña’s singing is competent, and this scene provides a preview to what’s to come: a film that is a musical in the most fundamental and traditional sense of the word, characters sometimes even singing lines that would make far more sense uttered straight.

Mind you, the presentation of musical numbers is the only conventional thing about Emilia Pérez. How many traditional musicals have you seen about drug cartels, or that revolve around the transition of a trans woman, let alone both? This movie has songs about gender-affirming surgery, and there really is a moment when a Chinese surgeon in Bangkok utters the line, “From penis to vagina?”—in song.

The quality of the songs, by French singer Camille (with a score composed by Clément Duco), is spotty. The singing of lines between Rita and an Israeli surgeon upon their first meeting makes little sense. But there are deeply touching musical moments too, such as the child of a post-transition parent singing about how she smells like the father he remembers.

That brings me to Karla Sofía Gascón, the 52-year-old trans actress who plays the title character and the Mexican cartel leader pre-transition. We see her first as “Manitas Del Monte,” and when we later see her as Emilia, it is a stunning revelation. Gascón’s performance as Manitas is astonishing in retrospect, an unusual sort of layered performance that skirts the boundaries of meta storytelling. She is also incredible as Emilia, filling the screen with her unforgettable presence. Gascón, as it happens, has 41 acting credits on IMDb, 37 of them from before her transition in 2018. If nothing else, we can rest assured that director Jacques Audiard cast a trans actress for this role.

Oh, did I mention that Emilia Pérez is actually a French film? As in: it’s a French production, filmed in a studio near Paris. No French is spoken, however, due to the setting being largely in Mexico City—recreated in studio. Presumably the same was done in other settings, from China to Switzerland to Israel to England. A surprising amount of the dialogue—and singing—is done in English, a logical choice given how common it is for people who don’t speak each other’s native languages to default to English in order to communicate.

I was particularly struck by Selena Gomez as Jessi, a woman convinced she has been widowed when Emilia’s transition coincides with the faking of Manitas’s death. Gomez is reportedly dissatisfied with her performance of Spanish dialogue, as she is not fluent, but for those of us watching who are also not fluent, she was excellent. Furthermore, Gomez gives a consistently flat and muted delivery of her lines in the Hulu series Only Murders in the Building, and if that’s the extent of your familiarity with her as an actor you would never expect the kind of performance you see here. I might be tempted to say she has a shot at an Oscar nomination, if not for the fact that she is given far less juicy material than her costars.

How in the world does Rita fit into all of this, you might quite reasonably be asking? Rita herself asks this, when a pre-transition Emilia has her abducted and then offers millions for her assistance in finding a surgeon who can be discreet enough not to endanger her. Rita is merely a high-powered lawyer. In the end, you could say she was tapped for her powers of persuasion.

To the significant credit of Jacques Audiard and his co-writers Thomas Bidegain, Nicolas Livecchi and Léa Mysius, Emilia Pérez takes frequent unexpected turns, is utterly unpredictable, and is always absorbing. It’s also a tad chaotic, and there is a shocking moment at the end that I truly did not see coming and am still unsure how I feel about. This film is already being met with deeply mixed responses, some finding it an incredibly original work of art and some finding it outright offensive. I find myself falling in the middle, but leaning slightly toward impressed by how well its boldness somehow actually works. This is an international feature in every sense of the phrase, and its very existence is extraordinary.

The cis-het gaze: Zoe Sadaña offers some star power assistance.

Overall: B+

THE COLOR PURPLE

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

Here I’ve spent many a year insisting any given film should be judged on its own merits, and then I go and watch this current iteration of The Color Purple directly after watching Steven Spielberg’s original 1985 adaptation.

I do not recommend doing this. It colors everything about how Blitz Bazawule’s current adaptation gets received, and it is unfair to this newer film. It can become difficult to draw the line between whether I’m not responding to it quite as well as I’d hoped, either because it is genuinely a weaker adaptation, or I simply like the earlier film better. And there is no question, I like the earlier film better.

A key difference between the two films is that the new one is a musical—not that you’d know that from its promotional campaign. Fans of Broadway will surely know it, as it may be a surprise to discover the Broadway musical adaptation is itself pretty old now: it debuted in December 2005, nearly two decades ago; ran through 2008; and then had a highly acclaimed revival run from 2015 to 2017. The latter would clearly be what then promoted this film adaptation of the stage musical, which I never had a chance to see but can easily imagine it being a fantastic, powerful experience.

The sticking point for me here is that storytelling works differently in different mediums. This is something too many directors forget when adapting books into films, and the same goes for adapting stage plays into films. Spielberg’s movie covers a great many years, and really lets the story simmer within each phase of Celie’s life, making each key occurrence all the more poignant. The Color Purple, the movie musical, covers just as much ground, but has a run time thirteen minutes shorter than the previous film, and it makes so much time for music sequences that the rest of the story, simply by definition, gets truncated and rushed through.

The actors portraying Celie and her sister Nettie as children (Phylicia Pearl Mpasi and Halle Bailey, respectively) don’t even look that young, thereby undermining the very point of their portrayals. Nettie then does not get near enough screen time, regardless of who is portraying her, which undercuts the intended emotion of the sisters’ eventual reunion after many years of separation. We hardly get to know Nettie here, and so have less reason to care.

All that said, there remains a lot to like about this Color Purple—particularly, somewhat ironically, the music. Your mileage may vary as to whether it’s worth trading effective storytelling for really good music, but at least when the music numbers are being performed, you’re happy to be there. We’ll just set aside how incongruous it feels to have characters breaking out into rapturous song in the middle of a story like this, which features fairly regular domestic abuse.

Furthermore, the actors can’t be blamed for what they’ve been given to work with, and The Color Purple is objectively well cast: Fantasia Barrino is effective as the older Celie (even if her incredibly distinctive voice bears no resemblance to Phylicia Pearl Mpasi’s). Colman Domingo is uniquely sinister as Mister, the man Celie is forced to marry; Taraji P. Henson is electric as Shug Avery, the blues singer with whom both Mister and Celie are enamored; H.E.R. is arguably underused as Squeak; and Danielle Brooks absolutely justifies her Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for her portrayal of Sofia, belligerent wife of Mister’s son, Harpo (Corey Hawkins).

Of course, here is where a generational divide creeps in again: none of these current actors can’t really compete with the indelible 1985 performances by then-newcomer Whoopi Goldberg as Celie; Danny Glover as Mister; or Oprah Winfrey as Sofia. The more relevant question might be how many people among 2023 audiences know or care about the 1985 film—they’ll certainly know who both Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey are, if not Danny Glover. The one performer who truly improves on the character in the current iteration is Taraji P. Henson, who truly lights up the screen.

There’s also the valid argument that Steven Spielberg, a rich White guy, was an inappropriate choice for directing this particular story—something he was actually insecure about even in 1985, only taking the gig once Quincy Jones convinced him to. Production of films about Black people plays out in this way less and less anymore, and it’s only right that a Black director should take on this film. It’s somewhat of a bummer, then, that a Black director could not have been given the chance to make just as good a film in 1985, and that the Black director who did direct the film in 2023 did a fine job but still not quite as good.

I do rather wish now that I could have watched 2023 The Color Purple in a bit more of a vacuum, without the 1985 film so fresh in my memory, from literally minutes before. I might not be quite as hard on it, although I feel pretty strongly I still would have given it the same rating, given its strong performances among tonal inconsistencies.

It’s hard to be as timid as the story really calls for when you’re regularly bursting into song.

Overall: B

MEAN GIRLS

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

When I saw the original Mean Girls in 2004, I felt even then that it was overrated, an ultimately unsuccessful attempt at being the 21st-century contemporary answer to the 1988 cult classic Heathers. I felt at the time that Heathers was a far superior comedy, with biting humor that Mean Girls lacked. Ironically, not even Heathers has aged especially well from a 2024 vantage point—and it should be noted that Mean Girls was released 16 years after it; this new iteration of Mean Girls is coming out a solid twenty years after the first one. (The Broadway musical adaptation of the 2004 film, on which this new film is based, had its first production in 2017—thirteen years after the movie. Are you following all of this?) These days, surely far fewer viewers of Mean Girls have any idea what Heathers even was than viewers in 2004 did, making Heathers far less relevant to this movie than it was to the 2004 movie.

It’s been so long since even the 2004 film, all that truly matters now is how well the current film works, within a 2024 framework. And I’d say it works . . . fine. I enjoyed this one more than I seemed to enjoy the first film twenty years ago, but not by a wide margin.

I was relieved to find the music catchy, if relatively forgettable. There has been a bit of press about the promotion of all the musicals released in the past couple of months, most notably Wonka, The Color Purple, and Mean Girls: the trailers for all of them were edited so that it was not clear in any of their cases that they are actually musicals. Are promoters afraid audiences aren’t interested in musicals? If so, why they hell are they making them at all? And god knows, Wonka was a genuine hit—with utterly forgettable music throughout—and the 1 p.m. Saturday screening of Mean Girls I went to was far from sold out, but still had a surprisingly robust crowd at it.

I’ll say this: I had a good time, and I can’t imagine ever going out of my way to see Mean Girls, the musical adaptation of a Broadway adaptation of a movie adaptation of a novel originally called Queen Bees and the Wannabees, again. The 2004 film was famously co-written by, and co-starred, Tina Fey, whose profile was much higher at the time than it is today; she also wrote the book (though not the lyrics) for the Broadway musical, and gets sole writing credit for this new film adaptation, while appearing, yet again, as one of the teachers at North Shore High School. To Fey’s credit, the script is updated well to 2020s sensibilities, if possibly a little off the mark when it comes to how high school teenagers actually behave toward each other anymore.

Last year’s Jennifer Lawrence comedy No Hard Feelings felt a little closer to the mark with this, with high school kids much more sophisticated than they used to be, and far less tolerant of bigoted or sexist behavior—granted, these things can easily still be very regional, and bear in mind I have not personally spent any real time inside a high school myself in a solid thirty years. Nevertheless, there is a thematic undercurrent to this Mean Girls which, being based on something twenty years old, feels a bit dated.

I still have a basic complaint about it: Mean Girls doesn’t have mean enough girls in it. It might be more appropriately called Girls Who Hurt Each Other’s Feelings, which is, just as before, the basic, simplistic lesson: girls can be uniquely catty with each other, they fight, and the ones with a genuine conscience ultimately make up.

Fair enough, I suppose, especially for audiences who are, let’s say, adolescents. On the upside, Mean Girls is cast with exceptional performers, with Angourie Rice (first seen as the 13-year-old in The Nice Guys; later the young-adult daughter in the HBO limited series Mare of Easttown) in the part of Cady Heron. Rice fits comfortably in the role of both awkward newcomer and one of the so-called “Plastics,” the clique of vapid popular girls. Reneé Rapp is especially effective as Regina George, the thoughtless leader of the Plastics, her musical numbers consistently the best vocal performances in the film.

Among Regina’s two main acolytes, I have more mixed feelings about casting a brown woman (Avantika) as the pointedly dumb one. In fact, the supporting cast is fairly diverse, including Auli’i Cravalho (who had voiced the title character in the Disney film Moana) and Jaquel Spivey as the queer kids who first befriend Cady at her new school. But, there’s no getting around the fact that casting the two leads as White girls was no accident, and thus centers Whiteness with all this array of other, diverse characters revolving around them. I love Tina Fey, but this does seem to be a lasting blind spot with her. (One might argue that this particular story doesn’t work the same way if the leads aren’t White, but I would not accept that argument.) Taken in isolation, Mean Girls could be given a pass on this front; the issue is that it’s part of a long established pattern, which not enough people talk about.

Casting considerations aside, Mean Girls is relatively harmless, a pleasant enough time at the movies, a fairly successful capitalization on nostalgia for something that was never that special in the first place. As with its predecessor, Mean Girls comfortably sidesteps a whole lot of potential, leaving us with both a sense of what it could have been, and a satisfying experience of something hovering just one or two steps above mediocrity.

I want to see the movie about the supporting players.

Overall: B

WONKA

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

An argument has been made that, well, Wonka is for kids, and kids deserve movies too, right? Well, here’ s my counter-argument: the likelihood that kids will indeed enjoy Wonka notwithstanding, there are still kids’ movies out there that are actually good. This is not one of them.

Mind you, it’s not terrible either. But that’s just the thing: there is a Roald Dahl legacy to live up to here, as well as a Gene Wilder legacy, and Wonka falls short on both counts. This movie doesn’t even live up to the 2005 Tim Burton film Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which I still insist was wonderful, I don’t care how many haters there are out there. Of course, that’s not to say any of these films have held up to the truly classic, enduring 1971 film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory—which, astonishingly, was rated G—but, on the flip side, kids today are neither likely to know anything about that film, nor have much interest in watching it if they do. It would be the equivalent of me having any interest in a film released in 1934 when I was ten years old.

The bummer of it right now is, if you want to take your kids to the movies, Wonka is nearly the only option. The only others in multiplexes right now are the animated films Migration and Wish, which are both getting worse responses than Wonka. Wonka, at the very least, is sprinkled with several genuinely charming moments, of the sort that are a signature of director Paul King. (King directed both of the Paddington films, and both of them are far superior to this.) If you’re one of the adults taking kids to this film, well, you’re kind of shit out of luck.

And, to be fair, it’s not just that it doesn’t live up to Roald Dah’s cinematic legacy. From the opening scenes, in which Timothée Chalamet dances with a bunch of people holding “Wonka” umbrellas behind him, the choreography middling and the lyrics unmemorable, I thought: Oh. This isn’t going to be great. The sequence ends with Wonka getting charged a fee for daydreaming, a brief gag that works better than any of the extended theatrics that came before it.

My biggest issue with Wonka is the visual effects. This movie was made on a budget of $125 million, and I just have to wonder: where the hell was the money spent? Just on the talent? Chalamet’s $9 million paycheck is objectively ridiclous, and yet even that is but a fraction of that budget. Once again, the shockingly good Godzilla Minus One comes to mind—that film was made for $15 million, and it looks far better than this.

Wonka is appropriately color saturated for a film that is clearly presented as a musical fantasia. And yet, a huge amount of it is rendered in subpar CGI, giving it a far more artificial look than films about the same character released 52 and 18 years ago. I was especially mystified by the one Oompa Loompa, whose movements are noticeably jerky-jerky. How can a film this expensive to make look so bad? To give credit where credit is due, Hugh Grant imbues the Oompa Loompa with more personality than any single other character in the film, which almost makes up for the bad visual effects. Almost. (Side note: it’s also in this film’s favor that the Oompa Loompa is given full autonomy, and never becomes the stand-in for slave labor that the Oompa Loompas were in either of the previous films.)

To be fair, Timothée Chalamet, an objectively great actor, does his best with what he has to work with. As do a bevy of other big names who make up the supporting cast: Olivia Colman as Mrs. Scrubitt, the innkeeper who tricks Wonka into indentured servitude; Keegan-Michael Key as the Chief of Police, so easily bribed by Wonka’s rival chocolatiers with chocolate that he gains a ton of weight over the course of the film (and I find the idea that this is “fat shaming” to be debatable at best); Rowan Atkinson as Father Julius, also easily bribed with chocolate; Jim Carter as Abacus Crunch, one of the other indentured servants slaving away in the inn basement; even Sally Hawkins, the mom in the Paddington movies and here playing Wonka’s mother in a few flashback sequences. In none of these cases does the actor get as much to chew on as they deserve, in spite of Olivia Colman’s extensive screen time as one of many villains, but the one who most directly steals Wonka’s luck away from him.

Fundamentally, Paul King seems to have missed the point entirely, of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which is about a possibly-corrupt, borderline sociopathic chocolatier weeding out the one good little kid in a group of spoiled brats. The only way Wonka’s return to that character’s story, particularly as a prequel, would make sense would be for Willy to learn the same kind of lesson himself as a youngster. Instead, Wonka is presented as pure hearted, and constantly taken advantage of by the adults around him who are the spoiled brats.

There is only one genuine kid in this movie, Calah Lane, who plays Noodle, also toiling away indefinitely in the inn basement. Lane is quite lovely, actually, one of the best things about Wonka, with onscreen charisma that helps keeps the proceedings watchable. But Noodle and Willy are both similarly pure of heart, dealing with heightened, standard kids-movie villains. Willy Wonka is supposed to be backed with subtext, and Wonka, generally pleasant as it is to watch, is all text.

All of that brings us back to this: kids will have a great time. The group of kids in the row of seats behind me, who did not shut the fuck up the entire film, certainly did. Surely they neither know nor care anything about Gene Wilder’s or even Johnny Depp’s iterations of Willy Wonka. For them, there is only Timothée Chalamet. But here’s the key difference: none of those kids are going to grow up regarding this as an unfortgettable classic from their childhoods. It’s just another passable outing at the movies, and in the context of its cinematic legacy, that’s a real shame.

Hugh Grant’s ample charms can’t elevate a middling achievement.

Overall: B-

DICKS: THE MUSICAL

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

Dicks: The Musical is definitely the filthiest rip-off of The Parent Trap you’ll ever see. Strangely, even as it goes further with certain taboos than any other movie ever has—this is very much the point—I’m sort of disappointed it wasn’t any filthier. Get this: there aren’t any actual dicks in this movie. No genuine full-frontal nudity whatsoever! This feels like false advertising. If it weren’t for the endless amount of times someone says “fuck,” this movie might have gotten a PG-13 rating. Okay, probably not.

One of the many meta gags about this movie is that the “Dicks” of the title actually refers to the personalities of the two leads, Craig and Trevor (Josh Sharp an Aaron Jackson, on whose original 2015 UCB show this is based; they are also co-writers of the script). We’re told in opening title cards how “brave” it is that these two gay actors are playing straight characters—who are, you guessed it, both dicks. They display such a camp level of narcissism and misogyny that it circles all the way back around to delightful.

There was a moment early on in Dicks: The Musical when I was finding it so genuinely hilarious, I actually thought to myself: Is this the 21st century’s answer to AIRPLANE? Alas. If only.

As Craig and Trevor discover they are “identical twins” (even though the two actors don’t look anything alike aside from being a cuple of brown haired White guys) and hatch a plan to trick their estranged and bonkers parents (Megan Mullaly and Nathan Lane, milking this movie for all the moderate value that it’s worth), the potential is there. There’s a scene with Nathan Lane and his two janky puppet “Sewer Boys” that had me laughing so hard I was in tears. You’ll never look at a bag of ham the same way again.

And then there’s Megan Thee Stallion, cast as the CEO of the company both Craig and Trevor also discover they work for, and are tied for the top sellers of parts for autonomous vacuum cleaners. Getting such a wildly random name into this movie is fun, right? She even gets a pretty elaborate song and dance number. The problem is that her song is merely slightly amusing, and doesn’t elicit any genuine laughs, and in that failure kind of stops the momentum of bonkers hilarity dead in its tracks. And although there are certainly genuinely funny moments after that, Dicks: The Musical never fully recovers.

Megan Thee Stallion’s song isn’t even the only issue, musically—it’s just the best example, of how a movie like this works far better if the music is as exceptional as its humor. The Book of Mormon, for example, has much greater success at this. (To be fair, The Book of Mormon has never been adapted to film, and there’s no guarantee that it would adapt well.)

Dicks the Musical also features a pointedly flamboyant Bowen Yang as God, with mixed but fun results. I won’t spoil the specific depravity “God” winds up fully endorsing, which I have mixed feelings about, even as irreverent comedy. I don’t even necessarily take issue with it as a comic idea, but rather the manner in which it’s presented here. It’s simply not as funny as Josh Sharp and Aaron Jackson want us to think it is.

Megan Mullaly’s vagina falling off and running away, though? We don’t even see that happen, we get to watch Aaron Jackson as Trevor describing it to his brother—and it’s fucking hilarious. And that’s the thing: I laughed a lot at Dicks: The Musical. Unfortunately, like way too many other comedies, it’s front-loaded with the funniest gags, which means it starts to lose steam about halfway through. And this movie is all of 86 minutes long.

The performers across the board are clearly having a great time, and that alone keeps the filthy depravity a fun time, punctuated with some great outtakes during the end credits. It just moves from a movie that feels wildly underrated at first, to one where you consider its mixed reviews and think: that tracks.

You won’t see any actual dicks but you’ll see some guys singing about them.

Overall: B