CIVIL WAR

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

A movie about a modern American civil war should have a clear point of view, and it should have balls. Alex Garand’s Civil War has neither. It should be noted: the premise alone does not qualify.

I’m not even saying this movie has to make explicit what the political issues were across the country that resulted in armed forces in many states turned secessionists. Garland’s choice to avoid that kind of specificity is actually one of his smart ones. That does not, however, preclude a point of view, something beyond vague notions of “war is bad” or “journalists are soulless.” And notwithstanding the empty complaints among people on the right who clearly haven’t even watched this movie, Civil War really offers very little, story-wise, to hold onto. It’s just a road trip through war-torn country that happens to be America, with some incredibly well directed, gripping, beautifully shot battle sequences.

Even the comparisons of this movie’s American President (Nick Offerman, seen onscreen far less than expected) to President Trump are exaggerated. We know this president is in his third term, that he has ordered air strikes on American citizens (but not how or why), and we know that unlikely groups of people are allied against him. He’s never characterized as a buffoon, or of particularly low intelligence. And yet, the “Western Forces” of California and Texas are allied against him—something that has caused a great amount of chatter among people, on all sides of the political spectrum, as straining plausibility. My stance on this is that far weirder things have happened in times of war, which makes strange bedfellows. Besides, a line early in the film has really stuck with me: “When D.C. falls, they’ll turn on each other.” Indeed, once a common enemy is pushed aside, people previously on the same side are free to find fault with each other.

There are other references to aligned states in throwaway lines in Civil War, such as “The Florida Alliance,” or Midwestern states still loyal to the U.S. government, where small-town residents live their daily lives pretending like none of this is happening. Our protagonist, hardened photojournalist Lee Miller (Kirsten Dunst, truly fantastic) has parents in Colorado doing exactly this. Her very young acolyte photojournalist, Jessie (Priscilla’s Cailee Spaeny, actually 23 years old during production and playing 23, though she barely looks even 18), has parents in Missouri doing the same.

A major problem I have with Civil War is the same problem I have with many dystopian visions of a near future: its refusal to acknowledge race. Does anybody really think there would be a second civil war in the United States and race would have no relevance? There’s a very tense sequence in which Jesse Plemons plays a blithely murderous militia man, and the scene uses two men of Asian descent to illustrate his pointed xenophobia. This is in the same neigborhood as racism, of course, but it’s still distinct from it. But Alex Garland just isn’t interested in going that step further.

This is the fundamental problem with Civil War, which is the cinematic equivalent of a product with claims of nutrition when it actually has none. And don’t get me wrong, there is still a lot to recommend Civil War, which is genuinely gripping from start to finish. But, much like the 2006 film Children of Men, it has too many “why” questions it refuses to answer while it wows us exceptional production. (Children of Men, at least, is far more impressive on a technical and production level, creating a world that feels far more lived in, if just as implausible.)

It’s the ideas themselves that are the problem—or, the lack thereof. This is the kind of movie that you really get into while it’s happening, and can only leave saying it was great if you don’t think too hard about it. Garland, however, is challenging us to think about it, without fleshing out what it’s trying to say. There’s certainly the idea that there are not truly “good guys” in active warfare, and we are never given a side to root for—something these journalists don’t even want, as they pride themselves on supposed objectivity.

And yet, even with journalism being looked at through by far the most critical lense in this film, even that winds up muddled in presentation. Too many of the details make too little sense. “They shoot journalists on sight in the capitol,” we are told early on. Somehow, the armed forces closing in on the capitol welcome press with open arms, no questions asked. Come on, really? And this is hardly a new observation: far too few of the journalists in this film are seen taking video (in fact, I think we see only one or two doing so, and only with a professional news camera—literally not one single character is seen taking video on their smartphone). Lee and Jessie engage with still photography exclusively, albeit with many of the still shots they take being equal parts beautiful and horrifying.

A lot of Civil War is gorgeously shot, which is part of the deeply misleading journey it takes us on. All the plot connections are shaky at best, making this a kind of low-rent Apocalypse Now, even with its often beautiful imagery. I just watched this movie feeling a bit lost as to the actual stakes, and what I was supposed to take away from it. And what I took away from it was its top-notch cinematography, direction, and acting, particularly on the part of Dunst, who has never been better. But what is the whole thing that these parts are coming together to make? Yet another in a long line of supposedly anti-war movies that wow us with its rendering of war, in this case with nothing of any real substance to say.

The Expendables: four journalists face their various fates.

Overall: B

LOVE LIES BLEEDING

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Overall: B+

I.S.S.

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

I.S.S. isn’t smart enough to be a clever thriller, and it isn’t dumb enough to be “dumb fun.” Didn’t these astronauts ever learn about the “Goldilocks Zone”?

At least The Beekeeper has the decency to feature exciting fight choreography, fun explosions, innovative death scenes, and groan-worthy “protect the hive” metaphors. I.S.S. seems to think it can skate on the supposed novelty of its premise, with all of six characters—three of them American, three of them Russian—directed to “take control” of the International Space Station after nuclear armageddon occurs on the Earth below.

Here’s the question I couldn’t let go of. What’s the fucking point? Writer Nick Shafir and director Gabriela Cowperthwaite would have us believe it’s a sensible expectation that some of these characters have hope of returning home. They want to see their kids again!

Earth to I.S.S. crew! Your kids have been incinerated! Not once does any one of these characters even entertain this as a possibility. The nuclear flashes seen on the planet’s surface below are in the dozens, do they think all that radiation is just going to mind its own business on one side of the Earth?

Cowperthwaite once directed the very good 2013 documentary Blackfish, about the tragic consequences of keeping orcas in captivity. What the hell is she doing here? I’d say this is the cinematic equivalent of a corporate CEO winding up living in a ditch, but I should be fair, that’s a little harsh. It’s more like a corporate CEO winding up the manager of a regional Sizzler.

I suppose these metaphors are a little random. They’re definitely more creative than any of the boilerplate ideas presented in I.S.S., which seems on the surface like it’s . . . fine. If you’re at or below average intelligence, this movie might work for you. If you think about it for a minute, you might realize this movie is insulting your intelligence. You might be forgiven for missing that, given all the actors have a charismatic and competent screen presence. They’re kind of fun to hang out with, even if nothing they do or say ultimately makes a great amount of sense.

The story begins with two American astronauts in transport to the I.S.S.: John Gallagher Jr. as Christian Campbell and Ariana DeBose as newcomer bioengineer Dr. Kira Foster. I was skeptical of this film’s logic from the start, given a book I read recently that covered how strict NASA is about bringing personal effects into space, as the slightest added weight comes at exorbitant cost. But, Campbell rides the rocket with one of his kids’ squeeze toys in his hand.

Sure, I came in hot with the nitpicking: it’s just a movie, right? So, these two join the four others already on the station: Gordon Barrett (Chris Messina), evidently the highest ranking American astronaut; and the three Russians cosmonauts: Weronika Vetrov (Masha Mashkova); and brothers Nichoai Pulov (Costa Ronin) and Alexey Pulov (Pilov Asbæk). I guess I’ll give I.S.S. points for casting actual Russian actors.

We see them all settle in; Foster has brought some mice with her. We see the six of them pal around, exchange Christmas gifts. None of this is particularly interesting. The script neatly sidesteps any details about what might have prompted the assured mutual destruction: “We don’t ever talk politics,” they say. “And we definitely don’t talk about what’s going on down there.” What is going on down there, anyway? People gettin trigger happy, apparently.

To me, the most astounding thing about I.S.S. is that no one responds to the unfolding events with any kind of existential crisis. Somehow being stranded on a space station during a nuclear annihilation makes them all safe? Oh wait, one of the scientists on board was working on a radiation treatment! Okay, but why the hell would that research need to be done in space? No matter, we have four or five vials of it to return to the surface and save humanity!

This treatment is just used as a minor plot turn somewhere in the second half of the movie. What Cowperthwaite wants us to focus on is the idea of global conflict distilled down to these six characters, three on each side, with shifting allegiances. In more capable hands, this actually could have been a taut, gripping thriller, an exploration of the human psyche under extraordinary and desperate circumstances. Instead we’ve just got an entire film crew phoning it in.

I.S.S. could have been much, much worse. The script could have been utter garbage instead of just blandly ridiculous. They could have cast bad actors instead of the clearly talented ones here, evidently just getting a paycheck. Good for them, get that cash! If anything were to save this movie, it would be this cast. Unfortunately, once I finish writing this review, I’m going to forget this movie completely and just move on with my life.

Hang in there! This movie might get better. JKJK

Overall: C+

THE ROYAL HOTEL

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

I can’t decide how I feel about The Royal Hotel. My initial reaction, particularly to the ending, was that the supposed payoff was unearned. The more I think about it, though, the more I think: but, was it?

There was a David Mamet stage play, and then a film, about thirty years ago called Oleanna. In the first half, we witness a series of conversations between an older, male professor and a younger woman student. In the second half, she accuses him of rape, and you are forced to re-evaluate everything you thought you saw in the first half. It was a very polarizing story, particularly down gender lines. I can still remember reading about the arguments it elicited among audience members. in Rogert Ebert’s 1994 film review.

That script was clearly designed to make audiences second-guess their own opinions, and to a degree, even their own eyes and ears. I’m not convinced that was the intention of director and co-writer Kitty Green with The Royal Hotel, and yet I find myself having that sort of response to it. I can imagine very different, and very gendered responses to it.

The trouble with me is, I exist somewhere in the middle. And when I start to go down the road of criticism in my mind, I start to wonder whether I am falling into the trap of victim blaming.

Kitty Green, who also happens to be Australian, has set this film in the Australian outback. Two young “work travel program” backpackers, both women, need to make some money quickly, so they take a gig bartending in a mining town many hours’ drive away from any city. When they arrive, there are two young women from the UK staying and working there, but they soon move on. The pub they work at has one other woman employee, an Aboriginal woman. The entire time we spend with these ladies, we see maybe two other women patrons of the bar. The point is, women here are vastly outnumbered by men.

And Green definitely traffics in nuance and subtlety. The men that Hanna (Julia Garner) and Liv (Jessica Henwick) contend with, mostly pub regulars, display a variety of demeanors. But, the more you think about it, the more you realize that they’re displaying varying degrees of toxic masculinity. So much of The Royal Hotel moves at a labored pace, with seemingly very little actually happening, it takes a while to register.

My own gender expression has no bearing on the fact that I cannot truly fathom what it’s like to exist in the world as a woman—whether it’s in the United States, or Canada (where these two characters are from), or Australia. Of course, the Outback is a reliable source for putting these sorts of cultural ideas into sharp relief. In any case, I could very well be off base when my initial reaction is to think that the way Hanna and Liv ultimately respond to these men is wildly disproportionate. The more I consider it, the more it occurs to me that there are plenty of women who suffer a sort of million tiny cuts, and these are a couple of characters who reach their breaking point.

They don’t reach it at the same time, mind you. Hanna is uncomfortable in this working-class, male-dominated environment from the first night. Liv spends a lot of time giving virtually all the men the benefit of the doubt, even a particular one who is clearly a creep. She’s convinced they all just have cultural differences.

A lot of The Royal Hotel is spent worrying about what harm might come to Hanna and Liv. Nothing as bad as feared ever really happens, and yet, it’s in this space of degrees where the real food for thought lies. There is a bit of violence that occurs in one instance, and again: it’s easy to imagine the interpretation of the degree to which it was an “accident” being split down gender lines. I think this is where Kitty Green knows exactly what she’s doing.

It’s whether it works, particularly as a movie, that I can’t quite decide. Also, no discussion about misogyny or toxic masculinity is complete without consideration of race, and that is every bit as much the case in Australia as any other bastion of colonialism around the world. An Aboriginal man appears in one scene, driving a delivery truck. The owner of the pub, Billy, still owes him three months back pay. Elements of racism, both with this character and with the woman who works the pub kitchen, are only hinted at. But, to a large degree, so is toxic masculinity.

Billy is played by Hugo Weaving, bearded and much aged since his heyday in the Matrix movies. I didn’t even recognize him. There are so many men with speaking parts in this film, I find myself wondering how much they truly understood the nuances of the script. The setting was very remote, and so was the set: filming occurred in the town of Yatina, South Australia, with a population of about thirty people. It’s roughly 150 miles north of Adelaide, where, presumably, a lot of the local actors were found. Billy is a drunk, and is predictably late paying Hanna and Liv, who over time are left to fend for themselves tending bar to rowdy locals.

I find myself struggling with this movie. I wanted more to happen in it, to justify the telling of the story. The plot pivots significantly at the end, in a way that may make some think of it as a “women’s revenge” movie. It’s not at all that simple. That’s an element in its favor, but, while I suspect I would gain greater insight with repeat viewing, I just didn’t find the overall story compelling enough to think that kind of investment would be worth it.

The Rorschach Hotel: you tell me what you see.

Overall: B

THE ORIGIN OF EVIL

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

Here’s something I’ve never said about a movie before: The Origin of Evil might just be too French or its own good. Full of unlikably arrogant people, with an inflated sense of self. Not all of the French are like that, I’m sure; these are stereotypes. But this movie isn’t doing them any favors.

In spite of its bevy of talented performers, The Origin of Evil lost me early on. It gets progressively weirder, in less compelling ways. Nathalie (Laure Calamy) is visiting a father, Serge (Jacques Weber) she’s never met before. She progressively gains his trust, to the suspicion of his wife, Louise (Dominique Blanc); his daughter, George (Doria Tillier); his grandaughter, Jeanne (Céleste Brunnquell); and their longtime housekeeper, Agnès (Véronique Ruggia), all of whom live in a giant, overly cluttered house together. I won’t spoil the many narrative left turns that follow, even though one of the few things that impressed me about this movie is how unremarkable it is for all its twists.

I will say this: we never get a sense of Nathalie as a whole person, or what really informs her actions. I knew little about this film going in, and when Nathalie is shown dialing Serge on the phone, she appears nervous to the point of terrified—a detail that makes less sense in retrospect once the film is over. “What are you playing at?” is something she is asked at one point, and I was already asking it. There are moments early on when it feels like The Origin of Evil will be a straightforward family drama, the title notwithstanding, but things prove to be far more complex than that. Just not in any way that particularly satisfied me.

This film has many unearned pretensions, not least of which is the title—these are shitty people, basically all around, but evil is a bit loaded for what ever actually happens onscreen. Nathalie works at a fish packing factory, and the opening title card appears superimposed over lined trays of fish, with ominous music. You would think the fish, or the factory, would play a particularly crucial part in the plot. They don’t.

If there is anything to love about The Origins of Evil, it’s the ensemble cast of nearly all women, with only one exception: Serge is the only principal character who is a man. He’s an asshole, but all the other women also prove to be either assholes in their own right or sociopaths, with the possible exception of Jeanne—but given the fucked up family she’s in, give her time.

The film runs slightly over two hours, though, and the first half in particular moves so slowly, it might play a lot better with a good fifteen or twenty minutes cut out. Things do pick up in the second half, and get a bit more exciting, but for me it was too little too late. I spent more time thinking about when this movie would end than I did about what was going to happen next.

I have to mention the cinematography, because some of it just plain sucks. Why the hell is a movie like this employing the use of retro split screens, with thick black lines separating the different feeds? The first time it happens, Nathalie is just sitting at a table having dinner with Serge and his family—five people, three sections of a split screen, each of them cutting to a new person saying something or making noise, including every time Jeanne gets a text notification. Why do we care about all this? I have no answer. A few later scenes employ the split screen as well, and you get the sense that director Sébastien Marnier thinks he’s doing something clever with this material. He isn’t.

I have to acknowledge that talent went into the making of this film, particularly the cast, and the set design. I’d love to see all of these people’s work in a less tiresome movie.

It’s not nearly as fun as this might suggest.

Overall: C+

SANCTUARY

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

Sanctuary wants you to think it’s sexy, provocative and clever, and it is none of those things. Everything that happens in it is preposterous. All I could think about, through its entire, tedious 96-minute run time was that no person in either of these characters’ positions would ever actually do or say the same things.

Here’s what it does have going or it. The two leads—indeed literally the only two characters ever seen onscreen, with the brief exception of a couple of extra walking through a hotel hallway—have chemistry with each other, and onscreen charisma. Margaret Qualley and Christopher Abbott, as a hired dominatrix and an ascending multimillionaire CEO, make the most of some truly subpar material. Within that context, though, Abbott in particular is well cast: he has a face made for a character who gets off on being humiliated.

This film is an odd specimen in that it both feels like a “covid movie,” being a two-hander with only two onscreen speaking parts and is entirely set inside a hotel room (with occasional forays into the hallway and the elevator outside of it), while simultaneously feeling like it could have been made any time, with this concept as its gimmick. It was a gimmick that wore thin with me very quickly.

Hal’s about to become CEO of his late father’s company, which owns and runs the chain of hotels this one is a part of. He’s been hiring Rebecca to come and humiliate him in one of the rooms, using memorized lines from a full script he wrote for them, for an unspecified but long time. Writing out entire scripts with lines they both memorize sure seems like a lot of effort for a climax in which Hal just jerks off sitting on a bathroom floor next to a toilet. To each his own, I guess. I’m not kink shaming! It’s just the first kink I’ve run across that involves the kind of work that is indistinguishable from mounting an Off Broadway play, albeit a dirtier one.

Hal has decided that his ascension to CEO means he must end his professional relationship with Rebecca. In response Rebecca decides to up the stakes of everything that is and has been going on between them.

Is Rebecca just expanding the limits of their sexual games? Is Hal actually indistinguishable from the doormat part he’s playing? Is Rebecca telling the truth with her threats of blackmail? Is Hal really this easily manipulated? Are these two actually in love? A better writer might have been able to make me care about the answers to any of these questions.

I can tell you this much: as soon as there was any suggestion that Rebecca might have real feelings for him—is she telling the truth? is she actually just still manipulating him, as he suspects?—even in the absence of a definitive answer, I decided Sanctuary had crossed over into the realm of total bullshit. Nothing these two said to each other ever rang true, even when we were meant to believe they were playing mind games with each other.

Sanctuary wants us to think it has a novel approach to gender dynamics, and it just doesn’t. Hal is broken and weak, Rebecca is bold with hints of insecurity. How revolutionary! I suppose we are meant to wonder whether the entire movie was just part of their “session,” and actually everything we saw was supposed to be as contrived as it seemed, all of it multiple layers of ways for Hal to get off. The movie just isn’t interesting enough to maintain that premise as a compelling idea.

What a disappointment when the games e play aren’t any fun.

Overall: C+

HOW TO BLOW UP A PIPELINE

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

Is it sad, or is it a relief, that the powers that be clearly feel no threat at the existence of How to Blow Up a Pipeline? It can be both at once, I suppose. The title can’t be taken too literally—we don’t see any cohesive instructions onscreen. It seems readily apparent that both instruction and inspiration can be found elsewhere. I can’t speak to the Andreas Malm book on which it’s based. Either way, not nearly as many people will see this film as it deserves, and its themes will be preaching to small choirs across the country, who nod their heads in faux “solidarity” while they all go back to the systems in their lives that brought us here.

That’s not a judgement, just a statement. How to Blow Up a Pipeline, as a film, is a statement. Its ensemble cast of characters is a diverse group of young idealists, who have a legitimate claim when they say their destructive acts are done in self-defense. This film is very much in league with the 2020 Kim Stanley Robinson novel The Ministry for the Future, in which, among a multitude of other events, “drone clusters” are used to clog dozens of commercial airplanes around the world on the same day, in an effort to frighten the population into avoiding such a carbon-heavy mode of transportation. The actions of How to Blow Up a Pipeline exist on a far smaller scale, but I have a feeling both are prescient. The longer establishment entities do nothing about climate change, the more radical the responses will become. The same is happening with gun violence protests right now, and climate action is close behind.

Which is to say, How to Blow Up a Pipeline currently exists largely under the radar, but the type of action it depicts won’t for long. These characters all have plausible, real-world motivations for what they do, from the young woman (American Honey’s Sasha Lane) with Leukemia as a result of growing up near a chemical refinery, to the Texas father and husband (Jake Weary) who has been forced out of his home by “eminent domain” to make way for the construction of the titular oil pipeline.

These two wind up as part of an activist—or terrorist, depending on your angle of view—group through a series of degrees of separation, including Marcus Scribner as a member of a documentary crew recording the displaced Texas family’s story; Ariela Barer as best friend to Sasha Lane, having grown up together in the same neighborhood; Jayme Lawson as Lane’s reluctant participant girlfriend; Euphoria’s Lukas Gage as a Portland protester and Kristine Froseth as his girlfriend who may or may not be acting as informant to the FBI; and Forrest Goodluck as the disaffected North Dakotan who has taught himself bomb assembly.

Most of How to Blow Up a Pipeline is very procedural, effectively tense thanks to the urgency of Daniel Goldhaber’s direction, and we meet all these people right as they are kicking their plan into action. We then see them follow it through to its conclusion, and the only time we really learn anything about them on an individual level is as, every ten or fifteen minutes, they each get a turn with a flashback that fleshes out each of their motives.

And this movie is clearly on their side, even when one or two of them argues against their tactics. The point that taking action within the system isn’t working is valid. These young adults know that what they’re doing is dangerous, that cutting off a vital line to literal power will hurt the livelihoods of people not that different from them. The specific plan carried out here is sound, and once its conclusion is reached, there’s an undeniable thrill to it.

There are moments when it feels a bit like the dialogue lacks depth. But then you remember how young, and to varying degrees desperate, these kids are. This is how such people would actually be talking to each other. The narrative thread wraps itself up a little too cleanly for plausibility, but that is also how movie making works: if you want a point to get made, you make it by also creating solid entertainment. How to Blow Up a Pipleline works very well on both tracks.

Hmm well I guess that’s how you do it.

Overall: B+

KNOCK AT THE CABIN

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

I haven’t gone to a new M. Night Shyamalan movie in seventeen years. I got tired of how dumb they were. He’s had a kind of renaissance over the past half-decade or so, however, albeit with decidedly mixed reactions, but on average with an upswing. I finally decided to give him another chance with Knock at the Cabin. This is my report of how that went.

It was fine. Is this movie compelling? Sure. Is it suspenseful? Occasionally. Is it terrifying? Not really. Does it make sense? Get real.

To be honest, I kept waiting for the signature “Shyamalan twist,” and—spoiler alert—this movie really has no such thing. I thought there would be something revealed about the four intruders who force themselves into the titular cabin, or some unexpectedly clever way the gay couple with an adopted child staying there would get the better of them. In the end, everything going on, or being claimed, turns out to be legit, which just left me wondering: why? Knock at the Cabin is a surprisingly earnest story, in its way even endorsing divine judgment. If there is any twist, I suppose, it’s that neither the movie nor any of the main characters in it pass judgment on this family comprised of two dads and a daughter.

I will admit this was a particular detail that caught my attention: the protagonists are a gay couple, Eric and Andrew (Jonathan Groff and Ben Aldridge). If this were the same story except they were a straight couple, I would have been less interested. The makeup of this family does prove to be a salient plot point, particularly the specific love of a chosen family, including a child—all of them part of marginalized communities.

The depiction of Andrew’s backstory as a gay man is a little heavy handed. We see several flashbacks of their relationship, including a physical assault at a bar and Andrew’s subsequent purchase of Chekov’s Gay Gun. His demeanor telegraphs “barely short of unhinged” when he’s purchasing this gun, and you’d like maybe someone at the gun store would express some concern. Then again, this is America, after all. In any case, there are elements of direction here that smack of a straight man telling a gay story, the actors themselves being gay notwithstading—although that fact does not go unnoticed, nor unappreciated.

The script, co-written by Shyamalan with Steve Desmond and Michael Sherman, is based on a 2018 novel by Paul Tremblay, with the far better title The Cabin at the End of the World. The film makes several very key changes, but the protagonists being a gay couple with an adopted child named Wen is not one of them. Strangely, the way the novel ends is something the film could have easily retained, and would have been better for it, when it comes to the choice the intruders insist this family must make.

The four intruders are led by a large man named Leonard (Paul Bautista), who is accompanied by a nurse named Sabrina (Nikki Amuka-Bird); a chef named Ardiane (Abby Quinn); and a guy named Redmond who Andrew is increasingly convinced was the guy who once assaulted him. Redmond is played in a surprisingly short role by Rupert Grint, here using an American accent. The whole group, after forcing their way inside the cabin, insists they must sacrifice one of their own, and then be willingly killed by one of the other three, in order to prevent the apocalypse.

How or why this is the case, Shyamalan evidently has no interest in exploring. Andrew and Eric both ask questions to this effect, and never get straight answers. They just say no to the question “Will you make a choice” each time it’s asked, and then Leonard turns on the news to show them the latest travesty or global disaster. A giant tsunami at Oregon’s Cannon Beach was a particularly fun one. There are really just three different “judgments” (or plagues, or whatever they want to call it) shown, always in news telecasts. These are by far the most interesting parts of the film, and although I appreciate the impulse to use them sparingly, I wished there were more of it.

The crux of the story, it turns out, is whether this family will make the choice demanded of them, and if so, how they will approach it. This is specifically where the film significantly deviates from the source material, in ways that do nothing to enhance the story. I was fully engaged the whole way through, but in a way that had a curious lack of urgency given the apparent stakes. Knock at the Cabin is the kind of movie that makes me grateful for my monthly AMC subscription: entertaining but relatively forgettable, worth seeing so long as it hasn’t cost anything extra.

It’s not quite as horrifying as they’re trying to make it look.

Overall: B-

INFINITY POOL

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

There comes a moment in Infinity Pool when Mia Goth’s Gabi, who has been toying with Alexander Skarsgård’s vacationing author James all along, pulls out a bad review of James’s one published novel, which did not sell well. She reads it aloud to him, emphasizing a passage that leans on how pretentious the novel was.

She might as well have been describing this movie, which spends all of its time attempting to convince us it has something to say while it actually says nothing.

This is a film by Brandon Cronenberg, son of David Cronenberg, who released his own subpar movie last summer. I guess you could say the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, except that with Infinity Pool, Brandon elicits very good performances in a story that fails to justify itself. I spent two hours watching this film, not bored per se, but keeping an open mind: maybe something will eventually tie everything together impressively. No such luck. The movie ends with a narrative thud. It’s not the greatest thing when a movie ends and you just think, That’s it?

It could be argued that the most interesting thing about this movie is that it features an orgy with people wearing deeply disturbing, disfigured-face masks. Except that the orgy is both an overly stylized fever dream of a scene and somehow still a bit dull.

Here’s the potential in the premise of Infinity Pool: James leaves the resort compound against the advice of the people who run it, or an excursion out in the fictional European island country they are visiting. When he accidentally hits a local man with his car and kills him, they discover the country has a tradition of a family’s firstborn son killing anyone who kills a member of their family—apparently for any reason, accident or not. But to maintain their tourism industry, they have this incredible side hustle where they make “doubles” (basically clones, though that word is never used in the script) to be sacrificed. The double is given all the same memories, and for reasons never even close to explained, the original people must be present to witness. What must that be like, then, to see a copy of your own self murdered? This is the kind of existential theme that is the makings of a rich text, for which Brandon Cronenberg offers no useful illumination.

Instead, we get Mia Goth as Gabi, an effectively creepy and manipulative woman from the start, beginning with one of the oddest hand job scenes ever put onscreen. You want to see some urine and then some semen splatter onto some beach pebbles? This is your movie!

James’s wife, also on this vacation and the breadwinner as the daughter of a successful publisher who we are told detests James, is played by Cleopatra Coleman. She has a notable presence through about half the movie, until she decides she’s had enough of the wild shit happening in this country and up and goes home. Coleman is good in a thankless role that completely wastes her. There is never even any sexual tension, as evidently Em remains oblivious to Gabi’s advances.

I knew there would be some kind of plot twist in Infinity Pool, and it comes along maybe three quarters of the way through the story. It’s disappointingly minor as twists go, and not particularly satisfying. Infinity Pool offers plenty of sex and violence and depravity, I guess maybe as commentary on the excesses of wealth: all these people can afford to pay for doubles to be sacrificed for their own sins, over and over again. The thing is, Brandon Cronenberg is what the kids these days call a “nepo baby,” and is plenty wealthy in his own right, which inevitably skews his perspective. It lands differently when someone with more than their fair share of advantages attempts commentary on the pitfalls of privilege. In this case, it’s kind of just a tedious mess.

Get over yourselves already.

Overall: C

PLANE

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

Gerard Butler seems to have settled comfortably in his role as ruler of a particular genre: the low-rent action movie. And as such movies go, Plane, rather surprisingly, sits on the higher end. This is solid entertainment, a movie that fulfills its promise, never being anything other than what it set out to be. It’s nothing special either, mind you, but that hardly bears mentioning. This movie isn’t trying to be special, it’s only trying to be a good time at the movies.

It’s a relief, as a matter of fact, that Plane does not go out of its way to telegraph that it doesn’t take itself seriously. On the other hand, it doesn’t take itself too seriously, either. It strikes just the right balance, for the most part avoiding the cliche of the action hero’s pithy lines (although there’s a line or two near the end that come close).

Actually, it’s less “action” than a cross between a disaster movie and a hostage thriller. It even sort of breaks these elements apart, with the hostage part sandwiched between thrilling airplane flight sequences: first a crash landing as the result of a lightning strike in the middle of a storm; then a daring escape on the plane that miraculously still works (with a lot of its instruments fried). Either way, let’s call it Die Hard on an Island. Only in this case, the heroes aren’t full of sardonic asides.

Plane is also a “buddy movie” of sorts, but with a fairly unique twist. This flight, en route to Tokyo from Singapore, has only a handful of passengers (not sure how often that happens, but it’s convenient for plotting), and captain Brodie Torrance (Butler) has been informed he is also carrying a man charged with murder being extradited (Mike Colter). Once the plane lands—skillfully by Torrance once he spies a road on the island—it’s these two industrious, former military men who find themselves working together.

There’s a quietly progressive way these men, one White and one Black, are treated onscreen. Race is never discussed or addressed directly in any way in this movie, and it even narrowly avoids problematic depictions of local island Filipinos by making the villains “separatists” who run the island. Colter is cast to look like an intimidating, very large and strong, bald Black man, who, once he has teamed up with Torrance, quickly proves both competent and at ease with himself, a guy with personality to spare. Plane exists in a world where racial tensions just don’t exist, which, in a movie like this one, is a perfectly good choice. Colter’s Louis Gaspare is presented as intimidating not because of his race, but because of his size and status as an accused murderer.

And, spoiler alert, we never even find out if Gaspare actually killed anyone. “Wrong place at the wrong time” is the phrase he uses when referring to whatever the incident was fifteen years before that got him here. He knows how to use weapons, and ultimately comes to Torrence’s rescue.

There aren’t any slickly choreographed fight sequences in Plane, but rather a series of increasingly desperate near-misses, keeping the tension effectively high. Torrence gets into a fight with a local islander, and cinematographer Brendan Galvin shoots it with effective urgency. He does the same in the flight landing sequence, almost imperceptively jerking the camera forward toward Butler’s face with each jolt of turbulence in the cockpit.

Plane is quite definitively a B-movie, right down to its plain and simple title. I can just imagine the pitches for what to title this film, only to wind up landing on the obvious. Talk about on the nose; it barely stops short of being tongue-in-cheek. This film’s refusal to go anywhere near camp is one of my favorite things about it. Director Jean-François Richet has no interest in winking at his audience, and that choice is what elevates the material, if only slightly. It’s still B-movie entertainment, and yet, the pointed title notwithstanding, it’s never ridiculous. These days, that kind of subtle earnestness almost qualifies as subversive. This is the perfect January release, one that won’t put on airs and lives up to its promise.

I spent way too much time looking for a screenshot featuring both Gerard Butler and the plane.

Overall: B