SIFF Advance: BODY BLOW

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

Body Blow is currently merely on the festival circuit, and thus far responses have been pretty mixed. I would argue that it practically invents the “camp noir” genre, though presumably there have already been other films released that fit the genre. Either way, detractors of Body Blow clearly just don’t get what it’s going for. This film is far from perfect, but it does strike the perfect balance in tone, right down to how it might as well have been titled Twink Fatale, except that even for this movie that title would have been a little over the top. Then again, the one onscreen murder scene in this film is the precise moment when Body Blow ascends to the point of high camp. And it’s kind of what made the movie work.

Mind you, this is a movie that falls apart with any close examination. The plot, as written by director Dean Francis, is so convoluted I often found it hard to ascertain why what I saw onscreen was happening. Some of it clicks together by the end, but not everything Francis attempts to wrap up in a bloody bow is quite fully contained in the package.

Speaking of packages—hooray for segues!—lead actor Tim Pocock’s figures prominently, albeit without a great deal of sense. (Side note: I don’t know if that guy’s last name was just a coincidence, but it sure got a smattering of giggles from the audience I was in.) His character, a Sydney cop named Aiden, is obsessed with the idea that not masturbating makes him both stronger and a better cop. In the opening scene, we hear the voiceover of a podcast he’s listening to, a guy with an American accept (also: coincidence?), is extolling the virtues of what we later learn is part of the “no fap” movement. Aiden eventually takes this to the extreme of buying a chastity cage for his penis—something we get several shots of him in, otherwise nude. I found myself wondering how the Motion Picture Association sets parameters for this, because it’s clearly not “full frontal” if we never see his penis, it’s rather unusual to see an actor’s testicles, however smooshed a cock cage might make them. Is this similar to it being okay to see nearly all of a woman’s breasts so long as only the nipple's are covered?

This cock-cage subplot is amusing—as is the fact that Aiden keeps chickens in his backyard, including roosters, even though you don’t need roosters in order for hens to keep laying eggs—but never feels vital to the plot. This involves Aiden’s introduction to Cody (Tom Rodgers), a guy who takes his identity as a twink so seriously that his car’s vanity plate just reads TWINK (the final shot of which is satisfyingly gruesome, incidentally). Cody is sort of a “kept boy” at the drag club run by a villainous drag queen played by Australian cabaret performer Paul Capsis. I don’t know how famous Capsis is in Australia, but this is the kind of part any drag queen worth their salt would love the play, yet Capsis doesn’t quite bite into the role the way you might hope, and his multiple club-host performances in the film fall a little flat.

It’s Tim Pocock and Tom Rodgers who make Body Blow worth watching (though Sacha Horler as Steel, the dirty lesbian cop and Aiden’s superior, has a bit of onscreen charisma of her own). I can’t pretend Body Blow was everything I wanted it to be, but it gave me plenty to work with, in that it features effectively knowing film noir tropes; it has a hot gay 40-year-old cop; it has a hot gay twink; I am also gay; and I have a pulse. That said, it also has a cinematographer (Franc Biffone) who clearly understood what the director was going for, and it has an 80s-synth-style score by a composer (Andreas Dominguez) who gave the vibe something you might find on a sonic highway connecting Priscilla, Queen of the Desert with the original Blade Runner.

Tone can really make or break a film, and this is where Body Blow nails it, staying impressively consistent with its very specific sensibility. The pacing is measured but never completely drags (so to speak), and this is in keeping with neo-noir storytelling. There’s a dangerous attraction between a copy and a young beauty, there are multiple levels of betrayal, and there are backyard cocks. Flaws aside, Body Blow is a film that truly stands apart, which makes it imperfectly exceptional. It’s not for everyone and it’s not meant to be, but I for one sit square in the crosshairs of its target audience, and I do love it for that.

This movie has a lot of entendres.

Overall: B

MOTHER MARY

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

Both Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel seem to be having A Moment this year, albeit to different degrees. Coel has had two film releases this year, all of one month apart—the first being The Christophers, the second being Mother Mary. As for Hathaway, though she has been working steadily all along, the last lead performance of hers that got any notable attention was for the fascinating film Colossal in 2016, and that was not a very big movie. And after languishing in a sort of obscurity, at least relative to her earlier success, this year she has five films coming out—and, due to my own life circumstances, I happened to see both of the first two, two days in a row this week: The Devil Wears Prada 2 and Mother Mary, even though the latter was released in my local market one week prior.

I managed to see Mother Mary in its last day in theaters, which I really wanted to do because of Hathaway’s role as the title character, a hugely successful pop star, with pop songs she actually performs—quite well—herself, written by Jack Antonoff and Charli XCX. I downloaded the EP of her seven songs recorded for the film, with Anne Hathaway herself listed as the artist and the album title Mother Mary: Greatest Hits. I like it a lot, and assumed it would enhance the viewing experience of the film to have familiarized myself with the songs first. Now, I’m not sure it really mattered—just as I’m not sure if it makes a difference if you eventually just watch this film on a streamer rather than in theaters (a predictable inevitability: this film grossed $2.4 million in its three weeks of theatrical release). It turns out Mother Mary spends most of its time as a dialogue-heavy two-hander, with just two people talking in a room.

Mother Mary is directed by David Lowery, and if you are familiar with his work, in spite of his resume being surprisingly varied (he directed both the wonderful 2016 remake of Pete’s Dragon and the perfectly pleasant 2018 film The Old Man & the Gun, both of which starred Robert Redford), then you know to be unsurprised when his films turn out to be very challenging and weird (he also directed both A Ghost Story in 2017 and The Green Knight in 2021). Mother Mary is much more in the vein of his more challenging films, in that it’s frustratingly tedious until it becomes compellingly baffling. In short, Lowery is a director with an established history of films I can’t understand, to the point of utter frustration, only for them to find some way to pull me in by the end. I know nobody in particular I would recommend his more challenging films to, and yet they are consistently films I can imagine gaining greater appreciation for myself, upon repeat viewings.

Mother Mary opens with Anne Hathaway as the title character, performing onstage to an adoring audience, with backup dancers. The pop music is super catchy from the start, so you might reasonably assume the music would play a significant role in the film. But, by the time the opening sequence is over, Mother Mary is rushing into the house of her former costume designer, Sam (Coel), insisting that she needs to design her a dress. There follows a lot of completely straightforward, unstylized scenes of dialogue between just the two of them, albeit with some scenes of Sam’s assistant, Hilda (Eurphoria’s Hunter Schafer), peppered in. It’s maybe halfway through the film before things predictably turn weird, and we find out that Mother Mary is now possessed with the spirit (rendered as a red fabric) that Sam had some time before expelled.

It seems Mother Mary is mostly about friendship, how it can be excruciatingly intimate and then devastatingly strained, and how the baggage of those strained connections can weigh on those affected. Honestly, this is my first pass at what that red-fabric-spirit represents as a metaphor, because in true David Lowery style, he never makes this explicitly clear. Even though Mother Mary and Sam literally talk about whether or not what they’re speaking is metaphor.

Mother Mary eases back into stylistic flourishes as these two regale each other with their respective experiences with this ethereal spirit, with no human personality or clear intention. We just know that it enters and exits Mother Mary’s body through open wounds. And I must say, there are certain scenes with this floating red-fabric-spirit in a black void that are hauntingly beautiful—and also some scenes in which it is rendered with surprisingly janky, herky-jerky visual effects. Lowery is usually known for great visuals, so I don’t know what the deal is there. Anyway, as they tell each other’s stories, one of them will open a door in Sam’s huge warehouse of fabrics, or turn their head, the camera will turn, and suddenly they are looking upon the flashback we transition to.

The more the film shifts in this manner, the more cuts we get back to Mother Mary’s stage performances. It’s worth noting that there has been some debate as to what real-life pop star most inspired Mother Mary, and to be it’s preposterous to think there is any debate at all: it’s clearly Lady Gaga. Mother Mary comes onstage in a high-waisted one-piece very reminiscent of many Lady Gaga costumes, at one point complete with a staff reminiscent of the “disco stick” from Lady Gaga’s “Lovegame” video. There’s even Sam’s brief mention of Mother Mary once arriving at an event “wearing nothing but freshly poured honey,” a clear nod to Lady Gaga’s infamous “meat dress.” And finally, what star besides Lady Gaga even has a pop persona in quite the same vein as “Mother Mary?” This would be why Sam’s signature element of her costume designs for Mother Mary are her so-called “halos,” a pretty obvious nod to the very name—and something we can easily imagine Lady Gaga having done if she were Mother Mary instead.

Mother Mary even seems to be at a similar stage in her career, with Sam referencing the biggest hits “between 2003 and 2015,” indicating Mother Mary is at least 20 years in, past the height of her career but still important to legions of fans. (Lady Gaga broke out in 2008, but 18 years is still pretty close.) I rather wish more of the movie focused on Mother Mary’s career, actually, or at least on her music and its effects. The EP title Mother Mary: Greatest Hits has a sort of meta amusement to it, because these tracks are really fun but hardly timeless; this would never be the collection of songs on anyone’s career-retrospective of hits, but are serviceable as a fictional version of one. It helps that Hathaway is surprisingly adept at performing them—she sang live on set—which is another reason I wish more screen time was given to the music.

The most unfortunate thing about Mother Mary is that Anne Hathaway’s EP is far more fun than the movie, which has a somewhat awkward ebb and flow between compelling and tedious (Lowery is increasingly revealing this to be his trademark). There’s something about it that keeps it in mind for me, though, and once again I suspect it may benefit from another viewing, especially now that I know where it eventually goes. If nothing else, the acting is excellent: Hathaway is an undeniable star and actually convincing as a pop icon; Coel’s performance is as stupendous as ever, and always the biggest reason to keep watching the scenes that don’t take place onstage. I may not quite be able to make heads or tails of the story, but how it’s told onscreen, even when veering into the objectively ridiculous, keeps me invested.

Sam has conditions for accepting Mother Mary’s apology for the ways in which this movie alienates its less perceptive viewers.

Overall: B

CRIME 101

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

Let’s talk about this title first. It’s dumb, right? It has to be the dumbest thing about this movie, although this movie is mostly not dumb. But apparently I am an idiot, because it did not register to me until I got home how prominently Highway 101 in Los Angeles figures in the plot. Oh, right: duh. It’s a double meaning!

And the cinematography is easily the best thing about Crime 101, from the camera work during car chases, to the many drone shots of the vast city of Los Angeles, painting a surprisingly loving portrait of a city many love to hate. There’s a lot of overhead shots of a freeway—oh, I guess that’s probably Highway 101 right there—and they are consistently beautiful. Cinematographer Erik Wilson (who also, as it happens, shot all three of the Paddington films) will sometimes get a bit artier, shooting the reflection of car lights off the sides of downtown L.A. skyscrapers.

I went into Crime 101 expecting it to be fine, and found myself locked in from start to finish. “Crime” as a genre isn’t particularly my favorite, but if it’s well done I can really get into it. This one, written by director Bart Layton and based on the novella by Don Winslow, features a star studded ensemble cast, each of them introduced at the beginning with no clear connection to each other. For a minute I wondered if this was going to be a jewelry heist version of Crash. Thankfully Crime 101 is just a fun narrative puzzle that clicks satisfyingly into place before your eyes, and has no sense of inflated self-importance.

Chris Hemsworth plays the seasoned thief, a guy from an unclarified but difficult background; Halle Berry is the insurance broker he catches the attention of in an attempt to score what she later calls “walk-away money.” Mark Ruffalo is the cop who is narrowing down his seemingly implausible leads toward catching this thief, whose M.O. is never to use violence against his victims. We get some notable people in smaller parts, such as Nick Nolte as the guy who hires Hemsworth for his jobs, or Jennifer Jason Leigh as Ruffalo’s estranged wife. Leigh only shows up very briefly in a couple of scenes—so brief that, with her straight long blond hair, I mistook her for Patricia Arquette. Honestly, Jennifer Jason Leigh deserves better than this.

Evidently just to mix things up, Nolte’s character hires the clearly unpredictable son of one of his other, now-deceased clients. This young man is played by Barry Keoghan, because who else are you going to get to play an immature loose cannon? (Keoghan also appeared in the previous film Bart Layton directed, American Animals (2018).) This character, who spends a lot of time tailing people on his motorcycle and/or threatening them physically, serves the dual role of throwing a monkey wrench into the plot and then also being a key part of tying up all the narrative threads in the end.

Honestly, this story, such as it is, is not exactly masterful, but it’s good enough. I’ll give it credit for zagging in a few unpredictable directions, particularly when it comes to its couple of prominent female characters. Monica Barbaro plays Hemsworth’s love interest, randomly rear-ending his car before he asks her out, and I was sure she existed only to be later put in peril. Instead, she really exists only to become an uncomfortable mirror of his issues. I can respect that. Halle Berry’s arc in the film takes some unpredictable turns as well. A scene in which she tells off her boss is equal parts contrived and satisfying, and happens in between said story turns.

Crime 101 clearly wants us to pick up on subtext about the City of Los Angeles, and has affection for it while acknowledging its faults. We get regular shots of people living on the streets, and the implication that Hemsworth’s thief once lived there. Ruffalo’s cop deals with a level of police corruption that is both infuriating in its reflection of truth, and a bit heavy handed. Watching this movie, I kept thinking a lot about another crime thriller that doubled as a love letter to L.A., the solid 2004 Michael Mann film Collateral, in which Mark Ruffalo also coincidentally co-starred. Crime 101 is not quite as good as that but it’s close; indeed, it feels a lot like its spiritual sequel.

And I must admit, I have an odd soft spot for the City of Los Angeles, which is widely and unfairly hated; it moves me when a film goes out of its way to bring beauty to its depiction. Movies like Crime 101 give it an unusual sense of place, and a sense of urban surroundings when it is otherwise thought of as just sprawling. Combine this with a great cast and a compelling-enough story given thrilling propulsion by skilled editing, and you’ve got a winner.

There’s a lot going on under the surface in Crime 101.

Overall: B+

A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Overall: B+

THE LOST BUS

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

What a strange movie landscape we live in now, where something as truly cinematic as The Lost Bus gets distribution rights by Apple Inc, who merely releases it on their streaming services. The irony here is that, even though this is a film that would have far greater visual impact on a movie theater screen than on a television—no matter how big that television is—it still has far greater audience potential on a streaming service. Granted, it would almost certainly get an exponentially larger audience on Netflix (300 million+ subscribers) than on Apple TV+ (45 million subscribers), but second-tier streamers have to put up the cash for their own exclusive content to lure suscribers. It’s hard not to imagine that’s a big part of what this movie is.

The unfortunate part of it is that I can tell you The Lost Bus comes highly recommended, but I can’t tell you to go see it in a theater, or even to pay for it on VOD. You need to subscribe to Apple TV+. Or! Here’s a deal for you, and I do this regularly: start a 7-day free trial, watch this movie, and then just make sure you cancel the subscription before it auto-renews. This is more trouble than a lot of people want to go to. If you want to go to the trouble for any particular movie, this is one I would regard as worth it.

I mean—it’s not perfect. It’s simply very good. It’s only momentarily distracting that 55-year-old Matthew McConaughey is cast as 44-year-old Kevin McKay, a native of Paradise, California who has only recently returned after decades of estrangement from his recently-deceased father. And when the film begins, the narrative really lays it on thick that this guy is down on his luck: in addition to his father having recently died, his cancer-ridden dog has to be put to sleep, and his 15-year-old son Shaun (played by Levi McConaughey, Matthew’s actual son) screams at Kevin that he wishes he was dead. We either learn about or actually see these things happen within 24 hours of the notorious 2018 Camp Fire breaking out, which then spreads through the entire region within hours. I haven’t even mentioned Kevin’s feeble mother (Kay McConaughey—Matthew’s actual mother) who also lives with him and is not equipped to take care of Shaun when he falls ill and starts vomiting.

In other words, to say that everything is going wrong for Kevin McKay, both in life overall and on this particular day, is truly an understatement. You might even say the script, co-written by director Paul Greengrass with two other writers, overdoes it a bit. It doesn’t seem likely that this part of the “true story” is truly sticking to the facts. It’s a little odd that a movie production would lean so hard into Hollywood tropes when Apple TV exists outside the typical plot notes of Hollywood executives.

And yet: I’ve got to hand it to Greengrass, who is a perfect fit for a production of this nature. Even with more plot contrivances than a lot of his other similar films, The Lost Bus has a procedural nature akin to United 93 (2006), which arguably leaned too far away from plot or character development. Or maybe a more apt comparison would be Captain Phillips (2013), which featured Oscar-worthy performances by both Tom Hanks and then-newcomer Barkhad Abdi.

I’d love to say The Lost Bus also features Oscar-worthy performances, but as good as they are, that’s just not what this movie is. There is an emotional speech that Matthew McConaughey gives, but it’s worth noting that when it finished, my husband simply said, “I don’t think the real guy gave that monologue.” Yeah, I don’t think he did either.

What The Lost Bus does do is grip you, from nearly the beginning to the very end. We get just a few minutes of all that aforementioned hard luck Kevin is under, and then suddenly the Camp Fire is spreading, threatening the entire town of Paradise, CA (population 27,000—down to 4,764 as of the 2020 Census). The bus of the title is being driven by Kevin, a relatively recent hire, who is running late to get his bus back to base for maintenance. When fate has him the only empty bus in an evacuation area with a couple dozen elementary kids whose parents haven’t reached them need to be taken away, Kevin answers the call.

One of the teachers, Mary (America Ferrera), winds up on the bus with him and these kids. And then, maybe three quarters of The Lost Bus simply follows these two adults and all these children on a bus, facing gridlock, and rapidly approaching fire, and occasionally more than once, as they make a long succession of desperate attempts at getting out of the area. There’s a lot of fire onscreen in this film, and most of it looks like CGI—relatively impressive effects under the circumstances, but still recognizable as such. This is a rare occasion where I was weirdly comforted by that: I’d rather not think all of these children were constantly surrounded by actual fire only feet away.

It’s worth noting that 85 people died in the 2018 Camp Fire, and that is tragic, but—spoiler alert!—none of them are characters in this movie. Movies aren’t made about the victims. Movies are made about the heroes, and the people who survive. This is a large group of people who came very close to death (there is one particularly heavy sequence in which the two adults on the bus make the mutual decision that their only choice is to sit in the unmoving bus and hope the fire doesn’t take them all out—but fret not, this is closely followed by the most thrilling/harrowing sequence in the film) but still barely made it out alive. It’s the stories of inspiration and hope that we want to see and hear, and that’s exactly what The Lost Bus delivers.

America Ferrera and Matthew McConaughey are having a hot time in the small town tonight!

Overall: B+

ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER

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

The more I think about One Battle After Another, the more impressed I am with it. This is the sign of a great movie. I didn’t have the wherewithal to think about whether it was a Great Movie while I was watching it, because I was too absorbed by it. I wouldn’t even say I was blown away by it, per se—and I mean that as a compliment. I was simply invested in every single character onscreen. I only had the bandwidth to reflect on it once it was over, and then, after some time, it gradually dawned on me: that was an amazing movie.

Everything that’s amazing about it is done subtly—not something that writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson is exactly known for. Many of his films, particularly early ones like Boogie Nights or Magnolia or Punch-Drunk Love, throw a lot onscreen that amounts to showing off. And don’t get me wrong, it works: those are all objectively great movies, top-tier in the PTA canon. Not that much of his output can qualify as bottom-tier—the only one of his films I did not particularly like was Inherent Vice (2014). Licorice Pizza (2021) got rave reviews and I thought it was very good but without the usual P.T. Anderson impact, and his debut feature film, Hard Eight, is fine. Just about any of his seven other feature films, though, you could reasonably call a masterwork. How often does a director come along like that?

Anderson does have a signature style, both in writing and in look—if you look deep enough. Many of his movies are truly like no other, and yet they all have a connective tissue to them. As such, One Battle After Another feels like the culmination of his life’s work. It might be his crowning achievement. He’s only 55 years old, though. Imagine what more we might get out of him over the next twenty, maybe even thirty years. It’s thrilling just to think about. Maybe he’ll give us a dud or two, who knows? I expect it will be worth it. This is a guy who takes huge swings, over and over, and nearly every time it pays off.

And how to even talk about One Battle After Another in a way that effectively illustrates its greatness? This is a movie about America, told through three different ethnic lenses: Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio), the once-revolutionary White guy who has long since given up; Willa (Chase Infiniti), the daughter he’s had with Perfidia (Teyana Taylor), a Black woman with a passion that cannot be domesticated; and Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio Del Toro), Willa’s Latino karate sensei who has his own immigrant-underground-railroad going on.

There’s a bit of yin-and-yang with the Whiteness in this film, Bob being counterbalanced by Col. Stephen J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn, as committed to the part as ever), who is eager to join the White-supremacist “Christmas Adventures Club,” but also has a conflicted attraction to Perfidia—who may or may not have similarly conflicted feelings about him. Lockjaw is one of the most compelling and layered villains to come along in cinema in a long time, and I will only say that there’s a pointed poetic justice to his ultimate fate.

It feels important to note that a great deal of time is spent on Bob and Perfidia (and, to a degree, fellow revolutionary Deandra, played by Regina Hall) many years in the past, their hunger for both revolution and each other, and the ultimate consummation of their relationship and what would appear to be the resulting offspring—and then, time jumps forward, and little Willa is sixteen years old.

The “French 75,” the name these revolutionaries have given themselves, is loosely based on the revolutionary spirit of the 1960s, particularly as detailed in the 1990 Thomas Pynchon novel Vineland—which is credited here as “inspiring” One Battle After Another, rather than being an outright adaptation of it. In this film, however, these revolutionaries are clearly grafted onto a 21st-century world, with no other added commentary: we get no context clues about what the French 75’s numerous bombings or bank robberies did to American culture. We only see that these things happen; this group exists; and they are in active pursuit by law enforcement. It is perhaps telling that this stuff does not necessarily feel out of place being recontextualized to the modern era.

The story does’t even take off until the jump forward to Willa as a 16-year-old. Her mother disappeared when she was a baby; her father spends his time frying his brain with weed. But a sudden turn of events has Colonel Lockjaw going after both Joe and Willa for the first time since her infancy, and the motivations here all come back to his obsession with his own Whiteness. A reactivation of communications between current and former members of the French 75 creates a lot of comic moments when Joe can’t remember all the communication passwords he’s supposed to have had memorized for the past sixteen years.

Nothing goes in the direction you expect it to in One Battle After Another—another hallmark of Paul Thomas Anderson films. You root for the characters, and you fear for them; sometimes they get out of scrapes and sometimes they don’t. Whatever is going on, the runtime of two hours and 41 minutes flies by, thanks to a kinetic energy that never abates. It has this in common with Magnolia, the only P.T. Anderson film that was longer. One Battle After Another is less stylized and far less high-concept; the characters here are much more grounded, making them more plausible and real. All of these things tie together into what amounts to the best film of the year so far.

One Battle After Another is so good you’ll be convinced by a 25-year-old-actor playing a 16-year-old character.

Overall: A

THE LONG WALK

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

Stephen King wrote the novel The Long Walk when he was 19 years old. It was the first one he ever wrote, though not the first to be published (that was Carrie, published when he was 27). That would place the writing of The Long Walk during King’s college years in the late 1960s, during the peak of the Vietnam War—for which reviewers later interpreted this novel as being a metaphor.

Now, nearly 60 years after it was written and 46 years after it was first published, The Long Walk gets its first-ever film adaptation, starring Cooper Hoffman (the late Philip Seymour’s son), David Jonsson, Charlie Plummer, Mark Hamill, and more. I don’t know if Stephen King is just trying to cash in on as many film adaptations as possible or what, but I can’t say this film works all that well as a metaphor for much of anything, much less the Vietnam War, which has largely passed out of an active place in the American cultural consciousness. We have young adults now with no memory of 9/11.

The Long Walk is getting some rave reviews, and I can’t quite understand why. It has strong performances and is well shot, so it kept my attention, but I still rather found it lacking. The story is set 19 years after a war has left the United States in economic dire states and a diminished place in the world. I suppose it could be argued that it doesn’t matter, but the story as presented here tells us nothing else about why the war happened or how our society got to a place where there is an annual marathon with one “winner” from each state who must walk through a desolate rural America, always at least at 3 miles per hour on penalty of execution after three warnings, until only one of them is left.

This is where even the Vietnam War “metaphor” idea falls apart, because these young men volunteer for this opportunity—they aren’t drafted. The winner is granted one wish as well as riches beyond their wildest dreams, and much is made of the country being so economically depressed that everyone they know is eager to volunteer out of desperation. But that’s not exactly the same thing, is it? Average young men didn’t enlist for the Vietnam War out of desperation; they were forced into it by the draft.

“The Long Walk” is indeed televised for the country, and Mark Hamill as “The Major” mentions how production picks up all around the country each year after the Walk. This brings in a dark sort of televised entertainment into the premise, which is both similar to and pre-dates the likes of Kōshun Takami’s Battle Royale (published 1999) or Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games (published 2008)—or indeed even Stephen King’s own The Running Man (published 1982), which itself is getting a second film adaption released later this fall, starring Glenn Powell (the 1987 adaptation starred Arnold Schwarzenegger).

The Running Man looks to be far more fun than The Long Walk, which leaves me still looking forward to it, albeit with a cautious optimism. At least that one promises exciting action set pieces, of which The Long Walk has none: my companion at The Long Walk today noted that it was the most violent movie she had ever seen with no action in it. It’s just a bunch of young men either walking, or, when they get too tired or get injured so they can’t keep the pace, getting shot. And you should get fair warning here: the kills in this movie are pretty gruesome, especially the first one, which shows a bullet tearing through a guy’s face. In many of the rest of the examples, you see bits flying out the other side of their head when they get shot. There’s quite a bit of this, but it’s not the only type of gross thing you’ll see: I’ll just say that one guy winds up with some gastrointestinal trouble, and we get a direct look at the results. I can only hope that I go with more dignity when I die.

But, basically, all these guys sign up for a 98% chance of an ignominious death. With there being 50 contestants of “The Long Walk,” I found myself running nerdy numbers in my head. For instance: if we assume 10% of the population is queer, then at least 5 of these guys should have been queer, but we don’t get a single gay character—a common issue with Stephen King’s vastly prolific writing, in which nearly everyone is cisgender and straight. Instead, we get a somewhat shocking amount of homophobic banter between these young men. I can’t figure out if JT Mollner, who adapted King’s novel into this screenplay, was just staying true to how King represented young men in the sixties, or if we are meant to rationalize this detail as the inevitable backsliding of social mores in a country that has become far-right authoritarian. The problem is that The Long Walk as a film provides no such clarity, so we’re just left to take the way these guys talk to each other at face value.

We don’t even get backstory on any individual characters. The closest is Raymond Garraty (Hoffman), the lead character, whose letter congratulating him on winning this “lottery” to represent his state serves as the opening title card. We see his mother (Judy Greer) driving him to the meeting point and breaking down when they say goodbye, and later we get the single real flashback regarding what was the ultimate fate of Garrett’s father—who defied national law by sharing old music and pop culture that is now banned with his son. That’s the extent of it with Garraty, and none of the other 49 contestants get even that treatment—not even Peter McVries (Jonsson, who was very impressive as the synthetic, Andy, in Alien: Romulus), who is eventually revealed to be the co-lead of the film.

Garraty reveals a plan to avenge his father, which prompts some wise advice from McVries: “Vengeance doesn’t help.” In the end, this is a big part of what makes how The Long Walk ends—very differently from the novel, to be clear—so baffling. It’s as though writer JT Mollner, and director Francis Lawrence, can’t decide what they’re trying to say. The Long Walk is clearly designed to be unsettling, and it very much works on that front. But, to what end? The character left standing at the end makes a truly momentous choice that is antithetical to what had previously seemed to be his own wisdom, and then walks off into the night in an environment that suddenly changes in a way that makes no practical sense. Are we supposed to take this at face value, or is this a fantasy in a character’s head? Again: this movie doesn’t seem to know. It would be one thing if The Long Walk were being provocatively ambiguous, but it feels more like it just doesn’t quite know what it’s going for. To that end, I can tell you what you should be going for: a better movie.

Are we there yet?

Overall: B-

DROP

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

I have just one major complaint about Drop, the thriller set mostly in a Chicago high-rise rooftop restaurant: the climax doesn’t even take place there! For that, we go to the protagonist’s neighborhood home. BOOOOO. Boring! That skyscraper was literally the single reason I went to see this movie, what the hell do I care about someone’s living room?

Okay, a couple of pretty cool things do happen at “Palate,” the fictional restaurant where Violet (Meghan Fahy) is terrorized by someone holding her young son hostage at home, and demanding she kill Henry (Bandon Sklenar), the man she’s on a blind date there with. To Drop’s credit, at least two thirds of the cool action that takes place in the restaurant is not even shown in the trailer. I just wish the action had stayed in the restaurant, rather than pivoting to a car speeding through the streets of Chicago, to a regular house that is surprisingly quick to drive to from the middle of the second-largest city skyline in the country.

I’ve tried very hard to figure out what the building was that was used for exterior shots of Palate Fine Dining Restaurant. Filming took place primarily in Dublin, which means the view of other Chicago skyscrapers through the restaurant windows was artificially rendered. How tall is this building supposed to be? I’m going to guess something like thirty floors. These are the things I’m interested in. Drop doesn’t care. To be fair, probably neither do most of its other viewers.

It is established early on that there must be at least two people working together here, to make demands of Violet and threaten to kill her son if she doesn’t comply. One is the masked man in her home, with an impressive number of security cameras in every single room. Another is the mystery person who is definitely in the restaurant with her, sending sinister memes via a “drop” app on her phone. Eventually Violet realizes there are tiny cameras installed all over the restaurant, particularly in the women’s room and at her table by the windows. We can only wait until Violet inevitably finds some way to outsmart her terrorizer, all while getting “drops” in a restaurant from which there is, it’s say, a thirty-floor drop–get it? Listen, director Christopher Landon: I’d get it a lot better if you kept the action in the restaurant!

Landon does have a bit of a penchant for fairly novel premises. He also co-wrote and directed the 2020 horror film Freaky, a twist on Freaky Friday in which the people who switch bodies are a serial killer and a teenage girl. That film was elevated by great performances by its leads, especially Vince Vaughn as said teenage girl. Drop doesn’t have any such thing to elevate it; the acting is fine, but each performance is interchangeable with countless others who could have been just as effectively cast in the parts.

The “twist” of who the home invader turns out to be is something we can see coming a hundred miles away—and that’s saying something, because I never watch movies looking for things coming even a mile away. Violet’s son is being babysat by her sister, Jen (Violett Beane), who eventually gets in on some of the action—one thing to enjoy about Drop is the extent to which the women in it actually do kick some ass, even the bartender (Gabrielle Ryan). A bit of an odd addition to the script is Jeffrey Self, a charismatic performer saddled with the part of a waiter working nervously on his first-ever shift, and constantly shot from wildly unflattering angles from just above table-height.

Most of Drop is effectively suspenseful, at least, and it has enough action in the final act to make it worth the wait through all the tension. I was entertained enough, but not enough to tell you to bother seeing it. I could be singing a different tune here if they had kept the action in the restaurant, so the filmmakers really have themselves to blame.

I’d say stay for the view but it’s totally fake and they don’t even stay themselves anyway.

Overall: B-

THE AMATEUR

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

If I hated The Amateur, I could make some wisecrack about how apparently everyone involved was just that. That would have been fun! Instead, these filmmakers had the nerve to make something that was . . . just fine.

Which is to say: I had a relatively good time. The Amateur doesn’t particularly arouse the passions either way. It passes a couple of hours serviceably. The definitively mixed reviews are no surprise. It has some clever plotting.

There is a bit of a moral quandary here, though. As directed by James Hawes (One Life) and as performed by Rami Malek (Bohemian Rhapsody), the title character, Charlie Heller, is not so much presented as an antihero as he is presented as a hero, understandably seeking vengeance by finding and killing the terrorists who killed his wife. I use the word “understandably” very loosely here. When the leader of these criminals is finally reached, he does point out the hypocrisy in Charlie’s pursuit of vigilante justice, but it barely gets touched on and then The Amateur moves on.

But hey, whatever—I’m here to see a glass swimming pool buckle and fall sixteen stories, and The Amateur delivers. How Charlie kills, or attempts to kill, the others is never as exciting as the swimming pool sequence, which is clearly why that pool collapsing got prominent placement in the movie trailer. The first of the killers he goes after, the attempt that goes the most wrong, Charlie does find a pretty ingenious way to threaten her life. It’s totally contrived for the sake of the story, of course, but at least it’s something we haven’t seen before.

Charlie works for the CIA, helped design all of their surveillance systems, and uses these systems and his wits to come up with clever ways to best the villains. Much is made of the difference between killing someone “from a difference” versus what killing someone at close range does to you. “You’re not a killer, Charlie,” says Henderson (a welcome Laurence Fishburme), the guy the CIA taps first to train Charlie as a means of placating him, then as an attempt to capture him. The Amateur isn’t much interested in the fact that killing is killing, no matter the distance.

But hey, forget about that, we’re having fun! The Amateur wants to have its cake and eat it too—and so do I. We’re all on the same page here. The moral gray areas of this story wouldn’t be egregious if not for presenting Charlie as though he’s on some moral quest, but I have chosen not to care about that. I care that we get to see Michael Stuhlbarg as the Big Scary Russian villain, and how he seems to have Charlie cornered but Charlie outwits him in the end. Julianne Nicholson’s CIA Director Moore is wildly oversimplified and idealized, almost to the point of propaganda, but she plays her part in taking down the people holding Charlie back so we love her!

I’ve made a fairly cynical read of The Amateur, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy it well enough. Whatever works! With competent performances all around and deceptively clever turns of plot, this movie gets a pass.

He gets the job done and so does this movie.

Overall: B

BLACK BAG

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

Black Bag begins with an extended dinner party sequence, the kind of scene that usually happens much later in a movie. George (Michael Fassbender) and Kathryn (Cate Blanchett) have invited four colleagues over, because George has been warned that they are among five who could possibly be the source of a leak in the intelligence agency they all work for. As it happens, George has been informed that Kathryn also has both the motive and the capability.

This is the third Steven Soderbergh film in as many years to be written by David Koepp, and it’s the best one yet—Kimi (2022) had a production limited by covid restrictions, but still takes a sudden and very satisfying turn at the end; Presence, from earlier this year, had a fascinatingly novel premise limited by a story not fully fleshed out. No such limitations exist in Black Bag, which is all of 93 minutes long and still achieves what many spy series only aspire to, and in a fraction of the time.

And this brings me back to that dinner party. Through deft writing, skilled editing and solid performances all around, we learn a great deal about all six of the characters at that kitchen table in a very short amount of time. What could have been clunky exposition in someone else’s hands, Soderbergh and Koepp reveal key character details while also moving the story forward—all with just a group of people sitting around a dinner table. Granted, it does culminate in an act of violence which is, in context, both shocking and delightful. Soderbergh has a unique way of keeping us on our toes.

Black Bag’s suspense both starts and ends around that dinner table. In between, a lot of time is spent with all of these characters in the UK intelligence office where they all work, with only occasional scenes shot on location. The central mystery shifts and moves, but with an unusual grace, never a particular jolt of plot turn. George and Kathryn’s four colleagues are in two known romantic pairings as well, but over time we learn who’s been sleeping around with which of the others in the group. Ultimately, their actions serve as a test of George and Kathryn’s marriage—it’s telling that others in the group call them “psychos” because they put their devotion to each other above all else.

This is a story largely about trust, and the type of work that tests it. George and Kathryn aren’t the only couple who use the phrase “black bag” as code for something that is work-confidential, something they cannot talk about. Somehow, though, they are the only ones who manage to make it work—even as they get playful with it: “Would you lie to me?” George asks. “Only if I had to,” Kathryn replies.

Cate Blanchett is 55 years old, and she’s as luminous as ever—this time with long, luscious brown hair. Michael Fassbender is a bit younger, 47, and he’s had showier parts in other movies. But he and Blanchett have a crackling chemistry, the kind without which this film would instantly fall flat. It is unclear to us early on whether George has reason to suspect Kathryn, or if the source of the leak is among the other four characters. The evidence ebbs and flows, and so do our ideas of what’s actually going on between George and Kathryn.

Black Bag is intrigue at its finest, a feast of sleek production design as a backdrop for a mystery both complex and concise. Not a moment is wasted in this movie, which is so well done, it leaves you wondering why so many other similar movies dwell on their own plotting so pointlessly. There is an irony to this film in that, by not engaging in any pretense of self-importance, it achieves an unexpected excellence.

Blanchett and Fassbender teach us about trust in the face of suspicion.

Overall: A-