Thoroughbreds (2018)

Score: 5 / 5

Though the title refers most directly to horses -- a symbol both of freedom and potential eroticism in the form of pure-blooded animals -- Thoroughbreds primarily focuses on the young, wealthy, and unhappy. Interestingly, the film combines many genres, so much so that it can hardly be called pure in any aesthetic sense; and yet the story is so fresh and the style so gorgeously specific that it never feels less that original, authentic, and engrossing.

Anya Taylor-Joy plays wealthy and academic Lily, who lives with her mother and stepfather in a beautiful mansion on the water. Its meticulously maintained gardens and facade -- and pristine interior -- set up a brightly lit stage for the horror lurking in the hearts of its inhabitants. This estate is no home; it's an idolatrous altar to the power of money and class and niceness. Lily has apparently been suffering some Hamlet-like melancholy (due no doubt to her father's passing and her mother's marriage to another man whom Lily hates), and though she functions well socially, it becomes clear that she harbors dark designs.

Enter Olivia Cooke as Amanda, who seems to suffer some mental disorder that prevents her from experiencing any emotion. Her mother has paid Lily to socialize with Amanda -- which the girl knows full well -- but it doesn't take long before their childhood friendship rekindles and the two spend lots of quality time together. Amanda's amoral and occasionally bloodthirsty interests pique Lily's latent passions, though the latter has the potential problem of actually feeling all the complex emotions involved in interacting with other people.

I don't want to spoil the story any further. A few added twists and turns make what is already a fairly original story riveting and unpredictable. People lie and tell the truth and we don't always know which. Anton Yelchin shows up for a few deliciously funny scenes that remind us of how horribly soon he was taken from us. But the joys of this film are manifold, in its killer screenplay, its deft direction, and some amazing performances. The two leading women perform at their usual world-class level, and their chemistry together is magnificent.

Thoroughbreds becomes a Leopold and Loeb story about women, about money, about social norms, about mental illness, and about the violence hidden just behind the veil of old money. What's fascinating to me is that we see these young, wealthy, intelligent girls as ruthless killers and yet, by the end -- which is neither tragic nor totally unrealistic -- I felt deeply moved by their relationship. Of course, I was also deeply moved by how pretty the film is and how each shot has been so carefully calculated. Hitchcockian in the best sense, the film unfolds in an inevitable march toward homicide. It's a similar aesthetic to recent A24 films, and more than once I thought of Yorgos Lanthimos; this film's rigid sense of time and place and purpose keeps everything at once sterile and layered, clean and uncanny, simple and endlessly complex. A haunting score interrupts lengthy periods of near-silence, highlighting the sudden and percussive nature of violence in the world of the film.

Dissect it, or don't. It's also just a hell of a good time.

IMDb: Thoroughbreds

Gemini (2018)

Score: 4 / 5

When a Hollywood starlet is found murdered, suspicion falls on her assistant.

That's about it in terms of plot, with the exception of a delightful little twist of an ending you can smell coming at least 30 minutes before. But the joys of Gemini lie not in a densely plotted mystery, thick characterizations, nor even much violence (or, for that matter, speed). Instead, this is the fairly rare neo-noir that is as classical as it is nouveau, as slow as it is engrossing, and as gorgeous as it is pretty.

We start with upside-down images of Los Angeles and a purplish sky, an atmospheric choice that perfectly sets the stage for the drama to come. Beautiful young leads are led by Zoë Kravitz as a young Heather, up-and-coming actress and social media icon, distracted in maneuvering out of a project she does not want to do. In the first sequence alone she (and we) encounter no less than four individuals who have motive to, well, at this point, strongly dislike Heather. Though distressed and apparently concerned enough about her own safety to ask her assistant Jill (played by Lola Kirke) for a gun, Heather remains calm in demeanor.

This informs the film as a whole. A dim film awash in bluesy music and purpley colors, we enter a world of dreams and celebrity where everything is face value and if it's not beautiful it doesn't belong. Interestingly, the characters seem most concerned not by murder itself, nor even the threat of it, but rather by surveillance and voyeurism; the first physical indication of a threat to Heather is in a fan who approaches her in a restaraunt, looking a bit too much like her idol, taking photos and asking deeply personal questions in a totally inappropriate fashion. Of course, this encounter happens in a trendy location, decorated to be hip and popular (if also overstylized and gaudy), where appetizers are aptly and repeatedly called "apps".

Given the title Gemini, it is worth noting too that the film engages head-on with all these themes through the device of doubling. Much like the Dioscuri Castor and Pollux, the two leading women are a nearly perfect pair, complete with shared fashion and home, mutual servitude and favor, dubious sexuality, all while one is famous and the other thrust unwillingly into the spotlight. I was reminded more than once of Ingrid Goes West with its creepy vibes and acute attention to bougie female millennial life. Questions of individuality, identity, and reality itself revolve in vague and unanswerable orbit around this tale of appropriated fame and inauthenticity.

And while it by no means complicates these ideas -- think of the possibilities of its racial and sexual dynamics -- Gemini knows full well what it's about. Not subverting or even really commenting. Simply depicting in an artful way, and suggesting that a cultural phenomenon (youthful fame mediated by media) deserves interrogation.

Oh, and John Cho is severely underused as the detective. That's all.

IMDb: Gemini (2018)

BlacKkKlansman (2018)

Score: 5 / 5

This is going to be a poor review for a few reasons. 1) The movie is so dense I'd need at least another viewing to appropriately comment on everything in it, 2) which would take a whole book to do, and 3) it's such an amazing cultural object that you could spend hours considering it from all kinds of angles. That's Spike Lee for you, and this may be one of my favorites yet from him.

BlacKkKlansman follows the true story of Ron Stallworth (John David Washington), the first black detective in Colorado Springs. Despite mistreatment from his coworkers and bosses, he perseveres and goes undercover. Unfortunately, his undercover test-run is to a black student union rally, where he meets the organization's president as well as a national civil rights leader, Kwame Ture (Corey Hawkins). Having succeeded in his task, Stallworth officially joins the intelligence office and is partnered with, among other men, Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver). Almost immediately, Stallworth sees a newspaper ad for the Ku Klux Klan and places a call.

It's a whirlwind of humor and horror as Stallworth joins the Klan and climbs their ranks purely through phone calls. When in-person meetings become mandatory, Stallworth sends the Jewish Zimmerman to impersonate him and solidify his membership. When David Duke (Topher Grace) becomes a staple in Stallworth's regular phone conversations, the detective hopes to gain insight into the Klan's activities and prevent any violence. But then Duke comes to Colorado Springs, the real Stallworth is assigned as his bodyguard, and the climax is essentially a clusterfuck of mixed signals and switched identities and racist violence.

Amazing as this story is, in the hands of Spike Lee it becomes a multitude of other -- larger and more important -- things as well. Lee imbues the tale with laugh-out-loud humor, deeply uncomfortable social commentary, and the most disturbing racial psychology since Get Out. The movie squarely belongs to John David Washington, whose command of the screen and script have no parallel. I don't know him from any other film, but his performance here is arresting and challenging. Topher Grace steals his scenes as the [insert adjective here] David Duke, and all his Klan brothers (and sisters!) follow suit, whether they be totally batshit crazy or so cool, calm, and collected that they could be your beloved neighbor. Though I usually don't find his performances convincing or compelling, here Adam Driver carries his weight admirably and balances moments of potential overacting (in some really difficult scenes, no less) with some incredible nuance and subtle humor.

Want more significance? Lee makes this movie a culturally reflexive film about film, about representation, and about the state of racism in America now. While the main plot of the film is set in the '70s, the film opens with Gone with the Wind (1939) imagery of the aftermath of a battlefield, followed immediately by a white supremacist infomercial narrated by a rather terrifying Alec Baldwin. Though he fumbles his words and works hard to get the message right, his speech is intercut with images of racism and violence, but undercut with hyperstylized imagery that makes us unsure of whether we should laugh or cringe or leave. But racism is not something so antiquated and obvious, as Lee is determined to show us.

The end of the film, like its beginning, features another blast from the past, when the KKK initiation includes a screening of The Birth of a Nation (1915), and we are forced to see scenes as a part of Lee's movie, not just framed as Griffith's dated picture. Not long after this sequence and Lee's film's climax, the denouement of the film leaps forward a few decades by showing footage from the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. We see the march, the protests, the counter-protests, the car attack, and even Trump's statements about evil being on "many sides" of the issue.

Though Lee can feel a little preachy in his films, by the end of BlacKkKlansman I wanted even more. For Lee, though this film is an absolute assault on contemporary issues, this film is also unusually indirect. He has created Art where he could have simply vomited rhetoric and style and morality on an age where Nazis are again openly marching in the streets. He has mined history and polished it, presenting it as truth and as allegory, framed it with art history in the form of film, and at the same time made an endlessly entertaining feature. It's amazing.

And then he released the film one year to the day after that Charlottesville rally. He's a damn genius.

Go see this movie. Go see it again. Take a friend. Take two. Tell everyone about it. Then buy it when it comes out. Host screenings. Circulate it amongst friends. It's that great.

And don't forget -- Nazis deserve to be punched.

IMDb: BlacKkKlansman

The Meg (2018)

Score: 1 / 5

If you know me at all, you know I love shark movies. The endlessly photogenic ocean, lounging beach bodies, and of course the silent, toothy terrors coming from below. Whether these films combine their horror with comedy, science fiction, indie minimalism, or surprising arthouse aesthetics, these movies beautifully round out the summer movie season and lead us into that creepy autumnal season before the Oscar race.

Unfortunately, not all shark movies carry their weight, and The Meg is more of a sinker than a swimmer. A gloriously promising premise -- that, below a natural barrier in the Mariana Trench, prehistoric life continues to thrive -- worthy of Arthur Conan Doyle or Michael Crichton gives way to mindless action and endlessly stupid dialogue paired with absurd plotting and laughably contrived setpieces. The whole thing is a wreck that had me laughing not at its comedy but at its utter lack of enjoyability.

But instead of just lampooning this flick, I'll meditate on what could have been; that is, let's look at some ways this movie might have succeeded on its own terms.

1. Simplify. This is summer blockbuster fare, so treat it as such. The Meg wastes its budget on silly details in its first and third acts. We don't need to spend so much time staring at so much money going into the underwater research facility with its state-of-the-art-appearing lighting and design. The only possible reason for the excess is for that single shot of the megalodon staring at the little girl and then biting the glass tunnel. Instead, we could have spent that money on the action scenes, on better CG imagery, on cinematography that didn't shake and roll so much we can't see what's happening. Or, you know, on screenwriters who know what they're doing.

2. The girl. Really, this is the stroke of genius the movie squandered. Shuya Sophia Cai plays Meiying, the daughter of one of the researchers (badass Suyin Zhang, played by Li Bingbing), whose presence is the sole saving grace of the film. She knows what's up, and her few one-liners steal the movie. Why wouldn't we want to focus on her? Think of it: What if the little girl -- one who self-proclaims to see and hear everything in the research station -- can solve the problem of the giant prehistoric shark? It'd be part of the grand history of monster movies to have a child with her books outsmart the adults with all their guns.

Plus, a focus on the child could help facilitate the three things hinted at but failing in this film: wonder at the vastness of the ocean, comedy regarding the outrageous proceedings, and terror in the form of the Meg. It would also help cut out the insipid subplots that never work: the strained romance between Li Bingbing and leading man Jason Statham, the moneygrubbing annoyance that is Rainn Wilson, and the weirdly contrived elements of everyone else's character.

2. Why so serious? The Meg takes itself far too seriously, considering its bizarre, absurdist presentation. It should have embraced its own hilarity while holding fast to what makes it all so scary. Really, this could have been a delightful romp in the style of Jaws or Piranhas instead of simply stealing plot elements from them and trying to do something action-oriented.

Case in point: As the third act begins, the Meg heads toward a crowded summer beach on Sanya Bay, China. I began giggling uncontrollably, which might not have been a good thing because it's also at this point that the film features a great many Chinese extras for the first time; the film's arguably racist effect of presenting such a ubiquitous Chinese body as shark bait notwithstanding, they're also mostly silly, inconsequentially characterized. My giggling came from my frustrations with the movie up to this point and my eager expectation that -- finally -- we would see the shark movie I had hoped for, complete with the beast ripping through tides of people. Unfortunately, these happened to be non-white people, and so I then felt pangs of guilt for laughing at their inevitable fate.

Despite some admittedly lovely moments in this beach scene -- notably one involving the shark dragging three rafts like bumper boats through the crowded water -- it all fizzles out with still more absurdities treated as high action. What a disaster. Finally, after the beast has been slain and the populace saved, the camera sinks down below the water during the credits (soundtracked by a puzzling Thai version of "Hey Mickey" for no reason), and I stayed for the sole hope of seeing a (SPOILER ALERT) third Meg swim up from the deep. I hoped in vain.

Don't let the promise of a giant prehistoric shark lure you into this movie. Just enjoy the trailer (which is pretty darn fun); it's more artfully made than the film. Or go watch a better shark flick. Rewatch Jaws. Enjoy The Shallows. Torment yourself with Open Water. Treat yourself with 47 Meters Down. And, whatever you do, stay out of the water.

IMDb: The Meg

Christopher Robin (2018)

Score: 4.5 / 5

I fully expected Christopher Robin to be an emotional disaster. Even the trailer had me weeping uncontrollably. I went in anticipating emotional brutality at every turn as the older character of Christopher Robin gets re-introduced to his stuffed animal friends and has to learn the value of imagination, friendship, and bravery. And while that is the gist of the story, it by no means characterizes the film.

What we get instead is a rollicking comedy-adventure that feels more like a real Winnie the Pooh story, albeit with real people. With the memories of his childhood suddenly thrust upon Christopher Robin's adult consciousness, Pooh awakens from slumber in the Hundred Acre Wood to discover his friends have all vanished. Of course the silly old bear decides to go find Christopher Robin to help, and he unwittingly stumbles into London. What follows is a magnificent adventure involving all the classic characters brought to glorious life by some eye-popping animation and, of course, the voice talents of the great Jim Cummings.

While the film's family-friendly adventure bits cemented themselves as wholly novel and utterly surprising in my mind, I would be remiss to neglect the other half of the story as well. While the primary story concerns the animals and their attempts to help their grown-up friend, the secondary story is far less original. Christopher Robin (Ewan McGregor) has become world-weary and distracted, neglecting his wife (Hayley Atwell, thank heaven) and daughter (Bronte Carmichael) to slave away at his work. Of course this gets preachy -- perhaps too much so -- but it is a Disney movie, after all. And as far as messages that his you over the head, this one is never going to wear out its welcome: Children are not children forever so don't sacrifice them to duties, and, similarly, embrace your own inner child before it's lost forever.

The film's warm heart contrasts nicely with its melancholic, often dark aesthetic, which breaks gloriously to amber sunlight in increasing increments as the film progresses. Heavy use of nature in the setting sometimes feels arthouse-y and even transcendent, like you might see in a Terrence Malick picture or even Into the Woods, and makes the whole impression that much more tactile and interesting. I liked this approach more than I expected, as the intricate details of the shadowed environment make Pooh's little truisms so much more poignant.

My love for this film stems from its affect, its aggressive but complicated way of stirring up emotions. My earnest hope is that we might get more Winnie the Pooh adventures as sequels -- because wouldn't it be great to see some of our favorite Milne stories mashed up together in a film featuring these magnificent stuffed animals? -- but I'm not convinced that will happen. As it is, we can enjoy this surprisingly successful standalone flick "deep in the hundred acre woods...."

IMDb: Christopher Robin

Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018)

Score: 4.5 / 5

This is one of those rare instances where a sequel is so amazing, it changes my opinion of the previous installment. Fallout is the fifth-act balls-to-the-wall, nonstop action, crazy complicated, knockout finale I wanted from Rogue Nation that we never got. Director Christopher McQuarrie returns as the first director to helm two Mission: Impossible films, and he proves his mettle not only in style and class and ingenuity (which he demonstrated almost ad nauseam in Rogue Nation) but with a level of insane action that, in my opinion, surpasses all that has come before in this franchise and in many others.

Fallout takes place not long after Rogue Nation with the splintering of the Syndicate and the capture of their leader, Solomon Lane. Now reorganized as the Apostles, the Syndicate remnant seek small, portable nuclear weapons in the form of plutonium spheres, which they acquire as a result of a botched mission by Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his team. Well, I say "botched," but that just means Ethan did his usual thing where he saves someone he cares about (in this case, Ving Rhames's beloved Luther) instead of accomplishing the mission the easy way. It's this heart of gold that will make it difficult to swallow another character (or actor) leading one of these movies, God forbid the day should come.

Then again, this film introduces a few new characters who are at once welcome and prove themselves extremely capable to carry the mantle. This time we still have Simon Pegg's Benji and Alec Baldwin's director-turned-secretary Hunley and thank heaven we still have a glorious amount of Rebecca Ferguson's Ilsa Faust. But now we have a new CIA director in the form of Erica Sloane, played by a fierce and formidable Angela Bassett, who really should have been featured more. We also have my personal favorite addition: Henry Cavill as August Walker, a CIA assassin (I know, I know, it's just too great) sent to shadow Ethan's team and make sure they succeed. Not only is he dark and more than a tad frightening, but Cavill shrugs off the mantle of CG action and superheroic world-smashing to reveal his incredible ability to match Cruise for every punch, every jump, every bonkers stunt, and even supercede him in panache and -- forgive me -- hunky appeal. That's no small feat.

Oh, and I almost forgot. There's a magnificent little performance by one Vanessa Kirby of recent fame as the White Widow, an arms dealer in the black market. Her glassy wide eyes and charming-if-scary grin made me guess at her identity about two seconds before it was revealed: the daughter of Vanessa Redgrave's "Max" from the first Mission: Impossible. What a great addition to this picture. I just can't even.

The film itself is long; perhaps too long. Its action sequences drag on and get increasingly violent and spectacular. Each one feels like a climax, and so the film becomes a test of our endurance as well as that of its characters. Its plot features numerous subplots and technical dialogue that frankly I couldn't follow and didn't really want to. Of course, because of the nature of these films, I didn't really need to. It's like a roller coaster: You can analyze things and anticipate them and reason around them, but ultimately it'll still take you on the same track with the same feelings and sensations if you're only there for the thrill. That's the magic of this franchise.

Unfortunately, the film will not go down as my favorite Mission because of its bloated length, convoluted plot, and surprising lack of "spy" genre trappings. Its humor is also at a series low-point, not in terms of quality but simply because everything in this one is just so serious. Its charms are many but its comedy is light, which is totally fine except that it doesn't always feel like a Mission: Impossible so much as a straightforward, unattached action movie. Then again, it's a damn good action movie; certainly one of the best this year if not the last decade. The cinematography is stunning, the editing fierce, and the sound mixing breathtaking. And the stunts -- the stunts. I've never seen so many climactic, death-defying stunts in one movie that I actually cared about. The filmmakers keep outdoing themselves with lengthy takes and outrageous stunts that I started to feel overwhelmed.

What else can I say? I love this series and I loved this film. I hope there's three more coming down the line, and more still. That might truly by an impossible mission, but something tells me Tom Cruise is up for the challenge.

IMDb: Mission: Impossible - Fallout