Ad Astra (2019)

Score: 4.5 / 5

Take the emotional and cerebral heft of Solaris and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Add the thrilling and technical brilliance of Gravity and First Man. Mix in some spiritual magic in the form of Interstellar. Then thread through these elements the plot of Heart of Darkness, and you'll find something that resembles director James Gray's newest film. When a movie wears its influences so blatantly, it's hard not to use their titles. But Ad Astra is a remarkable gem in that it very much carves its own niche in this series of major names.

In our future, Earth is struck by random power surges to devastating effect. The source, we quickly learn, is the Lima Project: a space mission sent to Neptune to search for extraterrestrial life beyond our solar system, from which no news had been received for sixteen years. U.S. Space Command sends astronaut Roy McBride (Brad Pitt) to investigate and make contact with the Lima Project, as his father -- the leader of the Lima Project -- may still be alive and on board. The intense foreshadowing suggests (and later, it is confirmed) that the father is in fact the cause of these catastrophic surges, and he must be stopped.

It's an awesome space adventure, filled with scenes of thrills and chills. We have moon pirates, predatory research baboons, antimatter cannons and nuclear bombs, and of course the ever-present wonder of space. Replete with awesome visuals, the film is utterly transportive, showcasing the vastness and unpredictability of the dark unknown we've grown familiar with. Space, Ad Astra seeks to remind us, is not the same we've seen in a galaxy far, far away or populated by Norse gods and ragtag guardians. The dangers are real, and none more so than the incredible isolation and loneliness suffered by those who attempt to navigate its depths.

And it is here that I most fell in love with this movie. Sure, it might feel plodding and pretentious, but I found it ethereal and haunting. Much like this year's earlier High Life, we're taken on a ride through the galaxy, yes, but also through a man's heart as he attempts to locate and reconnect with his father, who may be a planetary terrorist. He also seeks reconciliation with his estranged wife and with his own soul, battered as it has been by setbacks, workaholism, and a seeming inability to connect with anything but his fascination with space (read: not being around other people). Brad Pitt's unlikely powerhouse performance reminds us why he's enshrined as a top-shelf actor, as he so deeply internalizes every single emotional and mental beat of this mostly wordless screenplay. His narrative voiceovers betray nothing of his heart, and he intones his cryptic sentences like the dirge they promise.

Meditative, thrilling, and beautiful, this marks what may be a career-best-yet for James Gray, and flexes his muscles beyond the crime dramas he's helmed before. While it won't appease many space-minded sci-fi fans who want Star Trek-level answers to "Who else is out there?" or even Alien-level warnings of "What else is out there?", Ad Astra nevertheless manages a final sequence wholly unique in the genre, embracing a common and commonly unspoken theory about the universe at once more chilling and more hopeful than any I can recall in recent film history: We are, always and ultimately, alone.

The Goldfinch (2019)

Score: 3 / 5

From the director of Brooklyn, John Crowley, comes another picture about which I am of two very different minds. The Goldfinch is a strange hybrid film, one that is sensory and intoxicating, full of mystery and beauty, but one that is also over-sentimental, flat and often inert, and cruelly boring.

After his mother is killed in a bombing at the Met, teenager Theo (the fabulous Oakes Fegley, the best young actor working this decade) is sent to live with the family of a school friend. Despite some initial chilliness, Theo's foster family warms up to him, or at least the mother does (an awesome Nicole Kidman), and they work through his grief together. Then his alcoholic estranged father (Luke Wilson) comes to take him away to Las Vegas with his girlfriend (Sarah Paulson). By the time he comes of a certain age -- time seems rather fluid and artificial in this film -- he returns to New York and seeks out his foster family. He also reconnects with his mentor, antiques curator Hobie (Jeffrey Wright), under whom he apprentices.

It's a drawn-out, somewhat Dickensian tale of coming of age, the kindness (and cruelty) of strangers, the eccentric people we allow into our lives. In these ways, the film succeeds magnificently, with potent performances across the board. That is, except from Finn Wolfhard, whose character Boris, a Ukranian immigrant with an abusive father, is so overplayed I can hear Winona Ryder wishing she had received the role. Besides him, the cast drove me to laughter and tears more than once in an endearing -- if wacky and wonky -- ensemble drama. They're all fairly complex characters with specific and highly varied energies, which helps the film feel at once hyper-realistic and a little surreal.

Not having read the novel (yet), I can only imagine this film sticks terribly close to it. Or at least to episodes of it, since the novel is massive. I suspect this partly due to the episodic nature of the screenplay and partly because of its inertia. Every time I thought things would start to get spicy, the plot dished out more of the same. And perhaps that's part of the point: the story, which encompasses many years of character development, can't always be exciting. Rather, the lives we lead are often dull with a few moments of profundity, strangeness and charm, that flavor our identity and experiences. This movie dwells in the moments just before or after these moments, moments where we have to just sit and take it all in, moments where we have to decide what to do with the bizarre crap going on around us.

But this is no surrealist comedy, and while I don't think it should have been, it could have been less elegiac and more blithesome, or at least kinetic. Whenever Nicole Kidman, goddess, wasn't on screen, I felt myself sliding irreparably into a stupor.

Hold the Dark (2018)

Score: 4.5 / 5

Jeremy Saulnier's latest feature may not have the same kinetic frenzy as Green Room, but its lofty aesthetic ambitions more than make up for it. Hold the Dark is as enigmatic and abstract as its title suggests and, more than simply not giving us answers, it seems determined to eschew giving us the vocabulary to even ask questions. This is a movie you can watch once (I'm not terribly eager to view it again so soon), but it demands your full attention, or you'll be left out in the cold.

The puzzle box that is Hold the Dark begins with a child playing in the snow when a wolf appears, stalking it. The boy's mother summons nature writer and wolf expert Russell Core to come hunt the wolves blamed for her son's death, along with the deaths of other town children. Core arrives in remote Alaska to begin his search, and quickly realizes he's in far over his head. These people are strange, the landscape is forbidding, and the body count is quickly rising. But this film is no "the dingo ate my baby" Cry in the Dark, nor is it a bleak murder mystery a la Wind River. This is new. This is a journey into the heart of Alaskan darkness, where man and animal meld into a surreal, survivalist impulse and cruelty is the only rule of daily life.

The clues mount quickly, and it's impossible to discuss any without spoiling the central conceit, so if you dislike spoilers, I give you fair warning.

First, we have the name of the town, Keelut, which is fictional; the word comes from an Inuit folktale of a hellhound, a hairless dog-demon who feeds on the dead. Second, we have a wolvish mask that suggests the animalistic brutality of its wearer. Third, we have a cast of characters made mostly of hunters, a pack of humans who use stalking, aggression, sex, and violence as a way of life rather than to achieve any clear results. Fourth, we have stoically intoned legends and accusations of evil that we're never quite sure if we're meant to believe or not. Are these myths real? Are they metaphorical? Are they the product of lives lived on the edge of reality, a step shy of sun-deprived, communal insanity?

Are we confused yet? Let's back up a bit.

Jeffrey Wright plays Cole, world-weary and somewhat bestial after living among a real wild wolf pack and writing about his adventures. He comes to town and lives with Medora, the aggrieved mother, while investigating the situation; when she approaches him naked with the wolf mask and seduces him into choking her, he really should have gotten the hint. Not long later, he discovers the body of her son strangled in the cellar. She disappears into the wilderness; the townsfolk say she is possessed by a demon called tournaq.

Meanwhile, we see her husband Vernon in Iraq, the epitome of a cold-blooded killer. When he returns home to find his son dead and his wife missing, we're pretty sure he's going to lose it. He does indeed, going on a killing spree, burying his son in snow, and hunting his wife. Vern takes up the wolf mask like his wife, his soon-to-die friend encouraging him to let out the wolf inside. It's a little odd that Vern (Alexander Skarsgard) and Medora (Riley Keough) are so pasty-white in this town of natives; it helps suggest, with other things, that there is something Other about them, and perhaps that they are incestuous (she says early that she has no memory in which Vern is not with her).

This film will frustrate you. Its languid visual pacing doesn't comfortably jive with its horrifically brutal violence; its awesome photographic visuals belie unspeakable evil; its convoluted plot and dense themes weave a bewildering web. I had no clear grasp on what was happening until the centerpiece climax, a cinematic masterclass on a massive shootout, the camera sadistically lingering on excess, where we can't look away but can no longer bear the horror. And later, as the film builds toward its inevitable but paradoxically unpredictable conclusion, I found myself slack-jawed in awe more than once. But if you stick with it and watch the characters, holding darkness within, work through what it means to hold off primal, frontier darkness, you'll reach an aesthetic catharsis that requires no standard logic or understanding to appreciate.

It Chapter Two (2019)

Score: 4 / 5

Sometimes it's best to stick with the basics. After a fabulous first outing, I was so excited for the finale. Rumors were flying about its length, its depth, its horror. And while the new film does indeed deliver on these fronts -- it's a hell of a lot of fun, surprisingly emotional, and spooky to boot -- it also suffers from unnecessary changes from the source material, awkward pacing, an undercooked screenplay, and a terrible title.

Let's start at the very beginning, a very good place to start. We see the infamous, pulled-from-the-headlines opening scene of the novel in which Adrian Mellon, a gay man enjoying the Derry carnival (but apparently not enjoying Meg Ryan's hair), is brutally attacked by local bigots. The camera, thankfully, doesn't shy away from the assault, and we're reintroduced to Derry with a bang -- rather more of a crunch as the bullies punch and kick Adrian. It's a deeply disturbing scene, watching the asthmatic victim gasping for air before he is thrown into the river. Scenes like this -- in which the townspeople of Derry are demonstrably as evil as (perhaps more evil than) Pennywise -- are what make the book so memorable and horrifying. Unfortunately, these are also the hardest to capture on film, where the bogeyman is the moneymaker.

But, though this opening made me wonder how violent It Chapter Two would be, it's about as brutal as the movie gets. Sure, there's a vicious assault on the adult Beverly by her husband, there's Stan's sudden suicide, but the film really skims the surface of the real horrors lurking in Derry. Instead, the film tries to plant one foot in these physical dangers and the other in a pseudo-psychological world of perception, memory, and trauma. While arguably designed in the spirit of the novel (flashbacks and memories flood into adult consciousness in sudden and sometimes unexpected ways), the bizarre marriage of youth and maturity, of memory and reality, make the horror here less rooted in the body and more in the mind.

Thus we have what amounts to a madcap comedy, but in the horror genre. A parade of psychos and freaks and aggressively weird imagery floods the screen for nearly three hours, making the film an exercise in endurance for the audience. It's also an exercise in parsing the often oblique editing: we get many scenes with the kid-versions of the characters, but it's not always clear if it's a real memory, a perceived memory, or perhaps simply a hallucination brought on by panic, fear, and IT.

And, frankly, this film would have worked just fine relying solely on the adults. I understand the thematic importance of working through trauma, but we would have understood that because this is a sequel. We don't need to be constantly bashed over the head with new scenes of childhood terror at the hands of Pennywise -- that's what the whole first movie was about! (And I was especially irked that the new kiddo scenes are not based on the text anyway.) Rather, we could have had a totally adult movie that included more adult scares: Pennywise the second time around should be able to scare the adults as much as he had the children, but this movie makes it seem as though the adults are only scared because they remember him being terrifying.

A final complaint: the damn script is so romanticized (and torn between impulses and focus points) it's hard to really take the movie on its own terms because -- after only one viewing, admittedly -- I don't know what those terms are. The first chapter (God, I hate the "chapter" designation in the title, did I mention?) was a straightforward coming-of-age story that dealt with those horrors. Great. That makes sense. This time around, you'd think the Losers are either a) still coming of age, or b) aged and working with age-appropriate horrors. Instead we get c) a strange mix of the two, with almost none of the book's deep knowledge of adult issues rooted in childhood trauma. What do I mean? Let's go....

Henry Bowers becomes a random madman tossed into two or three scenes to add a scare, but we are given virtually no insight into his story, his character, or his own trauma. Pennywise himself is a very different character here, preying on emotional instability and desperation more than fear itself; at one point, he even describes himself as having "missed" the Losers in a strange masochistic monologue. Bill is a clear stand-in for Stephen King himself, who makes a sizable cameo, but his wife is notably absent from the proceedings; Beverly's husband similarly disappears after his early scene; these changes make the Losers appear still childlike, not in real adult relationships. Similarly, Richie takes on what is essentially Eddie's character in the book, that is, that he's gay and been closeted his whole life. While this would seem to act as a nice mirror to the opening hate crime, Richie of course does not get to fulfill his apparent lifelong crush on Eddie because (SPOILER ALERT) Eddie dies at the end. Then again, no version of this story was ever meant to have a happy ending.

*Speaking of queerness, I just have to add that this film is pretty queer. One lovely flashback hints a bit more at Richie's queerness. While I was bothered at first that they switched the closet case from Eddie to Richie, I think I like this better: they really made it work with Richie's caustic humor, and then it pairs nicely with Eddie's mama's-boy-ness. But perhaps the most unexpected and fabulous scene in the movie comes from Richie's confrontation with Pennywise on the Derry green space. With the hyper-masculine statue of Paul Bunyan on one side and the hyper-feminine cheerleaders practicing their routine on the other, Richie is caught in the middle, watching Pennywise floating toward him under an upside-down balloon pyramid singing about his "secret". Wow. It's an amazing high-camp moment of pure frisson, heightened by the hint that Derry passerby can also see the proceedings (they freeze and watch in the background).

Perhaps the two most egregious oversights I see in this romanticized script, however, concern Stan and Derry itself. First, of course, it's Stan's death that first horrifies the adult Losers. But by the film's denouement, we learn that Stan wrote letters to his friends letting them know he sacrificed himself partly due to fear but mostly to unite them into a common purpose in confronting Pennywise. What? That's on par with 13 Reasons Why levels of glorifying suicide. The whole point should be that Pennywise's horror was so traumatic that Stan couldn't bear the idea of returning. And then there's the town of Derry, so wicked and corrupt, which escapes totally unscathed by the end of this movie, lit in warm tones and a slight Hallmark-channel-esque haze in a final skyward shot. Again, what? In the novel, the town is mostly flooded in yet another cataclysmic event, as the psychic battle between the Losers and Pennywise basically explodes the sewer system and overloads the canal: the shit Derry doled out is returned in typical King fashion. I wanted some comeuppance, dammit!

Despite my irritations, this movie (I'm not using that title again) is thoroughly entertaining. A spectacular cast delivers on all fronts, and I found myself crying as much as gasping as they faced their fears. The movie is filled with lovely genre Easter eggs, most notably to The Shining and The Thing. Even the climactic battle, filled with some eye-popping and mind-bending visuals a la Mysterio in this summer's MCU flick, doesn't disappoint, and the Pennywise spider makes a vast improvement on its 1990 miniseries counterpart.

There is so much packed into this movie that I'll need to go again. And I'll hope, too, for a supercut of both parts with the much-teased deleted scenes added back in. (I heard they filmed the burning of the Black Spot and perhaps other Derry disasters, and I'm so ready for them all.)