The Prince (2019)

Score: 2 / 5

The Prince has to be the strangest film I saw in 2019, a bizarre mix of social commentary and masculinity theory dropped into a queer fantasy that is at once more graphically violent and erotic than anything we should fantasize about. I didn't know how to handle viewing it in an auditorium filled with other viewers, and I don't know how to handle talking about it now. It's such a sensory film that almost begs to be seen in the dark with other people, even if it makes you feel uncomfortable.

Starting with an extreme close-up of a slashed throat, the camera zooms out gradually to reveal a young, handsome man on the floor surrounded by a pool of blood before panning up and seeing the murderer. We then cut to this murderer, Jaime, entering his prison cell. The entire movie takes place in his prison block in 1970s Chile, a tan-colored series of stone-walled, sand-floored rooms that look hot and miserable. The only times we're not caught in this claustrophobic warren are in Jaime's brief flashbacks that somewhat outline how and why he committed murder. That's it, though, and there's almost no exposition or fleshed-out characterization. Because, it would seem, it doesn't matter who these people are; they're so much meat.

What does matter is that these bodies are engaging in a lot of sex. Jaime, young pretty boy -- meaning lean, quiet, and with good hair -- is almost immediately nicknamed "the Prince" by his bunkmates including the "Stud" (Alfredo Castro), who seems to have the most power and influence among the criminals. That first day, Stud's young lover is kicked out of bed and forced to sleep on the floor so the Prince can become Stud's new partner. And so begins a saga of naked men constantly flirting, harassing, and fucking each other in prison, each hoping to climb the social ladder to gain influence and some modicum of comfort.

It's mostly smut, and often toeing the line of pornography if not gleefully leaping over it. A lot of the sex is thematically meaningless and serves -- perhaps not to titillate, usually, as half the virile characters are unlikable, doing terrible things, and are not conventionally attractive -- I suppose to normalize this kind of sexual congress-in-concourse. And while that may be a somewhat admirable goal, it gets woefully lost in translation. Though this kind of tale might have appealed to the 70s-era queer crowd in which it was written, a sort of escapist erotic fantasy of being locked in a space with dozens of other similarly-minded men, it feels icky at best in 2019. The film treats rape as an acceptable means of community-building, and suggests more than once that consent is a vague, ambiguous negotiation if it means anything at all. In 2019, a young man cast into a cell with horny older men or violent offenders should be grounds for a horror flick, not a plot trajectory toward self-realization and romance. Regardless of orientation, I should note, as the film has almost no differentiation between sexual orientation and situational sexual behavior; too, we're never sure what the political climate really is outside the prison, if they criminalize homosexuals or if all these men are just playing some sort of game in their cells.

Then again, while the constant flow of problematic sex scenes is a bit overwhelming, there are some really interesting elements of mise-en-scene here, as well as a few scenes that are funny, shocking, and otherwise make up a decent viewing experience. Case in point: one scene shows a horny Jaime attempting to... I guess masturbate on the dirt? My favorite was a flashback wherein Jaime attempts to have sex with an older woman called "Mom"; she teaches him how to have sex, but it's clearly not very fulfilling for either party, though it's hilarious for us. Then of course, there's the long hair, the bell-bottoms, and the hippie 70s vibe that pervade the cast and production design. It's fun enough, and I guess we can rack it up as a success that Jaime doesn't get killed by movie's end. In fact, he becomes the undisputed leader in Stud's place. Too bad we don't really know him, or care about the prison drama by this point.

Buoyancy (2019)

Score: 5 / 5

It's not just another movie about human trafficking. Buoyancy, which should have been nominated for Best International Film at the Oscars this year, is a brilliant, searing, and transcendent work about the essential human crisis in a world that values money more than lives. Impressively filmed on location over four weeks with a diverse cast of mostly non-professionals, the film dramatizes the plight of one boy as he is sold into slavery and fights to be free again. But because it is rooted so clearly in real stories and frames itself against the current humanitarian crisis that controls the lives of over 200,000 men in the Thai fishing industry, the film reaches a heightened level of reality and urgency. This isn't just an exposé on modern slavery. We're watching something we shouldn't be seeing, something we all desperately need to see.

We begin with Chakra, a young Cambodian boy, who dreams of a better life. But this isn't the usual coming-of-age story that will of course go wrong due to hubris or naiveté; Chakra wants something better because his life is already doomed. Though free in status, he is a slave to his family, performing backbreaking work during long days in his father's rice paddies. He will not inherit anything, as he is not the eldest boy, and he will live and work here in squalor his entire life. When he hears that factory workers in Thailand can get paid well for their work, he decides to journey there and make a better life. Nevermind that he can't pay to travel, he can always pay his "guide" back out of his first paycheck. And so he's packed into a flatbed on top of several other hopeful workers and smuggled out of the country.

These early scenes display amazing economy from Australian writer-director Rodd Rathjen, who quickly marries minimal dialogue to gorgeous photography of the land and the work. Closeups center our experience on Chakra's amazingly expressive face -- new actor Sarm Heng is fourteen years old -- and we are forced into his headspace as he is quickly sold to a fishing boat that is suddenly miles out in the South China Sea. Though we "know" what's happening to him and he doesn't, we see his gradual disillusionment and feel as horrified as he when he grasps that this is not the future promised to him. Rathjen seemingly effortlessly combines Chakra's drama with the collective experience of his fellow slaves, turning what might be a character-driven chamber piece into an thematic opera of adventure and horror.

The fishing boat, small and utterly isolated on the open ocean, is where we spend almost the entire movie. It does not need to journey back to land and risk losing its labor force; other ships come and go to collect its goods. The captain, Rom Ran, is a leering psychopath, sadistically torturing his slaves through physical abuse and forced starvation (they get a single cup of rice per day). The slaves are forbidden to communicate, though Chakra bonds with an older man who had hoped to make more money for his wife and children back home. This connection is dangerous for them, but helps them keep their sanity under the impossible circumstances; the other slaves are variously ignorant, fearful, vengeful, or brainwashed, and the greatest tragedy of this film lies in watching their journeys coincide with Chakra's. Some are gruesomely killed; perhaps the most memorable attempted escapee is strung up between two boats and pulled apart, one of a series of horrors that spurs Chakra into action.

It's incredibly difficult to watch, but what makes this movie truly amazing is its final act. When Chakra decides he is not a victim, the movie becomes a thrill-a-moment genre game-changer. This is not a movie where a slave can run away or somehow advocate for peaceful resistance. And while some will view Chakra's turn toward violence as a fall from innocence or a poetic device to describe the state of a soul in traumatic crisis, Rathjen works hard to show that violence is, ultimately, the best and even only way to effectively end slavery in the world. Chakra cleverly and, yes, brutally, murders the ship's slavers one by one in the film's climax and takes command of the ship.

I wept at this point -- I was unable to for so much of the movie because it was a little too sad, a little too real -- out of something close to relief that Chakra was able to do what so few other enslaved protagonists in films do. How many slave movies have you seen that end in the righteous, grisly deaths of the slave owners, enacted by the slaves themselves? It's a magnificent and uncommon turn that prepares us for the remarkably unsentimental ending: Chakra returns home, leaving his brainwashed mates on the boat in a confused, despairing stupor, only to find himself unable to go back to his father. Is it because he cannot possibly relate to his family again? Maybe, but I think the ending -- Chakra looking at his father laboring in the paddy, then turning and leaving -- suggests that Chakra is in fact refusing to return to another form of slavery after declaring his own freedom. Heartbreaking, it most certainly is, but profoundly optimistic.

I pray this movie becomes available for general audiences.

Ghost Tropic (2019)

Score: 1 / 5

The opening shot is of an empty apartment as the sun sets. There is no movement, only the sunlight changing color through the window until darkness claims the space. It's done in what appears to be real time, and stretches your patience; this movie is orienting you to a very unusual pace for film. A whispering voiceover in French invites the audience to engage their senses before we cut to the woman who owns this apartment. Khadija is an older, headscarf-wearing immigrant woman who spends her long days as a cleaning lady. She leaves her work exhausted and gets on the train. Another long take features Khadija, in close up, as she falls asleep in her seat.

Unfortunately, this means she misses her stop, and is awoken sometime later at the end of the subway's line. The buses are out of service for the night. Khadija is stranded unless she begins to walk through the cold, dark streets of Brussels. And so walk she does, and we journey with her into the night on an odyssey back home. It's not clear how well she knows the city and its various neighborhoods, but she seems relatively content to meander her way past businesses, apartments, houses, and parks. She's not in any hurry, and there are occasional moments of beauty in the way the film is photographed, 16mm, with a tendency to turn rainspots and streetlights into glorious pools of color and light.

And that's about where the beauty ended for me. Plodding through what some may call a brief 84 minutes, the film is torturous in its lack of interest. I like a good melancholy think piece when it comes along, but this one is barely tolerable. As Khadija treks through town, her few interactions with other night owls have little depth, sparse drama, and often no consequences on the streamlined plot. She meets a security guard who allows her access to an ATM to get money for a cab; her account is overdrawn; she tells him she got what she needed before continuing on her way. Are we supposed to think that she is proud? If so, why did she ask him for one of his cigarettes, but not money? Are we supposed to think that she is afraid? If so, why is he handsome and aggressively kind to her?

Other interactions supply the episodic structure of the movie after Khadija's stranding. She meets a few people and we learn a tiny bit about her. She creepily approaches a house and sees someone apparently squatting inside; another man appears and asks what she's doing. She answers that she once cleaned this house, but mentions that she hasn't seen anyone else. Is this a fascinating subversion of classism and poverty? The man asks if she is looking for work because he is unhappy with his own cleaning lady. Is this a critique of capitalist influence on sexism, trading one working woman for another without a second thought? Is it a commentary on racism and how the man indirectly proclaims himself not prejudiced against the darker-skinned Khadija (he mentions his cleaning lady is Polish) even though he's the one interrogating her at night about her activities? Could this one interaction inform the movie's larger themes?

I'd say no, because it's too muddled, too brief, and never visited again. It happens again later, when Khadija runs across her daughter, out with friends and flirting with a young man. Khadija watches from afar as they drink and sit on a cold park bench. At first, I thought the film was asking us to consider how second-generation immigrants have such different lives from their parents, and the sacrifices one generation makes for the next. But it gets weird after a while as Khadija just keeps watching; she seems to have a kind face, though she clearly doesn't know much about her own daughter's social life or interests. Maybe she's not "allowed" to, given her hard work, but then again she is taking a long damn time to get home all night and surely she'll be working again tomorrow. Does this woman ever sleep?

I saw this Belgian film at the Chicago International Film Festival, and afterward Bas Devos, the director, spoke briefly and answered some questions. He repeated that his intention in making this movie was to help make visible women like Khadija -- an older, working woman (not a mother, not a terrorist, not a mother of terrorists) -- as that demographic is so universally unseen. My problem with that is in the way the film seems determined to do the opposite thing. Sure, she's "visible" if that means she's on screen most of the movie, although even that is debatable since many shots feature the city without Khadija or show her from far off, making her way slowly along a sidewalk into obscurity. But each interaction she has with people show her to be quiet and indirect -- it's so underwritten that we don't even know if she's aloof, scared, shy, or what -- and completely inconsequential. At one point, she approaches an unconscious homeless man for whom she calls for help in one of the only "actions" she actually takes; much later in the film, she enters a hospital and asks about him before learning he died earlier that same night. The one time she did something potentially worthwhile all night ends up being for nothing, and the filmmaker thinks that helps her social visibility?

Adoration (2019)

Score: 2.5 / 5

"Love. Or nothing." That's the tagline for this Belgian romantic dark drama, which features a sort of perverse Romeo & Juliet love tragedy. Paul, a twelve-year-old boy, lives with his mother in the woods next to a psychiatric hospital she runs. Hauntingly isolated, the location seems the setting for a fairytale or horror movie; Paul is forbidden contact with the patients of the hospital and so hungers for meaningful interaction with anyone other than his somewhat domineering mother. He spends his time wandering the woods until, one day, he saves a trapped and injured bird that he adopts and nurses to health. Its sudden death drives a violent wedge between son and mother, the unsympathetic and cruel attitude of the latter suggesting she may have killed the bird.

Enter the non-symbolic bird, Gloria, whose presence in the ward catalyzes an awakening for Paul. Her free spirit and beauty suggest to him that she is not ill, and the two develop a flirtatious, secret friendship that seems innocent enough at first. As it grows to an obsessive affection, Gloria reveals her suspicions that her uncle has committed her to the asylum in order to claim her deceased parents' money for himself. The two actors are wonderfully talented, much more so than I expected from the minimalist dialogue they are given; they are dressed in contrasting colors, Gloria in red and Paul in pale blue that they never change out of. Gloria convinces Paul to help her escape, but she kills his mother before they are forced to flee into the wilderness. It's not unlike Badlands, actually, and more than a few visuals seem inspired by Terrence Malick.

In this way, the story becomes a picaresque, that is, something between Huckleberry Finn and Bonnie & Clyde. After the intriguing and exciting first act, setting up conflict and romance, the film devolves into strange episodes of interactions as Gloria and Paul flee civilization and meet people who could help them or report them. It's not really "about" who they were or the realities of their situation, so their introductions are never revisited and exposition never given; it's about whether or not they'll survive in the wide world, or if they are even able to exist in nature. The two children -- because they are children, it's easy to forget -- are doomed, of course, and so the remainder of the film feels like a strung-along mess of coming-of-age and romantic tragedy. The former tends to work well while the latter does not. I can accept children caught in the throes of youthful love, and even experimenting sexually, but the extent of sexual behavior felt more exploitative here than thematic. I did not need to see Gloria masturbating Paul in the forest to understand that these pre-teens were expressing their "adoration" physically.

Perhaps my problem with this isn't in the material itself, but in the fairytale way it's presented. Soft amber light warms each frame of the 16mm cinematography, and we are intensely attuned to nature as an erotic, even ethereal backdrop to the story. As their canoe floats down the river, fog rolls in under streams of indirect sunlight, and the romantic music makes things feel delightful; it's only in cognitive awareness of context that it's actually a shot that belongs in a thriller or horror movie. Likewise, the handheld camera that alternates between severe close-ups of the kids and wide, landscape shots raises questions about the nature of intimacy between characters and between the kids and nature. Director and writer Fabrice du Welz's control of atmosphere is without dispute; his control of narrative and theme is tenuous at best. In delivery, the film forces us into the headspace of its characters, not into acknowledging that none of this is okay.

Which is fine, really, and feels the opposite of emotionally manipulative despite the heavy-handed work being done. But whereas Queen & Slim, for example, beautifully balances these same elements with riveting contemporary relevance, Adoration feels like a well-planned production that doesn't know its audience, doesn't know its own themes, and can't decide what genre to emphasize. It doesn't help that the film's clear area of potential relevance -- mental illness, indicated by Gloria's diagnosed schizophrenia -- is treated with such distance and apparent indifference. Sure, she becomes increasingly paranoid and violent off her meds, but it's treated by the film as just another element of nature the two kids must navigate on their destination-less path. Evading genre would even be an option, but this one swings widely from one to another instead of combining ideas into manageable narrative or aesthetic moves. That would be assuming that the narrative even has distinct moves; after the first act, I barely remember the film's story because du Welz's screenplay fizzles out into obscurity and anticlimax.

8: A South African Horror Story (2019)

Score: 3.5 / 5

Its actual title is 8, but if we relied on that, you'd never know exactly how to find it online. As its descriptor (and often stylized subtitle) says, 8 is a South African horror story. The extent to which it is some kind of "essentially" South African story is arguable, of course, and it seems catered to an international audience. While I'm not sure about any myth or folklore on which the film's premise is based, it seems to be a fairly straightforward -- maybe universal? -- story of demonic influence on suffering human lives. But it's presented to us in the English language, focused on a white family.

A recently bankrupt William (Garth Breytenbach) is returning to his father's home in rural South Africa, accompanied by his wife Sarah (Inge Beckmann) and recently orphaned niece Mary (Keita Luna). While they labor to rebuild the house, Sarah feels like a failing surrogate mother, no doubt causing William stress as a husband and father-figure, and little Mary decides to go adventuring. She stumbles across Lazarus in the woods, an older black man who worked for William's father and who may have never left the property. After William hires Lazarus to help them reclaim the property, Lazarus develops a close friendship with Mary, bonding over their shared grief at losing their immediate family members. But Lazarus hides a dark secret, one that will threaten their entire community.

Tshamano Sebe (Black Sails) plays Lazarus brilliantly, and more than makes up for the acting of the other major players. The plot slowly shifts until you realize the movie is about him far more than the white family. When his wife and daughter tragically died, he called out for their salvation; what he got was a Faustian bargain with a hungry demon. Now his daughter -- or, at least, something that marginally resembles her -- lives in a sack he carries on his back. Lazarus is cursed to roam the countryside for sacrifices, collecting souls for the creature. Sebe's performance is stellar, especially in his vocal power. When Lazarus prepares his victims, he chants over their resting bodies with guttural grunts that sound demonic themselves (which, again, might be one of those thinly veiled problematic moments, as what is made to sound threatening could in fact be a form of communication by certain geo-ethnic communities).

But it's a beautiful movie, with beauty that belies its dark heart. Sweeping vistas of green countryside and hilly ridges under a golden sunrise or thinly forested valleys darkening with the dusk are gorgeously captured by the camera and edited into transitions between almost every scene. It's a heavy-handed approach, sure, but it begins to shape a film deeply concerned with its sense of place as much as its natural beauty. I'd argue the film employs cinematic Romantic imagery with its soft, shimmering light, thick atmosphere, and awareness of thematic purity or corruption. It is realistic but precious, natural and un-, and could be said to be fashioning its own fairytale.

Much like a fairytale, the narrative is predictable and familiar, and the film relies on a few unexpected and unearned jump scares to try and appease the frisson-seekers in the audience. The one time I nearly lost it was when a black bird flew out of the shed suddenly for no reason at all. But the story itself is quite disturbing, all the more so because we are made to empathize with Lazarus. Cursed as he is, he is ostracized by his own community, led by Obara (Chris April) who is less a figure of dogmatic, ignorant, or superstitious influence but rather a leader whose experience and knowledge allows him to confront and challenge this very real threat to his community.

What bothers me about this film, though, is that it is pointedly set in 1977. The only onscreen text identifies this, and its setting "somewhere in South Africa", again fitting its pseudo-fairytale performativity. But the definition of that year is fascinating to me. First because, according to the director (who is white), he wanted to make it as an homage to '70s horror films, a genre which I as a viewer would never consider along with 8. Second because 1977 connotes a period of exceptionally fraught social turmoil and racial violence in apartheid-era South Africa. Yet there is almost no consideration of this in the movie; in fact, race is almost nonexistent here. Sure, Lazarus is black and works for a white family, and the white family is punished in the logic of the film; the black community seem at odds with Lazarus, but they work with the family to rid their land of the demon. It seems deliberately insensitive to have placed this date on the story and then have nothing to say about it.

Then again, taken at face value, the film allows for other interpretations a little too easily. Its central myth of hungry, parasitic demons that everybody (as a granted element) wholly believes in are manifested symbolically as creepy creatures of shadow, smoke, flesh, and flame, all rooted in nature but a terrible and destructive part of nature. Death is part of the cycle of life, which we see in a tender caterpillar burial, juxtaposed thematically with a delicate moth noticed by Mary. Conflict enters the movie with the evil spirit whose hunger upsets the natural cycle. Even William's family -- arguably in a position of privilege over Lazarus and the other black people -- have no power over the darkness that has come to their door. The film seems determined to highlight universal traits of grief, loss, and profound guilt as the most dangerous and deadly aliens in a community, not skin color or wealth or even where you live.

**9/14 EDIT** This movie has finally been released internationally for home media and can be found under the title The Soul Collector.

The Laundromat (2019)

Score: 3.5 / 5

Scott Z. Burns has been a busy man, with the release of both The Report and The Laundromat on streaming services in 2019. The former I found to be one of my favorite movies of last year, and while the latter didn't, it is still a worthy and worthwhile flick. It can be as occasionally difficult to follow -- or swallow -- but it still shows Burns doing his uniquely brilliant work: making a movie out of a situation that is surely unfilmable, or at least uncinematic by definition. He's done this before, but this time, he turns his piercing eye and dry wit toward corporate malfeasance in the financial world, using the release of the Panama Papers as his thematic crucible. Here, he pairs again with Steven Soderbergh in a film that appears to be a cutesy "DIY money laundering" special until you realize the bad guys are having the last laugh, and the film transforms into an angry, anti-capitalist call for action.

We begin with Gary Oldman and Antonio Banderas in character as Mossack and Fonseca, respectively, the lawyers and founders of the legal firm named after them. If you're like me and knew nothing about this firm, don't worry: it's pretty obvious these are the Bad Guys and that they're up to no good. At least, not for anyone but themselves. These are those one-percenters who develop impossibly complex financial systems to help billionaires stay rich and avoid paying taxes to their governments. Their posh, egotistical delivery is pointedly nihilistic, which makes you as skeptical as interested. We get the feeling that, although they are attempting to skirt the laws, these are the wealthy for whom loopholes allow them to make (and break) their own rules. Don't ask me specifics, though; as much as this movie tries to make these difficult topics accessible, I found myself bewildered by the halfway point.

It's not unlike Adam McKay's approach to the housing crisis in The Big Short, making a jargon-heavy and nuanced profession somewhat understandable and thoroughly entertaining, even if it's all moving a little too quickly for someone like me to understand. I probably should have taken a business or finance class in college, but here we are and I hate numbers. Thankfully, Burns has his characters break the fourth wall a lot to tell us more or less what's happening, and Soderbergh heightens the superficiality of these scenes to make it all a sort of meta-commentary on how we consume difficult information we really don't understand. That is, if it's in shiny packaging, delivered by classy A-listers, and makes us chuckle a bit, we'll swallow it, hook, line, and sinker. Oldman and Banderas are walking though theatrical sets in tuxes drinking martinis as they dryly "teach" us about finances. It's a filmmaking tactic that, in this case, puts us squarely in the position of its characters -- specifically, the ones who have no idea what's happening to them.

Speaking of which: Mossack and Fonseca narrate three stories about some of the people affected by the corrupt practices of their own firm. The first concerns Ellen Martin (Meryl Streep), whose husband (James Cromwell) dies in an accident. When she tries to get compensation from the boating company, she embarks on a journey through insane legalese to a reinsurance group, a remote trust, and a shell company based on a tiny Caribbean island. Before she is able to properly confront the trust manager (Jeffrey Wright), he is arrested by the IRS. The second story is of young Simone, whose father (Nonso Anozie) bribes her with $20 million in shares in an investment company to keep quiet about his affair with her best friend; when she goes to claim the money, it is revealed they are worthless shares in a shell company. The third story concerns the murder of Maywood (Matthias Schoenaerts) -- apparently based on a real person -- who demanded money from a rich Chinese client to continue laundering money through an offshore account and shell company.

Fascinating as the frame narration is -- and, really, it's a genius piece of work in itself -- it's not my favorite part of the film. I found the various stories more engaging, and for a brief time I wondered if this would become an ensemble drama like Crash with interconnected moments. Thankfully, it does not, but the film tends to have trouble straddling its focal points while balancing a unique dark humor. My favorite parts include Streep doing what she does best at this age: playing an innocent and furious woman, someone righteously crusading against a monstrous injustice she will never be able to comprehend, much less defeat. She is an everywoman, until she's not, and the film shows her doing her frighteningly acute character actor business as well. Really, I think it's amazing she has never worked with Soderbergh or Burns before, because they all can perform this uncanny balance of dramatic styles so well. But this is not a subtle movie, and some of the messages are as loud and crass as the filmmakers could deliver them; they call out the sins of the wealthy as well as the country in which greed is in fact (and law) enshrined as a virtue.

The Burns and Soderbergh team here crafts what may be the quirkiest, most stylistically camp outing from either, and it works brilliantly. I think. I couldn't quite shake the feeling that I was always a few steps behind the narration, and miles behind conceptually grasping the realities of money laundering and financial corruption rampant in our country and around the world. The film's ending, easily the best scene, is a galvanizing cry for finance reform: the brief imprisonments of Mossack and Fonseca are darkly farcical, and then Meryl Streep takes the stage in a magnificent relay through the multiple characters she has played in this movie, reciting the Panama Paper whistleblower's "John Doe" manifesto, ending in character as herself, the actress, but posing as Lady Liberty. It's a chilling and brilliant move from actress, writer, cinematographer, and director. It's just too bad I still didn't really know what anybody was talking about in this movie.

The Gentlemen (2020)

Score: 3.5 / 5

These "gentlemen" are anything but. Matthew McConaughey is an American drug lord in England who is looking to sell his marijuana empire and retire in luxury. Michelle Dockery is his wife who knows how to use a golden gun a little too well. Charlie Hunnam is his soft-spoken but violent right-hand man always several steps ahead of everyone else. Colin Farrell is a mild-mannered, Irish MMA coach who seems adept at criminal activities though he insists he's no gangster. And those are just the good guys.

I don't remember most of the character names (I'm not sure they matter much anyway here), but recounting the ensemble cast helps describe the narrative. McConaughey's prospective buyer is Jeremy Strong, an effete American Jewish billionaire with hands that are a little too clean. The other, more pushy, buyer is Henry Golding, a major player under a Chinese gangster who is all too eager to usurp the throne. When all the hands are in the pot, so to speak, things get messy, and though the action occurs less often than the laughs, it tends to explode unexpectedly and satisfyingly.

Not having seen many of Ritchie's earlier films, I'm aware enough to know this is a sort of return to form for the writer/director, a sort of "mockney" way of getting back to his roots. That is, he's digging deep into a specific time and place and people group to provide a performative -- almost camp -- romp through familiar tropes. You can tell he's having a lot of fun with the proceedings, and that this is what the guy loves best in his business. A bizarre ensemble cast that feed off each other's best impulses and worst manners, an unscrupulous screenplay riddled with wit, charm, and indecency, and of course a complex web of crime overlaid with stunning style. I mean, Charlie Hunnam has never looked better, and I suddenly desperately want Colin Farrell's array of matching plaid track suits.

As I've briefly (and poorly) described it, the story itself is clever if familiar. There is a secret connection between Golding and Strong to lower the price on McConaughey's empire, and once we find it out, we pretty much know what's going to happen. But what makes this film brilliant is the frame story, narrated brilliantly by Hugh Grant in his best performance in years. Grant plays a private detective employed by a slighted tabloid editor (Eddie Marsan) to dig up dirt on McConaughey and ends up writing a full script for a movie. It's called Bush, with a double entendre milked for all its worth, and Grant describes it to Hunnam during the movie as a framing device for the central story itself. His goal in narrating: to blackmail Hunnam and McConaughey into saving their own secrets. But, on a meta level, the inclusion of this device and character allows The Gentlemen to approach a level of consummate cinema as a film about film. It helps that current debates about the movie industry, drug industry, and the businesses of art and pot are all so hot right now.

All that said, it's still a Guy Ritchie movie, and that means certain elements will appeal more than others. Rape is threatened on the sole female character of substance, whose otherwise fascinating character is almost absent (she runs a garage with only female mechanics -- can we see more of that?!). Crude jokes about the names of people of Asian and African descent litter each scene, along with tired jabs at Jewish people (not to mention Strong's loudly, stereotypically "gay" delivery of his character). And while xenophobia, homophobia, misogyny, racism, and anti-Semitism are always serious concerns, you tend to expect them in a movie of this tenor and from this director, and tend to be just shy of offensive when the messages being communicated are, at best, ambiguous.

And, just to reiterate, this is Hugh Grant's best performance in years. I'm so excited that he has begun taking on challenging character roles. Here, he's essentially just a narrator -- one who is unreliable and gleefully slimy -- but I found his character uniquely absorbing. There's not a single moment when he isn't working through multiple emotional beats and delivering on all fronts. Watching him do it is a masterclass in acting.

Birds of Prey (2020)

Score: 4.5 / 5

This is the high-speed candy-colored f-bomb-littered roller coaster of a movie I really wanted from Suicide Squad. I liked that movie quite a lot, but it deserved more attitude and perhaps a less dire premise. Cathy Yan's Birds of Prey takes those extra steps to fashion a fun, violent, wicked, and smart action flick that feeds off the visuals of the earlier movie while making a strong case for more feminist content in superhero movies.

Along with some intense framing devices -- including an almost-annoying Deadpool-esque voiceover throughout the movie -- the film starts with a few narrative bangs that throw us right into the action. It's been rough for the antihero Harley Quinn after she and her comrades defeated the Enchantress, particularly because the Joker broke up with her. The first act of the movie is the sort of balls-out wacky fun we'd expect from her attempts at coping, and essentially comprises a fever-dream montage of her intoxicated clubbing, adopting a hyena pet named Bruce, cutting her hair, and taking up roller derby. This sequence ends when she drives a semi into the chemical plant where she and Joker became official, blowing it up in a trippy firework explosion. The female empowerment is infectiously fun, but eventually becomes earnest.

Despite the primary title of Birds of Prey, this is really Harley's movie, suggested by its subtitle the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn. An unwieldy title, it nevertheless manages to convey the spirit of the picture. Various threads of the story feel at first too convoluted for their own good, as we're yanked around between briefly introduced (or not introduced) characters at different times in the narrative. I'd have to rewatch the damn thing to figure out exactly which scene took place first chronologically. But that seems to be the point: if this is Harley's story, she's telling it as it would make sense to her. Hence the voiceover narration, I guess, which might be the first time I've felt voiceover is not only justified but possibly necessary to the telling of a particular story.

When crime lord Roman Sionis (who moonlights as the Black Mask) realizes Harley Quinn is single, he prepares to kill her off to eliminate an irritating liability. But the resourceful Harley offers to help Roman find a precious diamond that will lead him to a fortune. Silly MacGuffin as it may be, this diamond has been swallowed by street thief Cassandra Cain, whom Harley tracks down and saves from the Gotham police as well as bounty hunters and Roman's thugs. The two women bond even as Harley feeds Cassandra laxatives by the bottle, and the movie becomes a cat-and-mouse chase with lots of moving parts, including Black Canary (who works for Roman but informs to detective Renee Montoya) and Huntress (whose personal vendetta isn't fully revealed until late in the film). These women are all secondary in the screenplay, but are given strong scenes that showcase the actresses and their impressive physicality well.

Once the various pieces come together in a fabulously satisfying scene inside a fun house at an abandoned amusement park, the "Birds of Prey" take magnificent flight. Yan masterfully handles a balance between comedy and violence, keeping her unique aesthetic vision true to the material while serving up full helpings of technical accomplishments. She works brilliantly well with cinematographer Matthew Libatique (one of my favorites) to craft a fluid visual approach to the kind of hands-on violence we don't often get even in male-dominated superhero movies. These women are taking their punches and dealing out even harder ones, and the camera catches it all in dynamic, kinetic takes. And while Christina Hodson's (whose previous work is nothing special) screenplay is a little frenetic, it works beautifully in crafting our understanding of Harley's character -- and the very specific world in which she lives (this is not a Gotham we've seen before) -- as well as each of its ensemble cast.

I hope these Birds flock together again soon.

The Rhythm Section (2020)

Score: 1.5 / 5

A baffling mess of a film, The Rhythm Section fails to tell a coherent story just as it fails to make itself entertaining. Disjointed and confused, the film lurches uncomfortably between set pieces that are only held together by brief moments of solid cinematography and a dedicated, if lackluster, performance from Blake Lively.

Stephanie (Lively) works as a prostitute in London and is addicted to drugs. Her family died in a plane crash three years ago, but one day a journalist shows up telling her the government covered up that the crash was a terrorist attack. She doesn't believe him -- or doesn't want to -- until she sees his research and decides to kill the bomb-maker herself. She approaches him at his university but cannot bring herself to kill him. She discovers soon after that her journalist friend has been murdered, and uses his notes to locate his source, codenamed B. B (a buff AF Jude Law) is a former MI6 agent who gruffly trains her to bring justice to the terrorists responsible for the crash.

This is all fairly straightforward, even if it's all a rather dull, rote affair. We've seen it before, and we've seen it better. This is gloomy, somber work that takes itself far too seriously for its own good. Lively is committed to looking really awful (which is an amazing feat in itself), and her sunken eyes, bruised skin, and tousled hair pair well -- which is to say, really badly -- with the often unfocused, handheld camera that obsessively sticks close to her face in unflattering ways. We feel as hungover or intoxicated as she often is, which doesn't work well in this kind of complicated spy-esque story of names and places and hidden intrigue.

But once she meets B, things start to really derail. Time jumps with no clear markers, and so in one moment she's incapable of jogging but in the next she is apparently hiking miles around a Scottish loch. One moment she's getting her back beaten and is unable to stand, while in the next she's still getting beaten up but knows how to black and toss her own punch. B deems her ready after the excruciating ordeal of swimming across the loch (which makes no logical sense in context), and he sends her on her first mission: convince an information broker in Spain to help identify the terrorist who organized the airplane bombing. But the broker is hesitant, played by an inscrutable Sterling K. Brown. He sends her on a mission to a wealthy man to get funding, but he wants nothing to do with it all; his wife, whose son was also killed on the plane, will help if Stephanie kills a gangster in Tangier who apparently has something to do with the attack.

This is just the beginning of the mess, as Stephanie is forced into increasingly dangerous situations to spy or kill people that are suggested to have something vague to do with the airplane bombing. Precious little is explained, and my patience with Stephanie wore out quickly for two reasons. One, she allows herself to be constantly directed by men as to her next steps. Two, she's essentially incompetent as either a spy or assassin. She often fails at fighting when it matters most, and until the very end of the film she can't even kill her bounties. She allows one man to suffocate to death and nearly has a panic attack afterward; she cannot seduce another man in order to kill him, but still manages to get a knife on his throat before chickening out. You wanted this, sister, so own it!

In a way, it's interesting and even kind of cool to be following a reluctant assassin who scrapes along without actually doing anything cool. But frankly it doesn't make for good cinema. It doesn't really make sense that B doesn't just do the work himself; at one point, he even sets a car bomb to explode, proving he is clearly capable of the work he needs done. Why does he need Stephanie? And could he not tell that she just isn't capable of this kind of violence? How long did it take him to train her, anyway? He clearly blames himself for the bombing: in a ridiculously complex turn of events, we learn quickly and suddenly that he killed an assassin (a woman named Petra) who killed his wife, and was subsequently fired from MI6 because Petra had information on the terrorist who organized the bombing. Honestly...what? The best two scenes, in my opinion, are long takes by cinematographer Sean Bobbitt: one is a fistfight between Lively and Law in his kitchen, and the other is Lively driving to her escape through Tangier while her bounty's guards close in on her. But these scenes aren't awesome bits of action a la Atomic Blonde; they show her ineptitude and ability to keep taking hit after hit.

It gets worse, and at one point Stephanie gets in a weird sexual relationship with broker before finding the bomber kid (again?) in France and foils his random bus attack. Then, without a single bit of reliable or accessible explanation, she returns to the broker and kills him, understanding suddenly from B that her lover is the terrorist mastermind. So, in the end, nothing really matters in terms of plot or even character, apart from the two leads. The whole exercise is a masturbatory mess of violent impulses mostly aimed at a woman who demonstrates time and again that she doesn't have what it takes to live in this world of crime.

Plus the soundtrack is just weird.

Gretel & Hansel (2020)

Score: 4 / 5

If Terrence Malick decided to remake The Witch and include elements of Grimm fairytales, it might look something like Gretel & Hansel. Though the plot -- what little of it there is -- of this picture essentially hits the main expected points of anything adapting the old story, plot is so secondary you might be convinced that the plot has been effectively erased here. This is not a mystery, and it's not even very thrilling or scary. Even its themes are so abstract it's hard to say I really grasped what the film was going for, and though I enjoyed it, I'm keenly aware that lengthy bits escaped me. I can't even say confidently that I "understood" parts of the movie. But its beautiful, dark aesthetic captured my heart, and I'm looking forward to watching it again.

We begin with a prologue that dramatizes, through montage, the witch's backstory: a young, hyper-feminized girl (dressed in anachronistic pink) is discovered to have "second sight" and the power to induce other people to kill themselves. Her motives are unclear, but when she is exiled to the deep, dark forest, she enchants her new home to apparently lure in stray children. As an older woman, the witch is a deliciously wicked-looking old crone who wears all black with a pointed hat Elphaba would envy, but her most recognizable feature is her fingers, which are mostly black as if she had dipped them in a vat of tar.

Immediately apparent is the emphasis on female power here: after this opening sequence, we're introduced to Gretel, age 16, and her brother Hansel, age 8. And of course the inverted title of the film indicates the shifting power dynamic from male to female; this is, unequivocally, Gretel's story, and so her name is first in the title. Their mother, driven mad by starvation -- there's a famine in the land -- sends Gretel out to make a living. When Gretel realizes the only options are to be abused by men or to starve, she chooses the latter, only to have her mother despairingly attack her. Fleeing into the forest with her brother, Gretel is forced to act as a mother while trying to find safe haven and food. After a particularly bad trip on some mushrooms they consume, the children find a lonely house in the woods.

Oz Perkins (The Blackcoat's Daughter, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House) is up to his usual tricks here, and it certainly won't be to everyone's liking. He is a master of the slow-burner, deliberately pacing his dark fantasies until they are almost inert, forcing us to meditate on the horrors on screen. In this way, Perkins has set himself up as a new genre auteur vitally interested in philosophical horror (as opposed to the more traditional, popular brands). And while you might not expect this approach to a Grimm brothers fantasy, Perkins has anticipated that.

He weaves a spell of modernity into his apparently timeless tale, including themes of untrustworthy adults as well as feminism, capitalist awareness (everything comes with a cost) as well as where, exactly, witches (and fairytale stories themselves) come from. These added conceits make the story deeper and more interesting even if they don't add excess baggage to the simple plot. Similarly, Perkins's aesthetic hints at this melding of past and future, modern and timeless: the forest and village seem haunted by ages and sins past, while the witch's house is cold and erect, strikingly modern even as it feels old as time. Its cold, white basement is hidden effectively by layers of worn wood and a warm hearth with a veritable feast day after day. It's all carefully calculated to be uncanny, that is, at once beautiful and wrong.

After the widescreen prologue, the film closes into a storytelling format that makes everything appear contained within pages of a book or old photographs. Cinematographer Galo Olivares (Roma) seems to understand that the nature of his medium in this instance is best married to the material. But his delivery, combined with Perkins's vision, is uncommonly beautiful. Much like in Malick's work, the first half of Gretel & Hansel uses an active handheld camera to follow the kids into the woods as we hear Gretel's abstract voiceover narration; it's an odd choice, one that draws a parallel between the naturalistic and poetic in fairytale stories. But, especially once the kids are in the witch's home -- which is decidedly not made of gingerbread -- the lighting dramatically shifts into the realm of giallo, with strong red, yellow, and blue lights shining in from various obscure angles.

I am still hopelessly confused on the inclusion of Charles Babalola as a huntsman. The scene involves the children seeking shelter for the night before being attacked by something (it has the form of a person, but is it? Who knows?) that is promptly killed by the huntsman. He warns the children of wolves nearby, suggesting that he's actually on his way to a different Grimm story in the same woods, but then he disappears for the rest of the movie. He'll not be coming to Gretel's rescue. Other questions remain after the film ends, including why the woodshed is so terrifying and any sort of real understanding of what the witch is really up to. And while a repeat viewing might answer some questions for me, it won't answer all, and I don't think I want it to. The mystery and magic works best when we're still digging for significance. As an atmospheric descent into a familiar story reworked into something dazzlingly beautiful and bafflingly complex, Gretel & Hansel is already one of the most interesting movies of the new year.

The Turning (2020)

Score: 1 / 5

2020 has barely begun and we already have a contender for the most disappointing flick of the year. The latest attempt to adapt Henry James's brilliant novella for the screen looked to be a fun if campy exercise in moody, broody spookiness. I expected little else from director Floria Sigismondi, whose previous credits include mostly pop music videos and episodes of austere, stylized television (American Gods and The Handmaid's Tale). But nothing prepared me for the disaster waiting inside Bly this time around.

We start with a howling mess as a woman (we learn, later, to be Miss Jessel) flees Bly house only to be attacked by a brutish man at the gate. We turn (ha!) suddenly to the main story of Kate Mandell (Mackenzie Davis) who is leaving her teaching job to take over as the governess of Bly. Excuse me, it's 1994, she's not a governess; she's a... live-in tutor? It makes precious little sense, why the story would be "updated" but not placed in the present. I wondered if it would be nostalgic somehow -- more than once the film references the death of Kurt Cobain -- but it is staunchly not sentimental.

If you're familiar at all with The Turn of the Screw, you'll know that the central conceit of this Gothic masterwork is that the supposed narrator -- an unnamed governess, though her story as we read it is filtered several times -- may or may not be insane. There may indeed be ghosts in Bly. They may have driven her mad. Her madness may have invented the ghosts. Her madness may have provoked ghosts that were already there. She may be totally sane, or her internalized sexual repression may have pushed her far over the edge. These possibilities are perhaps even more terrifying than the haunted house or possessed children themselves, and so the ambiguity makes each ghostly visitation that much more gripping. This is even true of The Innocents, the 1961 adaptation that remains one of my favorite haunted house films.

Sigismondi's film, however, displays not only a tendency to ignore its source material but to incoherently plunge headfirst into murky narrative waters. While the early parts arguably follow the story of a teacher trying to adjust to isolated, manorly life while trying to connect with her charges, we know immediately this won't end well. Before Kate arrives at Bly, she visits her mother (Joely Richardson, and I'm baffled she ever said yes to this) in an insane asylum, with whom she seems to share a certain connection. Read: the apple doesn't fall far from the crazy tree. Kate is going to be portrayed as bonkers, because that's the decision these filmmakers have made for her. She is shown, in turns (ha!) to be an incompetent teacher, a horrible babysitter, and a generally dull if not downright unlikable person. Her charges are similarly unbearable; whereas James envisioned his children as sweet and mature far beyond their years, here Flora and Miles are monstrous from the get-go. They don't need to have been "corrupted", they were just born bad.

Bad as they are, Kate is unbearably patient and eager to continue her service. At one point, fed up with Miles's cruelty, she actually leaves the estate. Leaving, she stops to call her roommate at a pay phone and, while discussing the awfulness of working at Bly, decides to return. Nominally, it's to save face, as she had made a promise with Flora to never leave. But, like, she's a little girl and she'll get over it. How about saving yourself? It's this kind of absolute nonsense that gives horror flicks (especially heroines) a bad rep.

Even the technical aspects of the film fell woefully flat for me. Whirling cinematography, disjointed and distracting edits, an aggressive musical score, and blunt, obnoxious dialogue make the entire affair almost unwatchable. Brooklynn Prince is the only interesting part of the film, and her Flora manages to be as creepy as anything you might have hoped for. Finn Wolfhard is an exercise in lazy acting in his turn (ha!) as Miles, while the openly hostile housekeeper Mrs. Grose (Barbara Marten) is unsettling in a dusty, nasty old lady sort of way. There are almost no effective jump scares, and no enduring sense of dread or terror. The production design offers no points of interest, and the vine-covered ruin of Bly is less fear-inducing than annoying.

And then there's the ending. An unmitigated disaster, it takes the previous act of the film and utterly discounts it. We see Kate's discovery of Miss Jessel's raped, murdered body (again, why change the story in order to create yet another female victim?) and we see a ghost (or Kate?) flat-out murder Mrs. Grose before Kate safely escapes from Bly with her two young charges. Just as I was about to angrily shout at the screen and leave the auditorium, the frame zooms away from the car, driving into the night, and we see this is part of a painting. Specifically, a black painting with a distinctly Rorschach feel given to Kate earlier by her nutty mother. Kate has apparently imagined the preceding drama and is now totally convinced of the ghosts' presence. She assaults the children when they deny seeing the spirits, and laugh at her as being delusional. No closure, abrupt as hell, and utterly unsatisfactory. And that's the end.

Well, not quite the end. There's a bizarre moment where Kate again visits the asylum but when she goes to approach the figure resembling her mother, it turns and she screams. Is it her mother, or does she see herself? Was the whole mess in her head? Is she still being haunted, trapped in either the loony bin or the spooky old house? Does it even matter?

The answer is no. And as a matter of personal interest, I was perhaps most pissed off by the trailer's inclusion of Miles's pet tarantula crawling on his face, a scene not included in the theatrical cut of the picture. I'm going to pretend this movie never happened and, rather, look ahead to Mike Flanagan's adaptation in The Haunting of Bly Manor.