Luca (2021)

 Score: 3 / 5

The latest collaboration between Pixar and Disney is a mixed bag of half-baked ideas and cloying sentiment that looks great, feels sweet, and left me melancholy and generally unsatisfied. But that's not to say I didn't enjoy it while it lasted, and I'd rather watch it than most of the animated crap pumped out by other studios. It's only to say that, for a partnership that has redefined animated moviemaking for the last three decades (excepting the miserable Cars franchise), it's less than groundbreaking. In fact, it feels like an Italian fever dream after watching The Little Mermaid and Finding Nemo and eating too much pasta under a Tuscan sun.

Luca is a young sea monster, living underwater near the Italian Riviera, looking a bit like a disco merboy with his neon-green scales and bright blue head of whatever fishfolk have instead of hair. Growing bored with his days of shepherding a little school of brainless fish, he sees boats overhead and dreams of wanting to be where the people are. He's voiced by Jacob Tremblay, whose few credits of unspeakably brilliant acting (Room, Wonder) have led way to a bizarre and premature sophomore slump recently that we certainly hope he will overcome; here, he serviceably performs the title character with little to note. Of course, his parents (an unfortunately not particularly funny Maya Rudolph and Jim Gaffigan pairing) are terrified of humans, as they are well aware that the seaside villa rely on fish and fear and hate the legends of monsters in the nearby sea. A few fallen items from the surface, though -- whosits and whatsits galore! -- inspire Luca to explore farther than he ever has. He wants to, other fish might say, touch the butt.

It is, ultimately, a brief encounter with another, slightly older monster boy that brings Luca out of the sea. Alberto, voiced by a wonderful Jack Dylan Grazer (Shazam!, It and It: Chapter Two), has almost everything Luca has dreamed of. He lives an amphibian life, roaming the sea by day and sleeping in an abandoned coastal tower by night. His charisma and bravery are infectious: "Silenzio Bruno!" he says, to silence his cautious inner voice. Alberto's goal of owning a Vespa lead into multiple daydream sequences of the boys riding off into a golden sunset, flying over Florentine meadows in blissful freedom. Luca is mesmerized, and the two boys connect immediately. It helps that their transition from monster to human is involuntary. When dry, they have skin; when wet, scales return.

The actual plot begins rather late in the film, when Luca's parents, distressed by his ventures to the open air, plan to send him to live with translucent anglerfish-like Uncle Ugo (Sacha Baron Cohen being, well, weird) in the deep ocean. Panicked by the prospect, Luca and Alberto flee to Portorosso, the monster-hunting villa in what appears to be the Genoa coast. They soon meet Giulia (Emma Berman), determined to beat the town bully Ercole Visconti in a triathlon of swimming, bicycling, and eating pasta. This wild sequence is where the originality and beauty of the movie shine. Director Enrico Casarosa hits his stride in allowing the hazy Italian sun to illuminate photographic visuals of a fully realized world; the warmth and light pour out of the screen until you can smell the food and bricks and salty air. Many shots of the sea are more photorealistic than anything Pixar has ever done, and it certainly helps our understanding of why Luca has craved the freedom to travel and see this whole new world.

This sense of freedom is key in this film, a proper Bildungsroman of burgeoning desires and the deep sense of satisfaction that comes with independence and discovery. It manifests Romantically in Luca's setting, but also in its heavily weighted symbolism, particularly of the Vespa icon. More importantly, freedom is also the key to understanding all the characters of the film, from Luca and Alberto to Giulia and Ercole and even Uncle Ugo. But this freedom, the film suggests, comes with a dangerous social cost, and may entrap us behind performativity more than we were trapped in more familiar surroundings.

On this level, the heavy theming of this film seems to actively invite queer interpretation. Luca and Alberto, apart from their clearly affectionate relationship, are designed and performed as pre-pubescent, and labeling anything as explicitly sexual would be a stretch. But the youthful romance is shockingly present, and for a while I wondered how Pixar and Disney would handle the material. As we might expect, they don't, and in fact the director has publicly and aggressively denied any queer subtext and criticized people who feel moved and empowered by the narrative. The film itself, however, cannot be constrained by Casarosa's fear of queerness, and the shapeshifting boys hiding their monstrosity among the human hoi polloi is immediately relatable to any queer person. The lies they tell as they explore, the fantasies they dream up together, and the shame associated with their otherness are all here in spades; indeed, the film hinges on these elements to finally reach its narrative climax and the only character development at the very end. "Some people, they'll never accept him," Luca's grandmother says at one point. "But some will. And he seems to know how to find the good ones." I wept, honey. 

Despite a derivative and dull first act, the movie eventually hits its beautiful stride when it embraces its absurd and endearing plot among the humans. But, sweet and sentimental as its story of young friendship is, it's hard to appreciate because it does nothing fresh or interesting with it. Queer or not, two young friends who decide to part ways isn't worth yet another movie; even their identity as monsters -- unless coded as something substantial -- becomes immaterial by the conclusion. Ultimately, there isn't much wrong with the whole affair, aimed as it seems to be at younger audiences. There's just not much that's memorable, either. Casarosa would have done better to, like Luca, moved out of his safety nets and into a wider world.

The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It (2021)

 Score: 3.5 / 5

It's 1981 in Brookfield, Connecticut, and the Warrens are helping a family in need. This time, 8-year-old David Glatzel (Julian Hilliard) has been possessed by a demon, and we're introduced to his family in the middle of an exorcism. Or, rather, a pre-exorcism, as Ed and Lorraine Warren are preparing to cast out the evil and help David. The house is a wreck, to say nothing of the state of David's poor parents and sister. Thankfully, his sister's boyfriend Arne Johnson is there; the exact history of their relationship is unclear, but Arne is a wonderful older brother to David, and seems uncommonly protective. Even when the priest shows up (delivered by taxi under a streetlamp, in an introductory image straight out of The Exorcist), Arne is a primary actor in the ritual about to commence. He's just a great guy, and so when it appears the demon will claim David's life, Arne invites it into himself to save the little boy.

This riveting and shockingly violent opening scene ranks among the best of the franchise, and reminds us what's at stake in these movies. Sure, haunted houses and dolls are scary, and even when the demons materialize we hide behind our fingers. But the ungodly horror of a loved one suffering before viciously lashing out at other loved ones is the stuff of nightmares. Thankfully, this movie -- more than its previous installments, I'd say -- really leans into that, becoming more of a character drama focused on the victims than on their saviors. Sure, Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga are the main characters of this movie, with the most screen time and plenty of heartwarming interactions to satiate even those viewers nonplussed with the story and scares, but this time they aren't the dynamic characters. Then again, Arne is pretty much the only dynamic character here. And he should be, as his real-life trial marked the first time in U.S. history a defendant claimed innocence by means of demonic possession.

The first half of the movie is really quite solid, and writer David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick (Aquaman, Red Riding Hood, The Walking Dead) weaves an interesting story that establishes a lot of new characters efficiently while shifting our expectations away from a haunted house and toward a haunted person. The now-possessed Arne (played by a really, really great Ruairi O'Connor) doesn't seem to have many problems until he does, and the sequence that culminates in him murdering his landlord is nothing short of brilliant. We're allowed insight into his skewed perceptions, and in a feverish frenzy, he imagines his landlord as a lecherous monster; we're not totally sure what's real in this sequence -- is his girlfriend laughing or screaming? -- and by the time he stabs at the beast, we're made to worry if Arne himself will survive this ordeal.

I wish the actual murder was featured in the movie; it cuts out as it's about to happen, and we have to learn later through dialogue that he stabbed his landlord over 20 times. It's already rated R, and more violence would surely have helped the fans who want gonzo horror; plus, it would have made the subsequent murder trial more emotionally fraught for us as witnesses. At this point the film began to move downhill for me, and it's for two reasons. First, director Michael Chaves, who previously directed the lamentably dull The Curse of La Llorona doesn't seem to know what to do with the material. The possessions and exorcisms are beautiful and fascinating, generally, but when the villain arrives -- more on that later -- his style goes all over the place with no clear aesthetic justification. Second, the abysmal editing cuts to lengthy blackouts right when most scenes get to their most interesting moments, annoyingly jolting us out of the meat of the meal and leaving us craving more, but not in a good way.

And then there's the plot of the second half, which is about as bizarre as it could be. Right when I excitedly thought this movie would go whole-hog The Exorcism of Emily Rose -- a personal favorite of the entire genre -- and let us into the psychological and emotional mess of the famed courtroom case that gives this movie its title, it went completely the other way. Instead of demons manipulating justice, we are forced into a manhunt for a secret mysterious occultist. The Warrens investigate another similar case and discover a link through a macabre totem that apparently was used by a "Satanist witch" to conjure a demon and wreak chaos, claiming the lives of innocents.

By the climax, it's abundantly clear what's going to happen, and it's all a little too contrived for my taste. I think the movie would have been better served had the story focused on the real-life court case instead of a wild fantasy involving an admittedly scary woman in dark tunnels casting curses on young people. Then again, that gives the movie some of its more memorable scenes and lines, delivered by John Noble as Father Kastner, whose exposition deliciously places him among the investigators of the Disciples of the Ram cult about a decade before the events of this movie. It is this inclusion that ties The Devil Made Me Do It to the franchise, and arguably rationalizes the shoehorning of Satanic panic into an otherwise whodunit courtroom thriller.

Thematically, my favorite line in the film is delivered by Kastner, when, upon revealing the identity of the occultist, he says in his gravelly, demoniac voice, "We must be careful how our obsessions are passed to our children." Considering that the final Annabelle movie features the Warrens' daughter getting into significant supernatural trouble, I hope the next Conjuring installment heads a bit further into that direction. I also hope the studio does not hire Chaves to direct any more lackluster entries. Gorgeous cinematography and lighting by Michael Burgess and the solid work of the cast make this movie lovely to watch. A general lack of scares, or even a cohesive (or believable) plot, won't make it any new fans. And if they don't bring some ballsier work -- like in The Conjuring 2 -- I fear the franchise will meet an untimely end.

The Father (2021)

Score: 4.5 / 5

Easily the most immersive movie to depict the inner life of someone with dementia, The Father is finally available for the masses to view. Critics hailed it as Anthony Hopkins's best work yet long before he won the highly contested Best Actor Oscar, and yet so few of us had been able to see it for ourselves. And, indeed, he does showcase some of the best acting of the year and of his lengthy career. With impossibly precise technique, he imbues his 80-something-year-old character (also named Anthony) with the vim and vigor of someone who will certainly not go gentle into his good night, whose charisma and charm match his toxic volatility. You get the distinct impression that he was a man of his time, and was never an easy man to be with, even before the dementia set in. And yet his wit and passion for life still seek outlets, and so he seems to crave the attention of various people passing through his London flat.

And while Hopkins is astonishing here, I can't help but feel the movie as a whole is being overlooked by critics and audiences with stars in their eyes. Writer/director Florian Zeller, in adapting his own play, fully puts us in Anthony's world. It must be said, he occasionally allows us moments of insight and pain by shifting our focus to Anthony's daughter (an awesome Olivia Colman), and various other characters played by Rufus Sewell, Mark Gatiss, Olivia Williams, and Imogen Poots; all are excellent here. But, locked as we are within Anthony's mind and flat, the film forces us to experience a world at once familiar and alien.

Production designer Peter Francis (The Children Act, King Lear) and editor Yorgos Lamprinos work hard to subtly change the flat in every scene, quietly shifting our sense of reality along with Anthony's. The tiles of the kitchen backsplash change colors; rooms will be messy or tidy in juxtaposed shots; the layout of rooms doesn't ever seem to make logical or architectural sense. In an inspired bit of casting, Olivia Williams sometimes enters and introduces herself as Anthony's daughter; she looks a bit like Colman, and the film never gives us certainty as to which is which. When Poots shows up as the new at-home caregiver, Anthony is almost randy with excitement before we learn that he was abusive and perhaps violent with the previous maid; after offering her an aperitif, his melancholia takes over and he muses about her resemblance to his other daughter.

As the scenes progress, Anthony (and the audience) isn't ever sure if his lived experience is real, or a memory, or perhaps a fantasy. Is it indeed his flat, or is he living with his troubled daughter? Is his daughter married to a weary and sour man, or did she recently fall in love with plans to move to Paris? Does he have a son-in-law, or did he? Or are there two now? As characters enter and exit, looking vaguely alike, usually irritated that Anthony cannot identify them, we never know who is who, or what is real, making each fleeting moment vital. The urgency of our attempting to understand it all comes from our desire for self-contained plots and YouTube videos to explain the connections; Zeller's film eschews that, and dares us to feel the pain of not having closure, or even comprehension.

Precious few movies are as complex and confusing as they are compelling and compassionate, and The Father gets it all right. It reminded me often of the rare movies that deal with these issues -- chief of which, Still Alice and Relic, would make an interesting (and depressing) triple feature -- and how effective they are when not dripping with sentiment. The sense of danger, of desperation, of fear make these movies all the more tragic; they also, I think, suggest hope and comfort in ways that are far more profound than you would find in a Hallmark special. But be sure to bring tissues to this one.

The Mauritanian (2021)

 Score: 3.5 / 5

In 2001 only two months after 9/11, Mohamedou Ould Salahi was arrested at his home in Mauritania. After the authorities, desperate for justice, traded him around a bit, he found himself a prisoner at the infamous Guantanamo Bay detention camp. Although he was never formally charged with a crime, and only circumstantial evidence even marginally related him to one of the hijackers, Salahi was held there for fourteen years, tortured for information he did not know. It's an horrific story, one that lends itself well to a cinematic medium, especially carried by such a stellar group of actors. It's also a distinctly manipulative screenplay by writers M.B. Traven, Rory Haines, and Sohrab Noshirvani, more or less the kind of "dear reader" pathos structured into an equally manipulative courtroom drama. Told in this way, the film must be inevitably compared to other, less timely, dramas, and found wanting as a result.

That's not to say the story isn't as interesting as the previous times we've heard it, on the news and never more than when Salahi's whistleblowing account of his time at Guantanamo Bay was published, heavily redacted by the government. After an initial sequence of Salahi's arrest, the film jumps to 2005, when a concerned lawyer named Nancy Hollander (Jodie Foster) decides to defend Salahi and either get him charged or released. As she goes through the process of entering the detention camp, I couldn't help but feel that the film was hinting at the similar introductory sequence to her character in The Silence of the Lambs; she enters a warren of nightmarish holding cells, most of the base obscured by hanging tarps and stone walls, stripped of potential weapons, and advised to wear a head scarf. She's primed to fear and dehumanize the man she's promised to help, and through Foster's eyes you can see the unspoken battle of wills in her mind.

Joining her is Teri (Shailene Woodley), an associate who has never seen anything like this. During the course of their research, and visits to Salahi (played by a brilliant Tahar Rahim), the two women constantly fight red tape, analyze redacted documents, and slowly but surely seek to rectify the wrongs done not just to their client but to all the inmates. In this way, the film often feels a little out of time; the now publicly known problem that was Guantanamo Bay -- essentially a brutish and brutal prison of torture and total lack of oversight -- is the villain here, but its human rights violations have been the subject of scrutiny for years. One can only guess that the filmmakers, whose project was greenlit in late 2019, felt inspired after the 45th president signed an executive order to keep the prison open indefinitely. Now, however, President Biden's administration has publicly planned to close the prison. Hopefully this movie will add to the support for that plan.

Perhaps the most interesting character arc in the film comes from Benedict Cumberbatch as the Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Couch, representing the U.S. government even as he becomes disillusioned and disturbed by the information coming out about Guantanamo Bay. His is the proverbial fall from grace, and his oaths are put to the test as the government's crimes are finally spoken in courts of law. But, interesting as he is and effective as Cumberbatch makes him, he feels a little too thinly written; actually, I'd say all the characters in this movie -- specific as they are, nominally -- are little more than archetypes. Bouncing off each other in familiar ways, the stakes are never particularly high. Even if you don't remember this story blaring from the morning news years ago, you instinctively know how this story will progress, regress, turn, and end. While that's not a negative quality in any film, much less one that recounts real events, it does make The Mauritanian surprisingly dull viewing.

But, bland and trite as it feels in retrospect, there is a lot to appreciate in this film. Not only is its earnest attempt to vindicate Salahi's name and life a more than worthy cause -- and, I think, largely succeeds, emotional manipulations aside -- but it features really wonderful performances and a few interesting aesthetic choices as well. Lengthy flashback sequences, especially near the film's end, depict Salahi's many years of torment in the prison. These are largely presented in boxy 4:3 aspect ratio, isolating the frame and cueing us to see Salahi as trapped and under a microscope. It's arguably unnecessary, as the climactic sequence is a lengthy and particularly violent series of horrors much like we saw in Jonathan Demme's The Manchurian Candidate; and its placement as the climax feels extremely exploitative and sentimental at the same time. But the layers of mindful, if heavy-handed, direction makes the film immediately accessible to average viewers who may have no idea what they're in for.

The Woman in the Window (2021)

 Score: 4.5 / 5

The story of the making of this movie is long and disheartening, but it has been told elsewhere. Now that it has finally arrived (on Netflix, unfortunately), it actually feels disturbingly timely after the last year of our lives. It's the story, based on the delightful novel by A.J. Finn (pseudonym of the disgraced and fascinating Dan Mallory), of an agoraphobic woman stuck in her large house alone for months on end. After new neighbors move in across the street, she takes up spying on them from afar, though we imagine she's done this before, and to other neighbors. But when she suddenly witnesses a murder through their front windows, her options for helping are limited; it doesn't help that she's about as unreliable a witness as they come. It's a Hitchcockian whodunit thriller for the age of quarantine, and it's about as magnificent as you could ask for.

To be fair, this won't be everyone's cuppa. It's not exactly the most fresh when it comes to its ideas, especially after so many other recent and similar stories from Gillian Flynn and Paula Hawkins. Even despite its incredible cast, including Brian Tyree Henry, Wyatt Russell, and Tracy Letts (who also penned the screenplay) in bit parts, some will find this movie trite, overwrought, and unrealistic. Some won't like the exaggerated performances of Amy Adams and Gary Oldman. Many won't like the whirling camera, frenetic editing, and garish color palette. But these things, and more, made this movie one of the most unexpectedly rewarding I've seen recently. I expect it'll be in my Top 10 movies of 2021.

"Tell me to go outside," Anna Fox (Adams) pleads on the phone with her ex-husband (Anthony Mackie). We gather early on that her agoraphobia manifests specifically as an inability to go outside; perhaps the opening shot, swirling through the blackness and dotted with white flecks -- stars? snow? dust? -- is a representation of her fears of, who knows, falling upward through an endless sky? Anna seems fine interacting with other people, even if their conversations border on the absurd. Her psychiatrist (Letts) comes to visit her, not the other way around, and her tenant in the basement (Russell) tends to show up unexpectedly but warmly. Letts's dialogue leans into the idiosyncracy of her character, effectively putting us squarely within her frame of reference even as it quickly establishes wit, pain, fear, and a certain sophistication of percussive rhythm. Even as we learn she is severely depressed and mentally disordered, she has not lost her sense of humor, sarcasm, or functionality. Well, at least when she's not binge-drinking her wine.

Production designer Kevin Thompson (The Girl on the Train, Birdman, Funny Games) seems to have gone a bit gonzo with Anna's house, resulting in a highly theatrical space of wide open, wood-paneled doorways leading deeper into the maze of her house. Clearly meant to represent Anna's mind, the house is one of those old urban townhouses, rising up three or four floors via a steep central staircase that circles upwards through wide landings; the kind that Chekhov would say exists for the sole purpose of letting someone, eventually, fall all the way down by movie's end. Impossibly tall windows, almost always curtained and shuttered, exaggerate the closed-in feeling of isolation and intentionally walled-off nature of Anna's situation. Each table and countertop is littered with half-empty bottles and sometimes randomly full glasses of wine, revealing to us her lies about curtailing alcohol consumption while on heavy medications.

Cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Inside Llewyn Davis, Big Eyes) injects psychedelic colors and light through the huge house windows into Anna's home, and it was through this that the film began to make sense to me. His whirling, constantly moving camera forces us into the house, from its cavernous living quarters to its claustrophobic underbelly and corners. The house is lit differently in every scene, from electric blue to garish pinks and sickly green, as if the windows were sheets of stained glass. Some scenes are overlaid entirely, as one memorable one of Anna in bed bathed in a thick blood-red hue, much as we expect from 1970s giallo films. With that in mind, and because the film spends so much time forcing us into this aesthetic, I started to appreciate the incredibly hard -- and thankless, to a mass audience -- work director Joe Wright (Pride & Prejudice, Atonement, Hanna, Anna Karenina, Darkest Hour) and his team were doing.

The movie is about watching people, as of course was the case with so many Hitchcock films. Almost entirely taking place within the house, its contained setting of place (and, relatively, of time) make this a fairly straightforward Greek drama, complete with a chorus of sorts in terms of Anna's internal monologue and the voiceover presence of her ex-husband (Anthony Mackie) on the phone. By the time characters start entering through the foreboding front door, including each member of the Russell family separately (patriarch Gary Oldman, wife Julianne Moore, and son Fred Hechinger), we suspect all is not well with this otherwise nuclear family. Often these outside characters are shot with comparatively "normal" lighting, sharply contrasting the heady pseudo-reality of Anna's consciousness. When characters appear together, or when Anna is watching one of her many classic noir DVDs (Dark Passage, Laura, Spellbound), the movie utilizes the famed De Palma technique of split-diopter shots to showcase Anna in extreme closeup, framed or even upstaged by the fictions swirling in her mind.

Are we any different, deriving pleasure from watching Anna's insular suffering? Wright seems intent on, yes, luring us into her world, but with such outlandish, uninhibited artistic expression I can't help but feel he's also forcing us to recognize our own tendency toward voyeurism. Especially given the last year of our lives, we've all come to feel in some ways that our homes are our fortresses, and our level of obsession with personal comfort has reached a cultural tipping point. Anna is perhaps a little too much like us, collectively, than we'd care to admit. As with any play, we're made to feel as if we are present there with the protagonist, and once her secrets are revealed to us, we feel betrayed, unable to trust our narrator/proxy any more, and it is by this point, near the climax of the film, that things go completely off the rails. In a good way. Sort of.

Some will decry the finale of this movie as rote, a typical and semi-expected ending that, while still disturbing and surprisingly violent, relies heavily on the tried and true. A home invader, a chase up the stairs, a bloody showdown on rain-swept roof. It's the sort of cathartic release a movie like this usually needs, and I found it delightfully wicked even as its excesses outweighed its substance. That said, I think we can finally fit this movie into its generic niche: camp. Wright and his team pumping cinematic reference after homage after stolen imagery doesn't cheapen the film; this technique enhances the film, turning it into a meditation on the power not only of historic film to shape our understanding of new works (and real life), but of the ways our memory of things we see can reshape our perception of the world around us. More to the point, it's the kind of camp whose excess is its pride and in its prideful corruption of "good taste." It's meant, in many ways, to be seen as "bad" even as it critiques our understanding of voyeuristic art as standard, acceptable, and tasteful.

In pirating familiar movies, stories, and images, Wright twists them and violates them, drawing keen attention to them and making their meaning glaringly clear, profane as it becomes. One of the first shots of the movie is an extreme close-up of an extreme slow-motion shot from Hitchcock's Rear Window, from which this movie (and its source material) repeatedly draws direct inspiration; James Stewart's horrified face -- in a context absolutely un-horrific -- foreshadows, of course, but more importantly sets up a disconnect, an artistic artifice of disassociation and collage. This theme is heightened, later, even by the story itself: after Anna thinks she sees the murder of her neighbor Jane Russell (Moore) by her husband Alistair Russell (Oldman), she is forcibly reintroduced to an uncanny double of the woman, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh. Jane Russell, of course, as the film later reminds us, is the name of the star of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and then there's Hitchcock and De Palma's famed use of doubling in mystery thrillers. These references are less about Wright stroking his own movie knowledge and more about deconstructing tropes and history, cutting-and-pasting an amalgamation dripping with ironic takes on genre, more like queer artists like Todd Haynes than anything resembling earnest arthouse fare.

From Wright, Delbonnel, Thompson, and Letts to even the ballsy, overwrought performances of the cast, everyone associated with this movie are making a strong, unspoken point of actively interrogating the tight bonds between pop culture and history, between art and life, and how none can exist without the others. It's a high-brow game they're playing, one that will certainly fly over the heads of most viewers watching from home. In fact, based on the scathing reviews of professionals and nobodies alike, I doubt many people at all found much to appreciate here. That seems less surprising than disappointing, as most people -- myself included -- assumed this would be cut from the same serious, bleak cloth as Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train. But those reviewers are missing the simple fact that Wright's The Woman in the Window is a movie about those kinds of movies. It's a movie about our impressions of those kinds of movies, actually, and that even as cinephiles who think about these things, our impressions are as unreliable as the protagonists we love to watch.

I Care a Lot (2021)

 Score: 4.5 / 5

Spoiler alert: Marla Grayson doesn't care.

Marla Grayson cares about her clients. She cares about getting lonely, elderly folk into nursing homes. Working closely with a doctor friend who can help her identify well-off patients on the brink of dementia, Marla petitions the court for an order asserting the patients can no longer care for themselves. Acting as the new legal guardian, she spirits her wards away to a nursing home whose manager is also working in tandem with Marla. Meanwhile, as guardian, Marla can siphon away every penny from her charge, leaving the infirm destitute and any remaining family or friends at arm's length.

Marla Grayson cares about her peers. Dr. Karen Amos (Alicia Witt) takes care of the first steps, and manager Sam Rice (Damian Young) does most of the heavy lifting -- via his staff, of course. And there's Marla's partner in business and in love, Fran (Eiza Gonzalez), who researches the potential wards to make sure there aren't any troublesome kids or spouses and that there is in fact a nest egg in store. The movie begins with another success story for Marla, as the court -- headed by a friendly and naive judge (Isiah Whitlock Jr.) -- denies a challenge to her guardianship. Shortly after, though, the ward dies, and the unexpected vacancy leads Marla to make a rather quick decision.

Marla Grayson cares about money. Her doctor friend recommends Jennifer Peterson (Dianne Wiest), a "cherry" as the vampiric women put it. She has no known family and she has a lot of money. Marla seems to be little more than the epitome of avarice, an entrepreneur who pirates booty out of people to dim to stop her and from a system too corrupt to save. She points out more than once that her methods are, largely, quite legal, implying that she's simply using the tools given to her by a culture of greed, misogyny, and ageism (it's interesting that her lesbian identity is never an issue in this movie). Despite her apparently passionate defense of her behavior to the judge early in the film, when her ward dies, she smoothly pulls her picture off the wall and trashes it without so much as a blink. Pike's cold, bitchy excellence is dazzling to behold in even these briefest of moments.

Marla Grayson cares about her appearance. Played to utter perfection by Rosamund Pike and her full star-power glory, the character is a vampire in broad daylight and light, monochromatic suits. Often shielded by oversized sunglasses, her sassy blonde bob, and smoke from her large vape pen, she nevertheless is always on the offensive, calculating her next move and searching for vulnerability. My favorite scene of hers is when Jennifer Peterson's dubious lawyer (Chris Messina) shows up, looking phenomenal in many-piece suits of vibrant hues, and the two square off in her office. It's a deadly game wherein two sociopaths slowly rip through the constraints of politeness. It's wicked fun, and the movie never quite recovers from it. At least, not in terms of performances; from here out, it's all about the plot.

Marla Grayson cares about control. She controls her clients, manipulates her fellow conspirators, and even the movie itself. From the start, we're put tightly in her headspace for most of the movie, even subjected at the beginning and end to her voiceover, a cold and ruthless diatribe about the nature of fairness in a world that has never been fair to her. But this isn't a revenge story; at least, it's not hers. Because before long, strangers start showing up looking for Jennifer Peterson. Large men attempt to break her out of the care facility. Her lawyer materializes, though he has no proof of being her lawyer. And when something terrible happens to Dr. Amos, Marla and Fran realize too late that they've finally targeted the wrong "cherry." Dianne Wiest, known for her idiosyncratic lilting voice and sickly sweet mannerisms, shifts into a terrifying creature eager for vengeance; she's a Lear raging against the ties that bind, but the difference is that she has hope of her own deliverance. "He's coming for you," she giggles darkly through blurry eyes in the nursing home, even as Marla determines to torture her in the meantime.

Marla Grayson cares about herself. And so, when Fran tries to downplay the imminent threat caused by Jennifer and the men looking for her -- I won't tell you who or why, because it's an absolute delight when it happens -- Marla rebukes her naiveté. "Don't get fooled by old people. Even sadistic, immoral assholes get old." One wonders what will become of Marla when she ages. Then again, she may not. The film begins with a cool, stylish air of pitch-black comedy, a satire of society and money and age plastered with vivid colors and underscored by synth-music that wouldn't be out of place in a John Carpenter movie from the '80s. But by about the halfway point, things get a lot darker and almost all of the comedy drops out, leaving a crime thriller that doesn't thrill so much as titillate. We watch with morbid interest as the chase becomes a standoff and the players seek the upper hand in brutality.

In the end, Marla must face an enemy she never expected, and decides that she wants to live. But her ability to care about most of the things that were so important to her before slip from her grasp. So, much as our former first lady declared to the world, "I really don't care, do u?" Marla Grayson, as we've established, doesn't care. She just wants. And it's as satisfying as it is terrifying.

Black Bear (2020)

 Score: 4 / 5

Aubrey Plaza sits on a bleak dock in a red bathing suit, staring out across the calm and foggy expanse, before picking up her towel and going into a lake house behind her. She sits in a wooden corner table, opens a notebook, and begins to write. She will do this four times over the course of this movie, almost shot-for-shot. Each time, it means something a bit different, and each time, it indicates the start of a new arc of the movie. The first is our only introduction. We learn soon enough that her name is Allison, and that she's a filmmaker, though the exact truth of that becomes a bit complex as we progress through the film.

Moving briefly back in time, we see Allison arrive at the remote lake house, escorted in by handsome and flirtatious Gabe (Christopher Abbott), to seek inspiration for her next film. She discusses her past as an actress and her current work as a writer and director; he seems a little too interested, especially once we discover that Gabe's romantic partner Blair (Sarah Gadon) is also present at the lake house. The couple is clearly unhappy, with Gabe embarking on misogynistic rants and praising traditional gender roles even as he can barely support them after a failed music career, and Blair drinking consistently despite her pregnancy. Gabe not-quite-deftly handles the disastrous evening of arguments and explosive emotions, but after Blair falls asleep he and Allison go for a nighttime swim and have sex.

In an odd way, this series of events -- making up roughly the first half of the movie -- reminded me a lot of Malcolm & Marie, though it's in color, features an awkward as hell third wheel, and isn't nearly as didactically dense. And while Abbott and Gadon pull out the stops in their domestic squabble, Plaza owns the sequence as an enigmatic wallflower determined to leap into the fray. She's impossible to read, which Blair pointedly says at one point, to which Allison responds in chilling deadpan, "I get that all the time." Despite the wine in her system, Blair catches Allison in lie after lie, which Allison evades and deflects before ultimately owning up to, though we're never sure if her subsequent responses are true either. Lying is a game to her, perhaps some twisted way of writing or performing to get her creative juices flowing.

We're also not quite sure what's going on with her. When she's alone outside, there are hints that she might be a voyeur, a predator, with hidden designs on the couple. Her eyes linger over Gabe's body, and though it's only her first night there, she hasn't done any work yet. She hears rustles and thumps in the forest around the house and, once, sees an overturned garbage can that has been ruffled through by something large that growls. Could a bear be stalking the house? If so, it's a weird way to introduce a nature-run-amok horror movie about a killer bear. Then again, that's the title of the movie, isn't it? By the time, late in the evening, the couple drunkenly fights and Blair is injured by Gabe, Allison is tasked with driving them to the hospital. Suddenly a bear appears in the road and she crashes into a tree.

Suddenly the sequence ends, and onscreen text declares that part two has begun. The film essentially resets, and the same characters are reintroduced to the same location but in a wildly different situation. Gabe is actually the director of a film -- apparently the first part was the film he was shooting -- about marital infidelity and the artist's creative process. He's leading a small independent team of technicians and makeup artists and, of course three actors: a loose stand-in for himself (Alexander Koch), Allison, and Blair. But now Allison is Gabe's wife who just wants to be a talented star and Blair is the pretty new thing with eyes for the director. As the curtains lift and we see behind the scenes, their characters continue to grapple and fight with the same issues: Gabe is pretending to have an affair with Blair to provoke Allison's performance, but he might actually be having the affair, too. Allison is now the drunken, jilted lover obsessing over her artistry and her failing marriage.

It's all more than a little crazy, and it's hard to make interesting as prose. I won't say more about the plot, though I've pretty much outlined it here, because it doesn't really matter. What you think you know, you don't, and by the time the film flips on its head, I'm not sure the plot really matters any more. Kind of like in real life; what really matters is the art, while real life is too sordid to map out and make sense of. The film's keen resemblance, in this way, to Birdman is key: it's about life imitating art, or perhaps art imitating life, or perhaps the interactions between those two impulses. Performing is lying, as is the fiction these artists create, and the levels of comedy inherent in these absurd people doing terrible things to each other in the name of art belie a deeply disturbing meta-commentary on the state of the art.

The film feels like a horror film -- though it's not in the least scary, at least conventionally -- mostly thanks to its droning score and dark color palette in an isolated, claustrophobic environment. Plaza's unhinged performance pairs really well with both Abbott and Gadon's, who work really hard to keep their facades civilized and hospitable. So why the formal horror techniques? My guess is to highlight the emotional and psychological violence these characters are enacting on each other; if they were given knives they could hardly do more damage. And when you consider that the whole film (or perhaps only parts of it?) only takes place in Allison's mind, you wonder if any of it is so much discarded drafts or only an imaginative way to break writer's block. And it helps that Plaza's performance gives so much unreadable depth to everything Alllison says or does. She's constantly devastated in this movie, even as seemingly different characters, but where in one scene she is clearly in manipulative control, in the next she is crying into the void and desperate for salvation. Meanwhile, her co-stars go from thanklessly brutal domestics to wickedly gleeful artists mocking Allison as she crumbles beneath them. 

And then, of course, there's the bear itself. I don't want to spoil it for you, because there is one particular bit of dialogue near the end that uses the bear to name what should be an obvious symbol. But it caught me fully by surprise, and I'm still not sure what's going on there. Is the bear real? Is it imaginary? Does it represent a certain person? All are possible, and none are certain. It reminded me more than a little of Denis Villeneuve's 2013 masterpiece Enemy and its spiders. I have a suspicion, but it would take at least another viewing to flesh out. I'd rather revel in the multiple possibilities presented by this film and consider the implications of creating art at the expense of the people around you. That's some scary stuff.

Cruella (2021)

 Score: 4 / 5

We should have expected something like this after the financial success of Maleficent, though it's a bit surprising how late this is in coming. Not that an origin story for one of Disney's most iconic villains is ever to be expected, Cruella is still a wickedly good time at the movies. While it will have its detractors -- not the least of which vocally clamor against all live-action remakes, reimaginings, and sequels of beloved classics -- this is one case where I'm not sure that particular complaint is warranted. This is no mere origin story; in fact, it hardly even approaches the basic questions about the mad villainess. Why does she so detest nuclear families, and why does she want to murder 99 puppies?

Actually, if anything, this film answers the first of those questions. Cruella, or rather Estella, is a dog-loving, precocious child of a poor laundrywoman who is killed under suspicious circumstances at a wealthy manor. Newly orphaned, the Dickensian girl rallies herself and debuts as a sassy, spunky rebel with more bite than bark. Thieving on the street with her new friends Jasper and Horace, the trio come of age together and live in a crumbling flat by night while scamming the unwitting by day. But Estella (Emma Stone) is a fashion designer, and finally gets a job at the luxurious Liberty department store. Failing as a maid, she drunkenly reworks a window display that catches the eye of one Baroness von Hellman (Emma Thompson), a veritable Dragon Lady and primary vendor of the store.

In many ways, this is indeed an origin story, and it checks all the boxes of that narrative style in the sort of exposition-heavy, oddly fractured yet annoyingly coherent way that has become increasingly common. I'll never quite understand the need for these stories for iconic characters who really don't need them, but there is a basic satisfaction in seeing new performers and designers put fresh spins on old ideas. And while this isn't the same kind of story as Maleficent, which completely rewrites the character to be essentially and actively good, it's more like Broadway's Wicked or even Venom in that, while explaining her eccentricities away, the movie still respects and embraces the inherent madness and dangerousness that makes its antihero a true, real villain. I suppose, with that in mind, this movie is less an origin story and more along the lines of giving the Devil his due. Or, rather, her due.

In what becomes a crime-comedy mash-up of The Devil Wears Prada and Joker, our female fashionistas engage in heist after chase after publicity terrorism. Estella, now working for the abusive and manipulative Baroness, is determined to dethrone the bitch and take her place as London's premier designer. And yet, as in Phantom Thread and others, the Baroness is also the closest thing to a mentor (and mother?) that Estella has; moreover, even as Estella sabotages the Baroness's public appearances, the Baroness seems to feel that more lines are being crossed than just those between a boss and employee. While the film certainly never covers up the fact that Cruella is not a good person, and is capable of pretty rotten behaviors, we're constantly reminded that the Baroness is far worse; Cruella's intense determination to punish a wicked overlord intersects with her desire to be the best in the biz, and that combination reveals psychological depth to her character that is never fully explored by the film.

Craig Gillespie (I, Tonya and 2011's Fright Night, a personal favorite) directs this movie with a similar panache and irreverent style he's used before. Lengthy sequences match up with a bombastic and loud soundtrack packed with upbeat, recognizable hits like in an Edgar Wright movie. Cold lighting and stark sets frame costumes that wear actors, and yet everyone in this movie leans into the strange aesthetic. Whirling cinematography and nauseatingly choppy editing notwithstanding -- more than once during the two-and-a-quarter-hour feature I had to look away just to reorient myself -- its kinetic energy cannot be denied. And the movie looks great the whole time, even when we're not quite sure if it's doing anything substantial. Then again, the work here by costumer Jenny Beavan (Mad Max: Fury Road, Sense & Sensibility, Gosford Park, and countless others) is always doing substantial work, and I'd have watched it all again immediately to be able to stare at these habiliments again.

The only sore spot in this film that made me cringe is Joel Fry as Jasper, whose weird, unrequited thing for Cruella turns him into a limp, dull character who pulls focus in the worst way, a sort of bedraggled wallflower with little humor and too much sentiment. Paul Walter Hauser as Horace, on the other hand, is a laugh-aloud delight, and his pairing with wicked little piratey dog Wink is nothing short of brilliant. Kirby Howell-Baptiste and Kayvan Novak pop in to the film occasionally as Anita and Roger, and are lovely even as they are underused. But the movie belongs fully to Emma Thompson and Emma Stone, who manage to work with their costumes and hair in such a way that their performances elevate to another level altogether. Much like Glenn Close did, actually, in the original.

I say "original," because it quickly became apparent that this movie is not a prequel to the 1961 animated classic so much as it is a prequel to the 1996 live-action film that started the whole trend. Its updated time period and intoxicating visual spectacle reveal its kinship, to say nothing of the costumes that are sure to win buckets of awards. And with Close as executive producer here, could we have expected anything else? I'm desperately hoping for a follow-up film, partly to answer the remaining question of how and why Cruella becomes an animal-killing psychopath. Remember, it's not just dogs; in the original, we're introduced to her by way of cat-napping a Siberian tiger from the zoo and turning it into, well, something furry to play with in her boudoir.

But mostly, I'm eager for a sequel that has already been teased. Reports indicate that both Emma Thompson (who stars here, of course, but deserves a lot more screen time) and Emma Stone have publicly expressed interest in a sequel that bridges time, providing more backstory for these new characters and crossing over into Cruella's adult life. They described it as a Godfather II-like thing, which makes magnificently twisted sense, and would surely include Close reprising the role. If that happened, I could die happy.

A Quiet Place Part II (2021)

 Score: 4.5 / 5

Sequels are dangerous, especially in horror, and the unexpected (yet long-awaited) follow-up to the 2018 smash hit A Quiet Place hits a lot of the red flags. It's louder and faster, more expensive and expansive, and feels often derivative of other sci-fi horror. It doesn't really change the formula from the first movie, unless you count the bizarre switch from almost exclusive sign language communication to mostly whispered communication. As such, this movie has a lot more dialogue in it; it makes sense, as one of the four main characters is now dead (RIP zaddy Abbott) and we can hardly expect other characters to know how to sign. But even the three survivors of that family often whisper to each other while signing, which just seems like cheating after the first movie made us terrified to even breathe out loud.

But A Quiet Place Part II gets a lot of stuff right, and its conviction and sense of dignity for its characters take primary focus here. We begin with a flashback to "Day 1," when what looks like a giant burning asteroid -- or spaceship -- streaks through the sky above a small town kids' baseball game. As the nervous crowds disperse for the relative shelter of their homes, violent spidercrab-like monsters attack, apparently attracted to anything making significant noise. It's a nasty way to open this film, and works best because of its sudden, brutal violence. It also clarifies something notably absent from the first film: the monsters do not appear to eat people, but rather simply enjoy slaughtering their victims. In the middle of town, they slice and dice with their javelin limbs, or simply smash their prey to a bloody pulp, but there's not an indication that they are hungry or even carnivorous. Perhaps they hate sound so much that they just kill whatever makes noise, rather than "hunting" noisemakers?

We then leap forward in time over a year, to the aftermath of the first film's climactic and sudden ending. Evelyn Abbott (Emily Blunt) leads her children Regan (Millicent Simmonds) and Marcus (Noah Jupe) out of their destroyed farmhouse, apparently having fought off the additional monsters that attacked them after their father Lee (John Krasinski) sacrificed himself. Evelyn's newborn baby, literally fresh out of her womb, has been safely stored in a soundproof trunk with a supply of oxygen, but who knows how long that will last?

We have no clear indication of where the family is headed, though they may not know either. We've seen other fires at night on the hillsides, so we suspect a few other pockets of families might exist. As their defense, Regan also carries an amplifier, which when plugged into her hearing device (that otherwise doesn't seem to work), releases feedback that seems to be the only thing to weaken and bewilder the monsters. Marching beyond the borders of their farm and its sand-covered pathways, the family steps into new thematic realms as well as geographical ones. Part one seemed to focus on the sacrifices on makes for family and the domestic horrors of having that threatened; part two keenly shifts into the potential need to sacrifice for others, even strangers. It's a haunting reminder of what we've all had to consider during the past year, which makes the film (planned to be released over a year ago, in March 2020) terrifyingly prescient.

Approaching an apparently abandoned steel foundry, Evelyn hits a trip wire attached to a mess of glass bottles, summoning monsters instantly. Fleeing through the debris field, Marcus is caught in a bear trap. His screams, paired with her panic, drive the movie into full-octane terror that almost never lets up, much like the first movie. Here, the game is less novel, less interesting, but never less than thrilling. Krasinski ratchets up the tension with every scene, demonstrating at even more intense levels his uncanny ability to jump between various characters in various locations to tell the same cohesive story. Moreover, each character deals with impossible circumstances and almost always rises to the occasion.

While the first film terrifies us with sound -- and this one does, too -- what's scariest about this new installment is its unexpected attention to physical violence. Once the family starts meeting other people, especially their bereaved neighbor Emmett (a chillingly efficient Cillian Murphy), we get the sense that the people still alive might be as dangerous as the monsters. He suggests in his introductory, very creepy scene, that the people still alive are not worth saving. And he's also proven right, somewhat; one scene near the lurch toward the climax features a group of menacing humans; the only thing scarier than a group of clearly desperate and violent men trapping you and preparing to do something is when they're all silent. The whole movie is very The Walking Dead, and by the time our heroes finally locate a safe community, we are fully aware that the zombies -- er, monsters -- will arrive shortly afterward, with deadly consequences.

And while the proceedings aren't as wildly unpredictable as in the first, there's nothing wrong with Kraskinski's impeccable writing or directorial brilliance. A Quiet Place is a rarity in the genre for several reasons, but a major plus is its remarkable lack of subversion. So many popular horror movies lately are deeply subversive, and Kraskinski seems almost to use that new standard to his advantage, by utterly ignoring it. His robust and graphic approach to horror is the kind of balls-out, "what you see is what you get" action that has fallen out of vogue in recent years; even so, he's never exploitative, he treats his characters and his audience as intelligent, and he respects the craft more than he respects cheap thrills.

Given that this movie is a nearly perfect sequel -- meaning that it broadens, intensifies, and slightly changes the game while remaining mostly true to the spirit of the original -- and that it came from a movie we all thought would be standalone, I found myself immediately wanting a part three by the end of this film. If the first movie ended suddenly -- not really a cliffhanger -- with Evelyn taking control of her family and their situation, this movie ended with an even stronger character development in the two older children stepping up and into their adulthood. It's the kind of bravura filmmaking that drove me to tears even as I inched toward the edge of my seat in fear. And it's the kind of movie that, really, has to be seen in cinemas.