X (2022)

Score: 4.5 / 5

How do you take two forms widely considered the lowest of its type, and revive them with appeal to both arthouse circuits and mass audiences? I don't know, but Ti West just did it with his latest. His exploitation film, combining horror and pornography, may be aptly titled X, and while it's certainly not for the faint of heart, it's actually surprisingly tasteful in its delivery of genre thrills and weighty thematic concerns. The latest A24 film might cause some rumpled feathers due to content, as the studio's name has become synonymous with more high-brow or "elevated" horror. As the first proper slasher for the studio, this one comes with enough cerebral candy to woo some of the jaded Gen Z-ers who decry the genre, but only time will tell if it'll be embraced. For the rest of us, though, X represents a whole lot more.

Opening almost point-by-point like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, I wondered early if this film would be an homage to Tobe Hooper. And in many ways, it is. An odd group of misfits in a large van roll their way through Texas in the middle of a scorching summer. Arriving at their destination, an all-but abandoned farm run by two elderly people, the group sets about exploring and insulting the locals. It doesn't take long for things to get sexually heated and violent. The locals are about to fight back. Hooper's filmography was weird, and while this film clearly takes its inspiration from Massacre, it also draws from some of his other works. Most notably, the beast lurking in the nearby pond and its cheap effects are ripped directly from Hooper's Eaten Alive.

Without being too specific about the plot, the group of young folks includes burgeoning scream queen (and wonderful actress) Jenna Ortega (5cream, The Fallout, Studio 666), Brittany Snow (Prom Night, Hairspray, Pitch Perfect), Owen Campbell (Super Dark Times), Martin Henderson (The Ring, Little Fish, Everest, The Strangers: Prey at Night), Scott Mescudi / Kid Cudi (Crisis, Don't Look Up), and Mia Goth doing her best work yet (A Cure for Wellness, Marrowbone, Suspiria, High Life, Emma). A prime pleasure of this film in the first hour or so is learning these characters and their interactions; they bicker and discuss the movie they are going to make. At least two of them are horny and just want to have sex on camera for what will surely be the best porno ever; their director and his techie girlfriend want to make a legitimate arthouse film that nevertheless includes sex. By the time one character blatantly asks about Psycho -- Hitchcock's groundbreaking genre classic that combined explicit sexuality and psychology with slasher conventions (that he also sort of created in doing so) -- I realized that X may be earnest about some things, but it's also keenly aware of what it's doing.

Like Wes Craven's Scream franchise, these characters know they're in a movie. It's a film about filmmaking, specifically of an indecent and transgressive kind. Craven (like so many horror filmmakers) started his cinematic career in independent, low-budget exploitation with The Last House on the Left, and evolved to a place of metafiction that now defines the genre. When the director and producer agree that they are making a porno, not a horror picture, a dark chuckle rumbled through the auditorium, and the film almost pauses for the laughter because it knows what we know.

And that seems to be the film's purpose in general. Its first half is a foreboding dark comedy mixed with some nostalgic drama; the old couple who live on the farm are very strange, but clearly not aging well. Howard, the old man, can't walk or talk well, and he repeatedly mentions that his heart is weak even as he huffs and puffs his way around. Pearl, the old woman, is apparently senile, confused and wandering around. In a few intimate moments, such as when Pearl spies on the young stars having sex on camera, we see that Pearl longs for that kind of sexual fulfillment again; Howard denies her, suggesting he could die from that much exertion. It's tragic, and you feel bad thinking about the shame and ridicule our society places on older people having sex (Grace and Frankie for the win!). But they are still weird and creepy enough to carry us through the tense, deliberately paced first half of the film.

Then, as we might expect from psycho-biddy films or similar projects like The Taking of Deborah Logan and The Visit, things take a violent turn. This is where I'll stop with plot details because the second half is a straightforward slasher horror film, and it's endlessly pleasurable to experience raw, so to speak. Even the first big kill is as much a testament to the film's love of low-budget indie filmmaking, as the spraying blood cleverly changes the cinematography and lighting in fully theatrical fashion. Writer and director West knows exactly what he's doing, and what he's saying in generic context, and the audience he wants to entertain, and his playfulness with genre tropes and imagery are intoxicating. Costume and hair choices, cinematography and setting, sound mixing and editing, and direction of actors all feel pointedly informed by fairly specific referents, and West does not shy away from embracing those influences.

Thematic concerns beyond independent filmmaking include a consideration of elderly sexuality, sexual dynamics in a radically shifting industry, and commodifying youth in a burgeoning home video market. Howard and Pearl never really feel like believable characters as such, but their defining traits are clear and very real; and if we're being honest, how many killers do we ever really get to know in the first film? To quote one of Craven's killers, "Did Norman Bates have a motive? No. Did we ever find out why Hannibal Lecter liked to eat people? Don't think so!" I suppose we'll find out, because the post-credits scene is actually a trailer for a forthcoming prequel, starring -- well, I won't spoil it. But the casting is brilliant and should cause you to double check the cast list for this movie. It's a doozy.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022)

Score: 1.5 / 5

Requels are great until they're not, and we've had some great ones lately. Between Scream, Halloween, and Candyman, we're in a golden age of the fairly recent genre phenomenon. It was only a matter of time before one revamped its respective franchise without the respect or "legacy" aspect the requel format requires, being both a reboot and a sequel (usually to the original classic). I was partial to Evil Dead (2013) and Friday the 13th (2009) during the early 2010s, although some fans weren't, and I think those paved the way for the last few years of our renaissance. Unfortunately, the latest horror requel (at least, before David Gordon Green's Halloween trilogy ends and his upcoming Exorcist requel is finished) misses its mark repeatedly.

Much like Green's project, it feels that the producers of Texas Chainsaw Massacre decided to make a direct sequel to Tobe Hooper's original 1974 film and ignore the long series of sequels and remakes and prequels that have littered the franchise. I've actually quite enjoyed each installment since 2003 (I hate the original three sequels), and I was still excited for this new vision, despite its unceremonious debut as a Netflix original film. But the new one from director David Blue Garcia is a bit of a mess, and I don't mean that in a good way. What goes wrong? Let's dive into the blood bath.

As a standalone film, it's pretty mediocre. A group of young entrepreneurs travel to Harlow, all but abandoned, to auction off property and create a new town of young influencers deep in the heart of Texas. A bus of influencers is about to show up, so they need to check out downtown; they run into an isolated woman and what appears to be her son who refuse to leave their place in the middle of downtown. When they force her out, we know it's only a matter of time before her "son's" rampage begins. The supposedly cautionary tale about gentrification hits us pretty hard over the head, though it's never really explored beyond that, just punished in gleeful fashion. Similarly, the new protagonist is immediately established as a final girl when she reveals that she survived a school shooting. The problem with this is that the screenplay treats this a bit exploitatively rather than substantively, and it's annoyingly obvious (when she meets the trigger-happy open-carrying Man of the Town, who is admittedly a studly man) that she'll have to overcome her hatred of guns and use one by movie's end. It's very Chekhov. It's also weirdly pro-gun (I kept waiting for the "only a good man with a gun can stop a bad man" line, but this was never so simply verbalized), which doesn't fit current discourse in the genre or in real life. On the other hand -- much like the original film -- this movie is really quite beautiful to watch, and the colorful, inspired cinematography by Ricardo Diaz makes up for a lot of the film's shortcomings.

As a sequel, the film started with some promising tidbits. Its opening sequence with voiceover narration was effective in putting us back in the feel of the franchise. We meet the new young people who populate the film -- their names don't matter because they're all chainsaw fodder, and especially in this film they all make unforgivably stupid choices again and again -- and as they head into what appears to be western Texas, they stop at a convenience store filled with Leatherface tchotchkes. It's kind of cool, Scream style, to see the iconic killer as a pop star with t-shirts and corkscrews honoring his legacy. And then there's the gore, which is wonderfully disgusting. The violence itself is only occasionally brilliant (the film's first kill is sudden and shocking and definitely scream-inducing), mostly because the characters are insufferable and there is basically no tension, but the gore is thoroughly satisfying. In fact, I felt that this might be the first time in the franchise where we actually see the title's promise played out in a single scene. The "bus scene" will be surely talked about most in this film, as its terrified passengers film the onslaught with their phones as they drown in the ungodly massacre. It's a pretty great sequence.

As a legacy sequel, the film utterly fails. The whole point of legacy is to bring back the same characters and the same actors, right? Unless there's a major problem like untimely death, I suppose (thinking of our beloved Carrie Fisher in the Star Wars requel trilogy). But Marilyn Burns, who played the original survivor Sally Hardesty, passed away in 2014, and now the character is taken over by Olwen Fouéré, who looks the part well enough. The problem is that Sally was never a compelling character, nor even a true final girl (other than that she indeed survives); the aged Sally we meet now is too similar to Laurie Strode, a survivalist and veteran Texas Ranger always ready to hunt Leatherface and his family down. It doesn't ring true to the character, who we last saw driven to insanity and screaming from the back of a pickup truck. You've got to at least try and build off what came before. And then for the film -- SPOILER ALERT -- to kill her off after so little screen time made me angry. I mean, I was fine with her demise, but then why include her at all? The only hint is that she somehow survives long enough to shoot off another round into her foe before telling the new protagonist not to run "or he'll haunt you forever." Which I guess is a nice sentiment, but we've already had a more compelling feminist drama about overcoming trauma in a slasher movie, and it's not this.

As a reboot, I'd argue it fails on similar grounds. Gunnar Hansen, who played the original Leatherface, died in 2015, and is here replaced by Mark Burnham, who plays the character (perhaps we can't blame him so much as the producers and director) with far more intelligence than he should. This Leatherface has apparently been taken in by the town orphanage, though the story is conspicuously thin on details or exposition, and his bond with the current house owner Ginny (Alice Krige) is suggested to be important and possibly intimate but isn't explored at all. Moreover, this Leatherface doesn't feel like the psychologically challenged and/or mentally ill character we initially met in 1974, who screamed when intruders materialized in his house and changed his mannerisms drastically with each new mask. Instead, this one is almost superhumanly brutal -- the first kill involves a single-handed forearm break and a stabbing with the compound fracture -- and plans some of his creative kills in advance. Leatherface should be reactionary, not exploitative. Which is weird for a franchise built as grindhouse exploitation, but here we are.

The Fallout (2022)

Score: 4 / 5

HBO always pushes the limits when it comes to content -- just look at Euphoria, or don't -- and it seems that adolescent trauma is the name of the game when it comes to one of their latest original dramas. The Fallout drew me in because its star, Jenna Ortega, is suddenly a bona fide movie star doing surprising and prolific work (Scream 5, X, You season two, Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous). And while Ortega completely nailed this complex and nuanced role, the film itself surprised me in wonderful and challenging ways. Writer and first-time feature director Megan Park centers on her versatile star to tell a difficult story that smacks of authenticity in almost every frame. She's not playing an easy game either, choosing to tell the story not of the climactic events that predicate her film but of young people coming to terms with those events.

I had no idea what this film was about when I clicked on it, but within a few minutes of its beginning -- which sets up an otherwise typical bildungsroman for a high school girl teasing her younger sister about her first period and staring at a local influencer in the bathroom with curiosity or jealousy (or lust?) -- the relative tranquility is shattered as gunshots ring out in the school halls. The two girls jump into the nearest stall together, lock the door, and climb atop the toilet. Vada (Ortega), a short and baggy-clothed malcontent, pulls out her phone but is shaking too much to use it as the rapid fire gets closer; Mia (Maddie Ziegler), a tall blond dancer, drops her bangles on the ground and slips out of her heels, which end up in the bowl. We're locked in the stall with them, and the sound mixing forces us to breathe frantically with them as the bathroom door opens and footsteps approach. It's Quinton (Niles Fitch), who hides in the next stall before announcing himself. The girls invite him to crawl into theirs; he does, leaving streaks of blood on the white tiles. He checks himself for bullet wounds before breaking into panicked tears and mourning his brother, who presumably died in front of him. The three wait in horrified sorrow until the police arrive.

It's a hard introduction to the film, but Park's sensitivity lies in its focus on these students and their experience. The rest of the film deals with their ability -- or inability -- to cope with the tragedy and continue to live despite the trauma. The honesty with which she portrays each subsequent scene is profound: while Vada's family sits in stony, shocked silence at the dinner table, the camera lingers on Vada's catatonic face. When the news reports updates on the incident, which we hear mostly off-camera in bits and pieces, we center on Vada's face as she texts Mia and Quinton, students who were probably not her friends before their shared survival story. The "outside world" is a nebulous force, one that only occasionally reminds us (or Vada, or Mia) that it's there. Our experience is bounded by a fuzzy screen, one that limits the sound and sight of much beyond awkward, mostly silent interactions. Vada and Mia start spending time together, acting like best friends always on the verge of courting each other; they drink wine and talk, smoke a joint and float in the pool, and sneak out of their houses to connect when they start to feel panicked.

Even the experiences of other students begin to feel "other" to her, such as her gay friend Nick (Will Ropp) who becomes the media face of the incident and speaks at rallies to condemn the NRA and governmental inaction over these tragedies. Park is determined to avoid telling the, sadly, familiar story of traumatized teenagers who become famous activists; she's interested in the silent majority of teenagers who live through the same experiences and don't become famous as a result. Vada has to go to therapy (with Shailene Woodley, in a bizarre casting choice), where she feels nothing; she has to return to school eventually, and when she does she gets high on ecstasy just to make it through the day. 

Park's sensitivity in direction only increases from the inciting incident, and as Vada navigates her own psyche and the halls of her school, we're treated to a smorgasbord of bittersweet scenes that seamlessly combine dark, uncomfortable drama with raw humor. Several scenes aren't arguably "necessary" for the furtherment of any negligible plot, but the general aesthetic of this film seems to toe the line with a "slice of life" approach. It's a fascinating way to handle the traumatic issues raised, and it does so -- I think -- in an extraordinarily dangerous and effective way. The film works to normalize the shooting and its aftereffects even as it criticizes that same phenomenon as it happens in real life. We're normalizing mass shootings, especially in schools, as a culture, and doing so -- Park rightly sermonizes in this film -- only increases and exacerbates the trauma experienced by the (often young) people most immediately affected.

Umma (2022)

Score: 3.5 / 5

Even the most familiar stories can be powerful when told with the right conviction.

Isolated in rural Americana, a solitary apiarist homeschools her daughter and supports herself by selling organic honey. Amanda (Sandra Oh) is a first-generation Korean-American who abhors technology; their pastoral life is only ever intruded upon by a local shopkeeper (Dermot Mulroney), whose occasional friendly visits represent Amanda's only social interactions as well as her only means of making money through selling her organic honey. Her teenage daughter Chrissy (Fivel Stewart) doesn't seem too troubled by this arrangement, and tells us fairly early into the film that Amanda has some kind of intense sensitivity or unusual allergy to electricity. They don't have phones or cars, and at night they rely on candles and oil lanterns. We get the impression there is something traumatizing in Amanda's past -- based on a nasty opening flashback -- and it feels like the two women might be in some kind of witness protection program.

That's not quite the case, which becomes apparent when a mysterious car drives right up to their house. Amanda's Korean uncle pops out, informing her that her mother has passed away. The camera lingers on Amanda's face, and really this is where we must express gratitude and joy that Sandra Oh is our star. She deserves so much more starring screen time than she's ever gotten, and this film capitalizes on her profound ability to convey so many complex emotions in wordless looks. Her dedication to this role and this story saves it from tipping over the brink into typical B-movie vagaries. Amanda's complex reaction to her uncle's news is short-lived as her uncle -- without any ado at all -- shames her for her estranged relationship with her Umma (Korean for "mother") and her apparent abandonment of her culture. Then he gifts Amanda with a suitcase containing Umma's ashes with a morbid warning that her spirit is angry and will be until she is properly laid to rest.

Amanda's bitterness is left unexplained for a while, but when she unceremoniously dumps her mother's urn in the basement, we know it's only a matter of time before something dreadful happens. Almost immediately, Amanda is woken by nightmares of her past; her waking life doesn't fare much better when she discovers that Chrissy has been secretly requesting more information from colleges she might attend. The multiple generations of women now in the same house will unravel in the whirlwind of expectations and behaviors that lead each to question the extent to which they are turning into their own mothers. Some generational curses hit a little closer to home than we expect.

As a horror movie, Umma is pretty typical of its genre. Each beat is predictable, from the foreboding portents of the uncle's visit and the oddly edited dream sequences (that feel lifted out of early '00s ghost flicks) to Umma's eventual attempts at possession. Director and writer Iris K. Shim handled the jump-scares well enough to keep me on the edge of my seat in an otherwise comfortable way, and the effects are pretty darn effective for being, one imagines, quite low-budget. But where this one rises above is in its casting -- may I continue to praise Sandra Oh? -- and in its heart. Shim clearly feels passionately about this story and works hard to hitch the film to Oh's emotive power, reigning in what could be flyaway terror and spectacle to make this film more about the delicate lines between three generations of women of color. This movie is more about the aftereffects of immigration, assimilation, and family trauma than about a vengeful ghost.

With so much on its mind, I might have preferred a longer approach (this one clocks in under 90 minutes) that wouldn't have sacrificed so much potent drama. I certainly would have liked a bit more exploration of its weighty themes and a few more chances for Oh and the rest of this solid cast to shine. In fact, having recently watched Minari again, which is remarkably similar in many ways, I'm imagining an odd crossover that makes both films more satisfying to me.

My Top 10 Favorite Films of 2021

I have finally seen all the feature films on my yearly watch list, and so now, as awards season draws to a close, I present to you my ten favorite films from 2021, along with several honorable mentions that almost made my list here: everything hyperlinked to one of my reviews was in the final running for my list, and each counts as a personal favorite. Please note that I designate 2021 films based on when they were widely released and accessible!

Special Mention: The Fear Street Trilogy
Okay, before we get started, I just really need to pop this one in here. It may not have a place on my actual list, but the audacity of dropping three whole movies on Netflix this year that were all part of the same cycle and depend on each other for coherence is stunning. And then for those movies to be intelligent, terrifying, hilarious, stylish, and a ton of fun? What a fabulous and inspiring cultural product from writer and director Leigh Janiak, who adapted the stories from R.L. Stine with no small amount of debt to everyone from Wes Craven to the Duffer Brothers, and from Steven Spielberg to Ryan Murphy. But these movies are very much their own thing, and through their meditation on time and place, I found them, together, to be one of the most entertaining and intellectually satisfying pop-horror productions I've ever seen.

10. Raya and the Last Dragon

Disney didn't do much for me this year (outside of the MCU, which is consistently killing it), but this movie rang in 2021 with one of my new all-time animated favorites. Hilarious and heartwarming, it tells the story of an empowered young woman rising to the task of uniting disparate political factions, saving the environment, and learning how to trust others. Some of the timeliest and most daring topics right now -- and, obviously, in March 2021 -- are couched comfortably between major star turns from actors, animators, and designers in a movie as feel-good as it is challenging. I really loved Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar for its escapism and good humor this year, and it was sorely needed as 2021 got off to its rocky start, and I also loved Don't Look Up for whatever the opposite of escapism and good humor is because it felt like a hilarious and terrifying way to end a very weird year.

9. Candyman
This requel might be the best we've seen yet. Not only does this Candyman honor the significant legacy of the 1992 original, it actually helps make the loose ends of that film make more sense. It turns the Candyman myth, which once felt limiting in its specificity to location and culture, into an endlessly accessible and fraught vehicle to deliver nonstop horror. Brutal emotionally as well as viscerally, Candyman triumphantly rises above expectations and breaks through its walls into reality, turning its central premise into as hot a topic as many in our headlines, where saying the names of victims of racism and police brutality invokes a charge as old as our country itself. As much as I loved The Forever Purge, A Quiet Place Part II, and especially Halloween Kills, nothing scared me as much as Candyman did this year. But don't say his name five times, whatever you do!

8. The Night House
For me, the best horror movie of the year was also the star turn Rebecca Hall has long deserved. Understated until it's not, the film is a profoundly deep meditation on loss, grief, and suicide in such literal terms that it is often hard to endure. I'm still not entirely sure the extent to which it is allegorical and generic (meaning typical of haunted house genre, not that it is in any way a typical film), but it is definitely both at once, each informing the other interpretation. Lean, mean, and with every moment utterly crucial, it's a terrifying descent into despair and, finally, an empowering guide back into the light. Other crucial female-led horror films this year included Last Night in Soho and The Woman in the Window.

7. House of Gucci

Greed, especially in the family business, causes loyalties to fray and civility to dissolve, and Ridley Scott's masterful exploration of the phenomenon makes this movie sing. Taking the true story that is essentially soap and eyeing it with the veteran panache of operatic excesses, Scott forces us into a parable dressed in drag, a high camp fever dream determined to push buttons you didn't even know you had. It's a messy, brazen, glamorous cocktail of sin and style, as audacious in its faith to storytelling as it is to its own sickly beauty. I loved the similarly theatrical style and chameleonic performances in The Eyes of Tammy Faye, but this was by far the top queer movie of 2021.

6. Nightmare Alley

Uncanny in its timelessness, Guillermo del Toro's latest feature feels like a throwback to films noir of the 1940s even as it absorbs our senses in a visceral and urgent way. A character study of antiheroes, a stylistic meditation on circular narratives, a haunting parable about losing yourself to your vices, this sumptuous, sensual movie has it all. Two of the most interesting fictional characters on screen this year, played by two of our best actors at the height of their careers, and some of the year's best filmmaking to convey their odyssey into the dark heart of avarice. I also loved Being the Ricardos and The Father for acting (and the latter for production design and casting), but there's just not much that compares with this Gothic beauty.

5. TIE: Justice League / Spider-Man: No Way Home

A year of superheroes, mostly brought to us via MCU streaming specials and new characters, would not have been nearly as spectacular if not for us finally getting Zack Snyder's Justice League. And it completely blew me away in surprising and devastating ways. A stunning, glorious monument to storytelling, style, substance, and pure unadulterated entertainment, this was the vindication I've longed for while being a fairly vocal fan of the DC film series all along. The third installment of Spider-Man matched my feeling of elation, and its techniques that bothered me were largely smothered by the amount of perfectly executed, sensitively developed fan service that brought together the disparate parts of Marvel cinematic efforts over the last two decades.

4. The Last Duel
Despite a few questionable choices, Ridley Scott's first film release of this year has stuck with me like few others. It's a damning condemnation of toxic masculinity from a filmmaker often accused of sacrificing female perspectives and stories to that of men, and yet it reinforces the simple fact that no one does period war dramas better than Scott. It makes a case that no one does better than Scott in a lot of ways, but between this and House of Gucci, he ruled awards season this year in my books. The barbarism of medieval gender politics here feels far too relevant, and the film's grayscale grittiness brings a dark level of urgency to the story that I did not expect. I also really loved The Harder They Fall this year due for its similar historical revisionism in a crime drama determined to raise hackles across the board; but what can I say, I prefer the Gothic film.

3. TIE: In the Heights / West Side Story

It's amazing that these two films were made in the same year, and that both were uncommonly -- impossibly -- perfect movie musicals. One was a brand new vision that transported us from stage to screen and then directly up to cloud nine, the other was a remake that actually improved on the original groundbreaker. Both feature transcendent cinematography and production design, eye-popping choreography, Spanish language without subtitles, and extraordinarily talented young and old performers. They feel like companion films about hope, perseverance, overcoming prejudice and poverty, and dealing with loss of loved ones and of identity. Just amazing.

2. The Green Knight

A consummate story, David Lowery's latest film is a myth about mythmaking, a story more about storytelling than about its own narrative. From its title, curiously blurring its protagonist, onward, the film's brilliance manifests in every single shot, and sometimes even between shots with editing that constantly challenges our expectations of period films, adventures, fantasies, and action films. Some of the best scholarly writing of the year will surely come from this, as each scene seems pandering to scholars and theorists with ambiguity and metaphor. I'm rarely this shocked, mesmerized, and consistently frustrated by films, and even after four separate viewings, The Green Knight still holds me under its spell. I also really loved The Power of the Dog, which similarly examined the bildungsroman through competing masculinities, the influence of nature and life on the edge of civilization, and what we learn during the passage of time.

1. Judas and the Black Messiah

This one may cause a ruckus, as it was formally awarded things during the last cycle, but since it was widely released in 2021, I've waited a year to honor it on this damn blog. Judas and the Black Messiah is a timeless film, one that feels ancient and urgent at once, yet so clearly reflects the time of its subject that it feels more like a documentary than a drama. Much like last year's The Trial of the Chicago 7, the film concerns William O'Neal, the Judas to Fred Hampton's Jesus, during the formation of the Rainbow Coalition and J. Edgar Hoover's COINTELPRO efforts to eliminate perceived threats to the status quo. I also really loved Passing this year for its incisive look at racial dynamics in the 1920s, but the compelling real drama, in Shaka King and the Lucas Brothers' hands, of Fred Hampton's revolutionary life and its tragic, untimely, and downright evil end has devastated me for an entire year.

What were YOUR favorite movies this year? Let me know and we'll chat about some stellar cinema!

The Batman (2022)

Score: 5 / 5

Matt Reeves is a genius. We already knew that after what he did with Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and War for the Planet of the Apes, and frankly I hope that inspires people to revisit his brilliant earlier films Cloverfield and Let Me In. But nothing could have prepared me for the polished beauty and audacious style of yet another Batman movie from this burgeoning master of the craft. Most scenes could be frozen and framed, so rivetingly and beautifully composed as they are, and from the long, slow shots to the endless textured detail of every costume piece and prop, you can tell Reeves and team meant this film to be a labor of love. In a lot of ways, this movie reminded me of Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins in its shocking scope, emotional and intellectual depth, and world-building mastery.

But this film (and the franchise sure to bloom from its stem) differs from Nolan's stories in a critical way, and it is this I intend to explore in this post: Reeves is not interested in mythmaking. While Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy was rooted in realism and had a muscular, gritty aesthetic, it was primarily an epic. A means of turning Batman -- who isn't really a "super" hero after all -- from a man into an idea, as Bruce himself says in the first film. We get a mythic origin story that culminates in a physical and mental test; a damsel in distress; a terrifying enemy determined to destroy the city; an impossible race against the odds through a freshly realized hell to stop destruction and death. And there's the level of advanced technology, which often feels a bit too sci-fi for the world as it is. Reeves, on the other hand, intentionally makes Bruce a real person and doesn't outfit him with sonar technology or special goggles that turn cell phones into echolocation tools.

Reeves's Batman is, first and foremost, a detective. We meet him approximately two years into his tenure as the caped crusader, although he doesn't really seem to have donned the title of "Batman." He calls himself Vengeance in a delightfully sinister tone I didn't expect from actor Robert Pattinson, who has been doing unbelievably great work in the last several years, certainly since Cronenberg's Cosmopolis in 2012. The film opens with the murder of the Gotham City mayor, and as Lieutenant Gordon (Jeffrey Wright) investigates the crime scene, he escorts "Vengeance" past the police and forensics experts. The police don't like him; he's just a vigilante with a scary name to them. Pattinson imbues the character with the kind of tortured menace Christian Bale had, but his is more intellectual than passionate; nonverbal for, shockingly, most of the film, Pattinson's face is a masterclass of nuance as he slowly and deliberately takes in the crime scene. His eyes flicker to a blood spot apparently no one has noticed, and as he moves away from it, a photographer hurries over to snap it for evidence.

Most of the film is as slow and deliberate, but Reeves packs each photogenic image with details and weight that are astounding. It feels, in many ways, like a David Fincher movie in its calculated aesthetic and intentional turning of the screw. Add to it the unexpected, violent action, Like Zodiac or Se7en in plot, The Batman is very much a gritty drama about someone trying to solve and then stop serial murders from happening, and a significant part of that is due to the psychopathic killer. Here we have the Riddler, played by Paul Dano in what might be the most unhinged and genuinely scary performance of his career, who is determined to kill the leaders of Gotham and reveal the depths of their corruption and fraud. But there's always something else going on with him, and one of my favorite moments is also his first moment on screen: as the mayor watches the news alone in his apartment, he steps away to refresh his drink. In the negative space behind him, we see the vague silhouette of a figure whose only discernible features are of his eyes. The goggles or glasses he wears reflect the harsh white light of the TV, making him instantly a ghostly or demonic presence who seems uncannily linked with his own desire to force people in power to reflect on themselves, albeit in a public way. And that's only the third or fourth shot of the film!

Much will be made of Pattinson and his iteration of the character; I loved him as Bruce Wayne in all his hungover, battered, sallow glory. Similarly, much will be made of Andy Serkis as Alfred Pennyworth and Zoe Kravtiz as Selina Kyle (a particularly sexy Catwoman who pairs extremely well with Pattinson's Batman). Not to take away from them (although Serkis has precious little to do in this film), but I would rather fixate momentarily on John Turturro's deliciously creepy turn as Carmine Falcone and a completely unrecognizable Colin Farrell as Oswald Cobblepot, the Penguin. Especially the latter, who is apparently about to get an HBO spinoff series, because these characters are so often caricatured or made into comedic butts, but here they are treated with dignity and substance by the screenplay, director, and actors. It helps, too, that Reeves lets them own their moments, not rushing anything or highlighting spectacle over character.

The Batmobile arrives, looking like it just escaped a Mad Max sequel. Arkham shows up late, along with someone who appears to be the Joker, and I'm itching for Reeves's proposed Arkham horror series. The fighting is all very muscular, and Reeves doesn't cut away from the brutal punches and kicks, choosing intentionally for us to witness Bruce getting injured (and also kicking butt most of the time). He's just another man, Reeves seems desperate to tell us, capable of getting injured and risking his life and struggling to figure out how best to help others. By the end, it seems Bruce might be ready to embrace his identity as the Batman, but it's the path to that realization that makes up the film; he can't just be a vigilante, he needs to be the symbol of hope and justice Gotham so craves. He has to confront his history, his legacy, and even his daily purpose, and it reaches a head when he chooses, in the film's climax, to use a flare and guide a mass of people out of watery wreckage to safety. That kind of salvific moment is captured beautifully as a sort of harrowing of hell, and it's here that Bruce actively chooses mercy and aid over anger and his self-proclaimed goal of vengeance.

Come for the riveting Batman story and its neo-noir detective aesthetic. Stay for the unbelievably beautiful production, including eye-popping cinematography from Greig Fraser (Dune, Bright Star, Let Me In, Snow White and the Huntsman, Zero Dark Thirty, Foxcatcher, Lion, Rogue One, Mary Magdalene, Vice, The Mandalorian) and gorgeous music from Michael Giacchino (Jurassic World, Marvel and Pixar movies, Super 8, Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, Star Trek). And leave haunted by the memory of one of the best Batman movies you've ever seen, and what may very well prove to be one of my own top 10 films of 2022. It's early to make a claim like that, but once you've seen this film, you'll know what I'm talking about.

The Dry (2021)

Score: 3 / 5

Detective Aaron Falk returns to his home of Kiewarra, Australia, for the funeral of a childhood friend, Luke, who murdered his wife and young son before turning his gun on himself. But Aaron's return is greeted mostly by furtive whispers and untrusting glares because he himself was a suspect some twenty years prior, when he left town. As he (and we) learn about what happened to Luke and his family, we also learn about Aaron's youth, when a teenage girl drowned and both he and Luke were implicated, lied to the police, and suffered ostracism. It only ended for Aaron when his family left town; apparently the intensity and stress never really ended for Luke. But now that he's back -- and in a sweltering drought, no less -- the town's old wounds open up like they'd never healed.

After Luke's parents convince Aaron that there is room for doubting Luke's guilt, he decides to stay and investigate the already closed case. He has to endure some difficult conversations with townsfolk, including the father of the dead teenager from Aaron's past and the local police chief (who is clearly green when it comes to violent crimes and dead bodies). Interspersed among these scenes are flashback scenes that show a young Aaron and Luke hanging out, flirting with girls, and ultimately the events that led to the drowning. The assumed credulity of these flashbacks reveals a lot of misinformation, projection, and misguided anger in the present, as the flashbacks establish a gap between what people thought about the past and what actually happened. And as present-day Aaron connects with the idiosyncratic townsfolk, he uncovers a lot of secrets, motivations, and guilts. What is going on in Kiewarra during this dry spell?

The Dry stars Eric Bana as the guilt-ridden, haunted detective, and it's smart enough to let him carry the film with his singularly moody demeanor. It's his best role in years, and he runs with it like the protagonist of a Gillian Flynn novel or a new season of True Detective. We're left wondering for most of the film's runtime exactly how guilty he really is about the previous murder, and Bana gives us almost no help, even refusing to deny accusations or claim innocence when confronted. Clearly he feels guilty, but how much and why are left for us to decipher as audience detectives, and the film trusts us to keep up with its not-so-verbose screenplay.

The film -- as is true with many Australian films -- highlights the landscape, with frequent establishing or transitional shots taking in the windswept, dusty fields around the rural farming town. Warm with amber light, the film exudes its heat right out of the screen, transporting us to a land choking for air and water. We see dust devils on the plains, and often an overhead shot of the riverbed where the teenage girl drowned before, now a rocky crevice splitting the landscape. The townsfolk, primarily farmers who can't currently farm, are made to sit around lazily waiting for rain, gossiping about the crimes of the past and present and the ghosts tied to this town. I wondered a few times if the film would tip into wider issues, such as the danger in these small towns of dying out due to capitalist/corporate farming, or some deeper distrust of law enforcement or forensics (there is an underlying motif of powerlessness experienced by every single character), but it never really went there. It was just a fairly engrossing, beautiful to watch and unwind, whodunnit in the outback.

The French Dispatch (2021)

Score: 3.5 / 5

It might be the most Wes Anderson Wes Anderson movie yet, and that's just what it is. If you like his usual style, you'll probably like this, because he ramps it up about 200% from usual. If you don't like his style, you'll probably hate this because it's just too niche. I've always been on the fence with him, because for me Fantastic Mr. Fox, Moonrise Kingdom, and The Grand Budapest Hotel are wonderful films, especially that last, but I have felt indifferent or negatively toward most of his others, such as his most recent, Isle of Dogs. This most recent is more like Hotel in terms of style, substance, and grandiosity of storytelling, and for those elements I quite enjoyed it. But it's also surprisingly inaccessible, even for people who are willing to let Anderson take them on another funny, weird ride through his unique experience of life in a strange world.

A meditation on journalism -- I think -- The French Dispatch begins with Angelica Huston's voiceover narration about the establishment of the titular magazine. Though it was founded in Liberty, Kansas, where its editor Howitzer (Bill Murray) was born, it is now published in a little French town called Ennui-sur-Blasé, which means something like sophisticated boredom. In rapid succession, we are introduced to Howitzer's loyal staff in their oddly crumbling but quaint offices; the characters are not seen directly at first, and left almost unknowable until they respectively share some of their work with us. The film is divided into sections, one from each of the eccentric journalists, that form what is meant to be the final issue of the magazine. Based on the style of the on-screen font and the unusual focus of the fictional writing staff, it seems that we are meant strongly to think of the Dispatch in the same terms we think of The New Yorker. The secondary opening sequence seems pointedly to satirize (or offer homage to) the New Yorker regular piece "The Talk of the Town," funnily narrated by Owen Wilson in a beret and on a bicycle, riding through the small town and showing us the locations (past and future) when he's not colliding with commoners or falling down holes.

To recount the plot (of which there is essentially none) seems fruitless and even arrogant, as I frankly had trouble with all the characters and their doings. There are three main stories that take up the bulk of screen time, each from a different writer's perspective. One involves an incarcerated painter and his muse who is also his prison guard, and their work with an art dealer on the outside. One involves the writer inserting herself into a student protest led by a moody young revolutionary and the fallout that entails. One involves a legendary chef whose only employ is in the police department kitchen, despite the reporter's best efforts at launching him to fame. The pieces are all shot in Anderson's style, but with various kinds of changing aesthetics; for instance, during a chase scene, everything is presented suddenly as an animated cartoon.

That's shocking, but not really in context of Anderson's work. Everything is usually presented in toybox or dollhouse style in his films, and each piece of the set and props are clearly chosen and altered to cultivate a painfully specific atmosphere. His production design notoriously borders on the obsessive, and here (as in Hotel) that is most clearly sensed. Perhaps that's because it's so removed from most audience members' lived experience. There is almost nothing relatable in this film, at least physically, and yet it seems Anderson wants to transport us to a very real world for which he then wants us to experience some kind of catharsis through nostalgia, even if the nostalgia is for a fantasy. 

I don't really know what else to say about this film. It's a valuable experience, I thought, and one that I'll need to mull over. But even more than in most of his work, here I just couldn't connect to any of the (many, many) characters or even fully understand the setting or themes. I suppose part of the project is to simply appreciate the varied work of specialized journalists, but I'd rather have movies like All the President's Men or The Post than something like this. It just moved far too quickly and with too many moving parts for my taste; I could never really savor the crucial beats in even the expository bits. There's a relentlessness in its pace that denies us access to any thematic underpinnings, even as the experience of Anderson dragging us through his imagination was thrilling.

The Cursed (2022)

Score: 4.5 / 5

This is exactly the kind of movie that needs to be made more often and be seen by more people. The kind of movie we can hope major streaming services will fund or produce or buy. The kind of movie that will die out if we're not careful. An assured, confident, and profoundly accomplished period horror film so rooted in traditional techniques yet so entertaining and intelligent and beautiful that it could appeal to wide audiences. It's also so niche in its cinematic references and its central conceits that it will certainly live on with a cult following. I loved The Cursed unequivocally, although its original title of Eight for Silver was much better.

In the late 19th century, a French (possibly British, based on the accent, but living in France nonetheless) land baron named Seamus Laurent approaches a tribe of Roma people on his land. They had set up camp there and have claim to the territory; he and several men from town slaughter the "gypsies." It's a harrowing early scene, mostly shot in a long take from a nearby hilltop as the camp is burned and the people murdered indiscriminately. Laurent's band tortures and mutilates the two Roma leaders, one becoming a grotesque scarecrow and the other buried alive with a set of fanged dentures of pure silver, but not before they place a curse on Laurent and his estate. Anyone with a working definition of Universal's monster lineup or classic films in general knows that this is grounds for a bona fide werewolf movie, and my joy was instantly piqued.

Much like the mythology and themes of 1941's The Wolf Man, and many of its subsequent sequels, remakes, and re-imaginings, this movie starts from a foundation of exoticizing the Roma people in western Europe and leans slightly into concerns over colonialism and class conflict. There's a concern over silver -- mythologically, pure silver's antibacterial work kills the "infection" of lycanthropy -- though this film interestingly toys with the typical conceit. There's the idea that a person bitten can become a werewolf unless they die first. These ideas aren't really explored in much depth, except for that last one, but it's all there, firmly placing this film within the genre. Interestingly, the more overt -- and more recently exploited -- theme of adolescent sexual awakening manifesting as carnal monstrosity isn't present here at all, which makes this story less predictable and more intense as a sort of whodunnit murder-mystery with a monster (or monsters) on the loose.

Perhaps I'm getting a little ahead of myself. After the Roma slaughter and placement of the curse, the children of the estate begin to have nightmares of the scarecrow and of digging to find the silver dentures. Naturally, they meet up and go to the unholy grave. Writer/director/cinematographer Sean Ellis (The Broken, Anthropoid) is doing astonishing work here, creating a palpably haunted atmosphere that he maintains through the entire film; ethereal and foggy and beautiful all at once, the estate seems perpetually shrouded in twilight, while the gritty and brutal events sometimes make the film feel a little too realistic. Once the kids find the silver teeth and one tries them on, the curse is unleashed, and a Seamus's son Edward is attacked before he disappears. A monster prowls the estate by night, and so the Laurents board up their house and wait inside by candlelight.

This is a Gothic monster movie like we haven't seen in ages, and Ellis knows full well what he's doing for fans of the genre. It helps to have powerhouse actors like Kelly Reilly, Boyd Holbrook, and Alistair Petrie among the cast, especially Reilly doing her best to ramp up the hysterical nature of what is otherwise a fairly male-dominated story. I don't want to say much more about the plot, but it does cycle through usual werewolf beats in sometimes unpredictable ways, or at least ways that play on unusual themes such as colonialism and genocide, and even Marxist critiques of class (a maid gets bitten and hides her wound for fear of getting fired and cast out). The "Other" here is, in fact, much closer than we might at first fear, as evidenced most strongly in the briefly mentioned idea of the sins of the parents visiting (read: cursing or infecting) the children. And, of course, it's the children who initially fall victim to the curse. How much more Gothic can you get?

There is a frame story that didn't quite work as well for me, taking place in the Battle of the Somme in WWI, which I expect ate up a fair bit of the production budget that would have been better allocated elsewhere. But it makes the opening sequence unexpected and exciting, and the ending much more emotionally powerful, so I'll not criticize it too much. I will say that I utterly loved the monster itself, as it felt less wolfish and more monstrous; much like the characterization of witches in Robert Eggers's The Witch, the monsters here aren't easily classifiable and seem to morph based on the perception of the other characters, which makes a ton of sense artistically when attempting to understand the mindset of people without scientific knowledge of these things. Even when the Van Helsing-type character shows up (Holbrook), he only really understands what's happening because it happened to him once before; he calls the monster a wolf because it makes more sense than the reality, and he has to get the Laurents and townsfolk on his side quickly to stop further tragedy. I also really loved the score by Robin Foster, and its heavy reliance on droning, occasionally dissonant synth sound reminded me distinctly of John Carpenter, which in turn made me wonder how much Ellis was influenced by Carpenter too (specifically of The Fog and The Thing). 

Had I made the movie, or at least been in the room, I'd have pushed for a few changes in focus. By the finale, I could tell Ellis felt the need to wrap up the plot strands neatly while still making powerful references (I thought multiple times of The Innocents, The Others, and even Jurassic Park before all was finished). For this viewer, some more time to explore the fascinating intricacies and intrigues of the story and its already-introduced themes would have made the film feel more heady and haunting, like the organized nightmare it seemed at the outset. Pushing the allegorical elements begging to be exploited would have made it all more urgent and more memorable, especially considering the ideas of infection and isolation that have been real-life concerns for two years now. And while it may not have tapped those wells, The Cursed remains a thrilling and beautiful work.

Stillwater (2021)

Score: 3.5 / 5

Based very loosely on the Amanda Knox story, Stillwater concerns a father fighting to free his daughter from prison. An American father. A French prison. Where she's been for five years, and will be for probably four more. In a culture where precious few people speak English. After multiple appeals and investigations. When the French police and courts are certain that his daughter killed her female lover.

It's a messy story, one ripe for dramatic exploitation, and writer/director Tom McCarthy (Spotlight, Christopher Robin, 13 Reasons Why) mines it for most of its worth. In centering his story on the father's perspective, McCarthy aims the film squarely at an American audience, one still reeling from four years of politics that hated foreigners and distrusted government oversight. It's an interesting flip of the script, especially with the eminently likable Matt Damon as the protagonist. Bill Baker is the character's name, and he exclusively wears plaid shirts (or sleeveless band shirts), Wranglers, and a worn baseball cap. From his usually quiet mouth we occasionally hear a "Yes, ma'am" in a Southern drawl, or inquiries to French folk, "English? Speak any English?" He prays before every meal and listens to country music on his way to odd jobs of manual labor.

Despite appearances, he's not necessarily the Republican stereotype he seems, and this movie works hard to live in the complex interior life of characters who could be real people. His love for daughter Allison (Abigail Breslin), whose queer identity is almost ignored and whose relationship with the murdered ex-girlfriend is surprisingly honored by almost never being labeled or questioned, manifests in him leaving his titular Oklahoma hometown and actually moving to France. Once in Marseille, he finds construction work (he previously worked in oil) and befriends a local actress named Virginie (Camille Cottin) and her young daughter Maya (Lilou Siauvaud). They form an unexpected makeshift family, as the widower Bill tries to make up for his shortcomings in the past, and Virginie helps him investigate and litigate his way to Allison's freedom. Her mildly bohemian demeanor opens him up, and as she translates and guides him around the city, we learn that he's not the stereotypical character he's modeled after.

This emphasis on the power and unpredictability of socialization is buttressed by a theme of unconditional love of parents and children, and it could have made for a particularly mawkish flick. In McCarthy's capable hands, it's all remarkably unsentimental, and I really respect it for that. Bill gets second chances -- and of course he's working to get Allison a second chance -- and Damon's acting here is among his most nuanced. Much as in his Best Picture Spotlight, McCarthy's story is mostly about his protagonist knocking on doors and hitting the pavement to build a case. This time, though, the unexpected focus is on racial and class tensions: his interviewees alternately spew vitriol over Allison's deceased lover's Muslim identity or about Muslims and brown-skinned people in general. Shortly after Bill discovers his new prime suspect is a young Arab man, one of his interviewees looks at pictures of Arab men and says "they all look the same to me" and, to paraphrase, "pick one you want me to identify. I'm sure they've all committed a crime anyway."

The film suffers, though, in its final act, after what is already a bloated running time. Things turn shockingly to the bizarre, when (SPOILER ALERT) Bill abducts the suspect and keeps him locked in his apartment building's basement. It's the sort of shift that could have made a compelling story in itself -- think Taken meets Prisoners, and that's fine -- but that, after such a sensitive and thematically-minded setup, feels forced and almost like a betrayal of the characters and of the audience's intelligence. I wondered briefly, after a few crucial moments in which we close on Bill exclusively, if this sequence was meant to show his stress breaking him down into self-sabotaging behaviors he presumably had before, with his late wife and previous life. There's even a bizarre suicide attempt and some downright baffling writing and editing that made the final stretch of film feel like a different movie altogether. And then there's the conclusion of Allison's story which was a little too explained and a little too convincing; a bit more ambiguity about her relationship or her connections to the murder itself would have made for a much more powerful emotional story, and might have made the ending more satisfyingly ambiguous.

But I came for Matt Damon, and I definitely stayed for Matt Damon, and really that's what the movie is all about anyway.

Uncharted (2022)

 Score: 2.5 / 5

Anchors aweigh! It feels like ages since we got a swashbuckling adventure movie, and Uncharted delivers on its promise in just about every way. I'm not familiar with the video game series source material, but by some accounts those games are among the most popular and esteemed of Sony's catalog. This movie doesn't always feel like it was adapted from games -- there tends to be a similar aesthetic -- but when it does, it does. We go from occasionally heartfelt drama to galleons flying through the air, so you have to suspend a lot of expectation for realism, but this movie reminded me more closely of National Treasure with a dash of Indiana Jones thrown in. Not terribly smart, but a lot of fun, and we get some eye candy along the way.

Directed by Ruben Fleischer (Venom, Gangster Squad), the film opens with a bang: Tom Holland -- looking not unlike Brendan Fraser in The Mummy -- clinging to supply boxes dangling out of a cargo plane. We're suddenly shifted to Holland as a young boy, and we learn his character is Nate Drake, as he attempts to steal an artifact from a museum with his older brother. Once caught, his brother is kicked out and promises to return to Nate. Apparently that doesn't happen, as we jump ahead fifteen years to Nate bartending and pickpocketing his patrons. It's an odd casting choice; obviously Holland is eminently bankable, but his boyish good looks and higher voice don't quite match the ruff and rugged vibe of the Drake character. He tries, bless him, by wearing leather and bulking up a lot from his Spider-man look, but he can't quite shake the impression that he is playing dress-up as an adventure hero. His sleight of hand is more in line with Oliver Twist than his badassery is with Lara Croft. 

At his bar, he's approached by Mark Wahlberg -- frankly, looking and acting exactly as I expect Holland will one day -- and the story proper gets underway. Wahlberg's character Sully recently was exploring with Nate's brother and together they stole an old diary promising to lead them to an ancient treasure from Magellan's historic voyage. Globetrotting and stealing are both easy enough for these two (surprising if they're merely thieves), though they have a rocky start when it comes to trusting each other. Once they cross paths with Chloe (beautiful and talented Sophia Ali), an old teammate of Sully's, things really get going quickly, and I lost track of the plot's intricacies. Or perhaps I should say complexities, because there's very little that's intricate in this film.

It's a muscly, rollicking adventure from start to finish, and it works hard to overcome the typical video-game-adaptation problem of not having enough heart. There are many "emotional" scenes in this film that seem catered to Holland's penchant for teary-eyed stares, and for the most part they help disguise the feeling of action obsession. But between some truly outrageous set pieces -- when we get to the completely bonkers cargo plane episode, the auditorium was bubbling with audible laughter rather than gasps or cheers -- and a lackluster villain, this movie reveals that there's just not much substance to be enjoyed. I mean, Antonio Banderas is the villain, and it feels like he's in about three scenes before he's suddenly and bloodlessly dispatched. I couldn't help but feel his part was probably truncated by at least half. Then again, his main minion (Tati Gabrielle) is never less than entrancing to watch.

It's also decidedly safe in terms of content for a PG-13 movie. Not just in terms of sex or violence, although precious little of either is present here, but even in terms of plot, character, and humor. There are so few earned laughs in this movie that I think most of it was played earnestly; for something so laughable, it should be riotously funny. But it's rarely humorous, and rarely very serious, which makes the flavor of the whole film -- felt most strongly in its meandering middle section -- tepid and vague. There's also precious little that grounds the film in reality visually, as so much relies on digital effects and green screens that it occasionally felt like we were actually watching a video game on a huge screen. Perhaps some more world building, character development, or even a simpler and more fleshy plot would have done the trick. Perhaps playing the game is a better investment. I'll leave that for others to determine, but I had an entertainingly diverting two hours with this picture.

Death on the Nile (2022)

Score: 4 / 5

Thank goodness Kenneth Branagh can still surprise us. In his follow-up to Murder on the Orient Express (in 2017, five years ago, can you believe?!), he returns to the Poirot pot and gives us inklings of greatness. The previous installment in Branagh's burgeoning franchise left a lot to be desired for this viewer, but any effort to make a fairly stoic, period mystery would be challenging for most major studios right now; while I disagree with his choices to make certain parts action-based and illogically melodramatic, I understand that he wanted it to be accessible and entertaining for younger audiences and to make lots of money. But I'm grateful this time that he chose an Agatha Christie story that lends itself quite well to more of those action-packed money shots.

This time, it's out of the snowbound Alps and into the sparkling, expansive Nile valley. Hercule Poirot (Branagh) is again hard at work, both in solving the titular crime -- although the body count increases dramatically -- and in dealing with his own history. We open with a black-and-white flashback scene in WWI, with a convincingly digitally de-aged Poirot getting injured and falling in love with the nurse who aided him and encouraged him to grow a large mustache to hide his scars. It opens the film with surprising tragedy and violence but also warmth and actual romance, all things that were notably missing from the previous film. It feels, this time, that writer Michael Green (American Gods, Logan, Alien: Covenant, Blade Runner 2049, and Jungle Cruise) hits his stride a bit more confidently and with good reason. His tweaks to the source material, as before, wonderfully diversify the cast, but this time it feels more earned and less forced; his other additions -- especially including Bouc (the wonderful Tom Bateman) -- are truly inspired, and I just about lost my mind when the third body hit the floor nearer to the climax of this film.

I don't really want to go over the beats of this film, because as with any mystery, half the joy is taking the journey with the characters. And what a journey this story takes, along a lush and exotic Nile river cruise in 65mm film. To be fair, most if not all of it is certainly digitally enhanced or completely manufactured, but this is big-budget moviemaking and it never feels less than ridiculously expensive. The costumes are breathtaking and shimmering in the bright lights, the champagne flows in bubbling rivers, and the S.S. Karnak, a honeymoon river boat on the Nile, shines with hardwood floors and windows for days. I noticed at least one crocodile action shot, too, and that made me impossibly joyful. 

And then there is the cast, which is as varied and beautiful and talented as any ensemble picture we've had in a while. Whereas the previous film's cast often felt underwritten and misdirected, this cast actively breathes in the grandiosity of its surroundings and leans into the glittering bourgeois atmosphere with vivacity. I was especially pleased with Sophie Okonedo and Letitia Wright as the jazz-singing Otterbournes, though the character of Bouc's mother Euphemia is lovely as played by Annette Bening. Then there are the stars, the handsome Armie Hammer as Simon Doyle and his beautiful fiancee Jacqueline de Bellefort, played by Emma Mackey, whose intensely sensual introduction in the film felt a little jarring considering the allegations of abuse and assault against him in real life. Then enters Gal Gadot as the impossibly gorgeous heiress Linnet Ridgeway, for whom Simon leaves his fiancee and gets quickly married, leaving a distraught Jacqueline to follow them hauntingly and hauntedly around the world.

Who else? The ensemble includes Ali Fazal, Russell Brand (almost unrecognizable and underutilized, thankfully), Rose Leslie, and even the achingly trenchant real-life comedy duo of Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French. It's hard to give everyone equal time, but the balance is better on the Karnak than it was on the Orient Express, even with each character mostly deconstructed to a few basic traits. At least they look pretty! And the actors do significant work to each feel sympathetic and suspicious when the screenplay gives them precious little to do. I found Mackey and Okonedo the most joyful to watch, other than Bateman of course, but this affair as a whole is more emotionally satisfying, visually splendid, and less illogical in scope and style than Branagh's previous Christie adaptation. I didn't expect to say this, but I do rather hope for more from this series, even though at the current rate they're being produced we'll be lucky to have half a dozen in total. I'm hoping for Evil Under the Sun next. 

Moonfall (2022)

Score: 2 / 5

Don't Look Up told a parodical story of a real -- if vague -- fear of celestial bodies destroying Earth. It killed off the dinosaurs, right? So obviously we'll be next. And we've seen similarly inspired stories before, from Disney's Dinosaur to Lars von Trier's Melancholia, obviously each with a rather different tone. Rarely has the moon been the body meant to cause destruction (with a clear exception in The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask for you gamers), so naturally it was about time. What with the US Space Force being a fairly new thing, it's amazing we haven't seen more movies like this. Well, other than 2020's Greenland, which I will maintain is among the dazzling best of the disaster genre.

In what starts as a fairly cool idea, the latest disaster flick suggests that the moon is falling out of orbit and on a spinning collision course with us. The science -- or, I guess, as someone who doesn't know physics, the "science" -- involved is fascinating, as Earth's gravity gets increasingly chaotic. What starts as global tidal waves becomes more tectonic as land masses buckle and entire cities picked up and smashed on each progressive lunar revolution. It's a cool concept, and frankly the scenes of mass destruction are really entertaining in a way only Roland Emmerich has ever really mastered.

Emmerich has made a career out of destroying the world, or at least messing it up pretty badly, and it's usually a lot of fun! Moonfall isn't an exception to the rule, and it's a typical mix of effective thrills and overproduced hooey, flavored by that delightful sci-fi "what if" suggestibility. From Independence Day to 2012 and The Day After Tomorrow, and from 10,000 BC to even Anonymous (by far my favorite of his work), he takes conspiracy theories -- or at least the idea of major existential theories -- and turns them into thrillers about mass destruction and rewriting history. Emmerich knows how to tell these stories and what audiences want visually from them, and so he usually delivers it pretty darn well, like painting the apocalypse in a wine and canvas event for his drunk and amateur friends.

The problem is usually with his writers, which often includes himself. Moonfall is a profoundly stupid film on the page, which is probably why the "master of disaster" had to independently produce this enormously-budgeted flick. What could have been a cool story about a natural disaster is warped into one of the most aggressively weird sci-fi trips since Interstellar, and I don't say that as a good comparison point. SPOILER ALERT: it's basically "Transformers" (although I know nothing about that franchise, it almost certainly fits), where the moon is a hollow shell meant to safeguard and repopulate humanity as necessary, and it is now under assault by a swarm of Artificial Intelligence machines intending to eliminate humanity. I told you this shit got weird fast.

Whatever cutesy dynamic Godzilla vs. Kong embraced in its conspiracy theorist and sidekick geek character is largely recreated here in a character played by Game of Throne's John Bradley. He's always thought the moon was a megastructure, and his combined joy and horror at discovering its displacement is a bit infectious. His initial alarmist proclamations fall on deaf ears (I told you this felt like a companion piece to Don't Look Up) and so he leaks the deets to the media before NASA finally takes him seriously and calculates less than a month before collision. The military wants to nuke the moon, but for various illogical reasons they decide first to send more astronauts up there to find out what's going on (nevermind the earlier mysterious deaths and impending death of Earth). Who do they send? Space partners Halle Berry and Patrick Wilson, because frankly nobody's character name matters.

There's a lot of wasted time on the personal lives of these characters, whose melodrama is forced and unsatisfying. Wilson's son (Charlie Plummer) is trouble, as is his estranged wife and daughters, who now live with Michael Pena's character; Berry's son has a foreign exchange babysitter (Kelly Yu); Bradley's aging mother barely remembers him, despite his having a cat memorably named Fuzz Aldrin. The dynamics of these characters are frighteningly flat, despite hard work from Bradley and average work from the other leads (except for the always amazing Donald Sutherland, who shows up for exactly one very creepy and unnecessary and unnecessarily creepy scene). Could their universally one-note characterizations -- caricaturizations? -- simply be Emmerich's latent nihilism manifesting, even as a strange campy misanthropy? Possibly, and that interpretive lens would make another screening fascinating, if I cared enough to do that.

While its premise is great (the moon, falling; I just can't get enough of that), its story is shit, and its acting ain't where it's at, Moonfall also boasts some of the strangest effects I've seen in months. Compare the effects of this with Emmerich's most recent film, Midway, and you'll see what I mean. Many scenes of this film, by comparison, are clearly sound stages, especially during the climax as multiple characters race along a winding snowy road to a safe bunker in Aspen, Colorado. It's almost laughable, if it weren't meant to be so serious; some of the special effects are pretty great here, as gravity is in a constant state of flux, but the backgrounds don't match the action. Even earlier, often something cataclysmic is happening in the backgrounds and the characters seem quite bored, indifferent, or ignorant in the foreground. So if you're here for the drama or the storytelling, save your money and time. If you're here for a zany, eccentric filmmaker entertaining his own fever dream, buckle up and settle in. It's a bumpy ride.