She Said (2022)

Score: 4 / 5

Another year, another Oscar-baiting journalism procedural. I don't say that as a critique, per se, and indeed I do love this sub-subgenre, but it seems that a major one with award-winning casts and writers shows up during awards season quite regularly. And as long as investigative reporters continue to capture our public consciousness with revelations about abuses of power and corruption, we'll have more A-list dramas like She Said. This one, from director Maria Schrader (Unorthodox on Netflix, which I cannot recommend highly enough) and writer Rebecca Lenkiewicz (Disobedience and Colette) tells the recent story of the downfall of Harvey Weinstein and the popularization of the #MeToo movement. More specifically, it's the story of the New York Times reporters who brought the situation to public light.

Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan play Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor, respectively, who in 2017 receive a lead that actress Rose McGowan was sexually assaulted by Harvey Weinstein. Other names begin to circulate, including Gwyneth Paltrow and Ashley Judd, the latter of whom makes an appearance in the film playing herself. The reporters need more names and more details, but many of the women are unable to speak due to various NDAs or unwilling to be blacklisted in their careers. Weinstein was very well connected as an Indiewood producer at the top of his decades-long game.

What frustrates me about this particular film is that it isn't ever quite as interesting as I wanted it to be. Of course it's loaded with frustrations as a result of the challenges its characters must overcome to publish their story, and that's fine. But the screenplay isn't particularly keen on fleshing out all the legal intricacies of the investigation, and so several moments left me wishing for just a little more dialogue to understand the realities these reporters faced. I'd contrast this film's approach with that of The Report, which is so haunting to watch it feels like a thriller; I'd compare it, on the other hand, to Spotlight in that it sacrifices some of the pleasures and anxieties of suspense in order to more fully engage with the emotional journeys of the survivors whose stories need to be heard.

This makes for a much more emotional than cerebral film, as it forces us to sit with the characters and experience their testimonies head-on. It's an effective approach, in no small part because the #MeToo movement is so recent and so drastically changing the makeup of film business. It's also timely given the last presidential administration, the executive of which is played in this film by James Austin Johnson (the uncanny political impersonator and comedian from SNL) in a single scene in voiceover. Another movie about institutions enabling powerful and abusive men, victimized women being silenced, and then having it all flipped is just what we need right now. 

I love that the film's characters are almost all women. It's telling that the title embraces the important second half of the "he said/she said" dismissal that often arises in questions of sexual assault or harassment. Not unlike Ridley Scott showed us in The Last Duel, that particular idea of believing what the survivor says is crucial, and often ignored in male-dominated spaces. The two leads here are women dealing with female issues; Twohey struggles with postpartum depression while Kantor has two young children at home, and while they are supported well by their husbands and editors (including Andre Braugher), this case sends them both into a spiral due to its immeasurable implications. But the supporting cast, including Patricia Clarkson as another editor and Jennifer Ehle, Samantha Morton, and Angela Yeoh as survivors is all excellent just like the two leads.

Ultimately, it's inspiring to see, like in The Post, their persistence and integrity win the day in the end. It's annoying to know that there are so many people implicated by the crimes in this film (Weinstein certainly didn't do what he did in a vacuum); who exactly paid off all the hush monies and settlements isn't a matter this screenplay wanted to tackle. But then again, I'm perfectly fine with any movie that lionizes this kind of social justice and the importance of a free press in the real world.

Till (2022)

Score: 5 / 5

Finally, a biopic about the Till family released the same year that the Emmett Till Antilynching Act has been signed by the president. Can you imagine? It's 2022 and lynching is finally a federal hate crime. And it's thanks, in no small part, to the decades of hard work from Mamie Till-Mobley, his bereaved mother, who became an activist after her son's brutal murder. This film is indeed a biopic of her life with particular focus on the period of time immediately following Emmett's death, including the media frenzy, the trial, and her early activism as she navigates the shattering of the boundary between private and public life.

The first act of Till dramatizes the events around the end of Emmett Till's life. Jalyn Hall plays the fourteen-year-old boy, excited to head south to visit with his cousins in Mississippi. It's just a taste of his story, but the screenwriters have to establish some of his identity for us in ways that the media of the time largely ignored; rather than allow us to think of Emmett as a juvenile delinquent or "thug" who might have been asking for trouble, this early introduction humanizes the boy and reminds us that real people are so much more interesting and complex than headlines allow us to remember. It's no less eye-opening to see the ways Emmett, who lives in Chicago with his mother, has trouble changing his interactions with white people when he's suddenly in an environment quite hostile to him. That's not to say Chicago didn't have its racist moments too -- at least one scene in a store depicts this -- but the massive culture shift to rural Mississippi is something that Emmett senses but cannot quite understand. Any slight against a white person is amplified in ways that escape him.

It's all the more heartbreaking to see this disconnect because his mother had given him such stern lessons before his trip. Mamie has clearly had consistent, continuous conversations with her son about the dangers of navigating spaces dominated by white people and how to stay safe and fly under the radar. They've made do for themselves in Chicago, but she knows full well the perils of Southern inhospitality. She knows "rabble rousers" and other Black activists are being targeted and murdered. She reminds Emmett to "be small" and to come back to her safely at any cost. It's heartbreaking to watch in so many ways, not least because Danielle Deadwyler imbues each glance at the boy with masterful control of love and sorrow, fear and hope. She barely moves her face in these early scenes: her absolute control over her own face and voice is both a Deadwyler skill and, I suspect, a character choice. Mamie, as a relatively independent Black woman in Chicago in 1955, has cultivated a voice and demeanor and appearance that lets her fit in well enough with white folks to get by without issue. She keeps every emotion in fierce check, exhibiting a fairly stoic disposition unless she's safe at home with her family.

Then the expected happens. We know that Emmett Till was murdered mere days into his trip. In late August, he has a documented and much-disputed interaction with a young white woman working at a store in Money, Mississippi. The film's dramatization of this surprised me a bit, as many stories over the decades since have offered differing accounts. We may never know what all actually happened between them, but the film seems to pull from multiple stories to flesh out the scenario: Emmett is struck by Carolyn Bryant's (Haley Bennett) beauty and compares her to a movie star, he shows her a stock photo that came with his new wallet without describing it as such, and then he "wolf whistles" at her. It's not as ambiguous as perhaps it should be; other accounts of the real story have indicated that Emmett's whistling was a tool to help with his stutter. Regardless, the film makes choices of what to recreate and how, and I think the writers capably adapt the story for its full effect.

Director Chinonye Chukwu (Clemency) hits another heavy drama out of the park with Till. She smartly moves things along at a deliberate but brisk pace, letting the scene of the crime pass by with less spectacle than most filmmakers would prefer. We get a terrifying scene of the men barging into the house where Emmett was staying and abducting him from his bedroom, but the actual torture and lynching is only alluded to in a single wide shot of a barn lit at night while Emmett screams in the distance. It's a powerful move to not depict the violence, and it's definitely the right move for this film. Chukwu doesn't ignore the pain of the situation though -- far from it -- and from here the movie squarely belongs to Deadwyler as Mamie. Her haunting sorrow will stick with you for a long time after the credits roll, and it helps that Deadwyler is so committed to depicting every possible emotion running through her character's head. And it just keeps going, as her family (and mother, played by Whoopi Goldberg in an underutilized role) gathers around her, as the NAACP reaches out, and ultimately as she travels to Mississippi herself.

Chukwu's control over the film is undeniable, and I hope she makes a lot more movies. Clemency was one of the my favorite movies of 2019, mostly because of her ability to harness, guide, and showcase the talent she puts on screen. One of the moments in Till that most reminded me of Chukwu's unique skills is when Mamie testifies in court: the incredible scene -- and transcendent performance from Deadwyler -- features a long take of Mamie's face as she runs the gamut of emotional responses to delivering her own testimony, from controlled weeping to a near convulsion as her eyes flutter and finally to an icy hot conviction as she declares with no doubt that the body she identified was indeed her son's.

It's an astonishing film. Not least because it doesn't actually depict physical violence on Black bodies even while it honors Till-Mobley's famous decision to let the world see what it had done to her son's body. Its music and cinematography are stunning, but the performances and storytelling make it one of the few truly great films of the year. Its timeliness is hammered home at the end, as onscreen text tells us that the injustice of Emmett's murder only grew with the trial and its fallout, as none of the murderers or Carolyn herself have ever been punished. The Anti-Lynching Act is great, but so is justice. Thank God Mamie knew that and became the activist we should all be.

TÁR (2022)

Score: 5 / 5

Easily claiming a spot in my top 10 favorites of the year, TÁR is the latest masterpiece by Todd Field. Field hasn't made a movie in, as far as I know, 16 years, but you'd never know it. His style, not unlike Tom Ford's (who similarly doesn't make nearly enough movies), is graceful and enigmatic, seductive and vicious. He seeks what amounts to the sublime, and he succeeds yet again in this haunting character-driven chamber piece. It's an arthouse film through and through, but of the Gothic variety that also encompasses films like Black Swan or Steve Jobs, centering on a great artist dealing with the cost of that greatness. There's a madness swirled into the proceedings, and an eroticism, that makes it all fiendishly satisfying.

When we meet Lydia Tár, played by arguably a career-best Cate Blanchett, she's entering an interview with Adam Gopnik from the New Yorker in a concert hall. The audience offers her generous applause; she is a world-renowned composer and conductor (and pianist and Juilliard professor and ethnomusicologist) who specializes in classical music, so her distinction of being an EGOT winner is all the more unique. She's been recording Mahler's symphonies to re-popularize them, and she only has one recording left in the cycle. Her answers to his questions are profound (Field also wrote the breathtakingly brilliant screenplay), not least because she attributes to herself the godly power of controlling time while conducting. Her narcissism notwithstanding, it's also clear in this scene that she is not universally worshipped: some people appear to be either judging or envying her, and we see at least one phone screen with unkind messages being shared.

Lydia isn't a particularly lovable person. Her sensitive hearing, which helps her professionally and artistically, means that she's constantly on edge because of noise. The film's sound mixing and editing is phenomenal in actively moving around the surrounding space; you absolutely have to see this movie in a cinema or with excellent surround sound. The sound design puts us effectively in her headspace, where these almost violent intrusions come as both a shock and an annoyance. Lydia is also a pretty intense type-A person, immediately chastising her wife Sharon (Nina Hoss) at home for leaving too many lights on. Notably, her apartment (this one in Berlin) feels cold and modern, like a bunker, sparsely but impeccably decorated. During this interaction, we're also keyed into the secret that Lydia has been stealing and using Sharon's pills, to whatever end, and the well-known fact that Sharon is in fact Lydia's orchestra's concertmaster. Perhaps Lydia's greatest redeeming character element is her selfless love for her daughter Petra.

But despite their privately troubled marriage, the couple seems to work quite well in tandem. They are helped immensely by Lydia's quiet but efficient assistant Francesca (Noémie Merlant), whom Lydia clearly relies upon but treats coldly. It's a sort of Devil Wears Prada situation, but without the inherent comedy. Oddly enough, to continue that reference, Lydia lunches in one scene with another conductor (Mark Strong) who clearly admires and lusts after her prestige but tries to veil it with flattery and gossip. She can see right through him, but her own hunger for influence allows her to share some insight into her callousness toward people who she deems no longer useful: she plans to "rotate" an elderly player before the upcoming concert and recording, which will rightfully be seen as a betrayal and insult.

By this point in the film, we've seen her callous, borderline cruel, demeanor firsthand already. During a masterclass at Juilliard, Lydia's passionate lecture on Bach becomes an ad hominem assault on identity politics, directed at a student who proclaims (banal and dispossessed, as Gen Z-ers do) that, as a queer person of color, they aren't down to study Bach due to his patriarchal tendencies in life. Personally, I veer closely toward Lydia's ideology in this scene, but seeing it on the warpath like this was enough to really make me anxious. It's a fascinating and surprisingly early scene, one that demonstrates as much about Lydia's character and the tone of the film as it does about Field, whose writing is so meticulously detailed and well-researched that I forgot more than once this is a work of fiction.

I don't really want to spoil the plot, of which there isn't a ton that's concrete. It's primarily a character study, though certain key things do happen to spur new facets of Lydia's personality into the proverbial spotlight. She's hungry for influence and power, but she's also utterly dedicated to her craft and to excellence for herself. She considers an artist's vague intentions to be the greatest affront to artists everywhere, and so she's always ready with reasons and justifications for everything she does, veiling her desires in couched and assured logical explanations. Even Field acts this way as director at times, marrying himself with his character. In the lecture, we see both sides clearly, but as the professor Lydia carries more weight. As she decides how to dismiss her elderly musician, we're only really given her perspective in full. When a former protégé commits suicide, when Lydia hires and flirts with a young cellist, when she presses Francesca to help her cover an affair, she's never really unreasonable. She's just kind of awful, but the film itself shows us how difficult it would be to win against her in any argument. Case in point: the young cellist auditions for us, just as for her, and she's really very talented; it isn't until after that Lydia's suspicions are confirmed that she's also a pretty young thing who is probably queer.

Todd Field's latest is a stunning, revelatory achievement in a year mostly void of this kind of arthouse film. And it crosses genres, which would make it just as accomplished and great in any year. While it fits squarely into the tortured artists subgenre, it also fits into the recently growing subgenre of abusive behavior by supposedly great artists or artistic institutions (think The Wife, A Star is Born, Blonde, and the upcoming She Said, to name just a few). I love that this particular film stands apart due to Field's lack of moralizing; he doesn't depict Lydia as a hero or villain, just as he both lambasts and praises the musical-business culture that created her, houses her, employs her, and kind of resents her. Just as with Little Children, his last feature film, he just wants to ask the questions and take a moment to live in the gray area of their consequences and implications. It's powerful, cerebrally and spiritually, and it helps that it's also one of the most technically accomplished and daring works this year.

The Good Nurse (2022)

Score: 4 / 5

Without having any knowledge of what I was seeing, I clicked on this recent Netflix release purely because of its leads. Jessica Chastain and Eddie Redmayne starring together? Yes please, and I don't much care what happens! But Tobias Lindholm's The Good Nurse is in fact more than the sum of its main characters, and it's got a lot on its mind to boot.

Amy is a nurse in New Jersey, working night shift in the ICU. She's also a single mother without health insurance until she completes four more months working at her job. This is a problem when we're told that she suffers a serious heart condition that forces her to occasionally disappear to a private room to get her bearings and breathing back under control. The condition is life-threatening, and her high-stress job is doing nothing to help; she has to keep it secret, or it could be grounds for her termination from work. It's a pretty awful system if her employer, a hospital, would fire her on medical grounds and additionally wouldn't help her anyway. Chastain, ever the radiant feminist, is quite subdued in this role, presenting a more internalized character than we're used to seeing from her. She carries the film with a sort of soft internal clock, an awareness that if -- when, really -- her job becomes too stressful, she could die quite suddenly. 

The Good Nurse is a curious film in that its director, who is Danish and hasn't directed many films yet, allows it to breathe a lot more than most thrillers. Indeed, this movie is lugubrious and will probably send most casual viewers to sleep. But if you tap into its unusual wavelength, the film slides into a similar groove to a David Fincher film, coldly calculating itself to within an inch of its efficacy, chilling in its cerebral attachment/emotional detachment to the proceedings. How do I make this jump? Easily, once I tell you about the other half of the film.

Charles Cullen is brought in as a new nurse to help in the ICU and quickly bonds with Amy. He joins the night shift and helps with her patients. When he learns her secret, he offers to help, even using a hiccup in a medicine vending machine to get her free pills. When he doesn't work, he even helps watch her daughters, who similarly bond with him. There doesn't appear to be romance between the two, which is interesting; one wonders if Amy considers him romantically or even sexually, but his role is more of a fairy godparent or kindly young uncle. He's too good to be true, at least from our perspective and Amy's.

So when one of Amy's patients suddenly and unexpectedly dies, things get a bit weird. An abnormal amount of insulin is found in her blood, which means she was dosed incorrectly. Amy knows she didn't do it, and continues about her work with a more watchful eye. The hospital's risk manager (a deliciously cold Kim Dickens) has notified the police as a matter of routine. The police begin interviewing staff, much to the hospital's chagrin, and the risk manager demands to be always present to mitigate any blowback or fallout. Dickens's presence injects the film with a nasty shock of realization, in case we didn't already know, that healthcare in America is sorely broken. The film could lean into this a lot more, and it would be awful and wonderful to behold. But that's not the story, and this isn't a manifesto.

It's not really ever a question of whether Charles is offing patients by overdoses, at least not for us. The drama and suspense of this film comes from our wondering when Amy will catch on, and then of course when the authorities will. The police investigators (Noah Emmerich and Nnamdi Asomugha) do an extensive check on Charles, learning about his peripatetic and extensive work history at many other hospitals, none of which give details on his employment but all of which are suspiciously cagey about their relationship with him. Rumors will swirl, of course, and so the investigators approach Amy, Charles's closest thing to a confidant, to ask for her help in stopping him. All while more patients at her hospital die.

Ultimately, the film feels a bit like the documentary Deliver Us From Evil to me (it's my favorite documentary!) in that it lambasts the institutional systems that are so obsessed with protecting themselves that they are willing and even eager to allow predators to continue their crimes by mobilizing them and shuffling them around to other places instead of just stopping them. The only thing that stops this cycle of "business over ethics" is a person with integrity in the right place at the right time. That seems to be the impetus for dramatizing this story for both the screenwriter and the director. It helps to have two world-class A-list actors leading the way with deeply nuanced, introspective and introverted characters we don't usually see from them. And then there's the surreal story of the real-life Cullen, who may have killed hundreds of people during his career, which offers plenty of fodder for nightmares beyond this psychological thriller.

Blonde (2022)

Score: 3.5 / 5

Born in the Roaring Twenties, Norma Jeane Mortenson was the child of an abusive and mentally unstable mother. Blonde attempts to tell the story of what becomes of this poor girl who was sent to live in an orphanage at a young age. I say "attempts" because, as is the problem with most biopics, how do you accurately and honestly reproduce the life of a global superstar in a couple hours? This one, about one Marilyn Monroe -- other than the first scene, mostly about her after she changed her name -- is sure to cause lots of controversy. Why? Because some people are as madly fanatic about her as they are about Elvis (who also had a wonderful biopic treatment this year) and think it's got to be exact or it won't work. Because Marilyn's infamous and tragic downfall makes her life so much more poignant and heartrending, especially now that we're in an age of reckoning for the abuse of women especially in show business. Because the film is rated NC-17 and being widely released on Netflix, of all places. Because the film is primarily based on a fictional and experimental book by Joyce Carol Oates rather than a historical account. There are many reasons to hate or even just distrust Blonde, but very few of them, to my mind, actually have to do with the film itself.

Whether or not the film exploits her life isn't really my concern here, though it seems a likely conversation starter after any viewing of Blonde. We can be certain her life was exploited by men in positions of power and wealth and influence, and some will decry this film on similar grounds. The NC-17 rating allows for detailed glimpses into the sex icon's sexual life, ones that are often provocative to the point of excess. I'm thinking primarily of her dubious throuple relationship, one party being Charles Chaplin Jr., depicted early in the film, and also of her fellating President JFK in a long, extreme close-up much later in the film. Of course, in a film that lasts almost three hours long, there is a lot of time for sex, drugs, booze, and whatever else the glamorous Hollywood life can throw at Marilyn.

Crucial to understanding this film is that it's very much a biopic of its time. There have been an increasing number of biographical films lately that do their research, sure enough, and even have a few true-to-life recreation scenes, but that fictionalize most of whatever plot is present. Think Elvis, as I mentioned. Think Spencer or Jackie or Judy or Rocketman or Bohemian Rhapsody. These films, like Blonde, take the idea of the superstar at its center and attempt to explore his or her life in a highly theatrical, performative manner. The cinematography and production design are often diligently accurate and straightforward even as they exaggerate reality to make things a bit dreamlike. The fantasy is cushioned from criticism, then, by writing and editing that links past to present and future, often deliberately in confusing patterns. These techniques allow for condemnation of cultural opinions of these people (notice that all of the subjects of the films I listed are somewhat controversial in casual conversation) and the harmful, shameful methods of their respective industries; they also allow for a certain amount of voyeuristic viewing pleasure in seeing the "unseen" parts of these lives that were bigger than life.

Writer and director Andrew Dominik displays a surprising amount of confidence and dexterity and skill behind the scenes here, all the more so when considering his previous work: muscly, gritty crime dramas Killing Them Softly and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. I found most of the film to be quite sensitive and thoughtful in its approach to Marilyn's interior life, brought stunningly, beautifully, evocatively to life by Ana de Armas (Knives Out, Deep Water, No Time to Die, Blade Runner 2049) who lives and breathes Marilyn. It's a chilling, haunting portrayal that feels lived-in, as though she has been playing the unlikely role for years already. More importantly, she seems to thrive in the film's intentionally inconsistent tone: the tone, vacillating between dreamland and organized nightmare, feels a bit more realistic and believable than most biopics that just hop from one significant event in a celebrity's life to another. This approach feels nuanced and complex, and de Armas rises to the occasion to make Marilyn one of the most relatable and raw characters on screen all year. It is a bit unfortunate that so much of her identity is infantilized (her daddy issues manifest often as she calls her various lovers "Daddy") and victimized (she's almost always crying with some force, somewhat undressed if not stark naked, and even bloody). 

This isn't a terribly organized review, and I don't want to summarize, so I'll just hit a few more takeaway points. I mentioned cinematography earlier; Chayse Irvin also did BlacKkKlansman and Beyonce's Lemonade, and here he leans heavily into impressionism, even to the point of drastically changing aspect ratios and use of color/black and white, to break down our expectations to this film's approach to Marilyn's life and provoke more cognitive appreciation for the story. One moment that stands out is when we're in the perspective of a toilet bowl as Marilyn pukes her bubbly and pills onto us; moments like this, repeated often, could each deserve an academic paper to explore how and why these shots were made and their effect on the audience as well as the film itself. Another -- admittedly, my least favorite parts of the film -- dramatizes an abortion Marilyn undergoes with a POV shot from inside her vagina; it doesn't help that other scenes depict Marilyn speaking with her aborted fetus, and the film smacks suspiciously of anti-abortion propaganda as an unfortunate result. However, its attention to Marilyn's state of mind, especially through dialogue, help even these scenes feel more like service to her character development rather than simple lurid points of interest for the bored viewer.

Julianne Nicholson plays Norma Jeane's mother, and she's terrifying and typically wonderful. Despite its doubtful connection to reality, I loved her apparently happy throuple early in the film; personal interests aside, it's nice to see this kind of relationship being generally supportive, loving, and fulfilling for all parties of the nontraditional romance. It's also pretty clear that these two men are the only ones who really loved her for herself her entire life; leave it to two queer men to love the original hometown Norma Jeane for who she is as well as the glamorous sex icon Marilyn for who she is. But as much as that is nice to see, there are the darker sides of show business as well. Her marriages to Joe DiMaggio (Bobby Cannavale, a perfect casting choice) and Arthur Miller (Adrien Brody in a refreshingly underused and underacted role) aren't exactly cakewalks, and her coping mechanisms of booze and pills only get worse and more visceral. As the film passes its halfway point, things get increasingly unhinged in all aspects, and it's all intentional. At her premiere of Some Like It Hot (which I absolutely turned on the minute Blonde ended), the queue of men leer at her as visual effects warp their faces, elongating their mouths like wolfish maws eager to eat her up. Her The Seven Year Itch publicity shoot in the white dress over a subway grate is shown to us multiple times from different angles and various color treatments, turning the famous image into a nightmarish visual trap.

You begin to wonder if Dominik's real, secret goal was to give us such a spectacle, such a gratuitous look into Marilyn's life -- or what her life must have felt like, even if it's not what it appeared to be from the outside -- that we remember not to worship celebrities. That good or bad representation only matters if the dignity of the person in question hasn't been compromised first. That seeing Marilyn includes what she did and what was done to her, of course, but that she herself wasn't (and shouldn't be, now in retrospect) bound by those elements. Then again, it's also possible that this was a morally bankrupt attempt at a cash-grab for salacious viewers to get horny about an old star. I think the latter interpretation is out, on pure virtue of the craftsmanship on display in this character-driven epic. 

Lou (2022)

Score: 4 / 5

What? This movie must have been carelessly dropped on Netflix sometime recently, and I just won't forgive them for that. I shouldn't have to do the "bored scroll" through what the streaming giant thinks I might like in order to stumble across an action thriller starring Allison freaking Janney. It's called Lou, and that tells you nothing. The blurb is vague. The poster or image is vague and just sort of bad. But the movie is fabulous, and I earnestly hope that hearing that is enough to persuade you, dear reader, to go watch it.

Janney plays the titular character, a recluse and survivalist-type isolationist in the rural Pacific Northwest. It's 1986 and a massive seasonal storm is about to blast Orcas Island, off the coast of Washington, where Lou is not doing well. Sure, she capably kills a deer in the opening sequence, proving her mettle to us if no one else. But she also withdraws her savings from the bank, drinks straight bourbon, and writes a letter to someone about inheriting her property before preparing her rifle for suicide. Just then, a distant neighbor named Hannah (Jurnee Smollett-Bell) pounds on her door. Hannah's daughter Vee is missing, and she's pretty sure she was taken. The storm has just hit the island. As the sheets of rain cascade down, Hannah catches Lou up to speed on her situation, hoping Lou can help her as the only other person for miles, probably.

Vee was taken by Phillip, Hannah's ex-husband, who was a special forces soldier and abusive husband who faked his own death so he could sneak in and abduct his daughter. Phillip's (Logan Marshall-Green) sociopathy notwithstanding, he's a talented survivalist in his own right, and he has some backup nearby in the form of a couple mercenary-like friends. He aims to spirit Vee away and take revenge on his ex-wife after terrorizing her for a while. Of course, none of them counted on Hannah asking Lou for help; Lou is a sort of Liam Neeson from Taken character, so stoic you'd never know she has decades of preparation and training under her belt. They begin by tracking Vee and Phillip through the mountainous forest, and it feels like a really solid ground for a survival thriller.

Then Lou goes full-on badass bitch mode when they come across Phillip's friends, and the movie completely captured my attention as Janney kicks their rears and sells every millisecond of her fight choreography. After this scene, the film never really reaches this Atomic Blonde-level of butt-kicking again, but that's okay because it also wants to surprise us with a few dark twists. Her odyssey toward vengeance is not wholly unlike Nic Cage's in Pig, but it's much more exciting and less pretentious here, and she's not after an animal. In fact, she's much more closely related to the other characters than we were led to expect, and while this revelation might be a lot for some to swallow -- unrealistic as it may be -- it helps the film pack completely unexpected but well-earned emotional blows in its climax.

Suffice to say, Janney's acting chops are put on full display here, not as a dedicated character actor or even as a vehicle for a particularly nuanced character study, but rather as an action movie star who carries the whole damn thing herself. She's so smart to not waste any time developing her character; she knows Lou so well that she trims all fat from her performance, letting what she delivers in every moment inform us at breakneck speed the depth of her experience and reality. I wish the screenplay or direction leaned more heavily into dramatizing her cynical nature and flirtation with nihilism, especially once the big reveal is, well, revealed. But Janney makes do on her own, without much help from the director or writer. Hers is a masterclass from an unlikely source, and it's a marvel this movie wasn't released in cinemas. It's the kind of nose-to-the-grindstone grimy action thriller that Taylor Sheridan would be proud to have made, and I don't say that lightly.

Armageddon Time (2022)

Score: 2 / 5

The first day of sixth grade could be tough on any kid. Queens in 1980 certainly was tough for Paul Graff, a Jewish-American boy who lives with his parents in a comfortable and financially stable home. Due to his age and expectations of boys at the time, he tends to sleep a lot; when he's awake, he looks a bit lost or bewildered, as though a nap would do him more good than his various activities. Played with sensitivity and bravery by young actor Banks Repeta (The Black Phone), Paul means well but certainly can't stop himself from getting into trouble. His parents and brother seem to fight regularly to make Paul wake up and get going, usually to school. When he's there, he's not shy about causing trouble for his teacher or that he's more interested in doodling, cracking jokes and insults, and thinking about rockets. It's time for Paul to wake up.

At school, Paul meets a new friend at school, Johnny (Jaylin Webb), the only Black student in his class. Johnny is bigger than the other kids; we're told multiple times that he is in sixth grade for the second time, and the teacher chooses to be quite cruel to this student he's sure will be trouble. Johnny gets singled out and harshly reprimanded so often that he begins acting just the way the teacher has proscribed. Paul acts accordingly, relating perhaps a little too strongly to Johnny than his teacher or family would prefer. After a particularly troubling visit with the principal, Paul's mother (Anne Hathaway) calls a family meeting and they decide to send Paul to a private school. 

Armageddon Time is reportedly an autobiography of sorts for writer and director James Gray (Ad Astra, The Lost City of Z, The Immigrant). But it's also a thoughtful meditation on the "Armageddon" of our individual youths, the time when some of us had to suddenly change our mindsets and mature to survive. Paul is coming to the realization he wants to be an artist, but his parents want him to actually make a living someday. He's realizing that Black and white kids are treated differently, and that other identifiers such as being Jewish have various stigmas, challenges, and benefits beyond who you are and what you do on a personal level and a social level. He's seeing the inconsistencies between the American Dream messages preached at him and the realities of his family and family history. The Trump family is entrenched in his new private school, and Maryanne Trump (Jessica Chastain) delivers the first day address to students, lionizing the virtues of hard work and pulling yourself up by the bootstraps. Meanwhile, Paul's maternal grandfather (Anthony Hopkins) tells him about their family escaping antisemitic persecution in Europe.

Hopkins is the heart of this film. When Paul is sad that his parents don't support his dreams of becoming an artist, his grandfather gifts him a professional painting set. Though his age is starting to show, much to his daughter's concern, the grandfather is smart as a whip and eager to be a supportive and encouraging voice for Paul, even to the point of challenging Paul to stand up to bullies of his friend Johnny. He's seen the horrors of racial discrimination and persecution, and he has no interest in letting his grandson experience the same thing in the land of freedom and opportunity. He exhorts Paul to be a mensch, which is lovely but particularly difficult for the 11-year-old boy who just wants to fit in somewhere.

Gray works hard to make the film relatively void of sentimentality or nostalgia even as he wants to create a time capsule of period details. By including the Trumps and Reagan as major cultural moments, he drains the film of political or social neutrality. It's all shot in somewhat cold, dim lights, and the interiors of the family home are darkest when the television is blaring news about the upcoming election. Paul's concerns about internalizing the messaging he receives from his grandfather, his parents, and the authority figures at school and on TV are quite blurry -- intentionally so -- and yet it all builds to a whole lot of nothing. He doesn't learn much by film's end except the importance of thinking for himself, which he dubiously acts upon in the film's final scene as he leaves the Thanksgiving dance at school as Fred Trump delivers an address to the students.

I wanted to love this movie, but it just didn't do much for me. If this had come out in 2016, it might have felt more relevant. As it is, it feels like the de-sentimentalized version of Roma or Boyhood or any other number of autobiographies from auteurs. Which is fine, but it's just not the kind of movie I usually enjoy watching. It walks a fine line between sensations that plague this unique genre: sometimes it feels like the director is forcing us to go through old photo albums of his past, and sometimes it feels like the director is hammering home Big Ideas that he realize shaped his developmental stages of life and wants to preach those messages from the realm of his own experience. And yes, reflection on ourselves is important, and reconciling our memories of the past with perspective from the present can be a beautiful thing, but not in heavyhanded lectures like this. It's just not entertaining.

The acting is pretty solid across the board, but the screenplay doesn't seem to know how to give its characters much to do, other than Paul. His father (Jeremy Strong) is sort of amorphous, at times abusive and disciplining, at times gentle and emotional and kind, at times goofy to a fault. Paul's brother is so briefly and shallowly considered he's almost absent. Paul's teacher is a caricature of (pardon the pun) old-school cruelty. Hathaway's mother character has some heft in the actor's hands, but it's not because of the screenplay doing her any favors. Worst, Johnny is so thinly written I fear he is actually just a really bad representative of Black kids in a film that, by definition, should be more sensitive and knowing. It seems the movie as a whole is meant to be a kind of apology to kids like him, but it never really gets to that point, and by the halfway point even seems to largely sweep Johnny away from its concerns entirely. The early parts in which he proves more consequential relegate only a few attributes to him rather than any depth of character, which he frankly deserves in a film about learning to see and appreciate the interiority of people's lives.

Wendell & Wild (2022)

Score: 4 / 5

Henry Selick returns to his directorial chair for the first time in thirteen years, and it's another visually stunning, creatively intoxicating, and generally overwhelming adventure. His amazing stop-motion animation style is a genre unto itself, to say nothing of his dark and uncanny aesthetic. This time, it's an exclusive streaming release on Netflix during spooky season, the most appropriate choice for this dark and strange story. It feels much like A Nightmare Before Christmas and a bit like James and the Giant Peach, but this film embraces a slightly more surreal style than even Coraline (Selick's last directorial feature). Perhaps its ingenuity and freshness are due to co-writer and producer (and voice actor) Jordan Peele, who is quickly becoming a top-tier horror auteur like Tim Burton always seemed hopeful of being.

Kat (Lyric Ross) is a young Black girl who was orphaned at a young age after her father accidentally drove off a bridge. She blames herself for the accident that killed her parents, and now she's a punk-rock juvenile delinquent in an all-girls Catholic school run by a kindly but mysterious nun named Helley (Angela Bassett). Her only friend is Raul (Sam Zelaya), a trans boy, whose mother helps reveal the film's main conflict to Kat: a private prison company called Klaxon Korp is taking over their town, Rust Bank, and pressuring the school's head, Father Best (James Hong) to give up the property. The Klaxons have a daughter, Siobhan, who leads a posse of preppy kids at the school to antagonize the outcasts, much like Draco Malfoy did. It's a surprising choice for a film like this to be so interested in the prison industrial complex and to paint it in such lurid ways in a kids' movie. But then, some of the best animated films work on a surface level for kids and a more cerebral level for adults; why shouldn't we expose our kids to some of the most serious, complex issues of our time through palatable, fun media?

Wendell and Wild, meanwhile, are demons who work mindless drudgery in the underworld for their father, Buffalo Belzer (Ving Rhames). "Belzer" must be a corruption of Beelzebub and he manages and operates a theme park of hell to torment lost souls, but this demonic daddy with his chest harness is easily the creepiest thing in this film, as Wendell and Wild literally live and work on his body. They sleep in his nostrils and by day work to replenish hair on his scalp with a magic serum. Wild (Peele) likes to eat the hair cream, which apparently gets him high; Wendell (Keegan-Michael Key) and he suddenly discover that the cream actually brings things back to life. When Kat spontaneously gets marked as a Hell Maiden, the demons approach her in dreams with an opportunity: if she summons them to the world of the living, they will use their cream to resurrect her parents.

It's refreshing that Kat isn't a tragic or wimpy character; in fact, she retains her independence and stubbornness and strength throughout the film. It's also refreshing that Key and Peele are so effortlessly funny in their seemingly endless banter as two dispossessed (ha ha!) brothers who are just dumb or bored enough to do something daring and dangerous. The film is smart enough, conversely, to not make Wendell and Wild the villains; Selick and Peele emphasize that those who look like traditional villains aren't too bad, whereas those with money and power are far worse when they prey on and profit off the suffering of others. It's not as clear in terms of narrative, and will surely take some explaining for younger audiences; there are other subplots, too, and off-the-cuff jokes that pile up at times a bit too much. I felt occasionally overstimulated during my own viewing and had to pause just to look at something else more than once.

But that's to say nothing of the beautiful artistry of this film, which I liked just about as much as in Nightmare and Coraline, and in some ways more than those. I repeatedly found myself wishing the film would slow down or cut a character or two just so I could take some time to appreciate the animation, the designs, the voice acting, and the implications of the story. Its kinetic energy turns frenetic early on, so much so that I think I'll need at least one additional viewing to really get a full grasp on the film. But that's kind of typical of Selick's work, as long as you have a stomach for his aesthetic.

Hocus Pocus 2 (2022)

Score: 4 / 5

The witches are back, and there's hell to pay! Almost 30 years after the original, Hocus Pocus 2 graces us this Halloween season, exclusively on Disney+. It's pretty much what we all want and expect, give or take a few elements (and depending on your preferences). Specifically, it heaps on the nostalgia in tribute to the beloved original; some may decry its surprising diversity and inclusivity of realistic demographics, and probably the same detractors will mock its heartfelt efforts to be genuinely sweet, while others will consider its relative lack of violence, scares, or even genuine stakes a shallow substitute for camp, which has been almost entirely sanitized. But it's still a rollicking good time, and we can all be grateful for that.

In the present, Salem celebrates Halloween with renewed vigor. Becca (Whitney Peak) and Izzy (Belissa Escobedo) are two high school friends eager to observe the holiday with their own tradition: dabbling in white magic and having a sleepover for Becca's birthday. After school, they hurry to their favorite haunt, the historic Sanderson house, now a little magic shop run by Gilbert (Sam Richardson), where they stock up on sage and salt and whatever else they want. This time, he even gives them an infamous black flame candle. They're a bit down because their third friend, Cassie (Lilia Buckingham), isn't joining them, as she's been spending all her time with her new boyfriend. But that won't stop them entirely, so they venture into the woods and light the candle under a full moon. They seem to be well aware of the virginity requirement, but they either discount it as a sexist tradition or otherwise don't care, because soon enough the Sanderson sisters materialize in the flesh.

Their goal is much the same as before: to live forever and not disappear by morning's light. As corralling local kiddos to eat didn't work so well before, they try a different tactic this time: using a forbidden spell to become all-powerful. This film begins with a flashback to colonial Salem when the sisters, as little more than orphaned children, are banished from the village. The Reverend Traske (Tony Hale) decided to match the eldest sister, Winnie, with a young man from the village and send the younger sisters to live with other families until they come of age. Winnie naturally refuses, and the Pilgrims banish them from town. Together in the woods, the young girls meet a stylish and beautiful witch (Hannah Waddingham, dressed suspiciously like young Dani in the previous film) who initially appears eager to feed on their lives. Once Winnie is revealed to be a witch, the matronly sorceress gifts them her own spellbook, a sentient "Book" with a living human eyeball on the cover, and expresses wistful praise that the sisters' love is admirable and precious and will make them a strong coven indeed.

As the witches search for Book in the present day, they come across signs for the upcoming mayoral election, advertising that Traske's descendant is alive and well (also played by Tony Hale). He's Cassie's father, interestingly enough, and for the witches to enact their spell, they need the blood of an enemy: his. And so ensues the expected madcap romp through a Halloween paradise, each party chasing some magical item, potion ingredient, or missing person. The humor is mostly wholesome and surprisingly witty, as when the witches enter a Walgreens and drink lotions to feel young again. There are now two musical numbers the witches perform, though one excellent one would have been better than two odd choices even more oddly executed. The filmmakers graciously offer some queer content too, including a drag-inclusive Sanderson Sister Halloween costume contest and a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment of Winnie flying past an apartment window where two gay men are cuddling on the sofa and watching the original film; naturally, she sneers and flies on.

It's an odd move, this legacy sequel. Released exclusively on the streaming platform, almost three decades after the original, it begs the question, "Why now?" It seems to answer its own question with a "why not?" But with so much clamoring for a sequel for so many years, it's a bit tough to swallow that this might be a bit too little, a bit too late. The filmmakers express their love of the original in so many ways, not least of which in bringing back Bette Midler, Kathy Najimy, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Doug Jones in all their glory, though Midler in particular has to fight to keep up energy with her younger costars. But they've also sanitized a lot of it, taking out much of the bite (literally) of the original by not making the witches overtly cannibalistic or even scary (there is one jump scare in the original that gets me to this day). The overplayed "virgin" bit of the original is mostly absent here, thankfully, but so too are a lot of the edgy sexual innuendos (such as the fake cop scene, bus scene, and Satan scene) that make the film so delightfully and disguisedly raunchy. Instead, there is a lot of heartfelt nostalgia this time, and earnest messaging about the love between sisters and the sacredness of sisterhood in general. It's not "better" or "worse," just different, and ultimately a nice addendum -- if not quite companion piece -- to the original classic.

My Policeman (2022)

Score: 2 / 5

Another year, another dull gay romantic drama. Read: gay tragedy. As important and beautiful as these movies can be, most queer audiences -- the kinds who flock to see these films -- had their fill back in the 2000s. Now, two decades later, we haven't come much farther, apparently. One wonders if filmmakers are ambitious to play the heartstrings of awards voters, if they think heartrending stories of closeted gays in forbidden romances are hot topics, or if they themselves just want in on the Brokeback Mountain prestige. I don't mean to decry queer films in general, of course, but only good representation is actually good representation. Thank goodness for this year's Bros, right? But that makes My Policeman feel just that much more tone deaf and disappointing.

An older couple live together, now retired, in a quiet seaside town, each pretty much keeping to him- and herself. Tom (Linus Roache) takes their dog on long walks along the white rocky cliffs, and Marion (Gina McKee) watches wistfully out her windows and putters around the house. Their passionless doldrums are interrupted suddenly when a recent stroke survivor arrives in his wheelchair. The man is Patrick (Rupert Everett), their long-estranged friend, who Marion had volunteered to take in and care for. Patrick seems uncomfortable but grateful, and occasionally tries to bark out resentment from his clenched jaw and barely audible speech. Marion is clearly guilt-ridden. Tom avoids Patrick at all costs. We're quickly launched into their story in vibrant flashbacks, alternating these warm scenes of the past with the dismal, grayscale present.

In the 1950s, Marion (Emma Corrin) and Tom (Harry Styles) meet on a beach in Britain and soon start dating. She's educated and somewhat ambitious, he's humble and dashing and contentedly working-class. Tom becomes the titular policeman soon enough. During their dates, they eventually meet Patrick (David Dawson) in a museum he curates, after he acted as a witness in one of Tom's cases. The trio spend all their time together; often Marion and Tom are hand-in-hand, but Patrick often seems attracted to Marion, who seems happy to encourage their intimate friendship. Until, that is, she espies the two men being rather intimate shortly after her marriage to Tom. 

This revelation of their closeted sexual relationship almost destroys Marion. Nervous and disgusted and heartbroken, she desperately seeks help that won't come back to ruin her beloved husband. The film seems uncertain of its focus: are we meant to sympathize with the frighteningly homophobic Marion, whose prospects at the time are certainly to be ruined and whose love for Tom remains mostly unaltered? Or are we meant to sympathize with Tom and Patrick, doomed under the norms and laws of their country? Tom seems to be in love with both people, but he must lie to Marion to live his truth and he must hide his relationship with Patrick to survive. It's just a lot of the same old shit.

Screenwriter Ron Nyswaner (Philadelphia, The Painted Veil, Freeheld) seems like a natural fit for a story like this, but that doesn't stop this project from feeling like a boring box he's dejectedly checking off. It seems he found inspiration not from his own wonderful body of work but rather from insipid, sentimental claptrap of the likes of Nicholas Sparks; the film founders in its back-and-forth approach between present and past. I found it difficult, though, to be fair, to know if the dialogue was truly as awful as it sounded or if that was the fault of the actors. The older cast is pretty good, although Everett is utterly wasted in his role. The younger cast tries, bless them, and Corrin and Dawson do pretty well to convey the massive unspoken emotional pains of their experiences. Styles is almost unwatchable; sure, he's pretty enough to look at, but his mannerisms and tone feel like a bumbling fool who doesn't know what he's doing. His delivery is monotonous and riddled with unearned angst. If it's a character choice, it makes no sense as the fulcrum of this love triangle; if it's not, it shows his inexperience as a leading man with embarrassing magnitude. Together, the three have no chemistry whatsoever, even as friends. Despite being fairly attractive and the source material itself, of all things, they are mind-numbingly dull to watch.

It doesn't help that director Michael Grandage (who has met great successes on stage) demonstrates no sense of style, vision, or even inspiration in telling this story. Why is it relevant right now, and what is beautiful in the story? There appears to be only minimal collaboration between him and his team. Grandage seems to want a sexy, sad portrait of unspeakable desires -- see the numerous sex scenes that are about as boring and even cringey as the rest of the film -- while Nyswaner wants sentimental romance and the tragedy of regret and wasted time. Cinematographer Ben Davis works really, really hard to marry the two by using contrasting color palettes and some lovely visuals, but there's only so much he can do. Even the editor seems determined to fix Styles's deficiencies by sharply editing around his scenes, stopping us from seeing his painfully forced emotional reactions to the story, which is funny until it becomes annoying.

Mark me, I don't think it's a terrible film altogether. The present-day stuff is quite nice, cinematography and production design are lovely, and some people occasionally need a tearjerker and it may as well be a queer one. But the unfocused and derivative screenplay -- which mostly utilizes the perspective of a straight woman effectively spying on the men through diary entries -- makes the whole thing a jumbled, unsatisfying slog. And then there's the rushed ending, which might have been powerful (and a shining moment for McKee and Roache specifically) but ultimately squanders whatever psychological and emotional depths developed for these characters in favor of a slapdash bow meant to make everyone feel tired and sad. We're not allowed to understand the characters in this character drama, and so there's no real reason to care what happens to them after they've all done such awful things to each other.

Ticket to Paradise (2022)

Score: 3.5 / 5

Paradise, indeed! This blast from the past is the best kind of feel-good romantic comedy for the nostalgic viewer. That soft, golden shimmer to each shot makes it feel like a living, breathing fantasy. Its magnificent stars are churning out their most tried-and-true techniques, reliably winsome and effortlessly rousing. Scarcely a beat of this film is unexpected or surprising. We know every moment before it happens, and then seeing it results in joy after exquisitely satisfying joy. It's also, I reiterate, a fantasy, one that is nearly as problematic in terms of its privilege as it is rapturous in terms of the lovely dream it realizes.

David (George Clooney) and Georgia (Julia Roberts) ended their marriage twenty years ago and still actively hate each other. Despite their mutual regret over having had a relationship at all, they love their daughter Lily (Kaitlyn Dever), who just graduated law school. On her post-graduation trip in Bali, she meets a seaweed farmer named Gede and falls in love; after a little more than a month, they announce their engagement and her intention to live in Bali and forsake her expected legal career. David and Georgia temporarily shake hands to put a new plan into action: hurry to Bali and convince Lily that she is rushing into dangerous decisions and making similar mistakes to their own.

Of course, everyone is wealthy enough to do all the things just described, including dropping everything to fly to Bali for an apparently unplanned amount of time, to say nothing of their careers or alma maters. Their stability allows them the luxury of bitterness, specifically the parents, who lob zingers at each other as often as possible. Given that they are Clooney and Roberts, it's not so much that we care exactly what they're saying so much as that they're the ones saying it. Their charisma and charm carry the film even when the screenplay isn't quite savvy enough to know what to do with them; the camera, makeup and costume artists, and director certainly do!

The secondary plot -- that of Lily and her blossoming romance -- is completely unbelievable, the kind of screwball-comedy plot that made rom-coms famous guilty pleasures in decades past. While Dever herself isn't terrible (no performances are incompetent here, thankfully), her one-note part is sorely underwritten. She's rounded out a bit by her companion Wren (a delightful Billie Lourd) and her paramour Gede (Maxime Bouttier), but the romance isn't explored or explained or even featured in any way that allows for much dramatic heft. It's in fact such a lazy element to the proceedings, one wonders what might have happened if this entire plot had been cut. Couldn't Lily and Wren have gone on vacation and the parents have tagged along to celebrate, or spy on them or each other? That change would have cut a significant amount of worldbuilding and the shy introduction of Gede's enormous family and the lack of character development or even significance. 

But that wouldn't really be the style of director Ol Parker, who also wrote The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and its sequel (which really deserves more sequels). His genius includes a consideration of Other cultures than white bourgeois Westerners. Is it orientalism? Maybe, but in the Hotel franchise it's also deeply sincere and sensitive. Here, it's less of those and a bit more escapist and tourist in its attention to the Balinese seaweed farmers depicted, but I don't think that makes it a bad thing either. The white characters come in like "stupid rich" archetypes and are forced to confront serious emotional issues with each other; the setting is less about itself and more about getting the main characters out of their own comfort zones. Albeit in a place that is repeatedly referred to as paradise. And that's really what we're here for too; not the drama or realism or profundity or insight, just the beauty and joy and love.