Carry-On (2024)

Score: 3 / 5

It's not quite the same as the one-location surrealist suspense of this year's Drop, but Carry-On exemplifies a close sibling of the subgenre: that of the borderline-absurdist (often holiday-related) terrorist thriller. More an update on Die Hard, or Flightplan for that matter, this Christmas release brings all the expected action and heart out of an impossible but highly entertaining story. Shockingly not released in cinemas during the post-awards season holiday audiences, Carry-On is a Netflix exclusive, one that would have been fun on a large screen but nevertheless manages to demand audience attention and reward it. 

Jaume Collet-Serra belongs to a curious group of excellent but still comparably young genre filmmakers churning out movies with charming regularity, and clearly pulling directly from their favorite inspirations. Apart from his quartet of Liam Neeson-led action thrillers -- all of which are solid viewing choices, if somewhat indistinguishable, like The Commuter -- the Spanish director has handled some significant horror titles, including Orphan, The Shallows, and The Woman in the Yard, in addition to two major blockbusters belonging to important IPs: Black Adam for DC and Jungle Cruise for Disney. With all these, Collet-Serra staunchly resists excessive worldbuilding, extensive mythologies, and room for online forums to debate finer points of plot and theme. Lean and mean, straightforward thrills is his game, and he does it better than most these days.

Carry-On is clearly in the same vein as his Neeson thrillers, but this time it's Taron Egerton's vehicle for action stardom. And what a return to form it is for the hot young star, who steps into the role with capable aplomb and magnetic screen presence. Egerton plays Ethan, a TSA agent at LAX on Christmas Eve, one of the busiest days of the year; he has become stymied in his job, unmotivated to pursue promotions and seemingly content to be a grunt worker. When his pregnant girlfriend (Sofia Carson) who also works at the airport encourages him to reapply for his dream job at the police academy, he instead takes the initiative to prove to his boss (Dean Norris) that he can handle a more intensive job in the terminal: managing a baggage-scanning lane. It's not clear at first, but we learn Ethan has become quite cynical about law enforcement after he was rejected from the academy for concealing his father's criminal history. It's not a great backstory, and clearly forcefully arranged by writer T.J. Fixman to demonstrate daddy issues and an identity crisis, but little attention is paid to it by the film itself.

Thankfully, apart from this ham-fisted setup that overstays its welcome, the film proper kicks off when Ethan arrives on duty. After a somewhat miserable pep talk by the boss for their new shift, staffers take their positions as the onslaught of Yuletide travelers overwhelms the queue. Almost immediately, due to his eager offering, Ethan is put on a baggage scanner and slipped a mysterious earpiece, through which he is contacted by a terrorist. The stranger (Jason Bateman) quickly establishes dominance and consequence, proving that his no-nonsense plan is both imminent and irresistible. The unseen man has accomplices all over, and is nondescript himself, maneuvering literally behind the scenes to ensure that a certain piece of luggage bypasses the scanners without setting off any alarms. Ethan is in the undesirable position of ignoring whatever he sees on the scanner, though he has no idea exactly what or when or why this device is moving under his radar. 

Despite its Christmas setting, there isn't a lot of festive material here, so debates about this film's holiday canonicity will surely continue, but the whole debacle is a ton of fun regardless. While the terrorists' plot is admittedly overwrought, the film doesn't provide clear answers until later, making the narrative plot compelling up to its third-act climax, when the head villain confronts Ethan in a closed terminal bathroom and they brawl. Up to that particular point, I had few issues with the film, despite occasional unlikelihoods that are frankly necessary for things to proceed. But, as with a Bond film, the villain's monologue revealing all conveniently provides annoying closure to the varied fraying threads, and I found it wildly out of character for the master manipulator, who is patently not a sociopath or mastermind, and rather merely a committed mercenary. After this point, the climax continues for an interminable stretch that involves a tarmac hijack and chase, Egerton leaping into a plane's undercarriage, and a sequence of fights that would better fit a Mission: Impossible entry than a realistic story about an average Joe saving the day. 

The whole thing boils down to a sort of Trolley Problem: Ethan must decide whether he wants to save his pregnant girlfriend or everyone on a plane. When he makes his choice, the stakes are rearranged so that he must choose between his pregnant girlfriend and everyone in the airport. In a game like this, where consequences are constantly in flux -- at one point, it even becomes clear that a crucial politician is also in transit on the plane, and that she may be the true target -- the constant expository dialogue can become tiresome, as can legitimizing each new turn of the screw. Yet Egerton and the cast -- especially the typically sardonic, condescending Bateman -- remain consistently understated, a brave and smart acting choice in a flick like this that can so easily be played broadly and falsely. 

And all this is not to mention the rest of the film, which includes a bizarre and impossible -- but genuinely delicious -- subplot of Danielle Deadwyler as an LAPD detective piecing together disparate elements of the terrorist plot and attempting to intervene from the outside, along with DHS agent Logan Marshall-Green. It's weird and off-putting, but the considerable talents of these actors make it work, along with a strange and vicious fight in a speeding car. And it's within such sequences that we understand the absurd project at work: when you're laughing and choking in equal measure at insane action scenes, the movie has you hooked, and it earns its laurels. This isn't John Wick; it's violent, yes, but also silly. Carry-On might not be in my annual holiday watchlist, but I look forward to another screening already.

The Woman in the Yard (2025)

Score: 3.5 / 5

A mysterious woman dressed in a black gown and veil appears in Ramona's yard one morning, sitting by the road on a chair that hadn't been there before, and barely moving. When Ramona goes out to question her, she merely says, "Today's the day," offering no idea about who she is or how she came to be there. Once she sees the woman's bloody hands, though, Ramona all but flies back inside, ordering her two children to remain indoors as well. If today is the day, it'll be a long one: the power has been cut off to their remote house as a result of unpaid bills stacking up quickly. Ramona and her kids -- teen son Tay and preteen daughter Annie -- are still grieving the loss of her husband (Russell Hornsby) from an auto accident that also broke Ramona's leg. She relies heavily on Tay, who has proven himself a capable man of the house; she's also clearly wallowing in her pain whereas the kids at least seem to have begun moving on with their lives. 

It doesn't take long to tell that the film will be a character study far more than a home invasion thriller. And that seems appropriate, as the last decade of horror films has demonstrated quite the tendency to dramatize issues of guilt, mental illness, depression, and trauma in supernatural and often neo-Gothic terms. Call it "elevated horror" or not, these films deploy monsters less in a traditional sense and more in a metaphoric sense that, given enough psychic stress and horror, any person can snap and become monstrous. The titular woman in the yard, in this story, does end up moving closer to the house, threatening the family dog, children, and finally mother as she and her shadow menace them, but her purpose and identity are the clear revelations to which the plot will eventually wend its way. I won't spoil it here, but it's also not a groundbreaking storytelling technique, and you'll likely guess it relatively quickly.

But a central mystery does not, for me, a film make or break. The Woman in the Yard might not be complex or dynamic in its emotional heft and character-based story, which will annoy and turn off some audiences. But it has its boons, first and foremost in Danielle Deadwyler as Ramona; her craft is always amazing to watch, here anchoring the film in a sense of urgent, desperate reality. She can't defend her home and protect her children by herself, but she doesn't seem quite ready to relinquish full power over her son. We wonder, early in the film, why, despite her apathy and isolationism, she doesn't foster a domestic atmosphere of honesty, interdependence, or even communal responsibility. Our questions will be answered by the film's climax in highly satisfying ways; not satisfying in terms of plot development, but satisfying in seeing and appreciating the nuanced depth Deadwyler brings to her character.

Additionally, the film's style is worth watching, and I'll be watching it again for that. Jaume Collet-Serra has long been a director of interest to me, from his fun and silly crime thrillers to big-budget major IPs, but his horror efforts tend to be genre-bendy, clever, and never less than thrilling. This return to his most robust form features perhaps not the most inventive of his material, but in as much as this safely PG-13 film can, it does represent his command of aesthetic and tone. Not much can be done about the screenplay, which is workmanlike but effective in targeting its modest aims (apparently this project is the screenwriter's feature debut), but Collet-Serra and his cinematographer Pawl Pogorzelski (who shot Ari Aster's feature films in addition to Blue Beetle and Fresh) do some really fabulous work in making the film visually arresting and memorable. Elements of shadow play should have been improved but are still nice to see, and the haunting daylight-drenched imagery worked really well for me. Playing on larger, better ideas may not be enough to win awards or a strong legacy, but I admire this film for its willingness to play with expectations and determination to make its gamble worthwhile.

I Saw the TV Glow (2024)

Score: 4 / 5

No doubt lending the film its title, Jane Schoenbrun's third directorial feature exists in the filtered colors and sounds of memory, specifically those blaring from an old analog screen. Much like their earlier film We're All Going to the World's Fair, or the visually and somewhat thematically similar Skinamarink, I Saw the TV Glow attempts to capture the essence of coming of age and into belonging during the relatively early days of home media. Any child of the '80s and '90s will be reminded of that and more while watching, which may entice as many as it deters. Escapism fantasies and the powers of dissociation through magic screens arguably began there, and for many millennials those regular shows on network television and available for rent on VHS were a means of cultivating a social identity while experiencing more than what their mundane lives had to offer. The glowing television can and did literally save many kids in those days, and anyone for whom that rings true will find boons in store here.

But I Saw the TV Glow is not for everyone, not even in that demographic. Mismarketed as a typically hyperbolic "scariest movie of the year" and so forth, the film indeed claims horror and fantasy as its aesthetic lineage, but it's by and large a dramatic arthouse exploration of youth, identity, and belonging in a world getting smaller by the day. The film takes place over three decades in the life of Owen, an isolated and awkward teen who befriends social outcast Maddy, bonding over a television show on once a week, late at night. The Pink Opaque seems to be a something like a cross between Twin Peaks and Goosebumps or a particularly camp Buffy, and it features two teenage women using a psychic connection to fight monsters and other supernatural threats. Maddy is a hardcore fan, no doubt partly due to her burgeoning queer sexuality, and she invites Owen over to watch it with her, as it airs after his bedtime at home. Lying to his mother (Danielle Deadwyler), he sneaks and and stays the night at Maddy's house.

The show's grotesquerie doesn't phase Owen a jot. At least, not negatively. He's enraptured. Even as we (the audience) see flickers of the creepy images on screen and grasp for meaning in the characters' cryptic hints about the show itself, we see Owen allowing -- inviting -- it in to his soul. He has a strong connection to this material, and it's a moment that will haunt me for a long time. It reminded me, personally, of my memory watching Jurassic Park for the first time, away at a friend's house so my parents wouldn't know their pre-teen kid was watching a PG-13 movie. I was in heaven. My fantasies about dinosaurs were coming to life in a very real way, and I laughed and loved the whole thing. It wasn't until I revisited it many years later that I was shocked by how truly horrifying and scary that film still is.

The largest portion of the film jumps ahead in time a bit to 2006, as an older Owen works at a movie theater. Ten years prior, Maddy said she was going to run away and then vanished, Owen's mother died of cancer, and The Pink Opaque was cancelled. Owen, likely shortly after high school at this point, still lives with his father but clearly hasn't adjusted and has no ambition. Justice Smith, in what may be his most accomplished performance yet, plays Owen as all but his youngest self (Ian Foreman), delivering layers of subtle nuance beneath each awkward gaze or twitch the character makes. His seemingly lost identity comes crashing back into sight when, suddenly, Maddy materializes and wants to talk to Owen, claiming to have been inside The Pink Opaque for the past several years.

A push-pull rhythm controls the flow of scanty information in this film, and it's rather difficult to discuss as a result. Its thin plot and thick theming are more about a particular sensation than about any concrete knowledge or answers. Much as teens question their own identities, Maddy and Owen are actively searching for that things that feels True for themselves. The brief clips we get of their favorite show tell us something interesting about the characters, despite its overtly silly design; they can't stand the mundane banality of their suburb and of the lives they've gotten stuck enacting. There's a reason each moment of inspiration or liberation is marked with neon colors, especially pink and blue. It's a queer lens through which they are finally allowed to view the world, and they can finally see where they fit in.

In a crucial scene, the two sit on the school bleachers unsure about having sleepovers to fool Owen's mother. Maddy admits to liking girls, and asks Owen who he likes. "I think I like TV shows," he replies, providing perhaps the most naked moment of raw honesty I've seen in any film in a long time. Owen remains an enigma the entire film. So does Maddy (an excellent Jack Haven, who I only discuss less because I know less of their work and because the character is a bit more flat and intentionally enigmatic... or opaque, if you will), to a slightly lesser degree, but Owen's mystery is a challenge to even qualify. There could be some gender dysphoria at work here (there is a moment when he wears a dress, though it seems more likely that he's reenacting a scene from The Pink Opaque as one of the characters). There is certainly, on the filmmaker's part, serious consideration for ideas of queer temporalities and the repressive political climate of the '90s; by telling us the story of two queer teens finding community and affirmation in a heartfelt spookfest on primetime television, Schoenbrun is concurrently inviting us to think about the elements of our lives that shaped us, for better and worse, and how all our identities are constructed. Media isn't warping kids' minds; it's saving them. And, the film seems to suggest, those foundational reference points to our ideal selves will forever be burning within our memories.

The identity crises at the core of this film will invite a broader audience than queer people, though many are labeling this film as, particularly, trans. Owen's family is living in a very white suburb; Maddy's family exhibits painfully clear gender roles. That they immediately connect can be no real surprise, and their chemistry onscreen is a wonder to behold. Just pay attention to their body language and you'll see what I mean; they begin slumping and visibly uncomfortable, but later on Owen is all but collapsed upon himself whereas Maddy is proud and strong in posture. Hopefully their connection will inspire casual viewers -- especially those who don't know what they're watching -- to think outside the box more and see the similarly struggling spirit within the person across from them. To go beyond their comfort zone and not give in to the suffocating fantasy of a safe, guarded life.

Because that seems to be the purpose of I Saw the TV Glow. I won't spoil it here, but the final scene scarred me in a big way and strongly affirmed my suspicion that this is, fundamentally, a deeply trans film. And not just because of the throwaway line about Sleepaway Camp, which is a standout moment of dialogue that recalls the shocking and upsettingly problematic original trans slasher film of the same name. Owen's agony by film's end is tragic, meant in terms of Greek drama. Schoenbrun and their team honor it with glossy, stylish design elements and a dreamlike aesthetic approach. Beautiful music, haunting visuals, devastating performances, and frankly risky storytelling combine into a unique and endlessly fascinating sensory experience. It won't be the most exciting, terrifying, romantic, or weird thing you've seen, and I do wish it nailed down a few more specifics, if not scares. But I'd rather artists willing to take risks over those playing it safe, every time.

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.