Kraven the Hunter (2024)

Score: 4 / 5

Everyone has their favorites when it comes to superheroes and their counterparts, and mine were always part of the X-Men or Spider-Man comics. Certainly one of the top contenders was Kraven, a beastly predator of a man whose prowess at hunting and tracking was aided by certain mystical elements that granted him superhuman strength and the convenient ability to commune with and influence animals. The image of Spider-Man clawing his way out of his own premature burial at Kraven's hand will haunt me forever, as will the frank sex appeal of the character himself. And now, joining the ranks of Sony's Spiderverse films, Kraven lives in live-action, and it's easily my favorite of the franchise.

Don't get me wrong: the story is a mess. For whatever reason, and despite clear love of the characters, this series has never quite mastered the art of intelligent storytelling, often choosing to advance via strange plot twists and extended action sequences rather than believable character or thematic developments. They hop around the globe for spectacle, not for purpose, and they increasingly rely on digital animation in order to tell their stories, not as boons for having told a good story on its own and desiring embellishment. This is all true here, perhaps to some extent more so as a result of the many animals necessary to establish Kraven's identity, and the film will not win many new fans. Indeed, this franchise has become so popular to hate that I've already seen more folks than I care to count lambasting it on social media.

Yet you'll notice that precious few say much of substance, preferring instead to level evaluative charges of it being "bad" or "stupid" without attempting to understand or appreciate it. And while I'm admittedly blinded by my ecstasy that a personal favorite character is finally the title character of a film, I'm also aware that any earnest critical engagement with art will increase appreciation if not enjoyment. One must simply deny the base pleasure of sounding off an opinion and approach a challenging or troubling work with curiosity. It's wild, I know, especially in a genre of such grounded, believable stakes and realistic integrity as superheroes.

But seriously, for fun, this movie slaps. We begin with Sergei Kravinoff, called "the Hunter," assassinating an arms trafficker in a Russian prison before escaping to London for his younger brother's birthday. It doesn't take long for star Aaron Taylor-Johnson's shirt to come off, and while it's silly in context, at least someone making the film knows what we paid to see. Taylor-Johnson has never looked better -- which is saying a lot -- and while we see less skin of him that I was expecting, it does make the few select shots much more satisfying. More importantly, his acting is more subdued than in several of his recent roles (The Fall Guy, just this year) while still carrying that larger-than-life charisma. He knows he can handle whatever comes his way, exuding effortless confidence in every shot, specifically in his movement work, which incorporates some lovely animalistic flair I'd have liked him to lean into further.

Unfortunately, the writers wanted to include much more, meaning that many other characters are brought in without much room to develop. Dmitri, Sergei's half-brother, is a welcome addition, brought to life by Fred Hechinger, a casting choice I dislike despite his capable performance as the nascent Chameleon; sadly, he's only brought in when Kraven needs to urgently do something. Similarly, Kraven's two opponents in this story are Alessandro Nivola as the Rhino and Christopher Abbott as the Foreigner, two excellent choices who are undermined by ludicrous effects and a marked lack of interiority. Kraven's father (a miserably uninteresting Russell Crowe) and once and future girlfriend Calypso (Ariana DeBose looking great with nothing to do) pop in and out, but really are mostly there to monologue about what they care about and what they intend to do. You might say it's much ado about, well, not much at all.

But who cares? Probably most folks, so let me rephrase: I certainly didn't care, because I had a blast in the auditorium. Aided by a double shot of Jack Daniels in my frozen Coke, I laughed at half-baked jokes and gasped at contrived action and had the most purely entertained time at the movies in ages. Perhaps I'm a presold nerdy fanboy, but I'll own that. The mindless fun of Morbius or the Venom series or even Madame Web have had me all along, but if this is the true end of the franchise (as it is rumored to be), I'm thrilled that we at least got this action-packed sexy fantasy romp through previously unexplored geekdom. Even if my main takeaway was the final shot, that alone is worth far more than the price of admission. Selah.

Gladiator II (2024)

Score: 3.5 / 5

Gladiator was never one of my favorite historical action epics, though I do harbor a soft spot for the genre. And it's not for any real reason except that I personally don't care much for Russell Crowe's acting and I have always been annoyed by the overwhelming praise for it. But it's a solid film, one that should be watched multiple times if at all, so when an unnecessary sequel is announced over twenty years later, we were all worried.

We needn't have been. Ridley Scott -- all hail -- is as much at the height of his powers as ever. We shouldn't have been worried; even though the master of the historical epic (and of filmmaking in general) is nearly 90 years old, he remains vivacious and visionary. Here he takes what worked best about his original classic and revs up the energy, adding about 10% more complexity and 40% more spectacle for a sequel that will either be half as good as the first or half again better, depending on what you like in your historical epics.

Nominally about Lucius (Paul Mescal), the son of Crowe's Maximus, doing basically the same thing his father did previously, the film retreads the same ground, adding almost nothing by way of ideas or plot. As such, and although there are many callbacks to "the past" and "legacy" yada yada, this feels more like a remake or reimagining of what has come before. I don't think it would work well as a companion piece, because they are just too similar. Even the insanity of the Caesars, the villainized sexuality of Romans, the strange pseudo-heroism of the slave owners, all are hitting the same notes now as before. It's not unlike The Force Awakens and subsequent sequel trilogy in the sense that it took established lore, set up camp in the midst of it, and reworked it for new audiences with a glossier finish. Sure, it's lovely to look at, but isn't it also a bit cheaply underbaked?

Ideas aside -- and trust, it's a hard pill to swallow -- this is a really fun movie. If, like me, you enjoy the politics and "slice of life" bits of the original, you'll get that here too, though it's not quite as compelling. Helped by Fred Hechinger and Joseph Quinn, drama here lies primarily in the realm of palace intrigue, as Connie Nielsen returns as Lucilla, gaining supporters to rise up against the childish and syphilitic co-emperors Geta and Caracalla. In her train are husband General Acacius (Pedro Pascal), a loyal warrior who has become disillusioned with his warmongering empire and Senator Gracchus (Derek Jacobi, thankfully) returns as well, though now in a sadly diminished capacity.

But the film soars -- and I do mean that -- when Denzel Washington graces the scene. It's been many long years since he's delivered a real, raw, and daring performance in any film, and I've started losing respect for the safety in choices he's made professionally. Not so here, as his character Macrinus is one of the most original, engaging, and delightful creations of his career. Insistently chewing the scene every time, his mannerisms and voice are just off what we expect of Washington, consistently surprising us with little tidbits of quirkiness and menace. Macrinus is the gladiator handler this time, and his attention to Lucius's rage fuels his own grandiose schemes for climbing the political ladder. His Shakespearean Iago is miles ahead of the co-emperors, who really should start a morning talkshow called "Incel Incest" for all their characterization manages to convey. The gladiatorial games this time, as before, are a ploy for power, but this time, those in power aren't aware of the game of thrones until it's too late.

Ah, yes, the games: did you think I'd forget to mention? While before the most exotic part of the games were the live tigers brought into the arena, true to form for a big-budget sequel, this time we get a menagerie of threats in the Colosseum. Rhinos, baboons, and sharks -- yes, sharks -- are brought into these games in increasingly laughable ways. Making for a fun viewing experience, it does broadcast a certain desperation to fulfill the promise of entertainment rhetorically asked by the gladiators. And these scenes, even including flooding the Colosseum to reenact a naval battle, serve best to distract from political intrigue and dramatic heft rather than offering thematic insight. Thankfully, for the most part, it looks fantastic (the baboons are a bit too Jumanji-esque for me) and you can barely tear your eyes away from the spectacle. Maybe that's enough for some audiences.

Personally, I'd have liked a bit less CGI and a bit more practical effects in the arena itself. I'd have preferred the screenplay not sideline its own hero: Mescal is just as (if not more) captivating in his performance, but the character just isn't as interesting the second time around. I'd even have liked more a focus on Washington's character, who will stick with me for some time yet. Pascal offers some surprisingly affecting moments of dynamism despite having a smaller role, while returning stars Jacobi and Nielsen are sidelined and not used nearly as much as they should be. If the point of this film was to remake the original, it succeeds. If the point is to complicate and expand the original, with the screenplay only slightly edited, they should have focused on Washington's character, turning the film into a meta-commentary on the nature of power behind the scenes -- behind the games -- and the corporate cost of personal ambition. But, for what it is, I'll just be glad to have another Ridley Scott blockbuster and eagerly await what comes next.

The Fear Street Trilogy (2021)

Score: 4.5 / 5

It seems appropriate that this is my 666th blog post. Fear Street was released without much fanfare (at least, I knew nothing about it before it popped up on my Netflix suggestions back in the summer). Its candy-colored images started to multiply, and then a friend asked me casually if I had seen the trilogy. Without knowing what he was talking about, I added them to my queue and let them sit for a while. After all, I much prefer to binge, and if there were suddenly three, surely there would be more, right? Well, there aren't (yet, anyway), and now that I've seen them, they feel pretty complete together; they are also one of the most ambitious and accomplished new projects I've seen from a young, fairly new director (Leigh Janiak, who also directed Honeymoon in 2014).

The trilogy's story, based on a series of books from Goosebumps creator R.L. Stine, concerns two neighboring towns, distinctly not alike in dignity. Sunnyvale seems to have it all: nice kids, happy nuclear families, no crime. Shadyside, on the other hand, is a hotbed of perennial crimes, specifically mass murders, across many centuries; as a result, its residents are depressed and its economy suffers. The films don't really dig into this, and I think that's a profound disservice to the material's potential. Much time is wasted on dialogue about how terrible "Shittyside" is in comparison, especially by the smug Sunnyvalers, but we're not really given much else to understand the breadth of the problem. Kind of like Derry in IT, the town clearly has its issues; at least in that example, Stephen King identified bad parents and careless adults as the root of evil. Here, it's not so clear.

Well, at least not at first. Much like in iconic horror movies -- Janiak honors and borrows freely from staples such as Poltergeist, The Shining, Jaws, and Night of the Living Dead among many others -- the team of oddball protagonists are a group of outsider kids who have to come to terms not only with the evil hunting them but with the evils inherent in their town. History and future collide as they race to stop the people around them from dying, solving mysteries and looking for clues like a deadly extended episode of Scooby-Doo for adults. Much like King's masterpiece or Stranger Things, everything is awash in a glow of nostalgia; fortunately here, it's less thick or sentimental, allowing those other emotional heavyhitters to have done the work of whetting our appetite and providing a shorthand for these references. It's savvy on Janiak's part, because she's got stories to tell and can't waste time setting the stage. She's ready for blood.

Part One: 1994 starts it all with a fresh batch of killings. Anxious and excited -- as most horny, existentially-conscious teens are -- some adolescents disturb the secret grave of a witch. They don't know it until much later in the film, but explaining the series step-by-step would take a long time here, and its lovely, thoughtful pace deserves to be appreciated on its own terms. The witch, disembodied but apparently awoken, can evidently possess certain individuals and get them to kill; once these possessed folks die, she can also revive them to continue slashing away. And so what could be a Blair Witch-type premise becomes something more akin to a fever dream in which many undead murderers rise and continue their onslaught (something like Scream in attitude, if not in narrative). Deena (Kiana Madeira) and her brother get a group of misfits together to stop the witch and her minions before learning that Deena's ex, Sam (Olivia Scott Welch), is the witch's primary target. It ends with a bloodbath of a climax and an alarmingly high body count

Part Two: 1978 takes a bit of the infectious fun away, which some may find disheartening. I actually preferred it, as it honored the sacrifices at the end of 1994 and legitimized a level of brutal, bloody terror I didn't expect from this series. Taking as its apparent impetus one of the undead killers we've already encountered, 1978 launches us back in time to Camp Nightwing at the time of an infamous massacre (caused, too, by the witch). Less meta than the previous film, this one earnestly attempts to recreate the raw horror of slashers before the age of information: its obvious debt is owed to Friday the 13th, but it piles on references to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Carrie, and others. We focus on Ziggy (an amazing Sadie Sink), a bullied Shadyside girl who has to team up with her older sister to stop a possessed counselor from murdering everyone. The film takes its sweet time building the witch's mythology, too, as the wide-eyed campers learn increasingly horrifying details of the curse on Shadyside; indeed, we discover, that Sarah Fier, the witch, died badly and is determined to make others suffer her fate. It's a bleaker, more violent and nihilistic movie than 1994, and that's a good thing. Because things are ramping up for a killer finale.

As the previous entries relied heavily on period Amblin Entertainment flicks and slashers, Part Three: 1666 owes about as much to The Crucible, The Witch, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. I don't want to spoil too much because this series is extraordinarily brilliant, but pretty much any talking about this movie will spoil something. Essentially, we are thrust all the way back to a Puritan town apparently where Shadyside was born. Madeira now plays Sarah Fier herself, an equally misunderstood young woman of poor means in love with another young woman. The casting is key, because Deena is seeing the witch's story in real time (it's a plot point when, after the halfway point of this film, we return to 1994 for the showdown), and we are able to immediately parallel the experiences of the two characters. The accents are all over the place (most are, bewilderingly, Irish) and there isn't much accuracy in historical details of the colony, but it's clear that it was made to make sense to a high schooler. And that's not a bad thing here.

While we expect the witch to be a locus of horror at this point, the horrors here largely stem from the witch hunt. After the well is poisoned, produce withers, and the pastor commits heinous sins, the townsfolk prepare to lynch the young women seen loitering together in the woods by night. Interestingly, the real witch here (Jordana Spiro) has a lot to say without saying much of anything; in 1994 the actor played a babysitter (again, connecting the story to the genre) and in 1978 she was the nurse to tried to kill the killer before he killed anyone. This time her book of spells, etc., causes trouble when it falls into the wrong hands, and her best (or at least, not-malicious) intentions are tragically misunderstood. And then, yes, Sarah is lynched and curses the town. But then, quite suddenly, we are slapped with another title card and put back in 1994, and now Deena knows what must be done to stop the curse.

Apart from its fascinating storytelling and incredibly broad scope, this series works well for me in its aesthetic. It doesn't seem to take itself too seriously -- Janiak's penchant for pumping retro jams is too fun for that -- but it crucially does take its characters seriously, making us get to know them well so that we care for them and their survival. Especially in 1994, she is playful with frenetic editing choices and expressive lighting even as she patiently allows the dialogue (often frantic, between angsty kids spewing exposition at each other from their "research") to take us through each twisty new plot evolution. More importantly, it honors the burgeoning same-sex relationship at its core between Deena and Sam without capitalizing on it, even in a similar way to how any sexual relationship was often treated by slashers of the time period. Even the secondary misfits -- two of the Shadysiders sell pills -- aren't traditionally punished for their behaviors, because the film flips the trope to be a tool of compassion for their struggle and even of shallow admiration for their street smarts.

It's all a tightly wound ball of mythology and history, one that offers numerous parallels in plot even as it does in cinematography and design. The endless pleasures of this series involve reused locations and the way the camera and lighting treat certain characters in certain situations. Repeatedly suggesting that time -- or, at least, time under a curse -- is a wheel, the movies push us and its characters to escape fate and challenge the status quo. It was at the point of the jump forward that I realized what an amazing feat this series accomplished simply by existing. These days, we can watch a 6- or 8-hour miniseries without batting an eye. But three 2-hour movies are still a very different game, and these are unusually polished even for feature film standards. Plus, they all culminate in a fun, wickedly clever climax that left me on a thrilling high note, endearing to me everything that had come before. Do yourself a favor and visit Fear Street. It'll treat you right.

The Woman in the Window (2021)

 Score: 4.5 / 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

News of the World (2020)

 Score: 4.5 / 5

Every few years or so, there's a brilliant new Western released, and I honestly thought the genre was going to die off years ago. It resurfaces now and again with one that tries to be ironic and postmodern (The Sisters Brothers fails, but The Ballad of Buster Scruggs magnificently succeeds) or one that tries to take the genre in a progressive direction and only marginally succeeds (Woman Walks Ahead and Hostiles). It's not a genre I particularly enjoy anyway, but sometimes you just want to hop on a horse, ride through the dust to a saloon, and drink some whiskey, no? News of the World is my favorite since at least 2016, when Hell or High Water and the remake of The Magnificent Seven were released, and I enjoyed it so much I now feel inspired to go watch more Westerns. It's that powerful.

Captain Jefferson Kidd travels from town to town, reading local, regional, and national news to the toiling masses on the American frontier. Setting up a sort of theatrical space by night in the town center, he charges dimes for people to come and listen to him report happenings in the wider world. As he mentions, his audience is too busy (or illiterate) to read about things happening in the capital or on the borders. His service, though, might be a sort of self-imposed exile, and he seems tormented by something unsaid. The year is 1870, only five years after the Civil War officially ended, though news travels slowly in the wide expanses of the American West. Kidd was a Confederate soldier, and many townspeople in the part of Texas he visits are unhappy with the perceived tyranny of Yankees who patrol the region.

The plot kicks into gear when Kidd comes upon a Black man hanging from a tree, an overturned carriage, and a young white, blonde girl hiding in the wreckage. The girl, whom he guesses is named Johanna, comes from German immigrant descent, but was apparently raised by a tribe of Native Americans. She only speaks Kiowa and doesn't seem to know what's happening to her; Kidd learns from her documents that her tribe has been killed and she was being taken to the authorities. After a few disturbing encounters with those authorities, Kidd takes it upon himself to find the orphan a home. They embark on an adventure from town to town, Kidd on a path to find Johanna's last living relatives in an unstable territory rife with peril. The two begin to bond, despite clear obstacles in their ability to communicate, and learn to help each other in moments of crisis.

The movie stars Tom Hanks as a very different kind of captain than he played in Captain Phillips, his previous venture with director Paul Greengrass. Together, the two play with an old-fashioned Western aesthetic, gritty and dangerous and an almost lack of heart. You can tell it's a Greengrass movie by the way he edits and shoots, but thankfully the cinematography is this time handled by Dariusz Wolski, a personal favorite, who slows down the director's usual frenetic energy with sometimes unbearably long takes -- still handheld, but less nauseating -- that force us into the world they're creating. Add a gently supportive score from James Newton Howard, and you have a movie that never beats you over the head with what it's doing. It comes across as a straightforward story, the kind of yarn travelers out West would spin night after night by campfires after a long day's journey, with little apparent art and a keen sense of entertainment value. Its episodic structure eventually reveals itself as a Homerian device, one that builds until its themes and purpose overwhelm you by the climax.

Sure, some of the episodes are predictable, and I think they are sometimes meant to be. Its plot is certainly not ambitious, but its thematic strength and emotional intelligence are perhaps the most nuanced of any Western I've ever seen. A lot of this is due to Hanks's performance, the actor who in recent years has finally refined his subtlety so much that he is never less than believable, even when the part he plays could so easily fall into rote caricature. The smallest eye twitch, momentary breath, or tilt of the head speaks volumes to his otherwise fairly mysterious character, one who exists by simultaneously entertaining and informing about everything but himself. He can read people as well as he can read papers, yet his piercing eye constantly roves for something more. Of course, by movie's end, we learn exactly what he has been looking for.

I am tempted to call this movie Greengrass's most traditional film in terms of content and style, but that's not a bad thing. In fact, he imbues so much energy and thoughtfulness into this picture that in many ways he revitalized the genre for me. His screenplay, co-written with Luke Davies (Lion, Beautiful Boy), includes a few heavy references to 2020, and I admit to a bit of annoyance with a particular scene when Kidd visits an isolated community ruled by a racist, xenophobic autocrat who tries to force the newsreader to proclaim the propaganda he produces. Of course, the complicated identity of Kidd gives way to humility, integrity, and decency as he tries to help the townspeople, something we can now, finally, recognize in our own political climate. But, like in another recent movie starring Hanks, The Post, this movie reminds us of the strength, danger, and ultimate necessity of a free press, and that is a message we certainly still need to see lionized in major pictures like this.