The Bride (2026)

Score: 4 / 5

Having rewatched Maggie Gyllenhaal's sophomore directorial feature thrice, I can now say with certainty it's a favorite. Her follow-up to The Lost Daughter continues her unexpected and artful approach to new feminist cinema, yet does radically, offensively different things than we might expect or even want. While it's not out to garner her many new fans -- except maybe those interested in classical horror -- anyone who buckles in for this insane, ballsy ride will experience a thrill unlike many others. 

Nominally inspired by Bride of Frankenstein (1935), the classic Universal comedy-horror sequel to its 1931 flagship cinematic phenomenon, The Bride harnesses its metafictional take on the story to great postmodern effect. We open with an onscreen narrator, seemingly the ghost of Mary Shelley. Jessie Buckley, in her commanding dual performance, stares balefully into the camera out of a black-and-white limbo with low-key lighting that shifts unexpectedly around her, droning on in a thick character voice about her torment. As a writer, she cannot rest, burdened by another story she meant to tell before her untimely death. How to tell it? Well, naturally, she'll possess a vulnerable woman -- apparently one in a similar state of mind and/or danger as she was in life -- and enact the story herself. 

Enter Ida (also played by Buckley), a young woman caught among the higher-ups of an organized crime boss in Chicago, 1936. She seems a flamboyant nightclub performer and likely escort for these dangerous men, and in her introductory scene she's being assaulted by lascivious older men. Taking her opportunity, Mary Shelley inserts herself, forcing Ida into a full trance-like possession state in which she moves twitchily and spills the beans of the crime boss's sins. Trying to rush her out of the stunned nightclub, two henchman end up cornering her on the stairs as they try to figure out what's wrong with her, and soon enough Ida falls down the stairs to her death. The violent sequence -- from verbal altercation to broken bones -- is stylized to the point of alienation, I suspect, from some viewers. But it's proof that Gyllenhaal is a true artist, making bold swings and risky choices rarely allowed to female artists; I wish more directors followed their passions and tried weird things.

That's not to say the material couldn't have used a bit more workshopping. The screenplay, penned by Gyllenhaal, inconsistently plots itself through lurching steps, much like the monsters it dramatizes. After this lengthy prologue, we shift suddenly to Frank (Christian Bale), the original Frankenstein's monster, now in Chicago himself and looking for a deeper human connection than any he's had in his long, lonely life. He approaches Dr. Cornelia Euphronius (Annette Bening, working fabulously from what could have been a miserably flat part to electrify her scenes) to request that she expand her work on reanimation to a full -- recently deceased -- human corpse. He only stipulates that the corpse be female. Thanks to Ida's recent demise, she's carted in and successfully returned to life.

Or whatever passes for life, anyway. She's still possessed by Shelley and, as we might expect, has her brain fried during her resurrection. Buckley has the seemingly impossible task of playing an English woman from 1818 possessing a very different Chicago woman in 1936 who has amnesia and thus a new persona: essentially three different characters in one, constantly shifting throughout her often incoherent monologues. As is thankfully becoming vogue in cinema, Buckley glories in her unrepentant, deliberately defiant character, a feminist icon who isn't afraid to be nasty and crude and lusty and rebellious against any constraints. A favorite moment is at her first meal, when she begins smashing tableware in an almost bored state, waiting for demands on her to cease.

One can only imagine how much physical therapy Buckley had to undergo, both for her voice -- her verbal athletics are olympian in scope and fervor -- and for her body, which moves in contorted, angular patterns even when she's not putting her weight on a shattered shin. After an initial rebellion, Ida accedes to Frank and the two embark on a hedonistic, criminal spree not unlike Bonnie and Clyde, finding solace in their isolation. More touching moments occur as they go from cinema to cinema, absorbing old Ginger Rogers movies. Frank especially loves Ronnie Reed, a Fred Astaire riff played by a slick and debonair Jake Gyllenhaal. Yet all is not well in paradise, and the couple is being investigated by two detectives in the form of Peter Sarsgaard and Penelope Cruz in what might the film's weakest subplot despite its eminent charm. 

This is a maximalist's movie, a cinephile's movie, and a movie for anyone who values excess of style. Building more from films noir than classic, theatrical cinema, Gyllenhaal injects rage into her humor and sickness into her sexiness, meshing candy-colored sin with grayscale grime in every shot. If Poor Things told this story in a surrealist fashion, and Joker (and Folie a Deux in particular) told it in realistic fashion, The Bride camps it up, making mockery of deadly serious matters while acknowledging its own absurdity. And then there's the ending, which after a countrywide chase, resolves things in an unexpected and perhaps unearned happy way. I loved it. By film's end, I was exhausted from sheer imaginative joy and did not want a tragic denouement. And Gyllenhaal knowingly gives us what we need more than what we deserve in the film's final moments. It may not ring true to the world she's so painstakingly built up to that point, but it feels damn good. 

Good for her.

Hamnet (2025)

Score: 3.5 / 5

Few filmmakers view mundanity -- or indeed nature -- with the level of Romanticism displayed by Chloé Zhao. The Rider and Nomadland deal with individuals practicing their individualism in an unforgiving and bleak western America that nevertheless feels warm and richly layered. This palpability is shared even by her MCU entry, Eternals, which I find one of the most visually original and beautiful of the franchise (take another look at that naturally-lit forest fight scene if you want to argue me). Though I find the stories she chooses to tell stupefying, superheroes excluded, I cannot deny the spiritual craft at work in her attention to atmosphere and landscape. Her characters are not isolated in nature; her characters find connection with each other through nature, and it seems that's also how we're meant to connect with them.

Based on the 2020 novel of the same name (which I've admittedly not read, and now do not plan to), Hamnet tells a fictionalized story of how William Shakespeare and his wife, Anne Hathaway, may have dealt with the untimely death of their son. Meant to be a tearjerker of a certain literary order, we'd have seen a title like this sweeping the Oscars back when The Weinstein Company was churning out Best Pictures every damned year. The Academy loves a period, British biography and sob story. Or at least it did. As it is, star Jessie Buckley (playing Anne as Agnes, presumably in reference to her sometime legal name, according to official records) brings the bulk of the film's emotional intensity. Much as Frances McDormand managed to wrangle profoundly emotional work out of the otherwise dismally dry Nomadland screenplay, Buckley here has her work cut out for her.

Not that Hamnet, here adapted by novelist Maggie O'Farrell along with Zhao herself, is dry. Quite the opposite: this heartfelt and deeply sad material could have gone a number of directions, perhaps most dangerously melodrama. Yet Buckley and her costar, Paul Mescal, carry us through with rigorously internalized beats of eroticism, affection, loss, shame, guilt, withdrawal, and communion. One wishes to have been a fly on the wall during their intimacy coordination sessions, where surely simply hearing them talk through their craft would have sold expensive tickets. Unfortunately, they're forced to navigate familiar, dare I say rote, scenes with predictable revelations, resignations, and reconciliations to the point that I nearly dozed off in our screening.

Moments of interest abound, here, though they're rarely explored in any length or detail. Agnes is supposedly the daughter of a forest witch, hence her connection to nature both visually and aurally. The sound designer (IMDb tells us that Johnnie Burn won the Oscar for The Zone of Interest recently, deservedly) lures us into the woods in the same way cinematographer Lukasz Zal (also from The Zone of Interest) arranges it around us. Lush and sensual, the forest feels alive and communicative. It's telling that we're introduced to Agnes as she's dressed in a startling red gown, curled up under a tree, and our first instinct is of Grimm fairytales or Puritanical nightmares about alluring women in the woods. Her contrived but horny encounter with the man she'll be remembered for marrying feels natural in this setting; it's an effective storytelling device to immerse us in this cinematic world.

The first half is quite charming, and I found myself absorbed into the dynamics of this family. Between their somewhat mythic family being born and raised -- superstitions and all, as one child is miraculously revived from stillbirth -- to the intergenerational makeup and casting (shout out to Emily Watson and Joe Alwyn in almost pointedly underwritten roles), Hamnet sets up a lot of narrative and thematic possibilities. Yet, from its title and what we already know of shadowy history, the loomings and forebodings never allow us the opportunity to enjoy the present so much as dread what's coming.

Come it does, in full operatic fashion. Grief has become somewhat trite in some genres, drama included, arguably since 9/11, and this is no exception. Shrill and histrionic, the film luxuriates in the visceral pain both Mescal and Buckley deliver: score swelling, light fading, camera lingering in moments of private sorrow for far too long. I could feel the other bodies in my theater shifting with unease as we voyeuristically fed on the characters' bereavement. Powerful stuff, sure, but not clear in its own purpose or efficacy.

As a side note, if you haven't yet, please do yourself a favor and go watch All is True from 2019; the film tackles the same tragedy, navigating the same fraught marriage, but through the eyes of significantly older versions of the characters. It's wonderfully literate, minimalist in execution, with some of the most underrated acting and screenwriting of that year (by Kenneth Branagh, Judi Dench, and especially Ian McKellan). 

And then there's the mess of Hamlet, which is posited in this material as being Shakespeare's therapeutic response to his son's death. The historicity of that notwithstanding -- I'm not the person to judge, as I'm a bit of a conspiracist when it comes to the Bard's identity -- the film discredits itself as pandering claptrap when Mescal recites the Danish prince's "to be, or not to be" soliloquy like Inspector Javert looking at his reflection in the river and contemplating suicide. There's a nice nod to the play when, in the film's climax, Agnes travels to London to see Will's new hit; the playwright might say here that the play's the thing wherein he'll catch the feelings of his embittered wife. Agnes, sure that Will has been avoiding coping, or is profiting from their son's death, becomes enraptured in the play, pushing forward through the groundlings to all but crawl onto the stage itself.

And while far too much of Hamlet is shown here in the film, largely out of context -- and the case is frankly not made convincingly that the playwright had bereft paternalism in mind when writing this tragedy -- there is a keen observation that should be more clear. This is art therapy, both for its creator and its audience, and it works effectively. We watch the play (or, rather, a montage of its most irrationally recognizable one-liners) mostly through Agnes's eyes. There's a clever touch here, in that the actor playing the actor for Hamlet is Noah Jupe (A Quiet Place and its Part 2, Wonder, and series such as The Undoing) is the older brother of the actor who played Hamnet. It's as if Agnes is seeing her own son, grown up rather than fatally arrested, acting on stage, as he'd excitedly desired as a child. You'll notice, during this scene, that the cinematography and sound design revert to similar techniques from the opening scene: we hear the breathing of the crowd, the pulsing rhythm of life around a singular woman attempting to connect. The theatre is as natural and, indeed, lively as the forest of Agnes's origins, and she's spiritually returned there as a result of catharsis and finding meaning through art.

Women Talking (2022)

Score: 3.5 / 5

What a strange and wonderful film. Women Talking is almost precisely that: a film about women talking their way through the single biggest decision of their collective lives. The 2018 novel of the same name -- by Canadian author Miriam Toews -- is described as a "reaction through fiction" of real-life events as well as an empowering "act of female imagination." If it is anything like this film adaptation (I haven't read it yet), we could loosely describe it as a Socratic conversation, deeply philosophical and existential. But what isn't philosophical is their emotional investment in this conversation and the life-altering consequences that will ensue. So the drama of this film isn't at all based in any dynamic or even fully coherent narrative; there is no real plot, not much action, and really more themes than characters. It's about the situation, the words, the feelings, and the various reactions and responses to the horrors of these women's lives.

In an unclear, intentionally vague time and setting, a group of women gather in a large community barn. They are Mennonites, of a seemingly conservative variety, who live in a remote, rural colony somewhere; in the film, they speak with American accents and seem to be in a temperate setting, while the real-life colony was located in Bolivia. They have come to the realization, after an eyewitness's accusation, that many women in their colony have been systematically drugged with horse tranquilizers and raped, sometimes repeatedly and sometimes with complications like STIs, unwanted pregnancies, and injuries like knocked-out teeth and bruises. Now that the men of the colony are gone -- the opening narration tells us they've gone to try and gather money to bail the group of condemned men from jail -- the women are able to gather and discuss their plan of action: do they stay and do nothing, stay and fight, or leave?

There are too many interesting things at work here, and I can only really touch on several of them. But to start, let's discuss voice and agency. The film features the voiceover narration of one of the younger girls of the colony, and it seems to be addressed to the unborn child of the pregnant (by rape) woman Ona (Rooney Mara). This makes the narration both very dark and very innocent, and by film's end, surprisingly hopeful, as she intones something to the effect of "this has been my story, and it will not be yours." It's interesting particularly because none of the women have been taught to read or write, and so their oral history is crucial as they decide to leave the colony (SPOILER: they do in fact leave at the film's end; that's not really the point of the film so much as how they get to that decision). Additionally, the colony's male schoolteacher August (Ben Whishaw) -- a former apostate -- joins the women in the barn to take their minutes and record their dialogue. He is not formally permitted to speak, and while he harbors romantic feelings for Ona, he respectfully fulfills his duties without intruding much. His presence makes things a bit weird and tense at times, and in my understanding, it's his words that comprise the book on which this film is based; it's fascinating to me, and very welcome, that his voice and formal control over the narrative is so diminished in this film.

The women debate for a day and a half, and most of the film is just them talking about everything from how to conduct their discussion to their opinions of each other and the men, from vague, dark hints at what has happened to them to heightened concerns over their faith, gender roles, education, place in the world, marriages, etc. It's not unlike, in that way, much classical Grecian drama; for that matter, it's not all that different from 12 Angry Men. Each decision carries so much weight. Doing nothing (as only Frances McDormand's character voices support for) would mean further violence and no change in quality of life, but it may mean guaranteed salvation, as the only pathway to heaven is in fellowship in the colony. Staying and fighting for themselves -- that's a debate, too, if it would be for justice or revenge or equality or incremental improvements in their lives -- is an option, but perhaps carries too many more complex questions and intricacies. Would they have to forgive the men, and could they even if they wanted to? At what point does their abuse of forgiveness become permission? Leaving may mean damnation but liberation, but it too carries too many unknowns: they don't know where in the world they are, have never seen a map, can't read or write anyway. What would they do about the children? At what age are the boys too old to join them? If they stayed, would they be corrupted by the men, or would August be able to help the next generation of men to be better?

It's a very didactic and in some ways theatrical film, but it's never quite cinematic, and so it just won't appeal to everyone. That is, despite excellent production design and staging and cinematography, I'd rather have seen this in theatre, as it just never felt appropriately visually dynamic to me. I found its tone, however, to be the most surprising element of the whole thing. Given its horrific and tragic subject matter, I expected bleak nihilism more than anything. Instead, the film is almost arrestingly calm and even funny. It features no -- again, absolutely no -- onscreen violence. A few blink-and-you'll-miss-it shots show various women waking up, in flashback, with blood on their sheets or bruises on their bodies; bloodied teeth is the most unsettling image. There are references to violence verbally, of course, and some visible bruises (especially on Jessie Buckley's Mariche, whose husband beats her). There is one transgender man in the colony who is mute after his own rape; he only speaks with the children, and when one of the women finally calls him by his male name). His presence is more tragic than anything, and I wish the film did a bit more with him. Even with all this, the dialogue often sparks laughter, or at least smiles, even unexpectedly, as when one of the young girls pretends to be distraught and leaps from the upper level of the barn, only to land safely in a pile of hay.

During the screening I attended, I was reminded more than once of both George Cukor's The Women and M. Night Shyamalan's The Village in tone and, I guess, subject matter. It's not all terribly realistic -- obviously, in terms of actual history, but even in-world of the film -- and I wondered more than once as they referenced medicine where exactly they'd get it, or many of the goods in their colony. Perhaps, as the point of Women Talking is dialogue and ideas more than plot, it would be better conceived of as a parable. The women all seem to represent various stages of grief or ways to process trauma, including revenge, clamming up, fleeing, fighting, dissociating (telling stories), etc. The actors -- who also include Sheila McCarthy, Claire Foy, and Judith Ivey, as if there already weren't enough powerhouse women involved -- are all magnificent, and clearly know the profound depths of their screenplay. By the end, the main takeaway is primarily the universal yet still impossible choice to hope for the unknown or hate the familiar. And it will leave you reeling, if you allow yourself onto this film's wavelength and sit with it a while.

Men (2022)

Score: 4 / 5

The latest work from Alex Garland is perhaps also his most ambitious yet. Ex Machina was patient and cerebral, but completely accessible; Annihilation with its much bigger budget may have been visually accessible, but was even more heady with its artistic grasps at existentiality. Men, however, largely leaves the realm of science fiction behind, choosing instead to tell a story loaded with psychological horrors and emotional torment that feels a little too real and a little too theatrical at the same time. Garland's absolute control over tone, pacing, colors and light, and his performers is stunning to behold, even while we're grappling with the thematic implications of the madness to which we are witness.

Harper is a recent widow, and she needs a holiday. Choosing to travel alone to a quiet hamlet in the English country, she is haunted by memories of her late husband James. Their troubled relationship is shown in a few flashbacks to specific moments: the fight they had when Harper declared her intent to divorce; James's emotional attempts to gaslight, blame, and accuse before threatening suicide and attacking her physically; and finally James's death when he fell off an upstairs balcony and impaled himself on the fence below. It's this last moment that particularly disturbs Harper. Was James up there to jump and fulfill his threat, or was he trying to climb down and into his apartment she had locked? Did he know she'd be there, and is that why they locked eyes as he plummeted? Even in death, is he exerting his control over her?

Men may be many things, but it is primarily a journey through the grief process. Jessie Buckley, who is making quite a name for herself in thankless roles of psychological drama -- I'm Thinking of Ending Things and The Lost Daughter -- carries this movie as Harper with astonishing strength and grace, and of course lots of tension and screaming and slack-jawed terror. Much like we've seen in Relic and Midsommar and The Babadook and of course The Night House, certain cinematic horror in the last few years has largely been labeled as "elevated," and that seems primarily a distinction for psychologically complex and realistic horror that is filmed in a sensitive and suggestive way. With a few notable exceptions, Men dives into grieving for a lost husband, but also for a woman finding a way out from patriarchal expectations, away from misogynist control, and through her own internalized domestic guilt and shame. Seems like a bit of a leap to say that? Let's talk about the rest of the movie.

Shortly after arriving at her vacation house, Harper meets a man. The man, in fact, played by Rory Kinnear. He's the owner of the house, apparently some sort of off-the-grid Airbnb situation, and he's nice enough. Through his toothy smile, he assures her that the house is safe and takes her on a tour, making a few rough comments that smack of old-school misogyny: instead of asking her to throw away any non-biodegradable items rather than flushing, he points out brusquely and kind of creepily that menstrual pads must be tossed in the trash. It's the earliest clear example of something being very wrong here, and it sets the tone for the rest of the film: while Men isn't generally a comedy of errors like you could argue Get Out is, with its intense desire to skewer social behaviors, it does harness a curious intensity in focusing our attention on social cruelties that we can all recognize but don't all experience.

As Harper is a bit too restless to stay inside, she goes out to take walks through the village and interacts with several people. They're all men. And they are all played by Kinnear, the famed character actor doing remarkable work as the vicar, the bartender, the police officer, a nasty teenager, and even a naked stalker who is much more than he appears. Each man is distinct (thanks to amazing hair and makeup and some slickly uncanny CGI that is as off-putting as it is fascinating), and each one manages to threaten, annoy, or disappoint Harper in quick succession. Sometimes he makes a casual remark that is deeply wrong -- the vicar declares that James's suicide was Harper's fault, and if she hadn't locked the door, he'd still be alive -- and sometimes he chases her manically through a tunnel and a forest. Sometimes he's waiting outside for her to play with him -- and when she doesn't she's a "bitch" -- and sometimes he's peering through her windows as she rests.

Early scenes and scene breaks feature gorgeous landscape shots of tranquil, cool forests and countrysides under broad, open skies. The peaceful, inviting land could be Eden (and I thought more than once about other Aronofsky films like The Fountain and, yes, even Noah). And then there's the beautiful house itself, one intended to feel like a bougie, cozy retreat until it's too big and has too many potential points of easy entry for invaders for one lone woman to safeguard. The men become increasingly aggressive, to the point that the film started to become a home invasion thriller (and there's the reference I've been waiting for: mother!). As Harper deals with the onslaught, we realize she's reaching a psychological breaking point. The hell unleashed around her bleeds into her mind, and we're directly privy to it (thanks to great cinematography and editing) as things move from a realistic to completely abstract climax.

For most of the film, I assumed we were in Harper's mind as all the men couldn't possibly look alike (this isn't the kind of horror like Stepford Wives or something). By the climax, it's clear we are absolutely in Harper's mind, as the men vanish and reappear randomly, even in the middle of pursuit. She's paranoid for sure, but there are real horrors coming for her relentlessly, not unlike It Follows. The constant, dreadful tension builds until this climax, when it unravels in a completely insane bit of body horror that would make Cronenberg squirm. While I loved this movie, I couldn't rightly say what exactly its point might be. Is he simply assaulting general behaviors and attitudes of men toward women? That's vague and uncompelling at best. Is he making broader claims, like Aronofsky did in mother!, after his early and repeated use of biblical imagery of Eden and Harper plucking an apple? Why include the pagan imagery of the Green Man -- in the chapel, no less! -- and turn the naked stalker into a grassy, leafy pre-Christian god of the woodlands? This is no Wicker Man, but it is a masterful example of the best kind of British folk horror. Suggestive, scary, and sure to stick, unwelcome, in your mind long after.

The Lost Daughter (2021)

Score: 4 / 5

A character study of the highest tier, The Lost Daughter dropped with almost no fanfare on Netflix except for those of us who knew it was coming. It's Maggie Gyllenhaal's debut as director, and if that wasn't an interesting enough reason to want to see it, it's got Oscar written all over Olivia Colman's lead performance. But the film is also deeply complex, a sort of puzzle box for the cognitive adult who enjoys linking literary conceits with arthouse filmmaking. This is not the kind of movie that should have premiered on a streaming service -- it deserves a small, stately auditorium and a box of malted milk balls or chocolate covered raisins -- and yet here it is, sure to be overlooked or underseen by anyone unable to stop fidgeting or touching their phone while lounging on their sofa.

Endlessly literary, the film concerns a brief Grecian vacation taken by a middle-aged professor and translator named Leda (Colman). She's alone in the gorgeous resort town, and seems content to be so, walking through the trees down to the beach, reading under an umbrella, occasionally soaking in the sun and water. But, then again, her contentedness might be a bit forced, and it breaks now and again to see straining paranoia underneath. Her reactions to the people around her -- we're forced to watch other sunbathers and attendants along with Leda -- are striking, intense, and often internalized. While people-gazing, she might start to hyperventilate, eyes brimming with tears, before grabbing her book and hurrying in another direction. When another family asks her to move to another beach chair so they can all sit together, she refuses with disdain and almost cruelty before clearly getting upset that they are upset with her.

More than once, I wondered exactly what kind of movie I was watching. By the time Leda stares longingly at another woman (Dakota Johnson) and her young daughter on the beach, I feared this might become a Sapphic romance or even thriller, given the coldly impersonal first half hour or so and Leda's clearly unstable state of mind. Leda's attempts at conversation are uncomfortable, and she looks to be in pain while talking to the hotel caretaker (Ed Harris) and the beach boy (Paul Mescal) in early scenes. We get the impression more than once that Leda is not a reliable narrator, and I would not be surprised if the source novel was also written in first person, much like this movie, because despite the beautiful landscapes, I haven't felt so claustrophobic in a film all year. It makes you want to pause it just to come up for air, out of Leda's suffocating control of perspective. Leda's intense observance of the young mother and child seem triggering to her.

Then, suddenly, just as something weird is going on with Leda, the scene abruptly shifts, and it took me a little while to understand that the main narrative is interspersed with scenes from Leda's days some twenty years earlier, when Leda is played by Jessie Buckley. It's an inspired casting choice, but also a brilliant performance from Buckley as an irritated and overwhelmed young mother to two demanding daughters. These aren't really flashbacks, and if you're not paying attention, you'd think it was all happening in a unity of time, in the (fittingly) Greek sense. But really these are parallel stories that give us a more complete picture of Leda while emphasizing the relationship between motivation, sacrifice, and consequence. Younger Leda is so tired of this family life she apparently didn't want, and she's desperate to escape it to pursue her professional ambitions, which reach a boiling point when a celebrity scholar (the ever creepy Peter Sarsgaard) shows interest in her scholarship.

This is not a movie to watch lightly. The Lost Daughter is relentlessly challenging to watch, a test of emotional endurance not in a tragic or tearjerking way but because of its aggressive strangeness. To the casual viewer, it may appear inert. But if you cut out all distractions and dwell with Leda and the other characters in the moment, the film reveals itself unafraid to be ugly, messy, and often troubling. It will surely spark valuable conversations about "bad mothers" and "bad daughters," the latter of which is largely missing from feminist seminar discussions, but it will hopefully also inspire conversations about this kind of somewhat inaccessible storytelling. This is high art of cinema, and it trusts its audience to do the necessary legwork to keep up. I can't say it's a particularly entertaining film, but it's got one of the best performances of the year and it offers unique and rewarding challenges to its viewers.

The Courier (2021)

 Score: 3 / 5

British businessman Greville Wynne is surprised to be meeting two rather uptight people for an exclusive lunch. When he finds out one is with MI6 and the other is with the CIA, he seems both amused and bewildered. When they attempt to recruit him to help smuggle secrets out of Russia, he's completely dumbfounded. The year is 1960, and fears are growing about nuclear weapons in communist countries; Wynne is more interested in succeeding in his work to support his wife and son than in frequently flying to Moscow. But the agents are convinced that he, with no ties to the government and the theatricality inherent in salesmanship, is a perfect secret agent. They connect him with a secret Russian agent named Oleg Penkovsky (Merab Ninidze), and the two embark on a dangerous mission to help President Kennedy as the Cuban Missile Crisis looms.

Benedict Cumberbatch plays Wynne with somewhat atypical flair. Usually typecast as a introverted brainiac with unsavory social tendencies, here Cumberbatch seems to relish a more emotionally-driven character. The movie is, frankly, worth watching almost solely for the unexpected drama he proves himself adept at conveying. As he attempts to become the titular courier of intel, we never doubt that he's in pretty far over his head. His frequent conversations with his intelligence agent "handlers" -- Angus Wright and Rachel Brosnahan -- reveal his discomfort with lying to his wife and being constantly in danger of arrest. The Russians in the film are clearly ruthless, and fears of being thrown in a gulag are almost debilitating to the proper British gentleman. Well, "proper" when he's not schmoozing with potential clients; it's a joy to watch a loose Cumberbatch confirm for the Russians their worst suspicions about capitalist Westerners in raucous barrooms.

Remember Bridge of Spies, back in 2015? This movie reminded me of that, and of earlier movies in the genre, especially Hitchcock's. Based on true events that revolve around Cold War spies between Russia and the West, these films are most accessible as a character study, delving into the personal costs of espionage in service to your country (and, of course, the world generally). While I doubt The Courier will ever be considered an iconic or even particularly memorable entry in this genre, there's still a lot to be said for a smartly produced picture (Sean Bobbitt's engrossing cinematography feels as though it could have been made back in the 60s, while never feeling less than contemporary) with bankable stars who make a movie that comforts and interests and entertains us, even through and perhaps because of the clichés it relies upon.

Director Dominic Cooke and screenwriter Tom O’Connor work hard to strike a balance between spy-thriller action and character drama, and they mostly succeed. The movie's heart seems to be given to Wynne and Penkovsky, whose scenes together are often both fraught with tension and brimming with warm feelings. As the two men work together, they become entangled in each other's personal lives. Penkovsky even visits Wynne's family in England and becomes friendly with his wife and son. But Wynne's wife Sheila, played by Jessie Buckley, was the most interesting character to me. Patient and supportive and endlessly forgiving, she plays the dutiful wife even as she begins to suspect her husband is having an affair. He's exercising a lot, and trying new things in bed, and of course taking lots of long trips for work. When she finally learns what he's really been up to, she's utterly heartbreaking as she fights her own guilt for not trusting him and being unable to tell him, now that it's too late.

For it is indeed too late, when Wynne and Penkovsky are captured, imprisoned, and tortured by the KGB. The subsequent scenes are tired and morose, mostly taking place in dimly lit, grimy cells as they are deprived of food and sleep, beaten and abused, and isolated for two years. I found my mind drifting during these scenes simply due to their familiarity; the film renewed my interest for their final scene together, when Penkovsky's betrayal leads to his execution and Wynne is finally released after maintaining his innocence. Its sentimentality works as a result of the unpleasantness of the preceding 40 minutes or so, but I would have preferred more information about the spying and less about the incarceration, partly out of historical interest and partly because cutting out what is essentially stock footage of imprisonment would have made for a more engaging second half of the story.

I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020)

 Score: 4 / 5

"I'm thinking of ending things," the narrator repeats several times in the opening scene. The narrator is also the main character, played by Jessie Buckley, and she's sitting in a moving car. Amidst her not-quite stream of consciousness, including memory and hope, judgment and suggestion, her voiceover feels at once sad, bored, wistful. "I'm thinking of ending things," she repeats, seemingly contemplating dumping her boyfriend of six weeks, Jake, the man driving the car. He's taking her to meet his parents for the first time. On a farm. In a blizzard. It's not ideal. I'd think about ending things too, though by this point it's surely a little too late.

"I'm thinking of ending things," she says, framed by the window of the car and underscored by the sound effects of a whistling wind. The lengthy opening scene is entirely within the car. So is the third major movement of the film, when Jake and our narrator leave his parents' farm. These people spend a lot of time in the car and, thematically, get absolutely nowhere. They're trapped in the world of the film and by the film itself; the movie is shot in a tight 4:3 aspect ratio that feels unwelcome and uncomfortable in our days of big-ass-tv digital screenings. Her entrapment in these frames suggests another, darker meaning to her gerund thoughts: suicide. It helps that most of the shots are from outside the car windows, with the whistling wind and thick snowfall. It makes it that much harder to see their faces and hear their voices, which are the only things worth trying to see clearly. In fact, the first we see of the pair is the clearest we see them, in many ways. Things only get more cloudy, more strange from here.

"I'm thinking of ending things," but who is she? We never really know. Her name is, initially, Lucy, but it apparently changes when other people call her other names like Ames and Yvonne and she doesn't correct them. As Jake introduces her to his parents and their conversation develops, details of her life change from sentence to sentence, including how they met, her job, her past. She quotes poetry at length and, in one incredible scene I had to pause during to reference-check, imitates Pauline Kael while quoting her review of A Woman Under the Influence (a film in which that woman attempts suicide) as if she herself is creating the monologue. And she's not alone in this. Jake, played by Jesse Plemons, is apparently such a vapid man that he has essentially no character. Almost everything he says is a reference, a quote, or something he clearly lifted from another source.

Not long after they get to the farm and meet Jake's parents (played by Toni Collette and David Thewlis), the film teeters close to psychological horror. In this haunted house of Americana, each time the parents -- who very much seem to have missed the memo they'd be receiving visitors -- leave the room and return, they jump to a different time in their lives. From dewy-eyed newlyweds to a couple on their deathbed, their aging follow no linear logic. By the time Jake and his girlfriend leave into a night repeatedly referred to as treacherous, we're fully engaged in an organized nightmare; the problem is, we have no access to the organization of it.

And that's really writer/director Charlie Kaufman's modus operandi. But unlike his other films, i'm thinking of ending things is almost inaccessible in its opaque artistry, its tedious dialogue that would require a reference appendix, its bizarre obsession with -- typical for the creator -- an utterly unlikable and deeply introverted man in the throes of agony simply because he's alive and can't cope. Here, I'd argue (based on the conclusion, which I'd rather not spoil but may need to), his main character is in fact much more fascinating than in Being John Malkovich or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, for example, but then we'd have to discuss the issue of dramatizing mental illness in this way and with this very specific ending. It just gave me the willies, and not in a juicy frisson but in a guilt-ridden way. "I'm thinking of ending things" might be Kaufman's way of trying to end our understanding of his movies.

Of course, I'm sure a repeat viewing would help, especially now that I have a few notes of specific references these characters make. Frankly, I'm not sure I want to watch this hypnotic, bewildering movie again any time soon. It certainly doesn't help that it premiered on Netflix; this kind of experience needs to be seen in a blackened auditorium with absolutely no distractions. Netflix fare has to compete with all manner of food, cell phone conversations, family members interjecting, bathroom breaks ad nauseam, and to combat the soporific comfort of a viewer's bed or sofa and ambient lighting. I'd be surprised if this movie garners many fans, much like the beautiful and haunting I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House. Then again, Kaufman's work here is clearly a labor of love, and one that manages, despite its unfathomable ambiguities, to carry us along with it by sheer virtue of his control of the craft.

If you've seen it, or read the novel on which it is loosely based, let's have a conversation about it. I'm not at all convinced my interpretation holds all of the water. I'm not sure any interpretation would. I guess that's good, but it's also dreadfully dull in context of this movie. I guess I'd rather end things too.

Judy (2019)

Score: 5 / 5

Rocketman may have been the feel-good musical biopic of the year, and a brilliant gaddam bit of cinema, but Judy has the heart, soul, and enough nostalgia for this gay musical-lover to steal his heart. In what is essentially the real-life version of A Star is Born, we're subjected to the absolute evil that is showbiz fame. Here we see the monstrous aftereffects of Old Hollywood and exactly why it had to die. It also makes the #MeToo movement feel all the more justified, for those viewers who perhaps thought it was a "popular" or incendiary smear campaign.

Judy attempts to capture the final months in Judy Garland's life. Ravaged by the drugs she was given and the food she was denied, her frail and failing body and mind are forced into extreme situations to make money. She is forcibly separated from her children, sent overseas, and obligated to perform in order to stay afloat and, hopefully, return to her family. The film takes us within her mind, where her children are the only things that matter anymore, and she just can't get to them. The drugs make sense in this context, along with the booze and the men she tries to love.

Some parts of Judy's real-life story are, of course, blurred here. Mark Herron, her fourth husband, is entirely absent from the proceedings. We're introduced to her third (Rufus Sewell) and fifth (Finn Wittrock) in turn, however, and we see the dangerously abusive interactions between them. Judy is not blameless here, but the frequent flashbacks to her own childhood abuse spark compassion and understanding if not justification. The relationship she shares with her oldest daughter Liza is beautiful but only onscreen momentarily, while her professional relationships are as volatile as those she shares with her husbands. What makes its mark, however, are the relationships she shares with her fans. One especially poignant scene depicts her enjoying an evening with two gay superfans, a lovely bit of fan service to her legions of gay supporters and enthusiasts. "You won't forget me, will you?" are Judy's final lines in the film.

Rising majestically above the already strong biopic itself, Renee Zellweger returns to the silver screen with her most accomplished performance yet. Unbelievably technical in execution, the calculation and physical work she put into becoming the celebrity is palpably exhausting. And yet it never once distracts, never once disappoints, and never once reveals the facade. Zellweger is Garland onscreen, in the smallest of twitches and in the grandest of swigs from the bottle. She even sounds uncannily like Garland in her later years, belting out classics onstage and crooning "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" from her leisurely pose on the floor.

I wept through the entire movie. Sure, I laughed a few times and smiled through my tears, but by the end I was utterly dehydrated. By the time the final text appears -- L. Frank Baum's "A heart is not judged by how much you love, but by how much you are loved by others" -- I completely lost it. Be prepared with tissues, a hanky, and a water bottle.