Opus (2025)

Score: 1 / 5

We could spend hours picking apart every little problem with A24's most recent theatrical release, and I imagine most people who see it will do so. Before we get to my comparatively brief laundry list of complaints, however, it's important to impress on you -- in case you're wanting to see this film -- how exceptionally, suffocatingly unentertaining Opus was to me. I was so bored in the auditorium that I started counting the little lights that line the aisle and, as no one else was in the screening, I discovered that a total of 317 little tiny lights were dimly shining along the floor of this particular room. One might have been burned out.

Some films work by referencing others like itself, honoring and citing what has come before. Opus seems, rather, to think quite profoundly of itself, despite the obvious and better films to which one should readily compare it. Essentially, in the story, a journalist summoned to an enigmatic pop icon's isolated compound learns quickly that his worshipful cult has big plans for her. Titles like the cult-y The Wicker Man and Midsommar and The Sacrament come to mind, along with healthy doses of ritualized abuse like in Blink Twice or even White Lotus and Nine Perfect Strangers. There is some indication of pop art and/or celebrity status being used as a byproduct and shield of sorts of trauma mirrored in, for example, Vox Lux and The United States vs. Billie Holiday. The clearest point of connection, to me, was Ingrid Goes West, which plays with tone to a much more satisfying result.

Any invitation that includes the verb "luxuriate" should be accepted, so we're right there with journalist Ariel (writer and actor Ayo Edebiri, The Bear, What We Do in the Shadows, Theater Camp, Inside Out 2) when she's a bit excited for this otherwise weird summons. Her boss, Stan (Murray Bartlett of Looking, White Lotus, The Last of Us, Welcome to Chippendales), is also invited, and he educates her on their host. Aging pop superstar Alfred Moretti has announced a new album, years after his retirement. To drum up buzz, he has invited six notable journalists for a listening party at his private compound in Utah. "Journalists" is a stretch; the others include a talk show host (Juliette Lewis), an influencer, a radio shock jock, and a paparazza. Moretti himself is a mystery, but all the characters have long covered his fame in their lines of work or are personal fans. He occupies a mythic status far beyond that of mere artist, like one imagines the aura of Madonna and Elton John to be in life or the aura worshipped by devotees of Prince or Elvis in death. 

The main problem with the film is that we are given no reasons to believe or understand Moretti's greatness. By the time the characters have met and arrive at their desolate destination, it is immediately clear that Moretti is the figurehead of a cult, surrounded by sycophantic disciples tending to the compound. If Moretti's PR representative who announced the album (played by a delightfully unhinged Tony Hale) wasn't enough indication, the filmmakers include news footage of the global outburst upon news of Moretti's return. But the phenomenon of celebrity and "cult status" is herein literalized, and Ariel seems to be the only person present with an ounce of suspicion.

It's maddening, and only gets worse from there. The cultists all wear blue robes, and the visitors are pampered and prepared to meet with Moretti as if he's medieval royalty about to choose one as his concubine. An awkwardly funny sequence indicates that the visitors -- each constantly chaperoned (read: surveilled) by an attendant -- are freshly bathed, fed specific rations, shaved in specific private ways, and finally presented to their leader in the most elegant and unlikely of attire. While Stan gobbles up the experience like a greedy child, we're pushed to side with Ariel, clearly the only clear-eyed and competent guest, on whom will doubtless fall the responsibility of whistleblowing when things go tits-up.

And indeed they do. In predictable beats, the guests are treated to their glorious fantasy: a private musical performance from their host. Enter John Malkovich, in his uniquely bizarre brand of personality, dressed in what appears to be plates of mirrors that sorely hinder his movement, jerkily thrusting his way around the encircled chairs of his press. The "music" is grating and immaterial, and watching Malkovich pressing his crotch against Juliette Lewis in a big wig and red sequined gown was not my idea of a good time.

Yes, this seems excessive, but is it all meant to be too much? Could that be its aesthetic? A worthy question, dear reader. Apart from its pointed casting, the film does take big swings in odd moments. Moretti is never dressed the same way twice, and some of his outfits are genuinely dazzling. But Malkovich sometimes completely changes his wardrobe between adjacent scenes where the characters go directly from the threshold of a building to a dining venue or to a performance room, a space of time in which he simply could not have changed such elaborate ensembles. Camp? Maybe, but camp only works if it's about something, and something serious at that.

There's a curious subplot between Stan and Ariel. Though she was specifically invited to Moretti's gathering, Stan instinctively (or selfishly) delegates to her the task of taking notes of everything they experience. The article, "the story of this place," is Stan's alone. It's an infuriating first note to their dynamic, seeing his callous conceit and her automatic acquiescence. One could trace through Opus to connect the points of journalistic ethics and make some kind of point about paparazzi and the decadence of celebrity culture and the problems of parasocial relationships with emotionally-charged superstars. But despite being about that, generally, the film never offers insight into these phenomena. No sympathy, no empathy. No reason. By the film's disappointingly predictable climax, Moretti reveals the mass suicide plans for his cult and his motivation: wanting to stop critics. He seeks revenge for anyone whose artistic creativity has been hindered or crushed by the negative opinions of others.

The eye-roll-inducing basis for these doldrums revealed, I left this bitter viewing experience wondering only what this film is trying to say, and to whom. It's not funny, except in a few forced ways and a few awkward ways. It's not scary. If it's in defense of artists, its locus of horror is severely misplaced by making the artist a stand-in for Jim Jones. If it's in defense of press, it mistreats its characters by grossly misrepresenting their profession. If it's in criticism of celebrity culture and fan worship, where are its targets? Weirdness can work by and for its own purposes, but not in otherwise tepid and pointless material like this.

Ava (2020)

 Score: 3 / 5

Marketed as another thrill-a-minute action movie with spies and assassins for Jessica Chastain to shoot her way through, Ava was a slight disappointment. Not because of the movie itself -- I quite enjoyed it -- but because it wasn't another Atomic Blonde. I've said it before and I'll say it again, but sometimes marketing tactics can really ruin a movie, and this one set us up for an experience totally beyond the scope or purpose of Tate Taylor's latest flick.

In the vein of so many before it, Ava concerns its titular character, a former soldier and recovering addict now working as an assassin. We see her in action right away and notice that, for all her cunning and murderous efficiency, she has a remarkable moral streak. She asks her target if he knows why someone wants him dead, apparently needing some kind of confession or at least acknowledgment before dealing out death. That's not the way a lethal killer should do business, and she's being observed; we correctly suspect that her tenure is nearing an end. Jessica Chastain handles the character beautifully, as usual, and proves that she's as capable in action scenes as she is in high drama.

In fact, part of the reason I so enjoyed this movie is in its focus on Ava's character and relationships. The fighting is nice and all, but the movie soars when Ava faces off against people who are significant to her. Her hospitalized mother (Geena Davis), her sister Judy (Jess Weixler), and Michael (Common), Ava's ex who is now engaged to Judy, feature in only a few scenes but manage to carry immense dramatic weight. John Malkovich plays Duke, Ava's handler and self-professed father figure, who is forced to try and defend her behavior and reputation to his superior, Simon (Colin Farrell).

Actually, the plot is frustratingly straightforward and makes the most sense if you think about genre and not about logic or realism. But the thematic strength of how the film handles addiction is fascinating. Most of the characters are either addicts or recovering, and several times I was struck by the parallels to criminality. These assassins seem to crave risk and secrecy and murder in a way that keeps them trapped in a cycle; it is telling that Ava and Duke met in the military. Even Simon, who appears to be quite wealthy and well-adjusted socially, harbors nasty violent tendencies. Nothing about considering crime in terms of addiction is new, but the actors and director here are making a movie about real people that is thrilling and mysterious and sad. Too often it's the other way around, and the addicts are just used for the plot.

Come for Chastain being badass and looking amazing. Stay for Davis and the rest of the cast doing lovely things. Don't expect much, or expect to be frustrated or disappointed.

Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile (2019)

Score: 3.5 / 5

I have strongly contrasting opinions about this movie, and this is a rare case where my ambivalence does not particularly help the film in my esteem. And it begins with that historically accurate yet terribly cumbersome title.

The story indeed follows the life of Ted Bundy, here played by a more mature Zac Efron than we've seen since The Paperboy. Looking, as he does, uncannily like the handsome serial killer, Efron manages to play the character remarkably straight, never resorting to caricature or even relishing in the horror of the real man, in the way you might expect camp horror to (I'm thinking if Bundy were to ever appear on American Horror Story). His performance is so deeply layered that some might call it opaque, and I wouldn't say that, here, that's a bad thing; Efron does not give us any footholds, displaying Bundy in his charming wonder behind a blinding smokescreen of suavity. It helps that Efron's public persona is almost exclusively positive and popular, but here he is notably not playing any of his own strengths, and I didn't see a single -ism of his on screen. 

Most fascinating to me, though, is how tightly Efron and director Joe Berlinger work together to craft the film around his character. We never see Bundy committing any of his many murders. While I value the utter refusal to glorify his violence, the lack of it entirely almost does glorify it, doesn't it? It seems to suggest that his crimes occurred in a void, affecting no one, and are perhaps even forgettable, despite that many of his victims have friends and family still alive and mourning. Even more interesting, in this context, is that Bundy himself, bereft of the visual dynamic of his sins, becomes an utter void on screen. Efron's magnetic performance pulls us in, but in to what? He is a blank slate, a repository for all the headlines and accusations and charges leveled at him, but one that could possibly be -- forgive me for even suggesting it -- innocent. If the film is indeed trying to gaslight us (which I don't think it's smart enough to do, but more than once I wondered), it is surely because of its real focus.

The film's primary dramatic character is in fact Liz Kendall (Lily Collins), the barely fictionalized Elizabeth Kloepfer who literally wrote the book of being Bundy's girlfriend. Collins plays the character's insecurities to a tee, which makes her less interesting for us but perfect prey for Efron's Bundy. I say "prey" not because she winds up at the end of his knife but because the film eventually edits itself around her perspective as she begins to suspect the dark heart of the man she loves and has entrusted her daughter with. The too-good-to-be-true boyfriend Bundy is shown to us in blissful home video footage even as Liz turns to look at the latest news bulletin on television describing more brutal murders. Even in scenes where we only follow Bundy, Efron and the screenplay refuse to let us in on his secrets. I kept waiting for the murdering, the final blow of violence, and it never came, unless you count his increasingly adamant declarations of innocence. We never hear his thoughts, we never see his past, we never see his sins. The film, smartly I think, doesn't even try to rationalize his behavior by examining his childhood, development, or philosophy. That's obviously because it's impossible to rationalize him, but any attempt to do so belongs with criminal psychologists in a documentary, not in a Netflix drama.

I did, however, wish for a bit more; I just don't know of what. I found the courtroom climax -- courtroom dramas often boast my favorite climaxes -- dull, despite John Malkovich presiding with his deeply biting tone, because we've literally seen it before. There is a time and place for painstakingly recreated drama, and this one is just not it, especially not with numerous other Bundy documentaries streaming online at the same time. I wondered, during the movie, if Berlinger was relying too heavily on Efron and was otherwise incapable of making an interesting movie. And that may be true, but it's also highly possible that Berlinger was about a very different business than capturing a real-life boogeyman. What I liked most about this movie, and why I think I'd recommend it to any true crime fans, is that its refusal to reveal any hint of Bundy's "extremely wicked, shockingly evil and vile"-ness, is what makes the film so terrifying. His evil was real, as the film's deep understanding of him shares with us, and the only people who got to see it firsthand weren't able to warn others.

Velvet Buzzsaw (2019)

Score: 4.5 / 5

Dan Gilroy may not be the year's premier horror filmmaker, but no one can say he doesn't try daring new things with each project. Here he turns his attention away from seedy bottom-feeders in the news as well as shady lawyers in a morality play and turns his considerable insight and wit to the world of contemporary art. In doing so, he captures a dazzling, damning, and deeply disturbing look at the ways we treat art nowadays.

When she stumbles across a dead man in her apartment building, Josephina (Zawe Ashton) sneaks into his unit and discovers tons of beautiful paintings. She steals them and soon the L.A. contemporary art world clamors for the work. But the dead artist, Vetril Dease, had poured some of his inner demons into his paintings, stemming from his abused childhood that culminated in murdering his father and subsequent debilitating mental illness. Having violated his specific instructions to destroy his art, the greedy art dealers and critics become prey for the vengeful art they've profited from.

Sound brilliant? It is. Think The Picture of Dorian Gray meets It Follows, and you've about got the entire horror aspect of this movie. But what makes Velvet Buzzsaw a really amazing movie is that, in terms of its structure, it's not even a horror flick.

We begin not with the crazed artist painting his masterpiece nor do we even know about his death for the first several scenes. Instead, we start in an art exhibition in Miami Beach with an art critic named Morf Vandewalt (Jake Gyllenhaal), whose caustic wit and transcendent taste seem to have earned him a prestigious place in contemporary artistic circles. He passes through the gallery attentive more to the guests than the art, fleetingly trading gossip and insider info on the biz. His date is Josephina, who works for famed gallery owner Rhodora Haze (Rene Russo), and they quickly begin a sexual relationship when Morf reveals unhappiness with his boyfriend. But this, too, is fleeting. Morf is not the relationship guy, he's the social status guy.

With this inciting incident, the film is immediately established as a razor-sharp satire. Rapid-fire dialogue reveals characters' infinite disdain, avarice, and no small amount of personal loathing. You can never quite shake the feeling that these people know their entire sense of identity is based on being unable to create anything; they merely feed off what others make, hoping to grab whatever social and financial power they can by cheating the artists and making what should be experiential consumptive.

Leave it to Dan Gilroy to not only lampoon an entire institution but to make a complex and sophisticated piece of art in doing so. Everybody has ulterior motives, and all are impossibly selfish. Gilroy has a knack for these utterly unwholesome characters, and here he adds campy flamboyance to them. Perhaps best in this vein are Toni Collette and Rene Russo, vying for Morf's favor and the hottest pieces on the market, with their bizarre costumes, striking hair, and deliciously affected speech patterns. The film's color palette and cinematography paint a highly stylized world for our endless pleasure, the kind of cinematic candy that makes your mouth water and pucker up at the same time. What else would you expect from the production designer Jim Bissell (Suburbicon, Juamnji, 300) and cinematographer extraordinaire Robert Elswit?

With its large cast, short running time, and lots on its mind, Velvet Buzzsaw could have derailed into a sordid mess of half-baked ideas. Instead, thanks to precise writing, focused direction, and stellar work from cast and crew, it cuts deep into the state of art in a postmodern capitalist world of ownership and validity and subjectivity.

Bird Box (2018)

Score: 4 / 5

It's become a bizarre cultural joke, but the new Netflix thriller Bird Box is a surprisingly effective post-apocalyptic sci-fi/horror blend that will make you think and weep, if it is short on scares.

Based on the Bram Stoker Award-winning novel by Michigander Josh Malerman, Bird Box imagines a future in which mysterious horrors prowl the earth provoking widespread death. "Provoking" is the key here because, much like in M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening, these monsters do not kill directly, instead somehow inspiring their victims to kill themselves. Their methodology is vague because they are so mysterious, and it would seem that one informs the other. If they are aliens, do they drive their victims insane? If they are demons, do they possess their prey? We're sure of one thing: seeing the monsters is the problem. The film actually suggests the monsters are invisible until you see them; those we would call mentally ill or insane can apparently see the "beautiful" beings and choose to worship them, carrying out their will by trying to get other survivors to see as well.

Speaking of the survivors, that's where we get the now-famous image of Sandra Bullock with two children, all of them blindfolded in a boat. Having survived five years in this chaotic world, she finds herself the lone parent for two children and desperate for help. After receiving a radio transmission from a community of survivors, she blindfolds herself and her children and takes off on a boat, rowing for two days through wilderness and rapids. The film splits its time between two narratives: one is here on the river, the other is five years prior, just after the world falls to these mysterious invaders and as Sandy B joins up with other survivors.

I was shocked at the number and caliber of star power here. Other than Bullock, we have Sarah Paulson, BD Wong, Jacki Weaver, John Malkovich, Tom Hollander, Rosa Salazar, Danielle Macdonald, and Trevante Rhodes. What? I know, it's pretty crazy. Add to that the talent behind the scenes: director Susanne Bier (The Night Manager, Things We Lost in the Fire), writer Eric Heisserer (Arrival, Lights Out), and frequent Ron Howard collaborator cinematographer Salvatore Totino (Spider-Man: Homecoming, Everest, Concussion). It all makes for a beautiful picture I rather wish had been released in theaters.

Having held off on this picture for a while due to overwhelmingly negative responses from friends who had seen it, I'm really glad I didn't let them talk me out of viewing. Perhaps they were upset because it's not a "scary" movie, or perhaps they wanted more action or something. I found Bird Box to be a lovely, if intimate, adventure through the heart of a wounded woman. Bullock's character is hardened by the world -- she's pregnant and does not want to be -- and the events of this plot force her to make a choice between remaining isolated and breaking open. The film is far more emotional than scary or creepy, and as she learns to find hope and love in unlikely places, you might shed a tear too.

As in the best science fiction, this film invites many layers of speculation and interpretation. If the monsters are alien, how do they know intimate details of the characters' pasts? If they're demons, why does the natural world react in such strange yet predictable ways to their presence? The picture will provoke discussions of insanity, art, motherhood, survival, religion, community; it's sparse enough to be a fairy tale and thrilling enough to be entertaining. In the end, we've experienced a journey toward hope. That's something we could all use a bit more of.

Plus, Trevante Rhodes is beautiful.

Deepwater Horizon (2016)

Score: 2.5 / 5

In case you forgot, this picture will make you angry at BP all over again. Without going near the dangerous waters of the real-life events at Deepwater Horizon, I can say that this film works on its own terms and packs a few not-so-subtle punches. For the most part, however, it's exactly what I expected it to be.

Turning an enormous tragedy into a small-scale disaster, Deepwater Horizon never feels necessary, and worse, never feels inspired. Rather than augmenting its familiar story with powerful performances or Big Themes (as we see in most major disaster flicks), this film plays it safe and small, sticking strictly to the action. While there are some nice touches to the action, it never has much heart to it. Thankfully, there is enough distraction that I never laughed out loud at the thin dialogue and frantic editing. The sound mixing and sound editing are notably impressive, and the apparently practical set design is a study unto itself.

So, technically, the movie is dazzling. However, there are almost no characterizations of the considerable cast, making the ensemble drama just that. We see some nice performances -- John Malkovich is particularly delightful -- but nothing worth gushing over. As such, the fatalities of the film fall pretty flat, and the emotional climax is more climactic because of the fiery background effects than because of the performances of our leads. In fact, the most emotional scene I saw happened about halfway through, as a nearby ship views the explosive oil spewing into the night sky. A bird flies in, crashing through the bridge of the ship, coated in oil and shrieking as it smashes into windows and desks before dying. If there is a central visual message from the film, that is it.

The film's worst sin, though, is its flat sense of inevitability. Seemingly after each of the initial scenes, the camera cuts away to the base and its underwater pipes, showing the immense pressure and looming catastrophe before the film has even set up its narrative focus. There's never a moment when we don't know exactly what's going to happen. Because of this, I was disappointed in director Peter Berg, who has proven himself fully capable and even talented in helming an action-thriller. Here, though, I couldn't see a creative inspiration at work. Instead, I see substance ignored in favor of technical skill; a routine form of shallow entertainment, as mindless as it is predictable.

IMDb: Deepwater Horizon