May December (2023)

Score: 5 / 5

Todd Haynes, you brilliant bastard.

One of my favorite filmmakers is back on his bullshit (in the best and most challenging ways) in a recent Netflix film that deserves much more popular conversation and all of the awards. May December sounds weird and, in fact, is very weird; not at all a feel-good experience yet vitally important in the oeuvre of Haynes's work and in the past year of films. Only about halfway through, I realized this was the most emotionally and psychologically complex story I'd seen in ages, and that it was easily climbing the ranks of my favorite movies of the year. It's hard to desrcribe the effect of Haynes on an audience -- given the bizarre breadth of stories he chooses to tell -- and you can't really ascribe particular aesthetics to him, but the best I can manage is to loosely define his style as one of embracing mundane horror or, rather, seeing what is horrifying in otherwise commonplace things. And I don't necessarily mean horror in terms of "that which is scary" but rather what makes something disturbing, uncanny, or grotesque, despite appearing simple and beautiful and peaceful. Take his last feature film, Dark Waters, which he spun from a dry legal procedural about an environmentalist and humanist lawyer fighting pollution and corruption into a riveting, nightmare-inducing thriller with strong Gothic undertones. It was like nothing we had seen from him, but also kind of fits his filmography with its devastating premise and delivery.

And what a perfect return to form with this material! The narrative of May December concerns successful actress Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman), who arrives at a lovely home in Savannah, Georgia, to spend a week with a nice but unremarkable woman named Gracie Atherton (Julianne Moore) and her family. We know -- as does Gracie, who has agreed to be shadowed -- that Elizabeth will be playing Gracie in a forthcoming indie film. We don't know, however, exactly why, and dark hints are dropped during the first act as to exactly why Gracie might be the subject of a feature film. Surely it isn't about her twins, who are graduating high school while Elizabeth visits.

Indeed, everyone in the film knows what's really going on, and it takes us some time to catch up; a rewatch would only exponentially improve our understanding of the furtive glances, the thick silences, and the veiled language every character uses. We learn that, twenty years prior, Gracie had an affair with a coworker at the pet store where she worked; she was 36 at the time, married, with kids, and it royally messed them all up. We also learn that the man she had the affair with was, in fact, a boy: Joe, 13 years old, in the seventh grade. So the affair was actually rape. Gracie was sentenced to prison, where she had Joe's baby. After she was released, she and Joe married. They are about to be empty nesters, despite that Joe (Charles Melton) is now 36 years old.

It's an endlessly depraved premise, one that will endear few viewers. And it's not meant to, though this might be one of the most sensitive and daring looks into pedophilia and grooming I've ever seen in a film. Samy Burch's screenplay has no interest, really, in what happened in the past, or even probing the minds of its characters. We're (thankfully) not forced to endure flashbacks or reenactments (with one notable exception, when Elizabeth attempts to reenact the inciting incident in the pet store's supply closet by herself, but we'll get to that). The film doesn't even want us to judge its characters, despite the clearly appalling, monstrous subject matter. The more time passes, the more confusing their lives and motivations and rationalizations and justifications get, and we're awash in a bewildering mess of bright colors and lights, warm interactions that belie icily guarded truths, and the unbearably polite sham of social graces that enable evil to thrive.

For a drama that is as frequently gasp-inducing as laughably absurd, May December is also the most thrilling viewing experience of the year. I sat on the edge of my sofa literally vibrating with anxiety almost the entire time, a sensation I previously felt while watching Beau is Afraid. Haynes films the most dull moments with a melodramatic, Technicolor flair that could tip into Stepford Wives or other psychosexual territory at any second. It's funny that our introduction to Gracie is her face looking into the fridge, the cold light shining off her visage, wondering if they have enough hot dogs; Haynes stings the moment with music that could indicate something violent or graphic, but when nothing happens, we're left with the feeling that, for Gracie, it might be horrifying that she doesn't have enough hot dogs and that that's the most concerning trial of her present life. It's hilarious, but you don't dare laugh.

Maybe part of the reason we don't laugh, even then, is that we understand there's something not quite right about Gracie. Later in the film, other people characterize her as naive, passive, simple, sweet; she's not, apparently, a typically calculating, vicious, or even serial predator. Or is she? Moore plays both sides, balancing a dangerous game of moments that are genteel and hospitable, reluctantly forthcoming or withholding, and powerfully threatening in the most understated way, often all within the same scene. It's dizzying, heady stuff, and clearly only Moore herself knows what's really going on with the character. No less mesmerizing is Elizabeth, whose determination to learn all about Gracie leads her to try and insinuate herself into the lives of this already put-upon family who have endured surely no small amount of public disdain, ridicule, and ostracism. Why did Gracie agree to being the subject of a film? We'll never know. But Elizabeth is not going to let the opportunity go to waste. It helps that Portman plays desperation and artistry so well together (think Black Swan and Vox Lux), and as she mirrors Gracie's simplicity, Portman brings her own darkness to the character she's creating in recreating Moore's character. Her visit to the high school drama club -- and the things she says during it -- is the kind of scene that feels like you're free falling when you thought there would be another stair.

I told you it's heady stuff, y'all. It's also visceral.

Moore and Portman deserve endless awards for their performances, which should be studied by theatre artists and theorists alike for decades to come. Moore's lilting, occasionally lisping voice reveals nothing about her mental or developmental state, though you'd think it would, and in fact blurs the lines between pathology and physicality. Portman's vampiric efforts to consume her subject while becoming her are most obvious in their literal mirroring scenes, usually framed by or shot through actual mirrors, when we start to realize that we can't clearly identify which character is the predator. Obviously Gracie was the legally convicted predator, but is Elizabeth's predation any less animalistic? Is Elizabeth becoming the predator she's watching, or is the real predatory Elizabeth finally starting to show? Meanwhile, even as we're increasingly aware of Elizabeth's horrifying possibilities, we increasingly suspect that Gracie is as simple-minded as some claim her to be; she doesn't seem to understand that she ever did anything wrong in manifesting love for the person she fell in love with. Has she convinced herself of this over time -- as she has clearly convinced Joe, who Elizabeth starts pushing to question his lived experiences -- or has she ever considered the alternative?

The film is bright and colorful and beautiful, a visual style that just doesn't fit, and the ironic juxtaposition seems to inform our understanding of the characters as well. Despite several scenes outside in picturesque -- a little too picturesque -- locations, under fawning trees and clear skies and bright warm sunshine, the characters look lost in their own minds and bodies, floating through scenery without really existing in it or even seeing their surroundings. They're totally disconnected from the reality of the film, indicating levels of delusion, preoccupation, and willful unreality shared by every single character. It's the opposite of chewing scenery, and against every instinct of performers in any professional vein. I'd argue -- and this is its own dissertation, but I'm working on it -- that May December is a perfect example of real camp, the kind that is deadly serious and cruelly superficial. There is no end to discussing this film and its infinite complicated depths, but we'll pause here as I urge you with every ounce of my being: if you are willing to stomach it, buckle up and take the ride. One of the best movies of the year will fuck you up.

Dear Evan Hansen (2021)

Score: 3 / 5

One of the most troubling musicals ever produced -- after, what, maybe Carousel? -- Dear Evan Hansen has finally made it to the silver screen. As such, it's finally reaching a much wider audience than simply those of us who had listened to the soundtrack for the last four years or so. Of course, with each new project by composers Benj Pasek and Justin Paul (The Greatest Showman, La La Land, Aladdin), their fanbase has grown. But seeing the famed musical from top to bottom reveals that it's distinctly darker than their other works, and its story by Steven Levenson (Fosse/Verdon, the upcoming tick, tick...Boom!) is really, truly problematic. And not simply in the "that didn't age well" kind of cynically postmodern way; it grapples with intense and urgent issues before coming to a conclusion that, well, feels deeply unsatisfying. As the ending attempts to assuage any complicit guilt from the audience it also bravely faces the consequences of its own plot points. One has to wonder if the full presentation in such an accessible medium has influenced its less than warm critical and popular reception.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. In case you didn't already know, the film starts by introducing us to the title character, Evan, who is about to head off to school despite his debilitating social anxiety. We learn immediately that his mother, working a lot to support the two of them, is struggling to connect with Evan, but exhorts him to follow his therapist's advice and write letters to himself with attainable goals and words of encouragement. He wears a cast on his left arm, broken after falling from a tree in flashbacks presented to us ad nauseam during the film, although it's not until very late that -- SPOILER ALERT -- we learn that particular episode was in fact a suicide attempt brought on by Evan's equally debilitating depression. That revelation is the final emotional climax in a movie filled with similar twists of the knife. In case you weren't getting the idea, this is not a razzle-dazzle romp through high school.

In fact, and this is where I take some issue with Stephen Chbosky's adaptation of the musical, the film seems almost intent on making everything really fucking depressing for us as well as for the characters. With the exceptions of the opening number ("Waving Through a Window," one of the best songs in musical theatre in the last decade) and the letter-writing number ("Sincerely Me"), every song is despondent and sentimental, sickly both in emotional weight and in tempo. My indignation was piqued in the first few minutes because, even though "Waving" is a great opening number, the film cuts one of my favorite -- and notably upbeat -- songs entirely: "Anybody Have a Map," sung by the two mother characters. Similarly, nearer the climax, the film cuts "Good for You," a biting -- and also upbeat -- number that propels three distinct character choices in the stage musical.

Instead of including these numbers to help the momentum of the film, Chbosky just slices them in favor of lengthy dialogue scenes that feel, if possible, more morose and melodramatic than the songs. Even the two new musical inclusions, "The Anonymous Ones" (co-written with Amandla Stenberg, the actress who sings it) and "A Little Closer" are really slow and sad, far more about internalized character study than externalized character (or plot) development. Sacrificing story is just not a great model for any musical, especially one that has a lot of story to tell. The languid pace does more than just make the movie a bit of a sluggish experience: because each song is designed to pull at your tear ducts, I spent far too much of this overlong movie crying silently into my facemask. But, by the end of it, I felt less like I had experienced catharsis and more like I had been emotionally gaslighted.

And that's because -- as you might have gleaned from my first paragraph -- the screenplay is really, really weird. It forces us almost immediately to identify and empathize with Evan, through what we see as his weaknesses or flaws or relatability. Then we learn that he's not actually a great kid, and that his impulses are troubling; though it's clear he gets guilted or otherwise awkwardly shoehorned into making some of his bad decisions, the lies flow a little too freely. It's not a simple "yes" when the truth is "no," it's elaborate yarn-spinning, fable-fabricating, and it happens more than once. Soon enough, as a local tragedy spins into a spectacle -- and we really do have to question the overly dramatic response of the other school kids and townsfolk, who apparently never reached out to help before the tragedy -- Evan, caught in his lies, adeptly navigates tumultuous emotions for incredibly selfish personal gain. The tragedy, in which a relative stranger to Evan named Connor kills himself, leads Evan into Connor's family's home and hearts, until he finally lays claim to Connor's sister Zoe, a girl for whom he has been pining in silence.

The performances of the cast are uniformly excellent -- despite the screenplay's attempted hamstringing of the mothers, Amy Adams and Julianne Moore, who both steal their scenes -- and Ben Platt's awkward teenager persona, brilliantly translated from stage to screen, belies his breathtakingly angelic voice. What's interesting, though, is that on the surface, atop his layers of transformative makeup, he's actually quite grotesque. In a movie filled with profoundly flawed, human characters that could just as easily step into a scene from This is Us, Evan is so calculated and caricatured on a purely visual level, and so accomplished vocally, that he feels like he's from a totally different world. Moreover, Evan's devious methodology reveals him to be what we might loosely consider an antihero; we want him to succeed even as he fully deserves any comeuppance heading his way. Evan plays along with the public charade, gaining fame, family, and love he apparently always wanted and never got. All because a stranger, a high schooler, killed himself.

Honestly, if this same movie were presented to us in a different color scheme, let's say cooler and filled with greens or blues (the amber Hallmark-esque cinematography is unforgivably overwhelming), and if the score were occasionally in a minor key, it would probably feel like something akin to a thriller or black comedy. We'd recognize Evan for the troubled and troubling character he is, and fewer tears would fall as we inched closer to the end of our seats, waiting for him to snap. To be fair, Evan isn't the only heebie-jeebies-inducing person on screen; the film's climax begins when his friend Alanna (Stenberg), who has spearheaded the vigils and campaign to memorialize Connor, outright betrays Evan and publishes his most private letter to the world. Up to that point, she's easily the most decent person in town, and suddenly she destroys whatever sympathetic credibility she has. I mean, come on, who wrote this story, and why?

I'm going to have to do some looking for Levenson interviews to see exactly what the hell he was thinking when he wrote the book of this musical. I can only imagine the filmmakers here were trying to identify with young people struggling with mental health, but there is little direct attempt to honestly deal with those issues here. The depression and suicide elements have the opposite problem of !3 Reasons Why in that they are so vague as to be rendered almost irrelevant; the anxiety issues take center stage, and the characters do everything wrong regarding it. And the movie about emotional manipulation, itself structured manipulatively, can't quite wave through the window at us. It's beautiful and challenging and heartfelt, and those are great things. It'll make you cry, it'll make you cringe, and then it'll leave you reeling about what really happened to your heart. And that's just not my cuppa.

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.

Gloria Bell (2019)

Score: 4 / 5

Apparently last year's Gloria Bell is a remake of writer-director Sebastian Lelio's 2013 film Gloria, to the point of large sections being almost shot-for-shot reproductions. While I can't speak to that -- since I haven't seen it -- it makes me wonder why he'd be so keen to reinvent such a basic story so soon afterward, especially since it was evidently well-received. But that question left my brain almost immediately once I started watching this movie. The story is what it is, but the glory here is in Lelio's leading actress.

Julianne Moore plays the title character, a middle-aged woman looking for some kind of life. A divorcee whose two adult children are contentedly living their own lives, she spends her time out of the office either visiting with family or going clubbing. She is a woman liberated, fearless and jubilant and fabulously alone, dancing and singing her heart out to empowering music from late classic rock. She loves her children, enjoys success in her insurance job, clearly takes good care of herself, and knows how to have a good time. Clearly not averse to finding love (or whatever), she meets with men while dancing; she's not desperate or lonely, but she does seem to want companionship and someone to share her joie de vivre with.

Her optimism and good humor make the movie move along briskly. It's a sort of "life goes on" narrative that avoids tragedy or even much sentimentality. If you don't take control of your life -- or at least consciously choose to enjoy the ride -- it will pass you by faster than you think. And Moore is pitch-perfect in a role seemingly tailored to her unique skill set. Nearly every other scene featuring Moore is an actor's workshop in technique, and we watch Moore go from laughter to tears (during a poetry reading) or from joy to fear to loneliness and back to joy. Because Gloria lives so incandescently in the present moment, Moore gives her all to each emotional and intellectual beat. It's a magnificent performance.

As in his previous features -- including last year's Disobedience and A Fantastic Woman the year before -- Lelio directs his performers well and his film even better. John Turturro here plays Arnold, an uncanny foil to Gloria in that he wants to take control of his life but cannot, due to his ex and dependent daughters. Arnold's awkward attitude, his sort of hounded and trapped role, give him freedom to act in unpleasant and thankless ways: Turturro, so often the funny man, here combines his eccentricities with genuine anxiety that feels lived-in and authentic, perhaps because they are mobilized by his romantic interests. It is, interestingly, with this character that Lelio seems least comfortable, and so his scenes carry a darker weight that I wasn't expecting from this movie. But Lelio blends them all into an inspiring slice of life that soars in leaps and bounds over melodramas of its ilk.

After the Wedding (2019)

Score: 1.5 / 5

I've been waiting to watch this year's star-studded soap for some time, and a holiday weekend pushed me right in. There's always at least one -- an glamorous vehicle for major stars to do the easy crap usually offered on daytime networks -- and this year it boasts Michelle Williams and Julianne Moore. What's not to like, right? Turns out there's a lot to be desired in the latest from Bart Freundlich, who is apparently married to Julianne Moore, but I've never seen any of his other films. And now I probably won't.

Isabel (Williams) is the American founder and manager of an orphanage in India; we meet her as she travels to New York to meet Theresa (Moore), a potential major donor to her cause. Isabel seems more than a little anxious at having to leave her chosen home, and more than a little annoyed at having to justify Theresa's charitable giving. The film feels too pristine, too rich; the kind of bourgeois arthouse film that a wealthy film student might have made for his thesis. Everything is soft light, shining surfaces, tastefully simple decor; most of the film takes place in rich people's houses and offices where panoramic views through floor-to-ceiling glass reveal cityscapes or private estates. Make no mistake, this is a movie about sad rich white people who try to do the right thing but can't quite manage to escape themselves.

There's not much plot, but the film is determined to eke a few gasps from you on its way to an underwhelming climax. Structured much like a soap opera, the story works through revelations and confrontations to reveal that Isabel was once in love with Theresa's husband Oscar (Billy Crudup) and that together they had a daughter. Isabel, not ready to be a mother, gave her child up for adoption and left for India; Oscar fell in love with his baby and kept her, named her Grace, and didn't tell Isabel of these changes in his life. Theresa became a mother to Grace, and the weekend of Isabel's arrival is of course the weekend of Grace's wedding. On top of it all, Theresa has been diagnosed with terminal cancer and has a few months to live.

I think somewhere in all this mess could have been a moving story about motherhood; Isabel is ironically a great foster mother to many dozens (if not hundreds) of children in India, and Theresa has clearly been a good mother to her non-biological daughter. In the same vein, it could have been a biting critique of the demands we put on mothers, and how even an unfit mother, once given a time and place to enact motherhood on her own terms, can far exceed our societal expectations. Unfortunately, these are not thematic concerns with this film, and actually motherhood itself is largely invisible here, betrayed by a surprising lack of interaction between either mother and Grace.

Another lens on this film might reveal the disturbing ways rich people commodify and control the lives of people they deem beneath themselves. Theresa summons Isabel to a place she intentionally left and all but forces her to beg for this large donation. But because it's in the name of charity, we're supposed to go along with it? Similarly, Isabel's seeming generosity towards Indian children is bankrupt when she's faced with her former lover and alienated daughter, and she is suddenly ferociously selfish. The film becomes a sort of catfight between the three leads over secrets and lies, but it's all done in such a Hallmark style that we never see much of the fighting itself. The scene cuts right before the climactic arguments and resumes shortly afterward, debilitating any emotional response the film might possibly elicit.

Wonderstruck (2017)

Score: 4 / 5

An impossibly optimistic and sentimental film -- the kind I usually pass right by -- Wonderstruck struck me with wonder and even wrung a few tears from my eye.

An odd sort of coming-of-age historical melodrama, the film follows two children as they approach New York City in different eras. Rose (Millicent Simmonds) comes looking to find her mother (Julianne Moore) a celebrity actress in the late 1920s. Meanwhile, Ben (Oakes Fegley) runs away from his Midwest home looking for his father fifty years later. It's a testament to the strength of the young actors that they carry the movie, especially since they both play deaf children. Millicent Simmonds herself is deaf, and the character Ben has recently become deaf in a bizarre accident.

Implausible as the plot may be, thematically it skillfully ties the two stories into one. Writer Brian Selznick has adapted his own work here, and the film plays out like a love letter to youth, to overcoming obstacles, and to New York City. Much like how Selznick's other work adapted into a major film (Hugo) celebrated the beginning of film itself, this film honors the beauty and mystery that are museums, "cabinets of curios" that help us link time, place, memory, and sentiment. In fact, the film plays out like a sort of mystery in that each scene features explicit and subliminal connections to other scenes, weaving a web of interrelated elements to bind the story into cohesion and coherence.

Carter Burwell's extensive score helps too, as its sweeping musical themes latch its hooks into your heart early on. When paired with the fewer scenes featuring Rose -- shot in pristine black and white -- it feels like a silent film, a choice that, I think, could have been applied to the whole film. Instead, the scenes with Ben are often presented along with audio cues, which serve not to help us identify with Ben but rather understand what's happening around him. It makes his loss more disturbing for us, because we are forced to hear things around him and understand him as being different. In Rose's case, we are fully in her world, and everyone else seems the oddballs.

Todd Haynes (Carol, Far From Heaven) continues his trend of impeccably designed and emotionally rich filmmaking, though here he cuts out is usual queer impetus. Rather than focusing on burgeoning sexuality, here he crafts a film about people who are different -- in this case, deaf -- finding family, independence, and beauty in the world around them. By the time the two stories come together at film's end (I won't say how), I felt a little taken advantage of by the film, but it's all so sweet and lovely that I didn't really care.

Sometimes the craftsmanship is so good and the heart is so pure that you can forgive everything else.

IMDb: Wonderstruck

Suburbicon (2017)

Score: 4 / 5

Don't pay attention to the critics on this one. It's an absolute delight of a flick for pre-Oscar season nuts like us.

Suburbicon takes two stories and meshes them into one, though the synthesis isn't quite inspired. Think Stepford Wives meets mob-affiliated home-invasion thriller. The bare bones story is that of the Myers (?) family, consisting of a black man and woman and their young son; their presence serves little narrative purpose other than to demonstrate the horrors of Suburbicon, the all-white paradise of Trump's America. Oops, I'm sorry, I meant 1959 America, when America was "great" to begin with. There's a difference, right? Only the day after the Myers move to town, the mailman starts spreading the word, and neighbors begin picketing their property. The neighborhood decrees privacy fences will be installed around their yard. Groups of chanting malcontents gather on the street, shouting insults and appropriating spirituals to taunt the family. Ultimately, the rioters, despite halfhearted attempts by police to restrain them, attack the house, burn the car, and terrorize the family.

But their son makes tentative friends with another young boy, the white boy whose backyard mirrors their own. That boy, young Nicky, has family problems of his own, and though his skin grants him salvation from community bigotry, he goes through another kind of hell, and it is this that the film centers on.

Matt Damon, the patriarch of this family, plays a weak and desperate sort of suburban white-collar worker. He spends his days in an office pumping away on stress-relief squeezers, and it seems he has gotten terribly involved with "the mob" from another city. He lives with his infirm wife (Julianne Moore) and her sister (also Julianne Moore, praise be to Jesus), and their relationship is only barely introduced before their home is victimized one night. Two thieves appear and molest the family, tying them to kitchen chairs and chloroforming them before supposedly robbing them; they end up murdering the wife/mother Julianne Moore in front of little distressed Nicky.

I don't want to spoil anything, because half the joy of the film is its ability to story-tell. Nicky is the only sympathetic character -- apart from the Myers family -- and his ability to observe the corrupt dealings of adults informs our understanding of the evil at work in white suburbia. The white people are all variously destroyed by an effort to perfect their lives: through order and sense, through money, through status. Well, not "all", because of course the general population lives on to spin their own story. The final shot is of media interviewing "bystanders" who are declaring the Myers family responsible for the violence in their midst. Survivors and victors get to determine history.

Director George Clooney isn't making a treatise here on racial dynamics or white morality. He isn't making a statement on feminist culture or domestic patriarchy. These elements are present, of course, and arguably make up the meat of the movie. But he stays somewhat aloof, allowing the elements to blend and conflict at their own volition, and forcing the viewer to think. If nothing else, that's a damn valuable thing these days. And as a white lower-middle-class American, this movie made me even angrier at white middle-class America. The Coen brothers with Clooney have crafted a script that doesn't pursue the directions it could have taken -- intensely subversive domestic horror, hilariously scathing satire of white hegemony -- but certainly suggests all of the above and more. I laughed out loud more than once, and covered my eyes at least twice. (Seriously, why the hell wasn't that fire truck sounding its siren?!)

It's not a great mystery. It's a mediocre thriller, and a not-very dramatic drama. But as a quirky sort of crime flick, it works really well. Its well-rounded cast (including Glenn Fleshler and a scene-stealing Oscar Isaac who will make you feel all sorts of spectacular things in his brief onscreen appearance) provide a fabulous hour-and-three-quarters of entertainment. Workable if uninspired vision from the usually exceptional cinematographer Robert Elswit and typically mesmerizing music from Alexandre Desplat provide enchanting visuals and aurals to soak in, even when the plot isn't as daring as we might want. And, if murder and sexism and money and racism and child endangerment and classism weren't enough, there's always a crazy Julianne Moore, a sweet and terrifying Matt Damon, and a sexy and suave Oscar Isaac to soothe your soul.

Check into Suburbicon. You won't be sorry.

IMDb: Suburbicon

Kingsman: The Golden Circle (2017)

Score: 3 / 5

The primary sin of the Kingsman sequel is this: It begins to take itself too seriously.

Like its predecessor, this film knows how to have fun. It's all light and silly and happy, and you could do a lot worse for a late-summer escapade. I won't waste your time with a synopsis, because who really cares what happens in these movies? But there are a few highlights that demonstrate the fabulous meta quality that made the first one a successful parody of spy-action flicks. There's a smash-bang car chase that opens the movie. There's another crazed villain -- this one without a lisp or monochromatic wardrobe -- in Julianne Moore, whose global drug cartel has enshrined her atop a Cambodian mountain in a terrifyingly polished '50s kitsch theme park. There's a bizarre scene where hunky star Taron Egerton has to plant a tracking device inside a woman at a music festival. There's a smart parallel of Kingsman culture in cowboy Americana "Statesman," led with panache and boots by Jeff Bridges, Pedro Pascal, and Channing Tatum.

Like the first one, this one is pretty much what it was marketed as. A smutty excuse for ultra-violent action and ultra-silly parody, filmed as if it were the product of a tryst between a video game and graphic novel. It's sexy and stupid, violent and strange. It throws blood at you while grinning from behind bared fangs and joking about anal sex. (Actually, there is a particularly gut-laugh-worthy moment when Elton John, playing himself, dressed in lurid artificial feathers, offers Colin Firth a backstage pass to his concerts.)

As I said, all is fun and light and silly until it starts weighing itself down with sentiment and Big Ideas that just don't mesh with the nonsense spewing at you from the screen. Mark Strong's role gets weird when he starts singing John Denver songs in his Scottish accent in the middle of a jungle. The climax gets weird when huge mechanical dogs enter the fray. Colin Firth's presence is just generally weird, as he gets awkwardly resurrected and cured of amnesia. Halle Berry and Emily Watson show up a couple of times for little real reason.

If you have a mind for mindless action and humor, or if you enjoy self-reflexive awareness in movies, this sequel might be for you. It's certainly dazzling to look at, even if you can't quite swallow its half-baked preposterous bilge.

IMDb: Kingsman: The Golden Circle

Mockingjay: Part Two (2015)

Score: 4.5 / 5

I find these films -- probably the only series about which I'll say such things -- to be far more enjoyable than the simple prose of the novels on which they are based. And while the two parts of Mockingjay may not be have the fastest pace or the most daring action sequences of most modern young adult dystopian fiction, I find them to be fiercely intelligent and resourceful in mining the source material and in delivering satisfying results to their audience. The split also allows more time for us to focus on the great character developments that happen during the otherwise high speed, plot-driven events of the story. So I'm not really sure why people keep complaining about that.

As for Part Two specifically, it's brilliant. Not as breakneck as Catching Fire, not as meditative as Mockingjay Part One, it allows the various elements of the series to simmer together in a harsh treatment of escalating warfare. Its topical relevance shines through perhaps best in the moment when the rebels bomb a mountain, effectively burying the enemy soldiers and civilians inside together. The following scene between the escaping survivors and the rebel army led by Katniss. It's hard and it's complicated and it's wonderful. There's also a few beautiful moments as Coin leads her people to victory, and Katniss watches and suspects that her aim is less noble than she had first imagined.

Nothing in this movie quite matches the fierce brilliance of the scene in Part One of Gale and the rebels sneaking into the Capitol to save Peeta while Donald Sutherland drones in voiceover. However, Part Two skillfully avoids overdoing the special effects and getting caught up in its own exciting energy. In fact, there is really only one particularly violent sequence in this film that I can recall. It's also probably the most violent scene in the series, and one that I had some trouble watching. It happens in the sewers, where our team of heroes is attacked by monstrous white lizard-men in a terrifying melee that had me covering my eyes. Mad props to director Francis Lawrence, because it's got to be one of the most stunning fight sequences I've seen in a film since The Return of the King. Not because it's particularly intelligent, but rather because it's so fast, surprising, and long; it's an extended sequence that has absolutely no moments of relief. Even when they climb up the ladder and escape the lizards, seemingly in peace to mourn the deaths of their friends, sharp metal drills start popping up from the exploding floor beneath them.

Perhaps part of the reason I so loved the sequence is because the film until then is pretty tame. It's not slow, exactly, but more meditative and emotional like in Part One. Even when Katniss and her team get into the Capitol and maneuver its booby-traps, it's not a particularly action-y movie. Which, by the way, is great. It makes the climax that much more effective.

And speaking of the climax, I'm not exactly sure where it was in this movie. Which is also great. Because, as the finale to the series, the whole damn thing is a bit of a climax. Rather like the eighth Harry Potter film, this picture more or less begins with the climax and ends up with an extended resolution. Actually, in a sense, it feels like The Return of the King, with several denouement scenes that let the story end with a nice little flourish. Maybe the epilogue scene was a bit much, but it's a sweet little nod to the book. I noticed several people in the theater squirming to leave after the "climax" (I say that's the execution scene, because Donald Sutherland's face and laughter is devastating), because it's hard for some people to stay seated when there's nothing "exciting" left. It's sad, but the film manages those squirmers gracefully.

What else can I say? J-Law is fantastic. I'm glad we saw more of Josh Hutcherson in this one. I'd have liked to see Elizabeth Banks and Woody Harrelson more, but the story isn't really about them any more. Julianne Moore is great and we can always use more of her, and the moments with Philip Seymour Hoffman gave me all of the feelings. The camerawork is strong, the editing stronger, and I have no big complaints. It's a fine film, and a fine ending to the series.

**
I should probably qualify my earlier claim that I prefer these movies to their source material. I like the books fine, and I'm not saying they're bad. The prose is simple, straightforward, and first person. These fit the concept Collins was going for, and I can't fault them, except to say that I don't like that style in prose. I'm also conflicted with the fact that the intense and violent story is clearly marketed for young people; sure, the protagonist is also that age, but ultimately The Hunger Games is an extended Lord of the Flies, and Mockingjay is nothing short of a war novel (I'm thinking of a Tim O'Brien novel or two). I'm just not sure parents and teachers should be letting middle schoolers loose on this kind of material without accompanying conversations and context.

That said, I also have a little bit of misgivings about the films being PG-13. Much like the books being marketed for kids (I assume this might be why they are not particularly descriptive), the films are being marketed for kids. The MPAA rating stops the films from going into really dynamic territory (the moment in Mockingjay when Katniss randomly shoots a Capitol woman before she can speak; the bloody murder of a random girl in the streets by a shower of bullets). Ultimately these films take on a hue of polished Hollywood young adult sci-fi fiction rather than a raw, brutal war film.

I don't really have a coherent opinion on this franchise, obviously. But these are my main considerations.

IMDb: Mockingjay: Part Two

Still Alice (2014)

Score: 4.5 / 5

Julianne Moore deserves all the praise she got for this movie, but the film itself wasn't nearly as well-received. And I don't know why. Timely, tragic, poignant, and beautiful, Still Alice was perhaps the most emotionally brutal film of last season's Oscar race. Not unlike 2013's similarly underpraised August: Osage County, this film depicts a horror that plagues us all in a manner both iconic and empowering. In our Age of Information, what could be more devastating than a disease that infects our brain and makes us lose sight of our knowledge, experiences, and memories? That is the phenomenon Still Alice seeks to explore.

Moore infuses great charisma and even greater compassion into her character -- who we know from the first scene to be doomed -- and allows us to understand every single step on her complex emotional journey. Her family, including Alec Baldwin, Kate Bosworth, Kristen Stewart, and Hunter Parrish, are no less praiseworthy for their raw reactions and vulnerable sympathies. Writer/directors Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland wrote an uncommonly intelligent screenplay and directed the film with such an objective approach that the film avoids needless sentimentality.

Perhaps our directors' greatest triumph is in their empathetic approach to such a devastating, terminal disease. They effectively put us inside the protagonist's world, withholding some contextual information from us so that we feel as bewildered as the woman with Alzheimer's. She goes running around her campus (Columbia), and halfway through the background blurs while we zoom in on her face, registering her pain and confusion while being completely unable to help her find her way. Later, she gets lost in her own home when she tries to find the bathroom, in a scene strikingly reminiscent of one in The Judge, and her embarrassment is almost too much to watch.

The climax of the film comes when our hero makes a seemingly foolproof plan to end her own suffering via an overdose of sleeping pills. The directors make a dangerous gamble -- but one that pays off brilliantly -- by infusing the scene with more comedy than in the rest of the film. Poor Moore views the video message (given by herself) but forgets the suicide instructions before she can carry them out. Time and again she tries, until finally she is interrupted by her nurse and spills them. Finally, when the disease has progressed so much as to destroy her ability to speak (did I mention? She's a linguistics professor. Sound like Wit (2001) much?), her aspiring actor daughter (played effectively by Kristen Stewart) reads Angels in America to her. After reading a section, she asks her mother what the monologue was about. "Love" is her response. And as the lights come up in the house, everybody was sobbing.

IMDb: Still Alice

Mockingjay: Part One (2014)

Score: 4.5 / 5

Okay, I've never really been on the whole Hunger Games wagon. Don't get me wrong, I like them quite a lot. But the aggressive, vocal fanbase has often put me off. I finally got to read the first two books, and they're fine, and I thoroughly liked the previous two films. This one feels different, though, and I very much enjoyed it. Director Francis Lawrence (I Am Legend, Water for Elephants, Catching Fire) slowly builds up to its climax, which for me is the last, I don't know, ten minutes, and I eagerly anticipate the final film as a result. I'm glad Lawrence is directing both parts of Mockingjay, because it lets me hope that he will balance out a doubtlessly thrilling conclusion to this series.

In case you, like me, were wondering where this franchise was going, be prepared for a surprise. Because suddenly the dystopian world of Panem isn't divided into an evil empire and righteous rebels (yes, I am thinking about Star Wars), but a chaotic, war-torn country with virtues and vices all around. With Mockingjay, we are thrust headfirst into a gray area (and no, I'm not just talking about their jumpsuits) where plans and actions and intentions are all dangerous gambles with dire consequences. This film explores themes of the influential (and misleading) power of media, suggests ideas of guerrilla warfare and terrorism, and the ultimate costs of war. It's a powerful meditation on these things, even more so than The Hunger Games or Catching Fire due to its slower pace.

This film is nowhere near as action-centric as the previous films. Moody and broody, we get a lot of closeups on Katniss to see the effects that war horrors have on her. We see her desolate homeland, her hopeless countrymen, and her tortured love Peeta, but more importantly, we see the effects they have on her. She isn't just the firebrand the rebels want her to be, because she also feels the burn from that flame. I was a little upset, at first, that this film isn't remotely as exciting as Catching Fire, but I think that's because we need a little break to cement and explore our relationships to these characters before letting all hell break loose in the final installment. And that's not to say Mockingjay is without its tense scenes: The Capitol bombs a hospital at one point, and near the end of the film a small team infiltrates the Capitol to rescue Peeta.

I don't think that Jennifer Lawrence quite rocked this performance as she has before, but I also don't think she was given much chance. The Mockingjay Katniss isn't the same one who can own a battle arena. This Katniss is buried -- literally -- in a mine of secrecy, expectations, and fear. She isn't allowed to shine as she would prefer. She can't help Peeta, she can't go home, she can't reconcile the effects of war with the people she loves. Instead, she has to become a figurehead, filmed and protected, and watch as the people around her go to fight or cower under attack. As far as her emotional center and conflicted passions, Lawrence nails it here. But I expect Part Two to bring a dynamic change to her character.

Sadly, we don't get much of the charming and skilled Josh Hutcherson (Peeta) in this one, though his few moments are dramatic highlights. With him, and so horribly briefly, we see Stanley Tucci rocking his fabulous costumes as television host Caesar. We do, however, get to see a bit more of Liam Hemsworth as Katniss's other romantic interest, which is good because up till now he hasn't had much onscreen time, and Sam Claflin supports as fellow victor and rebel Finnick. Natalie Dormer (The Tudors, Game of Thrones) shows up as leader of the film crew, and we see a bit of Woody Harrelson again as a now-sober Haymitch. Elizabeth Banks rocks a jumpsuited Effie with sweet charm, though her time onscreen is also sadly short.

The real stars of this film, however, are the people in power. Donald Sutherland maintains his icy, terrifying hold on President Snow, and Philip Seymour Hoffman returns as ex-Gamemaker Plutarch Heavensbee with typical intelligence and fervor. But newcomer Julianne Moore gave a weird edge to this movie for me, as the rebel President Coin. She shows strength and smarts in leading the war effort, but something feels wrong to me. Besides her striking visage and crazy eyes, President Coin has cultivated a rigid, militaristic atmosphere among her people. I predict that her true colors have not been entirely shown. At one point, to defend her strategy, she claims "We are not the Capitol," before glancing directly at Katniss and then quickly away. Other characters mention in passing her strict control over rebel life. I wonder if her methods are not so very different from those of her avowed enemy, President Snow. But I suppose we'll have to wait and see.

IMDb: Mockingjay: Part One