Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (2024)

Score: 2 / 5

Oh boy.

Maybe the most disappointing viewing experience I've had in a cinema in years, the bafflingly titled Godzilla x Kong doesn't stop its confusion at the title. How do you even say it? Godzilla times Kong? Godzilla ex-Kong? Should it be an ampersand? And what about the subtitle, The New Empire, which makes even less sense the more you unpack it. Godzilla was previously touted as King of the Monsters, but now he's an emperor? Or is Kong the emperor of Hollow Earth? Is it "new," really, and who exactly are their subjects after they've killed so many other titans?

And we haven't even gotten to the film itself yet.

The latest installment of Legendary/Warner Bros's MonsterVerse franchise crashes and burns in a way I feared but did not expect from this series. I've been a fan all along, from Gareth Edwards's Godzilla -- which, contrary to popular opinion, did the whole "focus on the humans, not the monsters" thing a full decade before Godzilla Minus One -- through the stylized romp of Kong: Skull Island, the soaring epic religio-fantasy of Godzilla: King of the Monsters, and even the fabulously pastiched escapist mess that was Godzilla vs. Kong. Then, when the Monarch series launched on Apple TV+, I binged that and then did again because it's so much fun.

But Adam Wingard helms the latest and seems insistent on embracing schlocky nonsense over gritty pseudo-realism with his committee of screenwriters, at least two of whom should know better than to churn out this trash. Much like the absurdity of Godzilla's fiery radiation breath drilling a hole through Earth's crust to the Hollow Earth exactly into Kong's throne room (disregarding the film's own internal logic of a gravity well and inverted physics to get there and back), Godzilla x Kong throws its own dignity out the window in favor of cartoonish balderdash with about as much sense as Saturday morning shows under the influence of acid.

I won't waste time trying to recap any plot here, because there isn't a worthwhile one. A few familiar faces return, namely Rebecca Hall and her adopted Iwi daughter (an older Kaylee Hottle) and their friend, conspiracy podcaster Brian Tyree Henry. A new character, played winningly by Dan Stevens, is such an artistically bankrupt creation that I can only hope they paid him well; the character (I won't use their names because who can remember them when they matter so little) pops in to save the day as a titan veterinarian and engineer, replacing injured teeth and using Iron-Man like technology to mobilize a frostbitten hand. His deus ex machinas appear almost at whim, and you really have to wonder how and where and why but you can't because the breakneck pacing forces us to just accept it and move on. Suspension of disbelief should be the result of flawless internal fictional logic, not the result of necessity due to aggressively fast storytelling.

The endless plotholes, of which the titan vet's tech only scratches the surface, are not the film's only faults, though perhaps should be explored further. I still don't understand the dimensional portal to Hollow Earth, nor how there is sunlight down there, among many other issues. The film's insistence that the dual landscapes of Hollow Earth aren't enough space lead it to invent yet another secret, "uncharted" realm (as if most of Hollow Earth wasn't indeed uncharted) where an entire army of giant, violent apes prepares to wage war on their ancient foe, Godzilla, and conquer Hollow Earth and the surface world. Their leader, Scar King (I know, I know, I told you this is really stupid shit) controls a secret weapon through *some* mysterious means:  yet another titan, Shimo, who has the chilly power to change the world's climate and usher in a new ice age. Because somehow that would be good for giant apes, too? Hmmm....

This film works especially hard to anthropomorphize the apes, and it get less cute as it continues. Kong himself is treated like a big baby who fights good, and the humans just keep cheering him on and retrofitting him with artificial aid. When he discovers his own kind, one young one (who is objectively visually off-putting) acts like Tolkien's Gollum, repeatedly trying to trick and trap Kong to eliminate the potential threat to his master, Scar King. The lengthy scenes of apes communicating nonverbally bored me to distraction, and it all plays out much more rote than even I could give it credit for.

And all this has been centered on the Kong side of things because the film itself is Kong-centric. Godzilla is mostly absent from this film, apart from a few money shots like sleeping in the Roman Colosseum. The film globetrots more than a cheap spy flick as Godzilla hops around to eliminate other titans (one wonders what happens to those carcasses) before we even get to see or experience them. The humans, in their unforgivably exposition-heavy dialogue, suggest he's collecting and storing energy for a major upcoming conflict (for no clear reason), and when he goes to kill the most energy-rich one named Tiamat, he does so with almost no ado and very little screen time (which renders the whole climax of that subplot flaccid and facile). 

The disaster scenes here, as in the previous one, are woefully monster-centric, and you know that tens of thousands of people are just arbitrarily dying en masse without so much as a moment of respectful screen time. Like the climactic battle between Kong, Godzilla, and Mechagodzilla previously, here the fight scenes devastate heavily populated cities before a new and totally unexpected climax in Rio de Janeiro, which was dispiritingly nihilistic in its lack of a human element. Even the sudden emergence of a new Mothra -- which completely ignores the previous hint of a Mothra rebirth from earlier in this same franchise -- doesn't help refocus things on the human element despite a bizarre quasi-religious sect of Iwi people who apparently worship her and share a psychic link with her through Rebecca Hall's daughter. The kaiju take center stage in the end, no matter how hard Brian Tyree Henry and Dan Stevens try to let their humor win the day.

Resurrection (2022)

Score: 4 / 5

Rebecca Hall deserves so many more chances to headline elevated psychological horror, because between The Night House and now this, she's one of the best leading women in the genre. I sat down for Resurrection knowing nothing beyond its genre label, release date, and her name, and truthfully that's probably the best way to approach this film. It's a wild ride, one that is playing multiple games with itself and with us at the same time. While I won't necessarily recount the plot in my thoughts here, there will be spoilers -- because anything said about this movie is a "spoiler" -- so if you're at all interested in it, please stop reading and go watch it as soon as you can. 

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First things first: Rebecca Hall's Margaret is not a likable woman. We first meet her offscreen, as a young woman sits in her office telling her relationship woes to Margaret like to a confessor. When the camera cuts to her, she's seated uncomfortably perched on the edge of her desk in a pose straddling aggressively dismissive and forced casual. She tells the young woman -- a peer, colleague? An employee, assistant? Who knows! -- in striking, dominant terms that her boyfriend is a "sadist," using a tone of voice indicating that she knows all and there can be no alternative opinion. We all know someone like this, who is either too walled-off to properly relate to others or who is too wounded and hurt to have compassionate perspective. That doesn't stop Margaret from being immediately off-putting.

This translates outside of the workspace, where she has some illustrious job in biotechnology where she leads presentations on replacement therapy and the reorganization of cells. At home, she's a single mother of Abbie (Grace Kaufman), hovering and clinging and controlling as Abbie gets ready for college. Her household and her lifestyle are held prisoner by her sense of routine; for example, she takes a daily run that looks like boot camp (thanks to cold cinematography and icy editing), and in her house she's always either cleaning the spotless surfaces or lounging in a bathrobe while still dripping from her shower. She's kind of alone in this palatial existence -- beautiful production design subtly underscores her isolation and clinical minimalism -- and so she determinedly engages in a friends-with-benefits relationship with a married coworker. Well, "friends" with benefits, as she doesn't let down any emotional walls with him and only treats him like a transactional fuck-buddy despite his conflicted desires for her.

At a work conference, Margaret sees a man and everything changes. We won't learn who he is for some time, but she becomes agitated and sweaty, hyperventilating before she gets home and all but forbids Abbie from doing anything. Abbie naturally chalks it up to Margaret's looming empty nest syndrome, but there's a lot more going on, and as Margaret learns about strange things Abbie's been experiencing, her paranoia worsens. Abbie found a tooth in her wallet; Abbie got in an accident while riding a bike under the influence; they go to the mall and the man appears again before Margaret forcibly flees with Abbie. I thought this movie was about to become a story about the ways past trauma affects mother-daughter relationships in a world of predatory patriarchy, something between Women Talking and Alice, Darling, and I was ready for it. After all, generational trauma and mental illness are very much in vogue in our era of "elevated horror."

Then Margaret, in a roughly seven-minute monologue to the young coworker from the opening scene, reveals what's happening. The man she saw at the conference and the mall was David (Tim Roth), her ex from twentysomething years earlier, who she met at 18 and moved in with. He quickly became controlling and abusive, forcing her to self-harm and humiliate herself in acts of "kindnesses" to be worthy of his love and resources. When she eventually had a son, Ben, David became jealous to the point of possibly (probably) murdering him. To escape her blame, he tells her a lie so insidious, so cruel, so absolutely batshit crazy that some bizarre, manipulated, pained part of her broken consciousness believes him. Margaret's dedicated use of "sadist" earlier is finally made clear.

At this point in the film, the audience is asked for a crucial choice. We're either meant to think she's on the brink and completely untrustworthy, or to think compassionately for her experience and suffer the delusional aftereffects of abuse with her. This isn't a normal story of abuse -- disgusting, isn't it, that there is a "normal" or socially accepted understanding of typical abuse patterns -- like we've seen before. This is unhinged, totally bonkers stuff, and it's only though the filmmakers' calculated approach and artistic integrity that Margaret's revelation doesn't derail the whole movie. And it's from this moment, whatever we choose to feel and think, that the film changes its approach and plot, spinning violently into a psychological spiral between Margaret and David in which we're never sure who is the cat and who is the mouse, who is scarier and more potentially evil. Of course he is a pure monster, one that Roth is all too gleefully malicious to bring to life, but she's on the threshold of losing touch with reality entirely, through absolutely no fault of her own. 

The second half of this movie is the kind of psychological horror I love but has become quite rare these days; now, psychological horror is all about trauma and mental illness and always (always) carries some metaphorical monster who is also very real. Movies like Silent House and Black Swan and The Silence of the Lambs where the horror starts and ends in the minds of the protagonist and their adventure through a broken world are few and far between, but this one fits in their vein without the timely trappings of hot topics. As such, Resurrection is not a pleasant viewing experience; there are no "gotcha!" jump scares, no gory excesses to giggle about, no stylized monsters or mythology to unravel. There is just cruelty and menace and realistic -- if insane -- abuse. This is not the story of an abused woman getting revenge on her abuser. Not really. By the end, we don't know to what extent we can trust her as things get hallucinatory and almost supernatural (think along the aesthetic lines of Villeneuve's Enemy and Aster's Beau is Afraid), and/or to what extent she is suffering a breakdown. Then again, has she been trustworthy the whole time, or even sane? We are forced to relate to her perspective by the screenplay, editing, and cinematography, and we certainly want to because it's Hall and she's amazing. And there's a moment near the end, as David discusses himself and their relationship, when anyone who's ever been in an abusive relationship will relate a little too closely to the terrifyingly accurate language and ideas being used.

There's a lot to like about this movie for anyone interested in these topics. But it won't be for everyone, both in terms of concepts and content. The end will surely polarize even interested viewers, both because of the depraved darkness to which this movie sends us and because it goes for the gusto in terms of unhinged insanity for its finale. But it sticks to its guns, refuses to comfort us, and pushes us into a mindset I haven't experienced in a film in ages. Daring and fresh, haunting and nasty, this movie is unique and brave and wild, and I respect the hell out of it. Even if I may never choose to watch it again.

Passing (2021)

Score: 5 / 5

The movie begins with Irene, sitting alone in a hotel dining room in broad daylight. The sun streaming in lights up her white dress and white hat like an angelic robe and halo. A few furtive looks around her -- the camera subtly switches to her perspective a few times -- reveals that this is almost certainly an establishment for whites only, as the only other patrons are indeed pale. Irene herself has fairly light skin, and the gorgeous and dangerous black-and-white cinematography makes it particularly difficult to determine hue gradations. The camera does linger on Irene for a while, studying her incognito face with her dark hair and dark eyes barely visible beneath the brim of her lacy hat.

As the lengthy, almost wordless introduction to the film continues, the camera again uses Irene's perspective to survey the room. Is Irene, as the title suggests, a woman of color passing as white? It seems likely, even if you don't know the excellent performer to be Tessa Thompson. As she gazes at the white women in the sparsely populated restaurant, she locks in on one in particular. The shot lingers far too long as the other woman returns her stare. They recognize each other, but how? Or perhaps are they simply recognizing in each other a similar secret? It's an intoxicating scene, helped by intelligent editing, and one that effectively sets up the film to follow. This movie may be about words and ideas, but it's much more about lived experience.

Irene, we soon gather, only passes for white on occasion, when it might be especially beneficial to her, or when she just needs a brief escape from her life as a Black woman in Harlem in the 1920s. The other woman, Clare, does it much more frequently. In fact, as Irene's former classmate tells her, Clare is so light-skinned that she was able to marry a white man and live acting as a white woman. Played by the brilliant Ruth Negga, Clare seems hungry for the life of being authentically Black, having hidden her true self behind layers of conventional white mannerisms, speech patterns, and behaviors. But now, reconnecting with her old friend over their secrets and their history, Clare tries to hitch a ride on Irene's coattails into Black Harlem culture for the explicit purpose -- she says later in the film, before a dance -- "to see Negroes." Much as the Black men stare at this light-skinned flapper, Clare stares right back, drinking in the vibrant exclusivity of Black jazz nightlife. In these scenes, which make up most of the middle of the film, Clare shares a lot with Hugh (Bill Camp), a white writer who is nominally an ally to Irene and the Negro Welfare League, but who attends to watch the party like a child watching Sunday morning cartoons.

She's a mysterious character -- much like Irene, actually -- and we're meant to discover her bit by bit along with the protagonist. Is Irene's husband Brian (Andre Holland) in awe of Clare like the other men, or is his attention more intimate or lustful? Does Clare truly enjoy the privileged life of acting white, and if so, is she only using Irene to exert her own false sense of control over her secret identity? Perhaps the most arresting scenes involve the film's stand-in for a villain, Clare's racist husband John (Alexander Skarsgård). In his introductory scene, he is fooled into thinking both Clare and Irene are white; in his perceived safe space, he reveals his monstrous pet name for his wife, "Nig," earned as a result of her "getting darker and darker every year." The subtle reactions of the women in this scene -- and in the whole film -- constitute a masterclass of screen acting. Will Irene out her friend? What will be John's reaction?

That Passing, with all its impossibly complex themes and worrisome ideas, is Rebecca Hall's debut as director will never not blow my mind. It's an astonishing, confident, and nuanced work that brought to my mind similar films of split, shared, and conflicted racial identity such as Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, BlacKkKlansman, and of course both versions of Imitation of Life. With its heavy material, Hall is deliberate in her choices and pacing, which might sacrifice the attention of some viewers. But if you tap into its ebb and flow, the third act of the film will pull you out like a riptide and leave you breathless. It's a faithful adaptation of its source material that is also faithful to a modern audience; its gorgeous presentation in black and white the only heavy-handed artistic choice (one that I fully, enthusiastically support) in what is otherwise the most contemplative and thoughtful chamber piece in a year full of cinematic bombast.

The Night House (2021)

 Score: 5 / 5

Beth is in misery. Her husband Owen recently went out on a boat from their gorgeous house on a lake and shot himself in the head. She says he exhibited no depression, and she didn't even know he had a gun; his suicide note indicates that nothing is after her and that "You're safe now." Her grief is paired with anger and bewilderment -- she says she was the one who had once struggled with depression, not Owen -- and she struggles to continue her work as a teacher. Spending her nights drinking and tearfully going through his belongings, she starts noticing odd happenings like disembodied footsteps upstairs and the stereo turning on in the dead of night. Could it be the restless spirit of her beloved, or does she just want him back?

In Owen's boxes, she uncovers books about the occult with his handwritten notes. She sees blueprints for their lake house in reverse. Across the dark water, she starts to see lights of a house that looks disturbingly like her own. And on his computer, she finds photos of another woman a little too similar to Beth. What was her husband doing? What was he into? And why does she keep seeing ghostly women wandering around her property and in her dreams, all of whom look a lot like herself? It's a delicious mystery, one that unfolds in a dementedly languid pace even as I wished things would slow down so I could more carefully catalog the intense emotional weight of each new revelation.

Rebecca Hall takes this role in her stride, using it as a vehicle to hijack the whole movie. She steals every scene, chewing away even as she spends most of her time wiping away tears beneath terrified, wide-eyed stares. It's the kind of powerhouse leading woman we saw Nicole Kidman ace in The Others or Jennifer Lawrence in mother!, women whose strength is in their (culturally determined) weakness and whose terror is desperately emotional and rooted in her experience as women. She deftly combines her sorrow with anger and suspicion and confusion, and gives us just the right injections of morbid humor to be startlingly funny. Her character is as much a survivor as she is an investigator, and as she unfolds the mysteries of her life, she realizes the horrors hemming her in and braces herself for the coming fight.

I don't want to spoil too much (but I'm about to, so stop reading if that's your kink), but know that this movie requires a lot of interpretation on our part to make sense. This is because, in my viewing of it, The Night House is primarily an allegory of depression and suicide. Beth, who is herself a survivor of a deadly experience, seems hounded by death, which she refers to as "nothing." That nothingness is what she experienced when declared dead for four full minutes, and she now carries that nihilism within her consciousness. She worries that her experiences are infectious, and indeed if it is ultimately her fault that her husband killed himself. She may be more right than she knows, and as she learns about the "nothing" that hunts her, she hears that it had spent years whispering in Owen's ears. But one could also easily read this movie as a straightforward movie with a particularly iconic evil spirit (the production designer and cinematographer do stunning work shaping negative spaces into the "nothing" demon), and it's the rare film that fully works in both interpretations separately, and even better together.

In this way, the movie reminded me distinctly of Relic, which could be a simple house-haunting and could be a complex allegory to dementia and aging. Together, it's an irresistible, haunting exploration of both as they inform each other.

Further, this movie leaves us its share of mysteries, even once the credits begin to roll. While there is surely a deeper significance to various symbols -- the misogynistic sculpture, the red moon, the not-quite labyrinthine maze -- none are explicitly clear. At least not on the first viewing. It seems the caerdroia maze is meant to confuse or weaken dark spirits, which more or less leads into the reflected house and body doubling tactics employed by Owen. A blood moon, biblically, signifies the beginning of the end times. The sculpture, dubiously referred to as a Voodoo doll, seems to signify sacrifice and mystically binds whoever holds it to the dark spirit, or marks them as an intended sacrifice for it. These are briefly hinted at in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it shot at a book Beth skims, and would probably make more sense upon subsequent viewings. But they are as vague as elements of Prisoners or The Little Stranger, and those haunting stories are so chilling because they don't spell out each dark mystery.

Actually, this movie reminds me a lot of classic, old ghost movies like The Innocents and The Haunting, and their source materials, because of its rich, foreboding mood and its dense psychological realism. Director David Bruckner (if you haven't seen The Ritual yet, it's on Netflix) fluidly ingratiates us into Beth's uncomfortable existence until neither she nor we can tell what is real, what is imagined, and what is threatening. Ghosts run amok, but are they caused by a somnambulist's fever dream, her hopes and fears as her husband's identity is revealed, or perhaps manifestations of a malicious spirit hunting her? The most amazing thing about this particular story, written by Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski as an original screenplay, is that the answer seems to be YES. It's all almost more interesting because the various possibilities only heighten the tension of the others. Isn't it scarier to know that your delusional fear and exhaustion might make you more susceptible to a demon's influence, or that learning the truth about your life can make you start to lose your own sanity?

Its impressionistic imagery -- thickly captured by cinematographer Elisha Christian -- and amazing sound design make this movie an immersive Gothic experience where the memory of horrors is often as dangerous as the unseen ones around us. I cannot speak highly enough of this movie, nor of the exhilaration of seeing it in a darkened theater on a huge screen with surround sound. This is the kind of quiet, contemplative horror movie that would have worked perfectly without its jump-scares, but whose jump-scares are so effective that I wanted more even as I white-knuckled the armrests. 

Godzilla vs. Kong (2021)

Score: 3 / 5

Let's not split too many hairs about it, Godzilla vs. Kong is the sort of trashy mess that I usually try to avoid. It features lengthy sequences that, in any other franchise, I'd call utterly unwatchable. More often than not, it feels like a video game in ridiculously high definition. At least disaster movies usually focus on human characters, but this feels more like the smash-bang hoopla of a Transformers movie, which is to say, not particularly satisfying as anything but mindless summer action. Then again, it is the climactic part of the franchise that birthed it, and as such deserves some consideration in context of its buildup and its intended effect on future films. As the COVID box office leader, its financial successes will surely lead to more monster mayhem. We can certainly hope so, and that they will anchor it back into the aesthetic and themes that birthed it.

The fourth installment of Legendary's MonsterVerse begins with a distinctly troubling opening credits montage. Not troubling in terms of plot or theme, but troubling in terms of franchise: apparently five years have passed since the events of the magnificent Godzilla: King of the Monsters, and all the recorded Titans are eliminated. It's not totally clear if they have been, like Kong, isolated in secure facilities for observation and containment, or if they have been killed (by humans) or defeated (by Godzilla). The opening credits wind their way through a bracket, like sports teams, in which each loser is marked with a red X, until apparently the only two remaining are the giant ape and the giant lizard. After such beautiful and suggestive renderings of other Titans in the previous film, it's horrific to me, as a fan, that they'd so quickly kill everyone off simply so they can get to the "showdown" fight between the god and the king.

At least they could have given us a Monster Island movie first.

But without the inherent creepiness of some of the kaiju, Godzilla vs. Kong works best as an action film on the scope of a disaster movie. Its woefully thin story begins innocuously, with Kong held in a Monarch observation dome on Skull Island (and a strange aside suggesting that, for some reason, the encircling violent storm nearly destroyed the island before dissipating). Kong appears to have a nice enough life, and has developed a friendship with a little native Iwi girl who is deaf and uses sign language to communicate. Meanwhile, Godzilla attacks a facility in Pensacola, Florida, owned by Apex Cybernetics, apparently drawn there by mysterious experimentations and power surges.

A former Monarch scientist (Alexander Skarsgard, who has no business in a movie where he shows no skin) is approached by Apex to lead a term into the Hollow Earth to prove the theory of its existence as the homeland of the Titans and to search for other potential threats as well as alternative energy sources. He joins up with Rebecca Hall (I don't remember the character names, but they don't really matter anyway) and the Iwi girl and they transport Kong to Antarctica, where they plan to enter the Hollow Earth. Godzilla, drawn to Kong, attacks them en route and almost eliminates him. Round one goes to the lizard.

All this is fairly interesting plotting, and it works especially well as a development of the human organizations associated with the monsters. Monarch now fully represents the "good guys," the vindicated crypto scientists seeking to study and contain the Titans; Apex appears to be the new baddies, secretively experimenting and building something to combat the Titans. The human element poised to bring them down is led by a hilarious Brian Tyree Henry and Millie Bobby Brown, who infiltrate the Pensacola facility, get trapped in an underground high-speed train, and are shipped to another Apex facility in Hong Kong. It's all a little weird, but their discovery is one of the more exciting thrills of this movie, even if we see it coming hours in advance (I mean, Godzilla is the apex predator, so obviously the industrial machinists of Apex are doing something a little, well, mechanical to rival him).

If the first Godzilla was a Spielbergian encounter with a wondrous and dangerous Other, the first Kong was a Vietnam-era fever dream of violence and fun. Then, in King of the Monsters, we got a transcendent view of the apocalyptic possibilities these sacred kaiju could wreak on an abused and tortured Earth. The series worked hard to stress its theme of humans corrupting the world and nature fighting back, even as it repeatedly demonstrated that the monsters themselves are not intentionally killing humans for sport. The MonsterVerse fabulously manages to ground its movies in real, existential horror, allowing us glimpses of extinction-level events through the eyes of relatively inconsequential humans who nevertheless fail to understand that the only way forward is coexistence. The main characters are complex and conflicted, who grow even as they fail. When the army trucks roll up, it's often laughably silly, and we are well aware that most or all of the fighters will die.

But Godzilla vs. Kong, for all its energy and intensity, fumbles its characters. It doesn't know what to do with its own shadowy organizations, its complex human relationships, or even the parts of the plot it completely sacrifices on the altar of spectacle. I choked on my own incredulity during the impressively stupid journey Kong and his human handlers take to Hollow Earth; they fall through a black hole that becomes a weird, neon-blue jet, and it's all so fantastic, so utterly unbelievable, that I wasn't sure it belonged to the same movie, or even the franchise. Similarly, when Kong retrieves his weapon from Hollow Earth and activates the cosmic power source Apex is hunting -- that might actually allow him to defeat Godzilla -- Godzilla senses it and, in the most laughably absurd scene, blows his atomic breath straight down from downtown Hong Kong, through the crust, and into the Hollow Earth right where Kong is standing. What about the black hole and antigravity? Does anybody care?

And that's not to say Adam Wingard's (You're Next, The Guest, Blair Witch) installment in the franchise isn't without its pleasures. But, for me, they were a little too few and far between, laced thinly with excessively messy and dull action. The Hollow Earth scenes were a beautiful throwback to psychedelic fantasy standards of the '80s, and I wanted more of that. Brian Tyree Henry, Rebecca Hall, and Demian Bichir were fun to watch, even if they didn't get to do much, while everyone else was clearly squandered. Actually, part of me wonders if the film would have simply been better as a straight-up buddy monster mash, as Godzilla and Kong are here treated as anthropomorphized boxers in a ring. They get about three chances to knock each other out, and between their impressive physicality and cartoonish facial expressions, the movie seems determined to make them the primary characters in human terms. I don't love that at all, and can easily see this as a turning point for the franchise into self-parody.

Let's just hope the next torch-carrier chooses to respect the awe and horror of this franchise without settling for spectacle.

Professor Marston and the Wonder Women (2017)

Score: 4.5 / 5

For those of us who haven't always been DC fans but who found this summer's Wonder Woman to be phenomenal, this new film serves to increase our appreciation and love of the character. But before you take the kids to enjoy this real-life origin story, you may want to read up on your history. Or at least double-check the title.

William Moulton Marston, the American psychologist who created Wonder Woman, was inspired by not one but two women to create the Amazon goddess superhero. One was his wife, attorney and fellow psychologist Elizabeth Holloway Marston, and together they created a prototype for the first lie detector test. The other, Olive Byrne, defies strict description, as she graduated from student to assistant to lover of both Marston spouses. Their work together challenged not only scientific and academic tradition, but defied normative sexual and marital dynamics we still have today.

Professor Marston and the Wonder Women, as a no doubt fictionalized and dramatized account of their life stories, falls invariably into familiar biopic patterns. Their work leads to their love, their love is questioned and threatened by outsiders, and their lives ultimately transcend the bigotry and traditions of their community. The film succeeds exactly in this: its subject matter can't be so easily tied down by genre conventions. Its radical feminism (Marston himself would be a fascinating psychological study of a radical feminist straight man) and surprisingly sympathetic portrayal of polyamory and fetishes make this flick the most interesting and empowering biopic I've seen in years.

In an age of salacious scandals and voyeuristic sexual psychodrama, the human heart is often forsaken in favor of other organs located south of the equator. Not so in director Angela Robinson's movie, where the erotic exploits of its leading characters are so much a part of who they are that each sex scene is effectively riveting character growth. In many ways, that makes it even sexier than, for example, any scene where Mr. Grey and Anastasia Steele do the nasty in Fifty Shades, though at a glance motifs of bondage and polyamory would beg otherwise.

Bella Heathcote is mostly forgettable as third-wheel ingenue Olive Byrne, the wide-eyed student whose assistance to the Marstons extends beyond the "vanilla". Luke Evans delivers a fascinating performance as an especially difficult character. He is not the piggish frat boy who gets turned on by two women making love; he is a radical feminist who experiments on his psychoanalytic ideas -- immorally, arguably -- with his livelihood and marriage in the balance. He is never afraid to wear his heart on his sleeve, and his bare emotional state allows him to be frank and honest, even to a fault. But Rebecca Hall is the real MVP of this flick. She exudes a violent type of vulnerability I found at once hauntingly absorbing and a little too familiar. Encouraging her husband to adulterate and almost immediately harassing the object of his desire with threats, she defies simple description or clear motivation. She is a woman far ahead of her time but still in love with love, though perhaps in ways not socially acceptable at the time. Which is to say, of course, still not socially acceptable, despite some declarations that our culture is sexually free. This movie is far more timely than simply cohabiting 2017 with June's blockbuster.

IMDb: Professor Marston and the Wonder Women

The Gift (2015)

Score: 4.5 / 5

Easily the most stylish thriller this summer (actually, maybe the only thriller this summer), The Gift presents us with a masterful retelling of a familiar story. It's Fatal Attraction meets Gone Girl, but without much overt play on misogyny. Indeed, the woman in this film, played by Rebecca Hall, is the most sympathetic character, and we largely follow her journey between two opposing men who seem to have staked claims on her and her privileged life. But she doesn't really suffer from the two men in the same ways that they suffer from each other.

As I say, the tale is familiar: Rogue man (Joel Edgerton) with shady motives begins stalking our protagonist woman and her husband (Jason Bateman) in their idyllic suburban life. We get the idea that the stranger is after our heroine until we learn that the victim of his advances may actually be her husband, who had shamed the man many years prior. Rising above the soapy plot, though, the film perfectly captures appropriate dialogue, a stark visual approach, and entrancingly nuanced performances that, together, spin into a nightmarish descent that doesn't relent until the ending credits roll. Actually, the final fifteen minutes or so were possibly my favorite, as the plot ramps up and our sympathies are all over the place. Whereas we initially identified with the woman, we become more invested in the men's game of cat-and-mouse while (in the most brilliant turn I could have expected) we totally lose sight of the woman. In the film's climax, when we think she has become the men's victim, we get one shot of her, and in it she unequivocally (and non-verbally) declares her independence and autonomy with a single look of defiance. It took my breath away.

Joel Edgerton deserves all of the praise for this movie, as he starred, wrote, produced, and directed it, making it his directorial debut, I believe. His ear seems trained to the human voice at its most guarded, by which I mean the film's dialogue tends to take on double meanings, and works best when polite conversation is pulled back to reveal the raw cruelty underneath. Jason Bateman particularly shines in those moments, and he pulls a powerhouse turnaround about two-thirds of the way through the movie. Director Edgerton's eye, however, is trained on sensual patterns and proximity, allowing the rich colors and beautiful sets to frame casual conversations as if they were intimate, and intimate situations as if they were horrific. Indeed, the one overtly misogynist moment in the film (I kept waiting for it, when the plot hinges on two men battling, with a woman in between) happens near the end, and it's a fairly brutal (though not graphic) sequence. Its sexual nature is left ultimately ambiguous, which helps, but my point is that it is filmed not unlike a terrorist's home video, with shaky, theatrical handheld camera, and the victim is helpless as her masked assailant poses for the screen. In this way, even the more sensitive, sexual moments in the film are sensationalized as pure horror entirely as a result of Edgerton's directing.

Really, the only thing I disliked about the film was its title. It's a little too generic, a little too familiar for my taste. That said, it might bring a little insight into Edgerton's motivations for creating the film. His character seems driven by an inner sense of justice, a particularly vindictive higher purpose, and his means of enacting it is through gifts. Perhaps he feels that he himself is a gift to these people, showing them their sins and forcing them to confront their pasts and prejudices. Perhaps the titular gift is he himself, allowing the other characters a chance to change. Of course, given some of his actions, it would also be a haunting view into his mind, as we can trace how dangerous and vicious his behaviors can be.

IMDb: The Gift