Death of a Unicorn (2025)

Score: 4 / 5

A directorial debut hasn't been this exciting in a while, with writer-director Alex Scharfman's genre-blending and deeply satisfying Death of a Unicorn. Brimming with a stunning cast who very much understood the assignment and decided to work overtime with it, the film transforms from what could easily have been a mediocre creature feature and class-conscious satire into an original, entertaining, somewhat psychedelic trip dripping with style and fun.

Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega star as Elliot and Ridley, a father/daughter duo spending the weekend at the alpine mansion of his new client; their relationship is tense, as Ridley's mother recently passed from disease, and their terse conversation isn't helped by Elliot's severe allergies. Traveling through a nature preserve around the estate that bears the name of its lord, the duo stop their car after hitting and apparently killing a unicorn. Or, rather, fatally injuring it; Elliot panics and brains the beast with his tire iron, splattering both man and girl with its purple blood. Almost immediately they realize something magical has happened, as his allergies immediately subside and Ridley's acne clears. Ridley also experiences an ethereal vision while touching the horn, leaving her shaken and desperately curious. Fearing any dark marks on his record for this major job opportunity, Elliot determines to hide the corpse in his vehicle, sure he'll bury it quietly on the estate after nightfall.

Their arrival at the mansion is a thing of beauty, and I'll elide details of the utterly delicious characters we meet there. Suffice it to say that Elliot's employer is Odell Leopold (Richard E. Grant), a billionaire head of a pharmaceutical company (notice the constant thematic interest in health and wellness?), and his cancer appears to be in its final stages, hence Elliot's summons to help clean up shop, so to speak. His wife (Téa Leoni) and son (Will Poulter) are present, but it's never quite clear what role they play in the company, if any; they seem at a blissfully ignorant remove, both flattering dear old dad and slyly ready for their lives to jumpstart after his demise. They're the kind of family you expect to see dramatized in The White Lotus as "stupid rich" people, and their house staff (Anthony Carrigan and Jessica Hynes) are only marginally better; there is an edge to their unique brand of service, though, that is worth paying attention to. After all, servants understand their masters much better than the reverse.

The Leopolds aren't blind, though, and they aren't incompetent. No family that makes billions is unable to sniff out opportunity when it appears on their doorstep, and the shaken father and daughter who arrive don't sport worthy poker faces. Once the Leopolds discover the unicorn -- inexplicably alive in Elliot's car -- they kill it again and begin experimenting with its blood and horn, harvesting its curative properties without fully understanding them. Would you question such a miraculous and fast-working cure for cancer? Perhaps not, but bigger problems than unintended side effects are en route.

Some similarities to Jurassic Park cannot be avoided here, and I think the film somewhat capitalizes on that. Apart from themes of wealthy people recklessly exploiting the natural environment for the sake of even more fame and fortune, and their comrades who genuinely care about the creatures being exploited, there are some shared plot points, such as the parents of the captured, injured beast coming to rescue it and punish the human aggressors. Indeed, this is where the film tilts from fantastical dark comedy to a still very funny monster horror flick, as the young dead-ish unicorn's parents come galloping down from a remote cave in the Rockies to the estate, intent on wreaking their revenge.

In almost Spielbergian fashion, Ridley becomes the voice of reason as chaos envelops the household. She researches folktales of unicorns, learning that unicorns are much more violent and dangerous than kids' cartoons would have us believe, trying to convince the others to right their wrong and give the unicorn's corpse back to its family. Her lone dissenting opinion niggles her father, though, and it's Elliot's somewhat wide-eyed uncertainty between right and wrong, capitulating or resisting, that pulls the plot forward, even as the unicorns stalk and invade the house, brutally slaughtering the people in fabulously gory fashion.

We could talk about a few dead-end plot points, like the unnecessary grief that colors Ridley and Elliot, or the perhaps solidly B-movie visuals meant to titillate in the same way monster movies did a few decades ago, but it's really the concept and cast of this film that make it so worth watching. All the actors are showing us amazing individual work, especially with the comedic elements of their dialogue, and their mutual chemistry is some of the best ensemble work I've seen in years. Larry Fong's notable cinematography is fluid and exciting, and the CGI for the monsters worked well for me, even with its somewhat cartoonish style. For a wild, wacky ride through unbridled imagination, you could do a lot worse than Death of a Unicorn, the kind of film I'll always want to watch for the pleasure of its simplicity and earnestness.

Saltburn (2023)

Score: 4.5 / 5

Much like the tonal tightrope she mastered in her debut, Promising Young Woman, Saltburn is an aptly fitting sophomore feature for Emerald Fennell. As in that first film, this one doesn't really tread new ground; rather, it takes a familiar trope and turns it on its head. Previously, Fennell took the "rape revenge" arc and flipped the script, literally, turning the avenging angel into a self-sacrificing shell of a stalker and master manipulator. Now, in Saltburn, she takes the sociopathic class-climber and uses that lens to critique the wealthy elite and skewer their polite mannerisms that disguise cruelty and indifference.

Essentially -- and, surprisingly, without credit -- a reimagining of Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley, this story takes place in the English countryside in the mid-aughts. This is crucial, both in terms of geographical location (the original heavily utilized a tour of exotic Italy to contrast with the titular character's struggles in New York City) and time period (when, in the 2000s, certain vicious anxieties about acceptance of gay adolescents were reaching a breaking point). These changes make quite a difference to both aesthetics and theming, making latent queerness explicit while also making the entire plot more believable for anyone not accustomed to vacationing in romantic Mediterranean locales. We can all understand the eccentricities of an aristocratic Oxford family in their manor, if only because we know about Downton Abbey and the eventual decline of such estates.

Few actors were a better choice for the lead here than Barry Keoghan, who has made quite a career for himself in the last seven years playing possibly dangerous creeps, weirdos who don't quite fit in and are almost certainly unreliable in the most violent way. Here as Oliver Quick, his chameleonic tendencies showcase Keoghan's range in new ways, as we see him subtly shift his mannerisms and voice in almost every scene, to better ingratiate himself to his scene partner and their version of acceptable or endearing behavior; in this way, his performance reminds me a lot of Michelle Williams in All the Money in the World but with a much nastier tone. But Oliver is not just a scary social climber, oh no: he's a scholarship student at Oxford, shunned for his perceived poverty and relative lack of social graces (although he is completely unreliable about his past, even if we weren't to be introduced to his family eventually). 

While it's never quite clear what exactly motivates Oliver, he soon notices Felix Catton, an impossibly beautiful upperclassman (in every sense) whose cool suavity and seductive popularity sets him worlds apart from Oliver's reality. It's unclear in their early scenes whether Oliver wants Felix as a friend, a lover, or a role model, but his obsession is apparent. It's clear he has a long game in mind when, after their creepy meet-cute (is "meet-creep" a thing yet?), Felix and Oliver develop an unexpected camaraderie that even Felix's friends decry as weird. Part of us wants to root for the hot, popular guy to chum it up with the gutter kid, because that's sweet; part of us wants them to fall in love because if Julia Roberts can do it, these queer kids should! But the bigger part of us knows this isn't healthy or normal, and Oliver's leechlike ambitions will cause many problems to come. Jacob Elordi is making quite a big splash in highbrow cinema lately between Euphoria, Priscilla, Deep Water (also a Highsmith story), and an upcoming Paul Schrader film, and he knowingly weaponizes his good looks and mellifluous voice to devastating effect for both us and Oliver.

When Felix invites Oliver to his home, Saltburn, for the summer holiday, the latent tensions and suspected manipulations come to fruition, making up the body of the film. As Felix introduces Oliver to the sprawling property and mansion, we also meet his various family members in increasingly hilarious ways. These people are the proverbially "stupid rich," from Richard E. Grant's sweetly infantile father ("Sir James," as if he could be a knight) and Rosamund Pike's deliciously glamorous and dubiously "woke" mother ("Elspeth," if you please) to Alison Oliver's stylishly dispossessed sister ("Venetia," the sole possible reference to Italy and also a literally depressed sinking city) and Archie Madekwe's refreshingly clear-eyed but desperate-to-be-included queer cousin Farleigh ("far" as the only non-nuclear family member and effectively masking his bitchy faux-superiority from the family on "lee"ward side of politeness). Oh, and then Carey Mulligan rejoins Fennell in the most outrageous supporting role here as "Poor Dear Pamela," a houseguest for no discernible reason or rhyme, who is blissfully unaware that she has overstayed her welcome, although it's also notably possible that Elspeth's professed lesbian fling of the past is in fact not so past and might very well be Pamela.

In case it all sounds like too much at this point, don't fret. It's not. It's a perfect blend of substance and style, a wickedly blasé take on roasting the upper class while also raising questions about those of us who idolize them. The wickedly mean-spiritedness of the film is always a little murky, and we're never quite sure if we should be laughing aloud or cringing in shame. Saltburn is always beautiful to behold, though, both due to its lavish production value and especially Linus Sandgren's suggestive cinematography. The filmmakers' presentation of their world starts fairly accessibly and formally, but by our actual introduction to Saltburn itself, even the camera and edits start to lean into the characters' own perceptions of reality, addled as they are with alcohol, drugs, lust, and confused emotional states. The film is lush until it becomes garish, the summer night's dream tipping ever more into nightmare. Evening gowns and suits notwithstanding, the most shocking moments of the film involve multiple bodily fluids and nakedness of a sort that reveal the gleeful evil at the heart of these characters and the film itself.

The ending, however, frustrates me to distraction. Fennell's slyly funny project, both sumptuous and insidious, is best when it is also provocative. The same was true of her debut feature. Little is more provocative than some ambiguity, some suspense, as any filmmaker of dark dramas and thrillers would tell you since at least Hitchcock's reign. But in the final, I don't know, fifteen minutes of the film, Fennell makes a disastrous blunder in depicting -- almost like dramatized flashbacks in a Dateline episode -- exact moments of Oliver's criminality. We see him calculate and orchestrate his initial meeting with Felix, supply Venetia with razors, ruin Farleigh's prospects, poison Felix after his rejection, and ultimately murder Elspeth. For all the empowering moments of deduction and suspicion Fennell has provided her audience, in the final moments she acts as though she didn't trust us at all, holding our hand and explaining every gruesome beat that made her film so grimly compelling. Leaving all those moments vague would have been infinitely more powerful -- haunting our minds during and after the viewing -- especially given the film's final sequence of Oliver dancing nude through the halls of Saltburn.

Persuasion (2022)

Score: 2.5 / 5

I'm not always a purist with this kind of stuff. Frankly, I rather enjoy when someone recreating an often-adapted or historically popular work adapts it with some anachronistic updates. Consider Joe Wright's Anna Karenina or the recent Emma., both of which revel in their own stylized approach to otherwise familiar material. I'm less fond of full remakes in different settings -- Clueless and 10 Things I Hate About You and She's the Man are just not my cup o' tea, though I confess myself partial to Cruel Intentions and Bridget Jones's Diary, among some others -- but sometimes they can really hit it out of the park, such as this year's Fire Island (review forthcoming). Thankfully, the latest adaptation of Jane Austen's Persuasion sticks pretty close in appearance to its source material. Regrettably, it's also a bit of a tonal mess.

Carrie Cracknell, a modestly famous British theatre director, directs this film as her debut, and it's a mixed bag of results. I couldn't help but feel that she watched a bit too much Bridgerton and Fleabag before starting this project, especially given the apparently colorblind casting (or, perhaps more generously, color-intentional casting) and the protagonist's penchant for breaking the fourth wall and narrating to us directly. Dakota Johnson plays Anne with no shortage of energy and skill, but it never quite feels period appropriate; apart from her occasionally shaky accent work, her wit and dry humor feel a tinge too postmodern-y millennial rather than Regency era. She drinks red wine from the bottle and throws herself around from bathtub to bed (facedown) while drily commenting that she's "thriving" and rolling her eyes at the silly and vain people around her. It's actually very funny in an understated and nuanced way, and I'd have liked to see this side of Johnson in another movie that knows how to harness this brand of comedy.

I say comedy specifically because the early half of this film -- as with most Austen stories -- can be played firmly for laughs. The romance in this adaptation is, sadly, much less exciting, and as one of the more staunchly romantic stories in her canon (perhaps due to Anne's comparably mature demeanor and motivations) it falls rather flaccid when push comes to shove. When Frederick Wentworth showed up, I immediately didn't care about her relationship with him because he's utterly loathsome here. Played by Cosmo Jarvis, he's stiff and obtuse, exuding almost no energy and feeling more like a black hole on the screen. I got none of the charisma or intrigue that would make a character like Anne -- or Johnson, for that matter -- melancholy and obsessive over the thought of loving him. Their complete lack of chemistry is enough to make this viewer feel as though her family was right in persuading (it's the title, y'all) her to dump his ass several years previously. 

Thankfully, there are a few bright spots here. Johnson is really lovely to see working here, out of her usual repertoire. Her father, the vain and free-spending Sir Walter Elliot, is brought to voluptuous life by Richard E. Grant in all his glory. Mia McKenna-Bruce is very funny as Mary, the narcissistic younger sister, and Nia Towle is really lovely as Louisa, the sister-in-law. Nikki Amuka-Bird is electrifying as Lady Russell, and when Henry Golding graces the screen as Mr. Elliot, he revamps the whole movie. He's gorgeous, she's gorgeous, they have effortless chemistry, and frankly I wanted them to run away together because that's the problem with putting intellectual/social romances on screen. We want more eye candy than head candy, so to speak. And, of all the technical elements that are nice but generally immaterial, the cinematography from Joe Anderson (The Old Man and the Gun) is cool and dreamy, filled with the sort of shots that made this kind of movie so popular since Joe Wright's Pride and Prejudice in 2005. But the endless narration and chaotic anachronisms -- a "playlist" Wentworth made for Anne is in fact a stack of sheet music, which made me dry heave -- make this movie a lot harder to swallow than I expected or wanted.

Everybody's Talking About Jamie (2021)

Score: 4 / 5

Confession: I knew about the stage musical but had never seen or listened to it. Now, thanks to this adaptation from the same writer, it's a full feature film experience, one that demands to be seen on a large screen with an impeccable sound system. Unfortunately, a lot of its charm will be lost on audiences due to its exclusivity on Amazon Prime Video. By the end of its opening musical number, I was skeptical to say the least; it's not particularly catchy, and largely portrays a certain superficiality to its title character. In a strange mix of pop-rock music and the themes and narratives of The Prom or Kinky Boots, this movie felt at first like a ripoff. And maybe, to some extent it is, as the stage show premiered in 2017, some time after a lot of other, arguably "better" shows with similar themes had already changed the face of Broadway and the West End.

There's a glitz and glamour to the proceedings that, for me, didn't mesh with the material at first. Where are the stakes? Jamie (played by excellent newcomer Max Harwood) is a gay boy, living in Sheffield with his single mother, who dreams of becoming a drag queen. His mother (an equally excellent Sarah Lancashire) is endlessly supportive but struggling financially and emotionally, presumably due to Jamie's father (Ralph Ineson) having up and left due to his discontent and disapproval. His opening number is presented in the style of Glee or Chicago as a fantasy-reality that transforms his daily commute to (and through) school into a nightclub where he is the fabulous star. Then, after a sharp cut to harsh daylight, we follow Jamie into school on his sixteenth birthday, where he and his classmates are rebuked by their nominally villainous teacher (Sharon Horgan) for having unrealistic career goals. She tells them that they had all better prepare for a life in working-class suburbia and the doldrums of their futures.

Jamie is the rare bird in these stories who embraces his theatricality and performativity with little regard to his own safety or those around him. True to himself to a fault, he will prove, I expect, a divisive image in the thick but recent history of queer-coded kids coming of age in these films; confident in his identity, he doesn't experience shame and doubt and fear so much as hope, excitement, and the thrill of possibility. He's not self-sufficient, though, and relies on his friends to help him self-actualize. His best friend -- maybe his only friend -- is Pritti (Lauren Patel), the best in class and aspiring doctor who is ostracized due to her religion. Often bullied together, they stand up for each other whenever possible. It's a lovely example of healthy and unproblematic allyship rarely portrayed in any real depth in this genre.

To complete Jamie's triumvirate of supportive friends, we are gifted with the astounding Richard E. Grant as Hugo, the owner of a boutique that caters to, shall we say, the flamboyant. Once the famed drag queen Loco Chanelle, Hugo has survived more heartbreak and horrors than Jamie -- or, one imagines, most of the people who will watch this film -- will ever understand. In a single song, titled "This Was Me" and newly written for the film, he works to teach Jamie all about how to be a drag queen. More importantly, though, he teaches Jamie the roots of the craft, the profound (and profoundly sad) history of urban drag and queer culture. In some of the most effective use of stock footage (and some recreated historical scenes) I've ever seen in a film, we're presented with images of what Hugo's community suffered during the AIDS epidemic, street protests and police brutality, the death of Freddie Mercury, and of course Princess Diana meeting with sick patients. Some of these may not mean much to the unfamiliar, but the effect is still the same: a sobering reminder that drag queens did not always have syndicated shows and global fanbases, that AIDS was a social death sentence and almost always a medical one, and that queer communities were (and often still are) targeted for far more than just schoolyard bullying.

Thankfully, Jamie's bubble is toughened but not popped by his learning of this history. He still has some maturing to do, and he will get in fights and arguments on his path to prom, where he intends to stage his second "coming out," this time as a 16-year-old drag queen. Harwood navigates a particularly difficult role with grace and knowing, wide-eyed and optimistic even as he fights back tears at his father's rebukes or the school bully's taunts. Effervescent to the end, he dazzles in musical and non-musical scenes alike, often in glittering red heels that reminded me more than once of a young Judy Garland coming into her own. By the end, the film has the rare distinction of having felt like too much of a good thing -- a candy-colored feel-good rush of energy and light that is, admittedly, tonally chaotic with peripatetic pacing -- yet needles its way into your heart nevertheless. As the credits rolled, I consciously thought it was a fun but forgettable time; that was four days ago, and I still haven't stopped thinking about it.

And for a film from a first-time director (Jonathan Butterell) and starring a new actor, that's utterly fabulous.

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019)

Score: 2.5 / 5

The Rise of Skywalker, the end of a beloved multi-generation saga of folks who love the Skywalkers in a galaxy far, far away, is a muddied mess of fan service and forced nostalgia that sacrifices the joy and ingenuity that makes Star Wars great. It is often blatantly reactionary, repeatedly attempting to comment on and even undo the magnificent strides of its game-changing predecessor, The Last Jedi. Instead of allowing artistic integrity or even quality storytelling to rule the day, Episode IX retreats to a sense of cringeworthy sentimentality and often downright sloppy craft to produce a film that means well but ultimately reveals dangerous ideological impulses.

The plot is pretty bewildering, and all amounts to just about nothing. We begin with the opening scrawl, telling us that a broadcast message has announced the return of Emperor Palpatine. To determine the truth, Kylo Ren mows down soldiers on Mustafar and retrieves a Sith artifact called a Wayfinder. Guess what it does? He finds his way, then, to a mysterious planet called Exegol, where he encounters the decrepit old man. Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid doing wonderful things again) reveals that he is the architect of everything that has happened, including creating Snoke and initiating the First Order. Fittingly, he unleashes the Final Order, a legion of new Star Destroyers each with the power to destroy planets (Death Star tech again, because we clearly haven't had enough of all that).

Then we get tossed into a chase as we follow our heroes Poe and Finn on their mission to deliver new intel to the Resistance: the same damn info we've already got twice by this point. Rey, honing her Jedi skills under Leia's guidance, joins them and they embark to yet another new desert planet to find Lando, who supposedly can help them. After a mini-adventure, they discover a Sith dagger that tells the location of -- guess what? -- another Wayfinder to help them find their way. But then they go to a snowy planet to get a mechanical device from apparently the only person in the galaxy with one, then they use that device to crack the Sith dagger code and travel to another moon of Endor where the wreckage from the second Death Star fell. In the ruins, Rey finds her way. Excuse me, I meant she finds another Wayfinder to help her find her way.

The whole affair is laughably bizarre and confusing at this point, and they still planet-hop at least three more times before the movie ends. Though some may have criticized The Last Jedi for having such a straightforward "chase in space" and an odd but thematically crucial side-plot to Canto Bight, I would take that any day over this nonsense. The Wayfinders are MacGuffins by definition, and would be interesting as such if we had other things going on like character development, world-building, or even fun action. Consider for comparison Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, which plotwise is very similar to this: we didn't mind the weirdness of needing a drawing of a key to get the key to open a chest we had to find in order to stab the thump-thump and save the oceans because there was so much quality character development, humor, drama, mythmaking, and generally awesome storytelling.

Instead of those things, we often get the opposite. Much like in Lucas's original trilogy, we get very little -- if any -- understanding of secondary characters or locations. Keri Russell appears (sort of, we only hear her voice and see her eyes) for a hot second, as does Naomi Ackie. Dominic Monaghan shows up in a couple scenes for some reason. Richard E. Grant plays a new First Order (Final Order? Who knows) commander, which is thankfully about all we need to know. All these folks and more are suddenly introduced and just as suddenly ignored. As if the cast wasn't big enough.

Rose Tico, the most exciting new character since Poe, is basically unwritten in this movie. Two new female characters are put in for the sole purpose -- I defy you to give me one shred of evidence to the contrary -- of proving there is absolutely "no homo" between Finn and Poe. Finn doesn't even get a fitting arc, after all his amazing development in the previous two episodes, and he is here relegated to being a stock action hero. There's a truly baffling twist from General Hux. And while seeing Billy Dee Williams again as Lando is fun, he does so unbelievably little in this movie I'd have preferred him to not even show up. Maz Kanata shows up for like three scenes, and yet we still have absolutely no idea who or what she is, what she does, why she's important, or really anything interesting at all.

Most cruelly, Rey is here revealed to be as flat and boring a character as ever I suspected. Just when things were getting really cool in The Last Jedi, when we learn she is completely self-made, even in the Force, and that she came from unremarkable parents, The Rise of Skywalker has to screw it all up. Lo and behold, the granddaughter of Palpatine. Don't get me wrong, I think that's freakin' awesome. But when the main character has been set up as a pretty great feminist icon (remember the way she took control of every situation in The Force Awakens?), it should be artistically criminal to suddenly pull back the curtain and reveal that she is only what men make her to be. In this movie especially, she is stripped of any agency. Her story, her actions, even her identity are forced on her time and again by men. Even in her rare moments of strength, she is seeking answers, advice, and labels for herself from men.

And then there's Leia, whose presence in this film is just unfortunate from top to bottom. Granted, the filmmakers had an impossibly hard job on their hands after Carrie Fisher's untimely death, especially since it seems clear that Leia was supposed to be the last O.G. hero standing. But I can't help but wonder if they should have just killed her off in the opening crawl of this new movie, because her scenes are so deeply uncomfortable. Her presence makes me think of the uncanny valley, and her image is often drenched in so many aggressively drawn visual effects that she doesn't always look real. The scenes in which she's featured -- sometimes made up of deleted scenes from the other films, sometimes simply shot behind her and using a body double -- are disjointed at best, often with dialogue so vague it makes no sense.

Apart from the plot and characters, I can't help but shake what I read as the film's core ideological problem. The film essentially suggests that, if we put this into context, Hitler survived and resurfaced 30+ years later to join forces with the Soviets and turn the Cold War into an apocalypse. That's fine, I guess, except that this film attempts to cultivate nostalgia from the original generation of fans, which is annoying even if it makes sense from a business perspective. The problem is that it's a generation that has twice allowed a Palpatine-like war criminal and egomaniac to take control (George W. Bush and Donald Trump, respectively) and, each time, failed to rise up and challenge him. How about instead of stroking those egos and making that generation feel so safe, we try confronting them with the realities of their sociopolitical choices and its fallout for subsequent generations?

I don't want to belabor the point any longer, but I was just so utterly disappointed in The Rise of Skywalker. It spends too much time retconning the previous movie, which might be the only work of consummate art in the entire franchise. This tendency dissolves any cohesion in the sequel trilogy, making the episodes incoherent at best and conflicting at worst. These anti-developments in this final chapter result in denying the sequel trilogy its own artistic reasons for existence, unless you count the considerable interest in visual effects, which feels rather masturbatory for Disney at this point.

Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018)

Score: 4.5 / 5

Wait...that was Melissa McCarthy?

Disappearing into a role nobody could have expected or prepared for, McCarthy earns her place among the stars in her turn as Lee Israel. A writer who can't quite make her ends meet, a woman who can't connect with anyone in a meaningful way, and a person who seems to hate herself as much as she loves herself, the character exists more than lives in an indifferent New York of the early '90s. Her story, we learn, is one that is marked not by authorial success but rather by a criminal enterprise: namely, forging and selling personal correspondence from deceased celebrities.

It's a ridiculous, impossible story -- true, of course, but hardly credible on screen -- and the character could have quickly become a caricature of an eccentric, overweight lesbian who lies to live. With McCarthy's transformation, though, comes some of the most nuanced performing we've seen on screen this year. Her every movement is measured, each look calculated. We see a woman constantly at war with herself, denying herself what she most wants and indulging the very things she (and we) knows she should abandon. Her sparkling wit occasionally outshines her pessimism and scathing banter with the limited people she interacts with. It's a quietly intense delivery that is easy to get lost in, or to miss entirely.

Sharing the screen with her is Richard E. Grant, whose flamboyant and seedy character of Jack Hock is apparently the only person Lee Israel might call a friend. Wry and wicked, Jack joins in her criminal spree -- not forsaking his other sins -- and the two embark on a tenuous relationship that mixes work with friendship and wealth. It'll prove a doomed combination, but it is NYC nearing the end of a millennium, and doom is already in the city's lifeblood. Grant's character is a magnificent creation, no less complex than McCarthy's if given less attention by the film, and together the two make a strong case for this to be the queer movie of the year.

Much like McCarthy's quiet intensity, the film operates like a surgical knife, shiny and clean at the outset before diving deep into the carnage of our inner lives. Director Marielle Heller masterfully controls the flow of information, keeping everything intimate and allowing her creation to play a game of cutthroat poker. Everyone's hands are close to their chests, and while we're left with performances for the ages, nothing is as understated as the messages of the movie. The movie will end but its ideas creep under your skin and into your heart. Guard yourself, and then reconsider the cost of forgiving such deeply moving cinema.

The Nutcracker and the Four Realms (2018)

Score: 1.5 / 5

I thought this was The Nutcracker. It was almost exclusively the Four Realms.

After all Disney's wins lately, it was bound to crash at some point. The Nutcracker and the Four Realms is that point. Pretty enough to look at but utterly void of substance, the fantasy adventure feels like a thoughtless mash-up of other (better) ideas. A young girl follows her curiosity through an old man's mansion and into a wintry wonderland and meets a sentient rodent; that's straight outta Narnia. The highly stylized magical world features arbitrary characters and places that seem to be at war with each other; it feels often like Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland. And when the regents of the realms attempt to claim power while the misfits fight the good fight, I was distinctly reminded of Oz, the Great and Powerful.

Not that these are bad comparisons; rather, The Nutcracker is the failure here. Its dull story is mired in waste, begging its own spectacle to make up for the doldrums. Dripping in eye-popping visual effects, the film lurches from set piece to green screen, uncertain of its focus or even its own sense of fun. The only enjoyment I received from the film came in the form of its costumes, which are lovely to behold. Those, and the brief moment when Keira Knightley, lilting as the sweet Sugar Plum, turns to the camera and pulls cotton candy out of her hair and eats it. That moment was pure genius.

But where is "The Nutcracker"? I don't mean the character, whose bit part here is nothing special. I mean the famous short story by E.T.A. Hoffman, or even the standard ballet? Rather than treated to a festive romp through a world of toys and mice, we are tricked into a disappointingly typical young adult fantasy adventure. We're inundated with a new vocabulary of idiotic, simplistic proper nouns for the "Four Realms" and the regents of each; it begins to feel like an attempted creation of a legendarium that will never work. It's the kind of crap that defines those B movies, usually adapted from books in the wake of better franchises, flocked to by adolescent fans who say they like to read, but really only read elementary-level writings. You know which ones I'm talking about.

Worse even than these dismal trappings, the heart of the source material is utterly gone. It's not even a fantastic re-imagining of the story. The mice play only a menial part in this story, along with the nutcracker himself, and the focus is instead on the Oz-like characters and the state of their kingdom. There are exactly two scenes of dancing: one, briefly, a ball early in the film, and one during the credits. It's the latter that matters, featuring Misty Copeland in an (also brief) artsy display of talent with a half-naked man. It's nice, but not enough to dispel the waste that comes before.

Disappointing.

IMDb: The Nutcracker and the Four Realms

Jackie (2016)

Score: 4.5 / 5

We'll not see another like her, and we'll not see many biopics like Jackie. Unconventional in the best possible way, the film launches us headfirst into the hidden life of the icon who was no less unconventional in winning the hearts of Americans. This is not your typical tale, it's told atypically, and it plays a fine line between ravishing tragedy and devastating glory.

Exploring the time immediately following the assassination of her husband in 1963, Jackie reels us in by splashing us into different scenes of her life. Director Pablo Larrain leads us on a nonlinear journey to the heart of our hero as she balances politics and society and motherhood and widowhood and religion and style and formality and grief. He doesn't want us to see a great Greek tragedy about a dynasty in free fall and the horrors of family drama. He doesn't even want us to view the film as a history text documenting the trials and tribulations of the "woman behind the man." He shows us a woman. Sure, she happens to be grieving. Sure, she happens to be the most famous woman in the country. But we see her celebrating life, caring for her children, concerned for her legacy, brandishing her wit, unlacing her sorrow (behind closed doors, of course), and generally being a person. We see her building her own strength, refusing to let men run her life and her image, demanding a place in history as more than the wife of a murdered president while also lovingly facilitating his own memorial. Her search for meaning and fight for survival are inspiring.

And it works best because of Natalie Portman. Her indelibly nuanced performance aches with passion and intelligence. Her affected speech, commanding presence, and subtle movement work combine in a mesmerizing, chameleonic display of excellent acting craft. Thankfully, her director is smart enough to let her take charge, and he seems to follow her lead willingly. Though using an unusually complex narrative structure -- less a biopic than a character study -- Larrain handles his art as a master, gracefully implementing visual invention and stylistic grace in tandem with the story. It may take several viewings to appreciate the set decoration, costumes, music, screenplay, and performances (especially those by Peter Sarsgaard and John Hurt in his final film role), but by no means do those excellent and abundant elements distract from the real drama pouring out of the screen.

I only wish I had seen this before Oscar night. I had thought it was Oscar-bait, a vehicle for Portman that would surely flirt with sentimental exploitation if not wed it and bed it in one sad mess. I was wrong. This isn't just an awards movie. It's high art, great cinema, and novel storytelling.

IMDb: Jackie

Logan (2017)

Score: 5 / 5

The tenth installment in its franchise, Logan is the game-changer no one expected. Besides the hype for Hugh Jackman's final performance of the legendary character and the morbid enthusiasm for an "Old Man Logan" adaptation, the film does so many things right that it feels more an unfortunately late Oscar contender than big-budget superhero movie.

Logan, now aged, drunk, and ill -- an apparent effect of long-term adamantium poisoning -- wearily works as a limo chauffeur and drug hustler on the dusty Texas border. He and another mutant (Caliban, at a much different time than in Apocalypse) care for the ailing 90-something Charles Xavier, whose failing mind and sporadic seizures threaten the lives of everyone around him. Apparently, we learn during the film, one such telepathic episode resulted in the deaths of many X-Men, who are now extinct. No new mutants have been born for a couple decades (the film's setting is 2029), but Xavier vaguely prophesies that one will come to them with a mission. In the same way that Unforgiven seemed to signal a sort of death of the Western genre, this film -- with its trio of dying, bitter men living as vagabonds in an impoverished post-apocalyptic desert -- seems to betoken a new genre: the death of superheroes.

When a nurse from biotech company Alkali-Transigen (yes, that Alkali) approaches our lackluster hero and importunes him to safeguard young Laura, Logan's nihilistic perspective is more fully articulated. The nurse's subsequent death at the hands of Reavers (cyborg thugs working for Transigen) reveals the company's murderous intent for Laura and seemingly all remaining mutants. Logan gathers Xavier and flees with Laura to "Eden", a haven for survivors. Along the dangerous journey, Logan eventually learns that Transigen has been using the blood of mutants to create their own, and that Laura is...well, that would be telling.

It's a strange structure for a film, at once detailed and simplistic. A stylistically postmodern Western married to an anti-superhero plot, Logan works best when its grizzled characters allow their heart to show through the cracks. The characters, so guarded and afraid, also love each other, and in those moments the film sparkles with the tears of our youth. Conversely, the film rocks its hardcore action sequences in a way that Apocalypse could not; fluid, organic physical violence that requires less digital effects and more old-fashioned smarts. A risky move, but brilliant and necessary.

This is not a film for children. Earning its R-rating and then some, its brutal, bloody violence shares screen time with no less brutal character development and emotional depth. If you thought Logan was world-weary in other installments, you've seen nothing yet. Jackman's nuanced performance is matched, however, by Patrick Stewart, whose now feeble character is pitiful and tragic, broken by his past yet still attempting to help the children in harm's way. When you're not gasping for air amidst the fighting, you're choking back tears. Besides strong language and buckets o' blood, the movie features few themes apart from death. Don't fool yourself, you won't feel good when it's done. That's the movie, bub.

IMDb: Logan