The Lost City (2022)

Score: 4 / 5

I don't usually go for comedies, especially ones that combine adventure and romance, but The Lost City was the unexpected delight of the season for me. In no ways does it try to reinvent anything, yet its familiarity breeds ingenuity and joy. Essentially taking what we all love about middle-aged rom-coms and silly adventure flicks and mashing them together, it works as fairly mindless and fun entertainment. In the hands of the directors and this stellar cast, and a screenplay laced with gold, it's a lot smarter and a lot more heartfelt than I expected. I'd compare it tonally to Isn't It Romantic in that way, even though it looks and feels more like Romancing the Stone or countless other adventures with varying degrees of romance and comedy (Jumanji, The Mummy, The African Queen, Jungle Cruise). It's a movie that knows exactly what it is and who its audience is, and gives what we want and expect while still delighting us each step of the journey.

Loretta Sage (Sandra Bullock) is trying desperately to stay afloat. The famed writer of smutty romance-adventures, she has grown disdainful for her own work since the untimely death of her husband. Her grief has made her reclusive and misanthropic, and she's hit a writer's block with her new book. When her agent Beth (Da'Vine Joy Randolph) pushes her into promoting her latest book on tour with the wildly popular cover model Alan (Channing Tatum), Loretta suggests that she's done writing stories in this series. The agent, the model, and the fans won't have it; they love the hunky Dash McMahon too much. We get many hints, too, that Loretta's stories contain nuggets of gold in them; she actually did archeological research with her deceased husband to inform her fiction.

After successfully derailing a public appearance with "Dash," Loretta is abducted by a fan. Well, a fan who is also a criminal in the form of Abigail Fairfax (Daniel Radcliffe), an eccentric and vengeful billionaire who wants his own fame, fortune, and glory. Fairfax has located the titular lost city from one of Loretta's books and needs her to translate clues that might lead them to a hidden treasure. Time is ticking because, of course, the treasure is located near an active volcano. Why not? This is a highly contrived plot, but by the point the plot is properly laid out in the first, let's say, twenty or thirty minutes, we pretty much know every beat the movie will hit. And it does, in spades. What a pleasure.

The doubtful and resistant Loretta has no intention of helping Fairfax, but he takes her anyway (while destroying the world's largest charcuterie display, tragically). Alan, who seems to be somewhat smitten with Loretta -- or at least desperate to keep his famed character alive and popular -- gives chase with the help of a former mentor and meditation guru/fitness trainer Jack Trainer (Brad Pitt). And so ensues the rollicking, somewhat swashbuckling adventure that takes our cast to a remote Caribbean island in search of love, treasure, and themselves. Once they all reconvene, in one of the film's best action sequences to the sound of "Red Right Hand", things really kick into high gear. A principal joy here is the acting from stars who are simply doing what they do best. Tatum keenly understands his own appeal as a caring and slightly stupid hot guy; Bullock has made a career out of understanding her own appeal as a sexy, disillusioned, and somewhat awkward intellectual with walls to tear down. Together, they share some of the best chemistry I've seen in a comedy in years.

Everything about this movie is charming. Its supporting cast works well, though Radcliffe's character feels underdeveloped and sometimes forced into a narrative that clearly just needed a caricatured villain (though Radcliffe himself delivers admirably). It's bright and cute and often laugh-out-loud hilarious. It's also exciting and rousing and sexy and surprisingly emotional. It's everything you want from this kind of movie, and it's smart about playing itself accordingly; the Nee brothers are simply taking an old recipe, using A-list ingredients, and injecting it with fresh and jubilant energy. This is one of those movies I enjoyed so much I could have happily watched it again shortly after the first screening, and will probably stay on my repertoire of date night/sick day/rainy day flicks, and it would pair beautifully with tequila cocktails or any shade of wine.

The Unforgivable (2021)

Score: 1.5 / 5

Based on the brief Netflix synopsis, I thought this movie would be one thing. Then, what initially appeared to be a psychological drama turned into an odd mixture of legal and crime thriller, before coming to a head in an ending that took a few too many sharp turns for me. Narrative whiplash notwithstanding, The Unforgivable desperately wants to be a character study of a woman in what is usually a male role. And it somewhat succeeds there, mostly due to the commitment of an always surprising Sandra Bullock. The problem is largely with the screenplay and direction, neither of which seems able to focus on any particular point or use their assets wisely.

Sandy B. plays Ruth Slater as she is released from prison; we learn eventually that she served twenty years after she was convicted of murdering a sheriff. The sheriff had come to her family home to evict Ruth, who was caring for her (at the time) five-year-old sister Katie after their father's suicide. Their mother had died during Katie's birth. Now released, Ruth has to get odd jobs to try and survive while searching for Katie, who had since been adopted and presumably doesn't remember her sister or their childhood trauma. In case you weren't getting the hint, this is a bleak story, and the film consciously leans into its more grim aspects: we cut fairly often, even early in the film before the backstory is divulged, to Katie as a young woman dealing with sudden traumatic flashes, the inciting incident of which is a car crash she survives on the day of Ruth's release. Katie's adoptive parents are worried that Ruth coming back into her life will only make Katie suffer more.

Ruth returns first to her childhood home, isolated and rural somewhere near Seattle, labeled the "Murder House" but now with new inhabitants Liz and John Ingram (Viola Davis and Vincent D'Onofrio, if you can believe it). Catching her loitering outside their house, John invites Ruth in as Liz looks on incredulously, in one of the film's fleeting and darkly comedic moments. Ruth lies until finding out John is a lawyer, then she opens up a bit while asking them to help her find Katie. In this scene, and a few others that follow -- the film doesn't use its own cast very well, though Davis works hard to make her bizarre scenes work -- I found myself confused as to the extent to which we feel sympathy for Ruth. While we're clearly meant to embrace her perspective, the film repeatedly jabs at her privilege or cuts to other characters as they express their hatred or indifference toward her. This lack of focus undermines our relationship to her and stops the film from becoming a meaningful character study; the screenplay doesn't even give us any of her backstory until quite late, making her feel like an entitled troublemaker or a dangerous bitch most of the time. Katie has enough issues, and her new parents' protectivity is fully justified.

It's not just that the director (Nora Fingscheidt, in what I think is her first English-language feature) and writers keep Ruth's past a secret for so long that bothers me. It's that they incessantly tease what really happened twenty years ago through annoying, brief, literally unfocused flashbacks that suggest trauma and hidden truths without actually doing anything narratively or developmentally. It's a cheap trick of storytelling to say, "hey, I've got a secret, and you need to wait another hour before I spill the beans!" If your story doesn't contain enough interest to maintain its audience on its own, don't belittle yourself as a storyteller with this trashy mechanism; just find a different way to tell the damn story.

Oh, and then there's the ending, which showed me in spades that the filmmakers had no faith in their own story. There's the "big reveal" of what really happened to Ruth and Katie, and it's underwhelming (SPOILER: five-year-old Katie shot the sheriff, and Ruth took the blame). But then there's the now-adult sons of the sheriff, caricatures of something between white trash and angry white men. Now that Ruth is free, one brother wants to move on and forget the past while the other stalks her and fantasizes about violence and revenge. Eventually their roles swap, and the mild one turns murderous, and then Ruth gets viciously attacked by the daughter of another cop, and I wondered if this would turn into a cop-hating movie about brutal cops and the violence they beget in their offspring. Which is maybe something to consider in a film, but not in this particular story of a woman looking for redemption.

I wonder if with just a few tweaks in the writers' room (apparently this movie was written by committee, and adapted from a British miniseries) this movie would make more sense. Have a stronger sense of focus or inspiration, or even have any sense of urgency. Perhaps the miniseries worked better with more time to dwell on some of the thematic concerns the story raises? Who knows, because I have no interest in touching this one again. There's really no telling who exactly is "unforgivable," whether it's the deceased sheriff who didn't help children in need, his monstrous sons looking for revenge, Katie's new parents for their overprotection, the Ingrams for their tough love, Ruth's parole officer (Rob Morgan) or even Ruth herself. But I can squarely identify the director and screenwriters here as being unforgivable in their squandering of talent and resources.

Bird Box (2018)

Score: 4 / 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

Plus, Trevante Rhodes is beautiful.

Ocean's 8 (2018)

Score: 4 / 5

Debbie Ocean (Sandra Bullock), younger sister of the late Danny Ocean, is released from prison and immediately sets out to score a heist. Her target? A gorgeous necklace valued at $150 million. Due to her scheming -- and assembling a team of, you guessed it, seven remarkable women -- this necklace will be out in the open at the Met Gala on the neck of the clueless celebrity actress Daphne Kluger (Anne Hathaway).

I found Ocean's 8 to be my favorite of the Ocean family films. You can definitely feel that Steven Soderbergh isn't helming this outing, which is difficult to swallow. But you can also feel a pulsing energy and dazzling style that, for me, felt absent in the male-dominated entries. Those were fun and suave, to be sure, but here we have eye-popping flair. My immediate response to this film is that it is more accessible to a casual summer-going audience (or at least audiences with beautiful, badass women on our minds).

For all the glamour of the film -- which is considerable -- it remains a fairly basic caper. Every other move in the plot is predictable, and the major twists are almost annoyingly simple. But I found these rough edges to be more endearing than obnoxious, largely a result of the winning cast. Though the screenplay does them few favors, the ensemble works brilliantly as individuals and off each other as a team. Helena Bonham Carter steals her scenes as an eccentric fashion designer while Rihanna and Awkwafina dazzle as a hacker and thief, respectively. Cate Blanchett (as a fabulous possibly-queer partner-in-crime), Sarah Paulson (a profiteering suburban mother), and Mindy Kaling (a jewelry maker under the thumb of her overbearing mother) round out the rest of the team under Bullock, who is totally winning and convincing as an Ocean sibling.

Oh, and Anne Hathaway is unbelievably (perhaps too much so) nuanced in her character. She's silly and stupid in one scene, terrifyingly unbalanced in another, and arrestingly manipulative in yet another. Just watching her is a masterclass in farcical acting and grotesque affectation. She's magnificent.

I took my mother to see this movie, and we had a grand time. We laughed out loud, gasped appropriately, and walked out feeling thoroughly entertained. I about lost my marbles in one montage of the women walking out of the gala in fully bedazzled formal wear and my mom had to shush me. Really, what else is there?

IMDb: Ocean's 8