Little Monsters (2019)

Score: 3.5 / 5

Zombies, apparently, can be part of just about any genre, and this rom-com horror flick is proof that new ones can pop up just about anywhere. Little Monsters concerns an Australian kindergarten class on a field trip to a farm. While they are milking cows and taking wagon rides, zombies break out and overrun a nearby U.S. testing facility before slowly making their way across the fields. When they arrive, it's up to their teacher and chaperone to protect them and fight their way out.

As far as zombie movies go, this is slim fare. The beasts don't show up for almost half the movie and are less terrifying than on comparable Walking Dead-type works. Meandering and mumbling, though often dripping with gore, the zombies aren't terribly threatening; perhaps that's why their intended victims in this story are children. We might have wished for more hard-R zombie action and frights, but I think we're a bit zombied-out, culturally, and I'm more interested in what else zombies can do beyond shuffling and munching.

The joy of this film, though, lies in its inherent dark absurdity. We begin not with the horrors (meh) to come but with our unlikely hero. Washed-up heavy metal musician Dave (Alexander England) just broke up with his girlfriend, and after a twenty-something-minute introduction, is living with his sister and taking his nephew to school. Once he spots Miss Caroline, the teacher, he's smitten and looks for any excuse to be in her presence, even volunteering to chaperone the class's upcoming field trip. And rightfully so: Miss Caroline is played by none other than Lupita Nyong'o, whose ukulele-playing joie de vivre as a teacher is infectious and wickedly funny.

Add Josh Gad as the bonkers, foul-mouthed, MILF-sex addict kids' television personality, and you get a bizarre movie that will have you laughing almost as much as rolling your eyes. It's a delightful, fresh, and also oddly inert movie that showcases Lupita jumping headlong into a bloody fight with hungry corpses. I wish the film was as hard-R in its violent, genre content as it is with its humor: Gad's antics notwithstanding, the movie tends to look away right when there could be a really effective scare. But, since the move's major motif seems to be Lupita singing Taylor Swift's "Shake It Off" while she plays her instrument, I don't think scares was ever the focus.

Marriage Story (2019)

Score: 2.5 / 5

In a beautiful opening sequence, each of the two main characters delivers a voice-over reading of letters they've written about their spouse. The things they're passionate about, how they parent their son, their work ethic, sense of humor, personal strength, endearing quirks: the things they love about each other. The recitation is dramatized in montage fashion, revealing writer-director Noah Baumbach's absolute control over these characters and his depth of understanding of who they are. Rarely are romantic dramas populated by such specific, realistic characters; much less ones that take on hot-topic issues like divorce and child custody.

Make no mistake, Marriage Story is about marriage; it's just not about the lead into one. Rather, it concerns the dissolution of marriage, something we commonly consider to be a failure or a culmination of failures. Baumbach would have us believe that ending a marriage is in fact not a failure in itself, and he's right. His carefully articulated screenplay allows for no villains, no great explosive "event" that led to this scenario. Helpful to this end are the lead actors-- Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver -- who are striking in performances that carry the film. It's a painstakingly plotted course through divorce proceedings that demonstrate the ways in which people naturally grow apart that ultimately says, "It's okay to step away."

That's not to say things don't get ugly. The legal part of this divorce exacerbates their already emotional decision to separate. Enter Alan Alda and Laura Dern as disillusioned divorce lawyers who help the couple scrape for everything they deserve but don't really want anymore, and the things they want but perhaps don't deserve. Dern is especially delicious, turning magnificently in her few scenes; one in particular features her ranting about the cruelty of gender inequality in divorce proceedings. And while the case is utterly brilliant, I just didn't much like the movie.

It's shockingly funny, emotionally brutal, and intellectually stimulating. It's also fiercely annoying. As a matter of pure personal taste, I don't much care for "slice of life" movies that so desperately try to recreate realism on screen. I had the same problem with Terms of Endearment, among others. I don't want to see a movie about normal people doing normal -- if awful -- things. That's when it stops being art to me. Even some sitcoms and soap operas are more artful than this sort of doldrums. Further, I couldn't help but feel constantly irritated at these people. Literally all of their problems could have been solved if they just communicated better. They are so incapable of being honest and open and decent with each other, I started to feel that they deserve everything that happens to them, even more than Oedipus deserved his mess of a life. Tragic flaws are only tragic when the things you do to overcome or rectify them fail; the characters in Marriage Story aren't tragic, they're pathetic.

1917 (2019)

Score: 5 / 5

My friend and I, after seeing 1917, were musing on comparable war films. I tend to inexplicably prefer the genre, and even I had trouble recalling other WWI movies. I guess there's War Horse, and of course All Quiet on the Western Front; later I remembered A Farewell to Arms and Kubrick's Paths of Glory. But there aren't a lot, especially when compared to the perennial WWII, Vietnam, and Iraq war movies. As we considered why, we came up with two solid answers: first, Americans weren't nearly as involved in that war (Wilson was determined to remain neutral until the Lusitania sank, and US troops were deployed in only the last year of the four-year conflict), and it was a particularly brutal fight.

The brutality and isolation of WWI take central focus in Sam Mendes's vision of trench warfare, which he and cinematographer Roger Deakins capture in two individual, almost unbroken shots. At least, so it's meant to appear, as Hitchcock and Inarritu have notably done before. Initially, I expected that this single-shot approach would prove the unbelievable technical achievements of these artists; it does. Then I suspected that this technique would pull us into the story with immersive and devastating results; it does. Finally, I realized that this feature was not so much a technical gimmick as it was a theatrical and artistic expression of integrity. This is one of the rare stories in which the expense of time is in fact deadly -- the tagline of some ads reads "Time is the enemy" -- and so as the bloody fighting increases in intensity, so does the thematic anxiety we feel as we watch.

The German army has withdrawn from a section of the Western Front. The British and French soldiers are on a watchful rest, but only just. Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) and Schofield (George MacKay), two young soldiers, are woken and ordered to travel to another battalion, across enemy lines, to prevent their attack. The German retreat is a ruse, and the British attack will result in thousands of their own casualties, including Blake's brother (Richard Madden). Blake and Schofield embark, first exiting their own trench to immediately see, probably for the first time, the horrific hell on earth that is the recently deserted battlefield. Making their way through the muddy, bloody no-man's land and into the deserted German trenches is a nail-biting exercise in tension. And it's just the first step.

Because of the immediacy and immersion of the film, it often feels like a sort of arthouse video game, where you play a character picking his way across various battlefields, including tunnels, trenches, rivers, forests, fields, abandoned towns. The journey and action are punctuated by terrifying open-world dangers, especially gunfire that tends to erupt when least expected from shooters we never see. Occasional reprieves take the form of lengthy bits of exposition-heavy dialogue, either between the two young men or various commanding officers, including Colin Firth, Andrew Scott, Mark Strong, and Benedict Cumberbatch. The centerpiece, though, is a masterwork of light, sound, speed, and acting as Schofield sprints through a ruined town with Germans hunting him in the dark. Flares flying overhead turn the battlefront into a nightmarish ghost-town where shadows move and nothing is as it seems.

In what quickly becomes a sort of odyssey through war-torn northern France, the two young men are forced to deal with booby traps, enemy soldiers, friendly fire, dehydration, airplane attacks, rats, barbed wire, tunnel collapses, and hundreds of dead bodies. Not long after they initially enter no-man's land, Schofield cuts his hand on barbed wire and then, spooked and hiding, accidentally plunges his hand into a festering corpse's bowels. It's disgusting, and he'll probably lose that hand within a week, but it's just the beginning of the horrors to come. The action is relatively slow-paced, but so much detail and emotion is built into every minute that you still feel like things are flying along. In fact, lengthy sections feel not unlike Apocalypse Now in that, despite our protagonists' best efforts to find and deliver information, the battlefield is strewn with soldiers who have effectively lost their minds. Nobody knows where the command is, where the front is, who is a threat and who is a friend, or even how to function as a normal person. Madness is the cost these men pay to serve in war, if not their limbs or lives.

Little Women (2019)

Score: 4.5 / 5

The pleasant surprise of the year for me is Greta Gerwig's second directorial outing, a new adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. I liked Lady Bird, her debut film, well enough to recognize a rising auteur with wit, talent, and gumption. But her newest film demonstrates exceptional brilliance in both adapting the story and telling it -- yet again, as if we really needed it -- with stunning relevance and ingenuity. Even knowing the story and characters well won't stop you from enjoying this iteration as if it were all brand new.

Gerwig's depth of knowledge about the source material allows her to do some truly amazing work here, cutting up the narrative and dividing it into parallel acts that run concurrently. As we flip back and forth in time, brilliant new insights and ironies burst into bloom before us that were always there in the novel but never as clear. Gerwig's control informs the tone as well: her lived-in familiarity with the material allows her to play with strong senses of memory and nostalgia and hope and anxiety that are simply not as potent in the traditional linear narrative. Specifically, early sequences that juxtapose Laurie (Timothee Chalamet) and the sisters growing up with scenes of Laurie in his post-Jo European adventures showcase the dynamic ways these characters change over only seven (?) years. Later, in the film's climax, we get the two bouts of Beth's illness, bringing questions of fate into thematic discussion.

These kinds of moves make this Little Women feel rejuvenated while also keenly aware of its lasting, timeless impact as a core cultural work of art. It becomes at once accessible to newcomers while reviving interest and fascination in old fans. It helps, too, that the performers are all eminently likable and give stunning performances, perhaps nowhere more than in Florence Pugh's stunning delivery of Amy, whose dramatic shifts can sometimes appear shrewish but here feel grounded and powerful as a force of willful, profoundly human womanhood -- a force of nature, in fact. Saoirse Ronan brings her typical brilliance and fury to Jo but underscores it with potent unspoken desire. Laura Dern plays Marmee perhaps the best I've seen, though the film favors her character less than the four daughters. And then there's the costumes, which are uniformly breathtaking, works of pristine and visionary art.

The finale, though, is Gerwig's crowning glory in making this adaptation relevant and important. The ending here lies solely with Ronan's Jo, flustered and winded but absolutely triumphant as she watches her novel being printed. Once the finished copy is in her hands, I totally lost my composure. Having refused to compromise her worth -- though she does subtly compromise her artistic vision -- Jo is usually seen as a stand-in for Alcott herself, who was forced to change the ending of her novel into one that has its female protagonist married by the end. Throughout Gerwig's vision, we're never quite sure how in love Jo is with her intellectual equal and romantic gentleman caller, but by the end Jo is quite on her own. Sure, Friedrich is with her in the final scene, but they are not identified as partners in any way except as facilitators of Jo's new school, opened in Aunt March's house. It's an inspiring ending that smacks of artistic and historic integrity in ways we simply haven't seen yet from this story.

Skin (2019)

Score: 3.5 / 5

Rarely are we given a chance to see true evil change for the better. I don't mean just villainous characters in stories who "see the error of their ways" and are punished, and I don't mean the recent surge of antihero-centered films and shows. I can't think of many other films than last year's Skin that show more clearly that genuine, life-altering change is a tough choice to make, but one that can save lives. And in an era when Nazis and Klansmen are taking to the streets again, few stories are more timely or important than those that reveal the nature of this evil and how we can fight it.

Here we become witness to the real-life story of Bryon Widner (played by a brilliant Jamie Bell), an ex-white-power-skinhead. The main thrust of the story depicts Widner's life in Indiana as a backwoods, almost punk-goth member of a fringe organization devoted to worshipping whiteness. Early, we see his parents (Vera Farmiga and Bill Camp) leading a quasi-religious group of these neo-Nazis in praising their Norse gods and planning to claim a seat in government. They want, explicitly, to "just make them leave," referring to black people and Asians and other minorities they use different words for. It's a chilling scene, especially with the "send her back" chants we heard this year at Trump's rallies still ringing in our ears.

Widner becomes somewhat disillusioned with his gang, but this is where the film is especially interesting. The screenplay and direction never allow the story to enter familiar territory. It's shot mostly handheld with special attention to the grunge and grit of real life. Never sentimental, it churns on from disturbing scene to disturbing scene, not really even allowing us the opportunity to like Widner. Probably because he's just not a good person. We don't need to believe there is a nugget of humanity in there, because really there isn't at this point. When, however, he meets a nice ex-Nazi girl (Danielle Macdonald) and her kids, love for them begins to mobilize his desire to change. This could be a nasty, sickly sweet portrayal of the transformative power of love, but thankfully the film has too much on its mind for that.

American History X this is not. We aren't really allowed into Widner's head, to understand better how and why he changes, or even how and why he was a white supremacist in the first place. That seems to be largely rooted in his brainwashed upbringing, as Widner's parents are essentially cult leaders who emotionally manipulate their flock, inciting violence and paranoia and indignation. And while his desire to change becomes clear, it's never felt. Jamie Bell is almost unrecognizable here, and his performance is muscular and brutal, perhaps nowhere more so than in the shocking tenderness and affection he shows to the young girls who have entered his life.

And while the title may make you think of the film's anticipated morals regarding the colors of one's skin versus the color of one's soul, it most concretely concerns Widner's heavily tattooed skin, which flash-forwards show us he gets surgically removed in excruciatingly painful operations over the course of 18 months. It's a beautiful and agonizing play on the Romantic notion that inherent evil manifests itself in nature, and the pains to which we might go to alter that. It also reveals a fascinating irony in that someone who so loved his own white skin would cover so much of it with dark pigmentation and scarring. So while the film doesn't quite fully flesh out its characters and give us "answers", I'm not sure there really are any satisfactory answers as to why certain kinds of people can be so evil. Skin instead gives us a complex real-life story to consider from a refreshingly antisentimental perspective.

Uncut Gems (2019)

Score: 1.5 / 5

Easily the most unpleasant film of the year, Uncut Gems also manages to be aggressively annoying while telling a story that ultimately means nothing.

We begin with an Exorcist-like prologue of a rare black opal discovered in a collapsed mine in Ethiopia. Why? It's hard to say, other than to create a mythic feel for the opening of a movie titled after the shiny rock. The myth continues to build as the camera dives into the gem and we are taken on a roller coaster ride through ethereal color wheels and kaleidoscopic nebulae until we realize we are inside a human colon. Specifically, Adam Sandler's colon. It's a nasty way to start a movie, but it suggests lots of the nastiness to come. If the treasure is such an innate part of this character that it is figuratively inside his colon, the dragon-sickness born of greed soon becomes the defining characteristic of our protagonist.

Speaking of which, Adam Sandler plays Howard Ratner, a veritable rat obsessed with money and material things. He is a Jewish-American jeweler in Manhattan who spends his money gambling and his time jabbering about all kinds of things. In fact, the whole movie attempts to take us into his headspace, and so it is immediately apparent that his life is a cacophonous circus: chaos erupts every time he opens his mouth, both due to his ungodly squawking and his impressive tendency to curse and lie and flatter and plead all at the same time. He's an oily, overweight wreck of a man who thinks he's on top of the world, despite the sizable debts he's accrued due to his addictions. He's also a disgusting man who has a gorgeous wife (Idina Menzel) he ignores in favor of his employee (Julia Fox).

Ratner makes many mistakes in this movie, so much that the film could be trying to turn itself into a classic tragedy, but he is so endlessly unlikable that I found myself wishing for the worst to happen to him. And of course it does. the two-and-a-quarter hour runtime, then, is a deadly slow slog toward the gruesome inevitable, punctuated only by three or so delicious scenes with Menzel, who absolutely and articulately detests her lying, cheating husband. Apart from these comparatively quiet moments, the movie blurs into lengthy "chase" scenes of us chasing Howard around the city; he's constantly on the move, constantly blurting out obscenities and trivialities, and we get the feeling that the stress and panic are totally self-induced because his addiction is to danger and high-speed chaos, not just money itself.

Apart from Menzel, the only thing I liked about this movie is its cinematography from Darius Khondji. It's not terribly pleasant -- much like the story and characters -- but it heightens the seedy, grainy, and somewhat alluring sparkle of Ratner's world. It's a similarly sickly gleam to something in a hospital or cell phone store, with a greenish-blue hue that shines a little too much. It's a fascinating approach and Khondji is perfectly in sync with Sandler's kinetic frenzy. Too bad the screenplay, direction, and acting are so incredibly off-putting -- horrible people doing horrible things to each other, all for the love and misuse of money -- that I wanted to remove my face rather than finish watching.

The Grudge (2020)

Score: 3 / 5

If these walls could talk, they'd say all kinds of crazy stuff. That's the only message I've interpreted behind the Grudge franchise, which is the story of a haunted Japanese house. The iconic image of a pallid, skinny ghost with long, dripping black hair obscuring its face is chilling enough for some people, but its essence is what scares me. It's a vengeful spirit, created from a curse that spawns wherever someone dies badly, "in the grip of a powerful rage." The curse is, of course, the supernatural grudge of the title. Far from the divine justice of a Western deity, this curse metes out its cruel justice on those who stumble upon it: housed in its proximal location, it spiritually rots the house in question and manifests itself in various ways over time, resulting in a series of other bad deaths.

While I thought this newest installment of the franchise would be a sort of reboot or remake of the original Ju-On, it is in fact a sort of spin-off sequel. As it takes place in the US, I imagine the filmmakers conceptually see it as parallel to the regular sequels of the Grudge story. The curse of the house in Tokyo haunted by Kayako in the original is unwittingly transported to America by a live-in nurse who returns home. Disturbed by the horrors she witnessed, she is increasingly driven mad by the curse that has clung to her until she kills her family and herself. Then their ghosts haunt the next inhabitants of the house.

Here we don't see Kayako herself except at the beginning -- at least I don't think so, though some of the ghosts look similar enough and croak just like that bad bitch -- but that's okay because we get a host of new spooks to savor. After the nurse's family, we get John Cho and Betty Gilpin, sad because their baby is due to be born with a bad disease (ALD, which I had to Google during the film and still don't understand entirely). After John Cho visits the house and is attacked by its former inhabitants, he returns home to his pregnant wife and kills her and then himself; it seems he is possessed by the curse. Not long after, elderly couple Lin Shaye and Frankie Faison move in, dealing with dementia and terminal illness. Tryin to cope with his own emotional turmoil, Frankie calls Jacki Weaver in to help his wife commit suicide and end their suffering. And, as you might imagine, the ghosts attack them too.

I've never been much of a fan of the few J-Horror entries I've seen. It's mostly a matter of personal taste, as the vengeful ghost story just isn't something I find especially disturbing; at least, not when it involves a wet, gaunt specter or a zombified poltergeist. In this franchise specifically, while I really like the idea of dying badly causing a house curse, I've found the mythology a little to vague and the rules too flexible. This new installment, for example, exists purely as a result of some rules that bend its own premise: the curse of the Tokyo house haunted by Kayako in the original gets transported (or perhaps spreads?) to America, having used a live-in nurse as the unwitting courier. Later, as the stories of the new haunted house take form, we see that the ghosts follow their victims outside the house walls but only sometimes. The lack of consistency here is troubling, both in terms of innate plot holes and being unpredictably scary.

Its heavy reliance on jump-scares will no doubt earn it few fans, but I remained consistently disturbed by several elements of this Grudge that endeared me to it more than to any others in its franchise. It, like the original, works wonders with its nonlinear storytelling, but here it makes a strong case for a non-Western understanding of time and emotional intelligence. The dialogue itself, in one crucial scene, supports the narrative organization, which is brilliant. It also is the first Grudge I've seen to be truly, deeply ugly in its theme and character. Others have featured unhappy people, I suppose, but each new family in this film is dealing with staple hot-topic issues that are altogether unpleasant. Similarly, they all meet surprisingly violent and graphic deaths that we fully see on screen. We see bodies splatter multiple times, and frankly I just wasn't ready for it after all the ghost-faces popping out and gloomy, moody, slow camera machinations. After seeing these brief moments, I totally understood why these ghosts are upset.

But none more so than Andrea Riseborough and Demian Bichir, whose unlikely pairing here serves as a knockout audition for the next season of True Detective. They are both so miserable it's hard to entirely root for them, because we know they're past the point of no return. Paired together in the precinct, Andrea begins to investigate the house, perhaps to distract herself from her husband's recent death. Demian discourages this, as he lost his former partner to a manic obsession with the house and its curse that led to his near-suicide and insanity. And while no characters in this movie are around long enough for a dynamic arc, Andrea suitably carries the heart of the story right up to the end, when she's caught in a new haunted house and, I think, royally fucked by the curse she thought she destroyed.

Late Night (2019)

Score: 4 / 5

Often when we label something as a feel-good movie, we mean that it doesn't really matter in terms of art but manages to be calmly entertaining. Late Night is a true feel-good movie though, one that retains its artistic integrity while wearing its warm heart of gold on its sleeve. Its infectious good sense of purpose and humor works well with its surprisingly subversive social commentary, making the film critically important but in a pleasant sort of way. If every comedy were this earnest, I'd watch a lot more.

Emma Thompson stars as Katherine Newbury, the late night talk show queen. Right off the bat, the movie takes a swing at the male-dominated primetime lineup with her presence, and it just gets richer from here. Her show, we learn, is suffering in ratings and the network is planning to replace her. Desperate for help, she allows the hire of one Molly Patel (Mindy Kaling) who has almost no experience but is a rare Indian-American woman in a career of almost exclusively white men. Though her jokes themselves don't always work, her presence and perspective changes the environment and revamps the show.

It's not terribly complex as a narrative, nor is it terribly insightful. Instead, it streamlines itself and simplifies its story in an effort to -- I think successfully -- advocate for much-needed change of personnel in certain workplaces. Especially entertainment. While this movie seems to be coming on the decline of intense scrutiny on the ethnic and gender makeup of the AMPAS and other major entertainment clubs, it certainly showcases the incredible power of affirmative action in very real ways. In one particularly awesome scene, Molly tries to shame Katherine for employing her as a "diversity hire"; Katherine immediately confirms this. Of course she is a diversity hire. And now it's her time to shine in a realm she would otherwise have no access to.

And shine she does in several scenes with lazy, irritable, and egotistical white men she now can call coworkers. There's the head monologue writer who is a "legacy hire", the pretty but sleazy guy, the jealous and probably closeted gay guy, the overweight joke machine guy, and their disillusioned but wise and wisecracking boss Denis O'Hare. Their banter back and forth is a lot of fun, but nowhere near the wit and charm of the two leading ladies together. Thompson's dragon lady isn't as intense as Meryl Streep's Devil Wears Prada big bad, but she is firmly grounded and showcases her range in a series of detailed, poignant scenes that challenge our expectations of her brand.

Kaling is an unsung hero here, in a relatively thankless role meant to catalyze the story. But she brings a delightful wide-eyes naivety to the proceedings that works well with her character. Molly, a quality control specialist in a chemical plant, has no idea what she's getting into in the backstabbing world of late night entertainment. She brings cupcakes to work on her first day and recites Yeats poems as her mantra. Unlike other movies of its ilk, Late Night does not allow its lead character to be crushed before she is rebuilt; she maintains a course of growth and even some disillusionment, but she does not bow to the bullies around her and does not suffer unduly while in her out-of-place position. And thanks to screenwriter Kaling herself for that, who does not see a villain in this story. Instead, she empowers even the bullies (who are not really bullies, but rather products of a history of limited perspective) to become better people along with her protagonist. We could all use some of this infectious positivity.

Official Secrets (2019)

Score: 4 / 5

I'm a sucker for this kind of genre-inclusive thriller that fills space between politics, legality, courtrooms, history, war (or, really, any hot topic), and an all-star cast. Just this year we've had several, from the CIA Torture Report to the DuPont chemical poisoning, and though we don't really have a unique name for this genre, I'm always happy to dive in. Gavin Hood's addition to this genre, Official Secrets, isn't as dazzling as others this year, and feels more workmanly than cinematic, but manages to remain engaging, thrilling, and as entertaining as you could hope for.

This time, we jump across the pond to learn about -- if we don't already know -- Katharine Gun, the British whistleblower who leaked "official secrets" to the press. Though whistleblowing in the age of Edward Snowden and the much-publicized whistleblower who paved the way to President Trump's impeachment might seem glamorous and explicit, Gun's case is remarkably quiet. In the course of her job -- translating British intelligence memos from Mandarin to English -- she discovered an illegal attempt by US intelligence to spy on several UN officials in an attempt to predict and influence their decision to invade Iraq in 2003. She turned herself in rather shortly after her leak, and after some intense scrutiny leading up to her trial, the prosecution suddenly dropped the case with no explicit reason.

The reason, of course, was that the government was punishing someone for trying to stop an internationally illegal war of aggression and a trial would have uncovered highly embarrassing information from the US, Britain, and presumably other major powers. To save face, keep certain information secret, and ensure reputations were maintained, the prosecution no doubt bowed to pressures internal and external, choosing to hide behind a facade of "national security" as their defense. Infuriating as the story is, it's also a remarkably uncinematic one, because the buildup leads to an anti-climax, where Gun, on display during her defense, is suddenly and unexpectedly told she is free to leave after the prosecution fails to submit any evidence.

Much like The Report and Dark Waters this year, truth is strange but often deeply unjust, and therefore unsatisfying. Nothing big happens as a result of this mess. The main character spends so much time, effort, and anxiety to vindicate herself and bring the system to account for its criminality, and succeeds only to a small extent. The institution still stands, the systems remain in place, and we're left with the sinking feeling that all this will happen again. And while Official Secrets doesn't feature as intense or cohesive a story as others of its ilk this year, it features a stripped-down Keira Knightley doing her usual fabulous thing among a stellar cast and some sharp timely dialogue. At one point early on she screams at Tony Blair on the television, "Just because you're Prime Minister doesn't mean you get to make up your own facts!" I wasn't sure if I should laugh or cry.

The Report (2019)

Score: 4.5 / 5

One of the most riveting, scathing movies of 2019 came to us courtesy of Amazon Studios, and it has made its way up my favorites from the year. It's the sort of unlikely movie that captured my attention almost instantly and became so intense and thrilling that by the end I felt that no time had passed, while feeling physically and mentally exhausted.

Writer and director Scott Z. Burns (Pu-239 is his only other directorial credit, though he has written several paranoid thrillers including Contagion and Side Effects) here manages to do the near impossible. He has crafted a story that spans over 13 years that unearths countless secrets, involves a huge cast of characters based on real people, and concerns a 6700-page report. His main character, the primary writer of the titular report, is obsessive and apparently introverted, and in his introduction of himself refers to himself as being an outsider and not a good partner. The film takes place in lots of offices, governmental archives, and black sites, all of which induce claustrophobia and a loss of the sense of time passing. None of these are innately cinematic. In fact, a project like this seems nearly unfilmable. But Burns makes this not only cinematic but entertaining, challenging, and beautiful.

The report in question is sometimes crudely known as "the Torture Report," an enormous 2012 document meant to uncover the CIA's Detention and Interrogation Program and specifically their use of torture on prisoners. We are subjected to occasional -- and intensely graphic -- flashbacks that dramatize many of the "enhanced interrogation techniques" used on prisoners of war and suspected terrorists, notably Abu Zubaydah. These are jarring and difficult to watch, but as the film's more (and more extensive) didactic scenes grow more intense, we realize the calm ways people in business suits discuss torture are as brutal as those actually conducting waterboarding.

The screenplay is primarily one-sided in its focus on the Senate Intelligence Committee's investigators in the same way that All the President's Men is one-sided in its approach to Watergate or Spotlight is one-sided in its journalistic approach to the Catholic pedophile scandals. Which is to say, it's one-sided because there is only one side to this issue. While it does paint in broad strokes the Republicans who defend the use of torture and the CIA officials trying to save their own asses, its facts as to who knew what information at what time and supported what actions is all correct, as far as I can tell. It champions Senators Feinstein and McCain not because of any personal traits or their partisanship but because they chose to hold the CIA accountable for international criminality.

But the screenplay has other magnificent features, too, in the realm of entertainment. It's conscious of its place in the genre of...whatever this genre is? Legal thriller, historical crime drama, investigative journalism meets politics, courtroom of law? Its camera and editing sometimes recall The West Wing or House of Cards. Its characters feel ripped from C-SPAN in hyperdramatic moments that wouldn't be out of place in a courtroom drama. Its righteous sense of purpose stands in stark contrast to another film it directly references, Zero Dark Thirty, which boasts, I'd argue, thematic inscrutability. And it gives its incredible cast (including Ted Levine, Tim Blake Nelson, Corey Stoll, Maura Tierney, and Jon Hamm) a lot of juicy material that so easily could have been chokingly dry. Even Adam Driver, whose performances usually underwhelm me, here gives what may be his best work in a thankless, difficult leading role. But Annette Bening steals the show here, though her screen time is limited.

It's surprising to me, having viewed it now three times, how carefully the film straddles its own thematic ambiguity. I mean, obviously it's anti-torture, but it tries hard to come across as earnest and realistic. It doesn't sugarcoat the fact that no CIA officials have been reprimanded, disciplined, charged, or even fired as a result of their use of torture or their attempts to cover it up. But it doesn't tonally feel like an indictment of the agency, or of the government as a whole (an Eastwood film would have that feeling); instead, it turns its heroes into patriots. Near the end, Senator Feinstein praises the U.S. for being one of the few countries that would approve a document revealing such dark stains on national integrity. This film embraces the gray area in which it lives while advocating for us all to hold our authorities accountable, a remarkably mature and hopeful message as we head into an election year.