The Cursed (2022)

Score: 4.5 / 5

This is exactly the kind of movie that needs to be made more often and be seen by more people. The kind of movie we can hope major streaming services will fund or produce or buy. The kind of movie that will die out if we're not careful. An assured, confident, and profoundly accomplished period horror film so rooted in traditional techniques yet so entertaining and intelligent and beautiful that it could appeal to wide audiences. It's also so niche in its cinematic references and its central conceits that it will certainly live on with a cult following. I loved The Cursed unequivocally, although its original title of Eight for Silver was much better.

In the late 19th century, a French (possibly British, based on the accent, but living in France nonetheless) land baron named Seamus Laurent approaches a tribe of Roma people on his land. They had set up camp there and have claim to the territory; he and several men from town slaughter the "gypsies." It's a harrowing early scene, mostly shot in a long take from a nearby hilltop as the camp is burned and the people murdered indiscriminately. Laurent's band tortures and mutilates the two Roma leaders, one becoming a grotesque scarecrow and the other buried alive with a set of fanged dentures of pure silver, but not before they place a curse on Laurent and his estate. Anyone with a working definition of Universal's monster lineup or classic films in general knows that this is grounds for a bona fide werewolf movie, and my joy was instantly piqued.

Much like the mythology and themes of 1941's The Wolf Man, and many of its subsequent sequels, remakes, and re-imaginings, this movie starts from a foundation of exoticizing the Roma people in western Europe and leans slightly into concerns over colonialism and class conflict. There's a concern over silver -- mythologically, pure silver's antibacterial work kills the "infection" of lycanthropy -- though this film interestingly toys with the typical conceit. There's the idea that a person bitten can become a werewolf unless they die first. These ideas aren't really explored in much depth, except for that last one, but it's all there, firmly placing this film within the genre. Interestingly, the more overt -- and more recently exploited -- theme of adolescent sexual awakening manifesting as carnal monstrosity isn't present here at all, which makes this story less predictable and more intense as a sort of whodunnit murder-mystery with a monster (or monsters) on the loose.

Perhaps I'm getting a little ahead of myself. After the Roma slaughter and placement of the curse, the children of the estate begin to have nightmares of the scarecrow and of digging to find the silver dentures. Naturally, they meet up and go to the unholy grave. Writer/director/cinematographer Sean Ellis (The Broken, Anthropoid) is doing astonishing work here, creating a palpably haunted atmosphere that he maintains through the entire film; ethereal and foggy and beautiful all at once, the estate seems perpetually shrouded in twilight, while the gritty and brutal events sometimes make the film feel a little too realistic. Once the kids find the silver teeth and one tries them on, the curse is unleashed, and a Seamus's son Edward is attacked before he disappears. A monster prowls the estate by night, and so the Laurents board up their house and wait inside by candlelight.

This is a Gothic monster movie like we haven't seen in ages, and Ellis knows full well what he's doing for fans of the genre. It helps to have powerhouse actors like Kelly Reilly, Boyd Holbrook, and Alistair Petrie among the cast, especially Reilly doing her best to ramp up the hysterical nature of what is otherwise a fairly male-dominated story. I don't want to say much more about the plot, but it does cycle through usual werewolf beats in sometimes unpredictable ways, or at least ways that play on unusual themes such as colonialism and genocide, and even Marxist critiques of class (a maid gets bitten and hides her wound for fear of getting fired and cast out). The "Other" here is, in fact, much closer than we might at first fear, as evidenced most strongly in the briefly mentioned idea of the sins of the parents visiting (read: cursing or infecting) the children. And, of course, it's the children who initially fall victim to the curse. How much more Gothic can you get?

There is a frame story that didn't quite work as well for me, taking place in the Battle of the Somme in WWI, which I expect ate up a fair bit of the production budget that would have been better allocated elsewhere. But it makes the opening sequence unexpected and exciting, and the ending much more emotionally powerful, so I'll not criticize it too much. I will say that I utterly loved the monster itself, as it felt less wolfish and more monstrous; much like the characterization of witches in Robert Eggers's The Witch, the monsters here aren't easily classifiable and seem to morph based on the perception of the other characters, which makes a ton of sense artistically when attempting to understand the mindset of people without scientific knowledge of these things. Even when the Van Helsing-type character shows up (Holbrook), he only really understands what's happening because it happened to him once before; he calls the monster a wolf because it makes more sense than the reality, and he has to get the Laurents and townsfolk on his side quickly to stop further tragedy. I also really loved the score by Robin Foster, and its heavy reliance on droning, occasionally dissonant synth sound reminded me distinctly of John Carpenter, which in turn made me wonder how much Ellis was influenced by Carpenter too (specifically of The Fog and The Thing). 

Had I made the movie, or at least been in the room, I'd have pushed for a few changes in focus. By the finale, I could tell Ellis felt the need to wrap up the plot strands neatly while still making powerful references (I thought multiple times of The Innocents, The Others, and even Jurassic Park before all was finished). For this viewer, some more time to explore the fascinating intricacies and intrigues of the story and its already-introduced themes would have made the film feel more heady and haunting, like the organized nightmare it seemed at the outset. Pushing the allegorical elements begging to be exploited would have made it all more urgent and more memorable, especially considering the ideas of infection and isolation that have been real-life concerns for two years now. And while it may not have tapped those wells, The Cursed remains a thrilling and beautiful work.

Stillwater (2021)

Score: 3.5 / 5

Based very loosely on the Amanda Knox story, Stillwater concerns a father fighting to free his daughter from prison. An American father. A French prison. Where she's been for five years, and will be for probably four more. In a culture where precious few people speak English. After multiple appeals and investigations. When the French police and courts are certain that his daughter killed her female lover.

It's a messy story, one ripe for dramatic exploitation, and writer/director Tom McCarthy (Spotlight, Christopher Robin, 13 Reasons Why) mines it for most of its worth. In centering his story on the father's perspective, McCarthy aims the film squarely at an American audience, one still reeling from four years of politics that hated foreigners and distrusted government oversight. It's an interesting flip of the script, especially with the eminently likable Matt Damon as the protagonist. Bill Baker is the character's name, and he exclusively wears plaid shirts (or sleeveless band shirts), Wranglers, and a worn baseball cap. From his usually quiet mouth we occasionally hear a "Yes, ma'am" in a Southern drawl, or inquiries to French folk, "English? Speak any English?" He prays before every meal and listens to country music on his way to odd jobs of manual labor.

Despite appearances, he's not necessarily the Republican stereotype he seems, and this movie works hard to live in the complex interior life of characters who could be real people. His love for daughter Allison (Abigail Breslin), whose queer identity is almost ignored and whose relationship with the murdered ex-girlfriend is surprisingly honored by almost never being labeled or questioned, manifests in him leaving his titular Oklahoma hometown and actually moving to France. Once in Marseille, he finds construction work (he previously worked in oil) and befriends a local actress named Virginie (Camille Cottin) and her young daughter Maya (Lilou Siauvaud). They form an unexpected makeshift family, as the widower Bill tries to make up for his shortcomings in the past, and Virginie helps him investigate and litigate his way to Allison's freedom. Her mildly bohemian demeanor opens him up, and as she translates and guides him around the city, we learn that he's not the stereotypical character he's modeled after.

This emphasis on the power and unpredictability of socialization is buttressed by a theme of unconditional love of parents and children, and it could have made for a particularly mawkish flick. In McCarthy's capable hands, it's all remarkably unsentimental, and I really respect it for that. Bill gets second chances -- and of course he's working to get Allison a second chance -- and Damon's acting here is among his most nuanced. Much as in his Best Picture Spotlight, McCarthy's story is mostly about his protagonist knocking on doors and hitting the pavement to build a case. This time, though, the unexpected focus is on racial and class tensions: his interviewees alternately spew vitriol over Allison's deceased lover's Muslim identity or about Muslims and brown-skinned people in general. Shortly after Bill discovers his new prime suspect is a young Arab man, one of his interviewees looks at pictures of Arab men and says "they all look the same to me" and, to paraphrase, "pick one you want me to identify. I'm sure they've all committed a crime anyway."

The film suffers, though, in its final act, after what is already a bloated running time. Things turn shockingly to the bizarre, when (SPOILER ALERT) Bill abducts the suspect and keeps him locked in his apartment building's basement. It's the sort of shift that could have made a compelling story in itself -- think Taken meets Prisoners, and that's fine -- but that, after such a sensitive and thematically-minded setup, feels forced and almost like a betrayal of the characters and of the audience's intelligence. I wondered briefly, after a few crucial moments in which we close on Bill exclusively, if this sequence was meant to show his stress breaking him down into self-sabotaging behaviors he presumably had before, with his late wife and previous life. There's even a bizarre suicide attempt and some downright baffling writing and editing that made the final stretch of film feel like a different movie altogether. And then there's the conclusion of Allison's story which was a little too explained and a little too convincing; a bit more ambiguity about her relationship or her connections to the murder itself would have made for a much more powerful emotional story, and might have made the ending more satisfyingly ambiguous.

But I came for Matt Damon, and I definitely stayed for Matt Damon, and really that's what the movie is all about anyway.

Uncharted (2022)

 Score: 2.5 / 5

Anchors aweigh! It feels like ages since we got a swashbuckling adventure movie, and Uncharted delivers on its promise in just about every way. I'm not familiar with the video game series source material, but by some accounts those games are among the most popular and esteemed of Sony's catalog. This movie doesn't always feel like it was adapted from games -- there tends to be a similar aesthetic -- but when it does, it does. We go from occasionally heartfelt drama to galleons flying through the air, so you have to suspend a lot of expectation for realism, but this movie reminded me more closely of National Treasure with a dash of Indiana Jones thrown in. Not terribly smart, but a lot of fun, and we get some eye candy along the way.

Directed by Ruben Fleischer (Venom, Gangster Squad), the film opens with a bang: Tom Holland -- looking not unlike Brendan Fraser in The Mummy -- clinging to supply boxes dangling out of a cargo plane. We're suddenly shifted to Holland as a young boy, and we learn his character is Nate Drake, as he attempts to steal an artifact from a museum with his older brother. Once caught, his brother is kicked out and promises to return to Nate. Apparently that doesn't happen, as we jump ahead fifteen years to Nate bartending and pickpocketing his patrons. It's an odd casting choice; obviously Holland is eminently bankable, but his boyish good looks and higher voice don't quite match the ruff and rugged vibe of the Drake character. He tries, bless him, by wearing leather and bulking up a lot from his Spider-man look, but he can't quite shake the impression that he is playing dress-up as an adventure hero. His sleight of hand is more in line with Oliver Twist than his badassery is with Lara Croft. 

At his bar, he's approached by Mark Wahlberg -- frankly, looking and acting exactly as I expect Holland will one day -- and the story proper gets underway. Wahlberg's character Sully recently was exploring with Nate's brother and together they stole an old diary promising to lead them to an ancient treasure from Magellan's historic voyage. Globetrotting and stealing are both easy enough for these two (surprising if they're merely thieves), though they have a rocky start when it comes to trusting each other. Once they cross paths with Chloe (beautiful and talented Sophia Ali), an old teammate of Sully's, things really get going quickly, and I lost track of the plot's intricacies. Or perhaps I should say complexities, because there's very little that's intricate in this film.

It's a muscly, rollicking adventure from start to finish, and it works hard to overcome the typical video-game-adaptation problem of not having enough heart. There are many "emotional" scenes in this film that seem catered to Holland's penchant for teary-eyed stares, and for the most part they help disguise the feeling of action obsession. But between some truly outrageous set pieces -- when we get to the completely bonkers cargo plane episode, the auditorium was bubbling with audible laughter rather than gasps or cheers -- and a lackluster villain, this movie reveals that there's just not much substance to be enjoyed. I mean, Antonio Banderas is the villain, and it feels like he's in about three scenes before he's suddenly and bloodlessly dispatched. I couldn't help but feel his part was probably truncated by at least half. Then again, his main minion (Tati Gabrielle) is never less than entrancing to watch.

It's also decidedly safe in terms of content for a PG-13 movie. Not just in terms of sex or violence, although precious little of either is present here, but even in terms of plot, character, and humor. There are so few earned laughs in this movie that I think most of it was played earnestly; for something so laughable, it should be riotously funny. But it's rarely humorous, and rarely very serious, which makes the flavor of the whole film -- felt most strongly in its meandering middle section -- tepid and vague. There's also precious little that grounds the film in reality visually, as so much relies on digital effects and green screens that it occasionally felt like we were actually watching a video game on a huge screen. Perhaps some more world building, character development, or even a simpler and more fleshy plot would have done the trick. Perhaps playing the game is a better investment. I'll leave that for others to determine, but I had an entertainingly diverting two hours with this picture.

Death on the Nile (2022)

Score: 4 / 5

Thank goodness Kenneth Branagh can still surprise us. In his follow-up to Murder on the Orient Express (in 2017, five years ago, can you believe?!), he returns to the Poirot pot and gives us inklings of greatness. The previous installment in Branagh's burgeoning franchise left a lot to be desired for this viewer, but any effort to make a fairly stoic, period mystery would be challenging for most major studios right now; while I disagree with his choices to make certain parts action-based and illogically melodramatic, I understand that he wanted it to be accessible and entertaining for younger audiences and to make lots of money. But I'm grateful this time that he chose an Agatha Christie story that lends itself quite well to more of those action-packed money shots.

This time, it's out of the snowbound Alps and into the sparkling, expansive Nile valley. Hercule Poirot (Branagh) is again hard at work, both in solving the titular crime -- although the body count increases dramatically -- and in dealing with his own history. We open with a black-and-white flashback scene in WWI, with a convincingly digitally de-aged Poirot getting injured and falling in love with the nurse who aided him and encouraged him to grow a large mustache to hide his scars. It opens the film with surprising tragedy and violence but also warmth and actual romance, all things that were notably missing from the previous film. It feels, this time, that writer Michael Green (American Gods, Logan, Alien: Covenant, Blade Runner 2049, and Jungle Cruise) hits his stride a bit more confidently and with good reason. His tweaks to the source material, as before, wonderfully diversify the cast, but this time it feels more earned and less forced; his other additions -- especially including Bouc (the wonderful Tom Bateman) -- are truly inspired, and I just about lost my mind when the third body hit the floor nearer to the climax of this film.

I don't really want to go over the beats of this film, because as with any mystery, half the joy is taking the journey with the characters. And what a journey this story takes, along a lush and exotic Nile river cruise in 65mm film. To be fair, most if not all of it is certainly digitally enhanced or completely manufactured, but this is big-budget moviemaking and it never feels less than ridiculously expensive. The costumes are breathtaking and shimmering in the bright lights, the champagne flows in bubbling rivers, and the S.S. Karnak, a honeymoon river boat on the Nile, shines with hardwood floors and windows for days. I noticed at least one crocodile action shot, too, and that made me impossibly joyful. 

And then there is the cast, which is as varied and beautiful and talented as any ensemble picture we've had in a while. Whereas the previous film's cast often felt underwritten and misdirected, this cast actively breathes in the grandiosity of its surroundings and leans into the glittering bourgeois atmosphere with vivacity. I was especially pleased with Sophie Okonedo and Letitia Wright as the jazz-singing Otterbournes, though the character of Bouc's mother Euphemia is lovely as played by Annette Bening. Then there are the stars, the handsome Armie Hammer as Simon Doyle and his beautiful fiancee Jacqueline de Bellefort, played by Emma Mackey, whose intensely sensual introduction in the film felt a little jarring considering the allegations of abuse and assault against him in real life. Then enters Gal Gadot as the impossibly gorgeous heiress Linnet Ridgeway, for whom Simon leaves his fiancee and gets quickly married, leaving a distraught Jacqueline to follow them hauntingly and hauntedly around the world.

Who else? The ensemble includes Ali Fazal, Russell Brand (almost unrecognizable and underutilized, thankfully), Rose Leslie, and even the achingly trenchant real-life comedy duo of Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French. It's hard to give everyone equal time, but the balance is better on the Karnak than it was on the Orient Express, even with each character mostly deconstructed to a few basic traits. At least they look pretty! And the actors do significant work to each feel sympathetic and suspicious when the screenplay gives them precious little to do. I found Mackey and Okonedo the most joyful to watch, other than Bateman of course, but this affair as a whole is more emotionally satisfying, visually splendid, and less illogical in scope and style than Branagh's previous Christie adaptation. I didn't expect to say this, but I do rather hope for more from this series, even though at the current rate they're being produced we'll be lucky to have half a dozen in total. I'm hoping for Evil Under the Sun next. 

Moonfall (2022)

Score: 2 / 5

Don't Look Up told a parodical story of a real -- if vague -- fear of celestial bodies destroying Earth. It killed off the dinosaurs, right? So obviously we'll be next. And we've seen similarly inspired stories before, from Disney's Dinosaur to Lars von Trier's Melancholia, obviously each with a rather different tone. Rarely has the moon been the body meant to cause destruction (with a clear exception in The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask for you gamers), so naturally it was about time. What with the US Space Force being a fairly new thing, it's amazing we haven't seen more movies like this. Well, other than 2020's Greenland, which I will maintain is among the dazzling best of the disaster genre.

In what starts as a fairly cool idea, the latest disaster flick suggests that the moon is falling out of orbit and on a spinning collision course with us. The science -- or, I guess, as someone who doesn't know physics, the "science" -- involved is fascinating, as Earth's gravity gets increasingly chaotic. What starts as global tidal waves becomes more tectonic as land masses buckle and entire cities picked up and smashed on each progressive lunar revolution. It's a cool concept, and frankly the scenes of mass destruction are really entertaining in a way only Roland Emmerich has ever really mastered.

Emmerich has made a career out of destroying the world, or at least messing it up pretty badly, and it's usually a lot of fun! Moonfall isn't an exception to the rule, and it's a typical mix of effective thrills and overproduced hooey, flavored by that delightful sci-fi "what if" suggestibility. From Independence Day to 2012 and The Day After Tomorrow, and from 10,000 BC to even Anonymous (by far my favorite of his work), he takes conspiracy theories -- or at least the idea of major existential theories -- and turns them into thrillers about mass destruction and rewriting history. Emmerich knows how to tell these stories and what audiences want visually from them, and so he usually delivers it pretty darn well, like painting the apocalypse in a wine and canvas event for his drunk and amateur friends.

The problem is usually with his writers, which often includes himself. Moonfall is a profoundly stupid film on the page, which is probably why the "master of disaster" had to independently produce this enormously-budgeted flick. What could have been a cool story about a natural disaster is warped into one of the most aggressively weird sci-fi trips since Interstellar, and I don't say that as a good comparison point. SPOILER ALERT: it's basically "Transformers" (although I know nothing about that franchise, it almost certainly fits), where the moon is a hollow shell meant to safeguard and repopulate humanity as necessary, and it is now under assault by a swarm of Artificial Intelligence machines intending to eliminate humanity. I told you this shit got weird fast.

Whatever cutesy dynamic Godzilla vs. Kong embraced in its conspiracy theorist and sidekick geek character is largely recreated here in a character played by Game of Throne's John Bradley. He's always thought the moon was a megastructure, and his combined joy and horror at discovering its displacement is a bit infectious. His initial alarmist proclamations fall on deaf ears (I told you this felt like a companion piece to Don't Look Up) and so he leaks the deets to the media before NASA finally takes him seriously and calculates less than a month before collision. The military wants to nuke the moon, but for various illogical reasons they decide first to send more astronauts up there to find out what's going on (nevermind the earlier mysterious deaths and impending death of Earth). Who do they send? Space partners Halle Berry and Patrick Wilson, because frankly nobody's character name matters.

There's a lot of wasted time on the personal lives of these characters, whose melodrama is forced and unsatisfying. Wilson's son (Charlie Plummer) is trouble, as is his estranged wife and daughters, who now live with Michael Pena's character; Berry's son has a foreign exchange babysitter (Kelly Yu); Bradley's aging mother barely remembers him, despite his having a cat memorably named Fuzz Aldrin. The dynamics of these characters are frighteningly flat, despite hard work from Bradley and average work from the other leads (except for the always amazing Donald Sutherland, who shows up for exactly one very creepy and unnecessary and unnecessarily creepy scene). Could their universally one-note characterizations -- caricaturizations? -- simply be Emmerich's latent nihilism manifesting, even as a strange campy misanthropy? Possibly, and that interpretive lens would make another screening fascinating, if I cared enough to do that.

While its premise is great (the moon, falling; I just can't get enough of that), its story is shit, and its acting ain't where it's at, Moonfall also boasts some of the strangest effects I've seen in months. Compare the effects of this with Emmerich's most recent film, Midway, and you'll see what I mean. Many scenes of this film, by comparison, are clearly sound stages, especially during the climax as multiple characters race along a winding snowy road to a safe bunker in Aspen, Colorado. It's almost laughable, if it weren't meant to be so serious; some of the special effects are pretty great here, as gravity is in a constant state of flux, but the backgrounds don't match the action. Even earlier, often something cataclysmic is happening in the backgrounds and the characters seem quite bored, indifferent, or ignorant in the foreground. So if you're here for the drama or the storytelling, save your money and time. If you're here for a zany, eccentric filmmaker entertaining his own fever dream, buckle up and settle in. It's a bumpy ride.

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.

The Power of the Dog (2021)

Score: 4.5 / 5

I'm always a little skeptical when one movie sweeps awards and is widely touted as the "best" of the year, and so it took me a while to muster up the energy to open Netflix and finally watch its latest Oscarbait. And now I'm angry that I waited and heartbroken that this one wasn't released in cinemas.

The Power of the Dog is a masterful movie by writer and director Jane Campion, whose films (and miniseries) are usually great anyway. The Kiwi auteur this time shoots her homeland to look like Montana in the 1920s, a bare and beautiful landscape mostly untouched except for lonely, winding paths under rugged hills. Much like the land, the story Campion tells -- apparently adapted from a novel of the same name, for which I'm now hunting -- is bereft of fluff. Uncompromising and straightforward, it centers on the internal lives of a small family on the brink of society, eking out their livelihoods on the edges of what is known. We are given no flashbacks or really much context; any history between characters is mentioned in dialogue and left in the past; instead, we're made to study the faces of these characters in close-up much as we would study a landscape painting, reading paragraphs of detail in the actors' chiseled faces.

Phil and George Burbank are wealthy brothers who run a successful ranch. Upon meeting a widowed innkeeper named Rose (Kirsten Dunst), George (Jesse Plemons) decides to get married, and soon Rose and her son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee) move into the stately Burbank ranch. With George's money, Peter can go to school and study medicine and surgery. Phil, however, is not pleased; his rough-and-tough demeanor and hardworking isolationist attitude have made him the leader of the cowboys, and he sees weakness in his brother's affection. Moreover, he seems to see Rose as a leech on his family's resources, and he hates Peter for his effeminate mannerisms. Even in their first meeting, Phil verbally abuses Peter to the point of Peter leaving the dining hall where he works and Rose crumples into tears; he dominates the atmosphere of any social interaction with sharp words and abject cruelty. Here, he's a wolf in dirty clothes, lashing out at anyone on a whim. Cumberbatch is playing a villain, to be sure, but not as he's done before in The Desolation of Smaug or Star Trek Into Darkness; he's not particularly having fun here, just sinking his teeth into a raw and meaty role for the first time in what feels like ages. I would never have thought of casting him in a Western (August: Osage County was about as close as I expected he'd get to it), but he owns this movie like Phil would.

And while Phil's presence threatens to overwhelm the film, the other characters get a lot of quality time to shine, especially Rose and Peter, who react very differently to Phil's abuse. Rose crumples utterly; as the sex Phil doesn't desire and the leech he doesn't want, she represents an existential threat to him, and so he torments her relentlessly to the point of driving her to suicidal alcoholism and an inability to express herself musically or even verbally. Peter initially hides, a scrawny and limp-wristed kid, before he and Phil strike an uneasy but sudden and intense camaraderie. Doubtlessly feeding into Rose's sense of panic, Phil becomes a sort of mentor to Peter in everything from skinning cows to riding horses, and his influence over the boy remains somewhat mysterious during the latter half of the film. Peter works hard to appreciate and even embrace the rugged masculinity of his frontier foster father-figure, and we increasingly get the idea that Phil's rough exterior is little more than a coping mechanism for unspeakable desires he has long denied himself.

The secrets and desires flying between each character, fascinating in their transparency and fleeting acknowledgments, also inform the aesthetics of the film. Jonny Greenwood's score -- primarily string instruments -- make the sweeping film feel like a chamber piece, one whose notes soar until they zing. You can almost see the ways in which power dynamics shift between characters through the music, and for what is essentially "just" a drama about Western masculinities, the score and color scheme feel increasingly like they could tip into another genre, namely psychological thriller, at any moment. Actually, I'd place this movie in the same vein as American Beauty or Little Children in terms of this kind of tone, and for its acute analysis of American gender dynamics under the constraints of civil respectability. Despite appearing to be a peaceful, relatively uneventful watch, The Power of the Dog is a masterclass in nuance on all fronts, a stunning example of beautiful filmmaking that trusts its audience to do a lot of work in parsing out its delicate, sensuous, emotional strands as if unwinding strings of a rope.

The Lost Daughter (2021)

Score: 4 / 5

A character study of the highest tier, The Lost Daughter dropped with almost no fanfare on Netflix except for those of us who knew it was coming. It's Maggie Gyllenhaal's debut as director, and if that wasn't an interesting enough reason to want to see it, it's got Oscar written all over Olivia Colman's lead performance. But the film is also deeply complex, a sort of puzzle box for the cognitive adult who enjoys linking literary conceits with arthouse filmmaking. This is not the kind of movie that should have premiered on a streaming service -- it deserves a small, stately auditorium and a box of malted milk balls or chocolate covered raisins -- and yet here it is, sure to be overlooked or underseen by anyone unable to stop fidgeting or touching their phone while lounging on their sofa.

Endlessly literary, the film concerns a brief Grecian vacation taken by a middle-aged professor and translator named Leda (Colman). She's alone in the gorgeous resort town, and seems content to be so, walking through the trees down to the beach, reading under an umbrella, occasionally soaking in the sun and water. But, then again, her contentedness might be a bit forced, and it breaks now and again to see straining paranoia underneath. Her reactions to the people around her -- we're forced to watch other sunbathers and attendants along with Leda -- are striking, intense, and often internalized. While people-gazing, she might start to hyperventilate, eyes brimming with tears, before grabbing her book and hurrying in another direction. When another family asks her to move to another beach chair so they can all sit together, she refuses with disdain and almost cruelty before clearly getting upset that they are upset with her.

More than once, I wondered exactly what kind of movie I was watching. By the time Leda stares longingly at another woman (Dakota Johnson) and her young daughter on the beach, I feared this might become a Sapphic romance or even thriller, given the coldly impersonal first half hour or so and Leda's clearly unstable state of mind. Leda's attempts at conversation are uncomfortable, and she looks to be in pain while talking to the hotel caretaker (Ed Harris) and the beach boy (Paul Mescal) in early scenes. We get the impression more than once that Leda is not a reliable narrator, and I would not be surprised if the source novel was also written in first person, much like this movie, because despite the beautiful landscapes, I haven't felt so claustrophobic in a film all year. It makes you want to pause it just to come up for air, out of Leda's suffocating control of perspective. Leda's intense observance of the young mother and child seem triggering to her.

Then, suddenly, just as something weird is going on with Leda, the scene abruptly shifts, and it took me a little while to understand that the main narrative is interspersed with scenes from Leda's days some twenty years earlier, when Leda is played by Jessie Buckley. It's an inspired casting choice, but also a brilliant performance from Buckley as an irritated and overwhelmed young mother to two demanding daughters. These aren't really flashbacks, and if you're not paying attention, you'd think it was all happening in a unity of time, in the (fittingly) Greek sense. But really these are parallel stories that give us a more complete picture of Leda while emphasizing the relationship between motivation, sacrifice, and consequence. Younger Leda is so tired of this family life she apparently didn't want, and she's desperate to escape it to pursue her professional ambitions, which reach a boiling point when a celebrity scholar (the ever creepy Peter Sarsgaard) shows interest in her scholarship.

This is not a movie to watch lightly. The Lost Daughter is relentlessly challenging to watch, a test of emotional endurance not in a tragic or tearjerking way but because of its aggressive strangeness. To the casual viewer, it may appear inert. But if you cut out all distractions and dwell with Leda and the other characters in the moment, the film reveals itself unafraid to be ugly, messy, and often troubling. It will surely spark valuable conversations about "bad mothers" and "bad daughters," the latter of which is largely missing from feminist seminar discussions, but it will hopefully also inspire conversations about this kind of somewhat inaccessible storytelling. This is high art of cinema, and it trusts its audience to do the necessary legwork to keep up. I can't say it's a particularly entertaining film, but it's got one of the best performances of the year and it offers unique and rewarding challenges to its viewers.

The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021)

Score: 4 / 5

It's always tough to stomach a new adaptation of the Bard's work. Whether it's Kenneth Branagh's latest diva turn or an indie attempt at sacrificing substance for visuals, filmed Shakespeare often leaves a lot to be desired, at least for this viewer. And Macbeth, no doubt due to its already lean and mean plot, gets adapted more often than most of Shakespeare's work. Most recently, Justin Kurzel's 2015 adaptation was visually stunning but bereft of so much content that it felt more like an undergraduate's capstone than actual theatre. And, when I saw that the new adaptation from Joel Coen (as a solo writer and director, for the first time without his brother Ethan) had a running time of just under two hours, I panicked that it would travel the same, sorry road.

But turn, hellhound, as Macduff says, for this movie took me by blissful surprise. It's not the best version of the play I've ever seen, and it's not always a great movie, but it bravely pushes forward into fascinating new areas and, mostly, succeeds in telling its story anew. Shot in Gothic black and white by Bruno Delbonnel in gorgeous expressionistic sets by Stefan Dechant, the film reads visually somewhere between the nightmare aesthetic of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and the foggy grit of seedy L.A. or San Francisco films noir. Add a brooding score by Carter Burwell, and this film is pretty much exactly what I needed to see, cuddled up with a bottle of wine on a cold, snowy winter night while the fire crackled over the hearth.

To start with what we loved, let's start with the beginning. Veteran Shakespearean stage actress Kathryn Hunter appears in an almost blinding white desert, using her famed contortionist abilities to impressive and disturbing effect, growling out the witches' lines in her androgynous voice. She is the one and only witch, you might say, and the film occasionally highlights her acting acrobatics by placing her in relation to herself; one early moment has her standing over a pool of water as he pronounces fortune to Macbeth and Banquo, while her reflection shows two figures, making the trio of myth literal. There are also lovely visual cues to the boundary between worlds, usually heralded by crows (or ravens, perhaps) or still water reserves, as during the brilliant and chilling scene later when Macbeth returns to the witch(es) to learn more from them and their "masters." Hunter appears, too, as another important character usually treated as a cameo or cut altogether, and I love that this inclusion helped showcase her immeasurable talents.

Alex Hassel plays Ross, one of the "other" Thanes in a role more obvious and interesting than I've ever seen, one that plays more intentionally off Ross's fascinating character as one vacillating between loyalty to the crown -- whoever is wearing it -- and loyalty to whatever side will win the power struggle for Scotland. As this film makes him into the mysterious third assassin of Banquo, and it is he who discovers the hiding Fleance before the scene blacks out on him smiling at the boy, there is a lot to unpack there. As intimately familiar as I am with the play, this use of Ross made me want to re-read it again just to find justification or reason for it, because I'd never even considered his character much before, and now he feels like a dark parallel line to Macbeth himself. Oh, and I'd be remiss to say Corey Hawkins wasn't a pretty great Macduff, though I wish the stunted screenplay had given him a bit more to do.

And that, friends, is a segue into the criticisms. This film sounds like a SparkNotes audio summary of the tragedy, not so much like the Bard made manifest. Of course it hits all the beats it needs to, narratively, but for one of Shakespeare's shortest plays, I can't help but begrudge them for slicing his beautiful prose. Further, the players are largely not playing this film as a presentation of Shakespeare, despite the lavishly evocative sets (I thought more than once of Lars von Trier or even Bertolt Brecht) that should have informed a stylized acting technique. They play it as, instead, a deeply inverted chamber piece, grunting and hissing their lines to the point of being nearly inaudible most of the time.

No doubt this style was headed up by Denzel Washington as the titular antihero, whose occasional acting work for the last fifteen years or so has left me repeatedly underwhelmed (with some exceptions, like Fences and Roman J. Israel, Esq., of course). He injects his blasé grunts and typical deadpan "huh" into what should be glorious dialogue, and never allows himself to tip into madness, something that the role absolutely and unequivocally requires. A case could be made that he uses nuance to internalize his madness, but it just doesn't read on screen. Conversely, but also in tandem, Frances McDormand pops in for her limited scenes as Lady Mac, and while she naturally has a slightly wild glint in her eye, she too delivers her performance in atypically understated fashion. It's chilling until it's not, and even her sleepwalking scene felt a little too self-conscious. And then the film gives her death a visual, and that's just something I'm never down with in adaptations of the work.

On the other hand, I really liked the idea of Mac and his wife as an older couple. They are normally played young -- which checks out with his recent battle experience against Ireland and Norway, as well as their profoundly sexual dynamic -- but this time we can more deeply feel her desire to be "unsexed" when she turns toward murder, his lust for power and control as the end of his family line, and of course the weight of his legacy as he ponders "tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow." This also makes their attempted murder of Fleance and successful murder of Macduff's son more desperate and cruel. It also makes MacB's murder of King Duncan (Brendan Gleeson), which is fully shown on screen, a shockingly intimate moment, one that feels more like a betrayal of friendship and even kinship rather than simple regicide.

Light thickens, as Mac says, and this is a delicious cocktail to mull over as the snow continues to fall. Get into it, y'all.

The 355 (2022)

Score: 2.5 / 5

What's weird about The 355 isn't that it's a bit of a mess (it is) or that it's not as smart as it wants to be (it's not). A generic spy-action movie with little on its mind and some surprisingly immature technique behind the camera should make this a big waste of time. But, given the beauty and talent on screen and a rousing feminist baseline, I had an entertaining and suitably diverting two hours while viewing this flick.

As with all the worst of the genre, The 355 begins with a flash drive containing a program that can access any digital system on the planet, and it's in the hands of a crime lord and burgeoning terrorist (Jason Flemyng). At his compound, a sudden shootout creates chaos until a Colombian intelligence agent (Edgar Ramirez) takes the drive and bolts. This most basic of McGuffins controls the entire plot, which is unfortunately written not by film school students as it seems, but by playwright and television writer Theresa Rebeck and X-Men writer Simon Kinberg (who also directed). Enter protagonist Mace Browne (Jessica Chastain), a CIA operative assigned to purchase the drive, who travels to Paris with her partner Nick (Sebastian Stan) for the liaison. The deal goes south quickly when a German intelligence agent named Marie (Diane Kruger) interferes and the crime lord materializes.

All this takes place in the first 20 minutes or less. It's a smash-bang introduction to a globe-trotting adventure, even as it takes us some time to really understand what's exactly happening. We don't really grasp the drive's significance until much later in the film, when satellites drop from the sky and power grids shut down. There isn't much discussion about what exactly the threat is other than a nebulous existential crisis; the published synopsis of the film suggests the terrorists want to start WWIII, but that's not even really a concern in the dialogue beyond Mace saying it darkly to her team. Then we're quickly introduced to the other players, including Mace's former MI6 colleague and hacker Khadijah (Lupita Nyong'o) and Colombian psychologist Graciela (Penelope Cruz) who is inexplicably sent into the wide world to find the missing agent played by Ramirez.

They're all caricatures more than characters, and that is where the movie lost me. Why assemble such a brilliant cast of magnetic stars and then have them running around shooting at each other? The script doesn't know what to do with them in calmer moments, and it's only through the grace and strength of the actors that the film is watchable. Chastain and Stan have almost no chemistry, although their characters are meant to be lovers, but they're at least interesting in challenging typical power dynamics. Kruger is endlessly badass here, and Nyong'o is never less than fascinating to watch, but Cruz and Ramirez are utterly wasted. Cruz, despite her long history of playing strong, independent women, is relegated to being a deer in headlights, constantly cowering and pleading to return home to her husband and children, and it never feels authentic due to casting (not due to her performance). And the movie doesn't even seem interested in showcasing the traffic-stopping radiance of these women until the final act, a black market auction in Shanghai, where they are finally dressed in gowns (or, you know, a velvet jumpsuit) fit for the queens they are. Oh, and it's not until the climax that the film's final star, Bingbing Fan, shows up to join the team. What a waste.

None of the women have particularly deep characters, and the film is content to let their skills define them. This could -- and maybe should -- subsequently inform the action scenes, of which there are many. If they're shallow enough, they better be kicking ass, right? Not entirely, because the editing and cinematography are so opaque as to be often unreadable. Shaky, handheld cameras that are zoomed in far too closely cut out large portions of the clearly intricate fight choreography, and unbearably quick editing makes the elaborate chases and large battles bewildering and even annoying.

Arguably, the screenplay's best inspiration is to take the traditionally male-dominated genre (sometimes with an iconic woman just for "diversity") and transform it into a group of uniformly badass and diverse women taking control from the men who won't stop mansplaining. And there is truly joy to be had in the camaraderie of this "harem" (as the villain calls them), even though Kinberg does his best to squander it. The scene in which the women all come together, shouting bizarrely rancorous dialogue and pointing guns at each other in a stalemate, was staged, written, and shot so awkwardly that I wanted to cry from disappointment. Compare it to one of the film's best scenes -- when after a victory they lounge, drink beer, and swap stories of prior assignments -- and you can really start to see the actresses shine. I want that movie more than the one we got. I'm sure that is the movie Chastain (also producer of the film) set out to make, and it baffles me that it didn't happen. Chastain has crafted an utterly unique career out of starring as intensely feminist characters almost from her beginning to act, and while this movie fits the bill, I don't think I'll ever understand how all the right ingredients ended up tasting so bland.

But it's still a fun time at the movies, and with awards season ending, it's okay to enjoy just for the sake of enjoyment.