Heart Eyes (2025)

Score: 4.5 / 5

Holiday horror is having an unexpected resurgence in the last few years, and I'm totally here for it! As far as St. Valentine's Day fare, Into the Dark has covered the day celebrating romantic love, the too-late but entertainingly diverting Valentine (2001) exists if only as a temporally displaced exercise in pre-Scream slashery, and most notably the 1981 Canadian romp My Bloody Valentine and its 3D 2009 remake have carved their way into the festive niche of a gory subgenre. Following the trend of revitalized attention on the classic slasher format in new and creative ways, Heart Eyes dropped in time for V-Day this winter and came to slay.

Advertising agent Ally (Olivia Holt, Cloak & Dagger, Totally Killer) pitches her campaign for jewelry products, using the concept of famed doomed lovers. She's still a bit distraught over her recent breakup, but the pitch doesn't go well due to its timing. A serial killer known as "Heart Eyes" has been slaughtering lovebirds on Valentine's Day in various cities for the last few years, and customers surely won't buy jewelry tinged with the specter of more death. Her company, desperate for a fresh idea, unexpectedly hires a hot new consultant. Emphasis on the "hot." His name is Jay (Mason Gooding, Fall, Scream 5 and 6), and he oozes more charm than one human should ever possess despite his demanding job and packed itinerary. He suggests the most contrary approach, sending the company into a tizzy over the pending capitalistic frenzy.

Jay clearly has eyes for the irritated and dejected Ally, though in her attempt to reclaim some dignity in the face of her ex and his new date, she grabs Jay and lays a big whiz-popper* on him in public. While their promising and admittedly appealing date is ultimately cut short -- literally -- by the Heart Eyes killer, it's clear they're going to work together to survive in part because of their earned, sweet chemistry. Even though they keep reminding us that they are, in fact, not together.

The oddball couple fits the generic bill, to be sure, providing any viewer with ample ground to identify with them. Screenwriting can be tricky when navigating between archetypal or stock characters in such a polarizing subject area, but this writing team (including Christopher Landon!) elicits empathy along with good humor in poking fun at the holiday conventions. They do it with a knife, of course, but that's why it also feels aesthetically heightened beyond simple mockery or spoofing of rom-com "isms." Other characters pop in and out with delightful and imaginative offerings to suggest other kinds of love and the ways people change (or don't) as a result of their romantic relationships. 

I haven't had this much fun in the cinema in a long time. Horror fans needing nasty jump scares and foreboding plotting can reliably count on this flick to deliver the goods. Romance fans looking for a dark twist on otherwise accessible humor are in for a treat. And pop film buffs into excellent production design and thematic atmosphere have plenty to soak up. Both fans and cynics of the lovey-dovey holiday will find boons in this wholly unexpected and delightful exercise in tonal balance. Plus, it gives us a distinctive new killer who is brutally terrifying and bears a memorable mask, one reliant on inspiration from classic slashers even as it overtly flips the meaning of the heart-eyed emoji on its head.

*I hereby posit this word choice as an appropriate and necessary synonym for "kiss," with no need for comment.

Hold Your Breath (2024)

Score: 2.5 / 5

The Dust Bowl is an inspired setting for horror. 1933 Oklahoma, a rural farmhouse surrounded by barren plains. Storms can whip up dirt and dust that blot out the sun entirely, caking the surface of everything, causing terrible damage to throats and lungs. Hold Your Breath, directed by Karrie Crouse and Will Joines (and written by Crouse) and released as a Hulu exclusive feature last October, uses this setting to maximum effect. Certain elements of the film are quite stunning, including its mostly daylit scenes of horror, the vicious winds whipping up clouds of dust, and the typically masterful central performance by the always reliable and eminently watchable Sarah Paulson. For these, it's definitely worth a watch for a fun, chilling movie night at home.

Margaret Bellum (Paulson) is struggling to keep her family afloat. Her husband Henry is away, moved to Philadelphia for a construction job after their farmland was wasted by nature, leaving Margaret alone to care for their two surviving daughters. Ada, their youngest, died from scarlet fever some time previously. Of the survivors, teen Rose (Amiah Miller) helps to care for the younger Ollie, who is deaf and mute from the same scarlet fever that killed her sister. Margaret has sworn not to leave their home and Ada's grave, though Henry had pleaded with her to join him. In her grief, Margaret had begun sleepwalking and blacking out, so she takes sleeping pills to prevent any dangerous or violent episodes.

One night, Rose reads Ollie a scary story about "the Gray Man," a vagabond, murderous character who can dissolve into dust and shadows and enter houses and bodies through the smallest cracks and crevices. Once inside, he can influence your soul and make you do unnamed "terrible things." Disturbing sexual connotations aside (which are not explicit in the screenplay, mind), the story itself influences the girls' minds. Soon after, when stories circulate of a mysterious wandering man murdering a nearby family, the girls and their mother batten down their hatches and work overtime to seal up their house. Margaret, seemingly vulnerable without her husband around, becomes more anxious and paranoid about protecting their property until she suddenly discovers a drifter man hiding in her barn.

The thin plot won't hold if I describe more of it to you, so we'll leave things there. Suffice it to say that, as a premise, Hold Your Breath is nothing new beyond its setting and trappings, which are absolutely worth watching. Its story has been ripped and replicated too often: a single grieving mother watching after two ill or otherwise problematic children, attempting to protect them from supernatural evils prowling around their home. The Others is the obvious Gothic parallel (indeed, I'd say Hold Your Breath is a rare Western Gothic story, which is very fun to think about), but we usually see this in apocalyptic movies like Bird Box or even this year's Never Let Go. As you know from those examples, the external threat is often secondary to the internal one: something is off with mother. The strain of protecting children single-handedly or the crippling grief of bereavement are the first stones cracking in the dam; by the time her mental state deteriorates entirely, best to find high ground.

Frustratingly, the film never really rises beyond its compelling and contrived premise. Moments that suggest increased melodrama and thematic stakes are few and far between, mostly mobilized by Annaleigh Ashford (Broadway darling) as Esther, a nearby neighbor who also seems to be declining rapidly. I'd have liked more consideration of her as a parallel or foil to Margaret, and for the film to engage more with the hardships of simply living in the Dust Bowl. Even pushing the characters to madness could have made for a fascinating character study of the steps leading from motherhood to insanity under impossible conditions. After all, that's what Paulson does best!

Some really wonderful scenes of tense drama are strung together by haphazard transitions and lazy writing thick with exposition in unconvincing and inconsistent spurts. Similarly, visually, there are a few really effective gems that never quite scare but have haunted me since viewing a few nights ago. Taken together, and ignoring the occasionally baffling CGI dust storms, the film highlights the economic efficacy of a powerhouse performance from a powerhouse actress doing the most with a screenplay doing the least. It's just too bad the filmmakers decided to up the ante in ways that distract and undermine the raw potential of the nightmare they've crafted.

Anora (2024)

Score: 1.5 / 5

Every awards season, there's at least one golden darling lauded by the masses that I can't stand. This year, it's Anora. 

The title character, called Ani by most folks in the film, is a lively and willful Russian-American living in Brooklyn. She's an exotic dancer and sex worker, seen masterfully plying her craft in the film's frank and hypnotic opening shot. Unlike her counterpart in Pretty Woman, to which this film has been tirelessly compared, Ani is remarkably down-to-earth and content with her line of work. She connects with various clients, bickers and gossips with her coworkers, and has no ambition or pretension of rising above or beyond her station. She doesn't even seem interested in romance, and has no delusions about being swept away by a man. But, of course, some of her clients have a lot of money and aren't as self-aware as she is, so inevitably, one of them decides she's his girl.

The typical Cinderella story launches when Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), the wealthy playboy son of a Russian oligarch, frequents her club and asks for someone who can understand Russian. She can understand the language, but doesn't speak it, so there's a curious disconnect between them when she continues to speak English. She won't let even this charming twink of a man play her like a pawn; she will keep her strategy close. Ani becomes his living fantasy ("God bless America," he says once while orgasming) while Ivan becomes her sole benefactor, arranging to be her only client and for her to accompany him to parties and getaways in his family mansion on the seaside. Their transactional relationship isn't cute or romantic; he's always distracted, playing video games in various states of undress while she sits and watches, clinging on to him until he's ready to fornicate again. By the time he proposes to her on a whim in Vegas, she seems to have dollar signs in her eyes rather than hearts, but it's clear her affection (or feigned affection, to be debated) for him is in some way greater than his for her.

Their whirlwind marriage and shopping spree comes to a screeching halt when Ivan's parents hear of their son's marriage to an escort. They empower a local priest on their payroll, Toros, who keeps an eye on their US property (and son) to annul and dissolve the marriage and reign in their spoiled and prodigal son. He, in turn, hires two gangster buffoons to get Anora out of the house. They show up like something out of a mediocre crime flick, and while Ivan cowers in fear and shame, Ani gets shockingly manhandled. The sequence is meant, apparently, to be funny. It is not.

And this is where my problems with the film kick into high gear. It's one thing to have an obnoxious and rote opening for a pseudo-rom-com like this, but just when it could start to get interesting, Baker decides to marry his contrived, generic premise with that "slice of life" aesthetic that frankly I almost never enjoy in a film. Hints of it start earlier in the film, but it's the home invasion scene when I nearly stopped the film altogether. As the mercenaries push in the door and corner the newlyweds, all four characters talk and don't stop, yelling over each other as they demand various things, making ugly accusations and refusing to listen or pause for each other. Of course this might be "realistic," especially for spoiled, privileged jerks, but it's unbearable to hear, especially in this age of poorly recorded dialogue. Lengthy minutes pass with completely unintelligible verbal eruptions from the characters as they physically assault each other, destroying this expensive living room that was never comfortable and belongs to none of them. Then there's the obnoxiously stereotypical element of their Russian and/or Brooklyn accents, which become so grating I had to mute my television multiple times.

Admittedly, it's just not my kind of film at this point. If you know me, you know I almost never care about a film solely interested in a young adult heterosexual "romance," if that's even what this rightly can be called. Worse, I rarely care about gangster crime films unless there are significant other elements at work (think John Wick), and ones based in specific ethnic or linguistic regions especially turn me off; it's why I never choose to watch even Scorsese's gangster flicks. The caricatured Italian, Russian, Bostonian, or, worst, Brooklynite gangster in a film of glorified material and capital excess and criminal violence just makes me feel sick. And once Anora starts with it, it doesn't stop.

Mikey Madison (Scream 5, Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood) plays Ani with vim and verve, so to speak, with a backbone and fangs ready to fight back whenever a man tries to put her in her place. The character has had to, presumably, in her line of work, for survival. But when squaring off against the thugs, she becomes a petulant child, biting and thrashing while partly naked, insulting them in sexual terms while constantly screaming and cussing to distraction. By the time one thug, Igor, ties her up with a phone cord, I actually really wanted him to gag her just so the soundscape would cool down (I had the speakers muted for this part anyway). And while her screeching, monotonous babbling was clearly a choice Madison made -- or was elicited by her director -- that doesn't make it pleasant to witness in this scene or for the rest of the wretched film.

Igor (Yura Borisov) seems to be a more emotionally aware character than anyone else in the film, and Baker latches on to that, ensuring that we understand his absorbing of information. In particular, the brief moments when Ani is truly vulnerable are clocked and stored by Igor and, by extension, us. It becomes shockingly obvious that he will grow to understand her on a greater personal level than any other character in the film -- including Ani herself -- and that the two will embark on their own something by film's end. I guess that could be a spoiler, but a) I don't care, because I hope nobody else sees this miserable movie, and b) it's painfully obvious from the home invasion scene where this plot is heading. Both Igor and Ani are characters in lower classes, people doing hard jobs to make a living while being thrown money at by people who don't work, don't get their hands dirty, and who treat them like problems to be foisted off by a well-written check. Of course they're going to bond.

Baker, ever the humanist, is the kind of director I can usually respect even if I don't like what he creates. The Florida Project is his only film I've liked, and even that came close to the brink for me in its poverty porn and dreamlike sentimentality. His pretentious approach to this film was manifest in the studio's shameless awards campaign, and was only made worse when I finally saw what everyone was buzzing about. Cinematographer Drew Daniels captures NYC with a beautiful lens on film stock, making things feel from the '70s or '80s more than 2025, but that's about where my appreciation of the film ends. Like Uncut Gems, this is the kind of profoundly ugly film I just can't stand. Art is subjective, and projects like this are distinctly out of my personal charmed circle. I didn't laugh, didn't cry, and hated about four-fifths of the excessive runtime. In fact, the only scenes I can safely say I enjoyed -- and saw Madison's raw talent for the first time ever -- are smack at the film's end, in two quiet moments Ani shares with Igor as they figure themselves out.

Strange Darling (2024)

Score: 5 / 5

And the award for most unforgivably overlooked film of the year goes to... drumroll, please...

Strange Darling.

Saying anything too detailed about this film will spoil it, so do yourself a favor. Look up no plot points, no summaries, no reviews. Just watch it. If anything, check trigger warnings, as there is some terribly gory violence and a sequence of violent (grim but consensual) sexual activity.

J.T. Mollner's writing and direction is some of the best of the year, incisive and timely even as it subverts every expectation you could attach to its outcome. Giovanni Ribisi's cinematography (I know, it surprised me too) is glorious and stunning in grainy, chromatically vivid 35mm film. Willa Fitzgerald (The Fall of the House of Usher, MTV's Scream, and more) and Kyle Gallner (scream king of Smile, Smile 2, and many more) churn out the best performances yet of their careers, respectively, in their sadistic cat-and-mouse game. Barbara Hershey even shows up, which is always a good thing. Edited to pretentious perfection, this thriller is indeed a nonstop thrill ride that had me constantly gasping for air even as I chuckled my way through.

Don't look up anything. Don't hesitate. Curl up for a quiet movie night, eliminate any distractions, try not to grind your teeth, and enjoy. Strange Darling deserves all your energy.

Your Monster (2024)

Score: 3 / 5

This Halloween release went under my radar, but I've finally seen it and it's a delight. Horror-comedies have been increasing of late, to varying effect, but few lean into romance with gusto. Your Monster capably -- I might say uniquely -- handles all three genres separately and manages to combine them in a deeply satisfying, frustratingly safe, and shockingly brutal manner. Tonally, it's a series of soft punches that feel comforting until you realize it has burrowed under your skin and into your heart.

Melissa Barrera plays Laura in one of the most offbeat and welcome performances we've yet seen from her. The rising scream queen (who can also sing like an angel, in case you forgot about In the Heights) here is about as miserable as imaginable: while in cancer treatment, Laura's longtime boyfriend Jacob (Edmund Donovan) unceremoniously dumps her, not wishing to be her caretaker, sending her belongings to Laura's mom's house and disinviting her to audition for his new theatrical production (that she helped develop). Clearly, it's a bad breakup, so Laura's friend Mazie (Kayla Foster) takes her from the hospital to her mom's house, where she might recuperate in piece(s).

There she encounters Monster (Tommy Dewey), a hairy beast apparently lurking in the closets of her childhood home for years. Though their initial encounter is frightening, and Monster wants the unwelcome house guest gone, they develop a tentative mutually helpful alliance to abide together for a few weeks. Surprisingly, Monster even likes theatre, so they bond over shared interests. Monster eventually encourages Laura to take the reins on her own life and to go audition for the role written for herself. She does, only to be cast as the understudy, doomed to watch Jacob flirting with the new star. But Laura is no pushover, and with Monster's help, she'll continue navigating the perils of love and life at home and at work.

Written and directed by Caroline Lindy, Your Monster wears its heart on its sleeve, sometimes to its detriment. Monster looks like something from an SNL skit or a community theatre Beauty and the Beast, and his wackiness is charming from the get-go. Plotwise, there's some teenage-y scheming for love and revenge framed by lots of insider angst in the theatre industry, as performers vie for the spotlight and regularly stab each other in the back (a la A Chorus Line). Though Lindy apparently wrote the story based on her own experience being dumped during cancer treatment, there seems to be connective tissue between this romp and last year's Lisa Frankenstein, both in genre-bending thematic conceits and an irreverent camp tone. Too, both end with a rather emotionally empowering catharsis as the female leads embrace their darker impulses to grow and assert themselves with the help of rage and passion denied them by sexist culture (aided by a distinctly non-normative new romantic partner).

Wacky and strange as it is, Your Monster is definitely worth a watch, and would best screen in a group of likeminded friends. It's very much for theatre fans and rom-coms -- even while poking fun at the holes in their typical tropes -- more than it is for horror fans. It's never particularly scary. Its music doesn't quite fit, and its messaging is more obvious than it should be, but for a blossoming of style and substance in tandem for a predictable but enjoyable ride through multiple genres, you could do much worse than an hour and a half falling in love with your own monster.

Origin (2024)

Score: 4.5 / 5

Ava DuVernay is at her best with real life stories grappling with social structures and widespread injustices, and she tends to make provocative statements for the present rooted in careful consideration of history. Her most recent film, Origin, was released with little fanfare over a year ago, but I'm so glad to have finally seen it, ambitious and unusual a narrative as it is. Essentially, it's a biopic depicting the life and theories developed by Isabel Wilkerson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of The Warmth of Other Suns and Caste. How do you turn an academic scholar's life and ideas into a narrative? It's a tough question, and I can scarcely think of many that would take on such a task, but DuVernay's screenplay and direction make the case for a brilliant, daring new biographical film subgenre.

Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor plays Wilkerson enduring a series of personal crises while attempting to fulfill her editor's demands. She needs to get another book out, especially one that could deal with ongoing, increasing crises in the United States. The murder of Trayvon Martin spurs her editor (Blair Underwood) to pressure her to write about the hot topic as he sees her as uniquely capable to speak to a hurting nation. Wilkerson has her trepidations, and she explicitly describes her method as needing to "be inside the story" which will require time. Much like our experience of reading Wilkerson's real life writings or even approaching this dense, multifaceted film will take time and perseverance.

Though it's nominally an "adaptation" of Wilkerson's work Caste, Origin is more accurately a biographical snapshot of Wilkerson's personal life and professional interest in her subject matter at the time of composition than it is a dramatization of her thesis and research itself. Family trials beset her, including tragedies involving her mother (Emily Yancy) and husband (Jon Bernthal) that compel her to rely ever more on herself, her work, and the voice she needs to put to words regarding pain in the world around her. Her tribulations provide valuable insight into her ideas, allowing her to see Martin's murder not as the result of racism on its own, but rather in fact as a much broader, more invisible system at work in the US and around the globe.

Anyone familiar with Wilkerson's work knows what I'm talking about, and if you haven't, I'm not going to summarize it here. Suffice it to say that racism in fact is more a symptom than a problem, and resorting to racism to explain something as phenomenologically pervasive as the murdering of innocent young Black men is in fact a restrictive lens. But, as we all learned back in the day from Reading Rainbow, you shouldn't just take my word for it. Read her material and watch the film. DuVernay's adept screenplay masterfully weaves its way through Wilkerson's main theoretical pillars with aplomb even as it invites and encourages us to learn more on our own. Tying the violent aftermath of American slavery to Nazi war crimes against humanity and the degrading brutality of India's caste system, Wilkerson discovers and presents compelling evidence that ideologically link systemic systems of oppression, despite the naysayers (dramatized in a notable dinner scene, as Connie Nielsen attempts to challenge Ellis-Taylor on her intended scholarship). 

Formally, the film offers as much to compel viewers as it does to instruct and dramatize Wilkerson's work. DuVernay's cinematographer views everything in 16mm film which sidesteps the common pitfall of historical films using contrived lenses or color schemes to indicate alternate settings in time and place. Jumping between examples could make the film lurch uncomfortably, but the filmmakers keep the form consistent, helping us connect the daring thesis on visual terms as well as cerebral. Aurally hushed, the film feels intimate and tactile, like we're poring over historical records in a library alongside our protagonist, providing the scholarly insight room to strike us with awe and the actors room to nail us with pitch-perfect melodrama to help move the story along. Bernthal and Ellis-Taylor are exellent, and Niecy Nash even pops in for a few surprisingly intense and tender scenes as Wilkerson's cousin. One scene stuck out to me as both annoying and dispiritingly obvious -- if you know, you know, but it's when Wilkerson calls a plumber (Nick Offerman) to stop her basement from leaking and he arrives with a MAGA hat proudly on his head -- and I wish the filmmakers had made a more nuanced attempt to feel urgent or relevant. But as a dramatic account of astonishing journalism and the fraught process of crafting contemporary social theory, Origin is as poetic, contemplative, and emotionally and intellectually devastating as any award-bait films in recent memory. Weird, sure, and not always entertaining, but staunchly accessible, brave, and important.

Juror #2 (2024)

Score: 3.5 / 5

With the press indicating it might be his final film, 94-year-old Clint Eastwood churns out another feature in Juror #2. His work as both actor and director has hit notable high and low points, and his directorial work has gotten increasingly and obnoxiously tainted by his political messaging, but Eastwood is still a prolific and skilled proficient. Known for his efficiency behind the camera, Eastwood here tackles a convoluted and compelling courtroom drama as if it were a thriller. If you know me, you know I love a courtroom drama: by nature, their writing has to be brilliant. While screenwriter Jonathan Abrams is not a name I'm familiar with, his work in this particular mystery is admirable, perhaps most because it's not, strictly speaking, a mystery at all.

In Savannah, Georgia -- setting to one of Eastwood's most tonally unique films, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil -- at a time that seems to be close to the present day, journalist and recovering alcoholic Justin Kemp (Nicholas Hoult) is summoned and selected for jury duty. Though he does not wish to leave his at-risk wife home alone during her third trimester, duty calls, and he seems hell-bent on fulfilling it. The case: a year prior, Kendall Carter and her boyfriend James Sythe had a fight at a bar on the outskirts of town and was subsequently found dead under a nearby bridge. As opening statements wrap up, Kemp is struck with the horrific realization that he was at that bar the night of the fight. Distressed by his wife's stillborn twins, he went to that bar to mull things over over a glass of whiskey; he remembers not drinking and fleeing the bar in shame and regret, pulling out in the rain, and driving away before hitting something that vanished. Was it a deer? Or is he, juror number two, actually guilty for Carter's death?

It's a shocking revelation, all the more so because it happens so early in the film. Tension immediately ratchets as we watch Kemp decide how and if he might recuse himself, how to get his own legal counsel (from his AA sponsor and lawyer, played by Kiefer Sutherland, who urges him to keep quiet and do nothing). Sythe's public defender (Chris Messina) squares off with the county prosecutor running for DA (Toni Collete with, frankly, a gobsmackingly evocative if cartoonish accent) and the case proceeds through typically frenetic, peripatetic hoops of evidence and testimony. Finally, the jury is sequestered in deliberation, and they unanimously vote to convict Sythe.

Well, almost. Kemp is the holdout, and he attempts to Henry Fonda the shit out of his fellow jurors. It's compelling due to his tenuous culpability, and his efforts get frighteningly close to Jean Valjean's self-torment at the possibility of having another man pay for his crimes. He seems always on the verge of breaking, but then he'll do something desperate or stupid to cover his own ass, as when an ex-detective juror (JK Simmons) begins searching for his own evidence that would lead to Kemp and so Kemp leaks this illegality to their bailiff. Kemp grows distant from his wife (Zoey Deutch), who grows suspicious, especially after the prosecutor starts snooping around.

I won't spoil anything else, because courtroom dramas hinge on being compelling on their own unfolding of events, except to say that this film has a lot of annoying improbabilities. It's not a strictly realistic film, which did distract me more than usual. Too many convenient and unlikely coincidences make it all a bit untenable, especially for a story that requires narrative empathy to function, and its central conceit (that a sober and sane man could kill someone, have no realization of it, and then completely forget about it until it all flashes back to him a year later) strains credulity to its breaking point. And by its climax, Kemp's characterization surprisingly and unsatisfyingly flips without insight or justification from the screenplay or performances.

But this is an old-fashioned film with pleasures in store for anyone willing to bypass such shortcomings. It's the kind of mainstream feel-good procedural that pops up once in a while, with precedents from To Kill a Mockingbird to Where the Crawdads Sing, from The Verdict to any John Grisham adaptations from the '80s or '90s. Its middling budget -- all the money going to a wide cast of stars -- helps ground the film, and its unwieldy story develops a momentum of its own purely as a result of its integrity and determination. It's okay to have a straightforward genre flick that doesn't necessary do much in terms of novelty, seeks pure entertainment value, and encourages its audience to thoughtfully reflect and speculate. "What would you do in this situation?" Even trite questions like that can launch stimulating post-screening conversations with material this rich. And, whatever you think of Eastwood's layered criticisms of government, police and prosecutorial misconduct, personal liberties for rogue anarchy, and the judicial system in general, the denouement of Juror #2 will leave you breathless. So be sure to see it with other people, and plan to chat for a while afterwards. Eastwood is more transparent than usual, which makes this moral mess a doozy to try and concisely stake any claims in; it's a welcome change of tone from his overtly libertarian efforts of late.

Lee (2024)

Score: 2.5 / 5

Cinematographer and television director Ellen Kuras debuts as a feature film director with Lee, a wartime biopic that was released piecemeal in the US as awards season heated up. Kuras, whose work includes Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Summer of Sam, Bamboozled, Blow, and A Little Chaos, reunites here with Kate Winslet for a project more grounded in reality than what she usually captures on camera. Perhaps that's because she's using a different cinematographer, but I think it's also due to her surprising subject matter. Kuras understands what being a photographer is all about, how it involves a curious blending of intrusive and unobtrusive observation and a fierce determination to be present in moments when and where things happen. Coming out the same year as Civil War, which covers similar ground in fictional/speculative terms, Lee never manages to be as interesting or urgent as it wants, though it is a diverting and satisfying two hours.

The story concerns Lee Miller, a former NYC fashion model and urban bohemian who lived in France before marrying an artist and academic and moving to London. Working for Vogue by the time WWII erupts, she becomes a special war correspondent starting with the Blitz, navigating (and flouting) laws and restrictions designed to keep women away from potentially dangerous stories. Embedded with American forces, she photographs the Allied invasion of France and liberation of Paris, reconnecting with her French contacts and learning about the thousands of people who "went missing" during Nazi occupation. She and her journalist partner, David Scherman (Andy Samberg, in an uncharacteristic but welcome performance), scour the frontlines before finally getting footage in Buchenwald and Dachau shortly after those camps were liberated. A small climax of the film occurs when, just prior to Germany's surrender, they get to Munich and take pictures in Hitler's apartment, including the famous image of a naked Miller in his tub.

That's really the story, a simplistic and streamlined chronology of Miller's career. Kuras adds very little art to the proceedings, though she's bound by a screenplay attempting to recreate an entire life in a short amount of time. Written apparently by committee, it's disappointing that the film provides almost no insight into either Miller's own identity or the women carving out their own place in an industry unwilling to let them. Kate Winslet performs with her typical excellence, but even her likability -- here stilted to a fault, intentionally, to better depict the somewhat curmudgeonly, disillusioned nature of a career on frontlines -- can't effectively round out her flat, opaque character as it is written. If anything, Winslet and Kuras seem determined to showcase not the woman behind the camera but rather the phenomenon of any photographer who seeks to reveal truth in others while actively concealing herself. The former model and abstract bohemian becomes hard-boiled by the atrocities of war and the infringements of a male-dominated job market, and while that could offer interesting insight, Lee stops short of such epiphany. 

If anything, perhaps the centerpiece of Miller in Hitler's tub could have been a short film, and the whole thing summed up thus. After all, for a world-weary and likely traumatized war correspondent to whip off her clothes and pose like an art student in the tub of a fascist dictator, there seems to be a curious surrealism in her art, a performativity rooted in her carefree pre-war life that even the constraints of her chosen career cannot contain, staging a shoot to make a provocative artistic point beyond any photojournalistic impetus or mandate.

But the film is framed in a curious way that requires some commentary. Spoiler alert forthcoming, in case you are desperate for a plot twist in this otherwise straightforward character drama. The film presents itself as Miller's story as told by Miller herself. Winslet plays an aged Miller at her home in 1977, telling her life story to a meek interviewer, played by Josh O'Connor. By film's end, his hesitant questions and awkward demeanor is revealed to be due to his being her adult son, Antony Penrose, who knew nothing of her life's work. She never discussed her time in the war, no doubt due to the trauma and her subsequent alcoholism. And her pictures were apparently not published during her life, as the British censors decided that photos of the war and concentration camps would only further upset the already traumatized British public. While discussing her experiences and their effect on Miller, they also discuss Antony's difficult and distanced relationship with her. The already thick melodrama reaches its boiling point when, finally, it is revealed that Miller recently passed away, and that Antony is learning all of this from her hidden photographs in the attic as he's cleaning out her house. His interview is only in his head. She's inscrutable as ever -- indeed, we only see her true colors in the film in brief moments when she sympathizes with or protects women, such as fending off a rapist in Paris and comforting his would-be victim -- and her gruff, stoic presence does little to help the film feel like anything more than a History Channel dramatized retelling of someone's life. 

The Beast Within (2024)

Score: 1.5 / 5

I love werewolf movies. My favorite monster can take most any form, and I'll dig it. But The Beast Within, the sophomore feature from Alexander J. Farrell (I've not seen his other work), comes as close as I've ever been to actively disliking a werewolf movie. Its aims, arguably admirable, are to seduce viewers into a horror film that focuses on an isolated rural family -- father, mother, daughter -- and their strange rituals. The daughter, apparently kept out of the nighttime events, becomes curious and learns that their family is subject to a curse whereby dear old daddy must repress a raging beast within his body and spirit. It's contemporary rural Gothic, bleak and gritty, and I was excited to dive in.

Unfortunately, that's where its good ideas dwindle. The actors are all mediocre at best, though the daughter, Willow (Caoilinn Springall), is worth watching. Of course, she's also handicapped by her illness, which requires her to lug around an oxygen tank, which just feels too obvious a trope to be taken seriously these days. And of course it becomes her weapon and tool of liberation eventually, which almost made me turn off the film. Kit Harrington as the titular father/beast Noah often looks bored or confused while attempting to be menacing, and his character is somewhat sexualized, which is simply uncomfortable. He's the one with the disease threatening to rend their family ties, not she. Ashleigh Cummings plays the mother, Imogen, without much inspiration or impression.

Dreamlike editing and cinematography often mobilize a werewolf film, but the quality of this particular picture is so visually dark as to be often inscrutable. Worse, the half-world fantasy elements do not add to the theming or atmosphere (as in something like Pan's Labyrinth or even Antlers, which would be a closer comparison point) but rather obfuscate the plot itself. We're never quite sure what's real, what's a dream, and what a little girl might be interpreting from reality into her cinematic memory. It turns out (SPOILER ALERT, in case you are interested in watching this mess) that daddy Noah is not, in fact, a werewolf, but is merely an abusive alcoholic. His binges and violent outbursts are translated in the film -- facilitated as it is by Willow's perspective -- as his monstrosity (think The Shining). We see her reading Jack London's White Fang, suggesting her choice of literature is shaping her ability to make sense of her own abuse. Worse, there's an outing Imogen and Willow take about halfway through the film that overtly reveals that, metaphoric monstrosity or not, they are both victims of domestic abuse. 

The subjective haze around this otherwise potentially compelling narrative nugget makes it difficult to understand how a screenplay so half-baked could ever get green-lit, and why nobody involved suggested any additional workshops or revisions. An hour in, it's still trying to articulate the filial dynamics that were established in the first ten minutes; by the denouement, it's just beating us over the head with what was an obvious and simplistic resolution. The production design and characterizations make no sense; their rustic life is meant to be modern somehow, and yet for gifts they wrap things in plain brown paper and Willow is thrilled to receive match sticks, while their house boasts and enormous family portrait and a thronelike chair for its patriarch. These disparate elements actively confuse and distract our awareness as the film develops incrementally between nightmare fake-outs. Apart from a few almost-scary moments -- mostly shot in blink-and-you'll-miss-it bursts of shadowy images -- the film adds nothing to the subgenre, and is in fact very pointedly not a creature feature, merely muddying the waters with wasted opportunities and disappointingly trite messaging.

Do yourself a favor and skip this one. If you're hankering for a recent werewolf movie, spend time with The Wolf of Snow Hollow, The Cursed, or this year's brand new Wolf Man, all of which are better viewing experiences in every way.

The Substance (2024)

Score: 5 / 5

Coralie Fargeat returns to the director's seat with another sumptuously realized vision of feminist horror in The Substance. After Revenge (2017) put her in the spotlight with its genre-bending, pulse-pounding thrills and clever spin on the rape-revenge exploitation flick, we were all itching to see what she'd next craft. No one expected this behemoth of a body horror machine, nor a satirical, incisive assault on internalized ageism and sexism in the entertainment industry. This is very much a Major Issues film, no doubt why it has been so lauded by the season's award shows, but it's also the kind of horror film that doesn't usually get such formal recognition.

Fargeat's screenplay and direction are brave and brazen, spinning a yarn of an aging actress trying to stay afloat by leading video exercise classes on daytime television. Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), still gorgeous, seems to be just getting by. Her monstrous boss, a studio executive pointedly named Harvey (Dennis Quaid), cancels her show to find a younger, hotter girl who might boost ratings. Devastated and distracted, Elisabeth survives a violent car wreck; in her despair, she learns of a mysterious product that might help her. It's called The Substance, and it will supposedly rejuvenate her body so that she can continue working in the industry. It rings familiar in our Ozempic era of easy solutions and fast results; the product is shrouded in secrecy and its customer service could be viewed as either the shadiest low-budget street deal imaginable or the sleekest of high-tech alchemy hidden in plain sight. However you view it, you just know it's bad news.

Mythic stories like this rarely traffic in good news, indeed, but Elizabeth's single-minded determination to stay relevant in her youth-obsessed industry pulls her past the ideological red flags posed by The Substance. Like a child in a Grimm fairytale, she claims her first package and immediately dives into the process. By this point in the film, I was riveted. Fargeat presents us with stylized pseudo-reality like we rarely see anymore. Workplace fisheye lenses make us feel observed and paranoid, like Elisabeth, and present Harvey as a grotesque creature, physically repugnant in his bodily functions and avaricious materialism. Her apartment is sparse and spacious, modern but also somewhat liminal, especially her enormous bathroom entirely in white tile, a sort of reverse "sunken place" that feels more clinical and sanitary than any hospital. But there won't be medicine happening in this one. Expressive cinematography, inspired costuming, and compellingly overbearing music (mostly synth) make this film feel more inspired by the giallo tradition than by any contemporary styles.

Leaving the rest of the plot for you to discover on your own, I'll quickly run through my remaining notes. Much like in her first film, Fargeat here takes a perverse pleasure in toying with our expectations; between her many references to other genre staples, she ekes out a familiar story in novel ways. Unlike many horror films, The Substance doesn't encourage ways to outsmart or outmaneuver its central rules; once you activate and start the switch, you're locked in for the week. You can apparently stop at any time (unlike The Ring, which seems an intentional reference), but of course you won't want to once you taste the fountain of youth. Destroying her creation -- a double named Sue (Margaret Qualley) -- isn't really an option for her, so like her literary counterparts Dr. Jekyll, Victor Frankenstein, and Dorian Gray, Elisabeth is tortured by the monster she's created. But is Sue the monster? Fargeat demonstrates that it's not so simple. And visually, she's pulling as much from David Cronenberg (The Brood, The Fly) and Brian De Palma (Carrie) as she is from Re-Animator, Alfred Hitchcock, and '80s workout videos. The film even uses Bernard Herrmann's theme music from Vertigo, which should tell you all you need to know.

Though awards season is over, I'm finally getting through my 2024 watchlist and reviews, and frankly Moore should have won the Oscar for this performance. Not "in honor" of her career, as many have said, but simply for the brutality of her creation in Elisabeth. She's doing physical acting we've never seen from her, to say nothing of the emotional odyssey she mostly nonverbally embarks upon. By the climax, she's doing this Glenn Close-esque chameleonic thing as makeup and prosthetics take over, and I was so riveted that the humor was almost lost on me. Qualley is admirable here, and does exceptional work, but this is Moore's movie through and through, and her unbridled, raw embodiment of Elisabeth is one for the ages. The centerpiece of the film is a protracted scene in which Elisabeth, tired of the chaos and hoping to reclaim her natural, aging identity, primps herself for a date night. I won't say more, but if you know, you know. It might be the best filmed sequence of any film all year.

Without spoiling anything, there are boons for repeat viewings of this film. Quaid's performance is his best in many long years. Thematically, the film grapples with more than any one scene can handle. Visually, it beats you into submission and then pours acid on your wounds. Fargeat seems determined to gross us out, and the John Waters effect is palpable; by the denouement, we finally recognize that camp was her endgame, and it's as emotionally violent as it is absurdly irreverent. Whether you've put it off or even seen it once, it might be time to dim the lights and hit "play." No matter how ready you think you are for it, you're not.