Film Freak Central

Jungle Cruise

**/****
starring Dwayne Johnson, Emily Blunt, Edgar Ramirez, Paul Giamatti
screenplay by Michael Green and Glenn Ficarra & John Requa
directed by Jaume Collet-Serra

by Walter Chaw For a film based on a theme-park attraction without a point of view or anything to say, Jungle Cruise is as good as it could possibly be, i.e.: fine. It reaps whatever benefits one could from the star power of Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt without giving them something to do, and it seems to belong to the Aguirre, The Wrath of God cinematic universe, which is, you know, unexpected. There's a moment somewhere in the middle of it where Blunt's character, Lily, asks Johnson's Frank a personal question and then listens. She's an actor of tremendous empathy and clarity, and although, in these moments after finishing the movie, I can't for the life of me remember what they were talking about, I do recall thinking how nice it would be if Blunt got more roles in which she might play a human being. For now, she's a plucky scientist two years into WWI who is denied admission into stuffy scientific societies because she's not only a woman but a woman who wears pants. What Lily wants to do most is find a mythical tree blossom in the Amazon that bestows eternal life, making Jungle Cruise a part of The Fountain's cinematic universe, too, which is likewise unexpected. The person she hires to help her is Frank, of course, and the bad guy who wants the blossom but for nefarious reasons is German Prince Joachim (Jesse Plemons). Oh, the other bad guy who wants the blossom is Aguirre (Edgar Ramirez), a centuries-old conquistador doomed to jungle purgatory. It doesn't matter.

Old (2021)

**/****
starring Gael García Bernal, Vicky Krieps, Rufus Sewell, Alex Wolff
screenplay by M. Night Shyamalan, based on the graphic novel Sandcastle by Pierre-Oscar Lévy and Frederick Peeters
directed by M. Night Shyamalan

by Walter Chaw M. Night Shyamalan is a brilliant filmmaker and an arrogant storyteller, and sometimes that works out pretty well (see: The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable). More often, it yields wildly mixed results where his savant-like mastery of the visual wars with the pedantic, childish, even messianic tendencies of his writing. Imagine if Spielberg wrote all his own movies instead of merely tacking his tidy happy endings on them. There's possibly a paper in how the degree of obstreperousness in Shyamalan's cameos has a direct correlation to the film's obnoxiousness. My favourite Hitchcock cameo is in Notorious, where Hitch has himself drinking a glass of champagne at a party at a Nazi's house, thus, through a series of events, accelerating the discovery of our heroic secret agent. But Hitch never cast himself, as Shyamalan has, in extended speaking roles that have found him playing a prophet writing a new Bible (Lady in the Water), delivering key exposition in a protracted flashback (Signs), and serving as the beneficiary of the most complicated camera set-up to deliver the twist in an otherwise transfixing, transporting picture (The Village). Tarantino used to do garbage like that, and, predictably, this was reliably the worst part of a Tarantino movie. For a while, after Shyamalan went through a pronounced humbling (The Happening, The Last Airbender, After Earth), he cut the shit for a trio of tight, nasty, mostly-glorious, largely career-resuscitating little thrillers (The Visit, Split, Glass). With his latest, Old, he's got his confidence back, and that's...bad.

Riders of Justice (2020)

Retfærdighedens ryttere
***/****
starring Mads Mikkelsen, Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Andrea Heick Gadeberg, Roland Møller
written and directed by Anders Thomas Jensen

by Walter Chaw Dogma 95 vet Anders Thomas Jensen has a particular interest in oddness. Characters, especially, in Jensen's films as writer and director are given to sometimes-extravagant eccentricity, fueled by traumas Jensen declines to sanitize that are often exacerbated by intelligence worn as an unwelcome birth defect. Consider the menagerie at the centre of Jensen's Men & Chicken, an updating in a way of The Island of Dr. Moreau reconfigured as a "light" family drama in the Danish countryside. Mads Mikkelson stars in that one, too, playing a chronic masturbator who finds out that his father has been splicing his own sperm with animal sperm in an attempt to... Well, look, it's an interesting piece about social norms and how an inability to assimilate culturally leads to these islands of misfit boys. Jensen is interested, specifically and obsessively, in what happens when physical and mental mutations stunt emotional and social development. Though no one would want the crown, he is the poet laureate of the incel state.

Black Widow (2021)

**½/****
starring Scarlett Johansson, Florence Pugh, David Harbour, Rachel Weisz
screenplay by Eric Pearson
directed by Cate Shortland

by Walter Chaw You know it's gritty because of the gritty cover song interrupting the bucolic prologue--Think Up Anger ft. Malia J's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" this time instead of Rose Betts's "Song to the Siren." Too on the nose, perhaps, although they're both pretty on the nose, let's be honest. Another clue is a montage under the opening credits that shows rows of little girls abducted not for sex trafficking (because Marvel is more comfortable suggesting sex trafficking than, you know, consensual adult eroticism), but for the purpose of creating a Whedon-fantasy team of Dollhouse assassins. I spent most of my childhood reading comics and have watched and reviewed almost all of the MCU films to this point. I've seen none of the TV/streaming shows and don't intend to remedy that because life is incredibly short and also full to bursting with things I desperately want to see that I still won't be able to, no matter how smart I am at managing whatever time I have left. I have no idea what's going on in Black Widow, and I think that once you get bucked off this horse, there's no getting back on. So here's Cate Shortland's Black Widow, the 24th MCU flick, if only the second centred around a female protagonist--one we know has sacrificed herself for the sake of the least interesting/worthy of her male counterparts, meaning this one takes place in either the past or an alternate timeline or something. It doesn't matter. In the comic-book world, there are new #1s every few cycles that are reboots or speculative storylines or something. It's how they get you to keep buying them. What matters is, the more you humanize this character you've already made abundantly clear you don't really care about, the worse her already-loathsome sacrifice feels.

My Heart Can't Beat Unless You Tell It To (2021)

****/****
starring Patrick Fugit, Ingrid Sophie Schram, Owen Campbell
written and directed by Jonathan Cuartas

by Walter Chaw The reason Dwight (Patrick Fugit) goes to diners is to eat a little toast, drink some coffee, and listen to other people go about their lives. His sister, Jessie (Ingrid Sophie Schram), waits tables at one where she suffers the indignities of the service industry with pallid, resigned despair. Between them, the extent to which they can empathize with people beyond their bubble will drive their existence to a crisis. Cut from the same cloth as Jim Mickle's exceptional We Are What We Are and destined to be compared to Tomas Alfredson's Let the Right One In, My Heart Can't Beat Unless You Tell It To (hereafter My Heart), the hyphenate debut of Jonathan Cuartas, finds its closest analogue in Claire Denis's Trouble Every Day, which is similarly about the brutal banality and biological horror of caring for a terminally-ill loved one. Dwight and Jessie look after their brother, Thomas (Owen Campbell--so good in Super Dark Times), who needs to drink blood to survive. Sunlight burns him badly and instantly. Well into puberty, he still acts like a child--not for any sort of mental disability, but rather, we surmise, because of a lifetime spent in a handful of the same rooms, his brother and sister as his sole companions.

Luca (2021)

**½/****
screenplay by Jesse Andrews, Mike Jones
directed by Enrico Casarosa

by Walter Chaw Enrico Casarosa's Luca is a gentle love letter to the Miyazaki-verse set in a small, coastal Italian town called "Porto Rosso" in an obvious nod to Porco Rosso. The body of it, meanwhile, is parts of Ponyo, parts of Kiki's Delivery Service, bits and pieces of shots and sequences from Spirited Away, and even the scavenging scenes from Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. Luca's message of acceptance is general and loose enough to allow for a couple of innocuous interpretations, the obvious one being the Depeche Mode-ism of how people are people and shouldn't, therefore, get along so awfully, the more potentially impactful one a coming-out tale in which the residents of a cloistered community realize their friends and neighbours harbour secrets about their identities that they're afraid to reveal, lest they be ostracized, even murdered. It's tempting to go here, not just because the central drama revolves around the friendship between little Luca (voiced by Jacob Tremblay) and his buddy Alberto (Jack Dylan Grazer), but also because of the late-film reveal that a pair of elderly spinsters in town are identically coupled. There are also moments where it's clear that Alberto, without being interested in her, is jealous of the relationship blooming between Luca and Giulia (Emma Berman), the little girl who takes them in when they find themselves needing a place to stay. It's there if you want it.

Spiral (2021)

Spiral: From the Book of Saw
½*/****
starring Chris Rock, Max Minghella, Marisol Nichols, Samuel L. Jackson
written by Josh Stolberg & Peter Goldfinger
directed by Darren Lynn Bousman

by Walter Chaw It's so familiar it's fatiguing, another one of these projects that begins with passion and the best of intentions and ends up chewed to paste and regurgitated as this thin, masticated gruel. Is Darren Lynn Bousman's Spiral (a.k.a. Spiral: From the Book of Saw) the product of too many notes from too many people, or simply the wrong people? Or maybe there weren't enough voices in the room to challenge accepted wisdom, which tends to be unreliable more often than not. Spiral occupies a weird space where it's both desperate and cocksure. In moments of duress, one tends to revert to the familiar and the comfortable, so when things are obviously going south for Chris Rock, still-aspiring movie star, Chris Rock, legendary stand-up comic, tries to assert himself. The script is a mess, and the grafts meant to save the patient have been rejected. Spiral probably should've been killed at inception.

Cruella (2021)

***/****
starring Emma Stone, Emma Thompson, Joel Fry, Mark Strong
screenplay by Dana Fox and Tony McNamara
directed by Craig Gillespie

by Walter Chaw It's better to think of Craig Gillespie's Cruella as a riff than as a prequel--a variation on a theme rather than the puzzle-box predecessor to a beloved intellectual property. In fact, one's ability to do so informs the extent to which this film is not merely enjoyable but indeed good. Cruella is a mindfuck of a construct, a postmodern exercise in which nothing of it could cohere without knowledge of, and experience with, other cultural artifacts--but even there, it occupies two spaces simultaneously: the Disney side, where the references are all to 101 Dalmatians, against the Gillespie side, where the references are to pop-cultural movements in music, fashion, even literature. Early on, a young Cruella (Tipper Seifert-Cleveland), born "Estella," is urged by her saintly mother Catherine (Emily Beecham) to contain Estella's exuberant, sometimes-violent and "evil" side by dubbing her "Cruella" and, in so naming it, caging it. The suggestion, then, is that "Estella" is the polite-if-constricting requirement that Cruella be a prequel to a Disney "vault" classic, while "Cruella" is the Something Wild barely contained that, like Michelle Pfeiffer's resurrected Catwoman in Batman Returns, is a creature born of violence returned as the avatar for perversity and chaos. Imagine how great this good film would have been were it just the one with none of the other.

Those Who Wish Me Dead (2021)

*½/****
starring Angelina Jolie, Nicholas Hoult, Finn Little, Jon Bernthal
screenplay by Michael Koryta and Charles Leavitt and Taylor Sheridan, based on the book by Michael Koryta
directed by Taylor Sheridan                     

by Walter Chaw A certain déjà vu occurs with movies that feature what Gregory Peck once referred to as an endlessly replicable script. The hero who has endured trauma and, through the auspices of the film's familiar master plot, is given an opportunity to heal. In the parlance of this formula, perhaps there will be surrogate parents and children, replays--whether in the service of a literal time-loop or a figurative one--of inciting events with the opportunity to redress them, or... Look, I'm trying to find a clever way to say that Taylor Sheridan's Those Who Wish Me Dead is a new movie you've seen at least a hundred times before. It is one in every ten films or so. At its best, it's a cozy throwback to deadening programmers like The Client that saw great casts and decent budgets at the mercy of airport-rack bestsellers adapted by rote and delivered on time. At its worst, it's a meta-game of Scream where the instantly-exhausted viewer can nail major plot points based solely on the casting and the style of swooping once-helicopter/now-drone establishing shot. Maybe that's why there are so many superfluous cuts in this film--like how the introduction of one character to her summer home is split into six separate shots, none of them telling anything more than how she has arrived and managed to unlock the door.

Nobody (2021)

***/****
starring Bob Odenkirk, Aleksey Serebryakov, Connie Nielsen, Christopher Lloyd
written by Derek Kolstad
directed by Ilya Naishuller

by Walter Chaw I spent a lot of my freshman year in college in the shadow of post-trauma from a failed suicide attempt, untreated depression, and what felt like hardwired self-loathing. I looked for fights then and found them sometimes. I am so full of rage and frustration. I am beset by violent fantasies. When I watch videos of people turning the tables on attackers or racists, I wonder if, in the same situation, with the same upper hand, I would be able to stop hitting once I started. Age has mellowed me; my wife and my family have civilized me to some extent, and I don't punch walls anymore, you know? It's just sadness and self-loathing left in the debris, should anyone think to sift through it. I don't think I'm unusual. I think men aren't given the mechanism to express their despair in any way other than through violence and rage, and therein lies the reason everything is broken now and why we're largely beyond repair. We are the pure residue of a vile evolutionary animal. Everything that doesn't make sense makes perfect sense when you consider that we're just shaved apes barely behaving ourselves.

Mortal Kombat (2021)

**½/****
starring Lewis Tan, Jessica McNamee, Tadanobu Asano, Hiroyuki Sanada
screenplay by Greg Russo and Dave Callaham
directed by Simon McQuoid

by Walter Chaw I saw Paul W.S. Anderson's 1995 Mortal Kombat movie on opening night at a two-screen strip-mall theatre in Seattle with my friends Keith, Sam, and Dan. We knew the catchphrases from endless nights playing the game on a Sega Genesis, and we shouted them in jubilant concert like a Catholic callout and response. Since we were also fans of Highlander, the casting of Christopher Lambert as another ageless super-being felt exactly right. We were assholes. It was the best time of our lives. They were my groomsmen when I got married a few years later. Time has scattered us; Sam killed himself a couple of years ago. It all starts feeling like the framing story for Stand by Me. What's left are memories like this, which seem the easiest way now to get a movie project off the ground--a strip-mining of nostalgia that speaks more to a generational experience of loss than to a real paucity of imagination. If it didn't work, it wouldn't keep happening, and our deathless hunger for polyglot mosaics in pursuit of personal white rabbits is symptomatic of our despair.

Godzilla vs. Kong (2021)

½*/****
starring Godzilla, King Kong, Alexander Skarsgård, Demián Bichir
screenplay by Eric Pearson and Max Borenstein
directed by Adam Wingard

by Walter Chaw Godzilla is a reaction to America's attack on two civilian targets with nuclear weapons in the same way the current American superhero cycle is a reaction to 9/11. King Kong is an offshoot of Edgar Wallace's sledgehammer racist "Sanders of the River" tales, which he parlayed into early drafts of the screenplay that eventually became 1933's King Kong. Though it's possible to make a Godzilla or a King Kong movie without these ghosts of American war crimes, colonialism, and racism haunting it, Adam Wingard's Godzilla vs. Kong (hereafter GvK) ain't it. Not when these two giant metaphors for the poison of American exceptionalism destroy Hong Kong, a Chinese city the British only recently returned to the Chinese, before banding together to fight a Mexican-American's Japanese-piloted robot dinosaur. The film is a mess, an ideological jumble and a disaster of narrative that reduces its able cast to half exposition dump, half glazed reaction shots. It doesn't have anything to say and even in the worst of its predecessors, this was never the case. GvK isn't interested in ecology, in arms proliferation, in sociopolitical struggles--and failing all the big things it's not about, it's also free of parental issues, a romantic subplot, a compelling villain, or, indeed, a compelling hero. It's a giant nothing-burger. And that's without mentioning this new craze of writing a perfect minority child to teach the growed-ups how to get in touch with their better natures.

Crisis (2021)

*/****
starring Gary Oldman, Armie Hammer, Evangeline Lilly, Greg Kinnear
written and directed by Nicholas Jarecki

by Walter Chaw Nicholas Jarecki's Crisis is a Stanley Kramer piece, a "means well," ripped-from-the-headlines message flick that hews closer to 3 Needles than to Traffic in terms of effectiveness and humility. In place of dialogue, there is exposition; and in place of performances, there are swollen forehead veins and trembling lower lips, aghast at the injustices of a cold universe. Crisis sheds "importance" from itself like dander from a stressed but beloved pet, and it's unseemly to come down too hard on it when its greatest crimes are that it is middlebrow in its politeness and really doesn't have much to say beyond what's already inherently obvious. It's possible to do stuff like this and make something like The Insider--that is, something powerful, artful, and transformative. More commonly, it turns out like Crisis has turned out: instantly forgettable and mildly embarrassing in the way of your hip dad trying to jam with you about the evils of the sticky icky. Oh, and use a condom, son.

Tom and Jerry (2021)

½*/****
starring Chloë Grace Moretz, Michael Peña, Colin Jost, Ken Jeong
written by Kevin Costello
directed by Tim Story

by Walter Chaw I want to say right off the bat that Hanna-Barbera's "Tom & Jerry" cartoons were in constant syndication when I was a kid. I watched them every day after school, like all my friends did, and we agreed that we liked it best when Tom and Jerry were friends. We weren't peaceniks; honestly, I think all the unleavened brutality of the cartoons got tedious after a short while and we were starved for something that suggested creativity beyond how best to murder a cat. Thinking back, I wonder if these cartoons had anything to do with how cat abuse is still played for comedy in movies--I mean, you can't hurt them, right? The thing that's tempting about reviewing the new Tom and Jerry is to not take it very seriously. There's enough to skewer, after all, without bothering to engage it. Yet real people worked on this, an entire animation company's creative capital was spent on doing everything they could to honour the questionable source material (and they do a really good job), and now here it is, the second attempt at a feature-length Tom and Jerry movie in almost 30 years, ostensibly landing as some sort of family entertainment designed to make your kids docile and pacific for 100 minutes. Honestly, I don't think it's worth the damage it potentially does. I mean, you can feed your children paint chips, too. And it'll fill 'em up! But the cancer is something to consider.

Raya and the Last Dragon (2021)

****/****
screenplay by Qui Nguyen & Adele Lim
directed by Don Hall and Carlos López Estrada

by Walter Chaw I've thought a lot lately about quitting, and seriously, this thing I've done over the last twenty-some years--this thing that started, ultimately, because I was a kid who couldn't speak the language and wanted desperately to belong to something that would never have me on my terms. I've thought about quitting, and it's a dangerous thing for someone like me to think that way. Movies were a thing I loved that never betrayed me, never abandoned me, whenever there was pain or confusion, or something I needed to work through; this was the art form that was primary for me as a catalyst for introspection. There's literature and music and poetry, of course, yet film could encompass all of those things. It's saved my life a time or two. I thought I had a place among others who loved it like me, but no one loves it like me--people love it like they love it. Or they just use it because they've failed at everything else and don't have the introspection to feel despair. When you give yourself over to an idea of affiliation through the appreciation of objects, you're doomed to disappointment and loneliness. When a person like me thinks about quitting, he's thinking about cutting the line that connects him to his life. I've been thinking about quitting, because what's the point of any of it when your rope is tied to a quintessence of dust? I don't trust this anymore.

Judas and the Black Messiah (2021)

**½/****
starring Daniel Kaluuya, LaKeith Stanfield, Jesse Plemons, Martin Sheen
screenplay by Will Berson & Shaka King
directed by Shaka King

by Walter Chaw Shaka King's Judas and the Black Messiah is a fantastic Vietnam War movie that is not simultaneously a fantastic biopic of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton. It reminded me a lot, and directly, of Brian De Palma's moral opera Casualties of War, which first challenged me to reckon with the American military not as a source of global good but as the perpetrators of atrocity at the whim of an inexorable capitalist, expansionist empire hiding behind the cowl of religion and white supremacy. In that film, '80s emblem of white, "compassionate" conservatism Michael J. Fox plays a green soldier who turns whistleblower as the witness to the misdeeds of his rapacious, brutal company commander, (Sean Penn). Based, like Judas and the Black Messiah, on true events, Casualties of War, again like King's film, sees white America as engaged in war crimes against minority populations. Alas, like De Palma's indisputably powerful piece, King's film is a better cultural self-excoriation than it is an examination of whatever's embedded in the American character that sees the flaying of Black (and Asian) bodies as both inevitable and isolated throughout our short history. In each film, there is the implication that justice of a sort has been served: in the one with trial and imprisonment for the malefactors, in the other (Judas and the Black Messiah) with the reported real-life suicide of the rat in Fred Hampton's cupboard. Neither movie really reckons with the growing silence of minority voices in our discourse.

The Reckoning (2021)

½*/****
starring Charlotte Kirk, Joe Anderson, Steven Waddington, Sean Pertwee
written by Neil Marshall, Charlotte Kirk, Edward Evers-Swindell
directed by Neil Marshall

by Walter Chaw The first film of British director Neil Marshall's I haven't liked, The Reckoning is his contribution to the niche but endlessly rich Witchfinder General horror subgenre. What I've liked about Marshall to this point--from the Hawksian platoon-meets-soccer hooligan bonhomie of his werewolf debut Dog Soldiers through to his reboot of the Hellboy franchise (a widely-derided piece that I found delightfully perverse, gory, and hewing closer to the Mignola source, for better or worse)--is the efficiency and lack of sentimentality driving his narratives. His best-known picture, The Descent, is a triphammer thing, not an ounce of fat anywhere on its body--an instant classic about interpersonal tensions and resentments expressed through collapsing, wet, vaginal tunnels and the monsters that live there. It's a product of a distinct directorial voice that I could trace through all of his pictures. In contrast, The Reckoning could have been directed by anyone and, more to the point, feels a lot like it was directed by its star, Charlotte Kirk, who had a hand in its production and writing. It's a romantic hagiography of Kirk, establishing her as a romance-novel heroine in various carefully-arrayed, soft-focus, medieval tableaux. The Reckoning is not simply bad, it's uncharacteristically bloated and flaccid. Embarrassing, too.

The Little Things (2020)

*/****
starring Denzel Washington, Rami Malek, Jared Leto, Natalie Morales
written and directed by John Lee Hancock

by Walter Chaw For a film aspiring so desperately towards a kind of shimmering, sublime, existential opacity, John Lee Hancock's The Little Things would have done well to be not quite so gaffed and on-the-nose. The epilogue even features someone tying all of the film's alleged mysteries up in a literal bow (well, barrette), which could be sly and knowing postmodernism but, in the hands of Hancock and composer Thomas Newman, his confederate in pabulum, is almost assuredly just as obvious as it appears. I've liked a couple of Hancock's films--especially The Rookie, because it was heartfelt pap. And I've disliked the rest of them for being the same heartfelt pap. Saving Mr. Banks, for instance, is egregious in its Vaseline-smeared defanging of P. L. Travers, the better to pay proper tribute to an at-least-ambiguous Walt Disney. Which is still a far sight better than what Hancock did to infantilize Michael Oher in that completely irredeemable, appallingly paternalistic celebration of White Evangelical Christianity, The Blind Side. I guess I don't mind pap in the tale of an old person getting to play baseball and like it less when it's in the service of making strong women appear weak and Black men appear slow and affable. I guess I don't enjoy heartfelt pap, either, in a long, dark teatime-of-the-soul '90s throwback serial-killer procedural.

Sputnik (2020)

****/****
starring Oksana Akinshina, Pyotr Fyodorov, Fedor Bondarchuk, Anton Vasilev
written by Oleg Malovichko, Andrey Zolotarev
directed by Egor Abramenko

by Walter Chaw It should come as no shock that there were so many superlative horror films in 2020--not because 2020 was a year of horrors, but because horror films have always been the canary in the coal mine. That a few of these warnings are arriving in the middle of the end carries the added melancholy knowledge that none of this is was unexpected. I think I even said something that November night in 2016 about how we were about to get some real bangers in genre cinema the next few years. It didn't take a genius to figure it out. Clearly. Once the dust settles and whatever's left of us finds a moment to compare notes, a few of the worst will try to say that no one could have seen this coming. But everyone knew, everyone knows, and yet here we are anyway. Tiresias posed the rhetorical question a few millennia ago, "How terrible is wisdom when it brings no profit to the wise?" It's terrible, Terry. The fucking worst.

My Brother Silk Road (2002); Swing (1993); Kairat (1992)

Altyn Kyrghol
**½/****
starring Busurman Odurakaev, Tynar Abdrazaeva, Mukanbet Toktobaev, Kabatai Kyzy Elmira
written and directed by Marat Sarulu

Sel'kincek
**½/****
starring Mirlan Abdykalykov, Bakyt Toktokozhayev
written by Ernest Abdyjaparov, Talgat Asyrankulov, Aktan Arym Kubat
directed by Aktan Arym Kubat

KAIRAT
***/****
starring Talgat Assetov, Samat Beysenbin, Baljan Bisembekova, Indira Jeksembaeva
written and directed by Darezhan Omirbayev

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover It's impossible to understand an entire national cinema--or, for that matter, several national cinemas--through the prism of exactly three films. That's all I have by which to judge the Cinematheque Ontario's massive series Films From Along the Silk Road, which brings together films from five Central Asian countries--and so I offer my opinions with trepidation: I wouldn't want to turn you off of something magnificent that might be hiding within the schedule. Nevertheless, the selections offered to the press are/were of a fair-to-middling nature--pictorially accomplished despite extremely low budgets, but lacking a finished quality in themes and narratives. They're fascinating as cultural documents from a part of the world that never makes much of an impact in North America, but as cinema only one rates a proper recommendation.

The Tourist (2010)

**/****
starring Johnny Depp, Angelina Jolie, Paul Bettany, Timothy Dalton
screenplay by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck and Christopher McQuarrie and Julian Fellowes
directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck

by Ian Pugh The loss of Bond 23 to MGM's umpteenth bankruptcy drama was just one of the many disappointments in the cinematic year that was--but an even bitterer pill arrived in the films that took 007's place. With neither Daniel Craig nor Matt Damon to keep a perpetually-ailing genre on its feet, 2010's triumvirate of identical spy thrillers (Knight and Day, Salt, now The Tourist) represents a return to the cozy arms of irrelevance. Sexpot secret agent Elise Ward ("Salt" herself, Angelina Jolie) leads her superiors on a wild goose chase through Venice in search of American math teacher Frank Tupelo (Johnny Depp), whom they believe to be her mysterious fugitive beau, Alexander Pearce. Unfortunately, this little game also garners the attention of a gangster (Steven Berkoff) to whom Pearce is rather severely indebted. The Tourist is not a daring picture by any means. The most unconventional thing about it, other than the casting of Depp, is the oddity of hiring Timothy Dalton to play a version of "M" when this is so clearly a Roger Moore movie: a romantic trip across Italy in a white tuxedo, peppered with stunts that border on slapstick.

The Woman in Black (2012) + The Innkeepers (2011)|The Innkeepers - Blu-ray Disc

THE WOMAN IN BLACK
*/****
starring Daniel Radcliffe, Ciarán Hinds, Janet McTeer, Liz White
screenplay by Jane Goldman
directed by James Watkins

THE INNKEEPERS
***½/**** | Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Sara Paxton, Pat Healy, Kelly McGillis, George Riddle
written and directed by Ti West

by Walter Chaw A beautifully-outfitted, brilliantly-designed Victorian jack-in-the-box, James Watkins's The Woman in Black will likely be remembered, if it's remembered at all, as Daniel Radcliffe's Harry Potter commencement (given that no one saw December Boys). Alas, it squanders a pretty nice, 'Tim Burton Sleepy Hollow' set-up in bumfuck England for a solid hour of crap jumping out of shadows. Popping up from behind bushes is startling, but it isn't art (it's not even clever), and at the end of the day, it's only really entertaining if you or your date is a sixteen-year-old girl. Carrying the Hammer imprint and boasting production design so good that long stretches of the film are devoted to looking at it, the piece only ever honours its legacy and appearance with the brutality with which it handles its dead children and a delirious dinner scene in which a grief-besotted lady (Janet McTeer) treats her little dogs like babies and carves something on her dinner table whilst possessed of a hilarious fit. The rest of it is garbage.

My First Mister (2001)

*/****
starring Albert Brooks, Leelee Sobieski, John Goodman, Michael McKean
screenplay by Jill Franklyn
directed by Christine Lahti

by Walter Chaw Something's fatally off about My First Mister, veteran character actor Christine Lahti's feature-length directorial debut. Awkward and atonal, it appears to be some strange cross between a reverse-gendered Harold and Maude and a mainstream Ghost World, and despite its desperation to appear so, it's neither as intelligent nor edgy as either. Jill Franklyn's screenplay (her first produced) just doesn't work. It's hollow to the ear and disagreeable to the taste, only ringing true occasionally through the Herculean intervention of Albert Brooks, here in his most restrained and affecting performance since Broadcast News. That noise you hear when Leelee Sobieski's weary (and wearying) voiceover confides, "My clothes are not all black. Some of them are blue. Sometimes I wear them together so I look like a bruise," is an audience's worth of eyeballs rolling skyward. The problems Franklyn's script presents to the rest of the cast, however, particularly the Helen Hunt-ishly smug (and similarly limited) Sobieski and Carol Kane as another gnomish manic eccentric, are insurmountable. They're crushed beneath the weight of convenience, contrivance, Lahti's unfortunate impulse towards the cutesy, and a score that is as insulting and invasive as any to be found in a Chris Columbus film or from the recently-flaccid baton of the once-great John Williams.

The Motorcycle Diaries (2004)

***/****
starring Gael García Bernal, Rodrigo De la Serna, Mía Maestro, Mercedes Morán
screenplay by Jose Rivera, based on the books Notas de viaje by Ernesto Guevara and Con el Che por America Latina by Alberto Granado
directed by Walter Salles

by Walter Chaw Adapting respective memoirs by then-young Cuban-by-way-of-Argentine revolutionary Ché Guevara (Gael García Bernal) and his best friend Alberto Granado (Rodrigo De la Serna) that documented their Kerouac-ian odyssey down the spine of South America to find the soul of their country, Walter Salles's The Motorcycle Diaries is difficult at best. It's a road movie and a good one, as far as it goes, but it lacks the fire of change of something like Easy Rider in its substitution of a picaresque travelogue lightly spiced with delightful romantic misunderstandings for Peter Fonda's swiftly tilting planet and deserts of the real. Easy Rider talks about the dying of the light; The Motorcycle Diaries talks about how doe-eyed Ernesto Guevara became Ché, the Hoffa of Latin America and eventually the most reproduced and mass-marketed image since Marilyn Monroe's.

Mostly Martha (2002)

Bella Martha
**½/****
starring Martina Gedeck, Maxime Foerste, Sergio Castellitto, August Zirner
written and directed by Sandra Nettelbeck

by Walter Chaw A Bavarian Big Night, Sandra Nettelbeck's Mostly Martha joins a romantic-comedy premise with a lost-child scenario, setting it all to a leisurely pace and framing it with an eye for the handsome. Its sightlines as crisp and clean as the dishes chef Martha creates in her immaculate kitchen, the picture is as relaxed a viewing experience as any this year--a dish without many exotic ingredients (like a good Salmon dish, the film tells us), but just enough substance to forgive the froth.