Film Freak Central

Renfield (2023) + Sisu (2023)

RENFIELD
*½/****
starring Nicholas Hoult, Nicolas Cage, Awkwafina, Benjamin Schwartz
screenplay by Ryan Ridley
directed by Chris McKay

SISU
**½/****
starring Jorma Tommila, Aksel Hennie, Jack Doolan, Mimosa Willamo
written and directed by Jalmari Helander

by Walter Chaw Chris McKay is an able director still looking for a project that isn't an embarrassing high concept. His years on "Robot Chicken" and "Moral Orel" demonstrate a strong sense of timing and a willingness to offend the status quo, but so far--between The Lego Batman Movie, The Tomorrow War, and now Renfield--McKay has only been tasked with shepherding a few expensive (if laboured and overburdened) cows to pasture. Renfield is both a workplace comedy and a Raimi-esque slap-stick splatter ("splat-stick?") flick in which bug-eating vampire familiar Renfield (Nicholas Hoult) attends codependency support groups to listen to other people complain about toxic relationships. It seems his boss, Dracula (Nicolas Cage), is a raging narcissist, and Renfield, after centuries of servitude, has finally had enough. There's a parallel plot, too, involving a crime family led by imperious Bellafrancesca Lobo (a slumming Shohreh Aghdashloo) and her asshole son, Tedward (a not-slumming Ben Schwartz), running amuck while dedicated cop Rebecca (Awkwafina) and her FBI agent sister Kate (Camille Chen) try to bring them down.

Evil Dead Rise (2023)

***/****
starring Lily Sullivan, Alyssa Sutherland, Gabrielle Echols, Morgan Davies
written and directed by Lee Cronin

by Walter Chaw Lee Cronin's Evil Dead Rise is mean. It's that scene from The Exorcist (1973) where little Regan McNeil masturbates with a crucifix and then shoves her mom's face into her crotch mean. Vicious. But it's not Ari Aster mean, where you infer it hates its characters and/or its genre. Rather, it's mean in the sense that demons are mean, and it makes people we like do terrible things to other people we like. Evil Dead Rise is the line separating a horror film from a horrible film. It's closer in tenor to its immediate predecessor, Fede Alvarez's similarly vicious--brutal, really--Evil Dead (2013), than to Sam Raimi's original trilogy, though more to the point, it's exactly as mean as the first two entries in that trilogy but without Raimi's sillier visual affectations and Bruce Campbell's beloved caricature of a hambone persona. Indeed, most of the "fun" of those Campbell/Raimi pictures is the amount of humiliation and abuse heaped upon Campbell, with Campbell's physical resemblance to a cartoon character becoming the central gag of the third film, Army of Darkness, as his features are stretched and multiplied, shrunken and deformed to fit whatever comic-strip setup is required of him in that moment.

A Good Person (2023)

ZERO STARS/****
starring Florence Pugh, Molly Shannon, Chinaza Uche, Morgan Freeman
written and directed by Zach Braff

by Walter Chaw The answer to a question no one asked (what would happen if you smushed misery porn into eldersploitation and had Zach Braff do it?), A Good Person is, on a scale of 28 Days to Less Than Zero, somewhere in the Bright Lights, Big City neighbourhood of Girl, Interrupted. That's not fair--it's not as good as any of those movies. I don't know if this trainwreck caused Miss Flo to come to her senses and leave her two-decades-older beau, but I like to think so, because then at least something good came out of this self-pitying 15-year-old's adaptation of The Bell Jar. The hope that catastrophic events can lead to positive outcomes is the engine driving A Good Person, too, as Braff's patented manic pixie dream construct, Allison, a girl who sings and plays the piano at her own engagement party, gets high and complains about not being able to feel her ankles, and tells her dull-as-dishwater fiance, Nathan (Chinanza Uche), about how a creepy doctor at work is maybe hitting on her. So effervescent! So full of life! Look at how she puts her foot in his face to underscore her ankle's numbness! Look how she does a silly interpretive dance that Braff only shoots from the chest up, for some reason, before Allison wants to make out under a top sheet. Anyway, Allison is in the middle of a riff when she drives her future sister-in-law into a backhoe, killing her and sending Allison into a shame spiral as she faces the consequences of her quirkiness for the first time in her life. Apparently, she's killed her future brother-in-law as well, though no one seems to care. I mean, both of her victims appear for all of 20 seconds before they become tragic devices inaugurating an irritating white girl's redemption arc. They make so little impact that for the film's first hour, I thought the brother-in-law (Toby Onwumere) was Nathan and that Nathan was a ghost.

If you think you're exhausted, imagine how I feel.

Showing Up (2023)

***½/****
starring Michelle Williams, Hong Chau, John Magaro, Judd Hirsch
written by Jon Raymond & Kelly Reichardt
directed by Kelly Reichardt

by Angelo Muredda "You're ruining my work day," Michelle Williams's sculptor Lizzy whines to her cat Ricky early in Kelly Reichardt's Showing Up, which might be the most incisive portrait of the artist working from home to date. Its mundane, thoroughly lived-in depiction of Lizzy's domestic puttering among companions, both animal and human, under the clouds of an upcoming show, a slow-burning family crisis, and a few weeks without hot water, hits particularly hard post-COVID, even as Reichardt takes pains to emphasize the comforts and support that Lizzy enjoys as compared to the more precarious outsiders in films such as Wendy and Lucy. Originally co-imagined with frequent collaborator Jon Raymond as a film about post-impressionist Canadian artist Emily Carr becoming a landlord to pay the bills (before Reichardt realized Carr's outsized fame in Canada was roughly equivalent to Andy Warhol's in the U.S.), Showing Up has been retooled as, improbably, a contemporary comedy--a mordantly funny look at the myriad push-pull interactions between art, commerce, and communal obligation. That tangled mess, Reichardt's assured film suggests, makes it a wonder that any art gets made at all, let alone that anyone shows up to honour either the work or the people who make it.

The Pope's Exorcist (2023)

½*/****
starring Russell Crowe, Daniel Zovatto, Alex Essoe, Franco Nero
screenplay by Michael Petroni and Evan Spiliotopoulos
directed by Julius Avery

by Walter Chaw Right off the bat, I feel I must warn you that no popes are exorcised in this film. The prospect of Russell Crowe reading the rites over a levitating, pea-soup spewing Franco Nero, shuttled in to play the Pope in Julius Avery's The Pope's Exorcist, is incredibly juicy, so I get why they would attempt to mislead audiences in this way, but it's terribly dishonest. The cruellest blow, however, is that in place of Franco Nero in his dotage doing a spider-walk downstairs and pissing himself in his papal robes before a drunken astronaut (which, let's face it, once I hit 82, I can't promise that won't just be a Tuesday), we get Crowe, as real-life exorcist Father Gabriel Amorth, riding a Vespa through the streets of Rome, no doubt in search of an espresso, a gelato, spaghetti, and his portly, Vespa-riding twin for the Guinness Book photo shoot. It bears mentioning, too, how Crowe straps on the world's most offensive Mario Bros. accent to free poor little Henry (Peter DeSouza-Feighoney) from demonic possession. Why is Henry in Rome? Because his mom, Julia (Alex Essoe), is renovating a building, which happens to be the primary reason anyone moves to Italy. (See also: Donald Sutherland's character in Don't Look Now and Genevieve Bujold's character in Obsession and Diane Lane's character in Under the Tuscan Sun.) There's probably a piece to be written about how our perception of Italy is of a beautiful place the Italians have neglected, but now that P.J. O'Rourke, who once wrote, "Italy is not a third world country but nobody told the Italians," is dead, I don't know who'll write it.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023) + Champions (2023)

DUNGEONS & DRAGONS: HONOR AMONG THIEVES
**½/****
starring Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, Regé-Jean Page, Hugh Grant
screenplay by Jonathan Goldstein & John Francis Daley and Michael Gilio
directed by Jonathan Goldstein & John Francis Daley

CHAMPIONS
**½/****
starring Woody Harrelson, Kaitlin Olson, Ernie Hudson, Cheech Marin
screenplay by Mark Rizzo, based on the Spanish film Campeones written by David Marqués & Javier Fesser
directed by Bobby Farrelly

by Walter Chaw I like squad movies, always have. Heists, war, impossible missions, underdog sports teams, collections of samurai or cowboys, miscreants or heroes, misfits generally and specialists sometimes. When it came time to make a sequel to Alien, Walter Hill understood James Cameron's pitch as exactly this formula the great Howard Hawks had perfected: the squad film. I think it works as well as it does because the requirement to craft three-dimensional heroes is lessened in favour of reliable, audience-pleasing character types. Each player has a skill--a personal Chekhov's Gun, if you will. It'll only be a matter of time before they use it. Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley's Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (hereafter D&D) is one recent example of the squad flick; Bobby Farrelly's Champions is another. Both are about bands of social outcasts who learn to appreciate how their respective skills complement one another along the way to greater lessons about the world and its navigation. One sees a team of Special Olympics athletes led by an unctuous, quippy white guy; the other sees a team of nefarious and/or magical ne'er-do-wells led by an unctuous, quippy white guy. Only one of them, though, dares to deviate from the winning-means-everything formula, measuring its victory in the celebration of a friend's sense of self-worth and confidence. Which is not to say that one film is significantly better than the other, or even that they have different aims, ultimately. Rather, I only mean to suggest that the degree to which one is lauded and the other derided probably has a lot to do with internalized bias and very little to do with any meaningful distinctions in what these movies substantively are.

John Wick: Chapter 4 (2023)

***/****
starring Keanu Reeves, Donnie Yen, Bill Skarsgård, Laurence Fishburne
written by Shay Hatten and Michael Finch
directed by Chad Stahelski

by Walter Chaw The John Wick franchise is two things: a fantasy world with rules and consequences for breaking them, and a series of films crafted with extraordinary care and meticulous attention to detail. Both qualities are front and centre in John Wick: Chapter 4 (hereafter John Wick 4), the one allowing the other to be emotionally satisfying, the other allowing the one to be viscerally pleasing. The toast given when its characters drink is literally "Consequences!"--and, of course, our hero always shows up in an impeccably tailored bulletproof suit, 42-Regular. Given that the delicate surface tension of our society's maintenance relies on the decorum of its members, and given the last few years of seeing it all fall to shit before a treasonous wave of deplorables, this franchise is a glossy distillation of an American's dream of justice as the offshoot of morality rather than the promise of it providing smoke for cupidity. There's order in the world; you just aren't allowed to see it. It makes sense in this way that, for all their neo-noir trappings, the John Wick movies are traditional westerns: the great American genre employed to tell the myth of the United States. And it makes sense the eidolon for the better angels of Generation X is the eternally sweet Keanu Reeves, who, even when he's promising to kill everyone like a seen-it-all Sam Peckinpah mercenary, is only doing it because his dog died. Both he and John Wick are essentially simple in a complex world.

65 (2023)

*/****
starring Adam Driver, Ariana Greenblatt, Chloe Coleman, Nika King
written and directed by Scott Beck & Bryan Woods

by Walter Chaw Bryan Woods and Scott Beck's 65 is a straight-line exercise: You are familiar with where it begins, you are familiar with where it ends, and you are familiar with the line it travels. It starts with a man of action mourning a lost child. He has an opportunity to become a surrogate father to a kid who has lost her parents. Their time in our company ends with them jetting off to further adventures. If it's true there are only one or two stories in the Western canon, then it's not about the what but the how. The how of 65 is piew piew piew lasers and rrrrraaaawr rwar rwaaar! dinosaurs. When I was in elementary school, my best friend and I decided the greatest movie ever would involve aliens fighting dinosaurs, because, as children, we were undemanding of our entertainment to do anything beyond satisfy the most simplistic desires of our pea-sized lizard brains. We kept spending eighty 1980s dollars on Atari 2600 games because we could imagine they looked good. It was during this period that I saw most of the terrible movies I still love unconditionally for their ability to remind me of how much more promise the world seemed to hold back then. I even have an Atari 2600 connected and in working order. I've been grateful to have grown out of being that easy to please, though now I can't think of a single reason why.

Scream VI (2023)

**/****
starring Melissa Barrera, Courteney Cox, Jenna Ortega, Hayden Panettiere
written by James Vanderbilt & Guy Busick
directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett

by Walter Chaw There's a fine line between satire and simulacrum, between an ironic commentary on a thing and the thing itself. It's a tone more than anything, and context, of course. Timing most of all. Fall too far on the one side and the sarcasm is so strident it becomes sour. Overcorrect to the other and it becomes precisely the thing you wish to lampoon. I liked last year's Scream, Tyler Gillett and Matt Bettinelli-Olpin's "requel," for taking on toxic fandom and the expectations it imposes on franchise filmmaking--almost certainly the lingering topic of fascination for future cultural archaeologists excavating this period in our popular history. I thought it was a smart way to continue the series' penchant for metatextual self-evaluation while upping the visceral stakes with stalking and kills that levelled up the intimacy and brutality. The movie was self-conscious without being mired in self-admiration, a neat trick--and one, it turns out, difficult to replicate.

Cocaine Bear (2023)

*½/****
starring Keri Russell, O'Shea Jackson Jr., Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Ray Liotta
screenplay by Jimmy Warden
directed by Elizabeth Banks

by Walter Chaw The first 45 minutes or so of Elizabeth Banks's Cocaine Bear deliver everything the title promises: A bear, behaving erratically, mauls European hikers and precocious children daring one another to eat a tablespoon of what Jay McInerney would know as Bolivian Marching Powder. The last 45 minutes are an enervated slog heavy on convention and eager to pull all the punches the film was landing with malicious glee in the first half. It's almost as though a switch is flipped right around the time a pair of hapless paramedics, Beth (Kahyun Kim) and Tom (meme-meister Scott Seiss), stumble on a terrible scene before becoming the centrepiece of another--almost as though a decision was made to suddenly try to carve out a coherent three-act structure from agreeably bloody chaos. To what end? To make a play for awards-season consideration? To appease some imaginary audience coming to Cocaine Bear for an adventure story with not one happy ending but two? The only audience it's ultimately pandering to are non-creatives with a say in the process, congratulating themselves for forcing a movie about a bear doing murders while tweaking on nose candy to wrap up its various threads in tidy little bows. What a shame.

A-Maize-ing Grace: The Children of the Corn Saga

DISCIPLES OF THE CROW (1983) ***½/**** starring Eleese Lester, Gabriel Folse, Steven Young, Martin Boozer based on the story "Children of the Corn" by Stephen King adapted for the screen and directed by John Woodward	CHILDREN OF THE CORN (1984) Stephen King's Children of the Corn **½/**** starring Peter Horton, Linda Hamilton, R.G. Armstrong, John Franklin screenplay by George Goldsmith, based upon the story by Stephen King directed by Fritz Kiersch
CHILDREN OF THE CORN II: THE FINAL SACRIFICE (1993) ***/**** starring Terence Knox, Paul Scherrier, Ryan Bollman, Ned Romero written by A.L. Katz and Gilbert Adler directed by David F. Price	CHILDREN OF THE CORN III: URBAN HARVEST (1995) ***/**** starring Daniel Cerny, Ron Melendez, Mari Morrow, Jim Metzler written by Dode Levenson directed by James D.R. Hickox
CHILDREN OF THE CORN IV: THE GATHERING (1996) */**** starring Naomi Watts, Brent Jennings, Samaria Graham, William Windom written by Stephen Berger and Greg Spence directed by Greg Spence	CHILDREN OF THE CORN V: FIELDS OF TERROR (1998) ½*/**** starring Stacy Galina, Alexis Arquette, Ahmet Zappa, David Carradine written and directed by Ethan Wiley
CHILDREN OF THE CORN 666: ISAAC'S RETURN (1999) */**** starring Nancy Allen, Natalie Ramsey, Paul Popowich, Stacy Keach screenplay by Tim Sulka & John Franklin directed by Kari Skogland	CHILDREN OF THE CORN: REVELATION (2001) */**** starring Claudette Mink, Kyle Cassie, Michael Ironside written by S.J. Smith directed by Guy Magar
CHILDREN OF THE CORN (2009) **/**** starring David Anders, Kandyse McClure screenplay by Donald P. Borchers and Stephen King, based on the short story by King directed by Donald P. Borchers	CHILDREN OF THE CORN: GENESIS (2011) ***/**** starring Kelen Coleman, Tim Rock, Billy Drago written and directed by Joel Soisson
CHILDREN OF THE CORN: RUNAWAY (2018) ½*/**** starring Marci Miller, Jake Ryan Scott, Mary Kathryn Bryant, Lynn Andrews screenplay by Joel Soisson directed by John Gulage	CHILDREN OF THE CORN (2023) */**** starring Elena Kampouris, Kate Moyer, Callan Mulvey, Bruce Spence based upon the short story by Stephen King written and directed by Kurt Wimmer

by Walter Chaw Kurt Wimmer's Children of the Corn prequel/reboot is drab, uninspired, witless I.P.-sploitation. I first read Stephen King's same-named short story in the movie tie-in edition of Night Shift (the one with the red cover) in sixth grade and loved the Lovecraft of it, how it begins in the middle with a car-tripping couple hitting a kid running out of a cornfield in bumblefuck, Nebraska and leads said couple through a forensic reconstruction of the doom that came to Gatlin. I see in its setup and execution both the tendrils leading backwards and the ones nourishing stories like Clive Barker's "In the Hills, the Cities." It has a feeling of the inevitable uncanny that is underestimated in King's best work: a sense that what is happening has almost finished happening, and it's too late to do anything but bear witness to our collective ruin. Of the dozen films in the eclectic Children of the Corn franchise, only the third feature, subtitled Urban Harvest, hints at that feeling of Elder Gods infecting the innocent to act against the innocent and the generational end times attending that. None of the rest deal with the horror of good kids from loving families falling into an apocalyptic blood cult and suddenly murdering all of the grown-ups, choosing instead to paint the victims as abusive or absentee so that they kind of deserve whatever's coming to them. That's a revenge fantasy, not horror.

One Fine Morning (2022)

Un beau matin
***/****
starring Léa Seydoux, Pascal Greggory, Melvil Poupaud, Nicole Garcia
written and directed by Mia Hansen-Løve

by Angelo Muredda "You can be for and against at the same time," a woman says of her capacity to vote for Emmanuel Macron while supporting the young activists who agitate against him early in Mia Hansen-Løve's One Fine Morning. That seemingly throwaway statement about holding contrary feelings and priorities in tension speaks to Hansen-Løve's ambivalent ethos in her latest and most affecting work so far. Translator Sandra (a sublimely sad-eyed Léa Seydoux) finds herself pulled in two directions at once over the course of about a year, between her ties to her ailing father, Georg (Pascal Greggory), a philosopher whose neurodegenerative disease now necessitates full-time care, and the promise of a new affair with the married Clément (Melville Poupaud), a cosmo-chemist from her past who she meets again in a chance encounter at their kids' school. Though it's largely par for the course for Hansen-Løve's cinema of minor-key, semi-autobiographical middle-class family chamber dramas, One Fine Morning feels like a refinement rather than a mere retracing of thematic and aesthetic steps, gelling into a moving, novelistic array of scenes from a life in motion, where old and new frequently collide.

Knock at the Cabin (2023)

*/****
starring Dave Bautista, Jonathan Groff, Rupert Grint, Ben Aldridge
screenplay by M. Night Shyamalan and Steve Desmond & Michael Sherman, based on the book The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul Tremblay
directed by M. Night Shyamalan

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT FOR BOTH THE FILM AND THE BOOK ON WHICH IT'S BASED. M. Night Shyamalan's Knock at the Cabin is an accurate and appropriately vile portrait of Evangelical Christianity and a conservative mindset based on a sense of righteous indignation that their ignorance and bile are not well-received by people whom they despise for receiving the gifts they themselves have not received. The maxim of the meek inheriting the Earth is not, after all, a promise of something good, but rather the herald of small, terrified people emboldened by their shared ignorance and repulsive mythologies to exterminate everything that is not as morally bankrupt and spiritually unmoored as them. They imagine they're the good guys, the ones magnanimous in their mercy and forgiveness, when in fact they are the reason mercy and forgiveness are necessary in the world. If it were not so, the Sermon on the Mount--the keynote address by their ostensible human godhead--would be the document they're pushing to be posted in every classroom instead of the Ten Commandments and the Pledge of Allegiance to precisely the type of golden calf their fairytales warn against. The world is ending, not because of gay marriage, abortion, or immigration, but because of the prosperity gospel. In many ways, Knock at the Cabin shares an ideological space with Scorsese's Silence, yet only one of them reckons with the Christian god's promised, and thorny, non-intervention in the affairs of its creation. Only one of them, in other words, isn't a piece of ecstatic, ecclesiastical hoohah.

Infinity Pool (2023)

**½/****
starring Alexander Skarsgård, Mia Goth, Cleopatra Coleman, Jalil Lespert
written and directed by Brandon Cronenberg

by Angelo Muredda Brandon Cronenberg delivers his own visceral riff on the resort satire trend with Infinity Pool, a high-concept thriller that shares obvious genetic material with its precursor, Possessor (2021), but feels more like the runty kid brother in terms of its ideas. With his third feature, Cronenberg hones his skillsets in grounded sci-fi storytelling and kaleidoscopic montage while continuing to make a meal of the charge that he's merely following in his father's footsteps as a new purveyor of brainy body horror, boldly playing once more with the motifs of inheritance and imitation where less confident nepotism babies might dodge the comparison outright. Yet in the absence of stronger material, these predilections don't ripen into rich artistic fruits so much as they rot, leaving Infinity Pool's success riding largely on the back of its occasionally startling images and self-effacing cast, who, like Cronenberg, are riffing on the roles we expect from them.

Alice, Darling (2022)

***/****
starring Anna Kendrick, Kaniehtiio Horn, Charlie Carrick, Wunmi Mosaku
written by Alanna Francis
directed by Mary Nighy

by Walter Chaw Not quite the sequel to Alice, Sweet Alice I was hoping for, Mary Nighy's Alice, Darling is actually a principled character piece about a woman named Alice (Anna Kendrick) stuck in an emotionally controlling--indeed, abusive--relationship with manipulative artist Simon (Charlie Carrick). Simon's determined, as these pricks tend to be, to isolate Alice into a codependent situation in which she rejects her best friends, Sophie (Wunmi Mosaku) and Tess (Kaniehtiio Horn), in favour of a singular fixation on his wants and desires. Ripped, according to Kendrick, from personal experience, Alice, Darling feels, for lack of a better word, real. Real enough that I recognized a few terrible tendencies from the villain in my own dating history as a much younger man--people I've hurt in my past because I was too insecure to be alone, too selfish to be a partner, too stupid to know how to be better. I needed the help of a brilliant and fierce partner to set me straight. It is the work of my life to unlearn the things that were taught to me, and to feel whole enough not to require someone else to complete me. I don't hope to get there; I do hope to get close. No one deserves to be the final piece in an incomplete person's puzzle. It's an uncomfortable thing to see everything you've despised about yourself reflected in a movie character, but there you have it. Simon is a bad guy who doesn't kill people (this isn't a Sleeping with the Enemy thriller), though he's a destructive child who abuses a woman psychologically until she relies on his approval. Alice is through the looking glass, and she knows it.

Till (2022)

*/****
starring Danielle Deadwyler, Jalyn Hall, Frankie Faison, Whoopi Goldberg
written by Michael Reilly & Keith Beauchamp and Chinonye Chukwu
directed by Chinonye Chukwu

by Walter Chaw At once a muddle and overly simplistic, Chinonye Chukwu's Till is told in a broad visual style that signals "prestige picture," replete with slow and stately circular pans and, in one appalling instance, the dolly zoom Hitchcock made famous in Vertigo to dramatize a mother's pain upon confirmation of her son's death. It's handsomely decorated, and its costumes went on a national tour with the film's rolling release, which feels as oblivious as a tie-in fashion show for Schindler's List would have. That the screenplay, by a trio of authors including alleged Till scholar Keith Beauchamp (whose contentions a grand jury partially refuted in 2007), trafficks in debunked accounts of the inciting event in the film is one thing, but Till plays loose in favour of testimonies that eyewitnesses have since recanted, thus leaning towards Carolyn Bryant's account--Bryant being the white store clerk who falsely accused 14-year-old Emmett Till (Jalyn Hall) of making verbal and physical passes at her in Jim Crow-era Mississippi. Her accusations led to Till's kidnapping, torture, and murder, his body left for boys fishing in the river to discover. Till's mother, Mamie, insisted he be returned home to Chicago, and though the corpse was bloated by its time in the river and mutilated by the attentions of the backwoods crackers who killed him, she held an open-casket funeral that earned national attention.

A Man Called Otto (2022)

*/****
starring Tom Hanks, Mariana Treviño, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Mike Birbiglia
screenplay by David Magee, based on the novel A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman and the film A Man Called Ove written by Hannes Holm
directed by Marc Forster

by Walter Chaw "Get out of here while you can," the old man snarls to the stray cat. "I'm not your friend." But of course he will befriend the kitty, because you don't introduce a stray cat at the beginning of a manipulative piece of happy-go-fuckery like A Man Called Otto without it becoming one catalyst of many for the objectionable curmudgeon's development of a renewed reason for living. You could say that every character in A Man Called Otto is similarly a collection of adorable quirks and bottomless patience designed exclusively for the redemptive salvation of our man Otto. Otto, who is Tom Hanks's second shot at playing someone on the neurodivergent spectrum, this time landing somewhere just south of the elder Paul Newman, in the neighbourhood of Walter Matthau (at the corner of Richard Russo and Garrison Keillor). On his first date with his dead wife (Rachel Keller), a scene played in flashback by Hanks's other other son, Truman (who is less like a cross between Hanks and Rita Wilson than between Colin and Chet), Otto's asked what he's passionate about and says he's interested in machines and how things work. Forced into early retirement as the picture opens, he's a dedicated engineer obsessed with details--yet he doesn't understand that if he wants to hang himself from a rope looped through a ring hook in his living room, he needs to use a support beam in the ceiling or else what you know is going to happen will happen. Then he blames the hook. I know it's a Better Off Dead gag, but it's also inconsistent writing meant to extort a response like Thomas Newman's emotive/emetic tongue bath of a score. If you turned the concept of "insincere pathos" into a music box, this is the noise it would make. It conjures the images of teddy bears finding a baby next to a river. Look, if Thomas Kinkade paintings came with soundtracks...

M3GAN (2023)

***/****
starring Allison Williams, Violet McGraw, Amie Donald, Jenna Davis
screenplay by Akela Cooper
directed by Gerard Johnstone

by Walter Chaw That the Internet works the way it does and evolved as quickly as it did likely had everything to do with it being the finest distributor of pornography the world had ever seen. If a band of apes created something like the Internet, for instance, they would use it primarily to inflict violent dominance over others--and for sex, if possible. No "ifs" about it: we are, and we did. When an artificial intelligence was tasked with machine learning via the Internet, it became a misanthropic, misogynistic racist almost instantly. The Internet is also the single greatest anthropological bellwether ever created, diagnosing who we are when we're not obsessively adjusting our mask of civility; 100% pure id. I love Alex Garland's Ex Machina because it understands that if a robot that looked like Alicia Vikander were invented, men would try to fuck it, and no expense would be too great in that pursuit. It doesn't even have to resemble Alicia Vikander--it can just be a flashlight with a rubber hole in it. Which brings us to the question M3GAN refuses to confront. If you make a little blonde doll that looks like a 12-year-old Fiona Gubelmann, you're opening an entire hornet's nest of uncomfortable issues that would be fascinating to address. What happens when unfettered tech capitalism collides with pedophilia? I mean, the Replicants in Blade Runner are soldiers, teachers...and prostitutes. Even Spielberg's A.I. recognizes that great leaps in technology are historically tied to warfare and rutting.

Babylon (2022)

ZERO STARS/****
starring Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Diego Calva, Jean Smart
written and directed by Damien Chazelle

by Walter Chaw If it were only vile, only repulsive, it still would have been a disaster lacking insight and honesty, but at least it wouldn't also be afflicted with bathetic false modesty wet down with spasms of cheap sentiment. Damien Chazelle's back to his old tricks, in other words, with Babylon, a "love letter" to the end of the silent era in Hollywood presented with a child's understanding of history, obviously, not to mention human relationships, aspirations, behaviour, everything. It's a stroke fantasy made by a 13-year-old boy, meaning it's soaked in excreta without much evidence of anything like experience animating it--the movie made by the antagonist of Monty Python's "Nudge Nudge" bit, who, at the end of 10 minutes of naughty entendre, wonders rapturously what it might be like to touch a woman's breast. I loved Chazelle's last film, First Man: Sober and introspective, it found the soulfulness in an engineer's deadening grief over the loss of a child. His other three films, this one included, are a trilogy of desperation to be taken seriously as a great auteur, a great historian of jazz and Hollywood, and an artiste of the first calibre. Alas, he doesn't know the difference between being celebrated for his worst instincts versus fighting for his best ones. At the end of Whiplash, La La Land, and now Babylon, the only thing he's successfully communicated is that he's seen Singin' in the Rain, if not entirely understood it. It should take less than eight hours to accomplish that.

Avatar: The Way of Water (2022)

½*/****
starring Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver, Kate Winslet
screenplay by James Cameron & Rick Jaffa & Amanda Silver
directed by James Cameron

by Walter Chaw The discourse leading up to James Cameron's Avatar: The Way of Water (hereafter Avatar 2) has been largely about how although the first Avatar is the second-highest-grossing film of all time, it hasn't left much of a mark on popular culture. It's a take derided for the evidence of the numbers and the emergence of a theme-park attraction, though I do wonder if its cultural impact isn't like that Song of the South ride "Splash Mountain," which is only just now, finally, closing in early 2023. I don't know that the vile myth of the happy enslaved person made much of a mark on popular culture, either, insomuch as it is, itself, already and essentially popular culture. Maybe Avatar didn't make much of a "cultural impact" because it didn't introduce any new ideas into the ecosystem while profiting from a few antiquated ones. In the interim between Avatar's release in 2009 and this first of four promised sequels, a lot has changed in terms of cultural tolerances--even if, systemically, things have not only not improved but regressed. Maybe the problem with Avatar is the same one that any stories about first contact with a technologically less sophisticated alien culture share, given how our historical templates for these narratives involve genocide and the pillaging of natural resources. When a white person tells a story of a white man saving an indigenous culture from other white men, however, I start to worry about what kind of fetish is being indulged, and to what purpose/at what cost. What's not in doubt is that Avatar 2 will make bank, because whatever kink is being indulged in white-saviour narratives has proven a durable and profitable one in a white nationalist state. That's one way to look at it, anyway.

The Whale (2022)

**/****
starring Brendan Fraser, Sadie Sink, Ty Simpkins, Samantha Morton
screenplay by Samuel D. Hunter, based on his play
directed by Darren Aronofsky

by Walter Chaw The Whale is the first Darren Aronofsky film that lands for me the way his work often lands for others. It feels like much ado about very little, and though there are obvious things to recommend it, its central message, however well-taken, seems poorly served by the substance and execution. Most of the blame goes to screenwriter Samuel D. Hunter, author of the same-named play on which the film is based, for writing a trio of women characters meant to represent the mother, whore, and virgin but who mostly represent a uniform wall of shrill, lacerating rage. The Whale feels like the product of inexperience: a song by The Smiths turned into a movie in all its grandiloquent, hyper-literate (to the point of self-parody) self-pity. It's about the last five days in the life of online English comp teacher Charlie (Brendan Fraser), a morbidly obese, largely couch-bound shut-in suffering from congestive heart failure brought on by years of unchecked food addiction incited by the suicide of his partner. If that were all (and certainly that's enough), we'd have ourselves a classic. But it's not all. There's an evangelical missionary named Thomas (Ty Simpkins) who comes to the door to sit with him as he's popping off the first of what appears to be a series of heart attacks; Charlie's estranged daughter, Ellie (Sadie Sink), who is quite possibly Satan himself because this film is at some level about how anyone can be redeemed and so provides a demonic straw girl to prove it; pissed-off caregiver Liz (Hong Chau), who--it's weird to say this--has a bit too much backstory; and Charlie's alcoholic ex-wife Mary (Samantha Morton), who wants to listen to Charlie's breathing for some reason. The Whale is at once overwritten and underwritten, which is not uncommon. What sinks the ship, as it were, is that it's never particularly well-written--something it just can't surmount. I think the real movie is in the five days before the last five days, but what the fuck do I know?

The Banshees of Inisherin (2022)

****/****
starring Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, Kelly, Kerry Condon, Barry Keoghan
written and directed by Martin McDonagh

by Walter Chaw I lost a friend this year. Not to death but to no longer having anything of value to offer him, what with time getting short. I understand that. It's happened before for different reasons, and while it's tempting to say it's not my fault, sure, it's my fault. All you need to love in this world unconditionally are your kids, and, well, the last time my late parents told me they loved me, I was nine years old. I remember that because every few years, I've had reason to wonder when it stopped and what exactly I did to deserve it. The myth of family is just that; I think there's a reason people like me build their own families. The only thing unconditional is the love a dog has for you, and people abuse dogs all the time. I have friends who are enervating to me as well, and I wonder if my loyalty to them has everything to do with knowing the pain of being left by the side of the road by the people I have loved--and not wanting to inflict that on anyone else. The fashion of the moment speaks of this as "ending the cycle" of abuse. I'm drawn to artists like Kendrick Lamar who use poetry and what appears to be an extraordinary vulnerability to lay bare their struggles. Even as I write this, I'm noticing the pain I have in the middle knuckle of the third finger on my left hand. I've put down millions of words in the past 20 years, going through multiple keyboards and laptops in that time. I was driven by an obsession not to be forgotten, although I'm losing track of why that matters. The longer I go, the more it seems a blessing to slip beneath the surface, and then it's done. I have a heaviness in my chest sometimes that feels like a stone, worn smooth and round, sitting right there on my sternum. Time is getting short for me. Some days it feels a lot shorter than others. I wonder how small the iris of my perception will become as the possibility of works I'll complete dwindles to not one more. That's it, then someone else closes the cover of your last notebook.

The Fabelmans (2022)

*½/****
starring Michelle Williams, Paul Dano, Seth Rogan, Gabriel LaBelle
written by Steven Spielberg & Tony Kushner
directed by Steven Spielberg

by Walter Chaw Sammy (Gabriel LaBelle) loves making movies. He loves it so much there's a chance he'll destroy his family because of it--showing things that aren't for public consumption, mishandling the power of the medium, underestimating the magnitude of his gift. We know this because there's a scene where Sammy, while editing raw 8mm footage of a family camping trip, notices his mom, Mitzi (Michelle Williams), getting a little too friendly with family friend Benny (Seth Rogen). He cuts all the incriminating clips together into a mini-reel he projects for Mitzi against the wall of his closet as explanation of sorts for why he's sullen lately, and maybe as punishment for Mitzi, who has just struck him out of frustration. We know this, too, because his obviously insane grand-uncle, ex-lion tamer Boris (Judd Hirsch), has warned him, in a movie-stealing bit of scenery-chewing, that the tension between art and family always ends in tragedy. We know this, too...uh, too, because it's ventriloquized through the mouths of more than one character, including Sammy's bully, Chad (Sam Rechner). Word for tortured word. There are more monologues in Steven Spielberg's The Fabelmans than there are dialogues--more peaks than mountains, as it were. More waves than ocean. I don't know why everyone in this movie talks like either a greeting card or a diagnosis, though I think it probably has to do with Spielberg wanting to excavate his past and, in the exhumation, to find easy and uplifting bows in which to tie his various strings. We all want that. I feel for him.

Nocebo (2022)

**½/****
starring Eva Green, Mark Strong, Chai Fonacier, Billie Gadsdon
written by Garret Shanley
directed by Lorcan Finnegan

by Walter Chaw Lorcan Finnegan's Nocebo would fill an interesting double-bill with Jaume Collet-Serra's Black Adam, both violently rejecting the interventionist and exploitative tenets of colonialism (traditional and neo-). The reasons these films at opposite ends of the production spectrum might manifest within days of each other in 2022 are cynically self-evident, perhaps, but it doesn't lessen the fascination of their parallel genesis. The world is being destroyed by unfettered, voracious capitalism in ways so obvious that even widgets extruded from the intellectual-property mill are compelled now to occupy the same sociopolitical spaces as an independent film. I don't know that it's possible to qualify this development in that while it seems like progress, history has a way of reducing revolutions almost instantly to T-shirts and freshman dorm-room poster-ganda. Capitalism is undefeated. I loved Vivarium, Finnegan's previous film, a great deal, mainly because it played out manifold variations on its philosophical theme: to what extent does biology determine behaviour? Nocebo is similar in that it, too, asks a question about guilt and vengeance, then works over through multiple approaches to the answer before landing on the same conclusion that notions of good and evil are arbitrary distinctions imposed on innate compulsions. A mother will be compelled to avenge her child because a creature is obliged to reproduce itself. Anything else is merely obfuscating chantilly on an intrinsic cake.

Armageddon Time (2022)

***/****
starring Anne Hathaway, Jeremy Strong, Banks Repeta, Anthony Hopkins
written and directed by James Gray

by Angelo Muredda "All the great artists sign their work," Anthony Hopkins's benevolent grandfather Aaron tells his aimless but creatively-inclined grandson Paul (Banks Repeta) early in Armageddon Time, James Gray's autobiographical profile of growing up in Flushing, Queens as part of a tight-knit Russian-Jewish family. That advice seems to weigh heavily on Gray, who places it at the top of a ladder above less helpful artistic feedback like one teacher's admonition not to copy when Paul reproduces a Kandinsky he saw at the Guggenheim from memory, and another's gentler but no less prescriptive prompt, after Paul's creative work doesn't follow the brief, that he do the assignment. Signing the work for Gray, who has long been fascinated by the tension between the weight of Old World family ties and the seductive levity of contemporary life, means carefully tracking his fictional surrogate family's cross-generational assimilation into Ronald Reagan's America, which he proposes happened not just in the shadow of ghouls like Fred and Maryanne Trump (played here by Jessica Chastain)--donors at Gray's and Paul's private school--but, more insidiously, through American Jews' growing proximity to whiteness. Suffused with Gray's typical tragic grandeur and rich thematic preoccupation with the uniquely American compulsion to recreate oneself as a blank slate despite one's inescapable background, that signature is nevertheless a bit fainter than usual here, owing to the off-the-rack genre elements of the artist's coming-of-age narrative and a still-developing protagonist who, by film's end, remains too opaque to leave his mark as either an artist or an authorial surrogate.

Halloween Ends (2022)

***½/****
starring Jamie Lee Curtis, Andi Matichak, Rohan Campbell, Will Patton
written by Paul Brad Logan & Chris Bernier & Danny McBride & David Gordon Green
directed by David Gordon Green

by Walter Chaw I think the point, if not the pleasure principle, of franchise entertainments is the illusion of ownership over them, the obsessive knob-polishing of arcane knowledge not so very different, in many cases, from the pursuit of doctorate degrees in the liberal arts. You dedicate your life to learning so much about an exceptionally narrow field of study that you eventually come to a place where you know a lot about a little and not much about the rest. This monocultural--and, in most cases, monotextual--training tutors one in identifying deviations from the mean, so that what was joy in discovery becomes jealous taxonomy in defense of the tiny corner you've painted yourself into. The point of it all, ultimately, is to complain. When a totem such as John Carpenter's Halloween arrives, it carries with it the inspiration for epistemological/maniacal cults: entire fields of worship in which the limited revelations provided by a singular text serve as the foundation for religion. Hungry for more tablets, new installments are met with jeweller's glasses and tests of fidelity to the one true Word. The complaining, in other words, starts immediately. Is this new version of the Golden Calf walking the right way? Is it behaving as it should? Slow, not fast, or fast, never slow? Is it savage enough? Is the hero worthy? Is the lamb worthy of the blade? Each new film in any long-running series that earns enough each time out to warrant a continuation receives the scrutiny attending the unearthing of a new book of the Bible. Sources are vetted, false prophets are suspected, bloody debates are had in the town square, and finally, it's either the grudging acceptance into a growing canon or a casting off into the wilderness. The complaining is the point. It solidifies a community like the negging built into Evangelical outreach missions, and it's instant. The only thing verboten is if the franchise threatens the fragile identities of the high priests of its insular cult of personality.

See How They Run (2022)

**/****
starring Sam Rockwell, Saoirse Ronan, Adrien Brody, David Oyelowo
written by Mark Chappell
directed by Tom George

by Walter Chaw TV director Tom George's feature debut See How They Run is a Wes Anderson shrine decorated with screenwriter Mark Chappell's theatre-brat deep cuts, which ultimately just leads one to ask what of it is its own. Set around a murder that takes place at the time of the 100^th performance of Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap, complete with original cast members Richard Attenborough (Harris Dickinson) and Deila Sim (Pearl Chanda), the whole thing is a twee exercise in medium shots, split screens, and not much else. George and his production designers are gifted at creating clean, period-cozy environments, but all those acres of slick really do is demonstrate how money can buy a talented team of costumers and craftspeople in the pursuit of a recognizable veneer of prestige and quality. What it doesn't do, at least in this case, is provide the courage and the vision--perhaps it's experience and wisdom--to tell a story that isn't all surface pleasures. The real problem is that See How They Run has nothing to say about the world, about people, or, frankly, about Agatha Christie or murder mysteries. It doesn't even have all that much to say about itself. It's more the elderly Catskills chic of "Only Murders in the Building" than the genuine social revisionism of Knives Out. It has its opportunities; it mostly ignores them. It's a choice, and your mileage may vary.

Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022)

***/****
starring Idris Elba, Tilda Swinton, Pia Thunderbolt, Berk Ozturk
screenplay by George Miller & Augusta Gore, based upon the short story "The Djinn in the Nightingale" by A.S. Byatt
directed by George Miller

by Walter Chaw George Miller's Three Thousand Years of Longing raises impossibly tangled issues around representation in its tale of a "narratologist" who releases a Djinn from his bottle and wishes he would love her as she, instantly, loves him. Based on a short story by A.S. Byatt, part of a five-part cycle that seeks to navigate the rocky wasteland between colonist and colonized, the victor and the appropriated, Miller's picture is a story about a specific point of view that can never be entirely separated from itself. Whatever the best intentions invested in bridging cultural gaps, the process of absorption and reinterpretation tends to result in diminishment. The things that are most precious in our stories are ephemeral and shy. They're like exotic zoo specimens: they don't travel well and, once imprisoned, wither and die. But like anything judged to be rare and, through its rareness, authentic, stories belonging to others continue to be collected, no matter the damage collection does to them. Mulan, Aladdin... The popular conversation around them has swung so completely into their Disneyfication that Niki Caro, the not-Asian director of the live-action Mulan, based on one of China's most-revered folk heroes, said there "is another culture at play here, the culture of Disney." Unlike Mulan, however, Three Thousand Years of Longing is based on a work by a white, Yorkshire-born British woman (a Dame, no less), and I think it's not so much an attempt to colonize 1001 Arabian Nights as it is an ethical adaptation of a piece primarily interested in how the West has sought meaning for itself through the Orientalization of the cultures it's exploited for centuries.

Bullet Train (2022)

*/****
starring Brad Pitt, Joey King, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Sandra Bullock
screenplay by Zak Olkewicz, based on the book by Kôtarô Isaka
directed by David Leitch

by Walter Chaw I have so many thoughts about David Leitch's Bullet Train, and I don't think a single one of them coheres with any of the other ones. This is most likely a product of general exhaustion, or a lifetime misspent on excess consumption of media colliding now in middle-age with my becoming somehow the go-to for Amer-Asian-splaining of representational issues in American cinema. Like the whole "whitewashing" thing going on around Bullet Train, which is based on a popular Japanese novel by Kôtarô Isaka, who is pleased people like Brad Pitt and Brian Tyree Henry are in this big-budget Hollywood adaptation because it raises his profile internationally. Sony Pictures, whose parent company is Japanese, has already come out saying the same stupid shit about how much they wanted to honour the Japanese source material by hiring the best actors for the project--who happen to be Not Japanese--while Asian-Americans are rightfully outraged about the same stupid shit because of how much damage this ingrained corporate "wisdom" continues to wreak on the Asian-American community. If we continue to pull on this thread, we find Isaka has stolen the entire premise and execution of his book from Guy Ritchie and Quentin Tarantino, who, as we know, have stolen their things from British New Wave gangster flicks on the one hand, Asian cinema on the other--Asian cinema that has its roots in, what, Kurosawa? Whose favourite filmmaker was John Ford? And who was ripped off by Italian guy Sergio Leone, who was ripped off by Sam Peckinpah, who was ripped off by Hong Kong legend John Woo, who was ripped off by everybody for a while there. There's a scene in Bullet Train where Brad Pitt and Brian Tyree Henry, both playing hitmen, fight each other in tight quarters that is awfully reminiscent of Jackie Chan. Another scene recalls Louis Leterrier, who probably learned it from Jet Li--and neither Chan nor Li is Japanese, of course.

Nope (2022)

**/****
starring Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, Steven Yeun, Michael Wincott
written and directed by Jordan Peele

by Walter Chaw I don't think you ever see the heroes getting hurt, but they limp around a lot, and I couldn't stop wondering why. Just because it's more dramatic to be out of breath and limpy? There's a rule about not looking something in the eye, but I don't know how the horses can obey it, or if horses look up and behind them when they run. I've never seen them do that, in any case. If there's a rule about eyes, is the plan, in the end, to put eyes on the hood of that hoodie, and if it isn't, why did he? I understand there's a point being made here about how Hollywood doesn't care about the people who work in it--especially minorities and child actors--once their usefulness has been used up, yet I worry if by equating their trauma with a television chimp who goes insane and starts eating faces that the analogy, assuming there is one, has gotten as out of control as the chimp. There's a reveal that's less a reveal of an important plot point than a reveal that the reveal of an important plot point was left out somewhere. There's a powerful opening scene where something happens involving a nickel that is very effective up until the moment it's explained, at which point it no longer makes sense; why did it do what it did and not what it does for the rest of the film? Is it attracted to movement? Noise? It seems like both--but if so, how are folks constantly escaping it by moving around and making noise? That picture she takes? It looks ridiculous and will be convincing to no one. Wouldn't the camera and the film the famous cinematographer is shooting still be in one piece, like a black box, when the thing happens with the balloon? How is that the first balloon it's ever seen or eaten? If I ate a balloon (and could, for instance, withstand multiple gravities of speed and possibly interstellar travel), would I explode?

Elvis (2022)

***½/****
starring Austin Butler, Tom Hanks, Luke Bracey, Olivia DeJonge
screenplay by Baz Luhrmann & Sam Bromwell and Baz Luhrmann & Craig Pearce
directed by Baz Luhrmann

by Walter Chaw Baz Luhrmann's Elvis is part Perfume, part Immortal Beloved--which is to say, it's horny as fuck and formulates music as mass delusion and mind control. Safe to say, the sordid story of the King of Rock-and-Roll is the perfect match for a maximalist director I have found to be excessive to the point of obnoxious, even on those rare occasions where I've liked the movie anyway (see: Moulin Rouge!). Before Elvis, there wasn't an establishing shot Baz didn't torpedo with gratuitous angles and "whooshing" sound effects; before Elvis, his films were not just childish but relentlessly, punishingly childish. The first half of Elvis is more frenetic than the last, though neither sports any affectations that don't augment the story in positive ways. Dissolves, triple-split screens, restless camera movements--they all underscore the breathless headlong rush of Elvis's rise from broke Tupelo hillbilly living in the "Black" part of town to the biggest-selling solo recording artist in history. When it comes time for his inevitable fall, Luhrmann places it in a sociopolitical context, toning down his trademark freneticism in favour of a, most shockingly of all perhaps, thoughtful analysis of several factors that may have played into Elvis's decline into paranoia, drug abuse, isolation, and despair. A story this familiar in a genre as permanently scuttled by Walk Hard requires a certain wisdom to know what to recap versus what to excavate. Elvis walks that line more than it doesn't.

Jurassic World Dominion (2022)

½*/****
starring Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Sam Neill, Jeff Goldblum
screenplay by Emily Carmichael & Colin Trevorrow
directed by Colin Trevorrow

by Walter Chaw About an hour into Jurassic World Dominion, a nondescript villain--really, the bad guys are all nondescript here, no matter their gender or race--with the admittedly ridiculous name Rainn Delacourt (Scott Haze) is pinned on his back by two dinosaurs eating his arms. Our Dollar Store action figure of a hero, Chad--er, Brad, er...Owen? Our Dollar Store action figure of a hero, Owen (Chris Pratt), screams at Rainn to give up vital information about the location of the emotionless British cyborg clone from the last film, Maisie (Isabella Sermon), who (that?) Owen and his girlfriend/wife/whatever, Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard), have since adopted. Rainn, before getting his head torn off tastefully offscreen, spills the beans. Here's my problem: why? Why the fuck would he bother to say anything at all? When this scenario plays out in other films, it's because the person being asked the question hopes they'll be freed once they do. But Owen doesn't control these dinosaurs with his magic dinosaur-controlling hand, and it's not framed as Rainn having a change of heart. It's just a blatant misunderstanding of scenes like this, either on purpose or out of cynical desperation, rigged to move a stalled plot along, damning the characters and all sense along the way. What troubles me the most about it is the presumption that no one will notice or that no one will care once they've noticed. J. A. Bayona loaded his Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom with a shocking amount of social subtext, appropriate outrage, fairytale scale and wonder, even doom. The only thing Colin Trevorrow manages to create with Jurassic World Dominion (hereafter Dominion) is an endurance test of unusual cruelty that, despite its conspicuous bloat, still leans heavily on an extended voiceover prologue and epilogue to try to inject an illusion of plot into aimless, sometimes-vicious, ugly-looking garbage.

Top Gun: Maverick (2022)

***½/****
starring Tom Cruise, Miles Teller, Jennifer Connelly, Val Kilmer
screenplay by Ehren Kruger and Eric Warren Singer and Christopher McQuarrie
directed by Joseph Kosinski

by Walter Chaw Joseph Kosinski's Top Gun: Maverick (hereafter Maverick) does everything the Tony Scott original did well a little bit better and doesn't bother with the rest. What drives this legacy sequel is the sobriety with which it addresses the passage of time--the existential horror of being the oldest person at the bar, of all those pictures that look like what you think you still look like, of the toll of watching your children outgrow you while every anchor you have to this world withers and dies. It is, in other words, a spectacular action film and a mature character drama whose closest analogue might be Danny Boyle's T2 Trainspotting--a film that, likewise, took its cue from a showy and popular first film and forged from it a work of real substance and surprising pathos. What's most impressive is how balanced Maverick feels. Its action component is plotted out like an elaborate, aerial heist flick with the stakes obvious and the steps delineated cleanly and simply, so that when it finally comes time to set the dominos in motion and things inevitably go wrong, it's clear how they went wrong. The picture's dramatic component is as carefully metered: the love interest and her expectations; the lost father/orphaned son dynamic and how to salvage it; the old rivals-turned-friends and what they owe each other at the end. Maverick is a clockwork, a model of efficiency and effective storytelling; there are multiple avenues to appreciating this movie. I was afraid a sequel to a macho, homoerotic recruitment video bankrolled by the United States military would have no sense of its silliness. I'm happy to be wrong.

The Northman (2022)

**½/****
starring Alexander Skarsgård, Nicole Kidman, Claes Bang, Willem Dafoe
written by Sjón & Robert Eggers
directed by Robert Eggers

by Walter Chaw That Robert Eggers's latest film proves visually stunning is more expectation than revelation at this point. That it beggars traditional narrative tropes is also no longer a surprise, making The Northman a victim of, of all things, familiarity. There's even a moment about midway through where the natural beauty, the grandeur of the film's settings, works against it: being force-marched through the frankly-ravishing landscape, one slave essentially remarks to another that this place is a shithole. Imagine the claustrophobic vileness of the version of this film Andrea Arnold might have made. Aside from trodding the same frozen ground as the obviously superior Valhalla Rising, The Northman is merely extremely good-looking and very straightforward, for all its mythological underpinnings and ambition to be epic-feeling in terms of its royal melodrama. (No wonder: the ancient Norse folktale it seeks to tell is the basis for Shakespeare's Hamlet.) Sequences like an early coming-of-age ritual in a subterranean mud cathedral promise a picture as surreal and lawless as a Ben Wheatley joint (A Field of England. for instance), but rather than follow that path into Wonderland, The Northman barely reaches for the trippy heights of Eggers's previous film, The Lighthouse, and it's the first of his movies that doesn't require an active viewership. Indeed, the most surprising thing about it is how few surprises it holds.

The Contractor (2022)

***/****
starring Chris Pine, Ben Foster, Gillian Jacobs, Kiefer Sutherland
written by J.P. Davis
directed by Tarik Saleh

by Walter Chaw Tarik Saleh's The Contractor reminds me a lot of Michael B. Jordan's recent attempt at a franchise-starter Without Remorse in that both are the sort of workmanlike action pictures that once kept multiplexes afloat but now occupy a mid-budget niche relegated to streaming services. Its closest analogue might be Amazon's "Reacher" series in terms of its clean action, straight-line plotting, and lantern-jawed "all-American" hero trained to kill and prone to angst over his lethal ways. The Contractor adds some wrinkles in using the plight of veterans returning from service with neither financial nor emotional support while also reserving some criticism for the private, for-profit contractors who send mercenaries into conflict zones for the purposes of ratfucking and wetworks. Mostly, though, it's an able showcase for Chris Pine as a sturdy action hero who is also a non-threatening avatar for the Average Joe demographic: handsome but cool, clever not brainy, self-sufficient but loyal to an old buddy, a good dad and good Christian good at tamping down "girl" emotions and, moreover, good at boom-boom stab-stab.

Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

****/****
starring Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan, Jamie Lee Curtis
written and directed by Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert

by Walter Chaw When I tell my parents' story to myself, I never tell it as a love story. It's an immigrant story--a typical one, I've come to learn through reading, yes, but mainly through the films of Edward Yang. And it's a story about a broken family, where coldness and mulishness led to lost childhoods, resentments, and, for me, estrangement from my parents to varying degrees throughout my adult life. I became a writer because it was where mental illness and neurodivergence directed me. I needed therapy, and my family didn't approve of that for me. Not even after my suicide attempt. I know my choice of major disappointed my parents, and I think I chose it in part to disappoint them--they who liked to brag about me while doing their best to "break" my sense of self-worth and strip away any pride I had in my accomplishments. I still don't know how to rewire myself to take good news as good rather than as the preamble to a lecture on my stupidity and arrogance. I'm broken. I'm working on fixing it.

Umma (2022)

*/****
starring Sandra Oh, Fivel Stewart, MeeWha Alana Lee, Dermot Mulroney
written and directed by Iris K. Shim

by Walter Chaw Sandra Oh is very good as a woman working through the generational trauma shared by many first-gen Asian immigrants to the United States. She's exceptional occupying a range of complex, polarized emotions, managing in many instances to pull off scenes headed towards histrionics with exactly the right amount of reserve to keep it south of camp. Consider when her amateur apiarist Amanda learns of her mother's death from a long-estranged uncle (Tom Yi), who appears on her doorstep unannounced. He disapproves of how Amanda's daughter Chris (Fivel Stewart), born and raised in the United States, doesn't speak a word of Korean, and he blames Amanda for causing her mother's passing by the fact of her absence sitting vigil at her deathbed. He gives Amanda a bundle comprising her mother's favourite things along with her ashes, telling her to provide her a proper burial, lest Amanda herself become as vicious and intolerable as her Umma (MeeWha Alana Lee). Oh keeps her emotions steady. She holds on to them like a drowning sailor. You can see the turmoil in her face, though it's carefully held, and when she tells him to leave, she does it without turning the table over. That's powerful stuff. There's an entire film here, a good one, that never goes to a supernatural place with Amanda's baggage--one that recognizes how strong Oh's internalization of this role is and lets her do it without things jumping out at her from the basement. The parts of Umma that explicitly fail are the horror-movie parts. It's not simply that they don't work, it's that making an Asian mother the literal monster in an American horror movie is absolutely fraught with representational landmines writer-director Iris K. Shim doesn't quite know how to avoid. Had a white creator made either this or the recent Turning Red, there'd be an uproar. A justified one.

X (2022)

****/****
starring Mia Goth, Jenna Ortega, Brittany Snow, Kid Cudi
written and directed by Ti West

by Walter Chaw Early on in Ti West's X, a guy pulls out a guitar in the rented bungalow he's sharing with his buddies and starts playing a familiar riff. His girlfriend sings. She has a pretty voice. Not a world-shaking voice, but she means what she's singing, which makes up for a multitude of sins. It's a tough scene to pull off due to it being a set-up that's been paid off a few times, as it was in Animal House, by someone walking by and smashing the guitar against a wall. There are fewer muscles necessary to affect a snarky posture than to strike an earnest pose--less skill required to arch an eyebrow than to build a situation with fully-rounded characters we care about enough not to mock for their desire to connect with one another. How exactly, in 2022, do you do a scene where a group of kids performs "Landslide" without eliciting eye-rolls? Especially in a horror movie where a certain amount of superiority to the material is the expectation rather than the exception? Stevie Nicks wrote "Landslide" in 1974 to talk about a period of separation from her boyfriend and bandmate Lindsey Buckingham. An underestimated, perhaps superb lyricist, Nicks uses a natural disaster as a metaphor for both the violence and the inevitability of change over a lifetime: how she'll lose her looks to age, how she'll weather the tribulations of being in love in a temporary world. West shoots this scene without a hint of jokiness, intercutting the young folks at repose with elderly folks--their hosts--dressing for bed. The camera lingers on the sharp valleys and clefts of an old woman's back, casting harsh shadows in the moonlight. I expected many things from X, but I didn't expect it to make me cry.

The Batman (2022)

**/****
starring Robert Pattinson, Zoë Kravitz, Paul Dano, Colin Farrell
written by Matt Reeves & Peter Craig
directed by Matt Reeves

by Walter Chaw I love Matt Reeves. I think Cloverfield is exceptional, that I underestimated Let Me In upon its initial release, and that, for as popular as it was, the Planet of the Apes trilogy--to which he contributed two entries--remains underappreciated for how cogent and incisive a satire it is of the doomed trajectory of our irredeemable state. Reeves appears to be the rare bird who can work within the framework of franchise and intellectual property and still manage to produce largely uncompromised pieces, unbeholden to stock set-ups and happy pay-offs. I had the highest of hopes for his turn at the wheel of the Batman machine: if anyone was going to do a down Batman in defiance of the jealous protectors of a billion-dollar money tree, it was Reeves. Alas, The Batman is overlong, over-serious, poorly-paced, and the first of Reeves's films to show obvious production interference in the sort of narrative post-script--delivered via world-weary Blade Runner voiceover, no less--that is never not embarrassing for its awkward pandering. Any sins of structure can at least be attributed to Reeves and co-writer Peter Craig, who lean heavily on the "detective" part of Batman's "Dark Knight Detective" moniker in an earnest, all-in go at neo-noir. But the grafted-on epilogue suffers an instant, gaudy tissue rejection. It's sap in a movie that, for all its gravid clumsiness, has decidedly not been sap.

Moonfall (2022)

***/****
starring Halle Berry, Patrick Wilson, John Bradley, Donald Sutherland
screenplay by Roland Emmerich & Harald Kloser & Spenser Cohen
directed by Roland Emmerich

by Walter Chaw Between The Day After Tomorrow and the new Moonfall, Roland Emmerich has become our unlikely climate disaster Tierisius: Oedipus's blind seer, dispensing fair warning to a population not paying any attention. In the earlier film, global warming causes a new Ice Age and an exodus of American refugees looking for sanctuary in Mexico, while Moonfall sees the entire west coast flooded and essentially everyone at sea level in the United States trying to get to Colorado. Both ideas are ripe with satiric irony, animated with a sense of gallows humour about how extraordinarily shortsighted American leadership is in the face of obvious signs and portents. Oh, and science, of course, which should have been enough once the evidence of our own eyes somehow proved inadequate. Even Moonfall's ultimate revelation--something about AI and space arks and a running gag about Elon Musk--speaks brilliantly, however intentionally, to our primate desire to conflate the hoarding of generational wealth with genius, when all the wealthy really want to do is escape the rapidly-changing planet they've strip-mined for its resources. All that, plus a broad redux of H.G. Wells's The First Men In the Moon, and, kids, we got ourselves the smart and unpretentious version of Don't Look Up.

The Worst Person in the World (2021)

Verdens verste menneske
***½/****
starring starring Renate Reinsve, Anders Danielsen Lie, Herbert Nordrum
written by Eskil Vogt, Joachim Trier
directed by Joachim Trier

by Walter Chaw Joachim Trier has had his ear, unerring, pressed against the pulse of sweet melancholia and regret from the very beginning. He followed his first feature, Reprise, a downbeat essay of aspiring writers on the cusp of validation or immolation, with Oslo, August 31st, a jarring and indelible chronicle of one day in the life of a junkie trying for a second chance, maybe too late. Trier's English-language debut, Louder than Bombs, was about how a father and son remember their dead wife/mother differently, while his Thelma was a supernaturally-tinged coming-of-age film and my favourite movie of that year. Now comes this intense character study of the anxious generation, The Worst Person in the World. These films share an interest in people at a crossroads and forced to evolve. If I have a beef with Trier, it's that his endings of late have tended towards, if not tidiness exactly, at least a neatness not befitting his characters and their messy lives. It's less a failing of his than a failing of mine. I think what they do, though, these endings that feel like endings, is push his films a little away from realism and a little towards fable. The Worst Person in the World, accordingly, is a film through which it appears that Trier--32 at the time of Reprise, 47 now--is wrestling with what it means to be 30 in 2021 after providing such immediate and raw social landscapes in his early work. I wonder if fable is the only way to properly contextualize the young as we push into and past middle age. Maybe it would feel unseemly to pretend otherwise.

The Long Night (2022)

*/****
starring Scout Taylor-Compton, Nolan Gerard Funk, Kevin Ragsdale, Deborah Kara Unger
written by Robert Sheppe, Mark Young
directed by Rich Ragsdale

by Walter Chaw Rich Ragsdale's The Long Night is relentlessly familiar--which is too bad, because it features an excellent score by Sherri Chung, and DP Pierluigi Malavasi does yeoman's night-work and a mean drone shot. Their aptitude--indeed, elegance--is wholly at odds with the picture's smirky script (by Robert Sheppe and Mark Young) and solid wall of daft shoutiness. Star Scout Taylor-Compton spends so much of the picture shrieking, even before the bad things start happening in earnest, that the frequency of her hoarse emissions can be either the foundation for the world's newest and deadliest drinking game, or maybe merely The Long Night's most exhausting running joke. It's hard to say what this film wanted to be about, if it ever wanted to be about more than getting made--my obvious guess being all the supernatural doings as a metaphor for a disintegrating relationship. But if that's the case, that particular trope has been worn to a nub, and if you're not going to provide insight or approach it in a novel way, going through the motions really works the ol' patience muscle.

Scream (2022)

***½/****
starring Melissa Berrera, Mason Gooding, Jenna Ortega, Neve Campbell
written by James Vanderbilt & Guy Busick
directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett

by Walter Chaw Kevin Williamson and Wes Craven's Scream cycle, in terms of its influence on modern film, constitutes the most important metatext of the last 25 years in that it's not only self-referential, it's curious about how self-reference can be an essential ontological tool as opposed to a mere existential exercise. They're better movies, in this respect, than The Matrix and its sequels, and, at least in terms of their popularity, they're more important than even Charlie Kaufman's extraordinary but limited-appeal body of work. The Scream saga, for lack of a better word, matters. Not for nothing does Scream 3, despite being the weakest installment of the original four and the only one of those that didn't involve Williamson in any significant way, take place mainly on a simulacrum of hero Sidney's childhood home and neighbourhood, recreated inside a soundstage like the to-scale streets of Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York. If the first film is a watershed, the second is perhaps the series' masterpiece: a phenomenal bit of pop philosophy that sees Sidney (Neve Campbell) as a Cassandra figure, literally forced onto the stage with a pack of masked murderers to re-enact her trauma from and into eternity. It's her role in these Passion Plays to be preyed upon--and through her suffering, the "rules" of engagement between women coming of sexual age and men wanting to possess and punish them for that are forged. She has become an archetype, a thing that is representative of a fundamental truth, and the movies understand that. When she makes her entrance in the new Scream (hereafter Scream 5), standing up in a hospital waiting area to greet a young woman initiated into the abattoir, it is framed and shot as though we are all in the presence of a divine visitation.

The 355 (2022)

½*/****
starring Diane Kruger, Penélope Cruz, Jessica Chastain, Lupita Nyong'o
screenplay by Theresa Rebeck and Simon Kinberg
directed by Simon Kinberg

by Walter Chaw There's a moment early on in Simon Kinberg's execrable The 355 where Lupita Nyong'o, playing cyber-security expert Khadijah, is walking on a pier swarming with commercial fishermen, tailing a bad guy by holding her phone up like she's looking at her phone camera while it's recording him. After the third or fourth time they've locked eyes, she declares, with total seriousness, that she's been "made." No fucking shit you were made. If Lupita Nyong'o were walking along holding up a phone and staring at me from six feet away, I like to think I'd notice. Later, the reason given for Colombian psychologist Graciela (Penélope Cruz) tagging along on a very dangerous mission is that some dead guy's phone has been locked with her fingerprint. Because I'm able to remember that Khadijah is a cyber-security expert, and given that Graciela's fingerprint-bearing finger is sitting right there, I'm wondering why someone else's fingerprint couldn't be assigned to the phone. I'm also wondering where Sebastian Stan's CIA agent Nick found a crisp white T-shirt that doesn't stain when you spill coffee on it. That's some NASA shit, probably the technology everyone should actually be fighting over. Then there's the conversation where Graciela's son, over the phone, asks for "Duvalins," and Graciela responds, "Yes, I will bring you your favourite candy," which...okay, level with me--which one of them needed to know that Duvalins is candy? The first thing is a problem with direction; the next a script issue; the next, direction again; and the last another script issue. Meaning that while there might be enough blame to go around, I'm gonna put the bulk of it on co-writer/director Kinberg.

A Hero (2021)

Ghahreman
**½/****
starring Amir Jadidi, Mohsen Tanabandeh, Fereshteh Sadrorafaii, Sarina Farhadi
written and directed by Asghar Farhadi

by Walter Chaw A Hero is Asghar Farhadi's Iranian Neorealist version of Stephen Frears's gaudy American prestige flick Hero, in which a man lauded as one type of person is secretly another type of person, thus calling to the stand society's process for determining object choice and assigning value. Not a new conceit, in other words. Here, it's given Farhadi's "miserablist parade" approach, whereby the exhausted didacticism of the premise is meted out with the punishing drip-drip of water torture. Freed for 48 hours from a debtor's prison, Rahim (Amir Jadidi) has a clandestine--because of divorce or something--meeting with his girlfriend, Farkhondeh (Sahar Goldust), who produces a handbag she's found abandoned that's full of gold coins. Problem solved, yes? No. Exchange rates being what they are in this global economy, the gold isn't quite enough to cover Rahim's obligations, and so he hatches a plan to make a big show out of giving the money back, the better to capitalize on his freshly-minted Good Samaritan persona. It works until it stops working, as these things do.

The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021)

***½/****
starring Denzel Washington, Frances McDormand, Bertie Carvel, Brendan Gleeson
written for the screen and directed by Joel Coen

by Walter Chaw The Tragedy of Macbeth is a middle-aged lament of the childless, a haunted interpretation of Shakespeare that underscores my belief that the Coen Brothers--in this case, just Joel--are/is among our finest literary critics. Their O Brother, Where Art Thou? unpacks The Odyssey as a collection of regional tales and songs; their adaptations of No Country for Old Men and True Grit demonstrate a deep understanding of not merely the specific works being adapted, but Cormac McCarthy's and Charles Portis's entire bodies of work as well. The Big Lebowski, needless to say, is a brilliant and essential take on Chandler's The Big Sleep. That their planned adaptation of James Dickey's To the White Sea with Brad Pitt hasn't happened yet and doesn't look like it ever will is a genuine tragedy. (The relative failure of their Ladykillers remake suggests this skill may be limited to the transmutation between mediums.) For his solo debut, Joel Coen has taken a German Expressionistic approach, leaning heavily into long shadows and aestheticism that feels like mourning. The film falls somewhere between the mysticism of Kurosawa's Throne of Blood and Orson Welles's incantatory 1948 Macbeth, though it's less wild and windswept than either, reminding in this way of how steeped in superstition and the supernatural was Shakespeare--and how raw, even stripped down, the Scottish Play seems in comparison to the Bard's other histories.

The Matrix Resurrections (2021)

½*/****
starring Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Neil Patrick Harris
screenplay by Lana Wachowski & David Mitchell & Aleksandar Hemon
directed by Lana Wachowski

by Walter Chaw I guess I wouldn't mind that The Matrix: Resurrections (hereafter Matrix 4) is so stupid if it didn't spend so much of its bloat trying to explain itself. Just let it go. If you're riding with the same plot as Space Jam: A New Legacy, own it--run with it, for fuck's sake. Exposition is always a delicate if necessary evil, but here it's particularly undignified. It's Glen from Raising Arizona explaining his Polack jokes. The plot of Matrix 4 is essentially that conversation with the guy who's way too stoned who has this great idea for a Matrix sequel. "Okay, okay, see, Neo is--haha--NEO is Mr. Anderson again and--haha, check it--he's like this programmer dude, real boring piece of shit, and he made a game back in 1999 called 'The Matrix', and yo, yo, yo, wait, wait... What if Trinity was The One, too?" You've heard of the concept of "raising all boats"? Well, an hour of deadening exposition devoted to explaining a plot this contrived, this smug and half-cocked, this simultaneously convoluted and simplistic, sinks the boat--sinks all fucking boats. Good poker players have confidence and chill; not only does Lana Wachowski have a real bad tell, she gives speeches about what she's holding. "Hi, I'm Lana, creator of The Matrix, and I'm drawing on an inside straight." Small wonder Lilly refused to participate in this boondoggle, leaving Lana to recruit their Cloud Atlas partner-in-crime David Mitchell as one of her co-writers. That either of these people kept their names on this is evidence of an almost majestic, feline confidence.

Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021)

**½/****
starring Tom Holland, Zendaya, Benedict Cumberbatch, Marisa Tomei
written by Chris McKenna & Erik Sommers
directed by Jon Watts

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Peter Parker (Tom Holland), having just been outed to the world as Spider-Man by a dying Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal), finds himself besieged by press and angry mobs mistaken in their belief that Mysterio was a very handsome hero. This pushes Peter into hiding with his Aunt May (Marisa Tomei), girlfriend MJ (Zendaya), and bestie Ned (Jacob Batalon). The kids need guards when they go to school (why are they still going to school?) and are trying to focus on applying to MIT because they're all three of them brilliant, in case you've forgotten. Recognizing the toll of his exposure on the people who have remained loyal to him, Peter asks Dr. Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) to cast a spell on the universe so that people forget him. How this might be achieved in the age of social media and pocket cameras is dismissed as "magic," which is also how it's explained that a hole in the multiverse opens up, allowing a bunch of villains and other versions of Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield) to cross over into this one's reality. At least the film has the self-awareness to constantly call out the facility of "magic" as a catch-all, layering its characters' incredulity in a running joke about a "wizard's dungeon" and one character's "You have magic here?" As wit goes, it ain't much, but I'll take it.

The Novice (2021)

****/****
starring Isabelle Fuhrman, Amy Forsyth, Dilone, Jonathan Cherry
written and directed by Lauren Hadaway

by Walter Chaw Lauren Hadaway's hyphenate debut The Novice is so good, so self-assured, so kinetic and so very much about something that, all hyperbole justified, it heralds the arrival of an important new artist. Garnering instant comparisons to Whiplash for its heart-attack-fuelled kineticism and hyperfocus on the obsessive, gnostic practice of an obscure discipline and to Black Swan for similar reasons as well as its troubled female protagonist, The Novice's closest analogue for me is actually Andrew Niccol's Gattaca, a film about the pursuit of knowledge and sublimity free of the depressingly quotidian limitations of the body. The Novice itself is free of Damien Chazelle's preening and the literalness of the hero's emotional fracture in Black Swan. Rather, it preaches the gospel of being fine with who you are not despite how fucked up and "intense" you might be, but because of that. At the end of all that auto-excavation, it says that the self, whatever its attendant flaws and hardwired weaknesses, has intrinsic value, and the knowledge of that value comes with immeasurable power. The title of Hadaway's film recalls the Christian concept of the religious "novitiate," that period where a person called to servitude enters into intense study, constant prayer, forced brotherhood, and an invasive interiority, all to prove whether or not they will be welcomed into the fold. In The Novice, the novitiate is Alex Dall, and the "fold" is everyone at her school who thinks she's some kind of freak.

Being the Ricardos (2021)

**/****
starring Nicole Kidman, Javier Bardem, J.K. Simmons, Nina Arianda
written and directed by Aaron Sorkin

by Walter Chaw One of the best home viewing experiences I ever had was going through New Line's "Infinifilm" DVD of Roger Donaldson's Thirteen Days with my wife, clicking on every single prompt to view the voluminous supplementary material threaded through the picture and getting what felt like a freshman-level introductory course on the 13 days of the Cuban Missile Crisis. An old and dear friend here in the Denver Market threw his hands up while we were talking about Aaron Sorkin's Being the Ricardos and asked, rhetorically and not to an imaginary Sorkin, "Why Aaron Sorkin?" It's a great question. I think the "why Aaron Sorkin" is that he is the human manifestation of the "Infinifilm" concept but less educational and more facile and self-indulgent, hence populist in the worst way. That is, populist in a way that seems prestigious but is, in fact, playing to the groundlings-infested pit. Emboldened perhaps by the success of the David Fincher-directed/Sorkin-scripted The Social Network and the Bennett Miller-directed/Sorkin-co-scripted Moneyball, Sorkin's directorial efforts so far--Molly's Game, The Trial of the Chicago 7, and now Being the Ricardos--have all been based on true stories. Maybe he figures he's hit a rich vein of biopic dramaturgy that he can strip-mine until this mountain is just a pile of rubble littered with Oscars. Sorkin is a slick one-trick pony, that guy. Giddyup, cowboys.