SENTIMENTAL VALUE

Directing: A-
Acting: A
Writing: A-
Cinematography: A-
Editing: A-

Anyone with a thing for juicy family dramas should look no further than Sentimental Value, Norwegian director Joachim Trier’s follow-up to his similarly excellent The Worst Person in the World (2021). The person he cast in the starring role is also the same in both films: the wonderful Renate Reinsve, here playing Nora Borg, an accomplished stage actress in Oslo, where she lives in a home that has been in her family for generations.

If I had any minor nitpick about Sentimental Value, it would be how no one ever talks about the hugeness of this house, which appears to have three stories and an unspecified but certainly large number of rooms. The generational history is discussed as far back as Nora’s great great grandparents, but I don’t recall any family iteration being larger than a family of four: two parents and two kids. Clearly more recent generations aquired the house through inheritance; maybe earlier generations actually made it a multi-generational home? I kept wondering how the hell any of them kept it clean. None of these generations are shown with a housekeeper.

Surely it would make sense that such a house would be easier to afford in the era of World War II—today, in the United States at least, this house would have been converted into an apartment complex long ago. Granted, this is Norway, and a lot of things work differently there—although the simple tenets of capitalism infect every corner of the globe. And, to be sure: this house figures prominently in the plot of Sentimental Value, a beautiful repository for collective memory and generational trauma, from Nora’s grandmother’s Nazi imprisonment and subsequent suicide inside the house, to Nora and her sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, also excellent) witnessing the volatility of their parents’ marriage until their father, Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård), leaves and spends the better part of the rest of their lives estranged from them.

Sentimental Value opens shortly after the death of Nora and Agnes’s mother, a character we really never get to know. This is about their relationship with their father, a once-famous director who has not made a film in 15 years. But, he has now written an incredible script, with the lead part tailor made for Nora, who wants nothing to do with it. Searching for other options, Gustav turns to an American actress he meets at a local film festival: Rachel Kemp, played by Elle Fanning in a really tricky part that she nails. Rachel is curious about the deep sadness of the suicidal character she’s playing, and Gustave has to tell her more than once that it’s not about his mother. Meanwhile, he asks Rachel to die her hair the same color as Nora. (And incidentally, Elle Fanning and Renate Reinsve bear an uncanny resemblance. If not for the different accents, they could more believably play sisters than the sisters we actually see onscreen here.)

What Gustav has written is highly fictionalized but still has clear similarities to his own life and family—and this is where we return, yet again, to the house. Gustav wants to shoot the film in the family home. He also wants to use his young grandson, Erik (Øyvind Hesjedal Loven, the only cast member who is clearly not a practiced actor, just like the character), in the production—just like he once did Agnes, in a previous World War II-era film. Agnes was a great screen presence at the time, but did not pursue acting as a career as Nora did. Gustav, ever the undependable dad, complains of his dislike for live theater, and so never comes to Nora’s plays.

All of this comes together in a plot that is complex but never difficult to follow, and perhaps may even be a bit slowly paced for some viewers. It’s worth noting that although this is a family drama about two sisters with deep resentment toward their father, there are no histrionics here, no scene made for an Oscar clip. Where other movies of this sort go for familial cruelty, this one leans more heavily into a kind of benign neglect. There’s something about Stellan Skarsgård’s performance, though, that still elicits empathy. Few people can convey subtly tortured interiority like Stellan Skarsgård.

Gustav is a man who can’t help who he is, and doesn’t really know how to change—certainly not now at the age of 70. But, over time he uses this new script of his to convey how he has an uncanny understanding of Nora in particular, the daughter he wrote it for. In the end, it is through their art that they finally find a way to connect, and this is the subtle but very sweet note on which the story ends. Sentimental Value takes a sort of scenic route through its themes, never exactly a thrill of an experience but one with a finesse that stays with you.

A father-daughter relationship not quite like others you’ve seen.

Overall: A-

TRAIN DREAMS

Directing: A-
Acting: B+
Writing: A-
Cinematography: A
Editing: A-

Who knew that Train Dreams had such a connection to Spokane, Washington—the city where I grew up? Set mostly in the Idaho panhandle over decades starting in 1917, Robert Granier (Joel Edgerton) works mostly in the logging industry, but spends a short time on the Spokane International Railway, and he later takes the train for visits into Spokane. There is a brief sequence, very late in the film, of Robert walking the streets of downtown Spokane, passing old buildings I remember vividly from my teenage years. There’s a glimpse of the clocktower on the Review building, which has stood since 1891—somewhere in the vicinity of when Robert was born. The sequence is set in the 1960s, and Robert has a brief exchange with a woman on the street as they watch live footage of the Earth from outer space on a TV in a store window. The sequence also features a barely-seen glimpse of the 16-story Washington Trust Financial Center, which was not built until 1973, but I guess I’ll forgive the movie for that.

As is typical of film productions, most of the filming of Train Dreams was not quite where it was actually set. Aside from the brief excursion to Spokane, which is located about 22 miles from the state line with Idaho, all the scenes with Robert and his wife Gladys (Felicity Jones) are set in Idaho. There are many scenes of Robert working industry logging jobs far from home, but this still must be mostly in Idaho; we are told very early on that Robert never makes it further east than a few miles into Montana. These sequences feature deeply lush greenery that is very believable as Northern Idaho, where I have spent a lot of time. Nearly all of this film, however, was shot in Eastern Washington. The Inland Northwest is the Inland Northwest, I guess.

We get seldom enough film production oner here where I now live in Seattle; Spokane’s history with mainstream film is even spottier, with truly great films set there being rare indeed. Train Dreams represents a truly unusual circumstance in which I am jealous of their access to theatrical release: Train Dreams was just released today on Netflix, which was the only way I was able to watch it. As far as I can find, this film got no theatrical release in my local market at all. Netflix did their eternally frustrating thing with Oscar-worthy productions, giving it a limited release in order for it to qualify. I guess they took pity on Spokane, allowing locals to see it as it is best experienced: it’s currently playing there at the Magic Lantern Theatre.

And I do wish I could have seen this in a theater, it is so beautifully shot. Robert Grainier spends a lot of time onscreen doing timber industry jobs, mostly chopping down trees, and sometimes barely avoiding tragic ends from falling limbs or sometimes entire trees. Indeed he witnesses the deaths of other workers several times. The train of the title is somewhat misleading, given how much more time is spent with timber. But, during a job on the railroad, he witnesses the casual killing of a Chinese railroad worker, and this haunts him for the rest of his life, often in his dreams.

It should be noted that Train Dreams is very quiet, meditative, and a kind of gradual easing into sorrow. One might even spend some of the first half of the film wondering what the point is, as we simply see scenes from Robert’s younger days, the way he happens upon the woman he falls in love with without actively searching for her. They build a house together, Gladys raises chickens, and has their baby. I knew going in that Train Dreams is largely about grief—this seems to be a very popular motif in film of recent years—and that had to mean Robert was destined to lose his family. I kept wondering how it would happen and what level of horror would accompany it. This is, indeed, a turning point in the story with true horror from Robert’s point of view, especially with no definitive closure as to the specifics. I’ll just say that, at the very least, from the audience perspective, at least this particular loss is not the result of any human cruelty. It’s closer to the indifference of nature.

In any event, Robert is left alone, and director and co-writer Clint Bentley—who also directed and co-wrote last year’s spectacular Sing Sing—very effectively conveys a potent loneliness in this man, for basically the rest of the film. That is, until, for one brief moment, he experience a genuine moment of connection. It is brief indeed, but also spectacularly executed: it’s a deeply moving moment, and one that brought tears to my eyes without employing any of the typical “sad movie” tricks.

Train Dreams is the odd kind of movie that has a melancholic tone that somehow also has a comfort to it. In the wake of the horrid scene with the Chinese railroad worker, Robert regularly encounters people who offer him understanding and kindness. There are three such key characters as the story unfolds: an annoyingly talkative shirking but kind old man played by William H. Macy; a local Native shopkeeper who looks after Robert in his deepest throes of grief, played by Nathaniel Arcand; and a kind of hermit kindred spirit in a forestry worker played by Kerry Condon. In a scene where they share some tea and have an unusually heartfelt conversation, the forestry worker reveals she also recently lost her husband, and when Robert asks if he sounds crazy, she astutely notes that when something like this happens, nothing you do is crazy. At the end of this exchange, she observes that they are “just waiting to see what we’ve been left here for,” and that line has really stuck with me.

Robert does also encounter other people who treat him with callousness, particularly younger colleagues as he begins to realize he is aging out of the manual work of timber. Still, he lives his entire life as a quiet, stoic man who really never changes, except perhaps in that brief moment near the end. But sometimes it’s only a brief moment that can make all the difference, and it was indeed the moment that opened up my love for this quietly beautiful movie.

Robert keeps walking the path set out before him.

Overall: A-

WICKED: FOR GOOD

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B
Special Effects: B
Music: B-

I think I made the right decision not rewatching last year’s Wicked: Part I right before seeing Wicked: For Good. It could only have made For Good more of a disappointment—because Part I was undeniably, unequivocally better. Not by a wide margin, mind you, but a distinct one. One is left wondering what justification there was in even splitting this story into two parts, aside from box office hopes. I actually rather enjoyed Part I, even though at 2 hours and 40 minutes, I still thought it was indefensibly long—based on the first half of the stage play, which was only 5 minutes shorter than the entire stage play (including the 15-minute intermission). Here, For Good clocks in at 2 hours and 18 minutes, which means director Jon M. Chu has given us a combined four 4 and 58 minutes adapted from what was originally 2 hours and 30 minutes of actual content.

Which begs the question: why not just adapt this into a far tighter, 3-hour entertainment spectacular? I think I already answered this, really. We have to bleed this property for all it’s worth, right? Indeed, it’s easy to forget how complex the history of Oz is, with the original L. Frank Baum novel having been published in 1900; that book being adapted into the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz; the original Gregory Maguire novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, a revisionist take on Baum’s characters, having been published in 1995; Stephen Schwartz’s stage musical Wicked having been first produced on Broadway in 2003; and then just last year, we got Wicked: Part I, the first half of Jon M. Chu’s film adaptation of the musical.

Every iteration of stories in this universe has had their devoted fanatics, of course—albeit none with more staying power than the 1939 film, which was enjoyed untouched for nearly 60 years, unless you count the bizarre 1985 film Return to Oz, which never garnered the same kind of devotion. I never read the original novel Wicked, and perhaps I should; I suspect I would like it better than the films—and to be clear, I do enjoy the films (and I particularly enjoy Part I). After seeing Wicked: For Good, which was a movie I wanted to be delightful but which was just fine, I rather wish I could see a direct film adaptation of Gregory Maguire’s novel, rather than a film adaptation of a stage musical adaptation of the novel, which by necessity strips an original story of much of its detail and nuance.

For Good spends a lot more time than Part I on drawing connections to The Wizard of Oz, right down to offering origin stories for the Cowardly Lion, the Tin Man, and the Scarecrow. In each case, the retconned explanation for their existence is a stretch at best, even in a world of magical characters. Dorothy even shows up here, sort of—she figures surprisingly prominently in the chain of events, but only as a shoehorned narrative device, often as a somewhat forced in-joke. It’s easy to imagine how this can work better in a stage production, in which our main characters refer to a Dorothy we never see except as a silhouette. Chu, on the other hand, gives us glimpses of her, either very briefly from behind or just parts of her body, which makes her feel much more real, and therefore inexplicably ignored.

A lot that was established, and even leaned on hard, in Part I gets little payoff here—particularly the existence of talking animals who are oppressed by the governing characters of Oz. There are only a few brief scenes with animals actually talking here, which is actually fine because this element was one of my least favorite parts of Part I. That’s a lot of effort for such little satisfaction of resolution, though. I did enjoy the arc of the flying monkeys, one of the elements I like in both films: their origins, who they were originally loyal to, and the manner in which their loyalty shifts to Elphaba. They also, collectively, make for some of the more memorable cinematic images in For Good.

And yes, there are some good songs in For Good, particularly “I Couldn’t Be Happier” and especially “For Good.” Again, though, they still pale in comparison to what we got in Part I (and, by all accounts, this is a common refrain about Act I versus Act II of the stage musical): “Dancing Through Life,” “Popular,” and especially “Defying Gravity,” which serves as the spectacular big finish of both the first act of the play and the first of these two films. Part I also featured delightful choreography, which is all but nonexistent in For Good. This film spends much more time on Oz’s society turning for the worse, and a reconciliation between Elphaba and Glinda that is ultimately tragic.

Part I was so enjoyable, though, that it creates a lot of goodwill that carries into For Good, in a way that I don’t think For Good would be able to sustain on its own. People went to see the first film multiple times, and there’s no way that’s going to happen as much, if at all, with For Good. But we still love these characters, who mean just as much to us now as before, thanks in large part to the production for both films having taken place at once. We feel the love and struggle between Elphaba and Glinda because Cynthia Eivo and Ariana Grande embody them, respectively, so wholly and fantastically, with such clearly genuine affection for each other. If there is any reason to see this movie, it’s the two of them.

Splitting Wicked into two films really does both films a disservice. Part I feels like a great start that we now know had no hope of living up to expectations; For Good is decent but inherently inferior. I had a fine time at the movies, but can’t imagine going out of my way to watch this again. Had this been adapted into a single film, it likely would have elicited a much more enduring affection.

I don’t know who they think they are!

Overall: B

THE RUNNING MAN

Directing: C
Acting: C
Writing: D+
Cinematography: B
Editing: C+
Special Effects: B-

Edgar Wright has directed and co-written so many delightful movies—Shaun of the Dead (2004), Hot Fuzz (2007), Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010)—it’s easy to expect, or at least hope, that a new one will at least be really fun. Baby Driver (2017) was fun but did not quite reach the heights of his earlier work; and Last Night in Soho (2021) was . . . fine. You can perhaps detect a shift here, and I suppose every good director, if prolific enough, will inevitably product an outright dud.

Enter The Running Man, an exercise in squandered potential if ever there was one. Wright also has a co-writing credit here, alongside Michael Bacall, who previously collaborated with Wright on Scott Pilgrim vs. the World—a movie which, by the way, holds up surprisingly well. So what the hell happened? This The Running Man, the second adaptation of the Stephen King novel by the same name (the first having starred Arnold Schwarzenegger, in 1987), is badly written, phoned in by the actors, looks ugly, and is overlong. What person in their right mind thinks 133 minutes is a reasonable runtime for a movie like this? I saw that runtime before seeing the movie and immediately knew it didn’t bode well. A perfect runtime for a movie like this is, say, an hour and 45 minutes. (The 1987 film was an hour and 41.)

I never expected greatness from this movie, but I thought it would at least be dumb fun. It was dumb all right, though in a particularly unexpected way: this movie thinks it’s way smarter than it actually is. This is a dystopian future in which the divide between wealthy and poor is massive; “megacorps” own everything including government and law enforcement; and mass entertainment caters to the lowest denominators of profanity and dehumanizing violence—all the same beats we have seen time and time again in dystopian movies. The Running Man goes further with characters regularly ranting about the state of inequality, in ways that thoroughly ignore subtlety and never sound like anything but platitudes.

All of this shit is going in one ear and out the other of anyone watching, who are just there for escapist entertainment in an American cultural hellscape. The very existence of this film is the product of what it’s pretending to be preaching against. It’s worth noting that the one thing this movie does that we haven’t seen much of before is use AI as a plot point, with The Running Man’s gameshow manufacturing footage that isn’t real in an effort to keep the audience against the contestant—except it’s never addressed as “AI” and only ever declared “not real” in ways, again, we’ve already heard a thousand times. The only thing that could make this entire production—with a budget of $110 million—more perfectly cynical would be to learn that AI was actually used in the making of it.

I do try to find redeeming qualities, and I found a couple, though they hardly make up for what makes this movie suck. The cinematography isn’t bad, but that doesn’t mean much when the production design is so dingy and drab. Ben Richards (Glen Powell) spends a lot of time running around cities with crumbling infrastructure and complacent bureaucracy. The special effects aren’t terrible, but none of what’s decently rendered looks very good. There is evident skill but a fundamental lack of imagination. Even when we first meet Ben and his wife, Sheila (Jayme Lawson, given a truly nothing part to work with), we learn of their desperation to find medication for their young child with the flu. This is set in their tiny closet of a home surrounded by concrete walls, and the entire sequence is a deeply clunky exposition dump through their dialogue. This, along with Ben pleading with his shitty boss to get his job back, is how the film opens.

The Running Man reveals itself to be in trouble as soon as characters open their mouths. Glen Powell must be noted here, as deeply miscast in the role of a deeply disenfranchised, constantly furious man. After many roles as a romantic charmer of a leading man, I suppose it’s understandable that he’d want to be cast against type, except that he works well in those other roles and just isn’t believable here. He doesn’t feel genuine.

Naturally, as Ben spends a lot of time on the run, he crosses paths with an ensemble cast of supporting characters, including Scott Pilgrim star Michael Cera, here a surprisingly credible underground revolutionary who offers Ben aid. He’s booby trapped his large house so he can have fun with the “goons” (what everyone calls the police in this film, right down to the brief sighting of graffiti that reads AGAB) once they inevitably catch up with them. This is one of the more engaging action set pieces in the film, but for the fact that it comes along way too late and has no critical need to be included in the plot whatsoever.

The first helper Ben comes to is his old friend Molie, played by the always dependable William H. Macy, who is given far too little screen time—he’s in maybe two scenes. Sean Hayes makes a single appearance as the host of another dehumanizing gameshow called Speed the Wheel, in which we see an overweight man literally run to death on a human-sized hamster wheel. Lee Pace plays the leading “Hunter” among those professionally hired to chase down The Running Man. Pace spends most of the movie with a mask over his face, and it’s eventually taken off like a big reveal, only to show a guy whose biggest part to date has been as Brother Day on the Apple TV series Foundation.

The Running Man is just a series of misguided choices at every turn. Very late in the film, Ben takes a woman hostage played by Emilia Jones, who was previously seen as the hearing daughter of deaf parents in the 2021 Best Picture winning CODA, and much more recently as Maeve, the antagoinist’s niece in the HBO limited series Task. This resume reveals a very talented young actor who can disappear into different parts, but the only explanation I can come up with this one was that she wanted to be part of an action blockbuster.

I think I can say with confidence that The Running Man is not fated to be a blockbuster, especially once regular audiences start to see it, and do not rave about it. The closest thing to a saving grace this movie has is several fairly exciting action set pieces; once the clunky exposition was out of the way and Ben was on the run, I found myself more engaged, and thought maybe that would turn me around on the thud of a note the movie starts on. This sensation was short lived, as the writing is so inexcusably rote. Characters don’t make logical choices, but rather make dumb moves transparently designed to keep the action going. This gets ratcheted up to such ridiculousness that there’s even a gun battle in an airplane cockpit.

And all this time The Running Man is presented as though it’s confidently entertaining us, while also being thematically provocative. It definitively fails on both those fronts, ultimately serving up only rehashed ideas and recycled platitudes.

Is he angry or confused? After seeing this movie, you’ll be both!

Overall: C

FRANKENSTEIN

Directing: B-
Acting: B
Writing: B
Cinematography: B
Editing: B-
Special Effects: C-

We need to start by discussing how terribly miscast Jacob Elordi is as “The Creature” in Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein. Not because he’s bad—he’s actually a talented actor. But, and stay with me here, because he’s too hot. I’m not sure what del Toro was thinking. Did he think that just because Elordi is 6’5”, that would make him a frightening and imposing figure? Hardly. He’s far too youthful, too healthy looking, too strapping—and more than anything, too thin. This movie should have been called Frankentwink.

Indeed, once The Creature is brought to life, by this story’s namesake, Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac), we are treated to a memorably large number of shots of Hot Creature in little more than what looks like a sort of mummy-loincloth. I found this distracting enough to hope there is a costume design featurette somewhere called “Frankenstein’s Bulge.”

If you have been living under a rock for the past 207 years and don’t know this, The Creature is made up of the body parts of many different cadavers, assembled into a new being. Whenever injured, his wounds heal with magical swiftness—in this film it’s nearly instant, as opposed to the weeks it takes in Mary Shelley’s original 1818 novel. So, I suppose we’re not meant to think of his flesh as rotting. The Creature is not a zombie. He just can’t die. I still can’t imagine he smells great. He’s too hot in this movie for that to matter, Elordi’s whole body made up to look unsettlingly like an assemblage of disparate body parts. Except that Dr. Frankenstein finds all these different body parts from recently killed soldiers in battle. How did he get them all so perfectly proportioned?

Frankenstein does direct his assistance in the search to find larger bodies, “for scale.” Perhaps you could argue that most such men would indeed be young. This is a change from the novel, in which the body parts are found in charnel houses, slaughterhouses, and graves. I just keep thinking about the idea of The Creature being terrifying. You’d expect such a being to be both tall and thick. I saw Jacob Elordi’s Creature character and I just wanted him to spoon me.

He does have superhuman strength, so I guess I’d have to concede that can be scary, even if it’s an adorable 6’5” 28-year-old. Del Toro is far too indulgent with a lot of these details in this adaptation, however—at one point, The Creature single-handedly frees a dutch sailing ship from the clutches of arctic ice.

And this is where we must move on to the other marks against del Toro’s Frankenstein—namely, how indulgent it is, but also its truly terrible special effects. It does have impressively detailed period production design, but it’s also packed with truly subpar CGI. Fire in particular looks terrible in this movie, whether it’s from a giant explosion or just flames on candles. It practically looks animated. This film had a budget of $120 million; did they spend it only on production design and cast salaries?

It’s also too long, clocking in at two and a half hours. Ten minutes of this are the end credits; another ten are the “Prelude” We otherwise get “Part 1,” which lasts about 80 minutes and is narrated by Dr. Frankenstein; “Part 2” makes up the remaining 49 minutes and is narrated by The Creature. Jacob Elordi’s distracting hotness aside, The Creature’s section is by far the most compelling, as written by del Toro himself in his singlehanded script adaptation. I just wish it wasn’t so often bogged down by such bad special effects, as in one scene in which The Creature is attacked by a pack of wolves who might as well have been pixelated, they are so obviously not real. What the hell are we watching here, The Twilight Saga: New Moon?

I don’t know why it’s so hard for anyone to make a decent modern cinematic adaptation of Frankenstein. Kenneth Branagh’s 1994 film Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is so awful that I have never been able to tolerate more than half of it before turning it off to end my misery. To Guillermo del Toro’s credit, this 2025 Frankenstein is far better than that, but that bar is in the basement. At least I was still relatively entertained by this movie, my many complaints about it notwithstanding. Some trimming, particularly of the overlong Part 1 from Dr. Frankenstein’s perspective, would have improved it. I did like that, when the perspective switches, it still continues The Creature’s story right where Dr. Frankenstein’s left off, rather than rehashing anything we’ve already seen.

This film does waste some other major talent, though. Christoph Waltz plays Harlander, Dr. Frankenstein’s benefactor, but he’s just never a very compelling character. Mia Goth is cast as Elizabeth, Harlander’s niece who is also engaged to Dr. Frankenstein’s younger brother William (Felix Kammerer), but all she ever does is dote over The Creature as the only character who ever has any fully informed empathy for him. Goth has made a career of playing fantastic freaks, and this character is just too normal for her. We even get Charles Dance, gone after just a few scenes as Victor and William’s authoritarian father; and Lars Mikkelsen (Mads’s brother) as the captain of the aforementioned Dutch ship. The most interesting of these older character actors in the film is David Bradley (best known as Argust Filch in the Harry Potter films), as the blind man who treats The Creature with kindness and no judgment because he cannot see him.

Finally, and this is where I get a little more nitpicky, there are the lapses in logic, such as when The Creature, in pursuit of revenge against Dr. Frankenstein, allows a stick of dynamite to blow up in his hands. The resulting explosion is huge, the shockwave alone hurling Dr. Frankenstein’s body like a rag doll, and yet The Creature remains standing, unbroken. This would not have at least dismembered him? I suppose I can’t expect a story that ignores science to pay attention to simple physics.

Frankenstein is now streaming on Netflix, and there are multiple reasons why this is a huge part of what kept the film from realizing the potential it clearly had. Netflix has a reputation for allowing auteurs to realize their full vision, and on the one hand that is to be commended. On the other hand, it also means that filmmakers don’t get any notes when maybe they needed some. Had this film gotten a full theatrical release, it might just have gotten some much-needed guardrails. Would The Creature still have been played by Jacob Elordi? Probably, just because he’s a hot young star. The Creature should be a genuinely grotesque being with heart, though—not a young hunk cosplaying as a loinclothed monster like some dude at the West Hollywood Halloween parade. Frankenstein’s monster should elicit pity, not lechery.

Choke me Frankendaddy

Overall: B-

PREDATOR: BADLANDS

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B
Special Effects: B

I would not likely have had much interest in Predator: Badlands based on its own premise alone, if not for the fact that it was directed and co-written by Dan Trachtenberg, who directed and co-wrote the quite pleasantly surprising Prey (2022)—easily the best film in the Predator franchise. Okay, fine: full disclosure, Prey was only the second straight-up Predator film I ever saw, and I saw the original, 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger film so long ago I don’t even really remember it. But, I feel confident of this perspective based on critical consensus on al these films, which is generally a reliable barometer of quality. I guess I should say that “by all accounts” Prey was the best film in the franchise. It’s certainly remains the best of those I have seen.

The definition of which “Predator” films I have seen is a little murky, however, as is the degree to which Predator: Badlands should be regarded as a crossover with the (far superior) Alien franchise. The two Alien vs. Predator films are widely not regarded as canon in either franchise, the first of those being the sort of so-bad-it’s-good that I still never bothered to see its 2007 follow-up, which thus makes that one to date the only major film featuring a xenomorph that I have never seen.

Predator: Badlands has no further connection to the Alien vs. Predator films, however, beyond its inclusion of “synthetics” manufactured by the Weyland-Yutani corporation, two of which are played by Elle Fanning, without whom this film would not have worked at all. There are no xenomorphs in this film, but Weyland-Yutani and its synthetics are very overt pulls from the Alien universe, and I remain unconvinced that it was necessary. Certainly plenty of other science fiction franchises have their own forms of robot characters; why not Predator? Trachtenberg goes one step further by making the Kalisk, the impossible-to-kill monster on Genna, the planet on which most of the action takes place, the “specimen” that Weyland-Yutani is seeking to capture and bring home for its bioweapons division—just as had been the xenomorphs before it, though they get no mention here.

I did enjoy Predator: Badlands, and the critical response to it has been roughly equivalent to Prey, but I very much prefer Prey. That one had a far more efficient self-containment, within only the Predator franchise, but with what I found to be a far more novel premise: the earliest Predator sent to Earth, who winds up doing battle with North American Indigenous people of the early 18th-century—and specifically, a young woman. Predator: Badlands does a lot that has never been done in a previous Predator movie, but it’s all stuff that has already been done in other film sequels: turning the villain into the hero (which we’ve now seen in many films, from Terminator 2: Judgment Day to M3GAN 2.0); giving robots human feelings; turning a dangerous creature into something merely misunderstood. Even the manner in which the villain is destroyed in Terminator 2 has a very direct echo in this film.

Which is to say: Predator: Badlands is plenty entertaining, but lacks the cultural depth of its predecessor, and is certainly less rewatchable. There is a great deal of action in Badlands, which was a big selling point—for a film like this, I will go the uncharacteristic route of saying it could have used more relentless action, based on how it’s being sold to audiences. This film also features the first Predator ever to be given a name: Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi), who is immediately emblematic of the “weakness” the must be “culled” from a “Yautja” clan (Yautja being the name given to the Predator species). He is much smaller in stature than others of his kind, and when his older brother protects him from being killed by their father, their father kills the brother instead. Dek then goes on to Genna, seeking the apex predator no one has ever captured on the widely lethal planet, and planning to bring it back home as a trophy to prove his worth, and also seek revenge against his father.

It’s a lot of detail, much of which is revealed in the cold open before the opening title. All this “honor” talk among the Yautja is just another form of machoism that I have little interest in, the rest of the film slowly inching Dek away from that mindset notwithstanding. But if he returns with an even slightly altered idea of honorable behavior, to a fictional culture created specifically to be loyal to such ideas to the death, what then? Badlands doesn’t really bother with these questions. Perhaps another film in the Predator universe will, but I’m not sure how interested I’ll be.

All the Weyland-Yutani stuff aside, it’s when Dek discovers the synth Thia (Elle Fanning) that Badlands gets really interesting. This film actually has no human characters at all, as the Earth mission to Genna is comprised entirely of synths (all played by only two people: Fanning, or Cameron Brown, who plays all the “drone synths” who ultimately serve as this film’s version of Star Trek “red shirts”—nameless and easily destroyed). Thia has had a run-in with the Kalisk, and her body from the waist down is missing. Dek spends much of the film carrying Thia’s upper half on his back (this also being a clear reference to C3PO in The Empire Strikes Back). One of the better parts of Badlands is when Thia’s upper half and her lower half, still separated, work as a team fighting off the aforementioned drone synths.

Perhaps the biggest selling point of Predator: Badlands is the creature design—not so much that of Dek, who looks basically like the many other Yautja we’ve already seen, but that of the many alien species on the planet Genna, from carnivorous plants to animals, to even razor sharp blades of grass. This film is also packed with visual effects, and while I can’t say the CGI particularly wowed me, it was pretty decent. At the very least, unlike far too many other CGI-heavy films, it doesn’t look distractingly artificial.

Badlands has further twists that are not necessarily had to see coming, but at least it’s an exciting ride while it’s in motion. Dek and Thia befriend a small, monkey-like creature that later proves to be an important detail on which the plot turns; Thia names him “Bud” and he’s weirdly cute, like a cross between a chimp and a bulldog. To Badland’s credit, a great deal of impressive work went into its production, from the creation of an entire language for the Yautja by linguist Britton Watkins, to very believable animal behaviors specific to different fictional species. I’d have liked a bit more originality in the story beyond “twists” that are just rearrangements of well-trodden ideas from other films, but anyone with a thing for sci-fi action films with detailed world building is going to have a good time here.

Teamwork makes the dream work in Predator: Badlands.

Overall: B

DIE MY LOVE

Directing: B
Acting: A-
Writing: B
Cinematography: A-
Editing: B

Die My Love is very much in conversation with If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. The key difference is that If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is much more straightforwardly about motherhood; Die My Love is about a mentally ill woman who also happens to be a mother.

Granted, in what is arguably Die My Love’s best scene, Jennifer Lawrence’s Grace character chats with another mother at the party who specifically mentions post-natal depression, which would suggest that is specifically what this film is about. What’s curious about this is how Grace, for the most part, seems to have no problem with motherhood itself, or her baby. Indeed, at one point she says of her baby, “He’s perfect. It’s everything else that’s fucked.” But, perhaps that is the point: depression is not marked by logic. Furthermore, many of Grace’s frustrations actually make sense: her husband, Jackson (Robert Pattinson) has suddenly lost his sexual appetite for Grace, even though Grace’s sex drive has not waned. And Jackson travels for work, leaving Grace to feel crushing boredom as a stay-at-home mom.

It’s worth noting that Die My Love is directed by a woman (We Need to Talk About Kevin’s Lynne Ramsay), and co-written by two women (Lynne Ramsay and Lady Macbeth’s Alice Birch, along with Small Things Like These’s Enda Walsh, who curiously gets top billing among the writers). Maybe there is something about Die My Love that is just impossible to understand if you have never been pregnant or given birth to a child. Except, I must admit, I found If I Had Legs I’d Kick You to be much more coherent, even with its sometimes abstract style, and certainly more substantive in content.

Die My Love takes a far less linear approach, jumping back and forth in time, from the beginnings of Grace and Jackson’s relationship, to the period shortly after the birth of their child. The film leans so far into its nonlinear structure that, when it moves to a wedding sequence, I assumed it was a flashback to before the child was born. But, then you see the baby at the wedding. And this occurs well after many things happen that any reasonable person would think maybe these two should break up.

To be clear, Die My Love is very much about Grace’s mental illness—but within the context of her relationship with Jackson. Jackson is understandably befuddled by Grace’s crazy behaviors, but he’s also kind of an asshole. Shortly after the birth of the child, he’s not very locked into parenthood, and seems to operate under the assumption that Grace will assume all such responsibilities. And any guy who brings a dog home as a surprise to a spouse already dealing with a toddler is an asshole in my book. That dog, who is immediately quite literally an incessantly whiny bitch, becomes a significant plot point. Usually the audience wants to side with the dog in any movie, but I’m not so sure in this case. The dog can’t really be blamed. I blame Jackson, who expects Grace to take care of it, and certainly never bothers to train it.

It’s a bit difficult to parse, with Grace, how much of her erratic behavior can be attributed to innate mental illness and how much is a result of her crushing boredom spending all of her days with no one but a toddler—with the exception of a mysterious figure she has an affair with, played by LaKeith Standfield. Stanfield is an incredibly gifted actor and he keeps getting cast in parts that waste his talents, including this one. There is a single scene that reveals Stanfield’s character’s own life, and although it gives him some dimension, it does nothing to broaden his context or purpose in Grace’s life beyond sexual release.

Grace, for her part, does some wild shit—not least of which is approaching Stanfield’s character when she sees him with his wife and their wheelchair user daughter in a store parking lot. She has a propensity for injuring herself in truly startling ways, such as hurling herself through a sliding glass door, in a desperate attempt for attention from her husband. Grace’s mental illness is quite apparent far earlier than anyone does anything about it. You’d think smashing through a sliding glass door would be a pretty big red flag, but Grace does at least two more things at least as dangerous, if not more so, before she is taken to get any professional help.

To be fair, I suppose, not everyone understands when things are truly critical under these sorts of circumstances. And god knows, Jackson isn’t the most understanding person in Grace’s life. In fact, it’s Jackson’s mother, Pam (an always-wonderful Sissy Spacek), who is the only person who grants Grace any true empathy or understanding. Even she tells Grace, “Everyone goes a little loopy in the first year.” Grace doesn’t understand at first that Pam is talking about motherhood, and even when it becomes clear she avoids the issue by cutting her visit short.

The performances are excellent all around, but there is something about Ramsay’s style that leaves me a bit ambivalent about Die My Love, which falls a bit short on coherence and is long on metaphor that lacks full clarity. Again, perhaps people who have actually given birth will see some clarity here, but this was the sort of thing that If I Had Legs I’d Kick You did far better. I understood the frustration and desperation in that film thanks to Rose Byrne’s breathtaking performance. Jennifer Lawrence is also excellent, but I also kind of didn’t get it. I suppose that may be the point. With metal illness, there isn’t a lot to “get.” Die My Love, then, is a film that spends more time demonstrating that fact than giving us reason to empathize with Grace.

Die My Love is also pretty grim and hopeless, especially as it pertains to Grace, even after she has gone in and out of a mental health facility. Ramsay gives us no clean answers, no neatly tied bows to the story, and I respect that. There is even a dark beauty to the metaphorical forest fire that ends the film. There’s a peculiar dissonance to an artistic beauty that also conveys a deep sense of despair, and that might just be what you leave this film feeling.

It looks like the baby is trying as hard as we are to make sense of his mother’s behavior.

Overall: B

IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT

Directing: A-
Acting: B+
Writing: A
Cinematography: B
Editing: A

I wonder if I’m over here on Weirdo Island, thinking about Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho while watching Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident? There is almost no thematic connection between these two films, although Psycho features a serial killer and It Was Just an Accident features a near-murder. What the two films have in common are their unusual narrative structure, particularly an opening, extended sequence leading us to think one person is the main character, only to find out it’s actually another person. Indeed, the first character is even attacked by the second.

We are first introduced to a nuclear family, driving through the night: a seemingly loving husband and father (Ebrahim Azizi) with his wife in the passenger seat and pop music-loving young daughter in the back seat. The cinematography is fascinating here, as it appears to be a simple mounting of the camera on the dashboard, and a lot happens in a single shot—including other cars passing, in one case with several barking dogs chasing in the other direction. Within moments, we hear the bump of an animal being hit, and the man stops the car, gets out, and investigates. The camera never shows the animal—this technique is repeated later in the film in a pointed way—but we do see bits of the man’s shadow, a view of city lights on the hills in the distance behind him, as he drags the animal out of the street. He returns to the car, and the little girl’s chipper attitude has soured. “You killed it,” she says. And the mother tries to console her. It was just an accident.

Shortly thereafter, this family’s car breaks down, and the man asks for help from men in a nearby home. This is where the perspective suddenly shifts, to another man, Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), who is hiding on the second level of the home, out of sight. Panache’s camera only ever sticks with Vahid for the rest of the film, and it’s quite a lot time before we have any idea why. This includes Vahid following the man back to his home, and following him the next day to the place his car is towed to for repair. In his own van, Vahid creeps up on him in the street, opens the passenger door hard against him, and then knocks him out with a shovel.

All of this is essentially the first act. What follows is an unsettling sort of road trip story, Vahid eventually gathering several more characters: Shiva (Mariam Afshari), a woman working as a wedding photographer; Goli and Ali (Hadis Pakbaten and Majid Panahi), the engaged couple getting their pictures taken; and Hamid (Mohamad Ali Elyashmehr), Shiva’s former partner. what is gradually revealed is that nearly all of these people, with the one exception of Ali, were once arrested by the Iranian regime, and tortured for months by a man with an identifiable limp due to a prosthetic leg named Eghbal—and they are all varying levels of convinced that the man we met at the start of the film is this man.

It may seem that I have revealed a lot of detail about this film, but believe it or not, that is all mostly the setup. It does take a good deal of time to get through, but it’s how we get here: the way Panahi, who also wrote the script, explores the psychological effects of a deeply oppressive and authoritarian regime. The man who might be Eghbal easily plants a seed of doubt in Vahid’s mind as to whether he’s got the right guy, which is why he goes on an odyssey of sorts, gathering acquaintances who had also been arrested in the hopes that they can confirm the man’s identity, even though they were all blindfolded the entire time they were held captive and never actually saw him. They heard him, they felt him, they smelled him. For some, the familiarity they find is not quite convincing enough. For others, it’s triggering to the point of instantaneous rage. For all of them, it’s maddening.

Eventually all of them are traveling the city in Vahid’s van, maybe-Eghbal’s drugged, bound and unconscious body locked in a trunk that is curiously the perfect size for a grown man. There’s a number of exterior, urban shots of this cast with said van, and I often wondered how this film was made. Much like the similarly excellent The Seed of the Sacred Fig, directed and written by Mohammad Rasoulof and opened earlier this year, this was filmed in secret in Iran. Indeed, Panahi and Rasoulof are just two of many artists who have been arrested in the past for speaking out against Iran’s authoritarian regime.

And the roving band of characters in It Was Just an Accident have many of their own conversations about it. They talk and they argue, they debate and they yell—often about the tension between desire for vengeance and what it means to become just as violent and cruel as your oppressors. Many of their exchanges bring to mind parallel points of view here at home in the United States. This is less a reflection of cross-cultural commentary than of universal tensions among different societies. We eventually find nearly all these characters pushed to the emotional brink in one way or another, and It Was Just an Accident proves sneakily unsettling in the end. Panahi often holds a shot for a very long time, always with purpose, and especially in the very last shot of the film, which calls into question whether Vahid did the right thing in the end, or indeed what the point of any of it was. This makes It Was Just an Accident sound pretty bleak, and I suppose it is. It also paints a vivid picture of what authoritarianism does to the regular people subjected to it.

Overall: A-

BUGONIA

Directing: B+
Acting: A-
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: A-

If director Yorgos Lanthimos can be counted on anything, it’s that he’ll make a film with something in it that is very, very weird. It can be an actor, it can be a peculiar performance, it can be the entire story, or it can be a specific turn of the story. In Bugonia, it is very much the entire story, and a specific turn of the story.

In fact, Bugonia takes a turn toward the end that is truly wild, even by Lanthimos’s standard. It’s very easy to feel ambivalent about, the way the script suddenly leans into it, in a narrative space that many will quite reasonably declare is either corny or outright dumb—or at the very least, somewhere in the space between the two. There are some costume designs that are definitely . . . a choice. I found myself with a strange sort of appreciation for it, at least for the huge swing of it all, but I’d also have to admit the movie might have been elevated with this particular sequence removed entirely. That said, there follows a kind of montage that is both beautifully executed and deeply unsettling.

Emma Stone, now having starred in the last four Yorgos Lanthimos films in a row, plays Michelle, the CEO of a pharmaceutical company. Emma is abducted by Teddy (a stellar Jesse Plemons) and his intellectually disabled cousin, Don (Aidan Delbis), who are convinced Michelle is a disguised alien intent on destroying the planet. Very much to put a finer point on it, the pharmaceutical company Michelle runs is very much an active part of destroying the planet—not to mention a key part of treating Teddy’s ill mother (Alicia Silverstone, a strange casting choice considering the character is almost never conscious). Teddy also keeps bees, and we get many discussions about collapsing bee colonies while Michelle is tied to a bed in Teddy’s basement.

I can’t decide how I feel about the choice to make Don an intellectually disable character. I still can’t see the point of it, except maybe that it makes him easily manipulated by Teddy. Aiden Delbis, in a strong feature film debut, is reportedly on the autism spectrum, which at least lends the performance some authenticity. Somewhat ironically, Delbis apparently has no strong feeling about whether autistic characters should be played by autistic actors. None of this provides any answer as to what the purpose of making Don intellectually disabled was, but at least it gave an actor with some similarities to the character some work, I guess.

I went into Bugonia eager to find out whether Michelle really turns out to be an alien or not, which I suspect was the intent. Given Lanthimos’s history of wildly unpredictable films, it was clear he could go either way with this—or even end it with pointed ambiguity. He does make a choice about this, and the surprise about it is how hard he leans into that choice once it’s made clear. You might even leave the theater thinking: Okay, that was a little much.

One of Lanthimos’s many talents is to present a film with no particularly sympathetic characters and still make it compelling. Michelle, human or not, embodies the soullessness of a pharmaceutical CEO with subtle precision. Teddy is a grubby-looking conspiracy theorist few people would take seriously, which of course can be a huge mistake, given the circumstance—for instance, if he has you tied up in his basement. Michelle spends a lot of time trying to reason with him, and it’s clear very quickly that this is not a winning approach. All that said, Don is the one character who is sympathetic, and who even has any clarity of conscience—again, a dubious use of a character who is intellectually challenged.

In spite of all that, I was locked in with Bugonia, thanks to performances that very much elevate the material, which itself isn’t particularly bad either—it’s just not up to Lanthimos’s highest standards. It’s worth noting that Lanthimos did not write this script, which was written by Will Tracy (The Menu), based on the 2003 South Korean comedy horror-thriller Save the Green Planet!, written by Jang Joon-hwan. I can’t say there’s a huge amount of comedy in Bugonia; there are some funny moments, and a couple of laughs that are elicited by chock more than humor. This film is certainly twisted in a recognizably Lanthimosian way, which is something I can always appreciate.

To be sure, Yorgos Lanthimos is not for everyone. His films can be very entertaining, or they can be memorably unsettling. Until the very last scenes in Bugonia, it’s more tense than anything, with the anticipation of potential violence at all times—which sometimes happens, and sometimes doesn’t. In the end this script gets into the violent and self-destructive nature of humanity that’s pretty on the nose, so again, your mileage may vary. I have a lot of love or Lanthimos, so in spite of some clear flaws, I got a lot of mileage out of it.

Is she or isn’t she? That is the question.

Overall: B+

A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE

Directing: B+
Acting: B+
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: A-

All my life, I had this vision the thirty minutes or so it might take for a nuclear missile to reach the United States, and how I would spend those last moments, counting down the clock to obliteration. This vision always presupposed knowledge of the oncoming missile at the moment of its launch, giving time for us to . . . what? Prepare? Well, A House of Dynamite, directed by Kathryn Bigelow (Zero Dark Thirty) and written by Noah Oppenheim (Jackie), and streaming on Netflix now, has completely disabused me of this notion.

Once people even realize a missile is on its way, the countdown has already begun. And these are government and military employees with high security clearance, far removed from average citizens. These people have to spend precious minutes ascertaining whether the threat is even real. It occurred to me, while watching A House of Dynamite, that I really should have considered this long ago: the people spending all that time making decisions first on what's real and then on the select few who get whisked to some version of safety—they're not spending any time sending credible warnings to the masses. Hell, in this movie they spend several of those crucial minutes just ascertaining what the target is. In all likelihood, as is what happens in this movie, anyone just living their lives in a target city would simply be obliterated before they had any idea what hit them.

Is there a strange comfort in that? Maybe there is. One could argue it's not the worst way to go, with no fear or panic preceding it.

And that's a ton of what we see in A House of Dynamite: a huge, ensemble cast of characters having the reality of impending cataclysm settle in. A missile launch is detected, and in the first moments, everyone is blasé about it. They keep track of the trajectory, and realize it's not slowing down and it's headed for us. It soon enough becomes clear that in the best case scenario, ten million Americans are killed instantly and global destabilization ensues—and that is if we don’t fire any retaliatory shots.

There’s a fascinating angle to this film, in that the aforementioned 30 minutes are not enough to ascertain who fired the shot and thus who we should even fire against. Quick discussions are had about preemptive strikes against we could reasonably expect to take advantage of the situation. But Bigelow and Oppenheim never provide us with any of those answers—not what country the missile is coming from; not whether the bomb even detonates (sometimes the don’t, we’re told); not what the President decides about whether to launch our own strikes. This is the Cath-22 of the modern age, not quite as good as that classic film but with much to recommend on its own—because this is about the questions themselves, not the answers. This is about moral dilemmas under the deepest of pressures.

The three-part stucture of A House of Dynamite is arguably a bit of a gimmick: it’s told in real-time, from the moment of detection to the moment of impact, three times over: first in the Situation Room in communication with The Pentagon and Fort Greely, where attempts at ground-based interceptors will be lauched; then at United States Strategic Command (STRATCOM) in Nebraska; and then, inevitably, from the White House. Each of these chapters showcases separate groups of the ensemble cast, all of them interacting with each other: among the many familiar faces are Rebecca Ferguson as a Situation Room senior officer; Anthony Ramos as the commander at Fort Greely; Tracy Letts as the warmongering commander at STRATCOM; Jarred Harris as the Secretary of Defense; and Idris Elba as the President. In many cases, we first see important characters as only a face in one among many screens like an emergency Zoom meeting, then shift to the perspective of the room they are in, in another chapter.

Kathryn Bigelow unfolds this story in a very straightforward, procedural style, much like her multiple previous films set in wartime, but even more procedural in this case. The few moments that characters pause to show emotion are all the more effective. All of this doesn’t allow for a great deal of character development, but that is entirely beside the point: this is about making choices in the face of urgency. And side note, this is maybe not the best movie to watch about such a scenario with the current people actually in charge in Washington, D.C. This is unsettling shit, not the least because it quite pointedly reminds us that while things like climate change have long rivaled it as an existential threat, the nuclear threat to the world is very real and still goes on.

There are precious few genuinely amusing moments in A House of Dynamite, but one of them is when the President himself says how this phrase, “a house full of dyanmite,” was something he “heard on a podcast.” It’s something that feels both on the nose and very plausible. For the most part, these are just a whole bunch of regular people caught up in extraordinary circumstances. Even those who are on evacuation lists among all connected staff across these agencies can feel arbitrary. One character is extracted even though she’s only been in the position for a few months. “Why does she get to go and we don’t?” another woman asks. A fair question. Who in their right mind could expect things to be fair in these moments? But who in these moments would be in their right mind?

I feel a little ambivalent about what purpose this film serves, exactly—I found it to be riveting and unsettling, but to what end? It opened my eyes to at least one stark reality, I guess: not only would I not have any hope of escape from this sort of attack, but in a targeted city I wouldn’t even know it was coming. Surely Seattle would be on the list of targets. Whew! What a relief!

Yeah, you heard that right. It’s time to put you head between your knees and kiss your ass goodbye.

Overall: B+