SIFF Advance: THE SUMMER WITH CARMEN

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

There’s a lot of dicks in The Summer with Carmen. It’s largely set at a clothing-optional queer beach in Athens, Greece, where platonic friends Demosthenes (Yorgos Tsiantoulas) and Nikitas (Andreas Labropoulos) hash out the plot points of a movie script. Nikitas is directing and Demosthenes is maybe starring, and they are co-writing the story based on Demosthenes’s recent life experiences, including an ambivalent love life with Panos (Nikolaos Mihas) and a passive aggressively homophobic mother (Roubini Vasilakopoulou). We see the scenes they discuss play out in flashbacks, regularly cutting back to this day at the nude beach, where occasional hookups are playing out in the open around them, but Nikitas and Demosthenes are concentrating on their scripts, occasionally taking breaks to swim.

There is always a subtle, tongue-in-cheek presentation to The Summer with Carmen, where the story playing out pointedly reflects the plot constructions of their script, or even more on the nose, the script writing book Nikitas has with him as a reference. There’s also the unseen producer they talk about, who wants their movie to be “fun, sexy”—and so, Greek director and co-writer Zacharias Mavroeidis wants us to think of The Summer with Carmen as “fun, sexy” primarily by giving us plenty of close up shots of butts and cocks attached to generally hot bodies at a nude beach.

The metatextual approach was once something I found myself really into as a narrative device—I used it a lot in my own writing 25 years ago—but it has long since lost its novelty. What I’ll give to The Summer with Carmen is the casual way it’s used, in a very laid back, beach-stained story. I use the word “beach” loosely here, as this queer beach is mostly large rocks. I have clearly gotten old, because in one scene, Demosthenes bounds up some rocks in the nude, and rather than admiring his incredible body I just worried about how badly he could hurt himself if he slipped and fell.

There’s a fair amount of sex in this movie, but very little of it at this beach where you might expect to see most of it. The few times it does come up is as humorous asides, such as when Nikitas feels bad for an older man trying to get a “pervy peek” at two other guys who tell him to fuck off. The sex actually serving the story happens in the flashbacks that make up the scenes Nikitas and Demosthenes are writing, in which Demosthenes hooks up with guys in the wake of his breakup with Panos, all the while leaving Nikitas unattended to as his close friend.

That is what The Summer with Carmen is about, really: Demosthenes and Nikitas’s friendship. I always enjoy when a movie focuses on friendship more than romance, as it still gets sidelined most of the time, and especially when it’s between two characters that many writers would want to give some kind of romantic tension. Even in stories about gay friends, writers often throw in something about how they tried to be romantic and it never worked. There is no indication that Demosthenes and Nikitas ever had any romantic or sexual interest in each other, only that they have always been close friends and collaborators.

That said, the cynical side of me doesn’t feel that bad for Nikitas. Romance taking priority over friendship is just the way the world works, and it kind of feels like Nikitas is just pouty and doesn’t understand that. Through the course of this movie, though, we get title cards about the rules of script writing, while it identifies Demosthenes as “The Hero” (and Nikitas as “The Heroe’s Friend”), and that according to the basic rules of script writing, The Hero must learn something and change in some way by the end. In The Summer with Carmen, Demosthenes changes, to one degree or another, in both his romantic and platonic relationships. Except he very directly addresses the fact that scripts only end there and never reveal the frequency with which people just go back to their old habits.

There is a certain cleverness to The Summer with Carmen—the Carmen of the title is a dog, by the way, which Panos adopts after the breakup, and then Demosthenes becomes attached to after offering to pet sit, it’s a whole subplot with a somewhat nebulous reflection of the primary plot. It also has undeniable charm, especially with its breezy yet frank reflection of sexuality among gay men in their thirties.

There is nothing profound or deeply memorable about this movie, nor does it aspire to these things. In fact, it’s very direct about its aspirations to be simply fun and sexy—although Demosthenes and Nikitas also discuss the complications of throwing in heavy themes like homophobia and an ailing parent. The Summer with Carmen never gets too heavy with these things, though, and uses them only to give its characters a measure of weight. I felt the editing could have been tighter, the ton of this movie being more suited to a breezy 90 minutes than even the 106 minutes it runs. But, I still had a lovely time with it.

Sun’s out, plot turns out: Nikitas and Demosthenes rehash their lives in a script written in the buff.

Overall: B

SIFF Advance: SEBASTIAN

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

There’s a lot of gay sex in Sebastian. Many of these scenes go on longer than you might expect, and are unusually frank, it not overly explicit. It seems to be part of the point, given the title character is engaged in sex work in nearly every case, and he comments on how sex workers using modern technology regard it as a job, like any other.

As always, it’s the context that matters. “Sebastian” is actually a pseudonym, used by Max, a 25-year-old writer working for a magazine, getting short stories published, and working to finish a novel. This is where Sebastian’s premise gets particularly compelling: evidently unable to dream up scenarios for his fiction that feel authentic, Max’s “research” involves engaging in actual sex work.

Sebastian has far less to say about sex work, actually, than it does about the ethics of representation. Max is constantly telling people he gets the details for his content from interviews with sex workers; he’s not telling anyone he’s doing the work himself—and, somewhat predictably, he gets in over his head in this endeavor. Why Max doesn’t just do the actual interviewing of seasoned sex workers instead of lying about it is really never made clear. Perhaps he’s genuinely interested in sex work but can’t admit it to himself.

We never get a straight (so to speak) answer to this. There’s a memorable line during a conversation with Max about his novel in progress, another man tells him he spoke to a woman sex worker once, and asked about how she must, inevitably, find some of her clients repulsive. “She said it was never about them,” the man says. “It was always about her.”

Clearly we are meant to infer the same to be the case with Max/Sebastian. But why? To what end? This is, to me, the open mystery of Sebastian. There’s another exchange where Max complains about his own work having nothing to say. His friend retorts that his work need not always have something to say, it need only be true. The tension I constantly felt with this film was whether it’s presenting itself as something “true,” or if it indeed has something to say. I found it difficult to gauge, which kept me at a distance from it.

Which is not to say I didn’t find it engaging, if for no other reason than Ruaridh Mollica’s stellar performance as Max. There’s a moment when another character, another person in the home of one of his clients, says something that could have been the casting call description Mollica responded to: “You have this wholesome, boy-next-door look. But underneath. it’s all filth.” Mollica plays Max with a stunningly calibrated level of nuance, a guy who is eternally uneasy and vulnerable, but with a sturdy sexual confidence. I can’t think of any other character in film that I have ever seen quite like him.

Max’s clientelle tends to skew toward older men, and to Sebastian’s credit, these characters are all very well drawn, and feel like people with real-world dimensions. This film rightly doesn’t judge any of them, even as they have varying reasons for hiring a sex worker. Max has these experiences with them. and the way writer-director Mikko Makela puts this film together, it cuts mid-experience to Max at his laptop later, writing about the experience but from the perspective of Sebastian. This makes it impossible to tell how much truth there is to the rest of these hookup scenes, and how much Max is embellishing or inventing for his novel.

When Max develops a nonprofessional affection for one of his older male clients, Nicholas (Jonathan Hyde), he incorporates this turn into the novel he’s writing. Ironically, his publisher announces that this turn away from all the emotionally detached sex work is something that doesn’t work for the novel, while it’s the very thing that makes Sebastian more interesting. Max even makes reference to it being a means of handing down queer history between generations of gay men that might never have otherwise had anything to do with each other. I’d have loved for Sebastian to explore this more, but evidently the movie is as interested in that as Max’s publisher is.

By the end, Sebastian does manage to shift into a space I did find moving. But, overall, it feels like something is missing, something vital left unexplored. At least Ruaridh Mollica very much elevates the material with his performance, and I’ll be thinking about it for a while.

A perfect performance in an imperfect story.

Overall: B

I SAW THE TV GLOW

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

Maybe I Saw the TV Glow just isn’t for me. Who am I to say it’s bad?

I don’t even want to say it’s bad, really. I just . . . really don’t get it. I’ve never seen a movie so chill and so wackadoodle. How does one accomplish that? This film was written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun, and Schoenbrun being both trans and nonbinary is, it seems, deeply relevant. I have a personal history myself of fitting not quite into such neatly defined categories, but on the periphery of their realm—if nothing else I would be called “gender nonconforming.” And still, I could find no way into I Saw the TV Glow, no direct point of connection. Perhaps it’s a generational thing. Schoenbrun is a Millennial, and I am a Gen-X girly-man.

I have read that the nineties TV show that the two main characters in I Saw the TV Glow watch and obsess over, called The Pink Opaque, is a loose parody of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Presumably it is also relevant to my perspective that I never watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and what few clips I have seen seem too dated and corny, something too far past its time to get into. When Owen grows up and revisits The Pink Opaque, he finds it surprisingly dated and corny. There could be something there.

It’s not difficult to find glowing reviews of I Saw the TV Glow with headlines like “‘I Saw the TV Glow’ is a profound vision of the trans experience”—written, ironically, by a cisgender man. Sometimes it feels like people who fancy themselves “allies” fall over themselves to praise odd—one might say, opaque—art like this. I’m not saying that’s what’s happening here. I very much get the sames that I Saw the TV Glow is just as profound as they say it is, and for some reason it just flew over my head. I still can’t help but wonder: do the critics understand what Schoenbrun is doing here as well as they think they do?

It was about half an hour in when I literally acknowledged to myself: This movie is losing me. I spent a legitimate amount of its run time legitimately baffled as to what was going on—mixed with a legitimate insecurity, visions of smart people I know watching it and then saying, “How could you not get it?” Forgive me, but I prefer films, even ones this laden with metaphor and allegory, to be a little more straightforward.

At least it didn’t annoy me. I wanted to understand it, and was frustrated that I couldn’t. I am very fond of the lead actor, Justice Smith, a gifted actor with talents squandered in the likes of Jurassic World Dominion (2022) or The American Society of Magical Negroes (2024). His performance here is fantastic, genuinely moving, the work of someone who clearly understands the material better than I did. (Side note: interesting that the leads should be cast with cisgender actors—but clearly it gets a pass if the writer-director is trans.) His Owen is deeply repressed, shy, nervous, and forges a tentative connection with a fellow student two years older than him in high school, over the aforementioned The Pink Opaque.

The older student, Maddy, is an out lesbian with abusive parents (indicated only by a passing reference to her stepfather breaking her nose), played just as compellingly by Brigette Lundy-Paine. Owen’s own sexuality is left much less clear, but he does get a quite memorable passage of dialogue when in conversation with Maddy on the otherwise empty high school bleachers: “When I think about that stuff, it feels like someone took a shovel and dug out all of my insides, and I know there’s nothing in there, but I’m still too nervous to open myself up and check.”

Later, when Owen asks his parents if he can watch The Pink Opaque even though it airs at 10:30, past his bedtime, this is the one line his father utters in the entire movie: “Isn’t that show for girls?”

Later in I Saw the TV Glow, when lines are overtly blurred between reality and existence inside The Pink Opaque, which stars two girls, one Black and one White (Owen has a Black mother and a White father; Maddy is White), we briefly see Owen trying on a dress, one similar to the one worn by the star of the show. Should I even be using he/him pronouns for Owen? I’m choosing not to worry about it, especially given almost none of the meaning in this film is made explicit.

I kind of wish I could have gone to see this film with one of the trans people in my life. Might they relate to it deeply, in a way I could never fully imagine? Or, maybe it is just a wild swing and a miss. I hate to be this ambivalent in one of my own reviews, but I guess you can’t always get what you want, like a complex trans allegory that makes sense at first glance.

To be fair, I kept feeling there was some quality thing in there, something I just could not put my finger on. The acting is excellent, and there is some deeply indelible, dreamlike imagery. But then, I Saw the TV Glow ended in a way I found so bemusing and bonkers, I’m tempted to call Jane Schoenbrun the trans-nonbinary Ari Aster. Perhaps they would be flattered by that. For my part, I guess I’ll just accept that I didn’t get it and move on.

A nervous attempt at guarded connection, like me and this movie.

Overall: B-

SIFF Advance: MERCHANT IVORY

Directing: B
Writing: B
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+

How could I have gone this long, literally decades, without fully registering that Ismail Merchant, the producer half of the legendary filmmaking duo (and production company) Merchant Ivory, was an Indian man? I need to start paying attention! At this rate, I’ll never become a bona fide elegant gay elder of refined taste.

There was sure a lot of those at the SIFF screening of this film I just attended. This, I suppose, is one of the pitfalls of a documentary portrait of towering figures late in their lives: who else is left around to remember them? Or, at least, to remember their early days?

Ismail Merchant has been dead now for 19 years, having died in 2005, at age 68, after surgery for abdominal ulcers. Thus ended a personal and professional partnership with James Ivory—an American man born in 1928 who grew up in small-town Oregon—that lasted more than forty years. With Merchant producing and Ivory directing, much of the time also working with longtime collaborators writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and composer Richard Robbins, they made 44 films together.

A large number of them, of course, were British period films—the very thing they became most well known for, although they did make some films with contemporary settings. The most enduringly famous, however, included A Room with a View (1985); Maurice (1987); Howard’s End (1992); and The Remains of the Day (1993). Many years later, in 2018 James Ivory became the oldest person ever, at age 89, to win an Oscar, for his Adapted Screenplay for Call Me By Your Name, a film that really fits into the Merchant Ivory pantheon, particularly as an updated gay love story.

The gayness of it all is largely explored in this new documentary feature film, Merchant Ivory, directed and co-written by Stephen Soucy. He interviews Ivory himself extensively, inserts many clips of archival interviews with Merchant, and features a star studded array of other subjects from the duo’s storied film history: Hugh Grant, Helena Bonham Carter, Emma Thompson, a characteristically spitfire Vanessa Redgrave, as well as some of the writers and costume designers of the films, among others. There are also some notable absences, including Daniel Day-Lewis (hardly a surprise; he hasn’t given an interview to anyone in years), and Anthony Hopkins, who sued Merchant Ivory for unpaid wages after his performance in the 2009 film The City of Your Final Destination (2009). It was the last of four Merchant Ivory films he was in.

Anyway, Maurice was a groundbreaking film in mainstream gay cinema, especially having come right after the success of A Room with a View. Many of the interview subjects discuss how rightly impressed they are by that accomplishment. Conversely, James Ivory himself is relatively cagey about questions regarding his sexuality—fairly frank in answering some questions, but somewhat evasive in others. Merchant Ivory is, a lest in part, a fascinating portrait of a privileged sort of existence among gay men who once lived not exactly closeted, but as an open secret. Ivory and Merchant might as well have been a longtime married couple, but their relationship was not without volatility, with both of them (but evidently, especially Merchant) taking on other temporary lovers as time went on.

The thing about this documentary in particular, is it would qualify as a pretty niche interest. It’s for lovers of sophisticated period dramas, and for anyone interested in the subtle history of queerness in cinema. That does make for a Venn diagram with significant overlap. But outside of that, I’m not sure how much interest this film will hold, especially among younger audiences (and by “younger” I mean, say, younger than 50). Overall cinephiles may find it interesting.

I certainly did, and it compelled me to make a list of Merchant Ivory films I want to revisit, or see for the first time. I have only seen a handful, but of course only a select view would be considered essential in the oeuvre. That said, Merchant Ivory the documentary is fairly simple and straightforward, a compelling document but also mostly something to serve as a jumping-off point. The films they made have a sumptuousness that inherently makes them more interesting than the filmmakers themselves.

The powerhouse Hollywood couple you knew little about.

Overall: B

THE FALL GUY

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

The Fall Guy is a lot of fun. I might even agree with the assessment that it’s delightful. It’s also relatively forgettable, but how important is that? This is a movie that merely aims to entertain while you’re there, and it meets that aim.

There’s a line fairly early on, about the movie the actors are making: it doesn’t have to be realistic, it’s just a movie. It felt like it was giving its own audience permission not to get too nitpicky, and just sit back and enjoy the ride.

I, of course, have nits to pick. It takes a bit longer than really needed in order for the story to really get going. The Fall Guy is the kind of movie that could have been a tight ninety minutes, in which case I would have been left with it in much higher regard. There was no reason for this to be 126 minutes long, which provides too many opportunities for the narrative to sag a bit.

Once the story finally does get going, stuntman Colt Seavers (Ryan Gosling) gets drugged at a club. There follows a fight sequence that is uniquely weird, a character in the scene itself name-checking the psychedelic sequence in Dumbo, a perfectly apt reference. A running gag involves visions of a unicorn. I’d have loved it if this movie had taken the cosmic-comic vibe of this sequence and stretched it through the whole story.

Maybe I just expect too much of a movie like this. The Fall Guy is perfectly serviceable entertainment. You could call it a romantic action comedy, a fairly rare thing to be done all that successfully. Colt gets injured on the job while endlessly flirting with a cinematographer, Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt), quits the job and disappears for a year, gets convinced by producer Gail Meyer (Hannah Waddingham) to return as stuntman on a blockbuster science fiction romance epic on which Jody is now the director. The primary tension is whether these two can overcome Jody’s resentment for Colt disappearing and Colt’s regret for not staying in touch.

In other words, the stakes never get all that high. Not even when Gail asks Colt to go look for the movie’s missing star, Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), but without letting Jody know he’s going it, let alone that he’s doing it to keep the studio from pulling the plug on the production. Granted, the stakes kick up a notch when Colt goes to Tom’s house and finds a fellow stunt man dead in ice in his bathtub.

Most of what follows is just a bunch of action sequences, actors playing the stunt performers who are, ironically, often replaced onscreen by actual stunt performers. A lot of them are genuinely entertaining to watch, particularly a fight sequence in Tom’s apartment between Colt and Tom’s girlfriend (Teresa Palmer), where they wind up using movie props as weapons; a dog who only understands commands in French and takes rides along on a car chase; and a climactic sequence in which three people fighting in an out of control helicopter over a recording device veers a bit into screwball comedy territory. The car chase across the Sydney Harbour Bridge could have been rendered a bit more convincingly real.

When The Fall Guy is firing on all cylinders, it really works, mostly due to the undeniable chemistry between Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt. It should be noted that there is some irony in casting Aaron Taylor-Johnson as the hot movie star and Gosling as—well, as the fall guy, the one whose face you’re not supposed to want to see in the movie he’s working on. I mean, come on. Taylor-Johnson is plenty handsome but he’s got nothing on Gosling. Of course, The Fall Guy is the real movie here and Ryan Gosling is the actual star. Oh right, I almost forgot again: it doesn’t have to be realistic, it’s a movie.

It’s just too bad when a solid-B movie could have been markedly better with just some minor adjustments, a tighter polish. I’m convinced this is the real reason behind the film’s underperforming box office—a light action comedy never needs to run longer than two hours. I never got bored, but I did feel like some minor but key thing was missing. Perhaps it was an editor. A shorter film would have been more tightly packed with what are genuinely good action sequences, but as it is, there are too many stretches without much in the way of action.

There is a slightly pointed bit of dialogue about how there’s no Oscar for stunt performers. It’s saying something that, if there were one, The Fall Guy would not likely win it. I’ve seen better stunts in better movies, but this is still pretty fun—the best we’ve got in the genre at the moment.

How great the shot is, is up for debate.

SASQUATCH SUNSET

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

I went into Sasquatch Sunset expecting a kind of gross-out comedy that happened to be about Sasquatches. I had heard there was a lot of Sasquatch fucking and shitting. These things do happen in the movie, but, if you can believe it, they are used sparingly—which only heightens the impact when it does happen. What I was not quite prepared for was an ultimately bleak mood piece about extinction. In retrospect, the very title of the film should have been a clue.

There are only four characters in this movie, and none of them speak anything beyond a somewhat organized series of grunts. While watching, I kept thinking of the 1986 film The Clan of the Cave Bear, in which no verbal language is ever spoken. What I forgot about that movie is that they have established a form of sign language, with which the film presents subtitles. Sasquatch Sunset doesn’t even have that; in this movie, we just get the grunts. Beyond that, all communication and emotion is conveyed through a sort of mime by actors in hairy suits.

To say that Sasqutch Sunset isn’t for everyone is an understatement. There were reportedly many walkouts when the film played earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival. This is not difficult to believe: I was one of six people in the theater when I went to see this, and a person in the row in front of us did indeed walk out in the midde. She even booked a seat for an AMC screening of Dune Part Two on her phone before getting up and leaving. An excellent choice, to be fair, but still, side note: don’t do that shit. Your phone screen is distracting and annoying—it’s why I know what movie you booked as an alternative, which you should do after leaving the theater.

I really thought Sasquatch Sunset would be funnier. If there’s so much sex and shit, why wouldn’t it be? Well, co-directors David and Nathan Zellner, working with a script by David, have created something akin to a nature documentary—but with mythical creatures as its subjects. They also mark their territory with piss, and in one fairly gross instance we see one vomit after eating too many fermented berries. But the thing is, once I got a recalibrated sense of the meditative tone of this film, I found myself surprisingly engaged by it. In the end, it’s a kind of family tragedy. About Bigfoot. But it takes an unusually “realistic” approach to what Sasquatch might actually behave as feral animals in the forest, particularly as a kind of “missing link” species between great apes and humans.

Speaking of humans, another curious detail of Sasqutch Sunset is that there are none. Inevitably, the Sasquatch characters encounter human civilization, in the form of things like a red X spray painted on a tree trunk, or a campsite. But, they never encounter any human beings. It’s unclear to me whether we are supposed to infer a loss of habitat due to human activity, though we do see them observe smoke from a forest fire in the distance. Several times the Sasquatch characters we’re following smack sticks against trees together in a coordinated pattern, clearly a signal to any other Sasquatch who might hear it. But, these are the only ones we ever see, and —spoiler alert—not even all of these ones make it to the end of the movie. I got to a point where I began to assume they would all be dead by the end of the film, but that’s not exactly how it ends. I suppose it depends on how you look at it.

I’ll definitely give Sasquatch Sunset credit for being absolutely unlike any other movie I have ever seen. I can’t think of a single person I would recommend it to, but I’m not sorry to have seen it. It’s certainly compelling to know that the Sasquatch characters are played, under intricate layers of makeup and prosthetics, by the likes of Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keough, playing the one female among the group. There is also a juvenile played by Christophe Zajac-Denek, and Nathan Zellner himself plays the “alpha.” There is also a baby Sasquatch, performed mostly through what appears to be puppetry, with somewhat mixed results.

There are indeed a few genuinely funny moments, but Sasquatch Sunset plays much more like a meditative drama. And given whose story we are seeing unfold, your mileage may vary. By the time it ended, this Sasquatch story had kind of lost me and then, somehow, brought me back around again. This is a fascinating specimen of experimental cinema, with an unusual blend of absurdity and sincerity. Whether you’ll be into it, even if the premise intrigues you, may very well depend on when you watch and and what mood you’re in. Somehow, in my case, it had a hook that ultimately got me.

They have been to the top and it wasn’t what they were expecting.

Overall: B

ABIGAIL

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

The marketers of Abigail are kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place. Do they lure us all in with what the film appears to be about in its first half and let audiences get a wild surprise with the massive—and undeniably entertaining—turn it takes, or do they completely spoil the twist in all of the marketing? Well, if you’ve seen the trailer to this film, you know they chose the latter. Going with the former actually worked with some films once upon a time: think The Crying Game (its deeply problematic content being beside the point I am making here) or The Sixth Sense. Unfortunately, we don’t live in that world anymore.

But, let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that you are reading this and have never heard of this film, never seen any trailers for it. Do yourself a favor and just go to this movie, sight unseen. Or, make a note of it for when it becomes available on a streamer. I genuinely envy anyone who manages that experience. I enjoyed this film, but almost certainly would have enjoyed it a great deal more had the twist been the schlocky surprise it was meant to be.

If I don’t want to spoil it here, however, what else can I say about this movie? Well, here’s perhaps the most pertinent point: it was co-directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, the duo who previously gave us Ready or Not (2019) and Scream VI (2023). If you have seen those films, that should give you a pretty good sense of what Abigail is like—you may not want to have the twist spoiled, but you probably want to know the genre, which is horror with a healthy sprinkling of comedy. And, there’s a lot of blood, of nearly cartoonish proportions. So if you’re looking for a tear jerker drama or a romantic comedy, this movie probably isn’t for you.

Here’s the biggest drawback of Abigail. What we’re led to believe the film is about in its first half, during which a team of specialized criminals abduct a rich man’s ballerina daughter (a genuinely fantastic Alisha Weir, as the title character) for ransom, just isn’t especially compelling. In order to keep the twist secret, marketers would have to lead us to believe this is all the movie is about—along with, perhaps, the part where the criminals all find themselves trapped inside the house they’ve taken Abigail to. I suppose trailers could have said something like, “It’s not the job they thought it was” and throw in a few clips of gushing blood without showing exactly what’s causing it. These people should have hired me to be on their marketing team.

All I can say is: I will be keeping a lookout for the streaming release of Abigail, with the intent of showing it to my husband, sight unseen. That will be fun. And if by some miracle you don’t already know what this movie is about, just take my word for it: the turn is worth waiting for. The characters, while fairly stock, are genuinely fun as performed by Melissa Barrera as a former army medic and recovering addict; Dan Stevens as a former detective; Freaky’s Kathryn Newton as a hacker; William Catlett as a marine sniper; Kevin Durand as the “muscle”; and the late Angus Cloud as the sociopathic driver. The movie would be nothing, of course, without the delightful performance of Alisha Weir as Abigail, but I’d rather you just watch the movie to find out why.

Suffice it to say that Abigail is excessive in all the right ways, never takes itself too seriously (although an arguably unnecessary subplot regarding the former medic and her estranged young son comes close), and offers all the cartoonish violence you could ask for. Classic cinema this is not, but it delivered on everything I wanted it to be and that I came for.

Just wait until you see what she’s looking at.

Overall: B

CIVIL WAR

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

A movie about a modern American civil war should have a clear point of view, and it should have balls. Alex Garand’s Civil War has neither. It should be noted: the premise alone does not qualify.

I’m not even saying this movie has to make explicit what the political issues were across the country that resulted in armed forces in many states turned secessionists. Garland’s choice to avoid that kind of specificity is actually one of his smart ones. That does not, however, preclude a point of view, something beyond vague notions of “war is bad” or “journalists are soulless.” And notwithstanding the empty complaints among people on the right who clearly haven’t even watched this movie, Civil War really offers very little, story-wise, to hold onto. It’s just a road trip through war-torn country that happens to be America, with some incredibly well directed, gripping, beautifully shot battle sequences.

Even the comparisons of this movie’s American President (Nick Offerman, seen onscreen far less than expected) to President Trump are exaggerated. We know this president is in his third term, that he has ordered air strikes on American citizens (but not how or why), and we know that unlikely groups of people are allied against him. He’s never characterized as a buffoon, or of particularly low intelligence. And yet, the “Western Forces” of California and Texas are allied against him—something that has caused a great amount of chatter among people, on all sides of the political spectrum, as straining plausibility. My stance on this is that far weirder things have happened in times of war, which makes strange bedfellows. Besides, a line early in the film has really stuck with me: “When D.C. falls, they’ll turn on each other.” Indeed, once a common enemy is pushed aside, people previously on the same side are free to find fault with each other.

There are other references to aligned states in throwaway lines in Civil War, such as “The Florida Alliance,” or Midwestern states still loyal to the U.S. government, where small-town residents live their daily lives pretending like none of this is happening. Our protagonist, hardened photojournalist Lee Miller (Kirsten Dunst, truly fantastic) has parents in Colorado doing exactly this. Her very young acolyte photojournalist, Jessie (Priscilla’s Cailee Spaeny, actually 23 years old during production and playing 23, though she barely looks even 18), has parents in Missouri doing the same.

A major problem I have with Civil War is the same problem I have with many dystopian visions of a near future: its refusal to acknowledge race. Does anybody really think there would be a second civil war in the United States and race would have no relevance? There’s a very tense sequence in which Jesse Plemons plays a blithely murderous militia man, and the scene uses two men of Asian descent to illustrate his pointed xenophobia. This is in the same neigborhood as racism, of course, but it’s still distinct from it. But Alex Garland just isn’t interested in going that step further.

This is the fundamental problem with Civil War, which is the cinematic equivalent of a product with claims of nutrition when it actually has none. And don’t get me wrong, there is still a lot to recommend Civil War, which is genuinely gripping from start to finish. But, much like the 2006 film Children of Men, it has too many “why” questions it refuses to answer while it wows us exceptional production. (Children of Men, at least, is far more impressive on a technical and production level, creating a world that feels far more lived in, if just as implausible.)

It’s the ideas themselves that are the problem—or, the lack thereof. This is the kind of movie that you really get into while it’s happening, and can only leave saying it was great if you don’t think too hard about it. Garland, however, is challenging us to think about it, without fleshing out what it’s trying to say. There’s certainly the idea that there are not truly “good guys” in active warfare, and we are never given a side to root for—something these journalists don’t even want, as they pride themselves on supposed objectivity.

And yet, even with journalism being looked at through by far the most critical lense in this film, even that winds up muddled in presentation. Too many of the details make too little sense. “They shoot journalists on sight in the capitol,” we are told early on. Somehow, the armed forces closing in on the capitol welcome press with open arms, no questions asked. Come on, really? And this is hardly a new observation: far too few of the journalists in this film are seen taking video (in fact, I think we see only one or two doing so, and only with a professional news camera—literally not one single character is seen taking video on their smartphone). Lee and Jessie engage with still photography exclusively, albeit with many of the still shots they take being equal parts beautiful and horrifying.

A lot of Civil War is gorgeously shot, which is part of the deeply misleading journey it takes us on. All the plot connections are shaky at best, making this a kind of low-rent Apocalypse Now, even with its often beautiful imagery. I just watched this movie feeling a bit lost as to the actual stakes, and what I was supposed to take away from it. And what I took away from it was its top-notch cinematography, direction, and acting, particularly on the part of Dunst, who has never been better. But what is the whole thing that these parts are coming together to make? Yet another in a long line of supposedly anti-war movies that wow us with its rendering of war, in this case with nothing of any real substance to say.

The Expendables: four journalists face their various fates.

Overall: B

WICKED LITTLE LETTERS

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

Well, I’m going to stay on brand and go right to the race discussion—or rather, the odd point of view that Wicked Little Letters seems to have that there is no need to have one. One might try to argue that this film’s director (Thea Sharrock) and its producers had their heart in the right place, casting key characters in 1920s Littlehampton, England with actors of color, but I would counter that this was wildly misguided. Not so much because it gives dipshit conservatives ammunition in their stupid arguments against “color blind casting,” but because race is never even acknowledged in the film, thereby creating the sense that, while sexism plays a significant part in this story, somehow this was some kind of racial utopia, where skin color meant nothing to anyone. This is tantamount to revisionist history.

And what’s the point of that? This is no reflection on the actors, who are lovely—particularly Anjana Vasan as “Woman Police Officer Gladys Moss,” and Malachi Kirby as Bill, boyfriend to Rose (Jessie Buckley), the woman accused of sending profane letters to people all over the town, but particularly to her self-righteous neighbor, Edith (Olivia Colman). I mean, I’m genuinely glad these actors of color are getting work. I just wish they would get offered roles that made more sense: it isn’t hard to find out that, in the real life story on which this film is based, both of these people were actually White. Because in all likelihood, in 1920s small-town England, such people would be.

This deliberate choice to ignore race in a story steeped in sexism and misogyny is always irritating. It’s the exact same problem that existed in the Hulu adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale, which ignored race in a dystopian near-future. In what universe would this ever be the case? Willful ignorance of intersectionality only serves to further White feminism, which serves no one.

So, that is the major flaw in Wicked Little Letters, and it is a pretty glaring, consistently distracting one—if you approach a movie like this with critical thinking, anyway. This is a small movie that carries no such expectation, but I hesitate to regard that as a good excuse.

All that aside—and admittedly, for me it’s a pretty big aside—Wicked Little Letters is a genuinely charming watch, with solid performances, particularly among its two leads, Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley. both of who already have well established track records as stellar performers. In this case, Colman’s Edith is a middle-aged, never-married woman living a deeply repressed life with her parents and particularly under the thumb of her oppressive father, Edward (Timothy Spall). Buckley’s Rose is the free-spirited, foul-mouthed young mother and widow who moves in next door.

The film opens with what is identified as the “19th letter,” addressed to Edith and read by her parents, all of them sitting at their dining table. They are all convinced, with no more evidence than her general demeanor, that Rose sent it. Soon enough, Edith is giving an official statement to the police, and that is how we get half-truths from Edith about some backstory, where these two women actually spend some time as friends, but then fell out after Rose head-butt a man at Edward’s birthday party. I could have used a little more about how the two women got from there to here, as this backstory gets a bit glossed over, robbing them both of some character dimension.

Wicked Little Letters starts with a title card reading, This is more true than you’d think. Mmm, after seeing how it was cast, maybe not. The “mystery” of who is actually writing the letters becomes clear rather early on, henceforth focusing on where Edith and Rose go from there. For what they are, they do both make compelling characters, a great deal of which can be credited to the actors. I did enjoy the extensive amount of time spent on long strings of increasingly creative profanity. Even the end credits are seen over script appearing on letter papers, with phrases like “ten cocks a week minimum.” So that’s fun.

This is a movie that could have been a lot better with the right guidance, but some of its production choices are baffling. I can’t even fault the writer (Jonny Sweet), as his script makes no reference to ethnicity whatsoever—because why would it? In the end, it’s a charming story that did not aim for fantasy but kind of landed there.

These bitches

Overall: B

PROBLEMISTA

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

Problemista is a kind of movie that takes some time to win you over. I spent the first several scenes unable to decide how I felt about it, as a young El Salvadorian immigrant named Alejandro (Julio Torres) found himself in the tentative employ of a manically eccentric art dealer named Elizabeth (Tilda Swinton), in the desperate hope of getting a work sponsorship so he won’t be deported.

If Tilda Swinton can be relied on for anything, it’s that she’ll play a part wildly different from any other part she’s ever played. She practically invented “disappearing into a role,” and it’s almost like magic how you instantly forget it’s her you’re even looking at. Here, she wholly embodies Elizabeth and her high strung emotional distractions, to a degree that she is genuinely annoying, and when another character says to Alejandro, “I don’t know how you put up with her,” you’re already wondering the same thing. The even more impressive magic trick is how, by the end of Problemista, you are emotionally invested in Elizabeth in spite of all this.

Swinton is the perfectly cast actor who is just the right size star for this size of a movie, but it’s even more important that we discuss Julio Torres, who not only plays the lead part in this movie, but he also wrote and directed it. I was not very familiar with Torres before seeing this movie, but have heard of some of his other projects: Los Espookys, the Spanish-language comedy on HBO; My Favorite Shapes, his comedy special on the same channel. This guy has been around a few years—and he is nothing at all like Alejandro in Problemista.

It would seem that Julio Torres and Tilda Swinton are a match made in oddball heaven. They have wildly different energies, and yet they have chemistry. Alejandro is very mild-mannered and struggles to assert himself; Elizabeth is oppressively assertive. She never quite crosses over into bitch territory, though; all it takes to rein her in is someone who knows how to speak to her in just the right way.

Here’s my one major note for Torres. The way Alejandro walks is . . . a choice. A rather baffling one, honestly: he moseys forward with something between a shuffle and a hop, little tiny almost-bounces with each step. What the hell is that about? Torres’s performance is stellar otherwise, but having Alejandro walk everywhere in this manner was legitimately distracting.

Problemista is clearly intended as both a charmer and a comedy. and although I got a few legitimate chuckles out of it, it’s much more the former than the latter. There are production design choices that contribute to this, little fantasy vignettes casting Elizabeth as a monster and Alejandro as a hero in a fairy tale for him to conquer, both of them wearing decidedly low-rent costumes. It’s like Problemista is actively trying to charm us by calling out its own low budget—and somehow, it succeeds.

Granted, some things in Problemista work better than others. Rza as Bobby, Elizabeth’s cryogenically frozen artist husband whose painting subjects are exclusively eggs draped with different colored cloths (depending on the painting), isn’t quite as indelible a performance. In fact, I wasn’t super keen on the whole “FreezeCorp” thing where that’s how Elizabeth and Alejandro meet, where Alejandro loses his latest desperate attempt at employment. On the other hand, it does create a setup for the swing at the very end that pays off rather amusingly.

I suppose that’s the best phrase for this movie: rather amusing. Not hilarious, not dramatic (Elizabeth’s theatrics notwithstanding), not particularly moving—but rather amusing. It’s also a singular vision, I’ll give it that much. And sometimes a rather amusing, singular vision is all we need.

A diaspora of people exceeding the expectations of the small world they inhabit.

Overall: B