THE CHRISTOPHERS

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

Does Steven Soderbergh do anything besides direct movies? Okay, he directs TV every few years. He’s directed 33 feature films over the past 41 years—that’s an average of one every 15 months. And after three decades of films as varied as Sex, Lies, and Videotape and Erin Brockovich and Ocean’s Eleven and Traffic and Contagion and Magic Mike, his last decade has included eleven feature films and three limited TV series, which on average have been smaller productions that were surprisingly underrated. He’s put out three feature films in the past 15 years alone, from the fascinating but distractingly experimental Presence to the fantastic Black Bag (those two were released all of 7 weeks apart), and now, The Christophers.

Soderbergh is so prolific that I completely forgot he directed this movie. I remember seeing the trailer, and I must have clocked then that it was a Soderbergh movie. But I wasn’t thinking about him at all as I watched it, and was far more compelled by the great performances of an 86-year-old Ian McKellen, and a deceptively stoic Michaela Coel. Coel is here in her first lead role since the earth-shattering TV series I May Destroy You, and it’s clear that she chooses her projects very carefully.

Coel plays Lori Butler, an art restorer who is hired to work with McKellen’s Julian Sklar, a once-very-famous artist now long past his prime. This dynamic, with a younger character contending with a frustratingly enigmatic older character, does recall the 1998 film Gods and Monsters—my person introduction to McKellen as an actor, and even then he was 59 years old (but played 67). I’ve really only ever known McKellen as an old man, and ironically he gained his international fame in the years after that, thanks to the likes of The Lord of the Rings and The X-Men. He seems to be coming full circle now with The Christophers: in both this and in Gods and Monsters he played a queer old man—an artist, even—who never fully came to grips with his sexuality.

What truly makes The Christophers its own thing is Michaela Coel, who is the protagonist of the film. She finds herself hired by Julian Sklar’s fairly dopey two children, played by James Corden and Baby Reindeer’s Jessica Gunning—these two are very well-cast as siblings, though neither of them bear much of a resemblance to Ian McKellen. We do learn that they are actually half-siblings, given Julian’s reference to “their mothers,” and they are obsessed with profiting off the value of Julain’s paintings after his death. This is what they hire Lori for: to fraudulently finish a series of paintings known as “the Christophers”—fabled portraits of a lover who long ago left him—which they know to be languishing unfinished in the top level of his cluttered home.

We never learn much more about Julian’s family or how they came to be so contemptuous of each other, except that Julian blames his kids’ mothers for how they turned out because he “never had anything to do with them.” What we do get is a fascinating portrait of the tenuous connection growing between Julian and Lori, even though Lori openly detests him and is convinced to take this job as a means of revenge. Revenge for what, we do not learn until well into the film, but after Julian makes many offhand remarks about how Weinstein ruined the world for everyone, such as when Lori says Julian should not hang around her in pajama bottoms and an open bathrobe. Indeed, a couple of brief scenes like this are genuinely uncomfortable.

But the truth of Lori’s plan and her motives is uncovered quickly, by Julian who proves surprisingly adept at Internet research and use—indeed, when Lori first meets him, he’s in the middle of recording the Cameo videos he sells to fans in order to make a living (Cameo is never mentioned, of course, but we know what it is). This is how The Christophers gets really interesting, thanks to a script by Ed Solomon (who also wrote No Sudden Move, a very different movie that also happens to be one of Soderbergh’s many recent films). It never goes quite in the direction you expect, and we watch these two sort of begrudgingly come to respect each other’s work, if not necessarily each other.

It’s worth noting that The Christophers has all of 12 credited parts, only four parts of any significance, and Corden and Gunning are only in a few short scenes. The vast majority of this movie features only Ian McKellen and Michaela Coel onscreen, two very different characters dancing around each other’s suspicions, resentments and betrayals. The two of them deliver a ton of dialogue, and I was especially impressed by McKellen’s delivery of a self-deluded bloviator’s lengthy diatribes. Julian is not a particularly pleasant character, but McKellen still imbues him with a broken soul.

The Christophers is unlike any of Steven Soderbergh’s countless other films, and that’s one of the many things I really like about it. This is what seems to characterize Soderbergh’s later work: he seems willing to try anything, and it doesn’t seem to matter what he tries, he does it well. This is a guy who is not seeing out to make masterpieces, he just loves movies, and he loves making movies for people who love movies. This is just the latest of dozens of reasons why I remain happy he’s still working.

The Art of Deception: Michaela Coel and Ian McKellen make a deliciously odd couple in The Christophers.

HAMLET

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

It’s tricky business, these adaptations of Shakespeare plays where they transpose the setting to our modern world but keep the Shakespearean language intact. It’s a jarring experience, a high-concept idea now long since faded from novelty. I would argue that it only really works when the entire world is rendered fantastical, as in Bax Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet from 1996. Granted, even that film was met with mixed reviews, for largely similar reasons, but I would argue that a super-stylized version of a “modern setting” works better.

In the case of this new Hamlet, directed by Aneil Karia and with Michael Lesslie credited as co-writer with William Shakespeare (who was similarly credited as a writer on the 2015 version of Macbeth, which was not transposed to a modern setting), the “royal family” actually owns a real estate and development company called Elsinore Properties, and the setting is modern London. (“Elsinore” is the Danish city where the play is originally set.) Hamlet is played by Riz Ahmed, and he is a so-called “Prince” in a wealthy South Asian family, the parents of whom are consistently referred to awkwardly as “king” and “queen,” because Shakespeare.

Ahmed is onscreen virtually the entire runtime of Hamlet, and I am not convinced he was the best choice for the part. Karia’s approach is to have all of the actors deliver in a deeply naturalistic way, as though they were speaking contemporary English even though the language is straight up Shakespearean. As is usually the case with Shakespeare, I could barely follow what was going on based on the language alone; the delivery added to this challenge, and I could not quite make out a whole lot of what Ahmed was saying.

It’s not like this can’t be done, however. Both Morfydd Clark as Ophelia and Sheeba Chaddha as Hamlet’s mother Gertrude are quite good in their respective roles, and I found myself the most compelled when they were onscreen. Ahmed, on the other hand, delivers his entire “To Be or Not to Be” speech while behind the wheel of a car, driving recklessly down a highway, he shouts the lines like a lunatic: “To beeee! or not to beeee! That is the question!” This is a moment that veers dangerously close to being unintentionally funny.

This Hamlet is a mixed bag at best, adapting Shakespeare’s longest play, which when unabridged and performed onstage can run longer than four hours, into a film that clocks in at under two hours. Aneil Karia embellishes a lot of scenes with no dialogue as transitional flourishes, which can only mean even more of the original text was excised. The result is a number of highly dramatic and emotional exchanges between characters that feel unearned, a film constantly getting out over its skis. When Hamlet tells Ophelia to “get thee to a nunnery” in this adaptation, I hardly knew what the hell he was talking about; we saw Ophelia only a few times up to this point, and now we’re supposed to feel how she’s completely hurt and devastated?

There were a few choices I enjoyed, not least of which was the infusion of South Asian culture and music, even the play-within-a-play rendered as a sort of dark Bollywood dance number in the middle of a Hindu wedding. When Hamlet is first visited by the ghost of his father, his father actually delivers his Shakespearean lines in Hindi—a nice touch that the film could have used more of, but it’s the only time anything like that happens.

I haven’t even seen that many adaptations of Hamlet; the tragic deaths that occur in this film had me thinking to myself, I don’t remember any of this shit! I do remember snippets of other details though, such as the gravedigger scene that is not included in this film. I’ve seen a couple of the higher-profile adaptations of the late 20th century, such as Franco Zeffirelli’s Hamlet from 1990 with Mel Gibson in the title role, and Kenneth Branagh’s four-hour 1996 version in which he both directed and starred. This new version is clearly going for a “cool” factor that those others were not, but it’s difficult to hit that mark when the setting is now but you’re speaking like it’s 1599.

On the other hand, there are performers in this Hamlet who prove it can be done—that you can speak in Shakespearean language and still hold the audience’s attention, no matter how the setting is recontextualized. It’s Ahmed who consistently took me out of it, making subtle but distracting choices that just didn’t quite hit that authenticity sweet spot. Ahmed is a gifted actor who has really impressed me before (most notably in 2020’s The Sound of Metal), but here he feels a little like a square peg in a round hole.

There are several genuinely riveting scenes in this Hamlet, but they all feel disjointed from the rest of the narrative. It would be boneheaded to call any of the dialogue here “bad,” but someone also had to write stage directions, someone had to edit this, and the people who did managed to lower the material rather than elevate it. It’s true that I have a cursory familiarity with the Hamlet story at best, but what’s the point of a movie like this if you can’t follow it if you don’t already know the story through and through? Otherwise the entire enterprise just feels like indulgence.

Honestly, maybe this one should not have been.

Overall: C+

TWO PROSECUTORS

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

I didn’t get too far into Two Prosecutors before I got a sense of where it was headed. This was hardly a surprise, or a spoiler; this film is about a man navigating the rampant corruption of 1937 Soviet Russia—or “Stalin’s Great Terror,” as the film puts it. It’s fascinating how many films we have gotten over the decades about Nazi Germany, and the comparatively few we have gotten about Stalinist Russia. It’s also ironic, given that Stalin’s regime killed more people than Hitler. Which is to say, in Two Prosecutors, the young prosecutor Kornyev, played by Alexander Kuznetsov, is headed nowhere good, as he investigates the treatment of prisoners in his district.

He only manages to meet with one such prisoner, a very old man named Stepniak (Aleksandr Filippenko) who has been falsely imprisoned and by some miracle managed to get a note out of the prison. Not having been provided any writing utensils, he wrote the note in his own blood. Come to think of it, he sure did manage neat and tidy writing in blood with no writing utensils.

Fully the first half of Two Prosecutors follows Kornyev as he is stalled at every turn, making his way through the maze of the prison where Stepniak is being held. He waits, and he waits—and so do we. I got the feeling that Ukranian director and co-writer Sergey Loznitsa’s intent was to make us quite literally feel Kornyev’s frustration. And I’ve got to say: it worked. Two Prosecutors has a glacial pace the likes of which I have not experienced in ages, and is sure to alienate any casual movie watcher.

Of course, this is not a film for the casual movie-goer. It exists to challenge, and force us to confront the dangers of fascism in the most mundane of environments—and how the mundane can be used to mask horrors. This is a movie about a man who is increasingly brave as he insists on doing the right thing, and following the letter of the law, and we know far before the end that he will only be punished for it. I was reminded of the end of the far more exciting All Quiet on the Western Front: all that effort, for this?

After Kornyev finally meets his prisoner and is a first-hand witness to how horribly the NKVD (the abbreviation for the agency that translates as People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs) treats the countless people they arrest without cause, the second half of Two Prosecutors has Kornyev traveling to Moscow to meet with the Prosecutor General—hence the film’s title. Here he walks the labyrinthine halls of government offices rather than those of a prison, but he is stalled in exactly the same way. And we once again spend what feels like an eternity, waiting with him.

It would be one thing if it were just the waiting, but nearly every character is ridiculously stoic. Neither Kornyev nor anyone whose path he crosses has any personality to speak of. The guy who finally grants him permission to visit Stepniak in prison does laugh at his own joke, with a sort of mirthless glee. Once Kornyev finally gets his meeting with the Prosector General, the Prosecutor General listens to Kornyev’s litany of allegations with nary a facial expression. Then he provides him with a train ticket ride home in a train car that’s quite the contrast to the crowded car he traveled to Moscow in. On his ride home, he meets two engineers already sharing the room he’s put in, and these guys are the only characters in the movie who exude a modicum of warmth. And you should know instantly not to trust that.

Two Prosecutors is drab, dull, and bleak—all with clear intentionality. I have a hard time deciding what to make of it, overall. It kind of won me over in the end, as I got a sense of what it was doing. Nevertheless, I do not recommend watching this when you haven’t had enough sleep. You’re guaranteed to nod off, just as Kornyev himself does on more than one occasion.

Yep, this movie has Two Prosecutors in it.

THE DRAMA

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

The Drama is great entertainment for critical thinkers. If you don’t want to be challenged in any way, then this is maybe not for you—mindless entertainment, it is not. I mean, I suppose you could enjoy this movie okay without thinking too hard about what’s going on, or what it’s really about, but you won’t get much out of it that way. And this is clearly not for everyone; the critical consensus is mixed-positive at best. But it really worked for me.

And for me, it is mostly because of what it made me think about, the things it made me consider. And it’s hard to discuss this movie without revealing pretty critical spoilers. This much is revealed in the trailer: soon-to-be married couple Emma and Charlie (Zendaya and Robert Pattinson) are having dinner and wine with their couple-friends Rachel and Mike (Alana Haim and Mamoudou Athie), and after getting a little inebriated, they chose to share what was the worst thing each of them has ever done. Mind you, this was a mistake, and one I would certainly never make at a dinner with mixed company. But, without it, we wouldn’t have a movie.

The things they all share are pretty bad, each of them legitimately heinous, although in a couple of cases you might have to think a bit before realizing how bad it really was. But, it’s Emma who goes last, and her revelation is bad enough to suck the air out of the room. And the thing is, in retrospect, Emma doesn’t even answer the question correctly. Hers is the only answer that is not what she did do, but what she once planned to do but never went through with—at the age of 15, fifteen years ago. But, it’s how close she got to carrying it out that unsettles everyone, particularly Charlie, who is only learning of this within the week before their wedding.

And this brings up a host of questions that are equal parts compelling and unsettling. Does this mean Emma was truly capable of doing something so horrible? Does it mean she’s capable of it now? How much of who someone was as a teenager informs who they are now? The word “psychopath” gets casually tossed out a couple of times, and reasonable people could argue that it’s maybe not hyperbole.

It’s all of these “maybes” that makes The Drama work. It’s not without its flaws, and it leaves some pretty pertinent questions unanswered about Emma’s parents—one question Charlie even asks at one point, only to decide it’s the wrong time for it. So no answer ever comes.

Still, to call The Drama provocative would be an understatement. It could be the biggest conversation-starter of the year: what would you do in Charlie’s position? Learning something like this you never knew about a partner you’ve been with for three years? If anyone does a “movie club” the way people have book clubs, this would be a perfect choice for discussion. And I don’t mean the part about sharing what’s the worst thing you’ve ever done—seriously, just don’t do that—but regarding what you would do if the person you loved most shared the worst thing they’ve ever done, and it was way more than you bargained for.

Of course, Norwegian writer-director Kristoffer Borgli, whose previous film was the somewhat undercooked and definitely overrated Dream Scenario in 2023, ups the stakes by having this happen to a couple right when they’re about to get married. This puts a ton more pressure on them than they would otherwise have, and provides ample opportunity for—you guessed it!—drama. There’s a degree to which Charlie is spineless, and I have to respect Robert Pattinson for taking on roles like this. Neither he nor Emma seem to consider that no matter how inconvenient it might be, it would perhaps be for the best to postpone the wedding.

It’s probably also because of his emotional tailspin that Charlie does not insist that the only path forward is through couples therapy. Neither of them even think to mention it, which seems a little odd—especially in light of Charlie asking whether Emma had any therapy as a teenager (she did not, a further complicating factor).

And I haven’t even gotten into the plethora of narrative layers involved in The Drama, ranging from how often young women are violent, to the willfully ignorant privilege on the part of Rachel (pitch-perfectly performed by Alana Haim). There’s a lot of thematic intersectionality going on here, between gender and race, that is rich for the unpacking but easily glossed over by viewers not paying attention. And then there’s the thing Charlie brings up that I never considered but will now take a long time to forget, the idea that in addition to all the people out there who have committed heinous acts of violence, there must be an exponentially larger number of people out there who have seriously considered it, come incredibly close but never went through with it. What, exactly, do we think of that?

It’s certainly something to consider, as is this movie, which is something that will stay with me for some time. It ends in a surprisingly tidy way, after having no idea where the story would go, but it’s also deeply satisfying and moving. A film does not have to be a masterpiece to be effective at keeping your faith in the magic of cinema.

Overall: B+

THEY WILL KILL YOU

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

There are multiple things I don’t understand about They Will Kill You, but the thing I understand the least is the decision to release it all of one week after Ready or Not: Here I Come, which broadly speaking might as well be the same movie. They Will Kill You is even more similar to Ready or Not: Here I Come than to its 2019 predecessor, Ready or Not, which was the only one of these movies that was a morbidly delightful surprise. That movie’s sequel, and this movie, are both about a pair of sisters being hunted in an enclosed space by a large group of violent Satanic cultists. I find myself wondering if one of these movies should sue the other.

Still, I really wanted They Will Kill You to be better. I came for what the marketing promised: creatively cartoonish violence. I should admit that this film does deliver that, for a time anyway—I’m not sure the possessed pig’s head in the climactic sequence really worked. It was effectively gross, I’ll give it that.

The best thing I can say about this movie is that Zazie Beetz is the lead, and she has a very charismatic screen presence. This is her first lead role, and she carries it well. I wish I could say the woman who plays her sister, Myha'la, is as compelling, but in her defense, the writing doesn’t give her much to work with. I’m a little bit at a loss with what passes for a plot in this movie—movies that exist just to showcase fun violence don’t have to be deep, certainly, but they can be better than this. Honestly, Zazie Beetz is better than this. And between this and last month’s Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, I fear she may start getting typecast as a woman who is better than the movies she’s in. Someone needs to send her a movie script that’s actually good.

Much of the rest of the cast in They Will Kill You punches above its weight, though. Perhaps most significantly, we get Patricia Arquette as Lily Woodhouse, the elevated superintendant and cult leader at The Virgil, the 100-year-old Manhattan building Beetz’s Asia Reeves arrives at to start a job as a maid. She arrives soaking wet without a coat in a nighttime downpour, by the way. Why would that happen? We are never told. But hey, it gives the “plot” an excuse to get Asia quickly into a shower, next to which someone writes THEY WILL KILL YOU into the fog on the mirror.

Lily is also the matriarch of a family, of sorts, with “very special needs,” as she puts it—there’s a reason they must offer a sacrifice to their Dark Lord every night, and tonight Asia is meant to be the offering. Among the family, which also double as bumbling henchmen in the face of a woman who learned how to fight hard while in prison, is Tom Felton (Draco Malfoy himself), and Heather Graham.

You could say that all of these established actors are slumming it in a movie like this, but no one’s going to begrudge anyone having a lot of fun—especially when they’re getting paid to do it. That said, you can only see characters get dismembered and spray blood like they’re in a low-rent Kill Bill so many times before it starts to lose its luster. The action choreography in They Will Kill You is actually pretty good; I would argue it’s even better than in Ready or Not: Here I Come. It’s the writing, and the pointless backstory about these sisters, that’s the problem. They Will Kill You saw how undercooked the sisters’ relationship was in Ready or Not: Here I Come and said, “Hold my beer.”

They Will Kill You even begins ten years before the majority of the action that takes place, with Beetz still playing Asia but a different, younger actor playing her sister, Maria. They are on the run from an apparently abusive father, though the only evidence we get of that onscreen is a really large man stomping through a convenience store looking for them. A shooting occurs but the dad lives, and manages to keep hold of Maria; Asia panics and runs, and now it’s ten years later and she’s come back for Maria after hearing she’s been seen at this Virgil building, where some shit is going down that has nothing to do with any of that.

And with a movie like this, do we need any of that? It would be far more effective to throw us right into the action, and start with Asia’s arrival at The Virgil. There’s a very strange element to this film’s narrative where it tries too hard and somehow the result is a feeling like it’s been phoned in. I was moderately entertained by this movie, but in better hands it could have been a blast. Instead, it feels like a copy of a copy.

Overall: C+

READY OR NOT: HERE I COME

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

I’m going to nitpick right out of the gate, because I have to stay on brand. All of the marketing materials, right down to its IMDb.com page, lists this movie’s title as Ready or Not 2: Here I Come, which is boneheaded. The phrase is “ready or not, here I come!” Why stick a “2” right in the middle of that? It’s quite obviously a sequel either way. And guess what? The title card in the movie itself just reads, Ready or Not: Here I Come. That actually makes sense!

It’s also maybe the cleverest thing about this movie. Or at very least, there is nothing else in this movie more clever than that. This film was made by the same team as the 2019 original Ready or Not, with co-directors Matt Bettinelli and OlpinTyler Gillett; also with co-writers Guy Busick and R. Christopher Murphy. It’s been nearly seven years since the original Ready or Not was released, which is not ideal; that movie was a surprising delight, but not something you’d expect many to have a fresh memory of seven years later. You could partially blame pandemic-related delays, except nearly the exact same team (just one co-writer different) made Abigail, released in 2024. And all three of these films are very similar, ultra-violent horror-comedies, each with an ensemble cast either hunting or being hunted, and each in turn has offered diminishing returns. Ready or Not was a camp kick; Abigail was fine but undermined by the need to reveal its secret plot twist in order to market it; and Ready or Not: Here I Come is running on narrative fumes.

The major difference here is that Samara Weaving, as the bride Grace MacCaullay, is joined by Kathryn Newton as her estranged sister, Faith. I had high hopes for this casting choice; Newton is relatively unknown but a deeply underrated talent. She was a big part of what made the 2021 body-swap horror movie Freaky watchable, and was one of the better parts of the 2024 camp-horror film Lisa Frankenstein. She works well being cast as Samara Weaving’s sister, but the problem is in the writing. This movie wants us to be invested in their relationship and backstory, but all we get are vague references to Faith feeling abandoned by Grace when the latter moved away from their home with an apparently perfectly decent foster family at the age of eighteen. This backstory is narrative weak sauce, and exists solely as a lazy way to explain sisterly resentments. In a movie like this, you’d expect a shared history that was a little more twisted or morbid.

Granted, the whole premise of Ready or Not was that a seemingly innocent woman was hoodwinked into participating in a family ritual on her wedding night, which involves a game of Hide and Seek in which all of her in-laws compete to be the one to kill her. If they fail to do so by sunrise, they all die, and the manner in which this happens, at the end of that first film, was a big part of what tipped it over to the point of delight for me. These movies offer cartoonish violence for its own sake, and that is itself the appeal.

But what if it’s just more of the same as before? Ready or Not: Here I Come does little to innovate its premise beyond adding the sister. It attempts to raise the stakes by explaining to us that Grace’s rare victory triggered something in the Satanist organization’s “bylaws,” and now all the people that make up the worldwide “council” of five families must gather to play the exact same game again . . . the very next night. I will admit to finding it fun that this movie picks up right at the very scene that ended the first film: Grace lights herself a cigarette on the front steps of the mansion where she was hunted, faints, and she doesn’t get any further than the hospital before someone is hunting for her. But that hunter has jumped the gun and is about to forfeit his family’s participation; when he kills the cop who comes to escort Grace to the station for questioning by throwing a knife into his neck, a whole lot of time passes with not a single other cop coming to the scene. Does this hospital have no kind of security whatsoever? Okay, I’m nitpicking again.

One of the many delights of the first film was the mild-stunt casting of Andie MacDowell as one of the family members tasked with hunting Grace, and we get double the stunt casting this time around: Sarah Michelle Gellar as one of the council family members who, again, is hunting Grace and Faith; and Elijah Wood as a lawyer representing “Le Bail,” who is the demon behind all these people who otherwise control the world. It’s fun to see them in parts like this, except that Gellar’s fate in this film is disappointingly uncreative and unmemorable. Even I know Buffy deserves better, and I never even watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

It’s very difficult to catch lightning in a bottle twice, and calling the original Ready or Not “lightning in a bottle” is itself a stretch. But getting a particular camp sensibility just right is a delicate needle to thread; it either works or it doesn’t. I want to say that some of the times it works in Here I Come, except if it’s not always working, then by definition it’s not working. The cast is game and it makes a difference that they all seem to be having a good time, but it’s the reheated leftovers of a script that is the problem. I had a moderately good time with this movie, taking it for what it was—one thing all these movies have in common is that they don’t pretend to be anything but what they are—but there is no lasting mark being made here.

You’ll totally be ready for this.

Overall: B-

PROJECT HAIL MARY

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

If you’re looking for an incredibly charming and entertaining science fiction flick, for the next several weeks your go-to choice will be Project Hail Mary, easily the best film of 2026 so far. This one ticks an incredible amount of boxes, and will work for people looking for different things. It’s going to be a kick for science nerds, assuming they don’t get too picky about accuracy—and, being a layman myself, it all seems perfectly plausible to me. Many people loved The Martian, the last film based on a best-selling Andy Weir novel, precisely because of how (mostly) scientifically accurate it was. There is no reason not to expect the same here.

It seems worth noting that I am in a somewhat peculiar position of perspective in the case of Project Hail Mary, given that I quite recently read the novel on which it’s based. I have said over and over that films should be judged on their own merits, but I possibly made a mistake by making that impossible for myself in this case. I read the novel too recently and cannot separate the two experiences, most notably in that this film, as directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, and especially as adapted by writer Drew Goddard (who also adapted The Martian), is a great achievement in adaptation. But how do I know I only feel this way because I have read the novel? Would this film have been as easy to follow had I not read the novel? I’m honestly not certain—especially given that the film, even at 156 minutes in length, really felt to me like it rushed through a whole lot of the story.

Because a lot happens in this story: Ryland Grace (a perfectly cast Ryan Gosling), a middle school science teacher, through a whole lot of happenstance winds up as the Science Officer on the interstellar ship The Hail Mary, sent to investigate the one sun that has not been infected by a cellular alien life form, thereby dimming its power and thus threatening the life of the planet in its orbit that otherwise supports life—in the case of humanity: Earth. All the known suns within relative proximity have been infected, except this one that is roughly 12 light years away.

Grace is part of a three-person crew sent to study this sun and see if they can figure out why it is not infected and use that information to save Earth. He wakes up from an induced coma to find his two crew mades have died, but he doesn’t remember why he’s on this ship or how he got there. His process of figuring this out lasts through several chapters in the novel, complete with flashbacks serving as memories sporadically coming back to him; in the film, this happens over just the first few scenes.

And given that Grace wakes up alone on the Hail Mary, there are not a lot of characters in Project Hail Mary. The film does have 31 credited actors, but for a huge amount of screen time, Grace is the only character seen onscreen: Gosling truly carries this film, largely on the strength of his uniquely quirky charms, mixed with his improbable good looks. Cumulatively speaking, maybe half the run time, if not more, Gosling is the only human character we see. Through maybe the second half of the film, he is one of two characters, the other being “Rocky.” If you have read the novel you know exactly who that is; if you have seen the trailer you can easily guess who that is. This whole thing would be way more fun if you just watched the movie not knowing who the hell Rocky is at all, but if that were the case, why would you even be reading this review?

Any other characters are seen in flashback, which are Grace’s memories resurfacing as part of the plot mechanics of the novel, but function more as straightforward flashbacks in the film, providing us with backstory. Sandra Hüller is also very well cast as Eva Stratt, the largely humorless but compassionate leader of the international task force created to solve Earth’s problem. Grace also enlists the aid of a security guard named Carl (Lionel Boyce) as he runs his experiments and somehow learns about “astrophage,” the star-eating cells causing the cooling and potential environmental collapse of the Earth, faster than anyone else around the globe.

So we jump back and forth between Grace getting his bearings and slowly coming out of amnesia on the Hail Mary, and the flashbacks; this is mostly how roughly the first act of the film goes. In the next act, Grace learns he is not alone, and in the final act, Grace and Rocky do a lot of collaborative problem solving. This is specifically what characterizes the vast majority of the novel: a lot of science and problem solving. Weir had also provided a ton of fascinating detail about how evolution might have worked on another planet with a totally different atmosphere, and none of this gets covered in the film—we just see the result of this evolution onscreen, and therefore really never think about it in those terms. It’s too bad, because it’s pretty enlightening stuff, and gives the film adaptation less depth than its source material. But what can you do? The plot turns in the film are astonishingly close to those of the novel, and that alone pushed the run time past two and a half hours—all of it completely absorbing and entertaining.

It’s worth noting how stunning Project Hail Mary is to look at. This is a film with a ton of visual effects, almost none of it used to showboat; it’s all integrated well and serves the story. I’m tempted to say some of the exterior shots above an alien planet during Grace’s space walks are a little too vivid, like the cinematographer got a little slaphappy with the color filters, but what do I know? I’ve never done a space walk outside a spacecraft above an alien planet.

Where Project Hail Mary strikes a perfect balance is between the science fiction leaning heavily on plausible science, and a deeply affecting story about friendship. Readers of the book adore Rocky as a character, and there’s no reason not to expect the same of viewers of the film. This is a film that would be very deserving of Oscar nominations in many of the technical categories, including Production Design, Sound, and especially Visual Effects. I don’t often pay that much attention to Original Score but Daniel Pemberton’s original score here is also wonderful.

Honestly I struggle to come up with much in the way of criticism of this movie. I suppose one thing I noticed was the implausibly wide array of changes of clothes Grace seems to have on this ship, which feel only designed to add to his personality (and Gosling has that in spades already). But this doesn’t seem worth nitpicking about; it’s a detail that will hardly get noticed by most viewers and is just part of the visual medium that is movie making. Project Hail Mary is fascinating, suspenseful, and at times even moving—everything a movie like this is meant to be. The people who made this movie understood the assignment and knocked it out of the park.

It’s everything you want and more.

Overall: A-

SLANTED

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

Slanted has been widely referred to as “Mean Girls meets The Substance.” There is some accuracy to those comparisons, except that Slanted lacks the gonzo savagery of The Substance. And I really want to say it lacks the wit of Mean Girls, except that at the time I even thought Mean Girls was rather overrated, a warmed-over Heathers, which had far greater satyrical bite. This is precisely what Slanted is missing: satyrical bite.

I really wanted Slanted to go harder. A story about a high school girl who undergoes cosmetic—some say “trans-racial”—surgery to become White is some fertile ground for the kind of satire it’s going for. But Slanted is less biting satire, and a little more lower-rung Black Mirror. It does a pretty good job of reflecting the social and racial structure of America, but doesn’t go very deep into it. This kind of movie only really works if it makes you go deep. A bunch of White kids salting otherwise unadorned salads for lunch in synchronized movements isn’t really going to cut it.

There’s a very strange irony to this production as well. Writer-director Amy Wang is herself of Chinese descent, which bodes well for a movie about a Chinese-American family. She casts actors of Chinese descent to play characters of Chinese descent, particularly Shirley Chen, who plays the protagonist, Joan Huang, for the first third or so of the movie; also Joan’s parents, Sofia (Vivian Wu) and Roger (Fang Du). But these are the only characters—or actors—of Asian descent in the entire production, and once the surgery takes place, Joan renames herself “Jo Hunt” and is played for the rest of the movie by Mckenna Grace. The irony is that this is a film about the denial of racial and ethnic identity, made by a woman of Chinese descent, but the vast majority of the actors given work to play parts in the cast are pointedly conventionally—maybe even blandly—attractive White people. You know, the very people afforded the greatest opportunities in this society.

It even seems worth mentioning that Amy Wang is Asian-Australian—not, it must be noted, American. To be sure, there are other international directors out there with an astonishing ability to reflect deeply authentic, American characterizations. But Ang Lee, Amy Wang is not. Much of Slanted takes place in a high school environment that feels like a critique of what an outsider might thing American high school is like, based on countless other American movies they’ve seen. The “Mean Girls” vibe among the popular girls Joan/Jo is desperate to become friends with feel very contrived.

It’s the writing I have the biggest issue with in Slanted, which doesn’t even manage to be consistent. Joan is using an app to create White-faced filters on her phone called Ethnos, which clocks her heavy usage and then offers her a discount on their cosmetic services. Ethnos declares that they cannot do the full surgery without a parental signature due to her being a minor, but they’re perfectly happy to do a hair transplant without it—complete with masking her with gas to put her to sleep. We then see bloody spots where they begin pulling her black hair out. None of this requires parental consent?

I’m fully aware that Slanted is meant to be a fantasy world of subtle horrors, not something to be particularly concerned with realism. After all, when Jo’s face skin starts to droop, a significant plot point in the latter half of the film, Ethnos simply provides her with a cream and some tape. We see hands go to her face without the camera actually showing her face, and suddenly she looks normal again. The sticking point for me is that the parental consent is used only as a plot point in the process of Joan losing her parents’ trust; it otherwise has no point in the plot, if this guy’s going to do a hair transplant on a minor without parental consent anyway.

Where I really must give Wang her due is that the performances in Slanted are actually kind of astonishing. Shirley Chen is serviceable as Joan; it’s when Chen is replaced by Mckenna Grace that the cast truly impresses. Grace performs most of her role in English but does occasionally speak in Mandarin, and quite believably (not that I would have any idea how good or bad her accent is, mind you). Most significantly, even after Joan is no longer shown onscreen, but the character comes home and takes some time to convince Sofia and Roger that she’s actually their daughter, they’re still completely believable as a family. You never stop accepting that Jo is their daughter, even after she’s transformed into a White girl. This is a true testament to the performances of all three of them.

There is a bit of a plot twist that comes along that you can see easily see coming, but the performers involved, particularly Amelie Zilber as Olivia Hammond, the most popular girl in the school, also perform it well. Joan’s best friend, Brindha, is played by Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, from the Netflix series Never Have I Ever, and seems to exist simply to be a fellow Asian character who is not a member of Joan’s family. There is so much potential for a film like this to explore that it does not bother with, most significantly the intersection between White racism and the anti-Blackness of other races. Brindha is a young Brown woman who comes closest to representing the experience of anyone outside the Huang family who is also not White; the only Black people we see in this movie are extras used at the Ethnos clinic, and in one pivotal scene, a nameless and silent Black friend of Brindha’s who Jo is peer pressured into disinviting from a party. This feels like the very essence of Black tokenism.

If Slanted had any real curiosity about the diversity of American experience, even among insecure, White-supremacy-pilled people of all races and ethnicities, it might be easier to like. It’s perfectly fair to tell a story like this from the singular perspective of an Asian-American family, but then it brings in characters of other races and does them a narrative disservice. To be fair, Slanted still has its moments; I certainly got a good laugh out of Ethnos announcing new locations in “Richmond, Virginia; Pittsburgh, and Spokane.” If it spent a lot more time with pointed jabs like that and less time with a misguided undertone of melancholy and barely a hint of the “body horror” it seemed to promise, Slanted would have worked a lot better.

I see White people: this misguided irony of Slanted.

Overall: B-

SIRĀT

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

As I consider Sirât, the Spanish nominee for Best International Feature, I keep thinking of the 2021 film from Mexico, New Order, which was so deeply nihilistic it left me baffled, bordering on angry. There is no question that Sirât is a better film, and yet I am not convinced there was any more of a point to it. Sirât is far more subtle with themes that New Order beat us over the head with, but I still could not in good conscience recommend it to anybody.

Some truly horrible things happen in Sirât. I went in already knowing the first horrible thing that happens; I just did not know exactly when or how it would occur. I can’t say knowing about it ahead of time made it any less horrible to witness, this scene alone left me deeply rattled, mostly because it comes out of nowhere during what is otherwise a perfectly normal scenario: people working together to change the tire on a traveling bus on fairly treacherous Moroccan desert mountain roads. What I was not prepared for was how things sort of settle a bit after that, only for things to get even worse.

This is a film clearly working in broad, existential and spiritual metaphor, even though on the surface everything is very grounded in reality. It is explained to us in an opening title card that Sirât refers to the Islamic theological idea of a bridge one must cross, “thinner than a hair and sharper than a sword,” over hell and into Paradise. The faithful will cross successfully and the sinful will descend into hell. Now, I know next to nothing about Islamic belief, so it’s not only conceivable but likely that my Western mind lacks a certain understanding of nuance here. (Although, side note: after reading a few other reactions to this film, it’s clear there are people from the region who feel director and co-writer Oliver Laxe is dabbling with real-life geopolitcal tensions he has no business playing with.)

All I know is, not only do the characters in Sirât have horrible things happen to them, but they happen at random and without any directed malice. These are all perfectly decent people, basically minding their own business and helping others in whatever ways they can, and tragedy befalls them out of nowhere. The only pattern to be found is the quick succession of sudden horrors befalling this one group of people.

I’m not eager to tell anyone else to sit through this movie, which I found compelling until I found it by turns horrifying and deeply stressful, but I still won’t spoil specifics. I’ll just say that it begins with Luis (Sergi López), a middle-aged man, and his son, Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona), milling about a desert rave in Morocco, handing out flyers and looking for Luis’s older child, Esteban’s sister. We never do find out how long she’s been missing (except that it’s been a long time) or why she’s apparently lost; these two only know that she frequents these desert raves.

The rave music figures prominently in the plot of Sirât. I haven’t been to a rave since college, so my impression of them is that they occur overnight in dark lofts or basements, packed with young people on relatively harmless drugs and surrendering to the beats. This was roughly thirty years ago, so clearly I don’t know what the fuck is going on now; a quick Google search indicates there is indeed a thriving desert rave scene in Morocco. It would seem these are still typically overnight affairs, but all of those seen in Sirât appear to be happening midday. This is the case during the opening credits identifying the principal characters other than Luis or Esteban, nonprofessional actors found for director Oliver Laxe and given the same character names as their real first names. After this, we don’t actually see the title, Sirât, until 30 minutes in.

By that point, Luis and Esteban, still desperate to find their lost family member, follow a small caravan of vehicles on their way to another rave after military has come and forced a rave to break up. We’ve already gotten very sporadic snippets on car radios about nations in the region descending into armed conflict, and it’s serious enough for citizens of the EU to be singled out for evacuation. The smaller group of ravers that Luis follows in his car have little interest in it, aside from a passing reference to “World War III” that doesn’t seem to be taking it very seriously, even though some of them appear to be seriously injured veterans themselves: one with a missing leg who walks on what looks like a repurposed crutch; another with a missing hand. There is another passing reference to them being “deserters” but with no further detail or contextualization.

I am reminded yet again of that other film, New Order, in which the narrative takes us into the thick of the violent chaos—in that case a senselessly violent overthrow of the elite by the underclass. In Sirât, we have a group of people who have deliberately separated themselves from the violent chaos, escaping into drugs and beats but otherwise pretty pacifistic. And unsettlingly terrible things happen to them anyway. And in the most straightforward sense, there is no rhyme or reason to it.

So this is where the intended takeaway is up for debate, I suppose. The final sequence in Sirât was so tense I could hardly handle it. They cross a lethally dangerous path, which some cross unscathed and others do not; presumably there is profound importance to the line, “I just crossed without thinking.” This is his response to how he made it work, while another did not succeed.

And in the end, this is all we know about any of these people: only that some of them have dedicated their lives to raves, and that Luis is looking for his daughter. We don’t hear anything about Esteban’s mother, or about any of the ravers’ lives up to this point, at least not beyond a vague reference to desertion. Earlier in the film, one of the ravers turns off the radio announcer detailing what’s going on in the country, presumably because all they want to do is shut out the realities of the wider world. Beyond that, Sirât simply follows a small group of people who either meet violent ends or barely miss violent ends. The image of the first incident is so simple in its horror, something we hear rather than see directly, is something I will not soon shake, even though it is only the shock of characters witnessing it that plays out onscreen.

There’s something doubly effective about the choice to use nonprofessional actors for this. Esteban in particular feels like just a regular, unremarkable kid who is naturally very well loved by his decent dad. Horrible shit can happen to any of us at any time. And yet, in the end I was still left with the question: okay, but why? It seems the absence of an answer to that question was the point of this movie, except the characters have no choice in the matter, but we do. My experience of Sirât was one of tension and stress that could have been avoided; watching this film was not a random thing that happened to me out of nowhere. Not putting yourself through it is also a choice you can make, and in spite of a lot of it being very well done—including a good amount of genuinely gorgeous cinematography—that’s the choice I would encourage.

Let’s all form a circle and talk about my deep ambivalence about this movie.

Overall: B

HOPPERS

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

Has it finally happened? Have I become a contrarian crank? The old man who just doesn’t get it, who says Pixar movies were so much better back in my day? They just don’t make Pixar movies like they used to anymore! This is objectively true, actually, but does that matter to younger audiences? It’s certainly not going to matter to children, who will be perfectly entertained by Hoppers while I found it dumb as hell.

It’s a common refrain for me now, to say that Pixar once reliably made films that worked just as well for grownups as they did for children. They had a sophisticated sense of humor that made them stand apart from other animation studios. Those days began to end roughly a decade ago. Now the people at Pixar keep themselves afloat by riding their own coattails with endless sequels, interspersed with overstuffed nonsense like this.

I am reminded of The Wild Robot—a far superior film—and my one real complaint about it: that it depicts a wild animal world in which predators and prey become friends for the greater good. The same thing happens in Hoppers, they just don’t even do that as well. And Hoppers is a wildly derivative work of cinema. Its premise is so similar to that of Avatar, in fact, that the main character, Mabel (Piper Curda), literally says “This is like Avatar!” Mabel’s college professor mentor, Dr. Sam (Kathy Najimy), immediately retorts, “It’s not like Avatar!” but the cat’s out of the bag.

Or the beaver is, I suppose. Because, for reasons that are never made clear (who cares, it’s a cartoon), Dr. Sam and her helpers are doing research on porting their brains into robot animals as a means of communicating with them in their own language—which is somehow the same among all species of animals except human. Mabel, who is desperately trying to save the forest glade where she grew up with her late grandmother in an early sequence reminiscent of (but nowhere near as good as) the growing-old montage at the beginning of Up. The mayor of the nearby city of Beaverton (Jon Hamm) has selfishly dislocated all the animals there in an attempt to make way for a freeway bypass that will save commuters four minutes. Seizing an opportunity, Mabel ports herself into the body of a robot beaver, and then unwittingly ignites an animal uprising against humans.

To call the plot of Hoppers convoluted would be an understatement, and I haven’t even yet mentioned that the animals basically split into different factions, one who take the idea overboard and declare all humans need to be “squished,” and one that understands that’s a little much. Will children even be able to follow this? Probably not. Will they be delighted by a lot of the cute and funny animals? Definitely yes. Will Hoppers enter the echelon of classic Pixar animated feature films, like the original Toy Story or Finding Nemo or The Incredibles or WALL-E? Not likely. This movie will be forgettable to children and grownups alike.

I keep thinking about the 2022 film Lightyear, the first Pixar film I rated as low as a C+. And here we are again. The difference was that was an extension of an already-existing franchise, one that already had four previous installments (the fourth one being the weakest of the bunch—and yet, I’ll come back for #5). Hoppers is easily the most disappointed I have ever been in a wholly original Pixar film. It’s way too busy. It’s overstuffed. It’s convoluted. I don’t get it.

And this is a case where I am in the minority. At least in the case of Lightyear the response was definitively mixed. Hoppers is getting a pretty positive response, and I can only theorize that I am perhaps too whetted to what Pixar once was. Would I feel the same way about Hoppers if all else were the same but it were made by a different animation studio? I think I would, actually.

A lot of Disney properties stand the test of time, and Hoppers will not be one of them. You want to see a movie that examines relationships of substance using wildlife characters? Watch Bambi—which is not even my favorite Disney film, but I can recognize an enduring classic, complete with innovative animation techniques, when I see one. The makers of Hoppers are entertaining us, sure—I got a few good laughs—but they’re phoning it in. Why bother casting the likes of Meryl Streep as a megalomaniacal Insect Queen if you’re not even going to register that it’s her?

Setting all of that side, some wild shit happens in this movie. I probably shouldn’t spoil what happens with a flock of birds and a giant shark voiced by Vanessa Bayer, except to say that it’s ridiculous even by this movie’s standards. Director and co-writer Daniel Chong woke up one day and chose chaos. I was actually kind of locked in with Hoppers in the beginning, even though Mabel as a little girl is far more compelling than Mabel as a 19-year-old college student. I even leaned forward when Mabel found herself following a mysterious beaver into a science and technology lab. But then Mabel ports into a robot beaver, infiltrates a weirdly homogenous animal society, and winds up at a giant mound atop of which is King George the Mammal King beaver (Bobby Moynihan), to whom animals of all other species is bowing, and I’m just thinking, What the fuck is this? I haven’t even mentioned the brown bear (Melissa Villaseñor) who, much like in The Wild Robot, is for some reason everybody’s friend. She does eat a perfectly friendly fish at one point, so, points for that I guess.

I long for the days when Pixar made films that were both wildly entertaining and featured narratives of nuanced substance. In Hoppers, it feels like the relentlessly chaotic action exists to distract us from the fact that it’s all just empty calories for the mind. We might as well be plugging these looney antics right into our eye sockets, entertainment as overstimulating pacification. I want to say that Pixar is still capable of greatness, but it’s been a good five years since they last made something truly great; four since they squandered potential by dumping really good material direct to streaming. But I still believe in you, Pixar! I’m just waiting for you to climb to the top again, because this isn’t it.

Don’t ask.

Overall: C+