THE SHEEP DETECTIVES

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

If you were one to judge a film by its title, you’d probably think The Sheep Detectives sounds pretty stupid, right? Well, slap that idea right out of your own face, because it’s not! This might be the sweetest, most pure of heart, live-action talking animal movie since Babe. That movie came out 31 years ago, for anyone who’s counting. Indeed, a lot of young people smitten with The Sheep Detectives likely don’t even know about Babe. Look it up! And then look up its 1998 sequel, Babe: Pig in the City—directed by George Miller—which I think is even better, but then I have a thing for children’s movies that go weird and dark. Which the original Babe absolutely did not do, and neither does The Sheep Detectives. Even though there’s literally a murder in it.

When I first saw the poster for The Sheep Detectives, I was like: Whaaaat? And then I saw the trailer, and was shocked by how delighted I was by it. Might this movie actually be hilarious? Well, I am here to tell you that “hilarious” is a strong word; it provides regular chuckles at best. But, that kind of misses the point. The Sheep Detectives is so sweet you might leave the theater with two new cavities, but it’s also got a rare kind of genuine sincerity to it. It’ll charm the hell out of you.

A big part of that charm is the comfortable ease into which it settles into the story, directed by Kyle Balda (Minions) and written by Craig Mazin (The Last of Us), adapting from the 2005 novel Three Bags Full by Leonie Swann. This is quite the mix of people, or at least resumes, but collectively they clearly understand the best sensibility for a story about a murder mystery in a sleepy town, where the sheep on the farm where a farmer is killed set about solving the mystery. Why? Because George Hardy (Hugh Jackman, still handsome but for once actually looking like he’s in his late fifties) reads to them every evening, from murder mystery novels. Not only do the sheep love this, but when George turns up dead, they know all the rules of what they call their “nighttime stories,” and use that to help them figure out what happened.

The rest of the cast is a stacked ensemble, comprising of both the townspeople and voice work for the fairly impressively rendered CGI sheep. These voices include Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Lily, the sheep who is always able to solve the murders in the books and so leads the charge in solving George’s murder; Bryan Cranston as Sebastian, a loner sheep with a tragic backstory of his own; Game of Thrones’s Bella Ramsey as Zora, a perpetually curious sheep constantly asking questions; Ted Lasso’s Brett Goldstein as two bothers with the same voice with an affinity for ramming things; Patrick Stewart as Sir Richfield, a sort of elder statesman among the sheep; Regina Hall as the “diva,” Cloud; Rhys Darby as Wool-Eyes, so named because his long hair largely blinds him; and Chris O’Dowd as Mopple, the one sheep who is unable to forget things at will.

This ability to control memory figures significantly into the plot, and is how The Sheep Detectives smuggles a surprising earnestness into the proceedings. This is a story about how sheep are smarter than we are, and capable of more than they give themselves credit for. They engage in a kind of willful ignorance, choosing to forget unpleasant experiences, but at the expense of the good ones too. These are all pretty simple themes, but perfect for a young audience, all the while entertaining a more adult audience with its overtly knowing uses of murder mystery tropes. Except in this universe, farm sheep gradually reveal themselves to certain townspeople as having surprisingly complex intelligence. Not a lot of made of this, which is right for a movie of this sort. Mostly it’s played for humor, and done very effectively.

A significant subplot involves how a flock will reject a “winter sheep,” which is how this flock perceives Molly Gordon (Rebecca Hampstead), the daughter George put up for adoption but who is recently in town, rendering herself one of the suspects. Often in movies like this the animal characters are far more interesting than the human ones, but the people here offer plenty color of their own, including Succession’s Nicholas Braun as bumbling Officer Tim Derry, the town’s one-man police force (and here putting on a very convincing English accent); Emma Thompson as Lydia Harbottle, George’s lawyer; and Hong Chau as Innkeeper Beth Pennock (also adopting a convincing accent), among others.

Also worth noting is Nicholas Galitzine as as ambitious reporter Elliot Matthews, here in town to cover a “cultural festival” he finds disappointingly tiny. Galitzine also played Prince Henry in the 2023 Amazon Prime Video original gay romantic comedy Red, White & Royal Blue, which I only mention because Galitzine immediately struck me as being entirely too pretty to be convincing in this part. But in the end, what we learn about him makes his beauty make a little more sense.

It’s often the case that a movie can get weighed down by having too many stars in its cast, where the long list of names is attempted to make up for what’s lacking in the story. But miraculously, The Sheep Detectives works almost shockingly well, even if it isn’t quite a laugh riot. The trailer was a bit misleading on that front, but that’s not the movie’s fault—and that’s why I think Babe is a good comp. That movie was very funny as well, but also had a charming innocence to its sensibility and to its characters. The Sheep Detectives, which also revolves around animals on a farm, is a refreshing throwback in this way, in that it has no cynicism to it whatsoever, and proves that such movies can still be well-rounded entertainment. That includes genuinely moving moments that mean you might want to have tissues handy. Yes, with talking sheep. Ultimately, The Sheep Detectives is the perfect mix, of human and animal, of heart and humor.

These sheep have no idea what they’re in for.

Overall: B+

BLUE HERON

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

Blue Heron is an “art film” that, on the surface at least, really takes itself seriously as such a thing. It predictably delights critics, regular movie-goers only somewhat less so, a statement that basically ignores the legions of people who rightly assume this movie isn’t for them and so they don’t watch it at all. As is often the case in scenarios like this, I fall generally somewhere in the middle.

I wanted to love this movie, but I just couldn’t quite connect with it. Maybe it’s because of my own issues with memory, which Blue Heron explores in a unique way, as it presents the family life of Hungarian immigrants who have recently moved to Vancouver Island as remembered by the one girl, Sasha (Eylul Guven), among four children. She and two of the boys all seem quite close in age, approaching preteens but a couple of years away from it, give or take. The eldest, however, is Jeremy (Edik Beddoes, blond and with glasses that, while they are given a logical explanation, make him look a bit like a teenage Jeffrey Dahmer), is 14 years old, and the entire reason for the telling of this story.

The first half or so of Blue Heron is almost radically naturalistic, with effectively complementary cinematography by Maya Bankovic. It’s a series of vignettes that offer random slices of their everyday lives, seemingly somewhere between pleasant and innocuous at first. Very gradually, Jeremy is revealed to be a bit of a nuisance, acting out, causing trouble, being generally annoying. In the first example of this, he is seen laying down on their front porch as though dead, for so long that the neighbors call his parents, according to his father, to report that their “son is dead on the front porch.” But, over time, Jeremy’s antics evolve into things a bit more alarming and sinister, his behavior increasingly sociopathic. He gets arrested for shoplifting, a crime he never once shows any remorse for doing. He climbs onto the roof of the house and freaks his parents out as he refuses to come back down. In one example, his mom is woken up in the middle of the night by the sound of a window breaking, and she finds that Jeremy has cut his hand badly on it.

There seem to be dual ideas intermingling in the presentation of Blue Heron: what could possibly be the best option for a truly uncontrollable child in a world with very few genuinely workable options; and how the reconstruction of that story is complicated by memory itself.

In the far more naturalistic first half of the film, which is presented with an almost documentary-like quality while also being something close to dreamlike at times, I was much more taken with it, even as there seemed to be no real plot to speak of. We never actually see Jeremy do any truly horrible things; mostly we see him just being occasionally annoying. His parents, played by Iringó Réti and Ádám Tompa, are characterized as doing the best they can while also contending with the needs of three other children and their own lives separate from them. The father spends a lot of time on a nineties-era Mac computer (because these sequences are set in the late nineties), and we never know exactly what he’s doing on it. Does he work from home, even in that era? What the hell is he doing? At one point he sets Sasha on his knees and shows her how to draw and color a picture using the mouse.

And all the while, Sasha is observing. About halfway through Blue Heron, there is an abrupt jump forward twenty years, and we see Sasha as an adult (Amy Zimmer). She’s now a filmmaker, and hosting a focus group in which she asks how a case like Jeremy’s might be handled differently today. There is a pointed comment about how resources are scarce for kids like Jeremy even now.

It took me a minute to even realize the time had jumped forward. I thought: Wait a minute. She’s holding an iPhone. Indeed, this turns out to be the very iPhone she’s shown recording her childhood hometown with in the opening scene, before it jumps back to the nineties. From here, though, Blue Heron gets sort of meta, and certainly confusing if you’re not paying the right kind of attention. She drives to her old house, presses “record” on her phone and hides it in her purse, and then suddenly she goes to the front door to announce she’s making a health visit. Except, it’s her father, the same age (and same actor) as in the flashbacks, who interacts with her as though she’s the social worker she remembers having visited when she was a child. Part of this sequence we have already seen, with Sasha as a little girl and a different actor playing the social worker. And by the end of this sequence, Adult Sasha walks out of the room and Young Sasha walks in, having just been eavesdropping through the door.

Perhaps other viewers will find this very obvious, but my experience with it was a film that turned toward the inaccessible, toward something a bit obtuse. Given the notoriously unreliable nature of memory, I can see the reasoning behind it. I just can’t decide if it actually works.

It also gradually becomes clear that this is really Sasha’s story, and not Jeremy’s, and about how memory complicates a fraught history. It’s noted that sometimes Jeremy was scary and sometimes he was sweet, and this is precisely how we experience him in the first half of the film. This is also reportedly a largely autobiographical account of writer-director Sophy Romvari’s own experiences. It would seem that she was more interested in how memory affects her perception of family history, than she was in simply writing something more straightforward that, in a fictionalized world at least, might have provided some closure. I’d have been more interested in the latter, but it takes all kinds, I guess.

Hey I don’t remember any blue herons!

Overall: B

MOTHER MARY

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

Both Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel seem to be having A Moment this year, albeit to different degrees. Coel has had two film releases this year, all of one month apart—the first being The Christophers, the second being Mother Mary. As for Hathaway, though she has been working steadily all along, the last lead performance of hers that got any notable attention was for the fascinating film Colossal in 2016, and that was not a very big movie. And after languishing in a sort of obscurity, at least relative to her earlier success, this year she has five films coming out—and, due to my own life circumstances, I happened to see both of the first two, two days in a row this week: The Devil Wears Prada 2 and Mother Mary, even though the latter was released in my local market one week prior.

I managed to see Mother Mary in its last day in theaters, which I really wanted to do because of Hathaway’s role as the title character, a hugely successful pop star, with pop songs she actually performs—quite well—herself, written by Jack Antonoff and Charli XCX. I downloaded the EP of her seven songs recorded for the film, with Anne Hathaway herself listed as the artist and the album title Mother Mary: Greatest Hits. I like it a lot, and assumed it would enhance the viewing experience of the film to have familiarized myself with the songs first. Now, I’m not sure it really mattered—just as I’m not sure if it makes a difference if you eventually just watch this film on a streamer rather than in theaters (a predictable inevitability: this film grossed $2.4 million in its three weeks of theatrical release). It turns out Mother Mary spends most of its time as a dialogue-heavy two-hander, with just two people talking in a room.

Mother Mary is directed by David Lowery, and if you are familiar with his work, in spite of his resume being surprisingly varied (he directed both the wonderful 2016 remake of Pete’s Dragon and the perfectly pleasant 2018 film The Old Man & the Gun, both of which starred Robert Redford), then you know to be unsurprised when his films turn out to be very challenging and weird (he also directed both A Ghost Story in 2017 and The Green Knight in 2021). Mother Mary is much more in the vein of his more challenging films, in that it’s frustratingly tedious until it becomes compellingly baffling. In short, Lowery is a director with an established history of films I can’t understand, to the point of utter frustration, only for them to find some way to pull me in by the end. I know nobody in particular I would recommend his more challenging films to, and yet they are consistently films I can imagine gaining greater appreciation for myself, upon repeat viewings.

Mother Mary opens with Anne Hathaway as the title character, performing onstage to an adoring audience, with backup dancers. The pop music is super catchy from the start, so you might reasonably assume the music would play a significant role in the film. But, by the time the opening sequence is over, Mother Mary is rushing into the house of her former costume designer, Sam (Coel), insisting that she needs to design her a dress. There follows a lot of completely straightforward, unstylized scenes of dialogue between just the two of them, albeit with some scenes of Sam’s assistant, Hilda (Eurphoria’s Hunter Schafer), peppered in. It’s maybe halfway through the film before things predictably turn weird, and we find out that Mother Mary is now possessed with the spirit (rendered as a red fabric) that Sam had some time before expelled.

It seems Mother Mary is mostly about friendship, how it can be excruciatingly intimate and then devastatingly strained, and how the baggage of those strained connections can weigh on those affected. Honestly, this is my first pass at what that red-fabric-spirit represents as a metaphor, because in true David Lowery style, he never makes this explicitly clear. Even though Mother Mary and Sam literally talk about whether or not what they’re speaking is metaphor.

Mother Mary eases back into stylistic flourishes as these two regale each other with their respective experiences with this ethereal spirit, with no human personality or clear intention. We just know that it enters and exits Mother Mary’s body through open wounds. And I must say, there are certain scenes with this floating red-fabric-spirit in a black void that are hauntingly beautiful—and also some scenes in which it is rendered with surprisingly janky, herky-jerky visual effects. Lowery is usually known for great visuals, so I don’t know what the deal is there. Anyway, as they tell each other’s stories, one of them will open a door in Sam’s huge warehouse of fabrics, or turn their head, the camera will turn, and suddenly they are looking upon the flashback we transition to.

The more the film shifts in this manner, the more cuts we get back to Mother Mary’s stage performances. It’s worth noting that there has been some debate as to what real-life pop star most inspired Mother Mary, and to be it’s preposterous to think there is any debate at all: it’s clearly Lady Gaga. Mother Mary comes onstage in a high-waisted one-piece very reminiscent of many Lady Gaga costumes, at one point complete with a staff reminiscent of the “disco stick” from Lady Gaga’s “Lovegame” video. There’s even Sam’s brief mention of Mother Mary once arriving at an event “wearing nothing but freshly poured honey,” a clear nod to Lady Gaga’s infamous “meat dress.” And finally, what star besides Lady Gaga even has a pop persona in quite the same vein as “Mother Mary?” This would be why Sam’s signature element of her costume designs for Mother Mary are her so-called “halos,” a pretty obvious nod to the very name—and something we can easily imagine Lady Gaga having done if she were Mother Mary instead.

Mother Mary even seems to be at a similar stage in her career, with Sam referencing the biggest hits “between 2003 and 2015,” indicating Mother Mary is at least 20 years in, past the height of her career but still important to legions of fans. (Lady Gaga broke out in 2008, but 18 years is still pretty close.) I rather wish more of the movie focused on Mother Mary’s career, actually, or at least on her music and its effects. The EP title Mother Mary: Greatest Hits has a sort of meta amusement to it, because these tracks are really fun but hardly timeless; this would never be the collection of songs on anyone’s career-retrospective of hits, but are serviceable as a fictional version of one. It helps that Hathaway is surprisingly adept at performing them—she sang live on set—which is another reason I wish more screen time was given to the music.

The most unfortunate thing about Mother Mary is that Anne Hathaway’s EP is far more fun than the movie, which has a somewhat awkward ebb and flow between compelling and tedious (Lowery is increasingly revealing this to be his trademark). There’s something about it that keeps it in mind for me, though, and once again I suspect it may benefit from another viewing, especially now that I know where it eventually goes. If nothing else, the acting is excellent: Hathaway is an undeniable star and actually convincing as a pop icon; Coel’s performance is as stupendous as ever, and always the biggest reason to keep watching the scenes that don’t take place onstage. I may not quite be able to make heads or tails of the story, but how it’s told onscreen, even when veering into the objectively ridiculous, keeps me invested.

Sam has conditions for accepting Mother Mary’s apology for the ways in which this movie alienates its less perceptive viewers.

Overall: B

THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA 2

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

There’s a moment, relatively near the end of The Devil Wears Prada 2, when Miranda Priestly says, “I just love working, don’t you?” This is the line that is staying with me the most, as I wonder whether the meta aspect of it was at all intentional: the line is delivered by Meryl Streep, who might as well also be speaking for herself and her acting career. It serves as an explanation, beyond the obvious paycheck (Streep was paid a reported $7 million to reprise this role), for why she would bother with revisiting this role a solid 20 years later.

In 2006, the original The Devil Wears Prada came roughly 30 years into Meryl Streep’s career, and it became by some distance the most successful movie she was in—a record broken only by the ridiculous Mamma Mia! only two years later, in 2008. No role in her career has ever been more iconic than that of Miranda Priestly, however, as she singlehandedly turned what otherwise would have been a cinematic piece of mediocrity into a wildly rewatchable entertainment.

So how does the sequel stack up? In context, in its time, I’d say it roughly matches the original—with some elements that fall short. But, the original also had elements that fell short; they were just different. And, even 20 years on, we love these characters too much not to have a pretty good time. They brought back all of the heavy hitters, after all: Streep, of course; Anne Hathaway as Andy Sachs, now much more grown and confident; Stanley Tucchi as Miranda’s long-suffering professional sidekick; and Emily Blunt as Emily Charlton, now working leverage against Runway Magazine as the largest advertiser at Dior (the product placement and fashion cameos are, predictably, off the charts). Even Tracie Thomas returns as Andy’s best friend Lily—something I took way too long to clock, mostly because, while she still looks objectively great, she looks more naturally aged by 20 years than any of the other major actors do.

It’s worth noting that the original The Devil Wears Prada had things going for it that this film does not, most notably the notoriety of its source material: it was based on the 2003 novel of the same name by Lauren Weisberger, in which the Miranda Priestly character was widely known to be a thinly veiled representation of Anna Wintour. The speculation surrounding these facts fed the buzz around the film, although Meryl Streep came in and truly created a unique character quite distinct from Wintour. It’s probably telling that Weisberger wrote two sequels, but The Devil Wears Prada 2 is not based on either of them; both films’ scripts were written by Aline Brosh McKenna, but this time the story is entirely original.

Well, not entirely—it still has a credit that states it’s “based on characters created by Lauren Weisberger,” after all. It even slightly pokes fun at that, with a character scoffing at the idea of writing a book about a boss you don’t like. And, much like the previous film, a lot of the story is pretty contrived—especially the setup now that forces all of these same people back together. In the opening scene, Andy and all of her newspaper journalist colleagues are fired via text while she’s accepting an award for her work, and coincidentally Runway is experiencing a PR disaster. Andy, now a respected journalist, is offered a job at double her previous salary in an effort to restore credibility to the magazine.

Much of Andy’s and Miranda’s reintroduction is pretty entertaining, in that Miranda doesn’t (or maybe pretends she doesn’t) remember her. Streep’s acting is great as always, but I found her characterization in this film somewhat curious, in that she is uncharacteristically more personable than she was before, even as she’s being rude to people (and particularly to Andy). I don’t know if this was meant to be an indication of how she’s changed a little over the years or what. That said, The Devil Wears Prada 2 spends a lot of time acknowledging how the world, and especially both journalism and fashion, have changed over these past 20 years. This would include regular corporate workplace norms, as there is a funny running bit about how Miranda has to choose her words more carefully now to avoid HR interference.

What love interests there are, are different this time around—fine by me, as Andy’s boyfriend from the first film, while very cute, was pretty dull as a character. This time she has a meet-cute with an Australian played by Patrick Brammall, and he’s moderately more interesting than the first guy, if distractingly performative with his eyebrows. Emily, for her part, is seeing a billionaire played by Justin Theroux, who also happens to be the ex-husband of Sasha Barnes, rendered significantly wealthy in her own right, a desired target for an interview with Runway after some years of reclusiveness. Sasha is played by Lucy Liu, a very interesting actor in a part that gives her virtually nothing interesting to work with.

Miranda is now married to a guy played by Kenneth Branagh; B. J. Novak plays the incurious heir to Runway’s parent company; even Lady Gaga makes a special appearance as herself (performing an original song, which, to be honest, sounds like a generic version of Lady Gaga—it turns out she recorded four original songs for the soundtrack). To say this film has a stacked cast would be an understatement, although it could be argued it was the first film that transformed about four of them into the stars that they are.

I was feeling kind of indifferent to the story for much of this movie, but still taken by the characters; this is how “lega-sequels” successfully traffic in nostalgia. It does have some similar beats to the first film, in terms of the tensions between Andy and Miranda; Andy trying and awkwardly failing to impress Miranda; Miranda finally deigning to be impressed. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t taken with the movie by the time it was ending, though. These movies never made grand promises, just modest ones, which they deliver on. I still left the theater with a warm and appreciative smile.

The gang strikes an uneasy pose in a new and rapidly changing world.

Overall: B

I SWEAR

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

I Swear follows familiar formula beats, it’s transparently manipulative, and it’s also a wonderful moviegoing experience, a great exercise in empathy. Sometimes it’s good to remember why formulas exist: because they work.

The bit of infamy around this film is really unfortunate. It was nominated for five BAFTA Awards, and won two of them (Best Leading Actor and Best Casting), where John Davidson himself, the man with Tourette’s on whom the lead character is based, was a guest. He experienced some ticks that the film I Swear does an excellent job of explaining, and which was rather unfortunate in context—I don’t need to tell you what he said or who he said it to; the incident was covered endlessly in the press. What’s really important to remember here is that the presenters of the BAFTA ceremony were less sensitive than this film itself, which is absolutely worth seeing.

The script, written by director Kirk Jones, is even more sensitive than many of us remember the era being depicted being. The first act of the film focuses on Davidson as a 14-year-old (Scott Ellis Watson, who is excellent), and when the emergence of John’s ticks screw up his chances with a soccer scout, the scout actually asks the coach, “Is he disabled?” In this kind of working class environment in 1983 Scotland? I was so sure that the guy would have used a far worse word that it actually took me out of the movie for a moment. Later, that very word is used by John himself, and we hear it only the one time, but it’s quite pointedly used as an example of a person with Tourette Syndrome having wildly inappropriate outbursts that he doesn’t mean and can’t control.

Which is to say, there’s a noticeable element of I Swear that makes it a clear product of 2025 even though it’s ostensibly set mostly in the eighties and nineties. There’s an argument to be made for the utility of this approach, however, as this is a film that means to educate its audience about people with Tourette’s. I’ve certainly never seen a film so pointedly about the condition, with the protagonist a character who has it.

I’d be interested in how actual people with Tourette’s, or the people in their lives, feel about this movie. Presumably they mostly understand that some artistic license comes with the territory, and perhaps are relieved that this film takes pains not to sensationalize the condition. Not only is I Swear deeply empathetic with John Davidson, but it also empathizes with the people who struggle to understand him, including his mother, Heather (Shirley Henderson), and a frustrated school headmaster (Ron Donachie).

The story does glean over John’s relationship with his parents a bit. His father leaves the family, for which John blames himself, and the film leaves it a bit ambiguous as to whether he might be right. When Dottie (Maxine Peake), the mother of one of John’s friends, offers her home to John, he and his mother become seemingly and inexplicably semi-estranged, as Dot quickly moves in as a far more understanding mother figure. She has a background as a nurse in mental health, we’re told, so she approaches John with—as Dot herself characterizes nurses when she observes Heather was also a nurse—the patience of a saint.

We see John get predictably bullied and teased the more his ticks and outbursts come out, eventually culminating in, at separate times, a bar brawl and an outright physical assault against him. These characters are nothing more than tools for our sympathy, and most of the people who get close to John as an adult are characterized without any real flaws. As such, I Swear is hardly flawless—and yet, that doesn’t make it any less essential. The focus is always on John, as it should be, and Robert Aramayo’s spectacular performance as John is not to be missed. I was consistently moved by the portrayal, and you would do well to have tissues handy.

There’s a particularly memorable scene in which another person, a young woman, is brought by her parents to meet John, just so she can meet another person with the same condition for the first time. This sequence occurs in two parts, first when John gets into the backseat of a car with her, and later when they are hanging out together on a patio. In both cases, we see these two characters connect with each other in ways they had heretofore been unable to connect with anyone else, ever before. Anyone who has been othered due to their differences and then found community with people who were like them is bound to relate.

I Swear, for its clear imperfections, actually somewhat exceeded my expectations. I went in expecting a perfectly fine drama about a guy who did his part to make things better for people like him. What I encountered was an eminently entertaining and moving film that uses movie conventions to its advantage by leaning into them. I Swear may not be perfect but it is deeply affecting and extremely effective.

It has charms you simply won’t be able to resist, even as it hurls insults at you.

Overall: B+

NORMAL

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

I guess Normal is an apropos title for a movie like this, in spite of how clearly it wants to present itself as a curio. The writing is pat throughout; there are turns you can see coming a mile away; this is a movie that could have been made by countless interchangeable filmmakers. And yet? I actually had a good time. With a movie like this, as long as it’s not actively bad, all you need is to give yourself over to all that it aspires to be, which is honestly not much more than mindless entertainment, and you find yourself having a blast.

This is hardly even the first B-grade action movie Bob Odenkirk has done—that would have been the surprisingly fun 2021 film Nobody, in which he established himself as an unlikely, aged action hero, this generation’s Liam Neeson. The kind of funny thing is that Neeson and Odenkirk are 10 years apart in age, yet Neeson’s late-career action period started with Taken in 2008, when he announced to the world at age 56 that he had “a very particular set of skills.” Alas, when Odenkirk reasserted himself as an action hero at the age of 59, he wasn’t gifted with lines anywhere near as famous.

He pulled in a $57.5 million worldwide box office on that movie, though—chump change compared to Taken’s $226.8 million gross, sure, but it’s good to keep in mind that Nobody was released when covid was still keeping audiences out of theaters, its gross was on a $16 million budget. It came as little surprise, then, when—just like with Taken—Nobody 2 was released four years later, in 2025. Alas, it proved to be diminishing returns; that movie wasn’t even that good of a time.

Thus, I somewhat feared that Normal would continue that downward trajectory, given that it clearly exists square in the same vein as the Nobody movies: an older guy who proves surprisingly adept against violently challenging odds. In this case, Odenkirk plays Ulysses Richardson, who has been hired as interim Sheriff after the previous one died of supposed cardiac arrest in the freezing Minnesota winter. The town where he reports to work is called Normal, because of course it is, and something predictably sinister is going on there.

The most surprising part of Normal is the extent to which the Japanese Yakuza figures into the story—the opening scene is in Yokyo, and for a minute I thought maybe I had wandered into the wrong movie. How this ties into the town of Normal is a bit unnecessarily convoluted, and I have mixed feelings about the universally one-dimensional way in which every single Japanese character in this film is written.

I won’t spoil how the Yakuza turn out to be connected with this town, except to say that it gives director Ben Wheatley and script writer Derek Kolstad (Odenkirk himself is also given story credit) an excuse to treat the locals in a way similar to the townspeople of the 2007 Edgar Wright film Hot Fuzz, albeit with far less wit. I will admit to being well amused by a whole lot that happens in Normal, but it tended to be more because of the cleverly over-the-top violence (at times it gets about halfway toward Cocaine Bear, which I really dug), not because of any particularly well-written dialogue.

There are multiple characters, in fact, who are weirdly underused. The inciting incident is an attempted bank robbery by a young couple, played by Reena Jolly and Brendan Fletcher, but that was evidently the only thing these characters were created for. I was relatively compelled by them, especially when Ulysses finds himself needing to team up with them, but their departure from the story is weirdly anticlimactic. I really hoped they would return to be part of the inevitable climactic battle, nut, no such luck. And then there’s the always-welcome Henry Winkler as Mayor Kibner, who is dispatched shockingly early in the film.

But as long as Odenkirk is onscreen, you’re having some fun. He clearly has fun making these movies, and as long as he’s getting paid, more power to him I guess. It feels a bit like there’s a threshold of sort to these films, which need to have a magic balance of dumbness and cleverness, a sensibility that is at least partly self-aware and a refusal to take themselves too seriously. These sorts of movies are a very particular brand of stupid, but the better ones have a delicate knack for effective entertainment. Normal just barely tips into the better side of them.

Another example of effectively dumb fun.

Overall: B

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+