YOUR MOTHER YOUR MOTHER YOUR MOTHER

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

What a singular achievement Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother is, to be genuinely unlike any other film. And a singular vision on the part of Bassam Tariq, who wrote and directed. Where else are you going to find a tense action-drama with violent grudges and retaliation, presented with deeply devout, Muslim characters?

Ultimately, this is a film about faith—and it very much acknowledges other faiths as well, and is surprisingly respectful of them. Recently widowed Latif (Mahershala Ali) and his three children live in an apartment complex where teenage Fatiha (Adia) hangs out with neighbors who are all devout Mormons. Eventually Latif gets mixed up with an evangelical preacher, Pastor Hwan (John Cho—looking, forgive me, a little ripe) who is convinced he needs to “liberate” people from the porn industry—including Hatty (Abubakr Ali), the son of Mike (Laith Nakli), the Arabic man who has a history of hiring Latif for hit jobs.

It is one of these hit jobs that opens the film, after an introductory reading of the Islamic story behind the film’s title. The film later returns to the characters we first heard reading and listening to that story, but in the meantime we see Latif dispatch a faceless man with some effort in a public restroom, which turns out to be out of both working faucets and paper towels. But within minutes after this scene, we learn that Latif’s wife has recently died, leaving him with his aforementioned teenage daughter; an preadolescent boy, Qadir (Jahleel Kamara); and a baby still used to breast milk who will not accept formula.

There is only a limited amount of pumped breast milk left, so Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother quickly becomes a race against time, as Latif desperately tries to find breast milk for his baby, from multiple sources. As a parent, this is Latif’s driving motivation whatever else is going on—and a lot else is going on. He’s trying to maintain family stability. And Mike is so pissed about Pastor Hwan’s baseless accusation that Hatty is using his porn studio as a front for human trafficking that he insists Latif dispatch him. He doesn’t care about Latif’s many other concerns at the moment, and asserts that he has no choice.

All of this is just the groundwork for the story that unfolds, and it’s a lot—Bassam Tariq works his own miracle by getting all of these characters to cross paths organically. Latif is a seasoned and skilled hand-to-hand fighter, who has created his own “code” in which he never uses guns and only uses knifes. Why is never made fully clear, but it makes for some great action sequences. It’s worth noting that, aside from the opening bathroom sequence, it’s a while before any real action takes place. The action in this film is exceptional but used sparingly and therefore with unique effectiveness. We really get to know these characters, which raises the stakes far higher than your average action movie.

In the midst of all this, Latif is having a crisis of faith—something clearly suspected by his most trusted elder at his mosque, Abdul (Giancarlo Esposito, finally in a role in which he is barely recognizable). But this is where I get into some ambivalence with Your Mother Your Mother, which takes a turn into the supernatural in the final act—something that ultimately connects Latif and Pastor Hwan in a surprising way. I still can’t decide how I feel about it. I prefer my tales of crises of faith to be ambiguous, and this film takes a sharp turn into the opposite.

On the other hand, it could be said that this is one for the Muslims: Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother is a single dot of American cinema with a broadly positive depiction of Islam in a vast history of film that villainized Muslims by default. This is a story about flawed people, not a flawed religion. Granted, that is where my ambivalence comes in, because as an atheist I believe all religion is flawed. I also know I am in the minority on this, and I still champion fair depictions onscreen. Fair representation is one thing, though; telling a story in which something that appears to be an outright miracle occurs is quite another.

Whether it still works for the purposes of the storytelling here is something reasonable people can debate. It just took it a step into the realm of the ridiculous for me, but that doesn’t change how expertly crafted this movie is. The acting is exceptional across the board, and especially impressive on the part of the young actors playing Latif’s children. It’s probably worth noting that this story is very specifically about American Muslims, which might account for the degree of religious tolerance they have. They live in a country in which they have no choice but to coexist with other religions, after all.

In any case, until that turn at the end, which was clearly what Tariq was leading up to all along, I was super into it. Perhaps it’s a parable, or a morality play, and I’m open to these interpretations—I don’t even begrudge the many who have only good things to say about this remarkable film. I may not have been moved by faith the way the characters were, but I was still moved by this movie.

A father sits in, for Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother.

Overall: B+

Tasveer Advance: LALI

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

I am clearly not the target audience for Lali, which makes me patently unqualified to comment on it. I can’t even tell whether director and co-writer Sarmad Sultan Khoosat made it with the idea of general audiences worldwide watching it. One would presume so, but consider this user review on Letterboxd: Fucked with this hard and could smell the white people‘s confusion in the entire cinema heheheheh. It is perhaps relevant to note that I am married to a South Asian man, and when the movie ended he asked what I thought; I said: “I didn’t get it.” He said, no fewer than three times: “That was a crazy good movie!”

Context is everything, right? I saw this at the Tasveer Film Festival, which is specific to South Asian film, and that audience ate it up. This is pretty typical of festival audiences, regardless of the festival and regardless of how good the movie really is. I once saw a “documentary” called Orwell Rolls in His Grave at the Seattle International Film Festival, and it was one of the worst movies I had ever seen. There was a Q&A after the screening and the questions were shocking in how they revealed that the audience there clearly thought it was brilliant.

There is nothing so stark going on with Lali, which I kind of vibed with until the unhinged final act. There remains the context of cultural and ethnic experience, this film being dense with both, and which I have almost zero experience with. Even my husband grew up Hindu in India, so I have some broad knowledge of that cultural context—but, notwithstanding the obviously fair amount of cultural crossover, Lali is about a Muslim family in Pakistan. It opens with a wedding, and my husband did explain to me that green is a traditional color worn at Muslim wedding events. This was the first I had heard of that, and that would be the tip of the iceberg when it comes to cultural details densely packed into this narrative that I was unfamiliar with.

Even the experience of being one of only a handful of White people in the sold-out audience otherwise full of South Asians (or Americans of South Asian descent) was a somewhat peculiar experience. Lali is presented as a dark comedy, until the final act when it just slips into straight up (if not necessarily straightforward) darkness, but I was often baffled at what moments people in the audience laughed at. I laughed out loud a couple of times, but even my husband laughed a couple of times at moments when I thought: Is that supposed to be funny?

The basic premise of the film is that Zeba (Mamya Shajaffar) is finally getting married, to a man named Sajawal (Channan Hanif), or Sajju for short—after multiple previous engagements resulted in fiancés winding up dead. The community being convinced that Zeba is cursed is her cross to bear; Sajju’s is is huge birthmark on the left side of his face. The people in his family and community rarely use the word “birthmark,” though, in favor of the far more evocative word “scar”—an indicator of differing degrees of attitudes as compared to the West, perhaps. (Not to suggest that anyone in the West would have it easy with a giant birthmark on their face.)

It took me a while to understand why Sajju was so quiet and brooding. In the opening, wedding event sequence, he’s wearing a headdress with strings of flowers obstructing his face. Soon enough we see the birthmark, and we learn how it shaped him growing up. He has a comically overbearing mother (Farazeh Syed) and a father whose death he eventually reveals he blames on her. In the early scenes shortly after the wedding is finally over, with many people comically paranoid about Sajju’s fate with this supposedly cursed woman, it feels like we are meant to see that he’s deeply self-conscious but a good guy.

Much of Lali is very surreal, and it takes a turn when Sajju is suddenly prone to jealous rages. Maybe because of such deep-seeded self-loathing that he assumes Zeba must be looking elsewhere, despite all obvious evidence to the contrary? All I can say is, when a disturbing scene occurs in which Zeba comes home drunk, pours liquor over Zeba’s head, and the scene ends without depicting but unsubtly suggesting marital rape, it was a jarring narrative leap that felt a bit unearned, after we saw him making odd but still kind gestures toward her. This type of mystifying narrative turn only continues in the final act, in which I completely lost the plot and thought Lali went right off the rails, with both Zeba and Sajju having wild breakdowns that come out of nowhere.

Lal translates as “red” in Hindi and Urdu (this film is spoken in Punjabi but with sprinklings of Urdu). Lali is thus a pejorative nickname for Sajju and his “scar,” which he suddenly leans so far into in the final act that he wraps himself in a red blanket, covers himself with a red oil or paint of some kind, and otherwise starts hopping around and hanging from bars like a lunatic who thinks he’s a bat—all while referring to himself as a jinn, a dark spirit from Arabic mythology. The nickname is used exclusively by a neighbor woman who visits frequently and was much more kindly welcomed by Sajju’s mother than by Sajju himself; her condition is never specified but she is clearly mentally disabled in some way. If there is some symbolic meaning there, I completely missed it.

And therein lies the challenge in my experience with this film, which, while it left me baffled in the end, I did not hate—largely because the performances of both the leads were equally excellent. And I certainly cannot write it off the way I might have if it were made by an American director and writer and infused it with equivalent amounts of American or Western mythology. I read enough reviews and reactions to this film to know that I was certainly not alone in it losing me in the final act—what would be interesting but impossible to find out would be what the ethnic breakdown of these reactions were. It may be that it’s simply the audiences who are not of Muslim, Pakistani or South Asian background who do not get it. Lali is clearly dense with meaning that only a certain population can fully grasp. They get it, and I don’t, and I guess that’s okay.

Lali may surprise you, but who knows how much you’ll vibe with that surprise?

Overall: B

Tasveer Advance: HOOP LIKE THIS

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

What possible insight could I have about this movie? I mean, I watched it, largely due to happenstance, but it’s part of this year’s Tasveer Film Festival and it’s a new film so I’m reviewing it. But I should say right off the top that I am far from this film’s target audience: I am neither South Asian nor do I know the first thing about basketball. Okay, I suppose I know the first thing. You dribble the ball, right? That’s where my knowledge ends. I actually watched this movie thinking about how I have no idea how many points you get for making a basket, nor whether there are other ways to get points in the game. To say I am ignorant of this sport—okay, all sports—would be an understatement.

I gleaned this much: there is an annual tournament with the incredibly creative name of The Basketball Tournament, or “TBT” for short, for which the ultimate winner gets a cash prize of $1 million. Strike that—in 2026 it’s $2 million; but during the couple of years covered by this film, it was $1 million. It’s up the team to decide how that prize gets split up, but you can assume a roster of 12 players, a coach, and staff. Do TBT teams have staff? I have no idea! But if you assume a minimum of 13 people, then that $1 million works out to around $77,000 per person at most. No one discusses this in the documentary.

Anyway, the real subject of Hoop Like This is a very specific team called “India Rising,” comprised exclusively of either people from India or people of Indian descent from around the world—the Indian diaspora—and founded by Gautam Kapur (featured prominently) with the mission of showcasing South Asians in high-level basketball and breaking the stereotype that people of Indian descent are unathletic. India Rising is thus the first-ever Indian professional basketball team.

This film, directed by Shubhangi Shekhar, is broadly speaking a pretty standard sports documentary—the kind that is fine for people not already emotionally invested in its subject (like me) but perhaps a delight for people with direct relevance to it (South Asians; South Asian basketball players). I’m not sure how interested people who love basketball but don’t have much occasion to think about the ways it can be diversified will be, which is unfortunate (either for them, or for my own lack of imagination).

The stuff that interests me here are indeed the more cultural ideas—I am married to a person from India, so there is that angle of personal interest, albeit one that has never had any connection whatsoever to basketball. My husband sometimes watches American football, certainly gets invested in the World Cup (for soccer), and has a working knowledge of cricket—but has never been particularly compelled by basketball. There is a brief but fascinating detour in the film, though, in which Kapur visits India and learns that basketball was first introduced to the country by Canadian YMCA instructor T. Duncan Patton around 1893. It is thus argued that basketball is no more or less “Indian” than cricket.

Moving back to the present day, there are some amusing moments in which players kind of lean into their stereotypes, such as how something like half of them are doctors as a day job, and many of them have family members who own gas stations or drive taxis. We see one if them examining a teammate’s possibly-injured foot. That seems kind of convenient. We also get a few talking-head interviews with certain entertainers of South Asian descent, such as American actor/rapper/singer Utkarsh Ambudkar (Brittany Runs a Marathon, Blindspotting), or comedian and writer Nimesh Patel, among others. Between this and a lot of high-octane needle drops from presumably South Asian musicians, this all feels a bit like a means of upping the film’s “cool” factor. And, to a degree at least, it seems to work.

The period Hoop Like This covers is India Rising’s first and second years in TBT, when they suffered the loss of their very first game the first go-round . . . and then won their first game the second go-round. That second one serves as this film’s climax, as it was widely cited as the “biggest upset in TBT history,” when they defeated the No. 1 Seed and host Red Scare in Dayton. They were then eliminated in the second round, and I have already well established that I know next to nothing about basketball, but I suspect that would mean they still aren’t exactly the best team out there—but, Hoop Like This is quite deliberately not about that (and who would want it to be?), but rather about how they are gradually fulfilling their aforementioned mission, and proving that they can’t just be dismissed or written off.

We do learn that the team, in an effort to be more inclusive of all South Asians, has since been renamed the “Brown Ballers,” and I do wonder if I’m the only one who hears that and just thinks of brown people freeballing. The logo design is the same either way, with the word “Rising” or “Ballers” in standard red lettering at the bottom, below either “India” or “Brown” written in lettering shaped like iced mountain peaks with a basketball rising like the sun behind them. It’s clearly meant to evoke the Himalayas, but, I don’t know, maybe they should find a new marketing consultant. For a split second I wondered why they didn’t just call the film India Rising, until I realized that might only put forth wrong connotations—hence, perhaps, the change in the team name. Still, Hoop Like This is a pretty bland title.

When it all comes down to it, I’m not sure who to recommend this to, aside from South Asians with a marked interest in basketball (or even sports broadly), and maybe the people who love them. Professional sport does nothing for me, but there was enough here to make it a bit more interesting than expected.

Okay so what’s happening here? Is anyone scoring any points? Who designed those outfits?

Overall: B

THE SOCIAL RECKONING

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

Aaron Sorkin is a rightly celebrated screenwriter. This is the guy who wrote A Few Good Men, The American President, The West Wing, The Social Network, and Moneyball. His most recent four movies, however—Molly’s Game, The Trial of the Chicago Seven, Being the Ricardos, and The Social Reckoning—were both written and directed by Sorkin. You can tell at a glance what the issue is there: other directors have historically raised Sorkin’s work to the level of excellence. Sorkin manages to direct his own material to a level one or two steps below that.

So it is with The Social Reckoning, a follow-up to The Social Network sixteen years later, thus qualifying as a “lega-sequel.” Critics left and right constantly hail The Social Network as “a masterpiece,” and I’ve never been willing to go quite that far—it’s a really good movie that I gave an A-minus, but it’s not perfect. I still clearly did myself a favor by not rewatching it before seeing The Social Reckoning, in which both David Fincher’s direction and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s score are sorely missed.

It feels a little like Aaron Sorkin feels like he is the only one who can truly bring his visions to light, and he is mistaken. Parts of The Social Reckoning feel pointlessly heavy handed, and there’s a couple of editing choices that are genuinely baffling. Twice there are cuts to shots of only a set of people’s calves and feet walking on a sidewalk, with the audio deliberately going in and out. I don’t get it.

What I do get is the point of making this movie, though—I’m not really on board with the people saying the movie itself is pointless. Anything that keeps people talking about Facebook and its now-widely-known dangers is a good thing, however ineffectual it may ultimately be. “Based on a true story” movies don’t always have the intended impact when they are set less than two years before its release, and this one gets to within about five years ago. A lot of what was going on in the world then is still pretty vivid in our collective memory, and depictions of the covid years remains a tricky business. Yet again, we get shots with characters here and there wearing masks, but only just enough to jog our memory, and not nearly enough for it to be realistic. We have to keep seeing all these actors’ beautiful faces, right?

Covid is deeply relevant to this story, though, because it’s used as one of countless examples of Facebook being culpable in the spread of damaging misinformation. A brief but key scene is set in a grocery store (the one scene in which nearly everyone is actually wearing a mask), with a mask-less woman shouting at everyone “You’re a sheep!” And we all know she got this idea from Facebook.

Which is to say, of course, that The Social Reckoning is also often pretty on the nose. Is this movie actually providing any insight? I suppose it might be to some, who pay far more attention to movie entertainment than actual news, which sadly is most people—but most people seeing this movie aren’t necessarily going to care. I’d say you can just find the 17-part series The Facebook Files that was published in The Wall Street Journal in 2021 and the writing of which forms the basis of this film, but a) most of it is behind a paywall; and b) you wouldn’t likely read it even if it weren’t. (I haven’t read it, nor do I have a subscription to The Wall Street Journal.)

Still, by and large The Social Reckoning is pretty engaging, mostly because of being very well cast. This isn’t exactly a showcase for Mikey Madison, who plays the awkward and nerdy Facebook employee whistleblower Frances Haugen, but if you happened to see her in either the Scream reboot or her Oscar-winning performance in Anora, you’ll get a sense of her incredible versatility. This is a showcase for Jeremy Strong, whose performance as an almost sociopathic Mark Zuckerberg is almost worth the price of admission on its own. Nearly all of his scenes are set during a rehearsal for testifying before Congress, however, and we only get one scene in which Zuckerberg and Haugen are even in the same room (and they don’t even speak to each other). Sorkin’s choice to set this rehearsal on the same day the January 6 insurrection is one of several things that make this script feel a little over-written.

Jeremy Allen White is a great actor, but here he’s in a role—as Wall Street Journal investigative reporter Jeff Horwitz—that any competent actor could have played. The same could be said of Betty Gilpin, who plays Horwitz’s editor; or Bill Burr, who plays an evident frenemy of Zuckerberg’s implausibly brought into the rehearsals to help with crisis management. But, it’s still really fun to see them both.

In any case, The Social Reckoning is packed with performances that range from competent to quite memorable, and I’m not sorry I saw it. That’s a very different sentiment from being thrilled by it, I realize. Some of the writing choices are deeply contrived and corny, but I still left with a certain appreciation for the overall experience. I certainly hoped for better, but my highest praise for this movie is that it could have been a lot worse.

Watching pretty people look at Facebook internal documents is so exciting!

Overall: B

THE HISTORY OF CONCRETE

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

It seems I kind of missed the boat on this John Wilson guy. I never saw his HBO series How To with John Wilson, but if I had, I suspect I would have a more settled expectation of his deeply meta documentary feature, The History of Concrete. Perhaps I should still check it out; it sounds relatively similar. There’s certainly a very odd experience to The History of Concrete if you have no other behind-the-scenes context to it. I left the theater overhearing a couple of young women discuss whether Wilson is “laughing with or laughing at” his subjects. Based on this film alone, it’s genuinely hard to tell, given his evident knack for finding compellingly quirky people—but one hesitates to think he’s laughing at people who are truly no more oddball-nerdy than he is.

Certainly, if you have never experienced John Wilson before, he is an acquired taste. As he apparently did in his TV show, he narrates in the second person, though clearly talking about himself. He also has a very specific and distinctive way of speaking, stopping and starting mid-sentence in ways that often feel unnatural, in a rather nasal voiceover. And the premise of The History of Concrete is hard to put in any succinct way, as early on in the film, Wilson attends a workshop on writing Hallmark movies, then ostensibly tries to apply the rules to this very documentary. He takes such a meandering approach, though, that I can’t even remember how he settled on the topic of concrete. What’s easy to remember are the multiple shots of his own Zoom meetings attempting to secure funding for a project with that title.

It feels serendipitous that I watched Digger and The History of Concrete back to back, as these are perhaps the two most meta films of the year. The latter is actually far more successful at it, if still perhaps less clarified in its own purpose. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a documentary feature made this way, which is not only in constant commentary on its own construction, but comes across as a documentary form of stream of consciousness. Wilson uses concrete as a jumping off point, and will then wind up somewhere completely unrelated, from a hard rock cover band to the funeral of an elderly Asian woman judge.

The most amazing thing about this movie is that, in the face of every implication from its title, it is never dull. It should be noted that it features very little history (he does travel to Rome where the oldest concrete can be found, but that’s about the extent of it), and in the end this movie really isn’t about concrete. Wilson does constantly come back to concrete, both as jumping-off points and as ways of closing his endlessly tangential narrative threads. He does sprinkle in a good number of interesting things about concrete, but mostly he just gets people’s mostly nonexistent takes on the concrete in the environment around them. With a few exceptions (Rome; Bellefontaine, Ohio; Los Angeles; Brownsville, Texas), the vast majority of the film is shot in New York City. There is a filmmaker out there who could make an actually-compelling film that’s actually about concrete’s history, how it’s used, and what it means to our environment. John Wilson is just not that filmmaker.

The History of Concrete is so meandering that, about halfway through, I really couldn’t decide if I liked it. You begin to wonder: hey, what about all that stuff about applying the lessons of Hallmark movies? Well, in its way, the story being told here actually does come back around to that—as well as other arbitrary rules later applied by other people, such as the potential funding source who evidently misunderstands Wilson’s joke about this being “a rockumentary,” and states that the inclusion of a prominent musician is a condition of their providing funding. In the end, Wilson does discover a connection to a very prominent musician in a way that is genuinely shocking, and gives the film an overall truly unexpected and satisfying conclusion.

There’s something extraordinary about John Wilson’s work, where he can take you from thinking, What am I even watching? to That was actually kind of a blast. The History of Concrete is a visual work of art if nothing else, packed with striking images of regular but memorable people living everyday lives, so skillfully edited together that you have to wonder how much total footage he sifted through to get so many fantastic shots in a clean, 101-minute runtime.

The History of Concrete almost feels like a mockumentary, except its subjects are real, and it falls just short of ever actually mocking them. There’s a strangely consistent humanity to all of the offbeat character on display. It’s unlikely anyone in this film had any idea what John Wilson was actually going for, with the likely exception of Tim Robinson, who makes a split-second appearance at a dinner party in honor of Kim Kardashian. Speaking of which, to say this movie goes in random directions is an understatement, and yet it ends by slowly revealing an evident method to his madness. It’s not often you leave the theater strangely satisfied by how baffling it all was.

It’s more interesting than it looks—especially when it’s not even about what it appears to be.

Overall: B+

DIGGER

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

Digger opened five days ago, and it is already well-documented what a huge flop it is: made with a production budget of over $125 million and a marketing budget of around $100 million, it landed at #4 at the box office its opening weekend, grossing a paltry $8 million domestically and $23 million worldwide to date. This is a movie many media outlets are reporting needed to make $300 million in order to break even, and instead is Tom Cruise’s worst opening weekend in nearly two decades—likely longer in adjusted dollars, considering $8 million in 2007 was the equivalent of $13 million in 2026 dollars.

All of this is to say: Digger being not for everyone is the understatement of the year. Reactions have been sharply divided, to the point that word of mouth is actively working against it. It’s too bad, because there is a hell of a lot to say about this movie, and such conversations can be fun as hell. So: is Digger for me? I really couldn’t decide for a while. I actively thought about this while in the middle of watching the movie, which does not say much for it. And yet, I found it really stuck the landing in the end, on an unsettling note that was somehow both incredibly on the nose and subtle at the same time. There is no way of predicting this, especially in today’s siloed media consumption landscape, but this is a movie I can easily imagine being reclaimed sooner than later. It could be as soon as it releases on a streamer somewhere (it’s a Warner Brothers film, so probably HBO Max), or it could be a decade from now. Someone is going to discover this movie and wonder how they slept on it. The question is whether that someone will be in the company of significant number.

More than anything, because this movie is not for everyone, Digger has a marketing problem. For instance, let’s talk about that quite-obviously animatronic cat, which was featured prominently in the trailers. No context is given for why the cat looks and moves like that, and the result is something that seems to suggest the production skimped on budget and wound up with a pet that looked bafflingly artificial, given the state of visual effects capability today. And I don’t really know what the answer is here, as it would be a notable spoiler for the trailers to give context—maybe they should not have shown that cat in the trailers at all? Because the film itself does provide context to how that cat looks and moves, and it’s something that actually makes sense. But who would know that, watching the trailers? Whose boneheaded choice was this?

All that aside, I can’t say that Digger always worked for me, but it certainly worked better than I expected it to based on the reviews. This is perhaps one of the most critically polarizing films of the year, and usually a MetaCritic score of 46 is a reliable indicator that I will not like a movie. There are occasional exceptions, though, and this is one of them—fascinatingly, the user score on MetaCritic is a much more respectable 6.8 out of 10, so evidently I am not alone. (The user rating over on Letterboxed is a similarly respectable 3.8 out of 5 stars.) It’s worth noting that this is only among the few people who actually bothered to see the movie.

I just love what a swing Digger is—not that unusual for director and co-writer Alejandro G. Iñárritu (this guy directed both Birdman or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance and Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths; thankfully this movie’s title is shorter), but very unusual for Tom Cruise, who hasn’t taken a swing this big since his appearance in Tropic Thunder in 2008. I want him to keep taking swings like this, as it makes him a far more interesting actor. I was afraid the poor box office performance might scare him off such swings in his late-career years, but evidently he’s been defending Digger, which is a good thing.

Now, there are many big swings in Digger, and some of them work better than others. Cruise’s performance is excellent, especially considering he actually plays two characters—oil tycoon Digger Rockwell himself, and Curtis Markson, the actor playing Digger in a satirical play. This is where Digger leans hard into meta territory, something I love when done well, but the jury may be out on that point here. When the film suddenly shifts to the same actors we’ve been watching all along playing actors rehearsing a stage play, for a while it’s very confusing. It doesn’t help that clarity comes after these “actor” characters are suddenly arguing about whether this is a satire or a farce and whether it is funny. Up to that point, some of the comedy in Digger has landed well, but some of it also has very much not. I got several good laughs out of this movie, but also experienced multiple attempts at it that just fell flat. And if you are very directly asking us to consider whether what we are watching actually works as a satire, I’m not sure it’s actually working as intended. Or was that the point? Here Digger starts to get lost in its own convoluted plot machinations.

Digger has a sister, Emma, played by Sandra Hüller, an actor rightly celebrated as her profile has been raised in recent years. But this may be the worst performance I have ever seen her do, she spends so much time just shrieking at her brother, and it never quite feels genuine. Or was that a deliberate choice, and the actor playing Emma is not that great at her craft? It seems Iñárritu has built in a clever excuse for what appears to be subpar acting. The same can be said of John Goodman, as the idiotically bombastic President of the United States. His performance is so over the top it makes Digger himself—also an outsized character—seem subtle. And again, suddenly, we see the play actors discussing how different their play characterizations are from the real people they are playing, and how that is all part of the satirical intent.

There’s a lot going on on Digger though, and I have a feeling a lot of people are missing the point in what seems on the surface like a narrative mess, much like the characters themselves are missing the point of how they got themselves into the climate catastrophe that forms the basis of the story. There is a barely-detectable, unsettling truth seeping through Digger, about the hypocrisy of “advanced” societies reaping the benefits of the technology that they self-righteously deride as ignorantly self-destructive. There is a key scene in which Digger addresses a room full of world leaders prone to speaking out of both sides of their mouths, and again, much of what he says is very on the nose—and still, I listened to his screaming monologue about environmental hypocrisy and just found myself thinking: Well . . . he’s right.

I wonder what the carbon footprint of this movie’s production was, incidentally? Not that that’s part of Digger’s point either; this is not a movie that is preaching to its audience—if anything, it’s a skewer aimed at people prone to preaching to their audience. And there’s a lot in it that’s really fun, including Riz Ahmed as Digger’s Head of Environmental Safety, Dr. Ganesh, who seems to be a slightly stereotypical character at first but then proves to be satisfyingly nuanced. We also get Michael Stuhlbarg as the Vice President; Jesse Plemons in a ridiculous red wig as the play’s benefactor; and House of the Dragon’s Emma D’Arcy, who it took me a while to fully recognize in the part of Digger’s assistant.

There are some baffling choices in Digger that only come halfway around to making sense later, such as the scene in which Digger, the President and a host of other government officials are watching a live feed of environmental destruction in Europe, but the camera only ever shows the reactions of the people in the room and never what they are actually watching. Was this also a budget choice? Clearly not; we later see news feeds of the same destruction, rendered quite impressively. Was this a staging choice if we were to later consider how it would have been performed in a play? That idea also falls flat when you consider the extensive use of screen imagery in the play. I still don’t have an answer to this one.

Some of Digger may always remain a mystery. Some of it may become clearer after repeat viewings. Will I ever rewatch Digger? Probably, although I couldn’t say whether it will be any time soon. I can only say it had my undivided attention from its first moment; it veered dangerously close to losing me in the middle; and by the last scene, which is expertly staged and edited, I found myself surprisingly satisfied, if not exactly blown away.

There is so much more going on than you think,

Overall: B

FORGOTTEN ISLAND

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

I have mixed feelings about Forgotten Island. On the one hand, it ultimately proved surprisingly moving, and I loved its focus on friendship in a way that is universal but is rendered between two young girls—who are also young women in the movie. On the other hand, it almost buckles under the weight of its self-consciously frantic editing, like it’s made for kids raised on Instagram reels and has no self-confidence to hold attention any longer than your average algorithmic dopamine hit.

It was so bad that I nearly gave up on this movie halfway through. It had been fairly entertaining for a while, with relatively well-rounded characters and moderately clever humor. But then Jo (H.E.R.) and Raissa (Liza Soberano) get ported to the titular island, things quickly go antic, and a kind of fun way at first, but then it just becomes such a mess of action that my eyes started to glaze over. Why was I supposed to care about them again?

It’s too bad too, because there are so many cool things about Forgotten Island, which underneath its visual chaos has an understanding of universality through specficity. This is a story steeped in Filipino lore and mythology, with a bunch of specific mythological creatures. Filipino actor Manny Jacinto voices Bungi Tiyanak, a giant, three-eyed demon baby. Filipino singer Lea Salonga voices Manang, the bat-winged creature that can detatch itself at the torso. Jo Koy voices Datu, leader of the tree giants. The most prominent island character is voiced by Dave Franco (not Filipino), a “were-dog” named Raww, inspired the aspin, a mixed-breed dog of the Philippines. Unfortunately the script never quite comes to what exactly is going on with Raww, why he only occasionally turns into a human boy, and spends the rest of his time either as a humanoid dog or “full dog” whenever there’s a stick around.

The cast is diverse, but with a bent toward Filipino heritage: H.E.R. has a Filipina mother; Liza Soberano is American-born but largely grew up in the Philippines with her Filipino father. Jenny Slate (not Filipona) comes in to voice the quasi-villainous Batiba, a large, cat-like demon who steals memories. This forms the backbone of the story, written by Joel Crawfod (not Filipino) and Januel P. Mercado (American but with Filipino parents), both of whom also co-directed. Jo and Raissa strike a deal with Batiba in which they exchange memories in order to get back home, which turns out to be a bigger sacrifice than expected. As they desperately attempt to salvage their shared memories in a very well-executed climactic sequence, it would appear that these directors have perhaps seen Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind a few times. A valuable lesson here is that if you’re going to steal, steal from the best.

To be fair, Crawford and Mercado do make it their own. They just take a while to get there, or for them to fully bring us in through all the visual mess. That memory sequence had me thinking about my own friends-as-chosen family with tears streaming down my face, forcing to admit that okay, this movie isn’t bad—and then it jumps back into being pointlessly frantic.

It doesn’t really help that some of the humor is disappointingly witless, using pee and farts as tired punch lines. Raww gets kicked in the crotch and he says “My nards!” before you see him walking with a limp. How often animation so directly acknowledge the existence of testicles, I wonder? Will Raww one day be able to breed? Does Forgotten Island want me to be pondering these questions?

On the upside, Jo and Raissa represent friends who are flawed but deeply supportive of each other, one a talented artist and one so smart that she’s planning to attend college at CalTech in America. This is one of the sources of their unexpeceted tensions, as the two grow into young women and must decide on their individual paths forward. There’s a lot of depth to plumb in Forgotten Island, you just have to wade through a bunch of noise to get to it.

Clearly your mileage may vary.

Overall: B

YOU HAD TO BE THERE: HOW THE TORONTO GODSPELL IGNITED A COMEDY REVOLUTION, SPREAD LOVE & OVERALLS, AND CREATED A COMMUNITY THAT CHANGED THE WORLD (IN A CANADIAN KIND OF WAY)

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

Between The Cycle of Love and You Had to Be There, I’m not sure I have ever experienced such heartwarming uplift strictly from documentary filmmaking—particularly within the space of just a couple of weeks. People expect “feel-good movies” to be fictional narratives, but this are easily the most “feel-good” of movies I’ve seen all year. It’s too bad so few people will actually see them. This is exactly the kind of uncynical storytelling the world needs.

It’s all about sharing love—and in the case of You Had to Be There, it’s love in many directions: cast mates in a 1972 original production of Godspell in Toronto quickly developing deep love and affection for each other, and individually blossoming over ensuing decades to become truly beloved figures in the entertainment industry. To be fair, there are varying levels of beloved-ness, perhaps sitting at the top including Martin Short; Eugene Levy; and Gilda Radner, who remains a mythical figure in comedy circles nearly forty years after her passing. But this original-run cast of Godspell also included Paul Shaffer; Andrea Martin; and Victor Garber (who is now perhaps best known as the ship designer Thomas Andrews in the 1997 Titanic). Also included in that cast—and all of them giving contemporary intervies for You Had to Be There—are Second City veteran Dave Thomas; Jayne Eastwood; local Toronto performer Rudy Webb (the only Black person in the cast, something not discussed here); Valda Aviks; and Avril Chown.

Chown, as it happens, represents the one moment of darkness in You Had to Be There, revealing apparently for the first time, on camera. the reason she did not stay in the entertainment industry for very long. After Godspell, she was cast as the sole woman on a children’s show with five men, and she was repeatedly sexually assaulted. This turned her off of the industry, but she still keeps in touch with that cast—You Had to Be There ends with what appears to be one of a regular reunion between all of them, still close friends, more than fifty years later. What happened to Chown is clearly an important detail to note, but it does not fit very comfortably within the narrative of this story. That’s not to say it needs to be comfortable, far from it—but, director Nick Davis transitions a bit abruptly from that anecdote, straight into how beloved Gilda Radner was.

Given that the Toronto run of Godspell was in 1972—not the first run of the show, but after only the Off-Broadway debut and a London run, both in 1971—it’s not a huge surprise that all the subjects are now in their seventies or older. I found myself thinking about how much longer these wonderful reunions will be able to continue. You Had to Be There is itself thus a deeply appreciated record of this particular history, of a group of actors who went on to do great things from Second City to Saturday Night Live to SCTV to great film roles and much more. Nick Davis is rather playful with the documentary production, starting with the official, full title: You Had to Be There: How the Toronto Godspell Ignited the Comedy Revolution, Spread Love & Overalls, and Created a Community That Changed the World (in a Canadian Kind of Way). That’s thirty words.

Plenty more people are interviewed for the film, from directors and writers who worked on the play, to a smattering of contemporary, younger artists who speak reverently about the people from the Toronto Godspell. It’s not always clear what connection they have or why they would be especially relevant for inclusion; among the most prominently featured are Lin-Manuel Miranda; Janeane Garofalo; and SNL cast member Heidi Gardner. This rounds out all the interviews a bit, but the clips with present-day interviews with Godspell cast members are by far the most compelling, especially when they are surprised with a video clip of one rehearsal that most of them appear to have no idea ever existed. The emotions and delight it elicits is very touching.

Other than that, and one illegally captured tape recording Martin Short made of a single performance, no footage of this prodiction of Godspell exists. This means a lot of recreation has to happen to break up the talking heads, much of which is rendered in animation flourishes in a very old-school style, kind of like 1970s episodes of Scooby-Doo. Sometimes this is synced to Short’s taped audio, and sometimes it's just matching interview anecdotes. It works fine, if also somewhat transparently a trick for visual filler.

By far more than anything, what makes You Had to Be There work is the chemistry among this cast, how fondly they all remember not just launching their careers with Godspell but decades of resulting friendship. The reunion sequence is the perfect way to conclude this story, as it illustrates a group love that has endured for decades and will live on. I left the theater feeling buoyed by it.

I wish I had been there—disciple clowns and all!

Overall: B+

PRIMETIME

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

It’s hard to put my finger on exactly how I feel about Primetime, which feels intentional. I went in expecting to feel pretty icky about it, from virtually every angle—and that’s nearly where I landed. What I didn’t quite expect was not being able to tell what this movie has to say about its subject, if anything. If it’s intended as a showcase for Robert Pattinson’s talents, it certainly succeeded there—but I left wishing I’d gotten a bit more.

Shouldn’t a movie about a show as exploitative as To Catch a Predator have something clear to say about it? There is so much to say about the actual television series, which aired twenty episodes between November 2004 and December 2007 (most of them just between February 2006 and July 2007), that it feels odd that Primetime has so much less to say. If nothing else, it reflects the moral bankruptcy of the entertainment industry as it blurred the line between “news” and entertainment—after all, To Catch a Predator was part of Dateline NBC, but was transparently more concerned with ratings than with actually catching child predators. When the most elaborate sting the show staged inevitably ends in a kind of tragedy no one can particularly feel good about, we see the show’s producer (a wonderful Merritt Wever) say to show presenter Chris Hansen (Pattinson), “I can make this work.”

What does something like this do to the “performers” who play the decoys, anyway? Skyler Gisondo plays “Decoy Dan,” the 23-year-old actor cast to impersonate boys as young as 13. Gisondo does a great job of conveying the wild emotions that must go through someone who sees a guy whip out his dick and spray whipped cream all over it. (This never actually happened on the show, by the way, although some did get caught completely naked.) This is indeed a wild situation to be in, being a young man impersonating a teenager, who then becomes subject to a genuinely pedophilic act—all of which is caught on camera. One wonders whether “Decoy Dan” needed therapy after this.

Director Lance Oppenheim’s film is thus ripe for examination of the psychological effects of all this, but what we get instead is something presented as a media satire. Is it really satire, though, if it’s inspired by things that actually happened? Just because Oppenheim is taking artistic license doesn’t mean he’s not reflecting real life here. Hollywood has a long history of films depicting a dystopian media future, and here we have something that winds up being pretty disgusting from all angles, and it happened two decades ago.

I haven’t even gotten to how many of these sting operations, which were done with the cooperation of local law enforcement, stink of entrapment. No one wants to be defending pedophiles, but there are proper ways to catch criminals, and this isn’t quite it. Among the many ways To Catch a Predator was criticized, Charlie Brooker wrote at the time, “When a TV show makes you feel sorry for potential child rapists, you know it's doing something wrong.” This is worth noting because in many cases, Primetime does exactly the same thing, and it does not seem to be commenting on the fact that To Catch a Predator was itself doing it. We see actors portraying the entrapped predators, and we feel conflicted because of how close we get to sympathizing with them.

And, to be clear, I do hold the controversial stance that even pedophiles should be treated humanely. There have been a couple of films in the past, most notably the 2004 Kevin Bacon film The Woodsman, that dared to challenge their audiences with this notion. It’s a provocative idea worthy of debate, and an idea not particularly explored in Primetime, which is far more concerned with Chris Hansen, his (fictional) producer Andie Bender, and their insatiable quest for ratings. These people don’t really care about the supposed righteousness of catching these predators, except that it is this idea of righteousness that brings in audience numbers. There are multiple scenes of fans talking to Hansen and saying things to him like, “You’re doing the Lord’s work.” Of course no one is considering the damage being done to the people actually doing this “work.”

There is a subplot involving The National Inquirer hounding Chris Hansen for comment on photos taken of him with a woman he had an affair with, a clearly juicy angle given his purported moral crusade—as if a simple affair is in any way equivalent to pedophilia. Primetime’s cinematographer, David Bolen, shoots a ton of the action in incredibly dark rooms, almost to the point of distraction. I know the show’s crew did a lot of its work in hiding, but if they are all in separate rooms, am I to believe they still kept the lights off? This combines with a heightened style of shooting to really drive home of the darkness at play. And yet, everything onscreen is designed to entertain us more than to elucidate us, which kind of makes Primetime guilty of the same thing To Catch a Predator was guilty of.

And I won’t deny it—I was very engaged by this movie, maybe even entertained, albeit at someone of a loss when it ended. The acting is excellent, especially on the part of Robert Pattinson but also Skyler Gisondo as “Decoy Dan,” as well as Merritt Wever. I just can’t come up with a purpose to this film that sits well—the same as any sane person would feel about To Catch a Predator. I’d have loved to be enlightened by this film in some way, and instead I was entertained. There are certainly some who feel that the publicly humiliating punishment of pedophiles is just and right as well as entertaining, but I’d rather we just find an efficient way to protect our children from them. Using them for entertainment is not it.

A media satire about a sickening subject, what fun!

Overall: B

RESIDENT EVIL

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

I might as well start off by saying that I am not the target audience for Resident Evil, per se. If this kind of movie is very much your jam, you will likely love it, and take anything I have to say about it from here on out with a grain of salt. Maybe don’t even keep reading. Go read something else! All the issues I have with this movie are my issues alone, and I am going to work through them now.

Now you are perhaps thinking I must have hated this movie, and I did not—far from it. There’s actually a great deal about it that I liked a lot. My major problem is that I fell prey to the hype—a rookie mistake that I keep making—and went in expecting this movie to be something it clearly is not. I thought I was going to experience something thrilling and exhilarating, and instead found myself sitting through a movie that is merely amusingly scary. Thanks to too many people I listened to talking about it, I expected Resident Evil to be both much funnier than it actually is, and far more action packed than it actually is. It spends much more time building tension, and when considering the creature effects, to me it occasionally came across like a cross between Alien (which gets very directly referenced, with bodily fluid burning through floors like acid) and Beetlejuice.

The genre lovers out there are raving about this Resident Evil—a kind of franchise reboot that, it turns out, is actually the eighth adaptation of the popular video game series that dates back a solid thirty years—and I kind of get it. I, on the other hand, am a film lover first, and while this Resident Evil is undeniably entertaining, it feels like at least a minor step down from director and co-writer Zach Cregger’s first two films, Barbarian and Weapons. Both of those films featured genuine innovations of the narrative form of cinema. Resident Evil certainly features fun tweaks to video-game-to-film adaptation conventions, but here is where I would argue “innovation” is a rather strong word.

When it all comes down to it, Resident Evil is just another zombie movie. Okay, so the zombies here have tentacles, and have a few other tricks up their sleeves. There are certain shots where creature design looks like the demogorgon from Stranger Things (itself a retro sensation without any original ideas) by way of Little Shop of Horrors. I realize most of the audience seeing Resident Evil will be far too young to even get that last reference. This Resident Evil has been characterized as “breaking all the rules,” and yet I can think of better movies that also broke the same rules.

But, again, if you love zombies, then this is a movie for you. To be fair, this film is still far better than most of the other zombie movies, and certainly horror movies, that have ever been made. Of course, given the genre we’re talking about here, it would not be inappropriate to say that the bar is in hell. Zach Cregger doesn’t have to do that much to be relatively impressive.

So here are the ways Resident Evil did impress me. After so many pointlessly over-indulgent movies racking up runtimes of increasingly more than two and a half hours, this one clocking in at 95 minutes—which means less than 90 minutes at the point the credits roll—is a genuine dream. I’ll give the movie this much: there is not a second wasted in it. Thrilling or not, it’s never boring, and it plays like The Odyssey if all the traveling vignettes were grotesque monsters that existed for their own sake.

And Austin Abrams, who also had a key supporting part in Weapons (the very distinct difference between the two showcasing his versatility of talent), deserves special mention. He is Bryan, the young man whose point of view we follow from the beginning until the end. He’s couriering a package, which he assumes to be an organ, to Raccoon City General Hospital, and you’ve got to hand it to him—the guy never loses that package. Abrams plays a guy with a grunt job running an extra errand for double pay very well, and his ineptitude with guns in real life is well observed. He even talks about how he only shoots guns in video games, one of the few references to gaming in the film that I actually clocked, out of presumably a bunch.

I wish I could say the same for the rest of the cast, except that it features fun casting in bit parts by players who are ultimately wasted in far too little screen time: Paul Walter Hauser; Griffin Newman; Severance’s Jack Cherry; True Detective: Night Country’s Kali Reis. Hauser in particular is saddled with some of the film’s clunkiest dialogue.

I do wish more horror movies would dispense with the backstories ostensibly added to give the characters more depth. People come to these movies to see horror and mayhem, not an examination of the characters’ psychological damage. This is often a fatal flaw, as in They Will Kill You from earlier this year: every time the movie returns to the sisters’ damaged past, the movie grinds to a halt. Mercifully, we get none of that shit in Resident Evil. We do get a minor backstory involving potentially life-altering news from Ryan’s girlfriend (who we only ever hear as a voice on the phone), but only in two brief scenes, and in the end it largely only builds up to one of the movie’s better punchlines.

In other words, there’s a lot for even me to enjoy in Resident Evil. It just doesn’t stack up to Cregger’s previous work. He was very open about wanting to pivot with this film and just do something super fun, and he clearly had fun making it. And I’m glad! I’m just not willing to go so far as to consider this movie anything special.

Something about that woman doesn’t feel right.

Overall: B