TUNER

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

What a delight this movie is, an original idea executed well. What a concept!

It probably helps that the director and co-writer, Daniel Roher, is an accomplished documentary filmmaker, shifting into narrative film for the first time with Tuner. This means we get fresh and new ideas from someone who already knows a thing or two about making movies. Most crucially, he knows something about editing, which can make or break any film but is especially important in documentaries, and is easily the strongest element of Tuner,

Leo Woodall plays the title character, Niki White, a guy with a hearing condition best described as “allergic to loud noise.” When things are quiet, though, he can take advantage of his greatest talent, perfect pitch, while working for an aging Harry Horowitz (Dustin Hoffman) for a piano tuning company. Roher, along with co-writer Robert Ramsey, takes his time getting to these details, but eventually we learn that Niki’s father, who died some years ago, was close with Harry. This is one of the many great things about Tuner, which doesn’t bother with spelling a lot of things out. You simply get the sense that, in the wake of Niki’s father’s death, Harry and his wife, Marla (Tovah Feldshuh), took him under their wing.

When Harry, who we see immediately is perhaps in very early stages of dementia, is hospitalized, Niki learns that Harry and Marla are already in deep medical debt. He falls in with a group of Israeli criminals who are delighted to learn of Niki’s other gift: in total silence, he can use his pitch-perfect hearing to crack the code to unlock safes.

I spent a lot of time watching Tuner wondering how the hell it was going to resolve. Is he somehow going to outsmart these thieves who increase their threats when he tries to pull away from them? Is he going to endanger his concert pianist girlfriend, Ruthie (Havana Rose Liu)? It’s the not knowing the answers to these questions that makes Tuner exciting, because in someone else’s hands, we’d see what’s coming a mile away. But, not in Daniel Roher’s hands. I never had the slightest clue where the hell it was going, and in the best way. This is a crime thriller that’s thrilling in its originality.

Leo Woodall is the perfect fit to play Niki, a guy whose potential as a child prodigy was ripped away from him by his hearing condition. He now moves through life frustrated and shy, but in the end he lets a relationship organically blossom after a bit of pushing by Harry. Hoffman, who is now 88 years old, is an equally good fit as a lovably cantankerous old man. (If anything, he plays younger here; we never hear how old Harry is, but who continues running a shoestring business at 88? It’s easy to believe Harry and Marla are around the same age, even though Tovah Feldshuh is 11 years younger than Hoffman.)

I suppose you could call the plot to Tuner a bit convoluted, but it’s always legible, which is a credit to the director and writers. I do have a couple of nitpicks, chief of which is the presence of a brightly colored piano incongruously hanging out in Harry’s hospital hallway, convenient for Ruthie to bring in and play for him. Niki also seems a little too smart to believe the obviously bullshit lies that the thieves tell him about the rich people they’re stealing from, but whatever; I’ll forgive it because what’s great about the movie more than makes up for these things.

More than anything, Tuner has great editing—and specifically, sound editing. I was reminded of another excellent film, Sound of Metal, which also featured great sound that vividly illustrated the experience of a man losing his hearing. In Niki’s case, he wears hearing aids that he can use to turn down ambient noise, and often wears noise-canceling headphones on top of that. There are villainous characters who occasionally use this condition against him, and instead of going the more predictable route of Niki somehow outsmarting the Israeli thieves who are progressively more dangerous to him, the story comes to a completely unexpected yet fully satisfying conclusion.

Niki isn’t so much a hero as he is a flawed protagonist you can’t help but root for, largely thanks to Leo Woodall’s nuanced performance. This is a story that is both complex and comprehensible, gripping and utterly unpredictable. It would be particularly fun to watch having known nothing about it going in, but then how would you convince people to watch it? I had such a great time, this is the kind of movie that can restore a person’s faith in cinema.

I hear you need a tuneup: Dustin Hoffman and Leo Woodall on the scene.

Overall: B+

PRESSURE

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

It’s been said that Brendan Fraser is miscast as General Dwight D. Eisenhower in Pressure, a movie about how much the weather forecast went into play with the timing of D-Day, the 1994 invasion of Nomandy, France, which laid the foundation for victory over the Nazis. Look up photos of Eisnehower, and he looks a bit old and just this side of frail, almost too thin for his uniform. Ironically, Eisenhower was 53 years old on June 6, 1944 (spoiler alert! D-Day didn’t happen on June 5 as originally scheduled), and yet Fraser cuts a far more imposing figure at age 57, and a heigh of 6’3” as opposed to Eisenhower’s 5’10”. And to all this, I say: so what? If you’re bitching about how little Brendan Fraser actually resembles Eisenhower then you don’t understand how movies work. Just shave the man’s head and you’re good to go.

It’s the story that matters anyway, and how many people going to see Pressure are going to be hung up on what the real people the actors are playing actually looked like? Andrew Scott plays James Stagg, the Scottish meteorologist who made the critical weather forecast, and he’s far better looking than the real Stagg was. You don’t see me complaining!

Indeed, I have no complaints at all about Pressure, really, which is as down-the-middle an entertainment as you can get. There’s nothing in it particularly worth raving about, either; it just works. Your dad will like it. Your grandpa will like it. I liked it! If the two women in the aisle behind me are any indication, old ladies will like it. Possibly they loved it: they actually applauded when the movie ended, and this was in a theater with maybe fifteen people in the audience.

I suppose you could say they’re running out of the seemingly endless stories that have been told about World War II over the past eighty years—now they’re talking about the weather? Well, as we were informed in ending title cards, when Eisenhower was asked what gave us the edge on D-Day, he replied that was had better meteorologists than the Germans. Why not tell that story?

To be fair, the script, by David Haig and Anthony Maras and based on a stage play of the same name by David Haig, is pretty standard and by-the-numbers. I do find myself wondering how the play could possibly have been as fun to look at as the film with all its shots of stormy weather. Anyway, Stagg is the “genius” meteorologist recommended by Winston Churchill; Chris Messina steps in as Irving Krick, the antagonist American meteorologist who ignorantly insists that historical “analog” weather patterns are enough to be convincing forecasts. He’s very obstinate about this, because he has such a long track record of being right; he’s told more than once that the regions in which this worked so well for him have no relevance to the unpredictable weather patterns of Northern Europe. But does he listen? Of course not! We have a dramatic story to unfold here!

And that’s fine, I was into it. You go into this kind of movie knowing what to expect, and it delivers exactly that. It’s got a cast exclusively of men except for the one woman played solidly by Kerry Condon as Eisenhower’s secretary, and Tamsin Topolski as Stagg’s pregnant wife, who serves no purpose except to flesh out Stagg himself as a character. Otherwise this is entirely a men’s story, and that’s also fine given what the story and setting are. If “dad-core” were a genre, Pressure would be a prime example. There’s no need for you to see it in theaters, really, but you could do worse than to look for it eventually on one of your streamers. Watch it with your parents, you’ll all have a fine time.

Brendan Fraser is so dedicated, that’s his real scalp!

Overall: B

I LOVE BOOSTERS

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

I Love Boosters is only the second feature film by writer-director-producer Boots Riley; the first came eight years ago, Sorry to Bother You, a movie I struggled to connect to or make sense of. I Love Boosters is largely more of the same, but at least I can make slightly more sense of it. “Slightly” is the operative word here.

Riley is clearly a guy with a thing for gonzo excess. In this film, Keke Palmer, Naomi Ackie, and Taylour Paige play Corvette, Sade, and Mariah, respectively, also known as the Velvet Gang, the “Boosters” of the title—people who shoplift from high-end fashion outlet stores and resell them at a discount price. They quickly get the attention of the billionair fashion maven and Metro Designer outlet stores owner Christie Smith, played by a perfectly cast Demi Moore, who, along with her 2024 film The Substance, is really going for it with out-there roles in her sixties.

Moore is hardly the only fun casting choice in I Love Boosters, though. Don Cheadle shows up totally unrecognizable as Dr. Jack, a guy selling a pyramid scheme. Will Poulter is pitch-perfect as Grayson, the snooty manager at the Metro Designer store where Corvette, Sade, and Mariah manage to get jobs in an elaborate plan to boost its clothing. Eric André gets barely more than cameo time as a character credited as “Futuristic Police Tank Cop.” And while we’re on the subject of credited character names, LaKeith Stanfield plays “Pinky Ring Guy,” and I can’t even remember anything about a pinky ring; only that at one point one of the women says “He looks like sex”—and she’s right: LaKeith Stanfield need only stand still and stare at the camera to put a stir in the loins of viewers of any gender. (I guess I’ll take this moment also to name-check Jason Ritter as “Upstanding Community Member”; Kara Young as “Crying Black Mother”; and Jermaine Fowler as “Based Young Dude.” These characters all show up on news feeds offering backward talking points in defense of billionaires and corporations.)

I Love Boosters is surreal to the nth degree, to the point where the Velvet Gang are soon joined by Jianhu (Poppy Liu), a Chinese factory worker who steals two prototypes of a device with three different functions, depending on the setting: “Teleporter,” “Situational Accelorator,” or “deconstruction,” which renders anything it’s aimed at into the elements that made it. The plot is so wildly convoluted it would take an age to describe it all, but suffice it to say that the corporation is using this prototype to send product from China to the U.S. to save on shipping costs, but Jianhu teleports herself to the U.S. to start sucking all the Metro Designer outlet merchandise through the teleporter and right back to China.

This is where I Love Boosters has a lot in common with Sorry to Bother You, in which low-level workers are revealed to be literal “work horses.” The metaphor there was very on the nose, and much going on in I Love Boosters is moving in that same direction. Boots Riley throws in a lot of stuff about seemingly disparate groups of people actually fighting the same cause, and sets quite a lot of scenes in the Chinese factory where they are assembling the fashion. I’d say that there’s something ironic about the money spent to make a movie like this, using studios that arguably represent the very thing the movie is purportedly speaking out against, but this movie was made with a budget of $20 million and has grossed less than $5. Maybe Boots Riley knows what he’s doing, wasting production studio money!

I Love Boosters even features a bizarre, surrealist turn rather similar to the “work horses” of his previous film, just this time with a group of characters running after the Velvet Gang as stop-motion bodies of nothing but muscle and bone—complete with dangling, skinless penises—after being forced to shed their “suits,” which turns out to be their actual skin. This isn’t even the most memorable image in the movie; that would involve “Pinky Ring Guy,” who turns out to be way more than a guy wearing a pinkie ring, and is featured in the single most unfortgettably wild and hilariously disgusting scene in the movie. (It might also affect how much you agree that he “looks like sex.”)

This is a movie packed with gags, a ton of them visual, from Christie Smith’s office being in a leaning high-rise to the outfits worn by the Velvet Gang designed to contain all the clothes they’re boosting. A lot of the time, the gags work. A fair amount of the time, they kind of don’t. If there’s any signature trait to Boots Riley feature films—all two of them—it’s that they go in countless different wild directions and struggle to come together as a coherent narrative. I suppose a movie like this can work if you know what the very specific vibe is, and what it’s going for. I’m still not quite sure what I Love Boosters is going for exactly, but I picked up on the vibe. It worked better for me than Sorry to Bother You, but kind of barely. These movies are a lot, and you need to be ready for that. If you are then you’ll have a good time.

I Like Boosters Enough

STAR WARS: THE MANDALORIAN AND GROGU

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

Gather around, younglings. Let me tell you of a time very different from the one we currently live in. A time when a new Star Wars feature film release elicited palpable excitement. I’m not even talking about the prehistoric times of 1999, 2002, and 2005, when the Prequel Trilogy caused a global sensation in anticipation alone—only to disappoint millions (and yet delight viewers who were as young then as we were when the Original Trilogy was released). I’m talking just last decade—as recently as 2019, the appearance of the Lucasfilm Ltd logo elictited whoops from audiences. It’s worth noting that that was a full seven years after Disney bought Lucasfilm. But, it was at the end of their wildly misguided choice to flood the market with five feature films in as many years.

When I sat down to watch The Mandalorian and Grogu in a local theater, it was the first time I experienced that opening Lucasfilm Ltd logo and found it met with . . . silence. Everyone’s tired now. Star Wars is your parents’ franchise. The heyday has long since passed.

And yet: in a way, this helps The Mandalorian and Grogu, which is about as much fun as you can hope for with a feature film based on a television series, which was itself part of a broad franchise universe. It leans too heavily on action and is light on character development, but I have to say, most of the time the action is a blast.

There are many who act as though a lot is riding on this movie, and I’m not really convinced of that. I went in hoping for a good time that had no promise and no need to reinvent the wheel (or hyperdrive), and that’s precisely what I got. Perhaps more importantly, it gives a ton of screen time to that achingly cute character once known as “Baby Yoda” but whose name is actually Grogu, and it turns out that cuteness goes a long way. Even with a ton of screen time, Grogu never overstays his welcome. (For his part, Pedro Pascal gets one sequence without his all-important helmet on; they can’t have a star in one of the title roles without ever showing his money maker.) Having four new Anzellans, the small humanoid creatures who specialize in fixing things, doesn’t hurt either. The Anzellan Babu Frik was the best thing in The Rise of Skywalker, otherwise the one Star Wars movie to get worse with each viewing, and we didn’t get enough of him. We get plenty more of his kind in The Mandalorian and Grogu and it is always welcome.

All that said, there are elements of The Mandalorian and Grogu that are a bit of a mixed bag—namely, some of the casting. It’s bad enough that the opening sequence features several throwaway characters giving genuinely bad line readings, but this may be the worst I have ever seen Sigourney Weaver perform onscreen. It’s as though they just used the first take for every line she delivered, apparently having learned them just beforehand. How many science fiction franchises does Sigourney Weaver need to be in, anyway? Are Alien and Avatar not enough? Now she’s not only getting greedy, but apparently getting lazy. She genuinely feels out of place here.

The character around whom the plot turns is Rotta the Hut, a CGI character voiced by Jeremy Allen White, in a deepened voice that renders it unrecognizable. In which case, what was the point of casting him? At least Martin Scorsese’s voice is recognizable as Hugo Durant, a monkey-like character with four arms, odd a casting choice as that may be.

It’s somewhat of a miracle that Pedro Pascal is one of the few characters whose actual face we almost never see but who doesn’t seem like he’s phoning it in. Just as had been the case in the television series (but it should be stressed: you need not have seen the TV show to understand or enjoy this movie), there remains a delightful chemistry between him and the tiny puppet character—thank all the gods in the galaxy they never pivoted to rendering him fully in CGI—and that is truly the engine of this story, the reason to watch.

The Mandalorian and Grogu offers nothing particularly new, it doesn’t move the franchise forward in any real way, but it does prove it’s still viable. People may not be excited about this movie the way they were with previous ones, but this movie makes it easy to imagine one coming along that captures the public’s imagination again. Given the indelible nature of both the Mandalorian and Grogu as characters, it could easily be argued that this is better than Solo: A Star Wars Story, which made the mistake of making a Han Solo movie without Harrison Ford in it. The Mandalorian and Grogu has more potential for lasting impact, and is a fairly effective palate cleanser even seven years after The Rise of Skywalker squandered all the thrilling potential that came with The Last Jedi.

I do find myself curious about the way they title these movies. It feels a little like Lucasfilm backed themselves into a corner by retroactively making all official titles of any film in a trilogy start with the words “Star Wars,” and then making the subtitle to all standalone films “A Star Wars Story.” Except this new one is a standalone story and its official title is apparently Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu. Are they just sticking with “Star Wars” as the beginning of all feature films now and scrapping “A Star Wars Story”? Make up your minds!

The Mandalorian and Grogu heralds a clearly transitional time in Star Wars franchise history, which has had high highs and low lows, and a few movies, like this one, which are just fine. I kind of wish some of the special effects were better; occasionally movement onscreen is weirdly jerky. Other times, the picture rendered onscreen is stunning. Rotta the Hut is pretty standard-looking as CGI characters go, which qualifies as a disappointment: Star Wars is supposed to stand apart in these areas. If it’s not exceptional with its visual effects, how can it be exceptional at all?

Thankfully, none of these things drag the movie down to any fatal measure. The truth is, in spite of its clear flaws, I genuinely had a blast watching this movie. I got a good many laughs out of it, and I can easily imagine enjoying subsequent viewings. It doesn’t feature a story with enough depth to make it a new classic, but it holds its own among the other decent offerings in the franchise.

This far into a franchise’s history, this movie gives us just enough of exactly what we want.

Overall: B

OBSESSION

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

Everything’s a riff on a riff on a riff anymore, but I suppose the thing that still makes the difference is whether it’s done well. I have to admit that Obsession kind of exceeded my expectations. Granted, I went in with the bar pretty low—I knew this film got positive reviews, but as a rule the horror genre just isn’t my jam. I don’t tend to be impressed unless the movie is great enough to transcend the horror genre. I’d be hard pressed to say Obsession manages that, but it’s got a specific enough vibe to make it stand apart in a surprisingly compelling way.

We’re now 124 years from the original W.W. Jacobs horror short story The Monkey’s Paw, but we’re still not done seeing variations on its premise. You could spend a week listing off all the stories people have written about a wish gone horribly wrong because it wasn’t worded quite right or the person making the wish didn’t think it through. Plenty of people have already compared Obsession to Big, the 1988 comedy in which a kid wishes to be “big” and gets more than he bargained for by turning into Tom Hanks. Obsession is a little bit like if Big and The Exorcist had a baby.

The other thing Obsession has in common with countless other films is a character changed or possessed by powers beyond their control. Writer-director Curry Barker offers a bit of a fresh twist on this by having the possessed character turn out to be the victim as much as the villain, someone conscious of what’s happening to her but still unable to do anything about it.

In fact, you could have a fun debate about this movie: is the protagonist, a young man named Bear (a truly fantastic Michael Johnston) really the villain? We learn in very economic storytelling in the first few scenes that he’s got a huge crush on a woman in his friend group, Nikki (an increasingly unsettling Inde Navarrette), but is too scared to share his true feelings. He goes to a store to find her a replacement for a lost crystal necklace, and finds a product called a “One Wish Willow.” The instructions are to snap it in half and make one wish, and in a moment of panicked desperation Bear does this and says, “I wish Nikki loved me more than anyone in the world.”

You can imagine where this heads, and it heads there surprisingly quickly, underscoring the immediacy of the wish’s effect. I went into this movie expecting a sprinkling of comedy, and I have to say, there was only a couple of times I chuckled, and that was only out of nervousness. Barker is good at unraveling tension, especially as Nikki becomes more and more unhinged. And yet, when she literally says to Bear, “It’s all your fault,” she’s actually right. And because he’s spent so much time being in love with her, Bear even spends a fair amount of time selfishly convincing himself he can somehow make it work.

I won’t spoil what happens thereafter, but it feels worth warning the animal lovers that Bear’s cat, who is dead the moment we see it onscreen, factors significantly into the plot, and in no good ways. The best I can say is that it turns out to have been Bear’s own mistake that Sandy, the cat, has died; it somehow got into his mess of pills, presumably for his plethora of anxieties. How a cat would have gotten into pills with a secure lid while also eating its own food remains a mystery, but whatever. Maybe Bear just didn’t replace the lid well enough and then it fell from the counter? These are oddly laid out details, and we merely find the cat lying on the floor next to its own vomit and cat food spread around the floor mixed with pills. And this all happens before Bear even makes his wish, so I suppose we’re meant to see his judgment has been impaired by the trauma. This doesn’t stop him from jumping at the chance to attend Trivia Night when he learns Nikki will be there. You’ll have to watch the movie to find out how Sandy figures into the story thereafter.

There are two other people in Bear’s friend group, all of whom work at a music store run by a middle-aged man played by Andy Richter, the most random appearance of a single semi-famous face in the movie. Megan Lawless plays Sarah, the store owner’s daughter who has her own unrequited feelings for Bear. And then there’s Ian (Cooper Tomlinson), the most annoying of them all, a guy who is never truly listening when people need him to. This friend group winds up with a lot more going on between more of them than it seems at first, and I’m not sure all of that was necessary, but I guess it’s a way to thicken the plot.

When it all comes down to it, Obsession is a relatively predictable riff on The Monkey’s Paw, but it has enough fresh twists to it to make it worth a look if you’re into these kinds of movies. The performances elevate the otherwise fairly average material, and certainly some of the dialogue, especially in the beginning when things come across as a bit more contrived. When things turn creepy, though, they turn genuinely unsettling, and eventually we learn that is the case for both Bear and Nikki, who find themselves in a metaphysical bind with no solutions—or at least, no pleasant ones. Obsession gets pretty gruesome in its second half, and should delight the audiences who are coming for exactly that—not to mention the jump-scares that I never particularly enjoy.

But hey, if nothing else, Obsession is everything it promises to be, and Curry Barker and his cast deserve credit for that. This is the kind of movie I usually actively avoid, and I feel like I’m paying it a compliment by saying I don’t regret having seen it.

Hey dipshit, be careful what you wish for!

Overall: B

SIFF Advance: BODY BLOW

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

Body Blow is currently merely on the festival circuit, and thus far responses have been pretty mixed. I would argue that it practically invents the “camp noir” genre, though presumably there have already been other films released that fit the genre. Either way, detractors of Body Blow clearly just don’t get what it’s going for. This film is far from perfect, but it does strike the perfect balance in tone, right down to how it might as well have been titled Twink Fatale, except that even for this movie that title would have been a little over the top. Then again, the one onscreen murder scene in this film is the precise moment when Body Blow ascends to the point of high camp. And it’s kind of what made the movie work.

Mind you, this is a movie that falls apart with any close examination. The plot, as written by director Dean Francis, is so convoluted I often found it hard to ascertain why what I saw onscreen was happening. Some of it clicks together by the end, but not everything Francis attempts to wrap up in a bloody bow is quite fully contained in the package.

Speaking of packages—hooray for segues!—lead actor Tim Pocock’s figures prominently, albeit without a great deal of sense. (Side note: I don’t know if that guy’s last name was just a coincidence, but it sure got a smattering of giggles from the audience I was in.) His character, a Sydney cop named Aiden, is obsessed with the idea that not masturbating makes him both stronger and a better cop. In the opening scene, we hear the voiceover of a podcast he’s listening to, a guy with an American accept (also: coincidence?), is extolling the virtues of what we later learn is part of the “no fap” movement. Aiden eventually takes this to the extreme of buying a chastity cage for his penis—something we get several shots of him in, otherwise nude. I found myself wondering how the Motion Picture Association sets parameters for this, because it’s clearly not “full frontal” if we never see his penis, it’s rather unusual to see an actor’s testicles, however smooshed a cock cage might make them. Is this similar to it being okay to see nearly all of a woman’s breasts so long as only the nipple's are covered?

This cock-cage subplot is amusing—as is the fact that Aiden keeps chickens in his backyard, including roosters, even though you don’t need roosters in order for hens to keep laying eggs—but never feels vital to the plot. This involves Aiden’s introduction to Cody (Tom Rodgers), a guy who takes his identity as a twink so seriously that his car’s vanity plate just reads TWINK (the final shot of which is satisfyingly gruesome, incidentally). Cody is sort of a “kept boy” at the drag club run by a villainous drag queen played by Australian cabaret performer Paul Capsis. I don’t know how famous Capsis is in Australia, but this is the kind of part any drag queen worth their salt would love the play, yet Capsis doesn’t quite bite into the role the way you might hope, and his multiple club-host performances in the film fall a little flat.

It’s Tim Pocock and Tom Rodgers who make Body Blow worth watching (though Sacha Horler as Steel, the dirty lesbian cop and Aiden’s superior, has a bit of onscreen charisma of her own). I can’t pretend Body Blow was everything I wanted it to be, but it gave me plenty to work with, in that it features effectively knowing film noir tropes; it has a hot gay 40-year-old cop; it has a hot gay twink; I am also gay; and I have a pulse. That said, it also has a cinematographer (Franc Biffone) who clearly understood what the director was going for, and it has an 80s-synth-style score by a composer (Andreas Dominguez) who gave the vibe something you might find on a sonic highway connecting Priscilla, Queen of the Desert with the original Blade Runner.

Tone can really make or break a film, and this is where Body Blow nails it, staying impressively consistent with its very specific sensibility. The pacing is measured but never completely drags (so to speak), and this is in keeping with neo-noir storytelling. There’s a dangerous attraction between a copy and a young beauty, there are multiple levels of betrayal, and there are backyard cocks. Flaws aside, Body Blow is a film that truly stands apart, which makes it imperfectly exceptional. It’s not for everyone and it’s not meant to be, but I for one sit square in the crosshairs of its target audience, and I do love it for that.

This movie has a lot of entendres.

Overall: B

IS GOD IS

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

I feel a bit like I’m in an impossible position with Is God Is, which is a movie that I have to admit really did not speak to me, but then, I am perhaps not the person it’s speaking to.

I didn’t even realize until after seeing the film that Is God Is is based on a stage play of the same name, and a rather critically acclaimed one at that. I wonder if I would have felt differently about the play? Well, the play was written by Aleshea Harris, who also wrote and directed this film adaptation. I had never even heard of the play, much less seen it, so I have no idea how well it translates to film as compared to its original medium.

I left this movie a little stuck on how dedicated it was to its story of revenge. We have two twin sisters, Racine (Kara Young) and Anaia (Mallori Johnson), now young adults but long psychically connected, contacted by their birth mother, Ruby (Vivica A. Fox) after having long ago relinquished custody. All three of them have severe burn scars, Ruby worst of all—she is bedridden and now actively dying—as a result of her husband and the girls’ father (Sterling K. Brown) having set Ruby on fire. Anaia tried the hardest to save her and so is also significantly disfigured in the face; Racine’s face is unblemished but her arm and hand are severely disfigured. And, after all this time, Ruby has summoned her daughters to tell them, “Make your daddy dead. Real dead.”

The thing is, Racine and Anaia–who just address each other as “Twin”—take up this request, and go on a journey through which a pretty notable body count takes place, and with people who don’t necessarily deserve it. This is a film with an all-Black cast (as was the case with the play) and thus is sort of a Black woman’s answer to Quentin Tarantino, and I’m all for that. I guess I just expected something a little more stylistic, which is how the film was marketed. There’s something more nuanced going here, but if the theme is cyclical violence, it didn’t feel particularly clear while watching the movie. It felt more like a movie that just went along for the ride with these women destroying anything that gets in the way of their ultimate target, their monster of a father.

This much is clear: Racine is much more comfortable with the violence than Anaia is, and this grows into a rift between these telepathically connected sisters (we even get several silent exchanges of facial expressions, translated into dialogue with subtitles). I know this is arguably a silly nitpick, but there’s a moment when Racine and Anaia refer to themselves as having been “from the same cell,” but that would only be possible if they were identical twins, which they quite clearly are not. I could suspend disbelief here if they were two actors who looked similar and at the very least were the same height, but Mallori Johnson is literally four inches taller than Kara Young. Either Aleshea Harris is just deliberately ignoring how this works, or she doesn’t understand that fraternal twins happen when two separate eggs are fertilized by different sperm and develop in the same womb. Furthermore, it’s typically identical twins that report having some kind of psychic connection, and there they are basically telepathic with each other.

All that aside, Anaia is increasingly uncomfortable with Racine’s proclivity toward violence, and that did seem to be a clear thread in the narrative. It just didn’t strike me as consistent, or with thematic clarity, when it came to which characters actually seemed to be dangerous or capable of violence in the end. I could never quite grasp what Is God Is was trying to say, if indeed it was trying to say anything at all. At times it seemed only to revel in its own odyssey of vengeance.

Perhaps that’s the point. Maybe I just don’t get it. It wouldn’t be the firs time. There’s also a religious thread in this story, between Ruby, the mother, being referred to as “God” (hence the title) because she gave these twin sisters life; and Racine and Anaia’s encounter in a church with another woman their father abandoned, and who is now a cult-like preacher. I couldn’t quite grasp what Harris was going for here either.

There’s a lot going on in Is God Is, and yet each scene kind of takes its time, giving it a somewhat belabored pace. I’m fully aware of the acclaimed critical consensus enjoyed by this movie, which does make me doubt myself a little; maybe this just went over my head for some reason. What am I missing? Maybe I’m just missing something that wasn’t made for me, and that’s okay.

Ironically, this movie could have stood to have a bit more fire lit under it.

Overall: B-

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 lamb,” 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