BACK TO BLACK

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

Marisa Abela is clearly talented. She plays Amy Winehouse well enough that her performance is far and away the best part of the movie. She can even sing quite well. All of this means I’d really like to see her showcased in a better movie than Black to Black.

Also, there’s no escaping the shadow of the giant talent that Amy Winehouse herself was—Abela did Winehouse justice in an otherwise tedious biopic, but she’s got nothing on the real Winehouse.

Back in 2015, an excellent documentary feature was released, called Amy. I’m going to quote myself now, from my own review of that film:

She is shy, she is radiant, she has a charisma that can't be contained in spite of her apparent ignorance of it. She is the embodiment of nuance and vulnerability on the way to a tragic end, mirrored in the story arc resulting from the nearly perfect editing of this film.

Not one of these things applies to the 2024 narrative feature Back to Black, which feels a little like Winehouse’s family getting the last word in. Except, who is listening? This movie has barely made more then $3 million domestically. To be fair, the worldwide gross has reached $40 million, making it a rare English speaking film that made 93% of its groses internationally. Considering the budget was $30 million, that’s not the greatest profit margin.

It might have been, had there been good word of mouth, but no one is talking about this movie. Maybe because they are asleep. Marisa Abela has an undeniable onscreen charm, but with all due respect, saying she has a charisma that can’t be contained is not something that would ever have occurred to me. And she’d need that kind of charisma to elevate the deeply lackluster material, which seems to focus on the duller moments of Winehouse’s life, whitewash the enabling of her parents—and especially her father (Eddie Marsan)—and most baffling of all, de-emphasize the user of her actual music.

The music itself is clearly this story’s greatest asset. And we do get to hear several of her original songs, albeit often sung by Abela herself, which is the work of a competent singer rather than a superstar. But frankly, we don’t hear enough. Isn’t this supposed to be a music biopic? Instead we spend half the time on her rocky and drug-addled relationship with husband Blake Fielder-Civil (Jack O’Connell), and her adoration or her Nana (Lesley Manville).

Mind you, these are worthy elements of Amy Winehouse’s story, certain relevant. But Back to Black would have gotten a much-needed shot of energy if it focused less directly on these relationships and more on how she processed them through her music.

There’s also the casting of Winehouse’s father and Nana, where the two actors are so close in age it’s distracting: Leslie Manville, at 68, is perfectly plausible as 28-year-old Abela’s grandmother. But Eddie Marsan is all of twelve years younger than Manville, and is playing her son. He’s also plausible as Abela’s father, at age 56, but onscreen he just looks too close to Manville’s age. Weirdly, Manville looks younger than 68 and Marsan could believably be in his early sixties.

Manville is a consummate talent herself, and would be the second-best thing in this film, even if she’s not given any material really worthy of her. It’s always frustrating to see performers doing well in a lackluster movie. Well before it’s 122-minute run time was up, I was ready for it to be over. Maybe three or four scenes in a row I thought to myself, “Maybe this is the end.”

None of Back to Black is outright terrible, but one does want a movie to aim above mediocrity. At least an actively bad movie elicits a genuinely emotional response. Back to Black has its priorities out of order, and has nothing to recommend it—even its good performances are by people who have done better elsewhere. Take my word for it and just spend three bucks to rent the 2015 documentary Amy on VOD. You’ll have a far better time.

The best thing in Back to Black still doesn’t make it good.

Overall: C+

SIFF Advance: THE SUMMER WITH CARMEN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Overall: B

SIFF Advance: SEBASTIAN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A perfect performance in an imperfect story.

Overall: B

I SAW THE TV GLOW

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Overall: B-

SIFF Advance: MERCHANT IVORY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The powerhouse Hollywood couple you knew little about.

Overall: B

SIFF Advance: THE RIDE AHEAD

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

There’s a moment in The Ride Ahead, about a wheelchair user who in his early twenties uses a communication device to interview other high-profile disability activists and personalities for life advice, when its primary subject, Samuel Habib, is seen observing as a woman at an airport speaks to him off camera. By this point in the film, we’ve gotten to know Samuel well enough that we quickly pick up his irritation, even before his father speaks up for him. The woman off camera is speaking to him is blatantly ignorant of her own deep condescention, to the point that his dad, Dan, pointedly asks her to speak to Samuel like the 21-year-old young man that he is, rather than like he’s five years old.

One can only hope that some people will see a The Ride Ahead and then think twice about how they speak to people with disabilities, and gain some understanding that speech impairment has no correlation with intelligence or maturity. It certainly made me think about how I have related to people with disabilities in the past. A similar moment in the film involves Samuel managing to get in front of then-presidential candidate Joe Biden at a campaign stop in Samuel’s home state of New Hampshire in 2020. Biden speaks to Samuel with relative respect—which is undermined by his decision to stroke Samuel’s cheek. In Samuel’s voiceover narration, entirely spoken through his communication device, he observes: “Why did Joe Biden stroke my face? Weird.”

How many non-disabled people have seen The Ride Ahead and wondered whether they were more impressed with it than they should be, just because it was made in part by a disabled person? This is me, raising my hand. Such things can be difficult to gauge, when you’re aware of internal biases but can’t view yourself objectively. I can only speak to the genuine experience I had with this movie, which is something easily recommended highly to anyone. I also had what I can only assume to be an unusual experience, having also gone to see it with a friend who is a wheelchair user, and observing her reactions, quite clearly feeling validated at a regular cadence.

But here is one of the salient points of The Ride Ahead: people with disabilities have life experiences as diverse as people without disabilities, while facing common challenges in a world that resists fully integrating them, and subject to universalities of human feelings, emotions and ambitions. To get more specific, if you set aside Samuel’s mobility issues and speech impairment, he’s just like any typical American 21-year-old man (well, a straight one, anyway): he wants to go to school, he wants to live independently, he wants to find a girlfriend, he wants to get laid, he wants to watch baseball games.

He also wants to talk to other people with disabilities about how they manage to navigate their own challenges, both different from and similar to his. Samuel mounts two cameras on his 350-pound wheelchair, one facing outward to represent his point of view, and one turned inward to face him. This yields a lot of interesting footage (including, pointedly, the people who condescend to him off camera), but The Ride Ahead also includes cameras held by separate crew, a detail the film never directly addresses.

Samuel is credited as co-director of this film, alongside his father Dan Habib, who is already an established documentary filmmaker. Something that can be easy to lose sight of, because of Samuel being a genuinely impressive young man, is the amount of privilege has also has. How many other kids in their early twenties with the same or a similar condition would have the resources to create a movie like this? That said, sometimes you can use your privilege for good, and I would argue this film is an example of that.

Samuel isn’t exactly a genius—he notes that he gets a 3.0 grade point average, which is fine. But this is largely the point: he’s also not an idiot, and one of the problems is that people treat him like one. One of the people he interviews, Broadway actor Ali Stroker, talks to him about having “ninja patience,” a phrase that clearly struck him, as he repeats it again later. It’s something we all could learn, including when conversing with someone who uses a communication device.

Other people Samuel speaks to, some virtually and some in person, include Maysoon Zayid, a Muslim woman comedian with cerebral palsy; Bob Williams, a principal advisor on the Americans with Disabilities Act along with many other disability activism credits; Andrew Peterson, a marathon runner with slow speech due to fetal alcohol syndrome; and the late, legendary disability rights advocate and wheelchair user Judy Heumann (also featured prominently in the 2020 Netflix documentary Crip Camp), among others. The common thread among all of them is being regularly underestimated, and they all offer their own, varying takes on rising above it.

People with disabilities generally bristle at being pitied, and Samuel Habib has made a film in which he is emblematic of the ambition, drive and defiance of someone who simply redefines what a “normal” life is (“What the hell is ‘normal,’ anyway?”). No one with even a minor inkling of who Samuel is would ever reasonably pity him. It’s tempting to paint him as just a “regular guy,” but regular guys don’t get films made and released. This movie alone stands as an accomplishment, Samuel arguably also being a “nepo baby” notwithstanding. We see his slow but clearly locked-in engagement with the making of this film onscreen, from his education to how he dictates his interview questions for his dad to program into his communication device.

The Ride Ahead clocks in at a tight 93 minutes, including several brief animated interludes that help keep things lively. It’s as entertaining as it is illuminating, and I can think of few better uses of an hour and a half of anyone’s time.

If a rising tide lifts all boats, Samuel is one of the ones making the waves.

Overall: A-

KINGDOM OF THE PLANET OF THE APES

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

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is not just a fantastically entertaining cinematic experience for a movie that’s fourth in a franchise (well, the modern iteration of it, anyway–technically it’s the tenth of these films to be made), but a genuinely thrilling experience in its own right, on its own terms.

One of the many great things about the modern Planet of the Apes franchise is that you really don’t need to have seen any of the others to enjoy any given one of them. But, the experience is still enhanced by it, particularly the through line of what happens to the human population over time in these films. In Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011), the so-called “simian flu,” a virus made in a lab that enhanced the intellect of apes while making humans sick, was unleashed. In Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014)—my personal favorite of these films—tensions first rise between apes and what’s left of humans, ten years after the events of the first film, and apes discover that some of them aren’t so much better than humans as they thought. Two more years have gone by in War for the Planet of the Apes (2017), when the movie lives up to its name with some on-the-nose references to Apocalypse Now (“Ape-ocalypse Now” reads one graffiti), war raging with a pyshotic military human villain while a mutation of the virus in humans begins rendering them unable to speak.

All of this is, inevitably, leading toward the events of the original 1968 Planet of the Apes film, which itself was far more meditative and philosophically minded than these 21st-century special effects action extravaganzas have turned toward. The upside is that these films still have compelling ideas.

If Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes proves anything, it’s the modern franchise’s legacy of stunning visual effects. All of these movies feature ape characters rendered with motion capture performance, this one the first not to feature Andy Serkis, as his Caesar character is now long dead. Just as the franchise took a seven-year hiatus after its first three movies were released three years apart, in the universe of this franchise, we pick up on the story “many generations later.” We now have an entirely new cast of characters, among whom Caesar looms large as a mythic and increasingly misunderstood figure (shades of Ape Jesus there), all of them performed by new actors.

The urban landscape featured in all three of the previous films was San Francisco, and although there are no obviously recognizable landmarks this time, one can only assume its the same city—now almost completely obscured by green vegetation. I found it really fun to watch apes Noa (Owen Teague), Soona (Lydia Pekham) and Anaya (Travis Jeffery) swing and climb all over their habitat-home in the opening sequence of the film, increasingly wide shots revealing what they are climbing all over to be skyscrapers covered in leaves and vines.

It’s the details that elevate all of these movies, which one might otherwise expect to be as dumb as all those original 1970s sequels were, with talking ape characters in dated costuming. Now, the costumes are motion-capture visual effects, which actually hold up over time in a way few CG-laden films of the past twenty years have. Whoever makes these movies clearly cares about how convincing the visuals are, particularly Matt Reeves with the previous two films, and now Wes Ball, whose only previous feature directorial credits are the three Maze Runner films.

I can only say that the seven years since the previous film have been worth the wait. Ironically, War for the Planet of the Apes was the most critically acclaimed of these films and remains my least favorite; Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is the least critically acclaimed (reviews have been mixed-positive) and I was deeply impressed and thoroughly entertained by it. This one has the longest run time of them, at two hours and 25 minutes, but not a second is wasted. It’s nice to have a film like this, set further into the future than any of the others, spend some time effectively world building. But when the action sequences do occur, they are consistently, genuinely thrilling to watch. There are moments of CGI-rendered creature movement that don’t look quite completely natural if you look closely enough, but the story is always so compelling that it’s easy not to notice.

Another thing that sets Kingdom apart is how many fewer speaking human parts there are. Here we get Freya Allan as Mae, a human who stuns the apes of Noa’s clan when she demonstrates she can speak (one of a sprinkling of clear nods to the original 1968 film that crop up in all of the modern films). We also get William H. Macy as Trevathan, in a relatively small part as a guy resigned to “the way things are” and comfortably biding his time offering human intellectual education to the tyrannical ape, Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand). With the exception of one very brief other example of a speaking human, which might as well be regarded as a cameo, Kingdom is otherwise entirely made up of ape characters, including Proximus Caesar’s chief commander Sylva (Eka Darville); an orangutan Noa happens upon named Raka (Peter Macon) who has the last working knowledge of the original Caesar’s actual teachings and legacy; and Koro (Neil Sandilands) and Dar (Sara Wiseman), Noa’s father and mother.

When Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes begins, we get a glimpse of how ape culture has evolved, into this blend of what we think of as animal behaviors and organized social society. In all of these movies, the realistic ape-like movements and vocalizations of the motion capture performers have always been a nice touch. Wes Ball, and screenwriter Josh Friedman, have done an excellent job of continuing and expanding a genuinely unique universe, where the natures of men and beasts intersect in increasingly fascinating ways. That it gets couched in reliably thrilling action movie storytelling only makes it better, and if the quality of these movies has stayed this consistent through an impressive four movies, I can only hope to be first in line for another one in a few years.

Prepare to be wowed and thrilled.

Overall: B+

SIFF Advance: STRESS POSITIONS

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

It’s possible I might decide Stress Positions absolutely sticks the landing if I watch it, like, five more times. That’s not likely to happen so I don’t know what to tell you. Except, I suppose, that I feel like, in the end, its narrative conceit went way over my head.

It’s too bad. Director, co-writer, and costar Theda Hammel was at the SIFF screening I attended, and in the post-screening Q&A, she very quickly revealed herself to be whip smart, and ready to answer unusually incisive audience questions with surprising specifics of intention. It’s clear that nothing that happens in this film is an accident, and the intersecting narratives and changing points of view were deeply intentional. For all I know, Hammel could find this very review (I hope not) and deduce that I am an idiot who just didn’t get her art. In that case, she’d be half right.

For a “covid movie” (a pretty reductive way of referring to it, actually), there’s a lot going on here. It’s a movie contextualized by Millennials who came of age in between two era-defining catastrophes: 9/11 and, nineteen years later, the covid-19 pandemic. Hammel finds a way for her characters to refer to this directly by saying ignorant things about Bahlul (Qaher Harhash), the 19-year-old model recovering from a broken leg in the Brooklyn apartment basement of his White uncle Terry (John Early, giving perhaps the best performance I’ve seen him do in anything).

These relationships get sort of convoluted: Bahlul’s mother is Terry’s sister, but we never see her face, only blurry images from behind in flashbacks narrated by Bahlul. There’s a pointed image of her blond hair peaking out from under her head scarf, evidently after she emigrated to Morocco and had a child with a man there. We never fully meet the sister (Bahlul’s mom) or even see Bahlul’s father; we only meet Bahlul, a beautiful young man, often casually lounging around (recovering) in bed or on a couch shirtless, or sometimes in his underwear. This becomes a frequent topic of conversation among Terry’s friends, none of whom seem like great people, which Terry is understandably exasperated by, though his inclination to hide the young man from them, evidently for fear of them exoticizing him, is less understandable.

There’s a lot of voiceover narration in Stress Positions, divided between Bahlul, and Terry’s friend Karla, played by Theda Hammel. It’s relevant to note that both Hammel and the character she plays are trans women, and Karla comes over to the apartment and brings some influence on the impressionable Bahlul. Qaher Harhash is himself an actual model, incidentally, although I cannot find anything online to indicate his sexuality—he certainly read as “queer boy” to me onscreen, but that has no bearing on Harhash himself. Much is made among the characters that Bahlul is straight; whether he is also trans, it seems, Stress Positions leaves open for discussion.

There’s a kind of refreshing irreverence to Stress Positions, sometimes to the point that some might consider taboo. Hammel treats it all very casually, from when Karla says “Tell him your friend who used to be a man says hi,” to one exchange between two cisgender men in which one refers to all the “trannies” who live in the building. It would be a lot easier to get uncomfortable with that if not for the fact that a trans woman directed and wrote the film, notwithstanding a word now widely regarded as a slur being put into the mouth of a cisgender character.

There’s certainly something fun about this depiction of a group of people who have no particularly bigoted attitudes toward each other’s fluid differences of sexuality and gender (ignorance is another story), but are still all messy. They may have no fucks to give about matters that Boomers have spent decades giving themselves aneurysms over, but that doesn’t mean they know what the hell they’re talking about at any given time either. In particular, conversations about Bahlul being a brown person has all the White characters telling on themselves, not understanding the myriad nuances of the Muslim world, the Middle East, and where the two do or do not intersect.

This is especially the case with Terry, a character who provides by far the most comic entertainment, a guy who exudes and attracts chaos (all while Bahlul hangs out calmly in his leg cast), more than once throwing out his back when something startles him and he trips or falls in the kitchen while cooking. Terry is the guy who thinks of himself as a model progressive, while often betraying his own ignorance, particularly when it comes to his nephew’s multi-ethnic heritage. (A couple of funny scenes have characters, including Terry, queuing up a YouTube video called “What Is the Middle East?”)

Terry is also deeply paranoid about covid, this story unfolding in the summer of 2020—in Brooklyn, no less, where covid cases were catastrophic in a way few other places in the U.S. ever got. I have mixed feelings about Terry’s paranoia played as excess, because he actually has a point when he says, “We wouldn’t need a curfew if you all just stayed home.” Yet, he still lets Karla in when she comes to help after he throws his back out, and keeps bringing Coco, the weirdly voyeuristic landlady from upstairs (another trans woman, played by Rebecca F. Wright), inside to fix the Internet even though he’s constantly admonishing her to put her mask on.

There’s a curious element, an odd sort of vibe, about Stress Positions taking place during the height of the pandemic. There was a period where people clearly did not want obvious covid references in their entertainment, as they preferred to use that to escape from it. Now it’s four years on, and people are still getting covid, but it’s no longer the global catastrophe it once was. The audience at the screening last night seemed entertained by the comic references to an era we’re all glad is behind us, but I have no idea whether non-festival audiences will be as into it.

I haven’t even mentioned the fact that Terry has a husband, who has found a new man and served him divorce papers. We actually meet Leo (John Roberts) later in the film, at one of the “social distanced” parties held in the apartment backyard that is shockingly large for a New York City apartment. And his presence gets intertwined with Bahlul, who has already been narratively intertwined with Terry, and Karla, and Karla’s partner Vanessa (Amy Zimmer) who wrote a book in Karla’s voice—it’s a whole thing—and even, at lest in terms of narrative structure, with Ronald the GrubHub delivery guy (Faheem Ali), who himself intersects problematically with Karla.

I’d ask if you were able to follow all that, except it’s unclear to me if it even matters. I’ll tell you this: there are countless scenes in Stress Positions with crackling dialogue, well delivered, a sequence of conversations I could have listened to indefinitely, almost as if written by Richard Linklater if he were a messy queer Millennial. I really, really enjoyed the experience of this movie. I just didn’t quite understand the layers of turns it took in the end.

You might feel like Terry here by the time the movie ends.

Overall: B+

SIFF Advance: THE QUEEN OF MY DREAMS

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

There’s something sort of infectious about The Queen of My Dreams, for all its imperfections—or maybe because of its imperfections. It’s an unusual vibe in cinema, where if the movie had greater polish, I’m not sure I would have liked it as much.

The story is certainly unique: a queer Pakistani-Canadian woman named Azra must travel back to Karachi for mourning rituals when her father, having traveled for a visit back home with her mother, dies of a heart attack. The story cuts back and forth between Azra’s “present” in 1999, and when her mother was around the same age and being courted in Karachi, in 1969.

Never mind that we never see movies like this as written, but the most novel thing about The Queen of My Dreams is that Amrit Kaur (The Sex Lives of College Girls) plays both Azra, and Azra’s mother, Mariam, in 1969.

Writer-director Fawzia Mirza—herself a queer Canadian of South Asian descent—employs a fairly clever conceit here, throwing in a line among her extended family about how much Azra looks like Mariam did at the same age. After this, it’s no surprise when we see Kaur playing the part in 1969, never mind the fact that she really doesn’t look much like 1999 Mariam, played by Mimra Bucha, at all. There’s even a slightly awkward transition between 1960s Mariam to early-eighties Mariam, when the character suddenly transitions from Kaur to Bucha, but it hardly matters. Here, we get a different actress playing younger Azra (Ayana Manji), even though Azra’s brother, Zahid, is played by Ali A. Kamzi as both an older teenager and as an adult.

I guess I’m saying that the timelines in The Queen of My Dreams, with inconsistencies of who is cast in certain ones, are a little muddled. Somehow the movie still works, due more than anything to Amrit Kaur herself. She is in by far the most scenes, it’s never confusing whether it’s the 1999 “present” or the 1969 “past,” and she gives performances that are distinct enough to make the different characters clear but similar enough to feel like we’re watching a mother and her daughter at different times. It doesn’t hurt that Kaur has a face that just radiates light and charisma onscreen.

The genre of The Queen of My Dreams is a little harder to pin down. If pressed, I’d say it’s a dramedy, although it might more accurately be called a “fun drama.” It has both utterly charming sequences and periods of straightforward earnestness. Azra’s queerness seems a bit tricky, as Fawzia Mirza’s script regularly acknowleges it directly, but never truly makes it part of the story. Under normal circumstances I might love this, except it’s also clear that Azra is closeted to her parents (a spin-the-bottle scene Mariam interrupts with some consternation notwithstanding), and this detail is never given any resolution. Maybe this is just a standard way of living for many queer children of South Asian immigrants? I’ll grant that I’m just a White guy who has no idea, and am unsure if the fact that it played oddly in the film was because of my ignorance or because of legitimate narrative defect.

In any case, Azra’s queerness takes a backseat to the story of her relationship with her mother—although much is made of Azra’s frustration with being segregated from the men in all the mourning rituals, being denied certain privileges of staying with or burying the body. The film ends on a slightly uplifting note between Azra and Mariam, offering a bit of hope for them, although no more than we have already seen plenty of in their lives up to this point, much of it a mutual love for Bollywood movies. Perhaps a loving relationship that obscures some deep self-repression is simply all these two will ever know.

There could be many reasons I didn’t fully get The Queen of My Dreams, but I certainly enjoyed it while it played out.

Amrit Kaur, the most watchable thing onscreen.

Overall: B

THE FALL GUY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How great the shot is, is up for debate.