STOP! THAT! TRAIN!

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

Let me tell you a story, you ones. There once was a movie spoof comedy so hilarious, people went back to see it over and over again, just to catch the wall-to-wall gags they missed while they were too busy laughing the first time. It was a smash at the box office, it could reasonably be called the funniest movie ever made, and it was called Airplane! The thing is, if you are indeed young, you’ve probably never even heard of this movie, let alone the fact that it was sending up the countless, self-serious disaster movies being made at the time. And you certainly won’t understand that Stop! That! Train! clearly thinks its paying homage to it, but instead is straight up ripping it off.

It has the characters regularly returned to as a running gag—in this case, a horny woman (Missi Pyle) coming on to the train conductor (Chris Parnell) she doesn’t realize is dead; or the bitchy businessman (Jesse Tyler Ferguson) yammering to a pregnant woman (Mayan Lopez) about how he only likes babies when they are still inside the womb, or the distracted woman (Natasha Leggero) who can’t stop yakking on her phone. In retrospect, I suppose it actually is kind of hilarious that the woman playing a famous actress constantly thinking people are recognizing her, when really they just wanted to complain about her being in her seat or whatever, was an actually-famous actress I did not recognize, and it turns out she was Sarah Michelle Gellar.

Airplane! didn’t have these exact same scenarios, but it certainly had a number of similar concepts—enough, in fact, that here they play like overused ideas in Airplane IV. What Stop! That! Train! does do is have crew dragging the conductor’s lifeless body down the aisle while passengers fail to notice, and this exactly happens in Airplane!

What I’m saying is, I watched Stop! That! Train! constantly thinking of the far better movie that clearly inspired it but did everything a hundred times better and with actual laughs per minute. I won’t deny that I got a few good chuckles out of this movie, but the frequency was more like a couple laughs per act. I was excited by the thought of a major motion picture presented basically as a spoof but through a pointedly queer lens, but this is an exercise that would have worked far better as a five-minute sketch, or hell, even a thirty-minute short film. Stretching it out even as far as what otherwise should be a tight, ninety minutes, if you’ll pardon the pun, drags it down. Way too much of what’s onscreen just lands with an airless thud.

The opening credits sequence is amusing, as director Adam Shankman (who saw better days directing the 2007 film adaptation of the Hairspray musical—the ensuing two decades have not been kind) cuts back and forth between real footage of impressive high-speed trains zooming through verdant landscapes and shots of obvious model trains and toys. Unfortunately, this is the high point of the film. We then meet Tess and DeeDee (played by drag queens Ginger Minj and Jujubee), on their way to work at Stank Rail, only to find themselves laid off. When two crew members don’t show up for work at competing rail company Glamazonian Express, they quickly whip up disguises to go in their place. Very quickly this luxury train finds itself headed straight into a “Stormaganza,” and hijinks ensues. Shankman, and co-writers Christina Friel and Connor Wright, clearly want you to think that hilarity ensues. It might be more likely for your mind to wander.

If you’re a huge fan of RuPaul’s Drag Race, you might consider this movie star studded. I never got into that show, so while I’m sure plenty of people recognize the plethora of other drag queens in the cast (Brooke Lynn Hytes; Marty Lauter; Symone; Monét X Change; I think I may actually recognize Latrice Royale from somewhere), the only one readily recognizable to me was RuPaul, who plays President Judy Gagwell—part of the “gag” here being, obviously, she’s hardly any more ridiculous than the actual President we have right now, though her winning campaign slogan of “She fun” isn’t that far off from how he got here. Maybe my favorite was Matt Rogers as President Gagwell’s Press Secretary; his reaction after Gagwell says “Give it to me straight” and then “Now give it to me gay” is pretty great. This entire film could have used more of his vibe.

The thing is, I really want a movie like Stop! That! Train! to work, and to succeed. It was made for a paltry $20 million, and the $2.5 million it’s earned in the past five days might as well be regarded as nothing—but, if you watch this movie, you won’t be surprised. The people making this movie seemed to be having a good time, but apparently no one was around to tell them how much of it wasn’t working. The outtakes during the end credits have more energy to them than the entire film that precedes them.

Stop! That! Train! is the kind of project that would have worked far better as a janky live theater production, particularly one that could be workshopped in front of audiences so they could decipher which gags actually work. There’s a smattering of gags in the film that do work, but they are few and far enough between that you might start to get antsy, or downright impatient. The film does have a sort of knowingly low-budget quality, with what appears to be the aim of that being part of the charm. I really like a ton of the people seen in it (there are countless I haven’t even mentioned; I will say that Guy Branum is utterly wasted in it as one of countless idiot guys who won’t listen to the one woman—played by Rachel Bloom—at the United States Train Command Center who is trying to save the runaway train), but none of them get used in a way that comes close to meeting their potential.

This is a movie that actually could have been great, had they just used better writers. This makes it all the more disappointing, and given the hopes I had for it, maybe the most disappointing movie I’ve seen this year. I want to give the cast their due, say they’re doing their best, but that hardly matters in a comedy where most of the comedy doesn’t work.

Stop! That! Movie! and watch Airplane! instead.

Overall: C

FATHER MOTHER SISTER BROTHER

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

Look. Don’t talk to me about the “beauty in the ordinary.” We all get more than enough of the ordinary just walking down a residential street on any given day. Or, in an example much closer to the vibe of Father Mother Sister Brother, simply staring at a blank wall.

Every time I see a movie like this—or, more to the point, a movie that leaves me baffled by its very existence—I find myself imagining the talent reading the script for the very first time. All these people, in this case an ensemble cast of eight mostly-great actors, wanted to do this?

It would seem there is a whole lot here just flying way over my head. Over at MetaCritic.com, this film has a rating of 76 out of 100. It has a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 81%. It seems worth noting that the user ratings on these sites are 6.4 out of 10 and 46%, respectively—and there’s nothing “woke” here for people to stupidly review-bomb. This may be a rare case in which the populist response is actually the voice of reason. You won’t find any pretensions toward an inflated sense of worth in this review—Father Mother Sister Brother does more than enough of that on its own.

Which is to say: holy Christ was I bored by this movie. In my opinion, writer-director Jim Jarmusch has a spotty record at best; my favorite film of his would have to be Only Lovers Left Alive, about a vampire couple contending with the prospect of being together for eternity, and I gave that a solid B. It was an absolute thrill ride in comparison to this film.

Jarmusch’s project this time is to present an anthology, three separate stories with a thematic connection: the death of a loved one hangs in the air at all times. There are some viewers who find something profound in this. I did, too: profound boredom. Halfway through the first story, “Father", in which Adam Driver and Mayim Bialik play siblings on a deeply awkward visit at the home of their widowed father played by Tom Waits, I thought: Is the whole movie going to be like this? It was not long into the second story, “Mother,” in which Cate Blanchett and Vicky Krieps play sisters on an annual visit for tea with their mother, played by Charlotte Rampling, before I realized: Yes, I guess it is. And when the third story was presented as “Sister Brother” and I realized there was only one more story and not two, I thought: Oh, thank God. In that one, by the way, Luka Sabbat and Indya Moore play twins visiting the emptied home of their parents who died in a small plane crash while one of them was flying it.

There are several details Jarmusch playfully—I use that term loosely—puts into all three stories. All of them feature extended shots of the adult children driving cars. All of them feature characters wearing, and commenting on, a Rolex watch. In all three of them, one character utters some version of “Bob’s your uncle.” In all of them, the characters have tea—although in the third one it switches to coffee. In only the first and third one, a toast is made with their drinks; in the first the question is asked whether you can toast with tea, and in the third the question is asked whether you can toast with coffee.

Playing the game of keeping track of these common details in all three stories is the best chance you’ve got at staying awake. Seriously I could have slept through this entire movie and gotten as much out of it. Even identifying the common details got tedious after a while, because it was the closest thing to anything actually happening in any of the scenes, and by the end these touches felt forced and contrived.

I took particular issue with “Sister Brother,” in which the twins’ backstory made little sense. They’re clearly in France, they’re ostensibly visiting the apartment they grew up in, but they both have American accents? Maybe the family moved here when they were teenagers. But then they examine multiple IDs and birth certificates left behind by their parents, and this is somehow the first time they learn they were born in New York.

Father Mother Sister Brother is brimming with intentionality; it’s clear that nothing in it is accidental—including the long, awkward silences that characterize most of the 110-minute running time that felt to me like an eternity. I can’t remember the last time I was so happy a movie was over. There is a tone here not far off from that of the 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, which somewhat famously topped the latest Sight and Sound Greatest Films of All Time poll in 2022. That film also marinates in the ordinary, only in that case for three hours and 22 minutes. The key difference is that Jeanne Dielman has a point it makes far more clearly. I left the theater at a loss as to the point in Father Mother Sister Brother.

Maybe Jarmusch is your thing. He really isn’t mine.

Overall: C

THE RUNNING MAN

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

Edgar Wright has directed and co-written so many delightful movies—Shaun of the Dead (2004), Hot Fuzz (2007), Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010)—it’s easy to expect, or at least hope, that a new one will at least be really fun. Baby Driver (2017) was fun but did not quite reach the heights of his earlier work; and Last Night in Soho (2021) was . . . fine. You can perhaps detect a shift here, and I suppose every good director, if prolific enough, will inevitably product an outright dud.

Enter The Running Man, an exercise in squandered potential if ever there was one. Wright also has a co-writing credit here, alongside Michael Bacall, who previously collaborated with Wright on Scott Pilgrim vs. the World—a movie which, by the way, holds up surprisingly well. So what the hell happened? This The Running Man, the second adaptation of the Stephen King novel by the same name (the first having starred Arnold Schwarzenegger, in 1987), is badly written, phoned in by the actors, looks ugly, and is overlong. What person in their right mind thinks 133 minutes is a reasonable runtime for a movie like this? I saw that runtime before seeing the movie and immediately knew it didn’t bode well. A perfect runtime for a movie like this is, say, an hour and 45 minutes. (The 1987 film was an hour and 41.)

I never expected greatness from this movie, but I thought it would at least be dumb fun. It was dumb all right, though in a particularly unexpected way: this movie thinks it’s way smarter than it actually is. This is a dystopian future in which the divide between wealthy and poor is massive; “megacorps” own everything including government and law enforcement; and mass entertainment caters to the lowest denominators of profanity and dehumanizing violence—all the same beats we have seen time and time again in dystopian movies. The Running Man goes further with characters regularly ranting about the state of inequality, in ways that thoroughly ignore subtlety and never sound like anything but platitudes.

All of this shit is going in one ear and out the other of anyone watching, who are just there for escapist entertainment in an American cultural hellscape. The very existence of this film is the product of what it’s pretending to be preaching against. It’s worth noting that the one thing this movie does that we haven’t seen much of before is use AI as a plot point, with The Running Man’s gameshow manufacturing footage that isn’t real in an effort to keep the audience against the contestant—except it’s never addressed as “AI” and only ever declared “not real” in ways, again, we’ve already heard a thousand times. The only thing that could make this entire production—with a budget of $110 million—more perfectly cynical would be to learn that AI was actually used in the making of it.

I do try to find redeeming qualities, and I found a couple, though they hardly make up for what makes this movie suck. The cinematography isn’t bad, but that doesn’t mean much when the production design is so dingy and drab. Ben Richards (Glen Powell) spends a lot of time running around cities with crumbling infrastructure and complacent bureaucracy. The special effects aren’t terrible, but none of what’s decently rendered looks very good. There is evident skill but a fundamental lack of imagination. Even when we first meet Ben and his wife, Sheila (Jayme Lawson, given a truly nothing part to work with), we learn of their desperation to find medication for their young child with the flu. This is set in their tiny closet of a home surrounded by concrete walls, and the entire sequence is a deeply clunky exposition dump through their dialogue. This, along with Ben pleading with his shitty boss to get his job back, is how the film opens.

The Running Man reveals itself to be in trouble as soon as characters open their mouths. Glen Powell must be noted here, as deeply miscast in the role of a deeply disenfranchised, constantly furious man. After many roles as a romantic charmer of a leading man, I suppose it’s understandable that he’d want to be cast against type, except that he works well in those other roles and just isn’t believable here. He doesn’t feel genuine.

Naturally, as Ben spends a lot of time on the run, he crosses paths with an ensemble cast of supporting characters, including Scott Pilgrim star Michael Cera, here a surprisingly credible underground revolutionary who offers Ben aid. He’s booby trapped his large house so he can have fun with the “goons” (what everyone calls the police in this film, right down to the brief sighting of graffiti that reads AGAB) once they inevitably catch up with them. This is one of the more engaging action set pieces in the film, but for the fact that it comes along way too late and has no critical need to be included in the plot whatsoever.

The first helper Ben comes to is his old friend Molie, played by the always dependable William H. Macy, who is given far too little screen time—he’s in maybe two scenes. Sean Hayes makes a single appearance as the host of another dehumanizing gameshow called Speed the Wheel, in which we see an overweight man literally run to death on a human-sized hamster wheel. Lee Pace plays the leading “Hunter” among those professionally hired to chase down The Running Man. Pace spends most of the movie with a mask over his face, and it’s eventually taken off like a big reveal, only to show a guy whose biggest part to date has been as Brother Day on the Apple TV series Foundation.

The Running Man is just a series of misguided choices at every turn. Very late in the film, Ben takes a woman hostage played by Emilia Jones, who was previously seen as the hearing daughter of deaf parents in the 2021 Best Picture winning CODA, and much more recently as Maeve, the antagoinist’s niece in the HBO limited series Task. This resume reveals a very talented young actor who can disappear into different parts, but the only explanation I can come up with this one was that she wanted to be part of an action blockbuster.

I think I can say with confidence that The Running Man is not fated to be a blockbuster, especially once regular audiences start to see it, and do not rave about it. The closest thing to a saving grace this movie has is several fairly exciting action set pieces; once the clunky exposition was out of the way and Ben was on the run, I found myself more engaged, and thought maybe that would turn me around on the thud of a note the movie starts on. This sensation was short lived, as the writing is so inexcusably rote. Characters don’t make logical choices, but rather make dumb moves transparently designed to keep the action going. This gets ratcheted up to such ridiculousness that there’s even a gun battle in an airplane cockpit.

And all this time The Running Man is presented as though it’s confidently entertaining us, while also being thematically provocative. It definitively fails on both those fronts, ultimately serving up only rehashed ideas and recycled platitudes.

Is he angry or confused? After seeing this movie, you’ll be both!

Overall: C

THINGS LIKE THIS

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

Things Like This is an awfully bland and forgettable title for a movie premise with real promise: it’s a romantic comedy about two young men who fall in love in New York City, and one of them just happens to be fat.

I use the word “happens” loosely, because this is the first of many flaws in the execution of this film. The trailer makes it look like it’s just about two guys who don’t have their lives together, and falling in love with each other eventually helps them figure their shit out. It seemed refreshing to see a fat guy get cast in one of the lead roles, and in the trailer, his fatness is never even mentioned. And here’s the weirdest part: his fatnesss is incidental to the romance int his movie—and yet, in the opening scene, Zack Anthony (Max Talisman) is verbally dressed down by a hookup he’s just had sex with, telling him how he finds him unattractive. Zack’s response is to eat cake frosting straight out of a can. What the hell is this shit? There is almost none of this through the rest of the movie, so why make it a part of setting the stage, in the very first scene?

Things do not exactly get better from there, unless you want to count the few moments of genuine sweetness. Zack meets his love interest at a party, and the other guy’s name is also Zack—Zack Mandel. Mandel is played by Joey Pollari, and I hate that I have to say this since he’s the one “conventionally attractive” major character in the movie, but he’s also the only one with a natural screen presence, the only one with an unforced or unself-conscious delivery. The one critical thing he doesn’t have is chemistry with Talisman as the other Zack. They might have found someone he did have chemistry with had they been able to spend much time on, say, chemistry reads, but this film quite clearly did not have the budget for that.

To be fair, there is a sense that Talisman might have fared better under a different director. But the thing is, he is the star, and the director, and the writer. Which means he made the choice to cast and write himself as the fat guy who not only loves to eat right after sex (that alone isn’t so bad, I guess), but also defiantly eats cake frosting when made to feel bad about himself. These are choices I find frankly baffling.

Beyond that, Things Like This is utterly predictable, in ways that are inherently disappointing, because it didn’t have to be—it being a romantic comedy notwithstanding. Overall, the script has a vibe of being a first draft. (Realistically, it was not the first draft, which means I shudder to think what the actual first draft was like.) There’s a deeply dramatic, emotional scene on Zack Anthony’s apartment building rooftop, where Zack Mandel freaks out and breaks things off because of fear he’ll screw it up. This is a pretty universal feeling, sure, but the way the scene plays, this early in the film as well as this early in their relationship, the clear expectation of our emotional investment as viewers is entirely unearned.

Zack Mandel works for a talent agency where his boss is a complete caricature, where his friend is thinly drawn at best. Zack Anthony is a struggling writer looking to get a book about vampires published. One of Things Like This’s few accomplishments is giving Zack the confidence to say “I’m really good” about his own writing without coming across as insufferable. Nevertheless, there is a scene in which Mandel tells Anthony the plot of his book, and while Mandel says it sounds really cool, I just thought: this book sounds dumb as shit! It would never get published, but in the world of this bizarro movie—spoiler alert!—a book publisher almost immediately offers him what, to Zack Anthony at least, is a shocking amount of money.

There’s a climactic scene in which Zack Anthony sings a song (of course) in order to win over Zack Mandel, and Talisman has some genuine vocal talent. Honestly, even his performance as Zack Anthony might have been honed into something convincing in the hands of a director other than himself. Bringing another writer also wouldn’t have hurt. He must have been desperate to cover many jobs in order to get this movie made, but sadly, the final product just leaves you wondering how this movie got made. Even the outtakes that play during the end credits fall flat, a bunch of clips that make no real impact and simply intensify the mystery of their own existence.

There are many problems with Things Like This, but the fundamental one is the one-dimensional nature of nearly all of its characters. There’s earnestness here, even occasionally effective sweetness (I quite liked the winter scene in the park when they first kiss, albeit after some truly clunky dialogue), but no depth. There is always a sense that there is some depth around, somewhere, but this movie is always out of it.

A deceptively sweet image of characters who have no idea how contrived they are.

Overall: C

YOUR MONSTER

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

I’m happy to buy into the rules of the world of a movie, so long as it clearly establishes what those rules are. This is how Your Monster fails from the ground up: Laura is a young woman just home from cancer surgery, she shacks up in the childhood home her mother has long not been using for reasons never clearly stated—and she is confronted by the childhood monster who lives in her closet. And sometimes under her bed. We don’t get any clear patterns to go on here.

Your Monster wants to be a quirky riff on the Beauty and the Beast story, and instead flounders as it becomes less and less clear exactly what writer-director Caroline Lindy, here making her first feature film, is going for. I found myself losing patience with its fuzzy plotting long before I had a chance to consider what the point of any of it was.

I’ll give it this much: the actors are okay. Melissa Barrera plays Laura with a certain charm, as far as it can be taken as written anyway. We get a montage of her crying after being taken home by her friend, Mazie (Kayla Foster), who will become a pivotal plot point, and nothing more, later. It should be noted that when Laura and Mazie are together, they never feel like authentic friends. They always feel like a couple of actors pretending to be friends. This is the subtle vibe throughout Your Monster, which is populated with actors who seem talented enough but can’t muster any chemistry to speak of as an ensemble.

Oddly, Edmund Donova gives maybe the best performance in the film, as Jacob, the boyfriend playwright who wrote a part for Laura in his play but then broke up with her while she was in the hospital. Jacob is clearly set up as the villain of the story, and he really is a bit of a douchebag, notwithstanding some genuinely valid responses to Laura’s unhinged behavior after auditioning for the part he clearly assumed was no longer hers. In keeping with characters in this movie doing things that don’t make a lot of sense, he still offers her the part of understudy. Ultimately, though, as well as Donovan channels him, Jacob is never written as villainous enough for us to care that much. We’re left to wonder if this entire film was just mounted as a metaphorical exercise in revenge on a dipshit guy who broke up with his girlfriend while she was in the hospital.

I’m a little ambivalent about Tommy Dewey in the part of the monster, who is only ever called the incredibly original and creative “Monster.” Underneath the extensive face makeup and prosthetics, Dewey has a delivery that is eerily similar to that of Bill Hader. I thought a lot about the costume design. Who decides what outfits a closet monster wears? Except for the face and the long hair, he looks like a disheveled professor. At a Halloween party (don’t even get me started on the wildly contrived way this party is announced at a play rehearsal), Laura is dressed as the Bride of Frankenstein and Monster shows up in slightly more formal attire, saying “I’m a business monster.”

Your Monster is peppered with little gags like that, which made me giggle in spite of my increasing contempt for the movie overall. What irritates me most about this movie is its squandered potential. It has a compelling premise, with a promise it utterly fails to meet. In the hands of a better writer, this could have been really fun. Instead, it simmers in a weird stew of baffling character choices and utterly predictable plot turns. This is a movie that never quite comes together. It ends in a way that clearly regards itself as clever but is actually incomprehensible, coming right back to the complete absence of established rules of its world.

Several scenes feature Laura and the rest of the cast performing the play that Jacob wrote, and is apparently now directing. It’s a musical, and Melissa Barrera has a great singing voice she gets to show off—but in a play-within-a-movie that we as an audience can never get a handle on. Is it supposed to be the elevated feminist work that Laura indispensably helped workshop, or is it the driveling work of a pretentious dipshit? Your Monster can’t seem to make up its mind about that, and meanwhile the scenes we see actually performed on a stage are bland and utterly forgettable.

And that’s where we are with Your Monster: by turns bland and unintentionally cringey, its one genuinely memorable moment being (spoiler alert!) a literal sex scene between woman and monster. The incomprehensible ending suggests that maybe Laura was the monster all along (I think?), in which case we have to wonder what was really happening in the sex scene. Your Monster has no interest in clarifying what’s baffling about it, however, so perhaps it’s better for everyone involved if we just embrace how forgettable it is in the end, and move on.

More like Your Blah

Overall: C

IF

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

I found this movie utterly baffling. A story can be any kind of fantasy it wants to be, but once it establishes the rules of its own universe, it needs to follow them. If does not do that.

Ater having written and directed A Quiet Place and A Quiet Place Part II, John Krasinski has clearly built up a lot of goodwill—arguably too much. With If, he turns his attention away from horror and toward family-fantasy fare, and brings with him the voice talents of every movie star imaginable, from Steve Carell to Louis Gossett Jr. to Phoebe Waller-Bridge to Awkwafina to George Clooney to Bradley Cooper to Matt Damon to Bill Hader to Bill Hader to Richard Jenkins to Christopher Meloni to Matthew Rhys to Sam Rockwell to Maya Rudolph to Amy Schumer to Jon Stewart—and more!—all of them voicing a different, animated “Imaginary Friend” (IF). For some reason, somehow, they are all still hanging around Manhattan after their kid friends have grown up and forgotten about them.

All of these “IFs” might have made for a fun combined cast of characters, were this movie to have as much pep as the trailer clearly aimed to suggest. None of the marketing for this movie suggests how incongruously wistful it is in tone, sometimes downright melancholy, certainly downbeat. There are certainly peppy moments, but virtually all of them were in the trailer. You come to this movie and instead find a story about a 12-year-old girl who is growing up too fast due to the death of her mother.

Lest we miss an opportunity to get even more maudlin, our little-girl hero, Bea (Cailey Fleming), is now worried about her dad—played by writer-director John Krasinski—staying in the hospital for a major surgery. What kind of surgery is never explicitly stated, although the gag of his “broken heart” suggest perhaps heart surgery. Bea has already lost one parent and is now facing the risk of losing another. What fun, family entertainment!

Honestly, in spite of several genuinely fun “IF” characters that get too little screen time, I can’t see IF really working for children viewers of any age. This seems to be more aimed at adults who feel wistful about their own inner children.

While Bea’s dad is in the hospital, she goes to stay with her grandmother (Fiona Shaw), where she and her dad had also stayed when her mother was dying. It’s in this building where Bea discovers all the IFs hanging out in a sort of junk room up on the top floor, alongside the one evident human who can also see all the other IFs. This man is played by Ryan Reynolds, who gives a serviceable if surprisingly muted performance. Every once in a while, IF would give me genuine chuckles, among them a running gag where Ryan Reynolds keeps tripping over the one who is invisible.

What purpose these IFs serve in the movie, though, is never presented in a way that quite makes sense. First Bea is helping Ryan Reynolds match IFs with potential replacement kids, like they are running some kind of imaginary orphanage. When that doesn’t pan out, they set about reuniting the IFs with their original kids who are now adults. In one cast, a nervous adult played by Bobby Moynihan gets reassurance from his own IF right before some kind of job interview. What we are supposed to understand is happening there exactly, I couldn’t tell you. This guy’s Imaginary Friend would have been an original figment of his own imagination, right? So he’s gaining confidence for an interview (or presentation, or whatever the hell it is) by tapping into the imagination of his own childhood, in a way that’s beyond his control? What?

The fundamental problem with IF is the evident blank check Krasinski was given after his previous success, where no one else bothered to step in with some guard rails outside his own passion. This movie clearly means something to him, and presumably it made sense in his head. It has some fairly imaginative ideas in it, to be fair, but it also feels like it came from the imagination of someone who recently had a lobotomy.

The story improves, slightly, by the time IF reaches its final half hour or so—a fact that is undermined by the real fear that maybe Bea’s father will also die. Somewhat ironically, the best part of this movie is Fiona Shaw as the grandmother, a character who spends most of the film seemingly unrelated to any of the IFs (although you can probably predict where things are going there). Cailey Fleming as Bea is clearly a talented young performer, but a little mismatched with this movie, having that precocious quality of so many child actors that stops just short of unsettling.

Furthermore, no one in this movie has a conversation that sounds like actual people talking. There is a subplot of a budding friendship between Bea and another little boy in the hospital (Alan Kim), and after their first conversation I literally thought to myself, That was really weird dialogue. In short, Krasinski threw so much talent at his passion project that he could not properly organize it, and the final result is a total mess. If there was anything that genuinely impressed me was how a mess could be not so much chaotic as strangely dull. At least some more consistent gags might have kept me awake.

I’m very sorry to inform you this movie’s condition is terminal.

Overall: C

THE FLASH

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

When it comes to The Flash, we have to start with Ezra Miller, less because of their relatively competent performance and more because the great life lesson we must all learn from them, apparently, is that nonbinary people can also be massive creeps. Gone are the days of arguing for “separating the art from the artist,” and rightly so: no film exists in a vacuum, nor has it ever. This is why I can no longer stomach watching any film featuring Mel Gibson or Kevin Spacey or Woody Allen. The defenses and justifications just don’t work anymore.

Where does it end, you might ask, when Hollywood is packed with creeps? Do we just avoid all movies altogether? Setting aside the fact that there are degrees of severity (as well as redemption), and the fact that such a question is arguably disingenuous, ideally it ends with people like this no longer being given chance after chance while their behavior remains unchanged.

Your next logical question might be why the hell I went to see this movie, especially if I tell you I already went in with my expectations in the basement, and the answer is simple: I couldn’t help myself. That’s a lame answer, sure. Sometimes people are lame.

I never would have bothered with this movie were it not for the knowledge that Michael Keaton was returning to reprise his role as Batman, for the first time in thirty-one years. Like many people, I feel that Keaton has always been the best of all live-action Batmen, and my all-time favorite movie since my teens has been Batman Returns (1992), which I have seen more times than any other film. By extension, I have a similar, if less passionate, fondness for its predecessor, Batman (1989), which was helmed by the same director (Tim Burton). It is from that earlier Batman that The Flash takes all of its visual references, which is a delight if you’re An Old like me, and maybe pointless for anyone half my age or younger, brought up on endless iterations of the same superhero dreck that, unfortunately, this film also is.

If you were to split The Flash into three acts, both the first and the third are mind-numbingly busy with CGI chaos. (Not to mention witless: in the opening sequence we see a bunch of babies slide out the window of a collapsing building, just so we can hear it called a “baby shower.” Don’t worry about the babies, though: not only do they—spoiler alert—get saved, but they aren’t real!) I have to admit, however, that I found a whole lot of the second act genuinely delightful, as it successfully traded on nostalgia for a time when high-profile, blockbuster superhero movies were still a novelty, only came out every few years, and were elevated by deeply creative, practical production design. Oh, right: and they also had good scripts.

The second act is when we meet Bruce Wayne as played by Michael Keaton, now 71 years old (Jesus, this means he was younger than I am now in Batman Returns), an alternate-timeline version of The Flash’s mentor after Barry discovers his powers allows him to travel through time and attempt to save his dead mother. For a good twenty minutes or so, I was charmed by all the visual callbacks: from Keaton’s very face, to the dusty bat cave, to the Batmobile with the exact same design as in the 1989 film. Even when Barry and his younger, alternate-timeline self (we’ll get back to that) first walk into Wayne Manor, they find themselves in the exact room from the 1989 film when Robert Wuhl as Alexander Knox says to Kim Basinger as Vicki Vale, “Check this out. He must have been King of the Wicker People.”

Later, we even get a jolt of recognition when Batman trots out the Batwing aircraft, which ultimately plays heavily in the story, which quickly becomes a huge mess. The Flash is trying to cheat its way into the long-overused “alternate universes” plot device, which has been used extremely well in Everything Everywhere All at Once and the animated “Spider-verse” films, but hardly any of the far-too-many others. This one might as well be called The Flash and the Multiverse of Numbness. (Granted, the same could have been said for that Dr. Strange sequel.)

Both the opening sequence and the needlessly endless climactic sequence in The Flash are typical examples of what I have complaining about average superhero movies now for years: incoherent action extravaganzas laden with CGI that looks either unfinished or cheap. I am also not a huge fan of packing too many different superheroes into one movie, and this one definitely has too many. If the middle act could have been the whole movie, I’d have liked it a lot more. But, instead of getting the Michael Keaton Batman treatment he deserves, we get him grafted onto a movie with not one, but two Barry Allens. What the hell happened to all these arguments that meeting yourself in an alternate timeline could be cataclysmic? Well, I guess that’s just . . . part of an alternate timeline. How convenient! Here, The Flash and The Flash practically become frat bros. If it were me, and especially if I looked like Ezra Miller, I’d be too distracted from saving the world by all the time spent fucking myself, but I suppose that’s another conversation.

I haven’t even gotten to the cameo by Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman, or Michael Shannon truly phoning it in as General Zod, or Sasha Calle as Supergirl in a part that is completely devoid of any real meaning or gravitas, and ultimately just leaves her rendered in CGI flying around punching people like a cartoon. That’s what these movies are, increasingly literally: dumb animated features. They’re cartoons.

Even the Michael Keaton of it all, that being the best part of this movie by a mile, has diminishing returns. It’s like takin a hit of drugs when we hear Michael Keaton utter the famous words, “I’m Batman.” Did we also need a pointed close-up of him saying, “You wanna get nuts? Let’s get nuts”? No, we did not. In the end, The Flash attempts to tug at our heartstrings with visual references most of the young audience won’t even get, such as a brief CGI rendering of Nicolas Cage as Superman in the movie that never got made—I almost said “famously,” but this happened back in the nineties. Who is going to remember a movie from the nineties that never even happened, let alone give a shit?

The bottom line is, The Flash is a shit sandwich with a moderately tasty center, except what’s the point of a tasty center in a shit sandwich? I suppose we could call the two Ezra Millers in it the buns. There are some nice shots of their butt in that suit, for what it’s worth. And for the record I am separating the art from the buttocks.

Ezra Miller, Ezra Miller, and Saha Calle give us multiple dimensions of mediocrity.

Overall: C

INFINITY POOL

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

There comes a moment in Infinity Pool when Mia Goth’s Gabi, who has been toying with Alexander Skarsgård’s vacationing author James all along, pulls out a bad review of James’s one published novel, which did not sell well. She reads it aloud to him, emphasizing a passage that leans on how pretentious the novel was.

She might as well have been describing this movie, which spends all of its time attempting to convince us it has something to say while it actually says nothing.

This is a film by Brandon Cronenberg, son of David Cronenberg, who released his own subpar movie last summer. I guess you could say the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, except that with Infinity Pool, Brandon elicits very good performances in a story that fails to justify itself. I spent two hours watching this film, not bored per se, but keeping an open mind: maybe something will eventually tie everything together impressively. No such luck. The movie ends with a narrative thud. It’s not the greatest thing when a movie ends and you just think, That’s it?

It could be argued that the most interesting thing about this movie is that it features an orgy with people wearing deeply disturbing, disfigured-face masks. Except that the orgy is both an overly stylized fever dream of a scene and somehow still a bit dull.

Here’s the potential in the premise of Infinity Pool: James leaves the resort compound against the advice of the people who run it, or an excursion out in the fictional European island country they are visiting. When he accidentally hits a local man with his car and kills him, they discover the country has a tradition of a family’s firstborn son killing anyone who kills a member of their family—apparently for any reason, accident or not. But to maintain their tourism industry, they have this incredible side hustle where they make “doubles” (basically clones, though that word is never used in the script) to be sacrificed. The double is given all the same memories, and for reasons never even close to explained, the original people must be present to witness. What must that be like, then, to see a copy of your own self murdered? This is the kind of existential theme that is the makings of a rich text, for which Brandon Cronenberg offers no useful illumination.

Instead, we get Mia Goth as Gabi, an effectively creepy and manipulative woman from the start, beginning with one of the oddest hand job scenes ever put onscreen. You want to see some urine and then some semen splatter onto some beach pebbles? This is your movie!

James’s wife, also on this vacation and the breadwinner as the daughter of a successful publisher who we are told detests James, is played by Cleopatra Coleman. She has a notable presence through about half the movie, until she decides she’s had enough of the wild shit happening in this country and up and goes home. Coleman is good in a thankless role that completely wastes her. There is never even any sexual tension, as evidently Em remains oblivious to Gabi’s advances.

I knew there would be some kind of plot twist in Infinity Pool, and it comes along maybe three quarters of the way through the story. It’s disappointingly minor as twists go, and not particularly satisfying. Infinity Pool offers plenty of sex and violence and depravity, I guess maybe as commentary on the excesses of wealth: all these people can afford to pay for doubles to be sacrificed for their own sins, over and over again. The thing is, Brandon Cronenberg is what the kids these days call a “nepo baby,” and is plenty wealthy in his own right, which inevitably skews his perspective. It lands differently when someone with more than their fair share of advantages attempts commentary on the pitfalls of privilege. In this case, it’s kind of just a tedious mess.

Get over yourselves already.

Overall: C

SAINT OMER

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

Maybe Saint Omer just isn’t for me. What possible insight could I, a gay White American man, have about a film depicting the trial of an immigrant African French woman who killed her baby, also directed by a French woman of African descent? My knowledge of problematic French colonialist history is limited at best, and my best frame of reference is my own complicated relationship with my own mother, which bears no resemblance whatsoever to what is depicted onscreen here. There’s a lot of Venn diagrams that can be built here, where the circles just overlap at all.

All of that is to say: I’m a little insecure about judging this film, which critics by and large seem to be tripping over themselves to declare a stunningly brilliant piece of work, and I seem completely unable to see it. I went searching for what few reviews panned it, and predictably, they are generally White men. Are there any women who hated this movie? I found one, and then realized she was also White. Dammit! It would be a lot easier to feel vindicated in my distaste for this film if I could find any women of color who felt the same way. (To be fair, working women critics of color are hard to find overall, let alone any who also could not connect with the same film that failed to move me.)

How much general audiences like this movie also varies depending on the source. At Rotten Tomatoes, the “tomatometer” score is 95%; the audience score 25%. Over at IMDb.com, the average rating of this film is 7/10—pretty high by that site’s usual user rating standards. As you can tell, I’m eager to decipher whether I somehow missed something everyone else is managing to see in this film.

And I have to tell you, it bored me half to death. And not because of the subject matter, which is compelling (if not salacious) by definition, but because of the way the movie is shot, edited, and acted. Everything about how this film is put together put me off.

It took me a while even to understand why director and co-writer Alice Diop chose this structure: although the film is ostensibly about the incomprehensible act of a woman leaving her baby to die on a beach at high tide—that being based on a true event—the protagonist here is Rama (Kayije Kagame), a novelist who is attending the trial of Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda) with the idea of it informing her work. Saint Omer (the title is a reference to a town in France, where the trial is taking place) is sprinkled with brief flashbacks of Rama as a young girl, unable to connect with her blank-faced, stoic mother. It takes a while to realize we met this same mother, in the present day, during one of the opening scenes, when Rama visits her family, standing awkwardly and not chatting or connecting with anyone.

I was mystified enough by that introduction to Rama, but still keeping an open mind and being patient. The setting shifts to the French courtroom, where a good majority of the film takes place, and finally something interesting happens: this is when we meet Laurence, learn that she is charged with infanticide, and most bizarre of all, she both admits to killing the baby—that part is never a mystery—and pleads not guilty. And then Alice Diop trains her largely stationery camera on extended shots of the judge, or the defendant, or Rama, during jury selection, preliminary questions, and more.

And it goes on. And on. And on. And on. This wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for the delivery of the actors, which consistently stops just short of deadpan. The characters nearly always speak softly, as though it’s just the normal way all humans talk, even though it isn’t. This is not to say there are never any displays of emotion—the prosecuting attorney is increasingly frustrated with Laurence’s demonstrably inconsistent testimony, and there’s a moment, during the rare time we see her in her hotel room rather than in the courtroom, when Rama breaks down weeping.

The cinematography is rudimentary at best, and it’s possible I hated that most of all, the way the camera moves very slowly in straight lines back and forth or up and down, if it moves at all. I spent a long time wondering why the hell we were spending so much time watching Laurence’s testimony rather than, say, seeing her story in flashbacks. What the hell happened to “show, don’t tell”? This movie is almost nothing but “telling,” rendering it one of the least cinematic films I have seen in ages. And then I realized: this movie is “showing,” by telling the story, ultimately, of how attending this trial and witnessing the aforementioned testimony is affecting Rama. Mind you, Rama is never revealed to have any direct connection to the defendant or her crime, although more gets revealed to explain her interest.

I can’t help but wonder if I am being unfair to this film—a feeling I have only because of its otherwise universal critical acclaim—but I can only be honest about my personal experience with it. When the film ended, after what felt like an eternity of tedium, I felt sweet relief.

I’m just as bored as all these people look.

Overall: C

BABYLON

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

The first thing you need to know about BABYLON is that it is three hours and nine minutes long. You should then be asking yourself whether the film justifies its own length, and the answer is no.

Within the first ten minutes, we see a man get shit on by an elephant, and we see another man get pissed on by a woman. Both of these things have been widely reported, so if you have paid any attention whatsoever to the press coverage of these movies, you might think you already knew these things. Except, I don’t think you understand. There’s a close-up shot of an elephant’s asshole, dilating, and it sprays a firehose of shit right at the camera, before it cuts to the man, getting doused by an elephant-shit waterfall. What I’m trying to say is, there is a lot of elephant shit. And then, minutes later, in the back room of a wild party that takes up the bulk of the first thirty minutes of the movie—the party to which the aforementioned elephant is being delivered, that’s how wild it is—a woman is straddling a naked fat man lying on his back on the floor, and she pisses all over his belly, then penguin-walks forward and pisses all over his face. What I’m trying to say is, there is a lot of piss (although, I suppose it should be noted, less of the piss than the elephant shit).

One might be relieved to learn that these sorts of things do not make up the rest of the movie, but that does not mean it’s all uphill from there. Regardless, it still begs the question: are these things you really want to see? Does this sound fun to you? I did not find it particularly fun.

I’m tempted to say I can’t decide what writer-director Damien Chazelle is playing at, except that I think I get it: this is about the wild excesses of “classic” Hollywood, from the waning days of the silent era. The self-indulgent excess of this movie itself is very much the point. I won’t go so far as to call it “kink shaming,” but the choice of an extremely fat man is clearly a conscious choice, one meant to remove most of us from any kind of actual titillation. The pissing scene just as much as the elephant shit scene is meant to disgust us. So much is going on in that party—random fucking, several fleeting gimpses of full frontal nudity of both sexes—we are meant to be overwhelmed by the idea of BABYLON as a film that directly references Singin’ in the Rain multiple times, and in so doing makes us understand that BABYLON is the same movie if it were made by unrepentant deviants.

BABYLON even follows many of the same story beats. It just stretches them out over an eternity, so that a solid two hours pass before we are even introduced to Tobey Maguire as a yellow-toothed gangster who escorts us through multiple underground levels of dungeons that, according to many interpretations anyway, are meant to be the “circles of movie hell.” I just saw it as a random diversion in a movie packed with random diversions, brought to me well after I had long since tired of diversions.

There are far too many things happening in BABYLON to count, and I spent an inordinate amount of time focusing on elephant shit and golden showers. The thing is, Chazelle has to have included those things for a reason, and they are the things that leave the most lasting impressions, even through the two and a half hours that follow them.

Brad Pitt, who plays Jack Conrad, a former silent movie star now aging and struggling to succeed in the era of sound, does have a line far later in the film that I found the most unforgettable. He is asked how the movie he just starred in is, and he assesses it as “a giant swing at mediocrity.” If that doesn’t describe BABYLON perfectly, I don’t know what does.

There’s another conversation between Jack and gossip writer Elinor St. John (Jean Smart), in which she attempts to console him by noting how his circumstance is one among many to be experienced by countless other actors for decades to come, maybe forever: “It’s bigger than you,” she says. This is one of many moments where BABYLON gets into a love of cinema, its timeless nature, blah blah blah. She even notes that countless other people will have this exact same conversation. I saw that as a metaphor for BABYLON itself, which covers well-trodden ground with every thematic layer it purports to have.

With every single thing BABYLON has to say, it’s like: yeah. We get it. We’ve been through this already. Maybe to Damien Chazelle that’s the point, but there also comes a point where a dead horse can only be beat for so long. And it’s after this point that our primary protagonist, Manny Torres (Diego Calva), literally goes to the movies to see Singin’ in the Rain some twenty years after the previous events depicted, and recognizes everything that happens in it as what happened to him and all the people he knew, just sanitized, made more “wholesome,” and certainly whitewashed. It’s meant to be a moment of grand poignancy, but it came far after I had lost my patience—and that occurred before the title card (which comes up thirty minutes in).

I haven’t even mentioned Margot Robbie yet. As Nellie LaRoy, she is effectively the co-star of this film, alongside Diego Calva (with Brad Pitt in what is essentially a supporting role). She finagles her way into Hollywood filmmaking and quickly becomes a star, while Manny is rising through the ranks behind the camera. Virtually everything that happens to the awful-voiced actress in Singin’ in the Rain happens to Nellie, just in far dirtier, grittier and more dangerous ways. Robbie is a great talent who actually kind of gets swallowed up by the excesses of this movie, given how easy it is—as I have just demonstrated—to talk about countless things in the film before even mentioning her.

I went to BABYLON really wanting to love it. Damien Chazelle has made films I consider to be truly great. This one, though, feels like the last, desperate attempt of an auteur throwing all of his unused ideas into a movie, as though terrified no one will ever allow him to make another one. The sad irony is that none of those ideas were particularly original.

Paul Thomas Anderson did everything this movie tries to do better 25 years ago in Boogie Nights.

Overall: C