A REAL PAIN

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

In A Real Pain, Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin play adult cousins who attend a guided holocaust tour of Poland, and the tour guide is a Brit who is the only person in the group not in any way Jewish. How often does it actually happen that way, I wonder? I could be wrong, but I would expect that more often than not these tour guides are Jewish or have some connection to Judaism, or at the very least to the country they have chosen to operate in. I’m sure there are exceptions to that, as in this story, in which it’s a fascinating narrative choice.

Eisenberg wrote and directed this film, his sophomore feature film effort on both counts. It’s easy to be skeptical of yet another young(ish) actor fancying himself a director, but it really should be noted how assured and accomplished A Real Pain is. It’s a film filled with scenes set up to go a predictable direction, but which consistently go a different way. There’s a scene in which Eisenberg’s David is ranting to the rest of the tour group over dinner about Culkin’s Benji while he’s gone to the bathroom. He goes on so long that I was sure Benji would be revealed to be standing behind him and overhearing all this. Instead Benji does something totally different, serves as an effective disctraction, but is wholly in character.

Eisenberg and Culkin are two very different people, and so are David and Benji. After a while, it becomes increasingly clear that this casting is inspired. These cousins were only born three weeks apart, so they grew up very close, and you really feel it in their characters. David consistently allows Benji to walk all over him, and it’s never clear whether this has always been their dynamic, or if it’s only happening now because of a recent, sad incident in Benji’s life. Either way, I found Benji often deeply annoying, and can’t imagine tolerating him the way David does. He even asks David to lend him his phone so he can play music in the shower, making the dubious claim that he can’t on his own phone. I’d tell him to use his own fucking phone.

The magic trick of A Real Pain is how much we empathize with both of these guys in spite of their character flaws. In typical Eisenberg style, David is neurotic and nervous and awkward, taking anti-anxiety pills. At least he’s not a pretentious prick, a type of character Eisenberg excels at playing. David feels wholly his own person, someone with deep affection for the people in his life, from his wife to his son to, vividly illustrated here, his cousin.

I do love a story about grown men with an enduring love for each other, that isn’t sexual. We do get more of them these days than we used to, but there can never be too many stories of platonic but deep bonds between straight guys. Audiences need that modeled for them, and this movie does it stupendously. Granted, David and Benji are cousins, so it’s about more than friendship, as they are family. But, they are also so wildly different from each other, they function as best friends who complement each other.

The tour group they are on is fairly small, The others in the group are an older married couple (Liza Sedovy and Daniel Oreskes); a Rwandan man who escaped the genocide and converted to Judaism (Kurt Egyiawan); and a recently divorced woman played by Dirty Dancing’s Jennifer Grey. I heard her interviewed on a podcast recently on which the hosts insisted she’s “a scene stealer” in this movie, and I don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. She’s fine, but the part could just as easily have been cast with any other competent actor.

Will Sharpe, though, conveys some surprising subtlety as James, the tour guide—particularly when Benji randomly breaks and criticizes James’s over-reliance on historic facts and statistics at the expense of experiencing the moment. James takes the criticism with a graceful willingness to learn, an unexpected thing to see.

This tour also goes to locations notable to the holocaust not often seen in film, in particular the unusually well preserved concentration camp Majdanek, in Lublin, Poland. David and Benji take this particular tour in part because this is the city where their grandmother was from, and they leave the tour a day early to visit the house where she grew up. There, they have an interaction with a neighbor that is characteristically awkward, but which these characters manage to turn into their own brand of sentimentality.

That is perhaps why A Real Pain really spoke to me. The characters in it struggle to make it work, but with persistence they make it work. The story is very well constructed, and I can only imagine this film succeeds in much the same way, with loving layers of polish over time.

A relationship that’s more functional than it seems.

Overall: A-

ANORA

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

It’s so rare, and so deeply satisfying, when a movie actually lives up to the hype. Anora is everything it promises to be and more.

It’s also very much a riff on the 1990 romantic comedy Pretty Woman, a movie as beloved as it is quite rightly criticized as a vapid look at sex work. Anora takes the concept of a rich guy who woos a sex worker with the promise of riches in exchange for exclusivity, and makes it grittier, more real, with both more authentic joy and more authentic sorrow. Instead of a high-end Beverly Hills escort played by Julia Roberts, we get a no-nonsense Brooklyn exotic dancer played by Mikey Madison—who is a revelation in the role.

And in the case of Anora (Ani for short), the fairy tale begins to crack fairly early on. She’s on the job when she meets Ivan (a stupendous Mark Eydelshteyn), a young Russian man with money to burn. He buys a lap dance, then invites her to his giant home, and within days he’s asking her to be his “boyfriend” for a week. Within that week, he proposes to her, convinces her he’s serious, and flies her with some friends to Las Vegas, where they do indeed get married,

This is all extended setup, and it last probably a good hour into the movie: Ani being taken in by a whirlwind fantasy life moving so fast she doesn’t even have time to consider whether it’s too good to be true. All the while, Ivan has an irresistibly sweet, youthful exuberance that is easily mistaken for innocence. It’s just as easy to be taken in by it as a viewer as it is by Ani as a character, which is testament to Eydelshteyn’s performance.

It’s when Ivan’s parents catch wind of this marriage that things take a turn. He is visited by two men we would reasonably read as henchmen, working for Toros (Karren Karagulian), the handler hired by Ivan’s parents. But Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan) and Igor (Yura Borisov) get far more than they bargained for when they come face to face with Ani, who is having trouble processing the idea, suddenly presented to her, that her marriage is a sham.

This turn in the plot, though, would in just about any other movie get scary and violent. Garnick and Igor, as it turns out, are not interested in violence—only in getting Ivan and Ani to sign paperwork to annul their marriage. It’s Ani who turns out to be unexpectedly wild, a young woman with ample experience not taking anbody’s shit, and she’s the one who get surprisingly violent. This is an extended sequence in Ivan’s house, and it is hilarious.

Garnick and Igor have such trouble containing Ani’s outbursts—which, to be fair, are reasonable under the circumstances—that Toros is forced to leave the performance of a baptism to assist. He’s astonished at how beat up Garnick and Igor are when he arrives at the house, and instead of being on board with Ani being tied up like he would be in most movies, he’s aghast. The other two struggle to convince him it would be a mistake to untie her.

Writer-director Sean Baker has made easily his best movie since his masterful 2015 breakthrough Tangerine. I wasn't quite as huge a fan of his next two films, The Florida Project (2017) and Red Rocket (2021), which were both very good but not quite as incredible as many other critics asserted. With Anora, Baker adds to a truly impressive body of work and, so far at least, makes possibly his crowning achievement. It’s beautifully shot, beautifully acted, expertly edited, and its sexual frankness only adds to its quality.

It doesn’t take long to find online discourse about whether Anora is “feminist,” which misses the point. This is not what the story is concerned about, but rather with telling a nuanced story of a stripper who is neither ashamed nor explicitly proud of her job. She’s just matter-of-fact about it, about the line of work she’s in, and even about the clear talent she has (and yes, pole dancing takes talent). I would argue that alone is a feminist take.

Anora exists in a fully realized world, which is both very specific and something you can’t look away from. And this is Ani’s story from start to finish, Ivan much more a part of it in the first half than in the second, during most of which Ani, Toros, Garnick and Igor are searching the city for him. Igor in particular proves a surprisingly tender character for someone clearly meant to be a villain, and how he relates to Ani over time evolves organically until he plays a part in the closing scene of the film that is bittersweet at best and tragically sad at worst. In either case, he’s the one character who offers Ani any truly genuine intimacy.

There’s a lot of sex in Anora, particularly in its first half, when Ani is falling in love with Ivan. The fantastic trick Sean Baker pulls off is that it’s never gratuitous, at least not in the context of storytelling—not even when Ani gives a kind of performance in Ivan’s living room usually reserved for a private room at the strip club. In every case, it moves the story forward, and has a refreshing frankness about how sex plays an undeniable part in people falling for each other.

There have been many characterizations of Anora as “Pretty Woman meets Uncut Gems.” I would push back a bit on that characterization, as Uncut Gems is an unbearably tense and stressful portrait of a gambling addict you’re desperate to see make the right decision even once and he never does. Anora gets somewhat similarly frantic in its second half, but it’s far funnier and nowhere near as stressful. What it does do, on the other hand, is end with a couple of extended, quietly profound scenes that really drive home the inability of Ani to escape the trappings of her social and economic class, no matter what gets disingenuously promised to her.

Anora is a movie that passes no judgment on any of its characters, even while plenty of them—especially Ivan’s parents–are passing judgment on her. Mikey Madison is a star among stars in this movie, all of them giving unforgettable performances, and this is a stellar movie I won’t soon forget,

The promise may be too good to be true but this movie isn’t.

Overall: A

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

PIECE BY PIECE

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

Pharrell Williams really wants you to know how pleased with himself he is that he wants the documentary about him and his music career to be a LEGO movie. Lego Pharrell comments on it multiple times, on camera.

It’s cute. And undeniably entertaining. It’s also a transparent tactic, a way for Williams to put up a wall between him and his viewers, so we never really get to know him. Piece by Piece is little more than a broad overview of his three-decade career in hip hop and pop, touching on all of the key beats, tracks and singles Williams worked on or released. Quite the parade of superstars he’s worked with appears onscreen as LEGO talking heads (Snoop Dogg, Justin Timberlake, Gwen Stefani, Busta Rhymes, Timbaland, Jay-Z, and countless more, including Chad Hugo, Williams’s other half in The Neptunes), none of them given enough screen time to offer anything in the way of real insight.

I went to this movie already knowing to expect this. But director and co-writer Morgan Neville really won me over in the first half of the 93-minute runtime, employing clever visual flourishes that can only be possible by animating the stories being told. Some great visual gags get sprinkled into the narrative, some of them LEGO-specific: a young Pharrell watching Star Trek attempts the Vulcan salute, only to discover it’s not possible with his cylindrical LEGO hands. Plenty of other whimsical delights pass across the screen, particularly when talking heads throw out a hypothetical aside, such as E.T. freaking everyone out at the mall.

So, for a good while, I was thinking Piece by Piece was actually much more fun than I had been led to believe. The LEGO animation is very colorful and imaginative, making this a singular moviegoing experience, even among documentaries that play with form and genre.

But later, things get genuinely weird, and not necessarily in a good way. Making a big deal out of the fact that Williams’s wife, Helen Lasichanh, is giving her first-ever on-camera interview doesn’t quite mean as much when we only ever see her as a Lego Lady. And when the content turns serious, it’s easy to become ambiguous about the use of LEGO to tell this story. There’s a moment when Pharrell breaks down crying, in gratitude for all the friends and family that stood by him over the years. A LEGO version of Morgan Neville—who gets a surprising lot of screen time—offers him a box of tissue. Seeing this scene play out among LEGO pieces is fundamentally ridiculous and undermines the impact.

And I haven’t even mentioned the LEGO representations of moments of historic import, including the Martin Luther King rally on the National Mall, and even the protests in Ferguson, Missouri. I saw these scenes flash onscreen and thought: okay, this is bonkers. Outside of these visual references, the vast majority of Piece by Piece renders its subjects with the same childlike joy that we’ve seen in nearly all the characters in previous LEGO movies. Their vocal delivery, as sitting interview subjects, indicates their expressions are much more neutral most of the time, and yet their LEGO selves typically speak with some manner of smiles on their faces.

After a while, this stuff creates a unique sort of cognitive dissonance, even more pronounced by the use of this gimmick to create some distance between Pharrell Williams and those who are interested in him. Certainly nothing in Piece by Piece reveals what makes him tick, or even gives much of a sense of who he truly is as a person. The whole exercise feels like an attempt at having his cake and eating it too: he let someone make a movie about him, but he didn’t have to reveal anything genuine about himself. I’d have settled for some insight into how becoming one of the first superstar producers ever to exist really affected him on a deep level, but, no such luck.

In the end, we’ll just have to let Pharrell Williams’s work speak for itself, which it does plenty well with or without Piece by Piece. As I write this, I am listening to the soundtrack, packed with all the biggest hits he produced along with five new tracks, and that is a spectacular experience, highly recommend. This is a man with jaw dropping talent, in a movie animated by people with incredible talent, and the two just don’t much inform each other. At least we get clever gags like “PG Spray” used in the room where Snoop Dogg is interviewed, keeping things family-friendly in a story about a guy your young children don’t likely know or care about.

Clap along if you feel like LEGO’s what you want to do,

Overall: B

SATURDAY NIGHT

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

The best thing about the new film Saturday Night—and there are many good things about it—is the casting. Everything revolves around Lorne Michaels as portrayed by Gabriel LaBelle, who is fine. It’s the ensemble abuzz all around him that truly impresses. Ella Hunt is so convincing as Gilda Radner, it’s easy to wish the movie were just about her, and we only get a few brief scenes with her. Cory Michael Smith expertly channels the swagger of Chevy Chase’s early years, a lot of the antagonistic dialogue directed toward him taking on a peculiarly meta tone given how little-liked Chase is in the industry today. And the choice of Matthew Rhys as George Carlin, the first-ever host of Saturday Night Live, seems counterintuitive at first, and yet Rhys knocks it out of the park. I’m sure plenty of viewers won’t even realize it’s him until they see the end credits.

I’m barely scratching the surface here. Dylan O'Brien stands out as Dan Aykroyd, particularly in a scene in which Aykroid is uncomfortable being asked to wear short-short jean cutoffs for a sketch (something that is reportedly an artistic license invention for the film—his being uncomfortable, not the sketch itself, which actually aired later in the season). Nicholas Braun (Succession’s “Cousin Greg”) manages to disappear in two roles, of both Andy Kaufman and Jim Henson. Jon Batiste appears as Billy Preston, an amusing bit of casting in that Batiste is the band leader for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, which currently runs on CBS as the same time as NBC’s The Tonight Show—the very show CBS threatens to run a rerun of instead of airing Saturday Night in this film.

That threat is another film invention, incidentally. This one bring me to one of my few complaints about Saturday Night. Artistic license is to be expected, as is compositing multiple stories from a longer period of time into a story depicting just one evening. And with no knowledge of what’s real or what’s invented, Saturday Night works quite well; it’s certainly a fun time at the movies. That said, creating tension where none is particularly needed seems odd: why tell Lorne Michaels about CBS in the film that “They want you to fail,” if that was never actually the case? Director and co-writer Jason Reitman could have held the tension for the entire film just fine with the case and crew simply trying to get their shit together by the time they went on the air at 11:30. There is no need to create a villain (Willem DaFoe’s great performance as CBS’s threatening proxy notwithstanding), a trap that far too many films fall into when they would work just fine without one.

Saturday Night unfolds largely in real time, taking roughly an hour and 45 minutes to depict the ninety minutes leading directly up to the first-ever episode of Saturday Night Live (then called NBC’s Saturday Night) going to air. This compressed narrative is what gives it very Sorkin-esque pacing and dialogue. There’s a lot going on, as the camera moves throughout the building but mostly in the halls and backstage behind the studio, passing by one famous personality after another. Most of the time it follows Lorne Michaels around, seemingly in a daze, more often than not evidently unable to give concise direction to the myriad questions aimed at him. I did find myself wondering if Michaels really felt that out of it on the first night of the show.

I saw this movie with two people with a far more directly historical connection to Saturday Night Live than I possibly could have: they were in high school or in college when the first season aired; I was a year from being born. I felt a distinct difference in how the movie hits, depending on the generation of the viewer. There may be another distinct, if perhaps less pronounced, difference with people who had their own connection to a later cast of SNL—it is oft repeated that your favorite SNL cast tends to be whichever one it had when you were a teenager. I always liked SNL fine, but even when I was a teenager it was never that important to me. As such, I had a good time watching Saturday Night, especially during all the chaotic backstage antics (and it’s true that when the chaos stops, how compelling the film is shifts as well), but I would hesitate to call this movie something special. I would probably find a published oral history far more interesting.

As Saturday Night is happening, though, it’s undeniably entertaining. The script, while not its strongest element, has several zingers that got good laughs out of me. And if anything makes this film worth seeing, again: it’s the stacked cast, whose performances as generally less like gimmicky impersonations than they are effectively capturing the essence of the characters they are playing. I don’t expect to remember this film long after its time has come and gone, but it’s still as good a way to spend a Saturday Night as any.

Recreating history: the cast of Saturday Night.

Overall: B

MY OLD ASS

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

There’s something to be said for savoring the great moments in your life as they happen. Big moments, small moments: their apparent size can be misleading, and they can diminish or expand in retrospect. It’s the savoring that counts.

On a couple of trips I’ve taken over the past few years, I’ve thankfully had the wherewithal to look around and think—sometimes even say out loud: “I’m having a great time.” Too often, the best times are only appreciated in retrospect.

This was what I thought about watching My Old Ass, which uniquely captures this idea. It certainly does it in an unorthodox way: on her 18th birthday, Elliott (a superb Maisy Stella) takes a boat to a lake island with a couple of friends to trip on mushrooms. The three of them have individual, distinct trips, but what happens with Elliott, is she somehow conjures her 39-year-old self (Aubrey Plaza, always welcome but without enough screen time overall to be what truly makes this movie special). For a good while after this, Elliott things this was just a one-time hallucination, and so do we. But then Elliott discovers her older self—her “old ass,” if you will—has put her phone number from 21 years into the future into young Elliott’s phone.

Elliott calls the number, and is shocked to discover it works. Just as she did on the island, Elliott is able to have conversations with her older self—a self who, incidentally, is just as amazed from her own vantage point. Writer-director Megan Park deploys a clever conceit here, skirting any need for sci-fi explanations by having both versions of Elliott say to each other: “I can’t believe this is working!”

When they are done so well, I love movies like this, which have a deeply fantastical premise that is rendered immaterial to the larger ideas it’s trying to convey. And, to be fair, a lot of the elder Elliott’s advice is pretty obvious: spend more time with your family, your parents, your two brothers. Don’t be so blasé about moving away from the second-generation cranberry farm in favor of the city (this being a Canadian film, here “the city” means Toronto). But, the obviousness is the point: the things that don’t appear to matter actually matter much more than you realize.

Then, Older Elliott tells Younger Elliott: “Stay away from any boy named Chad.” Naturally, we soon meet Chad (Percy Hynes White, also excellent), and just as Elliott spends a lot of time doing so, we wonder what horrible thing comes with his presence in the future. The more time we spend with Chad, the more wonderful he seems, both to us and to the younger Elliott. It doesn’t take long to realize the precise type of heartbreak the older Elliott is trying to warn against, and how even “dumb youth” can come with its own kind of wisdom.

Predictable or not, here’s the thing: My Old Ass really got its hooks into me. I surrendered to it completely and unapologetically, because of Megan Park’s finesse as a filmmaker, and because of the irresistible performances of its cast. By the end, I was wishing someone had forewarned me that I should have tissues handy. The marketing of this film—and certainly its title—belie the emotional depth it actually has.

I should also mention a peculiar element of Elliott’s character: she identifies as a lesbian, but she falls in love with a boy. (There’s even the memorable line, “I’ve never had dick sex.” It just made me want to use the phrase “dick sex” more often.) But, amazingly, in My Old Ass, there is nothing homophobic or even heteronormative about it. If anything, it’s an honest depiction of the fluidity of sexuality that queer people have been talking about for decades. The fact that Chad is just a nice young man you can easily see Elliott falling in love with is actually kind of refreshing.

The older Elliott does offer a few glimpses into the future, just from her dialogue—both illuminating and amusing. She makes an offhand reference to a girlfriend. She also tells the younger Elliott to savor salmon while it still exists, and scoffs when younger Elliott asks if they’re married and have three kids: “No one’s allowed to have three kids anymore.” This is all just the welcome sprinkling of comic elements, enhanced by Aubrey Plaza’s delivery. All of it comes back to savoring the good things you have before they’re gone.

Park makes the smart choice, though, not to suggest that the elder Elliott lives in a horrible world, or that her life is terrible. My Old Ass is much more concerned with themes that transcend such things: the kinds of longing and regret any of us might feel when looking back on our youth, and what we might say to our younger selves if we could. This is a story of that scenario actually playing out, and from the point of view of that younger self. The younger Elliott actually takes the advice to heart, and in different ways, both the younger and older Elliott learn how they have been wrong minded.

My Old Ass is far less the cute romp it appears to be, and much more of a deeply affecting meditation on aging, regret, and living openly in the face of life’s risks. I stand firmly on the side of its point of view, which is to mindfully savor the great times as they unfold, be they moments or whole periods of life. I savored the very experience of this movie.

Wistfulness never felt so good.

Overall: A-

THE KILLER'S GAME

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

When it comes to a movie like The Killer’s Game, going in with seriously low expectations is an effective way not to hate it.

I hardly loved it either, mind you. This is a transparent ripoff of John Wick, with its own gimmick: Instead of a hitman avenging the death of his wife and his dog, we get a hitman who contracts a hit on himself after finding out he has a terminal disease, only to find out he’s been misdiagnosed. He’s going to live after all! Except, the other assassins—and one in particular—are bent on “honoring the contract.”

This would all be more fun if The Killer’s Game could be watched cold, with none of this known beforehand. The problem is, there’s nothing else interesting enough about this movie to pique anyone’s interest. What other reason is there to watch it? Even with this twist made crystal clear in trailers, it landed in theaters last movie with a thud, coming in at #6 and earning a paltry $2.6 million at the box office.

With a better script, The Killer’s Game might have worked. Instead, wedged in between some action choreography that is actually pretty good, it veers perilously close to self-parody. Leaning a tad more into earnestness, or even in the other direction into over parody, might have been an improvement. What we get, in this film directed by (of course) John Wick stuntman J.J. Perry, are characters who actually utter lines heard in countless other movies to the pint of ridiculous, with a straight face. When Ben Kingsley, as Dave Bautista’s hitman mentor, says “Don’t hate the player, hate the game,” not only is it played as preposterously profound, it’s at least the third time we hear a line that dumb and overdone.

Ben Kingsley, even at age 80, clearly just likes to work. Sometimes he’s amazing (Sexy Beast, Hugo), and other times . . . not so much. This is one of those other times. Don’t get me wrong; the B-minus level acting in this movie is the best thing it has going for it when we aren’t being treated to creative gruesome hit jobs. Granted, Perry ups the ante with each introduction of a new assassin or team of assassins. But then it goes so far that we wind up with Chilean martial artist and actor Mark Zaror as “El Botas,” doing a kind of one-man tango, complete with boot spurs as lethal weapons, as he cuts through his victims.

There is also more than just a splash of Kill Bill in this movie, with stylized introductions of characters with fun names, and blood gushing out all over the place. We get plenty of broken bones and dismemberment and bodies blown apart, some of it in a church—where, conveniently, there happens to be a priest handy when a couple decides on the fly that they want to get married. But not before the hitman must confess the entirety of his sins!

I won’t deny that I actually had a bit of fun watching The Killer’s Game. But that only works when there’s nothing better to choose from in theaters, and we’re setting a pretty low bar here. Bautista is barely serviceable as a leading man playing an actual human (as opposed to, say, an alien, or a Harkonnen), but the fact that he’s so giant and jacked it’s almost otherworldly makes it a challenge to accept him as someone who is in any way normal. Not that a hitman is normal, although a big part of the plot here is how he falls in love with a professional dancer played by Sofia Boutella. When they were shown in bed together, all I could think about is how dangerous it would be for them to literally sleep together, when he could just roll over and crush her to death.

The most frustrating thing about The Killer’s Game is its wasted potential. No one goes into a movie like this expecting high art—we’re here to watch people maim and kill each other. That’s the standard by which it should be judged: how well that is executed. Sadly, even by that metric, it’s pretty substandard, a constant riff on themes and concepts from far better influences that this movie completely fails to innovate in any way.

Dave Bautista demonstrates his acting range.

Overall: C+

BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE

Directing: C+
Acting: B-
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B
Editing: C
Specal Effects: B
Production Design: B+

Michael Keaton was 36 years old when he appeared in the 1988 film Beetlejuice—only Tim Burton’s second feature film as a director, it’s easy to forget. He’s 73 now. And this is one of the many elements of the sequel out this weekend, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, where there’s a bit of a dichotomy: in the “Beetlejuice” makeup, Keaton looks roughly the same as he did 36 years ago. But, there was a famously unique energy to his character in 1988 that is frankly lacking now. Beetlejuice just doesn’t have the pep that he used to. He’s still a wild nut, but there’s an undercurrent of tired old man in there.

This can be extrapolated to Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is a film overall, and by extension, to its director, Tim Burton. This is a man who spent the better part of two decades making dark classics for the modern age, from Edward Scissorhands to Batman to Sleepy Hollow to Sweeney Todd. Ever since then, his career has been one long paean to mediocrity.

Is Beetlejuice Beetlejuice any different? The answer is: yes and no. This is only the second time Burton has directed a sequel, and the last time was 32 years ago (and there’s an argument that Batman Returns was one of the best sequels ever made). Beetlejuice is a one-of-a-kind film that has been beloved by multiple generations, an execution of dark weirdness that could never have worked without all the pieces fitting just the right way. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice has thus cultivated a kind of anticipation that a Burton film hasn’t managed in years.

I hesitate to say that it lives up to such expectations. As expected, there’s a lot going on in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, and still, somehow, it drags much of the time, particularly in its first half. This movie is all of 114 minutes long, and it feels longer. Too many scenes linger on things that neither wow nor delight. And if we count Beetlejuice himself as an antagonist, then he is one of three, which is arguably two two many: the others are Jeremy (Arthur Conti), a local boy who befriends Astrid (Jenna Ortega), the teenage daughter of widowed Lydia (Winona Ryder) and is predictably not what he seems at first; and Delores (Monica Bellucci), the soul-sucking—literally—ex-wife of Beetlejuice who is resurrected and hell-bent on reuniting with him. And in both cases, we get very good performers saddled with parts that wind up being of little consequence in the end. Bellucci in particular, here channeling Sally from The Nightmare Before Christmas as a dismembered corpse stapled back together, has an electric screen presence, and not enough to do to move the story forward.

This is one of the common problems with these “lega-sequels.” The first film had a straightforward, simple plot around which all the creative chaos could revolve. The second has to tie itself in convoluted narrative knots just to get mostly the same cast of characters back together.

In this case, Lydia’s dad has died. This was a character played by convicted sex offender Jeffrey Jones in the first film, who does not appear in this one. And yet his character, Charles, has a surprisingly large presence in this film. In one sequence, he appears in claymation. It’s actually pretty funny how they handle it.

And that’s the thing with Beetlejuice Beetlejuice: there are many things in it that are hilarious, or super fun. It’s the many other parts that are neither that are the problem, and render the film disappointingly even. This is a movie with some very high highs, and some very dull lulls. It averages out to a movie that is just okay, which is a step down from earlier Burton films that were just wall-to-wall delights. In the end, this is a movie that is just riding on the coattails of its cinematic forebear from three and a half decades ago.

On the upside, it has some reliably solid performers. Catherine O’Hara’s Delia Deetz is the one character who makes the most sense after all this time, clinging to a desperate idea of evolving with the times with her pretentious art. Jenna Ortega is perhaps the best thing in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, proving she can elevate any material she works with. On the other hand, Willem Dafoe seems miscast as a former actor turned ghost detective, hamming it up in ways that often fall a little flat. And Winona Ryder’s Lydia, now deeply emotionally frail, seems incongruous with the bold but emotionally insecure teenager from the first film, or at least the self-assured version of her by the end of it. (It’s a fair counterpoint that spending a lifetime seeing ghosts could do a number on a person.) In the end, even the cast has better and worse, averaging out to—well, average.

If there’s anything that definitively does not disappoint about Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, it’s the production design. It’s a relief that this film doesn’t try to “update” the look of the first one so much as augment it; there are bits of CGI here and there, but always well integrated into a plethora of practical effects. Beetlejuice’s office staff of shrunken-head workers, like so many other things in this movie, have antics that sometimes land and sometimes fall a little flat.

In retrospect, sadly, I have to say that Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is about as good as I could have possibly expected. I so hoped it would exceed my expectations, but these days Tim Burton is nothing if not consistent. This is a guy with some real creativity left in him, but whose dark mojo peaked a long, long time ago. This is a movie that satisfies insomuch as we’ll take what we can get.

There’s great fun to be had if you’re willing to wait around for it.

Overall: B-

BORDERLANDS

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

There are so many things wrong with Borderlands, it’s hard to know where to begin—but, much as it pains me to do so, I am going to start with Cate Blanchett. Who knew she was even capable of bad acting, let alone being possibly the worst performance in this movie? Granted, an absolutely abysmal script—cowritten by director Eli Roth and Joe Abercrombie—didn’t do her any favors, but Blanchett is an actor of such talent and stature that one could reasonably expect her to elevate the material. Instead, it’s the opposite.

A big problem—among, oh my god, so many—is that Blanchett was cast in a movie like this to begin with. No one can blame her for wanting to have a little fun, but can she not recognize quality fun? Perhaps not. She’s like an alien trying and failing to act human in this part. It’s as though she spent decades playing parts with genuine gravitas, then dipped her toes into the pool of blockbusters—in this case, specifically video game adaptation—and discovered she had no idea what she was doing.

This brings me to Jamie Lee Curtis, who perhaps thought this was a the logical next step after the wild and brilliant ride that was Everything Everywhere All at Once. But when her charaacter, Tannis, is introduced a fair amount of time into the movie, we are literally warned that she is an “oddball” and “says a lot of weird things.” She then proceeds to spend the rest of the movie never saying anything particualarly weird at all. The oddest thing about her is a pair of dark protective glasses, and Curtis’s line delivery that has a incongruous dash of childlike chipperness. What, exactly, are these people doing?

Floudering in a narrative sink hole, that’s what. It’s truly depressing so see the likes to Cate Blanchett, after spending way too long with pointlessly expository voiceover narration, sit down at a bar and utter the words, '“I’m too old for this shit.” We have heard that line so many times in so many movies, it’s no wonder she says it with no conviction whatsoever.

It’s slightly ironic, then, that it’s the cast who aren’t such huge movie stars who better hold the camera in Borderlands. To be fair, Kevin Hart is a huge star too—as a comedian. He isn’t particularly funny here (almost no one is), but he has fairly natural delivery as Roland, the guy who kidnaps a young woman from what appears to be a space ship prison (this is never explained). That woman is “Tiny Tina,” played by Ariana Greenblatt, who gives the best performance in this movie—not that that’s a high bar. But least when she’s not hampered by leaden dialogue, she’s both compelling and fun, exuding a genuine charisma.

Blanchett plays Lilith, a bounty hunter hired to retrieve Tiny Tina for a corporate mogul (Edgar Ramírez) who may or may not be her father. When Lilith returns to her “shithole” planet of Pandora (very original) in search of Tina, she discovers a snarky robot named Claptrap who is programmed, to his own dismay, to serve Lility until her death. And Claptrap, while hardly the best movie robot in history, is the one consistently good thing in this movie. His lines, and particularly Jack Black’s delivery voicing him, got a good number of giggles out of me.

The production design, mostly rendered by subpar CGI, is very junkyard inspired, decaying husks of appliances and vehicles covered in graffiti, this being the general vibe of Pandora, where legend says there is a “vault” that holds the secrets to human potential once under the protection of an ancient alien race, or some such nonsense. The tone that Eli Roth is clearly going for is very much like the seminal 1997 Luc Besson film The Fifth Element. Except that movie had a director who knew what he was doing, it had a cast of natural movie stars who understood the assignment, and most importantly, it had an assured handle on both pacing and wit. Borderlands has none of these things. If not for Claptrap, I’d say it was completely witless. And not all of Claptrap’s lines land successfully either; he’s just got a greater success rate than any of the other characters combined.

The most frustrating thing about Borderlands is that it actually could have been good. Being silly doesn't inherently mean bad, but it needs just the right calibration. It’s not just that Borderlands is all spectacle and no substance. It’s that overall it rings hollow. The characters have all the dimension of video game characters left dormant, with no one even playing them—even while they move and speak. There’s nothing driving this story but going through the motions. At one point Lilith walks past an abandoned park merry-go-round and I wished I could have just spent two hours riding that instead. It would have been objectively more rewarding.

Behold, the hole they will never dig themselves out of.

Overall: C-

DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE

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

I’m so sick of the fucking multiverse.

Deadpool & Wolverine takes a moment to acknowledge that it knows this about me—and, presumably, a whole lot of other viewers. The problem is not only that the moment comes far too late in the film, but after spending a majority of the film leaning on the Marvel “multiverse” as a critical element of its premise, its setting, and the driver of its incredibly convoluted and frankly stupid plot.

It’s always a convenient device, isn’t it? Well, less and less so as the years of is use drag on. I don’t think any Marvel movie has used “the multiverse” in a particularly clever or certainly original way, aside from the exceptional Spider-verse movies. Marvel runs out of ideas for specific characters, and then recycles them using the same characters in “alternate universes.”

With Deadpool & Wolverine, we get a “threequel” in the Deadpool franchise, and a resurrected Wolverine as a follow-up to the relatively uncompromised vision that was Logan (2017), one of the best superhero films of the 21st century. Not that that’s a particularly high bar. I wish I could say it’s a delight to see the return of Dafne Keen as Laura, except that she’s utterly wasted in this movie, given nothing of real consequence to do onscreen. The same can be said of the plethora of cameos by other actors who were once big stars in franchises of their own, now showing up to take part in CGI-laden battle sequences that barely have visual comprehensibility.

I can say this for Deadpool movies: at least they’re consistent. Every one of these movies is of B-minus quality, but I cannot deny they make me laugh. Deadpool & Wolverine has a lot of very funny gags, delivered by actors with very good comic timing. These are the things that elevate a movie that would otherwise just be garbage.

When the movie starts, before the opening credits, this film rather pointedy acknowledges how very dead Wolverine is. Well, that Wolverine, anyway. Almost immediately. director Shawn Levy, along with writers that include Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick and Ryan Reynolds himself, introduce the “Time Variance Authority” previously introduced by the Disney+/Marvel series Loki, which had a first season that was surprisingly fun and a second season that was relatively lame. One wonders how many viewers of this movie now have seen Loki and have the kind of working knowledge of the Marvel Cinematic Universe that has been expected of viewers for so long that a good majority of them are now utterly over it. In any event, you can pretty easily imagine how we get Wolverine back into a feature film as played by Hugh Jackman—for the ninth time. The man was 32 the first time he played this character. He’s 55 now, and among Deadpool’s endless meta gags in this movie, he quips that Jackman will be playing this character until he’s 90. It feels as though that may actually happen.

The thing is, I’m not nearly as sick of Wolverine as I am of the multiverse, because Jackman has an unstoppable onscreen charisma, and a genuine chemistry with Ryan Reynolds. And I won’t deny my delight in how much more Deadpool leans into a winking queerness with every film, this time constantly leering and lusting after how hot Wolverine (or, as the case may be, Hugh Jackman) is. Most of the time, Deadpool, in all its iterations, is dumb but fun.

Still, I wish they had come up with a better story idea. What we get here as a story arc is frankly lame, only partly saved by the rapid-fire comic delivery. As is often the case, though, Deadpool & Wolverine suffers from an uninspired villain, here played by Emma Corrin as a cross between Lex Luthor and Sinéad O’connor. Corrin was fantastic as Princess Diana in The Crown, so they’re clearly a gifted actor—yet another just wasted on this movie.

Ultimately, Deadpool & Wolverine boils down to a skilled delivery of an uninspired project packed with countless uninspired supporting characters. In the climactic sequence, it steals a conceit straight from Spider-Man Into the Spider-verse, then amplifies it, and “playfully” vulgarizes it. That is, of course, what the Deadpool movies have been doing all along: throwing out all the bloody violence and profanity it can just because it’s an R-rated superhero movie. This time around, characters say “fuck” so often it starts to sound forced, almost compulsive, as though being uttered for no other reason than to increase the count of its usage. There comes a point where that just gets boring.

I’ll never understand why studios think giving every single one of these identical story beats is a good idea. Foul language and giddy dismemberment does not alone make a movie stand apart; it has to have a uniquely compelling story, and on that front, this movie is utterly lacking. in the end devolving into the same climactic, mediocre special effects bullshit as countless others before it. If this movie has any saving grace, it’s the two leads. If you focus on their delivery and stay “in the moment” at all times without regard to wherever (or whenever) the hell the “sacred timeline” movie is going, you’ll have a relatively good time.

Just because he’s delighting fans by wearing a yellow suit doesn’t mean we haven’t seen this before.

Overall: B-