NIGHTBITCH

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

I’ll give Nightbitch this much: it’s deeply engaging from start to finish. Some of the time you may not quite understand what’s so compelling about it, or indeed what the overall point is, but it’s still engaging.

It’s also very, very odd. It’s a layered film, in that it has layers of oddness. One particularly odd thing is how it moves back and forth from being a little too on the nose, and being metaphorically opaque.

This is the story of a woman (Amy Adams) who turns into a dog, after all. It’s confusing to her at first, but ultimately becomes her means of being set free, specifically from her resentment toward motherhood being far more overwhelming than she expected. Why a dog? You got me there. It occurred to me that it was possible I was having a gendered reaction to this heavy-handed yet unclear metaphor—I cannot have children, so who am I to judge? Sort of to my relief, it appears that other critics’ reviews of this film are pretty evenly mixed between the genders, whether they quite liked it or they didn’t.

The script, co-written by director Marielle Heller, is far more muddled than the previous feature film for which she wrote the script, The Diary of a Teenage Girl. And if the script isn’t great, it matters less when everything else is great. Nightbitch opens with the mother and son at the grocery store, and when another young mom sees her and asks how she’s doing, she immediately fantasizes about unloading all of her frustrations. It is no doubt very relatable to just about any mother, but also filled with sentiments we have heard many times over. One might even be tempted to call it deeply unoriginal.

The curious thing with Nightbitch is that Amy Adams’s stellar performance makes up for far more than it ought to. She’s incredible in this movie—both as a frustrated mother, and as a woman turning into a dog at night. She bites into this role with no vanity, giving us a performance on film more memorable than anything she’s done in nearly a decade. Nightbitch is almost worth seeing just for her alone.

I’m glad I saw it, anyway. I’m not going to urge anyone else to rush out and see it. I do love that Heller is uninterested in taking any particular moral stance on motherhood: there is no judgment here, and if there is anything done deftly in this script, it’s the adorable little boy (played by twins, Arleigh and Emmett Snowden), who is never anything but a perfectly normal toddler. There are no “special needs” or unusually challenging behaviors that set the mother off the edge. He won’t fall asleep when he wants her to, just like virtually any other kid. This is about motherhood being overwhelming no matter what the kid is like, and Nightbitch exists only to empathize with that—and with the quiet cluelessness of a husband (Scoot McNairy) who assumes he’s being supportive while never truly seeing the burdens of parenthood that he rarely thinks to engage with.

All of that is what I understand about Nightbitch. It’s the whole dog business that throws me. She develops heightened senses, particularly of smell, and starts to attract other neighborhood dogs to her door, who bring her dead animals as offerings. She starts to deeply hate the household cat, which makes for a few moments of good comedy even if it’s a little weirdly off the mark: dogs tend to be very affectionate toward cats if they are part of the same household. There’s a particular group of three dogs that keep coming around, and I began to wonder if other women are turning into dogs too, and perhaps we are meant to understand these dogs are actually the three other moms that keep chatting up our protagonist at the storytime group she brings her son to. But, there is never any clarity on this.

I do wish Heller had drawn a bolder line between what might be merely in this mother’s imagination, and how “real” what she’s going through actually is. The mother tells her husband about strange hair growths, but never shows him the tail that starts growing out of her lower back, or the extra sets of nipples that appear on her abdomen. The husband just keeps moving along in blissful ignorance, which I suppose is part of the point.

There are no named characters in Nightbitch’s primary family, by the way—this is why I have not referred to any of them by name here. Amy Adams is credited as “Mother”; Scoot McNairy as “Husband,” and the different types of descriptors there seems very deliberate. The little twin boy actors are credited as “Son.” Even in flashbacks, Kerry O’Malley is credited as “Mother’s Mother.” There’s something to this, how family roles erase previous identities. Again, it could have been illustrated with greater clarity.

Mother does use the word “Nightbitch” at one point in the film, because of her getting snippy with the Husband in the middle of the night when it’s only reasonable he take a turn dealing with the boy. Heller then very much literalizes the idea, and turns Mother into a bitch. Maybe the idea is that being a bitch is surprisingly freeing—although, as a dog, Mother sure sprints through the streets in the middle of traffic a lot. If this happened in real life, she’d get run over by a car her first night out. Even this interpretation of “bitch” as a metaphor has no clean application, however, as Mother is only a bitch in the behavioral sense a couple of times. She turns into a dog to get some space away from the tedious frustrations of motherhood, which is pretty distinct from being a bitch. Then again, many people would judge such a woman to be a bitch whether it’s fair or not, so maybe I’m walking right back into the point here.

There’s some real weight to that maybe though, when Nightbitch is arguably—and admirably—Marielle Heller’s most ambitious work to date, but also her most challenging to make clear sense of.

Bitch please.

Overall: B

Y2K

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

Y2K is really fun, for about twenty minutes. The opening scene is super fun, very deliberately tugging at our weird nostalgia for AOL Instant Messenger or the sound of dial-up modems. The first thing we see is computer screen activity, multiple AIM chat windows open at once, as well as a window showing a video clip of President Clinton (or, as a character later calls him, “President Blowjob”) commenting on the spectre of the Y2K bug.

Our introduction to Eli (Jaeden Martell) and his best friend Danny (Julian Dennison) is fun, especially as they chat in Eli’s bedroom while they wait for a topless photo of a woman to load in horizontal sections on his computer screen. Of course, the gag is a bit undermined by all the action going on with his computer screen in the opening shots, without any glitches whatsoever.

Still, Eli and Danny are perfectly endearing characters. We briefly see Eli’s parents, who talk a little awkwardly about Eli finding someone to kiss at the stroke of midnight. It’s New Year’s Eve 1999, you see. When Eli’s mom kisses him on the cheek, he makes a face perfect for setting the tone of a modern teen comedy.

Danny is preoccupied with one of them getting laid. Eli pines for a popular girl, Laura (Rachel Zegler). Pretty standard teen comedy stuff, most of it relatively charming, none of it particularly clever. Booksmart, this is not. Eli and Danny hang out for a few hours before deciding to go to a New Year’s Eve party. It takes just slightly too long for this movie to get to the critical moment, the stroke of midnight.

Y2K has a pretty great conceit, a revisionist history take on what millions feared when the date flipped over to the year 2000. In this movie, the computers really do go berserk. For a good ten minutes, machines start taking people out at the party, in amusingly gruesome ways. Panic ensues, lots of people die, it’s actually pretty entertaining..

And then? Just as quickly as the action starts, Y2K, a movie with tons of potential, runs out of steam. It uses up all of its ideas in a matter of minutes. A small group of kids escape the party house, and find a place with no electricity to hide out. A lot of the rest of the movie takes place in settings where no technology present, and it feels less like an active narrative choice than a way to stay within a seriously limited budget. We get one shot of a burning cityscape from the top of a hill—which is used, very economically, twice—and, in the same scene, one shot of two planes crashing into each other mid-air.

But here’s where Y2K really fails. First-time feature director and co-writer Kyle Mooney could have mined this concept for comedy gold, finding myriad ways for glitchy machinery to cause havoc, even without slapping on a tired “collective consciousness AI” idea onto it all. The computers and machines not only become sentient villains, they literally bind together to become humanoid junk-parts robots with computer monitors as heads. Seriously? Yes. A couple of times, a dude-bro avatar type figure comes onto screens and talks to the kids. Even the 1992 sci-fi horror trash fest The Lawnmower Man had more clarity of theme.

Mooney was born in 1984. He would have been 16 years old when Y2K happened. You’d think he’d have done enough research—and even memories—to come up with something better than this. The kids, such as they are, are of course high school characters played by young adults. Jaeden Martell is 21. Julian Dennison, once the breakout child star of Hunt for the Wildepeople, is 22. He also costarred in both Deadpool 2 and Godzilla vs. Kong, so at least he’s had some genuine box office success. He’s also the most interesting character in Y2K, only to be dispensed with in the first half of the film. I won’t spoil how, although there’s no good reason for you to watch this movie anyway. Unless you want to see Danny’s almost-clever resurgence during the end credits.

In any case, none of these young actors were even born when Y2K happened. They’re all taking direction from a guy who was 16 years old when it happened. Either these things are relevant to the many ways this film is lacking, or Mooney just isn’t that good a writer. He’s an adequate director; he gets endearing performances out of his young stars, anyway. In the meantime, Mooney attempts just coasting on millennial references and a late-90s soundtrack, complete with a leaden appearance by Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst as himself. Once these references move away from specifics of the era’s technology, they just stop working.

Otherwise, Y2K can’t quite settle on a tone, and it certainly can’t decide on a direction. To say it sags in the middle would be an understatement. I found it both boring and tedious by that point, although to its credit, at least it was always better than Red One, easily the worst movie I’ve seen this year. Y2K is only the eighth-worst movie I’ve seen this year, so at least it has that going for it.

You’re not ready for this. You don’t want to be ready for this. It’s too stupid.

Overall: C+

WICKED: PART I

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

Unlike the travesty that was Red One, Wicked is filled with actors who all know what movie they are in. They understood the assignment, and as a result this movie is poised to become the biggest movie musical sensation in five years—perhaps overtaking the surprising success of the 2017 live action remake of Beauty and the Beast. Although I liked even that one more than I expected to, I find myself rooting for Wicked’s success.

And this is in spite of fairly measured expectations going in. I did not expect to hate Wicked by any means, but I have never been among the rabid fans of the Broadway musical, which first opened in 2003; or certainly Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel on which it was based, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. I did find myself wondering how the filmmakers could justify giving a film based only on the first act of the play a runtime of two hours and 40 minutes, when the entire play—including intermission!—lasted all of five minutes more than that. But I’m here to tell you: Wicked Part I easily won me over, very early on, not in spite of but arguably because of how director Jon M. Chu (who also directed the wonderful and criminally underrated In the Heights) fleshed it out.

One of the biggest surprises, given how much the film is fleshing out the play, is that Part I features 11 songs, and all of them are from the Broadway play; reportedly the key difference is that, much like the rest of the story, several of the songs have been “altered and extended.” This, honestly, should comfort the diehards: it’s just more of exactly the thing you love.

As for me, my personal history with this property is practically nonexistent. I never read the novel. I did see the stage musical, once, on tour in 2009. I can’t remember anything about it. My vague recollection was that it was fine, but I didn’t quite see why people went crazy for it. This was why I went into this film, Wicked Part I, expecting it also to be fine, if maybe a little bloated. To my surprise, the film entirely justifies itself, and I was utterly charmed by it.

A huge piece of that success is the casting. Ariana Grande is stupendous as Galinda, later to be known as Glinda, the Good Witch of the North. She perfectly threads the needle between revoltingly self-centered and lovably clueless, delivering an over-the-top performance that is also packed with indelibly subtle touches. She is arguably the best thing about Wicked, except that this will inevitably, criminally, overshadow the deeply affecting and nuanced performance by Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba, later known to be the Wicked Witch of the West. This is the story of how two completely opposite personalities are first enemies and then become friends at Shiz University, in spite of Galinda’s blinding privilege and Elphaba’s lifetime of oppression for being different, having been inexplicably born with green skin.

There is obviously great potential for allegory here, which Chu doesn’t dig into quite as deeply as some might have liked—although, in contrast to Idina Menzel having originated the part on Broadway, one might read further meaning into the casting of Erivo, a Black woman, as Elphaba. Given the time elapsed since the play was first mounted, and the cultural landscape today, this is a change that makes more sense. (It would have made more sense in 2003 too.)

Wicked also features a far more directly allegorical subplot about animal characters who are the victims of a conspiracy to stop all animals from speaking. There is a goat professor character who is a key feature in this subplot—I struggled to identify the wildly familar voice being used for this CGI character rendered as a full-on goat who can talk (how the hell he does things like, say, get dressed in the morning, we just won’t talk about), and it turned out to be the great Peter Dinklage. In the Broadway play, the animals are portrayed by humans wearing fairly elaborate prosthetics, but they still presented as definitively humanoid; it follows that in the film, they would be entirely CGI creations. In any case, I found this subplot to be rather undercooked, more of a plot device for a wedge in Elphaba and Galinda’s friendship than the legitimate, front-facing concern it should be.

Speaking of the visual effects, it should be noted that this is Wicked’s weakest element. The universe of this film is invented with vivid imagination, I will give it that—it’s just rendered in plainly obvious visual artifice, with sometimes distracting glitchiness, such as how Elphaba’s movements hitch a bit when she’s seen flying on her broom. Even compared to the classic 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, one can’t help but be impressed by that film’s elaborately designed and colorful, practical sets, even by today’s standards. Much of the visuals in Wicked feel like shortcuts that did not demand the same kind of effort, even though a movie like this more than justifies such efforts.

What recommends Wicked is how much movie magic it still contains, in spite of that. The music is unbelievably catchy and easily elevates a script that could stand some greater depth. Far more importantly, the casting is spot-on across the board, starting with Ariana Grande and Erivo, who alone make the movie worth seeing, both for their shining, distinct personalities and their undeniable charisma as a pair. But the rest of the cast is wonderful too, from Michelle Yeoh as Madame Morrible, to Bridgerton’s Jonathan Bailey’s singularly charming turn as the prince Fiyero. There’s even a touch of unforced queerness among the supporting cast, most exemplified by Bown Yang as one of Galinda’s two biggest acolytes, which I very much appreciated.

Jeff Goldlbum, for his part, is serviceable as the Wizard of Oz; it’s a casting choice that works and makes sense, even though he’s just as Goldlbum-y as ever. I won’t say his singing is bad, but it certainly pales in comparison to the staggering singing talent surrounding him. And yes, original Broadway players Idina Menzel and Kristen Chenoweth do get concurrent cameos, in a scene that is quite funny. Finally, Marissa Bode is good as Ephaba’s sister, Nessarose, who is a wheelchair user, but I rather wish that character had been given more to do and meatier content to chew on. At least in this case they cast an actual wheelchair user to fill the role.

Wicked: Part II is set for release at this same time next year, and I am now looking forward to it far more than I expected to prior to seeing Part I. I still have mixed feelings about splitting film adaptations this way; on the one hand it feels like a choice motivated by profits alone, and on the other hand it can really allow a story with a lot going on to breathe. I find myself surprised to feel that nothing in Part I comes across as filler, and still some of it could have been better fleshed out. Given that this is an adaptation of a Broadway musical, it already has a clearly defined first and second half baked in. This film ends with an extended version of “Defying Gravity” and it is sensational, a great way to end the movie—in spite of one woman in the elevator after the screening I attended being quite miffed to have discovered only that night that this was only part I. Again: it just allows you to look forward to more of exactly the thing you love. In the meantime, just think of this as a year-long intermission.

Some of the best connections come from the most surprising places.

Overall: B+

RED ONE

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

Let’s talk, for just a moment, about Mariah Carey. I am not a fan. Okay, in the hands of the right director she can be a pretty good actor—but I’m talking about her music. And yes, I know, she has legions of fans; even I can acknowledge that she holds the record number of #1 singles of any solo artist in history. That doesn’t make the music good. I’m sorry, I just can’t with her music—especially that crazy-making perennial single “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” And I love Christmas!

You may be starting to see where I am going with this. Director Jake Kasdan (Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle), perhaps, thought he was being a bit cheeky when, instead of throwing “All I Want for Christmas Is You” onto the soundtrack to his new, absolutely soulless Christmas movie, Red One, he chose “Santa Claus Is Coming’ to Town”—from the same 1994 album.

The song’s arrangement is as generic and forgettable as it could possibly be. It’s what plays over the end credits, standard white text on a black background, nothing fancy or cute. And this is easily the best part of the movie.

Red One is what happens when feeling dead inside becomes a feature film. I have never seen a movie with so much magic onscreen be so lacking in actual movie magic. I went into this thinking I was fully prepared, but ready to have a good time in spite of the poor reviews and lackluster response. Sometimes bad movies are fun! If only. Instead, Red One is so busy just being busy, it dulls the senses, and becomes a snooze fest. Believe me when I say that literally. I nodded off multiple times. During the periods I managed to stay awake, one of the five other people in the theater let out a loud snore. We’re all in this together, I guess.

Except: you aren’t. Or you won’t be, if you value your time. Some of you might expect amusement from a movie where someone actually utters the line, “It’s Christmas, dickhead!” Some of you might even be genuinely amused by it. In that case, you’ve lost my respect. I’m just over here wondering why the hell anyone would cast J.K. Simmons as a Santa Claus who is not fat, but jacked. Santa literally lifts weights in this movie. In what universe does this make sense? Santa is supposed to be cuddly and soft. Stop fat shaming Santa Claus!

Okay, okay. I was reminded, as I left the theater expressing my active contempt for this movie, that I did laugh a few times. We all have our moments of weakness. There are some things in Red One that are almost fun. There’s a testy polar bear, voiced by Reinaldo Faberlle, who might have improved the film slightly had he just gotten more screen time. Kristofer Hivju chews up the scenery pretty well as Krampus. This is about as close as I can get to finding redeeming qualities.

Chris Evans plays Jack O’Malley, the unscrupulous tracker tasked with finding Santa Claus after he is abducted. He’s a douchebag on the surface who we know from the first second will eventually be revealed to have a heart of gold, and Evans might as well be sleepwalking his performance. Dwayne Johnson plays Callum Drift, head of North Pole security, and the earnest seriousness of his performance would feel out of place if not for the fact that not one of these actors seems to think they are in the same movie as any of the others. Lucy Liu is utterly wasted as “Director Zoe Harlow,” just walking around looking mildly annoyed all the time. I would be too if I had to appear in this movie. Bonnie Hunt appears as Mrs. Claus and similarly gets nothing interesting to do. Kieran Shipka, once young Sally Draper from Mad Men now grown up, plays Gryla the Christmas Witch, attempting to ham it up as a villain but sadly failing to make any real mark.

Christmas movies are a dime a dozen anymore. Less than that, even. A penny per hundred. It used to be a fairly regular thing to get a theatrical Christmas movie release that actually penetrates and becomes something special. I felt something close to that with Happiest Season, but that was largely contextual: an effectively sweet holiday film released on a streamer (Hulu) during the pandemic. These are the kinds of things Red One isn’t even aiming for. It’ll entertain a few teenagers who get a kick out of a “Christmas movie” with enough profanity to land it a PG-13 rating.

There’s something about Red One that feels deeply cynical to me. It hits obligatory story beats and the same old moral lessons, purporting to be about “the meaning of Christmas” without actually using the phrase. Characters spew platitudes and learn to be “nicer,” driving home the consumerism of the holiday by using toy store stock rooms as portals to travel around the globe, packaged as entertainment for an audience that increasingly celebrates cruelty. It’s clear that no one involved in the making of this movie thought they were making something any more special than a paycheck, and as long as those checks cash, what reason do they have to care that this was easily the worst movie I’ve seen all year?

Why so serious? Jesus Christ, eat a doughnut!

Overall: D+

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-