UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE

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

An odd and unusual thing occurred when I went to SIFF Film Forum to see Universal Language tonight. When I arrived, about 15 minutes before showtime, there was a surprisingly large group of people already waiting—I would guess at least 30—outside the theater, which was not yet open. I, like probably many others, assumed maybe they did not open until shortly before the one showtime they had tonight, and waited patiently, even though we could see two or three people skulking around the dimly lit lobby through the glass walls. The minutes passed, and the crowd grew larger. Who knew this many people were eager to see this obscure Canadian-Iranian film, six days into its run at SIFF’s smallest theater?

Shortly after 7:00, the listed showtime, a young woman finally opened the door to announce they were still waiting for someone to arrive who could run the projector. She thanked us for our patience, said they hoped to let us in within five or ten minutes, and declared she also had a ticket and was excited to see this movie. Within minutes after that, finally, we were all let inside, and filtered into the theater as quickly as possible. There were no concessions for sale, but this crowd didn’t seem to care. The house was nearly sold out (in a theater capacity of 90), and within moments of the film starting, the audience was eating up this film—generously laughing at the most subtle of humor, a crowd typical of SIFF Cinema, eager to bridge gaps across cultures through cinema. Just like the characters in this movie.

What is my take, then? Honestly, I’m relatively ambivalent—I found Universal Language’s self-consciously absurdist charms to be effective, but often had no idea what the hell was really going on. I still can’t decide if that even matters. I’m not as eager as the rest of that crowd clearly was wholeheartedly to embrace this film regardless of how much sense it made, and yet, I found it a fun experience, in a rather bemusing way. I was impressed by how successfully it conveyed an often surrealist sensibility, without the use of camera tricks or special effects. This movie was clearly made on a shoestring budget, and still it looks great, thanks in large part to cinematographer Isabelle Stachtchenko.

Much of Universal Language went over my head, but I got this much: it straddles the line between absurdism and realism, and its odd sensibility and tone belie great narrative depths. There is a peculiar fusion of both culture and language, between Tehran, Iran and Winnipeg, Manitoba (in spite of a running joke with multiple characters mistaking it for a city in Alberta). Director and co-writer Matthew Rankin is himself a native Winnipegger, who plays a character in the film named Matthew, a government employee in Montreal who sheds his identity and hops on a bus to Winnipeg. On this bus he is joined by the “French immersion class” teacher (Mani Soleymanlou) who is never seen again after the bus breaks down outside Winnipeg, one of the narrative threads that kind of threw me for a loop—especially given that the film opens on that class.

But, there are two other interwoven storylines, and one of them involves a couple of girls from that class, who discover money frozen in ice and then go on a quest through the city to find the tools to chip it out of there. In this location, I was under the impression that we were all still in Montreal, but their quest later has them in Winnipeg, as though the two cities are easily traversed back and forth—even though it is specifically noted on the aforementioned bus that they have to ride all the way through Ontario between the two. But, maybe I missed something. I may have missed several things.

Finally, we meet Massoud (Pirouz Nemati), employee of the “Winnipeg Earmuff Authority” who freelances as a tour guide through amusingly absurd and innocuous “points of interest” in Winnipeg. This includes a briefcase abandoned on a park bench in 1978, and a stop at the memorial site for 19th-century Manitoban resistance fighter Louis Riel, where the tour group is asked to observe “thirty minutes of silence” in his honor. Eventually we learn that Matthew has returned to Winnipeg to reconnect with his ailing mother with whom he long ago lost touch, and who in her failing memory of old age has long been mistaking Massoud for her son, after a few years of him shoveling show for her. Ultimately this provides opportunity for connection through shared elements of identity, although for me this metaphor lacked clarity.

Still, between Matthew, Massoud, the girls, and even a couple of other students from the French immersion class, in the final act these seemingly disparate storylines connect in startlingly satisfying ways, puzzle pieces that suddenly fit together almost as if by accident. All the while, we are taken through a fictional version of Winnipeg where it has such a large population of Iranian immigrants that every sign is written in Persian, right down to those on a version of Tim Horton’s that is a teahouse that also sells doughnuts. Indeed, the vast majority of the dialogue in Universal Language is Persian, with merely a sprinkling of lines in French.

This blend of East and West is very much borne of the collaborators on this film, with Matthew Rankin co-writing the script with Iranian-Canadian friends Ila Firouzabadi and Pirouz Nemati (Nemati being, again, who plays Massoud, and Firouzabadi appears in a cameo as the bus driver, who argues with an old lady passenger who complains about having to sit next to a live turkey—who, the driver points out, had its own paid ticket).

Universal Language has a clear love of Persian culture, at the same time it has some fun with the notion of Winnipeg as a dull city with nothing worth attracting tourists (something I am certain is not true). It has a “Grey District” and a “Beige District.” Ironically, it is shot beautifully, with stark, almost Brutalist simplicity, often framing characters against a backdrop of grey concrete and white snow. I don’t know what it is about Winnipeg that apparently inspires wildly absurdist films; I couldn’t help but also think of the 2003 film The Saddest Music in the World, set in a Depression-era Winnipeg in which Isabella Rossellini gets two glass prosthetic legs filled with beer. The director of that film, Guy Maddin, also a native of Winnipeg, later directed the very strange 2007 film, a sort of local history through a dreamlike lens, My Winnipeg. Rankin seems very much to be following in Maddin’s footsteps, just with a much more multicultural bent.

If there is anything Universal Language decidedly is not, it’s American—it’s very Persian and very Canadian, with no American sensibility whatsoever. These days, that comes as a relief: a celebration of diversity through quietly fantastical cultural fusion. I didn’t always know what to make of Universal Language, but I enjoyed the journey through its tightly structured if untethered narrative.

Matthew Rankin and Pirouz Nemati embrace their differences.

Overall: B

I'M STILL HERE

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

The more I think about I’m Still Here, the more impressed I become with it—and not just because Fernanda Torres, as the central character, Eunice Paiva, is easily the best thing about it. That’s the most obvious thing to be impressed by, actually. I found myself saying, a bit prematurely, that this movie was good but didn’t blow me away. But “blowing me away” is not what director Walter Salles is going for. He’s going for something far more subtle, something that succeeds in impressing those who pay attention to detail.

This is based on the true story of a wife and mother, and her five children, and their resilience in the face of a brutal dictatorship—specifically the military dictatorship in Brazil between the 1960s and the 1980s. And the word “brutal” is not used lightly here. It’s easily to imagine graphic violence when thinking of such things, but one of the many takeaways from I’m Still Here is that there are many forms of brutality. Some of them hide in plain sight, while society goes on as though everything is normal. Families still go to the beach, barely noticing military trucks driving by.

There’s a memorable quality to the editing in this film, as Salles initially immerses us in the Paiva family’s daily life, showing us a casually comfortable, happy marriage, and five kids clearly being given a great childhood. All of this changes in a matter of hours, when unfamiliar men show up at their door, and declare that “Congressman” Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello) must be taken in for questioning. Rubens has not been a Congressman for several years, and has even recently returned from exile after being ousted from his position, but the reference is pointed.

This is the last time anyone in that family sees Rubens, and I’m Still Here is the story of how the family left behind coped with this injustice. This includes both Eunice and one of her older daughters shortly thereafter being detained as well, questioned, pressured to identify other people in a binder of mugshots. Eunice is held for 12 days, the entire time having no idea what they’ve done with her daughter—who is sent home after only a day, but Eunice doesn’t know that. Meanwhile, she can overhear the torture of other detainees in other rooms.

There is a key moment in the sequence of scenes at the place Eunice has been taken, a young man, a guard, who escorts her from her cell to questioning and back. Just before her release, the young man says to her, “I want you to know, I don’t approve.” And that means what, exactly? This young man represents something far too few people think about: that terrible regimes thrive on the willing cooperation of people who “don’t approve.”

This whole experience, as well as years of experience thereafter, changes Eunice. She does everything she can to get the government to admit her husband was arrested, and accepts him as dead within a couple of years. She becomes a lawyer and an advocate. And most critically, she still insists on raising a happy family. When a local reporter comes to get a family photo and says the publisher asked for them to look more serious, Eunice refuses. All the kids giggle, she encourages it, and insists that they all smile for the photo. Eunice is an inspiring woman for many reasons, not least of which is her refusal to let anyone steal her joy—even as she still works tirelessly for justice.

I’m Still Here makes two unusually large time-jumps, first 25 years from 1971 to 1996; then another 18 years to 2014. Both of them function as epilogues of a sort, first when Eunice finally gets some closure, if not quite justice—the regime change is to her advantage, although it’s also noted how even when regimes change, the perpetrators of the worst crimes are far too often never held to account. The final sequence, in which little occurs beyond a portrait of how the extended family has grown to that point, Eunice is played not by Fernanda Torres, but by Torres’s real-life mother, Fernanda Montenegro—an accomplished actress in her own right, and who starred in Walter Salles’s previous film from 1998, Central Station.

With I’m Still Here, Salles has created something so straightforward that it doesn’t seem all that profound while watching it. But there is something ingenious about its construction, a subversive thread that is a indicator of the sinister nature of dictatorship, especially when daily life seems basically unchanged for anyone besides those directly affected. This is a film that could not possibly be more timely.

Don’t let the bastards get you down.

THE SEED OF THE SACRED FIG

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

It has been widely reported that The Seed of the Sacred Fig was made in secret, and that is the first thing we see in the film, white text on a black background: This film was made in secret. There is a second line on that title card, though, something that will stick with me for a while: When there is no way, a way must be made.

A way was certainly made by writer-director Mohammad Rasoulof, who made this film in Tehran, shortly before he was sentenced to eight years in prison, flogging, a fine, and confiscation of his property. He had already faced legal troubles from the Iranian regime for previous films, dating back to 2010. He has since fled the country, a painstaking journey that took 28 days but allowed him to be present at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2024. As far as I can gather from extremely limited information online, Rasoulof’s wife (Rozita Hendijanian) and child are still in Iran.

People love to use the word “brave” to describe all manner of involvement in art, and particularly in film. Anyone be hard pressed to outmatch Rasoulof when it comes not just to his dedication to art and craft, but the use of art to speak truth to power—something we rarely see employed to the same degree in America, though we may see more of it here soon. It’s unlikely Rasoulof used The Seed of the Sacred Fig as any kind of allegory for where the U.S. is headed, but it’s difficult not to make the comparisons as American audiences. This kind of fascism is very much the direction in which we are headed, which is also stepping in the direction of theocracy.

Iran, of course, is already there, and Rasoulof pulls of an astonishing accomplishment with The Seed of the Sacred Fig. Just knowing the entire film was made in secret puts everything we see onscreen in a different light, as none of it looks like a film made with any such constraints. This includes several scenes of characters driving through Tehran streets, and I kept wondering how he could have mounted cameras on the vehicles without looking conspicuous.

There are so many things I love about this film, I’m not even sure where to begin. Perhaps with the title itself, which, after the initial title card, the film offers a brief explanation: the “sacred fig” is a species that wraps itself around another tree and gradually strangles it to death, until it can stand on its own. This is a symbol of the story to follow, which centers around a family of four: regime-loyal parents Iman and Najmeh (Missagh Zareh and Soheila Golestani, respectively) and their much more progressive and idealistic teenage daughters, Rezvan and Sana (Mahsa Rostami and Setareh Maleki, respectively).

This film is unusually long, at two hours and 47 minutes, but a lot goes down, it is never slow, and almost none of it feels like wasted time. The run time allows for an illustration of how ideologies can gradually either strengthen or unravel, depending on the person and the circumstance. Iman has been working as a government “investigator,” then given a promotion, in a new job where he is asked to approve sentencing with no time to actually review the cases. He starts with some level of indignity but ultimately an inability to shed his dedication to this government; Najmeh can only tell him it’s his job so it’s what he has to do. They spend a lot of time giving what appear to outsiders to be clear oppressors the benefit of the doubt. Rezvan and Sana respond to increasingly violent government crackdowns on student protests with the healthy skepticism of their youth.

It’s when Rezvan’s friend from school gets mixed up in a violent clash with police at a school demonstration, and she is brought to this family’s home to dress her wounds, that things get thorny. Najmeh does this only begrudgingly, having already spent a great deal of time admonishing her daughters to be extremely careful about their associations and their public behavior as a reflection of their father in his new position. This friend, Sadaf (Niousha Akhshi), maintains her innocence, that she just happens to have been outside her dorm when the police attacked, and so Rezvan maintains the same, to the last. Rasoulof never makes explicitly clear whether Sadaf and Resvan really are “innocent,” perhaps because it doesn’t matter.

The Seed of the Sacred Fig is set during the 2022 protests in Iran, and Rasoulof’s editor, Andrew Bird, who did his work after the footage was smuggled out of Iran to Hamburg, pointedly cuts in real footage of some very distressing violence in the government crackdown. Much of it just feels chaotic and without direction; several show some pretty shocking images. The characters in the film are divided in a way presumably many families in Iran were: parents taking television news at their word; younger people watching clips online posted by protesters.

The plot takes a very specific turn, quite a while into the film, when Iman’s gun goes missing. This is a pistol lent to him by a colleague as self-defense against oppositional forces already known to find and publish the home addresses of judges and associates hauntingly down clearly unjust convictions and sentences. The disappearance of this gun sows distrust between all four members of this family, and serves as a kind of central mystery to the story: what happened to this gun? Which one of them took it? For some time, I was convinced Iman, over-stressed by his job, just left it somewhere he forgot. Of course, things get much more complicated than that.

All of this political unrest serves as the backdrop for this conflict, which becomes the—pardon the pun—trigger point for what might finally, truly tear them apart. Iman can’t imagine any of the three of them taking his gun from him, but is effectively forced to regard all three of them as suspects in the matter. And when the inevitable happens and they have to flee their home due to their address getting shared online, conflicts come to a head between the four of them in a secluded house far outside the city.

This was the one stretch of The Seed of the Sacred Fig where I disengaged slightly, as the narrative shifts to something closer to a conventional thriller than the dense story and plotting that led up to it. In the end, the conflict shifts to the patriarch against all the women, which also feels (rightfully) pointed. I do love that Rasoulof has made a film where all of empathies, and nearly all of its depicted perspectives, lie with the three women central to the story.

Then, the “climactic” sequence involves an extended foot chase through some desert ruins, which went on long enough for me so start wondering what exactly we’re doing here. This was the only point in the film where I felt some cutting for time would have been fine, even as I can acknowledge that Rasoulof might very well have had specific intention with how he dwells on wife and mother, daughters and sisters all running in panicked, labyrinthine circles around the man trying to dictate their lives. I felt slightly ambivalent about the very end, but not enough to move how deeply impressed I am by this film overall.

We should all be spending more time hearing the voices of women like these.

Overall: A-

NICKEL BOYS

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

America—or, I guess I should say, White America—has a stunning capacity for sticking our heads in the sand, for ignoring our own perpetrated horrors in our history. We aren’t told about things like what happened at the Florida School for Boys, the school that inspired “Nickel Academy” in RaMell Ross’s unforgettable new film Nickel Boys. The school in the film is thinly veiled in fictionalization, but the horrors that occurred there are not. The staff at the Florida School for Boys in Okeechobee, Florida, opened in 1955 and finally forced to close in 2011, really did abuse, torture, and in many cases even murder the Black students at that school, with dozens of unmarked graves discovered and excavated only into the 2010s.

Nickel Boys exists to force us to confront these horrors, and there should be no mistake: this is a difficult watch, of Schindler’s List proportions. I still have a deep appreciation for having seen it, even though it left me feeling even more dispirited about America than I already was. Much like two different Presidential elections in the past decade, it’s just another layer peeled off revealing who we really are as a nation. Any argument that “it was a different time” holds no water here—this is not a story set in colonial times, or during the Civil War. People are still living today with vivid memories of this stuff, and any idea that the permissive social structures that allowed this to happen no longer exist is preposterous.

The story presented here uses the Civil Rights Movement of the early sixties as a backdrop, largely as a way to underscore how the two teenagers whose points of view we see are beaten down in even worse ways than they could have imagined: inspiration and hope for change was in the air, only to be gleefully and cruelly crushed by local authorities. Elwood (Ethan Herisse) is an incredibly bright and promising student, on his way to a new school recommended by his high school teacher when the car he got into hitchhiking is pulled over. The car is apparently stolen, and in spite of Elwood’s clear innocence in the matter, he is arrested and sent to Nickel Academy, where he is expected to stay until he graduates. He doesn’t even learn until much later that when his guardian grandmother (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) first tried to come and visit him, the staff lied and said he was sick and could not take any visitors.

Early on at the school, Elwood makes a friend, Turner (Brandon Wilson), and Nickel Boys switches back and forth between their perspectives. And I do mean this literally, as in, with the cinematography, used as first-person perspective, the camera showing us exactly what is seen through the eyes of each character. The entire film is shot this way, and is what makes it truly stand apart on an artistic level—it really is a film experience unlike any other, and a stylistic choice, it turns out, I have very mixed feelings about.

Until Elwood meets Turner, the camera perspective is always that of Elwood’s. In the scene where they meet, at the school cafeteria, the perspective suddenly shifts from Elwood to Turner, and we see the entire exchange repeat from his perspective. Showing the same scene from both perspectives only happens a couple of times in the film, which otherwise just keeps moving the story forward each time the perspective shifts. This is how we finally start seeing both of the boys actually in front of the camera. A few times, we see very cleverly shot scenes where we see reflections in windows or mirrors, of course with no view of the camera (I found myself wondering if that was somehow done practically with camera angles or if some kind of special effect was used; either way it’s impressive). In one scene we see the two of them looking up at themselves together in mirrors mounted on a ceiling above them. Elwood spends an awkwardly long time looking straight up, even once they start walking along.

Nickel Boys is one of the most critically acclaimed films of the year, and based on what I knew about it beforehand, I went in both expecting and wanting to really love it. What I did not expect was the extent to which its story gets obscured by its artistic abstractions, which permeate every scene, from beginning to end. The story this film is telling is essential, but I found its manner of telling to be frequently disorienting. Even with its first-person camera points of view, the editing and cinematography are so florid, sometimes even dreamlike, it was easy to get lost. Certain technical choices often took me out of the movie, such as how the perspectives of Elwood and Turner as teenagers were literally of their own sight, but when the narrative sporadically flashed forward to one of them as an adult, RaMell Ross and his cinematographer Jomo Fray pull the camera out and behind his head: those scenes all play out with us just behind the man’s head.

To be certain, the performances are great across the board, with one possibly key exception: when we are inside either Elwood’s or Turner’s heads, and we hear them speak, there’s a naturalism missing from their delivery, that is very much there when we see them perform onscreen. It seems obvious that Nickel Boys is a wildly impressive achievement on a technical level, with intricately planned blocking and choreography to make the scenes work, especially with everyone onscreen playing to a camera rather than to a fellow actor. I’m just not fully convinced this stylistic choice was the best way to tell such a story—or, one wonders, any story. In this case, there is actually a narrative twist at the end, and largely because of the ample technical and artistic abstractions, it took me longer than it should have to register what had really happened.

When it comes to the aforementioned horrors, it may do well to note that we see very little of it onscreen. What we see more of is the terror the kids feel at the expectations of these horrors, as in a pivotal scene where kids wait outside a closed door listening to the savage beatings of corporal punishment and knowing they await the same fate—a fate that has one of our two protagonists later waking up in the infirmary. A lot of abuse and torture goes well beyond the physical, however, and Nickel Boys also makes that clear. In the end, in the flash-forward scenes, we discover that the school was far worse than we even realized, or even those students realized. It’s these sorts of details that make it no less difficult a film to sit through.

I wonder if the uniquely unparalleled cinematography here is meant as a sort of buffer, an artistic space meant to cushion the act of facing horrifying realities. How well Nickel Boys works on an artistic level feels far more up for debate to me than apparently a lot of other people, who simply regard it as an absolute triumph. For me, though, the first-person visuals combined with its nonlinear editing often put the narrative a bit too far out of reach. The story itself, on the other hand, could not be more essential or relevant, although the impact is likely much greater in the Colson Whitehead novel on which it is based.

Elwood and Turner confront the viewers by facing themselves.

Overall: B

THE ROOM NEXT DOOR

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

The Room Next Door poses a compelling philosophical question. If a terminally ill, close friend asks you to be around—not in the same room as them (hence the title), but around—when they achieve a self-orchestrated death with dignity, would you do it? Should you do it?

Pedro Almodóvar is a singular filmmaker with a recognizably unique style, here having made his first-ever feature film entirely in English. There would be justifiable concern as to whether his cinematic language will translate well, and certainly The Room Next Door has some awkwardly sedate pacing. Strangely, though, the more the film goes on, the more it somehow manages to justify its own existence.

The friends in question are Martha and Ingrid, played by Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore respectively, two older women who knew each other well when they were much younger but have gone many years without keeping in touch. All manner of contemplating death is a running theme in this film, and when we are introduced to Ingrid, she is at a book signing, supporting a successful work that directly examines her own deep fear of death. She learns from a mutual friend at this event that Martha is in the hospital with cancer, and so goes to visit her.

They catch up. They move through the small talk and get to substantive discussions quickly, for obvious reasons. They tell each other anecdotes that get presented to us in tangential flashback scenes with unclear purpose, though I suspect Almodóvar knew exactly what he was going for. A bit of time goes by, Martha and Ingrid get organically reacquainted, and in so doing forge a type of closeness somehow perfect for Martha’s request. Martha has already tried asking her other, closest friends, who have all refused. She can’t ask it of her estranged daughter as it would be an unfair burden to her. A clear argument is made that it is unfair to ask it of Ingrid given her fear of death, but in the end, she accepts: Martha wants Ingrid simply to be in the room next door when she ends her own life before the terminal cancer can.

Martha has a plan, and they leave New York City to rent a beautiful house together for a month in the woods outside Woodstock. And this is the deal: Ingrid won’t be given a heads up. Martha will do it once she’s ready. And Ingrid will know the deed is done by seeing her bedroom door closed rather than ajar as usual. We see Ingrid wake up on several mornings, walk halfway up the stairs, and check to see if the door is open or closed. All I could think about was the emotional agony that would put me through, how it would be all I could think about each night when I attempted, presumably with great difficulty, to get to sleep.

Through all of this, the dialogue is always soft-spoken—not deadpan so much as a sort of an oddly relaxed sadness. Martha has a bottle of sedative pills for Ingrid to use if the stress ever gets to be too much, and it feels a bit like this whole movie took one of those pills. John Turturro as Damian, the climate crisis writer and lecturer who was a lover at separate times in both Martha’s and Ingrid’s pasts, is no different. Even when he blithely refers to the entire planet being “in the throes of death,” putting a pretty fine point on Martha and Ingrid’s relationship here as a broad metaphor.

But, again, the more the story unfolded in The Room Next Door, the more it spoke to me. It took on an almost hypnotic quality in its beautiful melancholy, its very Almodóvarian visual poetry with a consistent color palate of solid reds, greens and blues, from their outfits to the deck furniture. Production design is as much a statement in Almodóvar films as anything else; in some cases more so—the line delivery of the dialogue has a slight feel of being under-rehearsed. And yet, The Room Next Door is such a quintessentially Pedro Almodóvar film that one can only assume the performances are exactly what he wanted.

Swinton also briefly plays Martha’s daughter, Michelle. Swinton has played multiple characters in the same film before (to great effect in the 1992 film Orlando), but here “mother” and “daughter” are so obviously the same person portraying them, I found it so distracting it briefly took me out of the movie. Thankfully the two characters never share screen time, which only would have made it worse.

If The Room Next Door has a thesis, I suppose it would be how to live in tragedy, particularly with grace and dignity. It’s about agency. Almodóvar does include a sequence in which a police officer is inappropriately aggressive with Ingrid because he suspects her of assisting in Martha’s suicide, which he is keen to point out is a crime. It’s a way of acknowledging passionate differences in philosophy when it comes to death with dignity, but Almodóvar throws in a lawyer pretty quickly to smooth out any narrative wrinkles the acknowledgment caused.

But fundamentally, The Room Next Door is about friendship, compassion, and sacrifice in the face of a hopeless situation. It focuses on these two women but with a pretty hard nudge to the global climate crisis, which also provides for a few moments of subtly dark humor. There’s some unevenness to the storytelling, but Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore go a long way to make up for it, even in their muted grief. The Room Next Door merely skirts the edges of “tearjerker” status, mercifully dispensing with any melodrama. I kept thinking less about the story structure than how effective its mood was, for several minutes after I left the theater. It felt like the film had worked exactly as intended.

As artists get older, it follows that more of their art would be about death.

Overall: B+

HARD TRUTHS

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

Marianne Jean-Baptiste previously teamed up with director Mike Leigh for the stellar 1996 drama Secrets & Lies, a film about a Black woman who was adopted and surprised to discover her birth mother was White—and her birth mother is surprised to discover her biological daughter is Black, having mistaken which of the two men she had sex with six weeks apart was the father. Watching that film, I found myself wishing we could have learned more about the Black family she was adopted into, even though the “secrets & lies” of the title were very much a logical focus of the biological, White family.

It’s the closest I got to any criticism of that film, which is totally absorbing, heartbreaking, and packed with stellar performances. Now, 28 years later (this is technically a 2024 film, we can talk about the stupidity of delayed regional release dates another time), Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Mike Leigh have teamed up again for Hard Truths, which almost serves as an answer to that lack of Black family representation in the earlier film. This time, the focus is indeed on a Black family, and Jean-Baptiste is a matriarch of sorts, albeit a truly miserable person who everyone else she knows tiptoes around.

The Mike Leigh approach to filmmaking is a fascinatingly unique one. Reportedly, he develops a script collaboratively with his entire cast, settling on character arcs across the board through improvisation in early rehearsals. Leigh has a script finalized before they actually start shooting, which is perhaps why he still gets sole script qriting credit—but, for an old White guy writing a story about a Black family, this very much lends an aspect of authenticity to the story itself: none of these actors would be delivering these sterling performances if any of it didn’t ring true, especially after guiding their own characters’ directions in the early stages of development.

How the Black experience differs from others is touched on in both Secrets & Lies and Hard Truths, albeit very subtly and briefly in both cases. Hard Truths is much more about how Pansy (Jean-Baptiste) is anxious, depressed, and filled with suicidal ideation—none of these words are ever uttered by any character in the film, underscoring how it’s better to show rather than to tell. Instead, Pansy is heard many times saying things like, “I just want it all to stop” or commenting on how she’d like to just go to sleep forever. Pansy doesn’t necessarily set out to make every human interaction in her life a confrontation, but it’s what seems to happen. We see this from the very first scene in Hard Truths, as she lives with a husband, Curtley (David Webber), and a 22-year-old son, Moses (Twain Barrett), both of whom are beaten down just by living with Pansy.

Curtley is the most mystifying character in the story, a guy who works as a plumber and comes home to his wife’s aggressive negativity and never challenges her, or even responds. I’m still baffled by, but thinking about, the moment he takes the flowers their son has gotten Pansy for Mother’s Day, and just tosses them out into the middle of the backyard lawn. Moses, on the other hand, is the character I found myself empathizing with the most: emotionally stunted, worn down by a mother who doesn’t understand why he has no dreams or aspirations. A scene late in the film where a random young woman blithlely strikes up a conversation with him provides a glimmer of hope.

The relationship Hard Truths focuses the most on, though, is that between Pansy and her sister, Chantelle (Michelle Austin—who played Jean-Baptiste’s character’s best friend in Secrets & Lies, incidentally). Shortly after we are introduced to a miserable Pansy and her miserable husband and son, Leigh cuts to who we soon learn is Pansy’s sister, Chantelle, and her two daughters, Aleisha (Sophia Brown) and Kayla (Ani Nelson). The contrast could not be more stark: Chantelle and her daughters are a happy, fun-loving family, quick to smiles and laughter.

All of them are reticent when it comes to dealing with Pansy, of course—all except for Chantelle, who has an easy rapport with Pansy, and has an easier time letting Pansy’s aggressiveness roll right off of her. In a key scene where Chantelle does have a bit of trouble with it, the two of them are visiting the grave of their mother, who only died a few years ago. Pansy is complaining about how often people ask why she can’t enjoy life, and Chantelle counters, “Why can’t you enjoy life?” Pansy instantly shoots back: “I don’t know!”

To some degree or another, we all know a person like this. Pansy is a particularly extreme example, igniting arguments in the checkout line at the grocery store, or just waiting in her parked car for some guy looking for an open spot to come along and yell at her about whether she’ll be leaving soon. It’s almost as though Pansy has a sort of battery inside her that can only be recharged through confrontation. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before, but leaving the theater, it was pointed out to me that this is a story about a woman with untreated depression. Suddenly it all seems so obvious.

The cast is fantastic across the board in Hard Truths, but Marianne Jean-Baptiste deserves special attention. There’s a scene in which Pansy sort of cracks, slow at first to build into laughing maniacally, shifting seamlessly into heaving sobs. It’s the only time in the entire film we see pansy laugh or even crack a smile, and it’s utterly heartbreaking—it’s the prime example of what elevates this film to something better than the sum of its parts. Her performance alone is worth the price of admission.

Mike Leigh isn’t exactly known for movies with much in the way of uplift. He makes movies about deeply unhappy people, but with a curious knack for sprinkling in truly funny bits here and there—even in the case of Hard Truths. Still, this film does end on a truly downbeat note, with the suggestion that people like Pansy don’t tend to change. Not without treatment, anyway. But this film was something I found to be an emotionally cleansing experience.

Some families have no choice in facing Hard Truths.

Overall: A-

THE LAST SHOWGIRL

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

I’m here to root or Pamela Anderson. It’s the reason I went to see The Last Showgirl, the first wide release film she’s been in that garnered her any real respect. And she deserves as much respect as anyone else. I just wish the movie were better.

Don’t get me wrong—I actually enjoyed it. Maybe more than it deserves. It’s not bad. It’s just . . . incompetent, maybe? This is the first of Gia Coppola’s films I have seen, and I find myself wondering if her previous films also featured narrative threads that ultimately went nowhere.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Here’s what I genuinely like about The Last Showgirl: it has empathy for its protagonist, while not necessarily endorsing her choices. Shelly (Pamela Anderson) has been working as a Las Vegas showgirl in the same show, called Le Razzle Dazzle, for four decades at least. She talks about how she was featured on the promotional materials last shot in the early eighties, which the show is still using now. This job is her life, and she is devastated to learn that the show is closing for good. She has a daughter, Hannah (Billie Lourd), with whom she is not close, because she left her to grow up in the care of one of Hannah’s friends’ parents.

But here’s where the writing in The Last Showgirl (by Kate Gersten) gets messy. It’s never made clear how or why neither of Hannah’s parents actually raised her. We learn relatively early on that the producer of the show, Eddie (Dave Bautista), is actually Hannah’s father. There’s a scene in which Hannah confronts Shelly, having come to see the show for the first time in her life, and challenges her to say why working in a topless Vegas show was worth more to her than raising her daughter. It’s a good question. Shelly’s response is to say she’s done defending herself, but she hasn’t done very much of that.

And one of the things The Last Showgirl actually does well is characterize the vibe of Las Vegas, the false hopes amidst its glitz, the place where dreams get lost in the shuffle. But Shelly has a singular passion for her work, which she romanticizes as something of great value of the past, even as the young women hanging out with her backstage note how things have changed. Shelly talks of how, as young Showgirls, “We were ambassadors!” To what, though? An idea of what Las Vegas once was to her, I guess. And to be clear, I love Las Vegas, and its parallel tracks of polished glamor and tacky sleaze. Coppola does not give us a clear picture of exactly which track Le Razzle Dazzle is on, or has ever been on.

There is a scene near the end, when we get a glimpse of the show, actually on stage, for the first time—it’s their final show, and all we really see are the women gliding across the stage in their elaborately bejeweled costumes. I will admit I got a sense of what Shelly had such pride for—something that a lot of work went into, at a high standard. In these last couple of weeks of the show, though, they repeatedly reference their rapidly dwindling audience, just a smattering of people in the house. It seems clear the show’s time has come.

Much has been made of Pamela Anderson’s performance in this film. I do want to give her the respect she deserves, but to say this is the best performance of her career does not set it above an exactly high bar. A slight majority of the time, she is very compelling, even with her pitched, girly voice and Shelly’s blindly selfish ambition. A bit too much of the time, her delivery is slightly off, giving an air of a self-conscious performer. A method actor, Pamela Anderson is not.

Anderson is surrounded by other actors who lift her up with their own gifts, most notably Jamie Lee Curtis as Annette, Shelly’s cocktail waitress best friend with a gambling problem. Curtis tears into her part with gusto, albeit with a striking similarity to her part as Carmen’s mom in the Hulu series The Bear (in which she is, frankly, much better—because the part is written much better). There’s also Kiernan Shipka (Sally Draper from Mad Men, now 25, recently seen as the villain in the abysmal Red One) as Jodie, one of Shelly’s young cast mates. Shelly judges her for auditioning for another Vegas show she thinks has no class, though Jodie’s demonstration of a lusty dance with a chair in their dressing room is the most amusing scene in the movie. Shipka us actually quite good in this role, but for the fact that it has Jodie seeking maternal comfort from Shelly, Shelly coldly denying it, and the script never offering any resolution to their relationship.

It doesn’t seem like the greatest sign when it’s Dave Bautista who gives the best performance in a film. He’s actually got long-ish, salt and pepper hair parted in the middle, and his Eddie character is the most “regular guy” kind of character I’ve ever seen him play—somewhat impressive given how gigantic he is. Eddie is a very docile man who does not deserve to be treated the way Shelly treats him. And although The Last Showgirl doesn’t necessarily want us to agree with Shelly’s choices, it clearly wants us to root for her. And this is a challenge.

Ultimately, The Last Showgirl seems to exist solely to prove to the world that Pamela Anderson, herself age 57, is more than she seems at first glance. I’ll grant the credit that the film does exactly that. None of this makes her part in this a “great performance,” and it certainly doesn’t make it a great film. The relentlessly wobbly handheld cinematography alone—a choice I was baffled by—is enough to drive you to distraction. In spite of all that, I was compelled by the story from beginning to end, which in this unusual case was part of the problem: being compelled alone means little when so many of the narrative threads are dropped without resolution by the end. I get what Coppola was going for by finishing with Anderson’s final defiant, desperate smile onstage, but I left the theater with too many questions that should have been answered.

I honestly wanted better for her.

Overall: C+

THE BRUTALIST

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

I’ve been thinking about the plot structure of The Brutalist. It might just be a cornerstone of modern American cinema. It takes some time to digest it . . . architecturally. Okay, I’ll stop.

So here’s the great question: is The Brutalist a modern American masterpiece? I hesitate to use the word '“masterpiece” in reference to a film the very same day I saw it. Time will be the judge of that. The marketers of this film sure have been eager to share the many reviews that have referred to it as “monumental.” This was not how I responded to it, though. The Brutalist did not blow me away. Instead, it seeped into me, like some kind of narrative IV drip. There are certain narrative threads that remain unresolved and which I keep thinking about, but there is also a strong sense that that is by design.

I’m always impressed with a film that takes a fairly small cast of characters and successfully makes it an allegory for America. That is certainly what’s happening here, along with its examination of capitalism, massive income inequality, insidious antisemitism, and broad xenophobia. All of this is woven into the subtext—and often the text—of a story involving three principal characters: László Tóth (Adrien Brody), the title character having immigrated to the U.S. from war-torn Budapest; László’s wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), who isn’t even seen onscreen until the second half and yet she still looms large; and the Pennsylvanian millionaire Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), who discovers László to have been a renowned European architect and hires him to design a massive community center in his town outside of Philadelphia.

There are other key characters, of course. Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy), László’s mute and orphaned teenage niece brought to America with Erzsébet, is in many scenes in which she never says a word yet conveys a great deal with her eyes alone. Later, as a young adult, she gets one scene in which she has any dialogue, when she and her young husband declare to László and Erzsébet that they have decided to move to the then-very-young state of Israel—a scene with many implications, both in their time and in ours. Harry Lee Van Buren (Joe Alwyn), Harrison’s entitled son, is the first to hire László for a design job, rebuilding his father’s library as a surprise that does not quite go as planned but kicks off Harrison’s and László’s complicated and ultimately tragic relationship. Attila (Alessandro Nivola), László’s cousin, takes him in when he first arrives in America, and hires him to work at his furniture store in Philadelphia. Audrey (Emma Laird), Attila’s Catholic wife, has convinced Attila to convert to her religion and clearly resents László’s Jewishness. Minutes after meeting him, she says, “We know someone who can take a look at that nose,” and although the conversation is about an injury, the double meaning is far from lost on us.

There is a great deal to unpack in The Brutalist, but perhaps the most with László’s Ivorian single father friend Gordon (Isaach de Bankolé), and Gordon’s young son William (Charlie Esoko as a little boy; Zephan Hanson Amissah as a teenager). William is also orphaned; Gordon is also an immigrant; both of them are Black; and it feels somewhat like a missed opportunity that The Brutalist has nothing to say about them as it pertains to these facts, least of which how their experiences might differ from László’s. They are just László’s friend—met in a bread line; Gordon later hired by László to work on his projects—and his son. There is a moment when Harrison returns from a trip sooner than expected, discovering the library “surprise” mid-construction, and refers to Gordon as a “strange Negro” in his front yard, and this is the only overt reference to their race. There is no doubt that director and writer Brady Corbet is unusually intentional with every choice in this film, from casting to editing, and still some of it remains a mystery. We get a brief glimpse into Gordon and William’s relationship when Gordon insists William does not remember his late mother, and William replies that he just wanted to make it easier on him—and then it cuts to the next scene.

That said, one of the notable achievements in The Brutalist is how quickly it seems to go by in spite of its length. This is a three-hour and 35-minute movie, including a 15-minute intermission (which helpfully features a countdown clock), and when the intermission happened roughly ninety minutes in, I was surprised we were halfway through already. And this is with a narrative that is not especially fast-paced—but, you still can’t take your eyes off of it: not the excellent performers, not the beautiful cinematography, not the tragically typical American immigrant story unfolding onscreen. During the opening titles, the camera follows László through a tightly crowded, dark space that I first suspected to be some chaotic place he was escaping from in Europe, but turns out to be the depths of the ship he’s taken to Ellis Island. This is where we see, within minutes of the film’s beginning, the iconic shot of the Statue of Liberty viewed upside-down. László is elated, but we already know what American experience awaits him. Much later, he utters one of the most memorable lines in the film: “We came here because we had no other option.”

Felicity Jones deserves special mention, as László’s wife, Erzsébet. We hear her, narrating letters from Hungary during László’s first five years in America without her, in the first half of the film, before the intermission. We see her onscreen for the first time in the opening scene of Part Two, when she finally arrives. Others have already commented how Erzsébet is “the wife” character but also more than that, and this is true. Brady Corbet and his co-writer, Mona Fastvold, have written her with much more autonomy than most characters of this sort get, and she is much more integral to the story in the second half. I actually found her to be one of the most interesting and dynamic characters in the film.

Guy Pearce’s Harrison Lee Van Buren, on the other hand, is by turns the most enigmatic and the most predictable character. His son, Harry, is much more readily pompous, but Harrison is subtly every bit the entitled figure one would expect from someone with far more money than he needs. Money changes how people view the world, and how they view everyone else in it, especially those without wealth, and Harrison embodies this to his very essence. Pearce plays him as a deeply repressed man, with occasional bursts of shocking violence. In one such scene, between him and László, I was so taken aback my jaw dropped, and I’m still not entirely sure how I even feel about it. In the end, though, it all comes down to power and privilege, and how casually they can be leveraged when people simply move from one system of oppression to another. They may have different structures, but the same people are granted access to separate spaces designed only for them.

Opening doors to the intersection between aesthetics and knowledge, but without equal access to either.

Overall: A-

A COMPLETE UNKNOWN

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

I have a confession to make: I have never, before today, sat down and listened to any Bob Dylan album from start to finish. I am actually listening to his 1965 landmark Highway 61 Revisited for the first time, literally as I write this. And my first impression, upon hearing Dylan’s singing, is that Timothée Chalamet’s performance in A Complete Uknown is actually a bit more subtle than the real man himself. You know how people sound when they do comic impressions of Bob Dylan? That’s what he actually sounded like. If Chalamet had gone for absolute accuracy, people might have thought he was being a little over the top.

Honestly I enjoyed Timothée’s version better.

To be fair, I’m getting a bit more into Highway 61 Revisited as it goes along, although its status as something that exploded the music industry would never be clear just from listening to it, without a music history lesson. More fundamentally, and this is something the film depicts beautifully, Bob Dylan’s talent as a songwriter is undeniable. One wonders if someone like me might like it better performed by a better singer. There’s certainly plenty of that to choose from—from Simon & Garfunkel to to Heart and Ann Wilson—just in my own music collection. It’s easy for young music fans to be completely ignorant of the wide reach of Dylan’s staggering infuence.

People truly idolize this man, particularly working musicians, and many quite famous ones. Could we even say that, at this point, there is more idolatry of Dylan than there is of the Beatles? That is perhaps up for debate, and to be fair, Dylan is still alive (he’s 83) and only half of the Beatles are still alive; if they were still alive and producing music today, they’d probably still be ahead on that front. In any case, the cultural reach of Bob Dylan simply cannot be overestimated.

A Complete Unknown climaxes with Bob Dylan’s famous (or infamous, depending on the perspective) performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, when he angered the crowd by performing with electric rather than acoustic guitar. The scene is a curious one to witness, with the crowd immediately responding with confusion and anger, literally throwing things at Dylan and his band onstage. Director and co-writer James Mangold (Logan, Ford v Ferrari) makes an interesting choice here, not focusing a great deal on the crowd at least partially coming around as the set goes on. If you’re paying attention, you see specific audience members initially screaming in anger later moving happily to the beat.

To Mangold’s credit, there was no need to bring me around, as I was locked in with A Complete Unknown from start to finish. This is due to two key components, the most important being the music: the actors (including Chalamet) performing the songs themselves, and doing so wonderfully. There’s a lot of beautiful acoustic music in this film that I was only moderately familiar with and very much enjoyed, bringing to mind the 2013 Coen Brothers film Inside Llewyn Davis—blatantly Dylan-inspired, and an objectively better film.

The second key component is the casting, which is stellar all around. Tomothée Chalamet’s inevitable Oscar nomination will be fully justified; Edward Norton brings an old-school warmth to Pete Seeger; Monica Barbara is subtly radiant as Joan Baez; Elle Fanning does a lot with a girlfriend part that is typically thankless; Boyd Holbrook is irresistibly charismatic as Johnny Cash; Scoot McNairy is astonishingly compelling as a nonverbal Woody Guthrie suffering from Huntington’s disease. Many have already commented on how A Complete Unknown follows pretty typical beats of a film biopic, and this is accurate, but the fantastic cast and the fantastic music largely renders an otherwise by-the-numbers script to be inconsequential.

What’s more, the script takes the wise course of focusing on a specific moment in a person’s life, rather than attempting to cover an entire life. In this case, it’s the early- to mid-sixties, Bob Dylan’s early years, gaining a startlingly quick amount of fame with folk music with the uncharacteristic distinction of being original compositions (with the exception of his largely ignored debut record of covers), and then culminating in a monumental expression of freedom so as not to feel boxed in by fan and producer expectations. To be specific, “going electric.” And that sequence, at the Newport Folk Festival, is indeed electric.

Incidentally, while I was writing this, Highway 61 Revisited ended, and I went back and played his sophomore album, 1963’s The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. I must admit, I’m enjoying this earlier, acoustic folk sound better. Now I am also disappointed he went electric. What an asshole!

The Bob and Joan Story—is one that will suck you in regardless of generation or musical interest.

Overall: B+

BABYGIRL

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

Babygirl does not pull any punches regarding what it’s about: it opens with Nicole Kidman having an orgasm with Antonio Banderas. Or so it would seem!

That is to say, this is a very sex-forward film. It’s a very sex-positive film, which is good for everyone. It’s actually not that difficult these days to find high-profile, even mainstream movies that are frank and positive about sex, a trend I fully support. What makes Babygirl stand apart, how it goes an extra step that other movies do not go, is that it’s specifically kink-positive.

I’m not saying this has never been done before. Secretary came out 22 years ago, after all. The key difference is that James Spader and Maggie Gyllenhaal are nowhere near as big of movie stars as Nicole Kidman, or even Antonio Banderas, and never have been. Nor did that movie bother much with gender politics and power dynamics at all really, let alone handle them so deftly. Another key point is how much of a relief it is that Babygirl was written and directed by a woman—Halina Reijn on both counts, who previously directed (but did not write, though perhaps she should have) Bodies Bodies Bodies. Any movie about a woman with a humiliation fetish should absolutely be directed—and, preferably, written—by a woman.

Nicole Kidman gives a towering performance in Babygirl, which I fear may be overlooked by many just because of the subject matter. This is arguably her best performance in twenty years, although a couple others come quite close—it’s no revelation to say she’s an incredible actor. But she’s given something very new to do here, as a woman who can’t climax without very particular circumstances, and who only slowly comes to understand and embrace what’s going on in a healthy way.

This brings me to Harris Dickinson, who is hot as hell as Samuel, the subtly cocky intern who seduces Kidman’s Romy, the CEO of an Amazon-like tech company in New York City. Dickinson is the rare kind of package in the same vein as Timothée Chalamet or Colin Farrell before him: as talented as he is gorgeous. I’ve been impressed with Dickinson as a performer since his breakout role as a closeted gay teenager in Beach Rats (2017), and he was magnificent in Triangle of Sadness (2022). He is unlikely to become a superstar like Chalamet, but he’s poised to have a film career that is every bit as interesting.

Babygirl never tells us how old Romy is, though it’s easy to presume it’s somewhat younger than Kidman’s actual age of 57. She’s the mother of two teenage daughters, one of whom (Esther McGregor) is an exceptionally well-drawn young lesbian. Samuel is clearly meant to be in his twenties (Dickinson is 28), which makes the age gap between him and Romy somewhere between 20 and 30 years. Halina Reijn, as writer-director, spins a sexually tense tale between them with true finesse, never quite making clear the degree to which Samuel may or may not be threatening to Romy. What’s easy to forget, and perhaps deliberately so, is the inherent power imbalance between them, and very much in Romy’s favor. Samuel knowingly talks about how he could take everything from her with one phone call because he knows it turns her on. But who is really taking advantage of whom here? How threatening could he actually be to her, really? Reijn is very much playing with our expectations, taking advantage of our inclination to see the man as the one who is inappropriate. Neither of them is innocent here, but only one of them has the real power.

This is not directly related to, as many would assume, but is in conversation with Romy’s humiliation kink. Her husband, Jacob (Banderas), is a nice guy who cannot wrap his head around Romy’s specific sexual desires. He utters perhaps the most critical line in the film when he says of her suggestions in bed, “It makes me feel like a villain.” This sexual disconnect, having no bearing at all on how much Romy loves him, is the entire reason for her affair with Samuel, who has an innate instinct for her desires and takes advantage of them at the first opportunity. Conversely, again, it’s important to note that Romy allows it—something made explicit when she and Samuel have a conversation about consent that is unusually clarifying onscreen, and they even agree on a safe word. Incidentally, when I was thinking about Samuel’s seemingly borderline behaviors later in the film, it took a while for me to register that she could have used that mutually agreed-upon safe word, and never did.

I kind of love that Reijn cast a star as big as Antonio Banderas for the part of Jacob, which could arguably have been played by anyone and which in someone else’s hands could have been a thankless role. This is the kind of part that has been a bone tossed to older women actors for decades, although once you look deeper, you realize that Jacob also plays a critical role in this story. Samuel, tantalizing as he is, is just a catalyst for what is ultimately Romy and Jacob’s story. There is only one scene Banderas and Dickinson share, and it is fantastic, going in directions you never expect, in turn both furious and tender.

If you are super vanilla and don’t get kink at all, you’d best avoid Babygirl. If you are vanilla but have an open mind about people who are different from you, then you have just as much reason to see this incredible film as the rest of us. Babygirl is easily one of the best films of the year, and Kidman gives one of the year’s best performances. Romy is just the kind of complex figure perfect for an actor of Kidman’s caliber, a woman balancing the nuances of beauty standards for mature women in the highest levels of the corporate world, who remain rare indeed.

There is another key line, when Romy’s assistant (Sophie Wilde) says “I genuinely thought women with power would behave differently.” What Reijn deliberately leaves unclear is the extent to which the implication there is or is not correct: is Romy behaving just like the other men in her position? We could argue about this for hours, and that, perhaps more than anything, is what makes this movie great.

Move over Nicole, I’m next!

Overall: A