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

THE END

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

I went in to The End really wanting to like it. The premise is right up my alley—a postapocalyptic musical about a family fraying at the seams after twenty years in an underground bunker. “Bunker” is a bit misleading; Tilda Swinton’s character, here credited only as “Mother,” has saved priceless pieces of art from the surface, and decorated all of their walls with them. We get many close-up shots of painted skies and clouds, the closest thing we get to seeing real versions of such things in the entire film.

I get that many details are completely irrelevant to the plot of this film, but there were so many that defied logic that I found it distracting. We never see any exterior walls to this structure this family lives in—Mother (Swinton), Father (Michael Shannon), Son (George MacKay), Friend (Bronagh Gallagher), Butler (Tim McInnerny), and Doctor (Lennie James). These six have been living in this self-sustaining underground home for over twenty years. We know this because it was twenty years ago the last time anyone tried to come after them from the surface.

But now, a stranger has managed to penetrate, and is found unconscious, no one with any idea how she got in. I watched the entire film thinking they were in cavernous snow caves, only to discover when I looked it up after getting home that, apparently, they are deep down a salt mine. Still, plenty of questions remain unanswered. All we know is, the group tentatively agrees to take the stranger in. She is played by Moses Ingram, credited here as “Girl.”

Over time, this young woman reveals that she is the last surviving member of her family, and she begs to stay with these people because she cannot survive on the surface. She sure looks well fed, though—not fat, but perfectly normal. You’d think she’d be as emaciated as she was desperate, but these are not details director and co-writer Joshua Oppenheimer is concerning himself with. Instead, the story focuses instead on how her presence gradually reveals how this wealthy family has spent decades both lying to each other and kidding themselves.

Normally, I would be really into this, except that The End spends a lot of its extended runtime—148 minutes—with very little actually happening, aside from them singing, to themselves or to each other. Oppenheimer’s choice to make the singing fully unironic is a bold one I can respect. The singing abilities run the gamut; neither Tilda Swinton or Michael Shannon are very good at it; George MacKay and Moses Ingram are much better at it. What’s more, the limited setting allows for little in the way of variety: we either see people sining inside a home amongst the paintings, or out in the salt caves.

I just couldn’t quite connect with The End, and not for lack of trying. This is like a quiet family drama where the family members happen to break out into song. And what of the music, then? It’s serviceable. It’s not bad, but neither is it particularly catchy or memorable. The accompanying orchestrations are pleasant. Much like Emilia Pérez, the point of making this a musical is never readily apparent. I would propose that this film would be both a more reasonable length and more compelling without the songs.

The performances are solid across the board—something we can reliably count on with both Tilda Swinton (her somewhat distracting dark haired wigs notwithstanding) and Michael Shannon. There is real depth to mine in these strained relationships. I just found myself preoccupied with unanswered questions, such as where they get the eggs they eat from, when we never see any live animals down there. And if the stranger could survive that long on the surface, why do these characters never go up there? Surely there’s stuff they could scavenge. But I guess they are all committed to their insulation, as is this largely impenetrable movie.

A talented cast offers music without passion.

Overall: B-

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 his mom wants him 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

QUEER

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

I’m not sure I can fully explain what the hell is going on in Queer, which starts of relatively normal and progressively moves into a definitively wackadoodle space. There is very much a sense that this was what director Luca Guadagnino was going for, and in his hands, I felt totally okay just letting go and falling into his very specific atmosphere.

This is a director who has made films I adored (Call Me By Your Name, Challengers), films I have hated (Suspiria), and movies I’ve had a mixed reaction to (Bones and All). Guadagnino is a man for all seasons, a man for all tastes. There are people who adored the titles I hated and people who just didn’t get the ones I adored. He even directed a meandering but beautiful limited series for HBO called We Are Who We Are which I would highly recommend. So where does Queer fall on this spectrum, one that stretches wider than it does for most directors?

Queer is very specific, and with me at least, it elicited a very specific response. This may be the most bemusing movie I’ve seen and so very much enjoyed the experience. There’s something truly nebulous about the script, adapted from the William S. Burroughs novella of the same name, by Justin Kuritzkes. I have never read any of Burroughs’s work, but by all accounts the tripiness the story gets further into as it goes on is characteristic of his work. I’m not sure I need to read any of it. I trust the capable hands of Guadagnino in shaping an adaptation.

It’s notable that both Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey, who play the two leads, are straight actors playing queer characters. One might be tempted to call it regressive, except that Guadagnino himself is gay, and evidently these were the actors he wanted. If straight actors must be cast for gay parts, it makes up for a lot if the director is openly gay. And I cannot stress enough that Daniel Craig’s performance in this film is incredible. His William Lee is an aging gay man biding his time in 1950s Mexico City, engaged in casual sex but quick to infatuation, and singularly vulnerable and insecure. Craig’s portrayal is at once unique and broad, specific and heartbreaking. William is a man who seems in search of something to fill a void in his life that his era just cannot accommodate.

The one thing I genuinely struggle to get on board with in Queer is Jason Schwartzman, giving an admittedly delightful performance in the deeply unfortunate use of what appears to be a fat suit. I’m having a hard time finding specific confirmation that this is indeed a fat suit, but given how thin he is in recent photos, I’m not sure what else we can conclude. And there are definitely genuinely fat actors who are just as talented as Schwartzman and could have given just as good a performance. On the upside, his character, Joe, is not only also queer, but is only ever seen making out with hot young guys. So at least we’re seeing a fat guy onscreen who can get it.

Speaking of which, there's some unusually frank depictions of gay sex in this movie–another point in its favor. Daniel Craig looks amazing at age 56—25 years Drew Starkey’s senior. But Euguene, played by Starkey, is an independent and almost aloof young man, barely acknowledging William’s obvious yearning for him.

And here is where Guadagnino’s dependably delicate touch comes in handy: at no point does Queer feel like some kind of gay version of Lolita (it helps that Eugene is well out of his teen years). A great deal of time passes with very little seeming to have happened, even though a great deal is happening onscreen, with oddly but effectively focused cinematography, great performances, and great finesse in editing. There is no question some will be bored by this movie. I was fully compelled at all times, even when it shifted into areas I could not fully grasp.

Queer takes a hard turn in that direction as it explores William’s drug use, and specifically his search for a root that he’s told will give him telepathic capabilities. The story is split into three “Chapters” and then a particularly impenetrable epilogue; the third chapter is titled “Lady in the Jungle,” the title character there being a sort of slicked-back woman with long greasy hair who looked incredibly familiar but was nearly impossible to place: it turned out to be the amazing Lesley Manville.

It’s in this third act when William, with Eugene right there beside him, goes on a bit of a wild trip, on the drug they’ve traveled out there for. Guadagnino pivots to what is essentially an interpretive dance on ayahuasca, the two shirtless men moving in and out of each other, quite literally: we see a hand passing underneath the skin, or their two torsos barely melting into each other. It is at once romantic and unsettling, unlike anything I have ever seen. I suppose it could be seen as a comment on two people truly connecting, but sometimes with Guadagnino, you just have no idea and perhaps you never will.

This is one filmmaker where, depending on the vibes anyway, I am okay with having no idea. I couldn’t tell you precisely what Queer is going for. Guadagnino is capable of such mystery in ways both deeply unsatisfying and deeply satisfying. For me, this round was pretty satisfying. If nothing else, he has a gift for molding thoroughly realized characters who elicit your compassion and interest. Queer is certainly not perfect, not least of which because of several scenes with pointlessly obvious CGI (background landscapes of South America; a near-miss attack from a viper). Still I’m glad to have gone on its journey, and would happily do so again.

Insecure vulnerability and comfortable confidence intersect in Queer-ness.

Overall: B+

ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT

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

All We Imagine as Light is the most critically acclaimed wide-release movie of the year, so I went in primed to love it. Since I liked it just okay, that rendered it kind of a letdown.

Maybe there’s something I’m just missing. Maybe I’ll watch this again one day and think: What was I thinking? This is a masterpiece! But I doubt it. I’ll be too busy watching other new movies. This is a good example, though, of how stupidly caught up I can get in the score at review aggregate sites like MetaCritic. A “Must-See” score of 94? It must be amazing! No, not really.

I should have trusted the feeling I had when I watched the trailer. I could find nothing in there that looked particularly worth getting excited about. This is not to say that I can’t find incredibly quiet movies—a huge amount of the dialogue in this film is delivered barely above a whisper—to be deeply impressive. It’s just that this movie, in particular, I am a bit at a loss when it comes to the universal praise it’s getting. Side note: the MetaCritic user score of “Generally Favorable” 7.1 out of 10 is much more in line with how I felt about it.

Which is to say, I don’t have any harsh criticisms of it either. This is just another example, of many films that critics gush over but audiences aren’t nearly as impressed by. There is a perennial divide between the intellectualist consumption of film critics and the populist tastes of audiences, and once again, I find myself falling somewhere in the space between.

And it’s not like I am incapable of gushing over films that general audiences don’t really connect with. Consider TÁR (2022), a film I loved. But there are key things that sets that film apart, including its cinematography, its editing, and most significantly, a stunning performance by Cate Blanchett. I suppose it’s not really fair to compare that to All We Imagine as Light, an international independent film with naturalistic actors totally unknown to American audiences.

I should note that this does not mean they are unknown at all. The lead actor, Kani Kusruti, has more than forty other acting credits. She plays Prabha, a nurse working in Mumbai a year after the husband she was arranged by family to marry went to Germany to work and now no longer even calls her. Her younger and more carefree roommate, Anu, is played by Divya Prabha, who has 16 other acting credits. They work at the same hospital, along with Parvaty, the hospital cook played by Chaya Kadam, who has 60 acting credits. Parvaty is a widow who is getting forced out of the home she’s lived in for 22 years because she has no papers to prove her residence, her late husband having never discussed it with her, and now developers want to build on the land.

I was pretty compelled by the framing of All We Imagine as Light at the start, writer-director Payal Kapadia opening with tracking shots of everyday life in the crowded streets of Mumbai. This is accompanied by anonymous voiceover voices, each in a different language, sharing their impressions of life in that particular city. The differing languages serves to underscore the cosmopolitan nature—if still strictly from the Indian subcontinent—specific to Mumbai. It’s an effective setup for a film primed to be a uniquely accurate portrait of a city, which is the kind of thing I tend to be really into.

Once that introductory vignette is done, it cuts to Prabha, commuting on one of Mumbai’s ubiquitous trains. We only very slowly get to know her, and her living situation, her job, her absent husband, her young roommate who asks her to cover rent this month. There is an aspect of this film using just a few characters to convey a sense of living in the city, and it is indeed done very well—if quietly, and at an incredibly measured pace.

Somewhat surprisingly, only the first half of the film is set in Mumbai. When Parvati decides to stop fighting the developers and move back to her coastal home village 150 miles south of Mumbai, Prabha and Anu help her move, turning it into their own trip to Ratnagiri. This is comparatively very remote, green, serene, and near the beach, and it’s where the second half of the film is set. It’s also where All We Imagine as Light briefly turns into a kind of fantasy on Prabha’s part, and after such gritty realism it had me momentarily very confused.

There is also a subplot regarding Anu engaged in a romance with a young Muslim man named Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon), and I had slightly mixed feelings about its fairly rote “forbidden love” aspect. There’s a scene in which Anu is going to sneak out to Shiaz’s neighborhood when his parents are gone to a wedding, but in order not to attract unwanted attention she buys a burka to wear as a disguise. How do Muslim audiences respond to this, I wonder?

If nothing else, I must say that All We Imagine as Light is executed with tenderness above all, a deep empathy for its characters, particularly the three women around whom the story revolves. These details are all very much in the film’s favor, which is sprinkled with several moments of quiet profundity, occasionally quite memorably framed as a picture. I found very little to criticize in this movie. I just couldn’t connect with it as something enduringly special.

This is much how I looked watching this movie. Well, I wasn’t wearing a sari.

Overall: B