A MINECRAFT MOVIE

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

I could have had a field day ripping A Minecraft Movie apart—if it weren’t funny. But, the thing is, I laughed a lot. And maybe you won’t. Maybe you will. This movie has a pretty specific and peculiar sensibility, which gets very goofy and dumb, for no other reason that its self-reward. It spoke to me. And I don’t even have the slightest bit of knowledge or familiarity with the 2011 video game on which it’s based, although plenty of the action feels like a video game. Or what I imagine a video game to be like, anyway. What do I know? I played a few video games at a friend’s house in the summer of 1989, decided fairly quickly that it wasn’t for me, and haven’t bothered with it since. Most of this movie’s audience will have been born after that.

How easily I settled into A Minecraft Movie’s delightfully absurdist humor only better serves to recommend it. Anyone open to its brand of humor can enjoy this movie, whether they’re familiar with the video game or not. Granted, the setup a paper thin and utterly stupid, introducing us to Jack Black’s Steve, a doorknob salesman with a lifelong dream of being a miner. He follows his dream, goes down into a mine, and within minutes uncovers an “orb” (it’s actually a cube) that opens a portal into “the Overworld,” a place where creativity knows no bounds—well, except for the unstated fact that apparently everything has to be designed in cubed shapes.

Anyway, everything that so quickly gets Steve to the Overworked is ridiculously convenient and untied to any backstory to give Steve any character dimension whatsoever. I don’t seriously think this is the case, but I suppose you could argue that this setup is itself a meta commentary on the thinly contrived characters in any typical movie of this ilk. There are no intellectual pursuits here—getting right to the delightful absurdities is very much the point.

I could have lived without the way Jack Black’s delivery is far more over the top than it needs to be, every single line he delivers. He’s overly excited about everything he sees onscreen, or even any particular thought he has. It’s on-brand for Jack Black, I guess, and makes him fit better in the Overworld than he does in the real world. The others that find themselves sucked into this world give more naturalistic performances, with the exception of Jason Momoa as Garrett “The Garbage Man” Garrison, a former “Gamer of the Year” in—speak of the devil!—1989.

Not all of the humor in A Minecraft Movie lands. What makes it work is that most contemporary absurdist comedies, especially wide-release big-budget ones, have far more humor that falls flat than that works. A Minecraft Movie is the other way around. For every gag that doesn’t work, there are five that do. I laughed far more consistently at this movie than I expected to.

Not all of the characters really work either, to be fair. Jennifer Coolidge appears as a high school Vice Principal, who invites a Minecraft villager to dinner after he wanders through the portal to the real world and she hits him with her car. Director Jared Hess, working with a script written be a team of six writers, cuts back and forth between the Overworld action and this dinner date, enough times to make you wonder what the point of the dinner scenes even is. In the end, the point seems to be only to get to a bit between Coolidge and the CGI villager during the end credits. Well, the bit is hilarious, one of the funniest things in the movie, so I guess it’s worth it?

Rounding out the principal cast are Sebastian Hansen as Henry, a very creative kid just starting high school in the Idaho town of Chuglass; Emma Myers as Natalie, Henry’s older sister who hardly looks like she should be out of high school herself (Myers is 23) and has been hired as the social media manager for the town’s potato chip factory; and Danielle Brooks as Dawn, the local real estate broker with a mobile zoo as a side hustle. Brooks in particular is a known talent who is somewhat wasted here, as all these characters are easily interchangeable with any serviceable actor, but they’re still all fun enough. Momoa, Coolidge and to a lesser degree Jack Black provide the most color as characters, although only Momoa provides a kind of colorfulness that fits neatly into the video-game-adaptation context.

The bottom line is, none of the plot, such as any plot exists, matters. What matters is a bevy of well-executed, adorably bizarre details, such as the villainous borde of cube-headed “piglins” from another dimension, led by a piglin witch named Malgosha. By and large, there is little to no rhyme or reason to anything that happens in A Minecraft Movie, but it’s the execution that makes it work—humor that works more often than it doesn’t; and more actors with charisma than without. It’s an impressively staged bit of organized chaos, set in a world rendered with surprisingly artful special effects. It’s a movie that is ultimately meaningless but kind of a blast, but sometimes a mindless blast is its own reward.

Which of these characters is the most fun? You get one guess!

Overall: B

DEATH OF A UNICORN

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

The first thing you should know about Death of a Unicorn is the visual effects are kind of shit. It was made with a $15 million budget, and it looks like about $10 million of that went to cast salaries. That’s probably not how it actually was, but it’s certainly how it looks. Writer-director Alex Scharfman, in his feature film debut, employs a lot of camera tricks to minimize the amount of time we see actual unicorns on camera. Some of the time, it’s an effective technique for either illustrating the creatures’ enormity, or underscoring their darkly dazzling otherworldliness. Most of the time, it’s a transparent reflection of budget constraints. This is a film with many visual references to other, much better films, from Jurassic Park to Alien. Perhaps we are meant to see Death of a Unicorn as also an ode to Jaws, which also had to obscure its monster due to budget constraints and equipment failures, but with skilled editing became a masterwork of suspense. Once the shark was seen onscreen, audiences were in awe. Once we see the monstrous unicorns onscreen here, there isn’t awe so moch as a question of which cheap off-the-shelf effects software was used.

The second thing you should know about Death of a Unicorn, which makes up for a whole lot of flaws and mediocrity, is it is exceptionally well cast. Granted, most of them are basically phoning in their performances, especially Paul Rudd as Elliot, the misguided dad trying to ingratiate himself to a dying wealthy employer on a weekend retreat at his house in the mountains “this far north”—the most specific reference we get to the location. Are we in Alaska? Where? (It was filmed in Hungary.) But there are others, even when phoning in, who have such strong personas that you can’t help but have fun with them in this context: Richard E. Grant as Odell Leopold, the aforementioned dying employer; Téa Leoni as Belinda, his equally selfish and money-hungry wife; Will Poulter as Shepard, their even more single-minded, dickish son (who is constantly wearing pleated shorts, and somehow, it’s a perfect touch). Possibly my favorite among the cast is Anthony Carrigan, best known as NoHo Hank from HBO’s Barry, as Griff, the Leopolds’ increasingly put-upon butler. Jenna Ortega plays Ridley, Elliot’s daughter, and in the year 2025, Ortega probably qualifies as the film’s biggest star. Now 22 years old, I found myself wondering how long she can continue playing teenagers—although, to be fair, this movie never says exactly how old she is, and does make one reference to college studies.

The film opens with Elliot and Ridley, traveling to this weekend retreat, and it’s while they are driving through the mountains, frustrated with sudden loss of juice in their electronics (later a key plot point), when they hit a “horse-like creature”—or, as Ridley later puts it, “A fucking unicorn.” When the Leopolds discover the healing properties of this creature, and particularly synthesized powder from its horn, everything this greedy, wealthy family does from then on is utterly predictable—as is Death of a Unicorn overall. Let’s just say that the script is not this movie’s strongest element.

There’s something undeniably fun about the story in spite of its flaws, however. Death of a Unicorn might ultimately have been more successful if Scharfman had focused more on directing and collaborated with some other writers. To Scharfman’s credit, though, he strikes an unusually nice balance of tone, with consistently effective humor sprinkled into sequences that overtly veer into the horror genre, as the juvenile unicorn’s parents show up to exact their revenge. This movie has plenty of jump-scares, and I spent plenty of time covering my eyes with my hand.

How often do you get a horror-comedy-fantasy that is also a genuinely good time? This is not a movie that will still be talked about generations from now—or next week, really—but it’s a kick while it’s happening (sometimes literally). Even special effects that are subpar, if not outright terrible, do not detract from that. A lot of movies try to be simultaneously stupid and fun, but typically they land solidly on the side of stupid. Death of a Unicorn pulls off the minor miracle of succeeding at the fun part. With a bit more discipline, it could have been far better, but sometimes you leave a movie satisfied by the fact that it could have been much worse.

Death of a career? Not quite, but a fun step in that direction!

Overall: B-

TUESDAY

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

It can be astonishing when something comes along that is utterly original, unlike anything you have ever seen before—sometimes, to the point that it comes close to inexplicable. Since when does Death manifest itself as a deep, scratchy-throated parrot, anyway? Ever since Daina Oniunas-Pusic thought to write and direct Tuesday, I guess.

Maybe it’s just that the black cloaked figure with a scythe has long since played out. Tuesday offers no explanation whatsoever as to the use of a parrot instead, but rather, presents him as a character with challenges and internal struggles like anyone else. Not even that is a particularly novel approach, but how it gets contextualized here certainly is.

Death can be tiny, and he can grow to a giant size, a detail that becomes a surprising plot point later on in the film. When we first see him, he is so tiny he is nestled into the corner of a man’s eye, something we don’t even realize for the few seconds it takes the camera to pan out. This is part of an opening montage that makes it quite unclear what the tone of the film is going to be, in which we see Death release random people around the world from their pain, waving his wing over them.

I had a peculiar experience with this film on a number of fronts. I never saw a trailer for Tuesday, and chose to go see it based on a fairly high MetaCritic score of 70, and a brief synopsis I found both odd and compelling: a mother and teenage daughter must confront Death when it arrives in the form of a talking bird. That honestly sounds a bit whimsical, possibly bordering on corny, but late-career Julia Louis-Dreyfus has made some very interesting choices, tending to be in movie projects that are both a bit off the beaten path and reliably entertaining.

All that said, when Tuesday opened on a shot of Earth from outer space and the ominous sounds of countless people longing for death, shifting between voices like the movement of a radio dial, for a minute I wondered if I had gone into the wrong theater. Is this a horror movie? Not quite. Is it a comedy? Definitely not, even though it has a through line of irreverence that gives it several genuinely funny moments. Is it ultimately a tear jerker? Definitely yes, but still in a way that leaves Tuesday a movie that defies categorization. It’s sort of a sad mood piece with a surprising amount of humor. You don’t see that every day.

“Tuesday” is actually the title character, the terminally ill teenage girl played by Lola Petticrew, who Death (voiced by Arinzé Kene) is summoned to visit by the sounds of her wheezing, evidently indicating that tonight is her time. But rather than freaking out when the bird appears on the table in her backyard, Tuesday suddenly launches into a joke, an earnestly cute one that involves penguins in the back of a car and actually made me laugh. (I did wonder how that would play on rewatch, when the punch line is already known.)

Death is disarmed by this, which causes him to hesitate, and then agree to wait until Zora, Tuesday’s mother, gets home.

This is where Julia Louis-Dreyfus comes in, as she is perfectly cast in the role, which becomes more significant as the story plays out. She is more than anything what makes Tuesday worth seeing. Ultimately, Tuesday is a movie about accepting the inevitability and ubiquity of death. It just uses a wild premise and some very odd turns to get us there, a journey you might have mixed feelings about on the way but in the end you’ll be glad you went on.

Given how low the budget for Tuesday clearly was, Daina Oniunas-Pusic does a lot with very little, focusing most of the movie on all of two characters, with one supporting character, an in-house nurse (Leah Harvey) as a third who comes and goes. Oniunas-Pusic manages to use subtle cues and sparingly used special effects to render the apocalyptic consequences when Death is taken out of commission for a while—thanks to some jarringly inventive tactics on the part of Zora, who cannot cope. In a way, Tuesday is a demonstration that our very universe does not work if death does not happen in it.

As is often the case, it’s the terminally ill person who accepts their fate, and the people who love them who cannot. When Zora meets Death, she isn’t freaked out by a magical bird so much as the knowledge that he is there to take her daughter away. Zora then quite understandably acts out of desperation, ultimately only prolonging the inevitable.

As odd as this movie is, I can see it being deeply moving to anyone who lost a loved one, particularly one gone before it should have been their time. It has far more depth and far more nuance than its simple premise might suggest. And Louis-Dreyfus gives a magnificent performance, by turns funny and heartbreaking. It may be a challenge to open your mind to it at first, but if you can manage it, you’ll be glad you did.

No, this isn’t a family comedy: it’s an exploration of our emotional connection to Death (which is also a bird).

IF

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Overall: C

SASQUATCH SUNSET

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

I went into Sasquatch Sunset expecting a kind of gross-out comedy that happened to be about Sasquatches. I had heard there was a lot of Sasquatch fucking and shitting. These things do happen in the movie, but, if you can believe it, they are used sparingly—which only heightens the impact when it does happen. What I was not quite prepared for was an ultimately bleak mood piece about extinction. In retrospect, the very title of the film should have been a clue.

There are only four characters in this movie, and none of them speak anything beyond a somewhat organized series of grunts. While watching, I kept thinking of the 1986 film The Clan of the Cave Bear, in which no verbal language is ever spoken. What I forgot about that movie is that they have established a form of sign language, with which the film presents subtitles. Sasquatch Sunset doesn’t even have that; in this movie, we just get the grunts. Beyond that, all communication and emotion is conveyed through a sort of mime by actors in hairy suits.

To say that Sasqutch Sunset isn’t for everyone is an understatement. There were reportedly many walkouts when the film played earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival. This is not difficult to believe: I was one of six people in the theater when I went to see this, and a person in the row in front of us did indeed walk out in the midde. She even booked a seat for an AMC screening of Dune Part Two on her phone before getting up and leaving. An excellent choice, to be fair, but still, side note: don’t do that shit. Your phone screen is distracting and annoying—it’s why I know what movie you booked as an alternative, which you should do after leaving the theater.

I really thought Sasquatch Sunset would be funnier. If there’s so much sex and shit, why wouldn’t it be? Well, co-directors David and Nathan Zellner, working with a script by David, have created something akin to a nature documentary—but with mythical creatures as its subjects. They also mark their territory with piss, and in one fairly gross instance we see one vomit after eating too many fermented berries. But the thing is, once I got a recalibrated sense of the meditative tone of this film, I found myself surprisingly engaged by it. In the end, it’s a kind of family tragedy. About Bigfoot. But it takes an unusually “realistic” approach to what Sasquatch might actually behave as feral animals in the forest, particularly as a kind of “missing link” species between great apes and humans.

Speaking of humans, another curious detail of Sasqutch Sunset is that there are none. Inevitably, the Sasquatch characters encounter human civilization, in the form of things like a red X spray painted on a tree trunk, or a campsite. But, they never encounter any human beings. It’s unclear to me whether we are supposed to infer a loss of habitat due to human activity, though we do see them observe smoke from a forest fire in the distance. Several times the Sasquatch characters we’re following smack sticks against trees together in a coordinated pattern, clearly a signal to any other Sasquatch who might hear it. But, these are the only ones we ever see, and —spoiler alert—not even all of these ones make it to the end of the movie. I got to a point where I began to assume they would all be dead by the end of the film, but that’s not exactly how it ends. I suppose it depends on how you look at it.

I’ll definitely give Sasquatch Sunset credit for being absolutely unlike any other movie I have ever seen. I can’t think of a single person I would recommend it to, but I’m not sorry to have seen it. It’s certainly compelling to know that the Sasquatch characters are played, under intricate layers of makeup and prosthetics, by the likes of Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keough, playing the one female among the group. There is also a juvenile played by Christophe Zajac-Denek, and Nathan Zellner himself plays the “alpha.” There is also a baby Sasquatch, performed mostly through what appears to be puppetry, with somewhat mixed results.

There are indeed a few genuinely funny moments, but Sasquatch Sunset plays much more like a meditative drama. And given whose story we are seeing unfold, your mileage may vary. By the time it ended, this Sasquatch story had kind of lost me and then, somehow, brought me back around again. This is a fascinating specimen of experimental cinema, with an unusual blend of absurdity and sincerity. Whether you’ll be into it, even if the premise intrigues you, may very well depend on when you watch and and what mood you’re in. Somehow, in my case, it had a hook that ultimately got me.

They have been to the top and it wasn’t what they were expecting.

Overall: B

THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF MAGICAL NEGROES

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

There were multiple ironies to my experience watching The American Society of Magical Negroes, starting with the fact that the theater I went to see it at started to show the wrong film at first. After deeply confusing those of us in the audience with this very film’s trailer playing amongst all the others before the feature started, they then played American Fiction—a vastly superior film in every way imaginable.

Eventually, once the correct film was playing, after some time I registered another irony. This is a film about Black people whose literally magical job is to ease the discomfort of White people. And this film is so blandly inoffensive, with a premise with great potential to be effectively biting, it plays as though the movie itself exists to ease the discomfort of White viewers.

On the one hand, The American Society of Magical Negroes just can’t win. It triggers the Fox News set by quite directly suggesting the most dangerous animal on the planet is “White people.” Then it rankles leftists by having its Black protagonist risk everything by falling in love with a White woman. (Sort of. We’ll get back to that.)

And here is where we get into the fundamental difference between The American Society of Magical Negroes and American Fiction. American Fiction didn’t give any of its White characters a pass. This movie, by contrast, wants us to think it’s highlighting the absurdity of the myth of the “Magical Negro,” and then gives its White characters a pass at every turn. There’s an impassioned speech near the end, delivered by Justice Smith as Aren, a new recruit for the Society of the film’s title, explaining to his coworker Jason (Drew Tarver) what it’s like for him to live in this country as a Black person. And—spoiler alert!—a minor light goes on in Jason’s head, showing a definitively contrived, if small, step toward White understanding. Except to present all this in the context of literal fantasy genre filmmaking rather undermines the message we’re meant to get from this movie.

This is a film of endlessly missed opportunities. It doesn’t even play with the concept of a “Magical Negro” as a historic stereotype specifically in literature, cinema, and television, where Black supporting characters reliably come to the aid of White main characters. Instead, while trying to convince us it’s using the concept subversively, it’s just continuing the tradition of its use. The only difference is that now, the protagonist of the film is the Black supporting character, and the White main characters are its target audience. The oddest thing about this movie is that it’s like a low-rent Harry Potter but with an undercooked premise and a lead actor who is actually more charismatic and talented than Daniel Radcliffe.

Because this is the one major strength of The American Society of Magical Negroes: the winning cast. Justice Smith embodies his character wonderfully, playing both awkward and increasingly confident with equal skill. David Alan Grier exudes warmth as Aren’s mentor, and Michaela Watkins is a welcome presence, if relatively inconsequential, as his boss. An-Li Bogan has great chemistry with Smith as the love interest for whom Aren ultimately risks everything. The story here rather lacks focus and suffers from uneven tonality, but the cast alone makes up for a lot, and together make this movie watchable, if ultimately forgettable.

A particularly curious element of this film is the multiracial ethnicities of both its protagonist and his love interest. Aren even mentions at one point that his mother was White, yet never offers any clarity on what must be unique to that experience, distinct from either being White or having two Black parents. Lizzie is briefly referred to as “ethnic” but never clarified beyond that—evidently we are to understand that, as a matter of fact, she is not a White woman. At least not fully: she’s Asian and White. But, given that Jason makes a comment about not realizing she’s “ethnic,” it would seem she’s “White enough.”

It may be that I’m splitting hairs here, and overdoing the parsing of ethnic heritage in characters—except that this movie is quite literally asking for it. It seems to give White women a pass in particular, in the end offering Lizzie a last-minute “twist” that underlines the role of women in society as “supportive wives and girlfriends.” This is incongruously problematic on its own, as it creates a a false equivalency between the otherwise very real struggles of women, including White women—something that has its place in film for sure, just not this one and not in this way—and Black people experiencing racism.

The American Society of Magical Negroes has some genuine charms (including Nicole Byer as the Society’s president), but it ultimately fails at what it aims to be, and struggles to clarify its point of view. Everything it aspires to, American Fiction achieves with ingenious finesse. I recommend you just watch that movie instead.

We’re meant to learn how White people are more dangerous than sharks, except this movie has no bite.

Overall: B-

DUNE PART TWO

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

The word “iconic” has been overused for decades. For this reason, I don’t ever use it. Maybe Dune Part Two is the exception that proves the rule. There is a moment in this film that is so visually iconic, it looks like the cover of a pulp science fiction novel come to life. There’s nothing kitschy about it, though; it’s very earnest—a key element of both these movies’ success.

I have to admit, I spent a fair amount of Dune Part Two thinking that it might not be living up to the hype. I wanted to be bowled over, overwhelmed by my love for it, and that wasn’t quite happening. The thing is, that’s just not how Denis Villeneuve operates. This is an artist with such unparalleled skill as a storyteller, you need to regard the piece in its entirely before you can properly judge it. This movie does not disappoint.

There’s something about Dune Part One, released in the fall of 2021—two and a half years ago—that makes it stand apart. I really liked that film when I first saw it, but I didn’t love it. And yet, every single time I rewatch that film, I appreciate it more than the last. I’ve seen it at least four times now, and I still notice new details every time.

It is for that reason that I expect the same thing with Dune Part Two. I’m not yet prepared to declare my undying love for it, but, much like Paul Atreides’s visions, I can see a near future where I’ve gotten to that point. I am genuinely looking forward to seeing this movie again, and will certainly be seeing it many times. This first go-round, I know there is much I did not catch, which is to be expected with films so well adapted from literary source material, but material I have not read. I have started to consider reading it, though.

I am especially looking forward to the point at which both Dune Part One and Dune Part Two are avaiable to watch together, back to back, as one film. Part One was two hours and 35 minutes long; Part Two is two hours and 46 minutes; the two combined, as one interrupted narrative, would make a five hour and 21-minute movie. When combined, maybe one of the greatest science fiction films ever made.

Has anyone else thought to compare this to Kill Bill Vol. I and Kill Bill Vol. II? Wildly different movies, obviously, but a key thing in common: a first part that ends abruptly, with much of the story clearly left to go—but incredible up to that point. Then the second, concluding part comes out, and even the first part is improved when regarded as part of the whole.

And there’s a lot new to discover in Dune Part Two, particularly when it comes to the cast. Zendaya had all of seven minutes of screen time in the first Dune, and as expected, here becomes a critical part of the story. She is great as expected as Chani, as is Timothée Chalamet as Paul—effectively embodying a young man who is maturing, for both good and for ill, before our eyes—but I simply must mention Austin Butler, as Feyd-Rautha, nephew to the grotesque Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård). I could already tell from Elvis that he was a very good actor, but only when comparing that to his performance here does Austin Butler prove to be an astonishing talent. He’s not just the most eminently believable psychotic character in this movie, but he takes it a step further with an incredible vocal performance just similar enough to Stellan Skarsgård’s to make him believable as a relative of his.

There’s a lot of other new famous faces introduced to Part Two: Christopher Walken as the Emperor; Florence Pugh as his daughter, Stellan Skarsgård; Léa Seydoux as Lady Margot Fenring, one of the Bene Gesserit; even Anya Taylor-Joy as a flash-forward of Paul’s little sister. Unfortunately, none of these top-notch actors get much to work with, while Chalamet, Zendaya, Rebecca Ferguson (as Paul’s mother, Jessica), Josh Brolin and especially Javier Bardem get all the desert scenery to chew. Anya Taylor-Joy get about one minute, if that, of screen time.

It’s understandable, however, for them all to want to be part of something that is greater than the sum of its parts. There may not be any better example of that phrase than the two Dune movies—and, incidentally, unlike many other franchises, you absolutely need to have seen Dune Part One in order to fully appreciate, or possibly even understand, this movie. They really should be regarded as part of a collective whole, like Kill Bill or The Lord of the Rings.

The special effects, once again, are spectacular. Even more of this film takes place on the desert planet of Arrakis than the previous one did, and still Villenueve makes it a work of art, between the incredible cinematography and the seamlessly integrated visual effects. The fact alone that he manages to render characters riding sandworms without it looking ridiculous is an impressive accomplishment. The sandworms alone give the film an arresting, visual grandeur.

None of this would matter, of course, without such rich storytelling, in a fully realized, wholly separate universe. For much of this film, we see Paul learn the ways of the Fremen, the people native to the desert, fighting alongside them, protesting their insistence that he is their Messiah while also using that faith to his advantage. This film certainly has more to say about religion, a running subtext to the intergalactic political intrigue and fighting between different planetary clans. Which of these “houses” will ultimately gain the greatest power is incidental to the means by which this power is attained.

I will say, I could feel large swaths of the source material left unaddressed, at least not directly, while watching Dune Part Two. But, like Dune Part One, it is denslely packed with information, which no doubt gives greater satisfaction to those familiar with the books, and more easily picked up on by the rest of us with subsequent viewings. “Epic” is another word I try to avoid because of its overuse, but it is unavoidable here. This is an epic film for the 21st century, done right in a way it hasn’t been for decades, a classic that might just be beloved for generations to come.

Just when you wonder when there will be shock and awe . . . it comes.

Overall: A-

ALL OF US STRANGERS

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

How do I adequately convey how much I loved All of Us Strangers? How do I even explain what it’s about? Except, perhaps, to say it’s a beautifully melancholy, queer love story with an emotional through line that cuts deep?

Mind you, I say this as a gay viewer, and this is incredibly relevant. I can’t help but wonder how the response to it might be different among audiences that are not gay men. I am certain anyone open to the experience of this film can be deeply moved by it, and even have an intricate, nuanced understanding of what the characters are feeling. But for me, in a way few other movies ever have, this story wrapped my very soul into a warm embrace.

Will I love this movie as much upon rewatch, I wonder? There’s only one way to find out.

In the meantime, I must say there is plenty of All of Us Strangers that evades straightforward understanding. That is beside the point. You need only to feel it. And boy, did I.

Adam (Andrew Scott) and Harry (Aftersun’s Paul Mescal) are two gay men, living in the same London high-rise apartment building. It must be a new building, very few other people living in it, as they discuss how distractingly quiet it is living there. We really never see them interact with anyone else in the building, only each other. When a fire alarm has Adam exiting the building, he sees Harry’s silhouette in his sixth-story window, looking down at him. After Adam returns to his unit on a much higher floor—with spectacular, panoramic London views—Harry knocks on his door, drunk, and introduces himself.

Adam and Harry’s steadily blossoming relationship expands beyond that first meeting, which is tentative, cautious, a bit shy. They don’t hook up immediately. They do a bit later, though, and it’s some of the most beautifully shot and tender, gay sexuality I’ve seen onscreen since Moonlight (2016). It’s both highly erotic and genuinely moving—a feat of narrative execution that has me tempted to call director and co-writer Andrew Haigh a cinematic magician.

And All of Us Strangers is indeed magical, even when it defies logic, and quite deliberately so. The story of Adam and Harry runs parallel to the story of Adam and his late parents, who died in a car crash when he was twelve years old. And yet, he takes a train across town to his childhood home—and finds his father (Jamie Bell) and his mother (Claire Foy) there, the same age they were when they died, somehow unsurprised to find their son coming home, now a grown man they had never actually gotten to see grow up.

Mum and Dad have an understanding that about 35 years have passed, but have no knowledge of what has transpired in that time. Their knowledge and relative ignorance remains stuck in, we can only estimate, about 1988. And as premises go, this is a little out there, because All of Us Strangers never makes explicit exactly what’s going on, and there’s a physicality between Adam and his still-young parents during their visits that negates any idea of them as conventional ghosts. It’s a little more like they exist as flesh and blood, but in a different dimension.

What it does allow for, however, are conversations Adam never had a chance to have with his parents otherwise. He comes out to them both, in separate conversations. It’s notable that his mom has a more complicated, slightly more negative reaction than his father, who is much more quickly accepting—a scenario that defies the stereotype of gay experience, and is likely more common than many realize. This, among many other conversations Adam has with his parents, packed a unique emotional punch for me, and so far as I could tell, I was crying before most of the rest of the people in the theater.

All of Us Strangers features gorgeous cinematography, and is edited with unparalleled finesse, transitioning between Adam with Harry, and Adam with his parents, with seamless grace. There’s a sequence in which Adam and Harry go out dancing, do some drugs, and then proceed into a sort of montage of domesticity, with the club music continuing uninterrupted through it all. It’s beautifully executed.

There is a bit of a twist at the end, very directly related to Harry, which ultimately had me baffled. It calls into question a great deal of what has been seen beforehand, but then, there is even a moment when Adam asks his mother, “Is this real?” The answer, evidently, is that if it feels real, then it is. And All of Us Strangers is all feeling, which therefore makes it real. Adam tries to introduce Harry to his parents, and for most of this sequence, Harry seems to be the only one existing in a grounded reality. This is now a film that will allow things to be that simple.

This is a movie I will be thinking about for a very long time, maybe for years to come. I haven’t been this in love with a mood-piece queer love story since Moonlight. Indeed, that film and All of Us Strangers would make for a spectacular double feature. From end to end, it is beautiful and sad and cozy and charming and erotic and mysterious and bewildering. It would seem there is no end to the riches it has to offer.

Nowhere to go but up: together,

Overall: A

WONKA

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

An argument has been made that, well, Wonka is for kids, and kids deserve movies too, right? Well, here’ s my counter-argument: the likelihood that kids will indeed enjoy Wonka notwithstanding, there are still kids’ movies out there that are actually good. This is not one of them.

Mind you, it’s not terrible either. But that’s just the thing: there is a Roald Dahl legacy to live up to here, as well as a Gene Wilder legacy, and Wonka falls short on both counts. This movie doesn’t even live up to the 2005 Tim Burton film Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which I still insist was wonderful, I don’t care how many haters there are out there. Of course, that’s not to say any of these films have held up to the truly classic, enduring 1971 film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory—which, astonishingly, was rated G—but, on the flip side, kids today are neither likely to know anything about that film, nor have much interest in watching it if they do. It would be the equivalent of me having any interest in a film released in 1934 when I was ten years old.

The bummer of it right now is, if you want to take your kids to the movies, Wonka is nearly the only option. The only others in multiplexes right now are the animated films Migration and Wish, which are both getting worse responses than Wonka. Wonka, at the very least, is sprinkled with several genuinely charming moments, of the sort that are a signature of director Paul King. (King directed both of the Paddington films, and both of them are far superior to this.) If you’re one of the adults taking kids to this film, well, you’re kind of shit out of luck.

And, to be fair, it’s not just that it doesn’t live up to Roald Dah’s cinematic legacy. From the opening scenes, in which Timothée Chalamet dances with a bunch of people holding “Wonka” umbrellas behind him, the choreography middling and the lyrics unmemorable, I thought: Oh. This isn’t going to be great. The sequence ends with Wonka getting charged a fee for daydreaming, a brief gag that works better than any of the extended theatrics that came before it.

My biggest issue with Wonka is the visual effects. This movie was made on a budget of $125 million, and I just have to wonder: where the hell was the money spent? Just on the talent? Chalamet’s $9 million paycheck is objectively ridiclous, and yet even that is but a fraction of that budget. Once again, the shockingly good Godzilla Minus One comes to mind—that film was made for $15 million, and it looks far better than this.

Wonka is appropriately color saturated for a film that is clearly presented as a musical fantasia. And yet, a huge amount of it is rendered in subpar CGI, giving it a far more artificial look than films about the same character released 52 and 18 years ago. I was especially mystified by the one Oompa Loompa, whose movements are noticeably jerky-jerky. How can a film this expensive to make look so bad? To give credit where credit is due, Hugh Grant imbues the Oompa Loompa with more personality than any single other character in the film, which almost makes up for the bad visual effects. Almost. (Side note: it’s also in this film’s favor that the Oompa Loompa is given full autonomy, and never becomes the stand-in for slave labor that the Oompa Loompas were in either of the previous films.)

To be fair, Timothée Chalamet, an objectively great actor, does his best with what he has to work with. As do a bevy of other big names who make up the supporting cast: Olivia Colman as Mrs. Scrubitt, the innkeeper who tricks Wonka into indentured servitude; Keegan-Michael Key as the Chief of Police, so easily bribed by Wonka’s rival chocolatiers with chocolate that he gains a ton of weight over the course of the film (and I find the idea that this is “fat shaming” to be debatable at best); Rowan Atkinson as Father Julius, also easily bribed with chocolate; Jim Carter as Abacus Crunch, one of the other indentured servants slaving away in the inn basement; even Sally Hawkins, the mom in the Paddington movies and here playing Wonka’s mother in a few flashback sequences. In none of these cases does the actor get as much to chew on as they deserve, in spite of Olivia Colman’s extensive screen time as one of many villains, but the one who most directly steals Wonka’s luck away from him.

Fundamentally, Paul King seems to have missed the point entirely, of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which is about a possibly-corrupt, borderline sociopathic chocolatier weeding out the one good little kid in a group of spoiled brats. The only way Wonka’s return to that character’s story, particularly as a prequel, would make sense would be for Willy to learn the same kind of lesson himself as a youngster. Instead, Wonka is presented as pure hearted, and constantly taken advantage of by the adults around him who are the spoiled brats.

There is only one genuine kid in this movie, Calah Lane, who plays Noodle, also toiling away indefinitely in the inn basement. Lane is quite lovely, actually, one of the best things about Wonka, with onscreen charisma that helps keeps the proceedings watchable. But Noodle and Willy are both similarly pure of heart, dealing with heightened, standard kids-movie villains. Willy Wonka is supposed to be backed with subtext, and Wonka, generally pleasant as it is to watch, is all text.

All of that brings us back to this: kids will have a great time. The group of kids in the row of seats behind me, who did not shut the fuck up the entire film, certainly did. Surely they neither know nor care anything about Gene Wilder’s or even Johnny Depp’s iterations of Willy Wonka. For them, there is only Timothée Chalamet. But here’s the key difference: none of those kids are going to grow up regarding this as an unfortgettable classic from their childhoods. It’s just another passable outing at the movies, and in the context of its cinematic legacy, that’s a real shame.

Hugh Grant’s ample charms can’t elevate a middling achievement.

Overall: B-

THE MARVELS

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

The Marvels has all the same old bullshit I tired of eons ago in these superhero “universes”—the supposed stakes of saving the world; the CGI-laden action climax; the same broad story arc as dozens of other superhero movies just like it. Even worse, it relies too heavily on “MCU world building” that connects all these movies, the onetime novelty where the collective audience consensus finally seems to be: we’re over it.

And yet: there are things that set The Marvels apart. Like Captain Marvel (2019) before it, this is the exceptionally rare movie about a woman superhero. Indeed, this time, it’s about three women superheroes—one of whom is a woman of color. I am all about supporting movies like this, just to keep the studios keyed into the idea that they clearly have an audience. But, it also helps if the movie is actually good.

One of the unfortunate things for viewers who haven’t consumed all of the MCU content is that The Marvels, like most MCU movies anymore, relies on shorthand assumed to be understood by viewers who have. I’ve heard moderately good things about the Disney+ series Ms Marvel, but haven’t gotten around to seeing it, so this film is my introduction to her—otherwise known as Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani)—as a character. Incidentally, I did watch WandaVision on Disney+, but even two years ago is long enough for all the MCU mediocrity I’ve viewed to simply blend together in my memory. I know I liked Teyonah Parris’s screen presence as Monica Rambeau then, and I still do now.

How it comes to pass that Kamala, Monica, and Carol Danvers (Brie Larson), Captain Marvel herself, have found themselves in a predicament wherein every time they use their power at the same time, they teleport to swtich locations, I could not pretend to explain. The Marvels is packed with science fiction techno babble that is utterly meaningless, and all you can do is let it go. If you keep an open mind to the objective stupidness, The Marvels is actually pretty fun.

It’s the scenes where it goes gonzo-bonkers that I wish it had more of. Goose, the “flerkin” who looks like a regular domesticated house cat but is actually an alien that can swallow things exponentially larger with giant tentacles coming out of his mouth, was easily my favorite thing about Captain Marvel in 2019, and that remains true now. And director Nia DaCosta, along with her team of writers, really ups the ante with Goose this time around: Goose’s ability to swallow giant things whole, and then cough it up like a hairball later, slimy but otherwise completely unharmed, becomes a pivotal plot point. I didn’t know I needed to hear an overhead intercom voice say in a deadpan tone, “Don’t run from the flerkins. Let them eat you.” But it arguably made my week.

In other words: I came for the cats. Or the flerkins, to be more specific. Not to get too far into spoiler territory here, but this time we get more than just goose, but in a way you may not be able to predict, and it’s bizarre, fun, and hilarious.

I just wish flerkins weren’t the only area in which The Maevels leans into getting super weird. Weird is good! The rest of it, really, is just rote. The villain, Dar-Benn, is just dull (through no fault of Zawe Ashton, who does the best with what she has to work with), and represents otherworldly aspects of the Carol Danvers / Captain Marvel story that come across like a cross between Superman and Star Trek, with dying suns and generations of alien-ethnic rivalries. The stuff Captain Marvel has to condend with is rarely earthbound, and within the MCU context—Guardians of the Galaxy notwithstanding—it makes her less interesting. The most interesting superheroes are specimens of flawed humanity contenting with awesome responsibilities, who are dealing with other human beings.

All that said, Larson, Parris and Vellani have an undeniable chemistry as a trio, and the addition of Khan is particularly welcome, with her South Asian family getting the kind of representation seldom seen in films like this. Her parents, played by Mohan Kapur and Zenobia Shroff, make the most of the screen time they are given—even as a fight takes place in their house that destroys a bunch of their stuff, and even blows a hole in their ceiling. This is the kind of stuff that annoys me, the massive collateral damage that barely gets acknowledged, or might just get a sigh or an eye roll. Sure, these movies are utter fantasies, but if you are going to set any part of them on our version of Earth, there should be some modicum of groundnedness.

But, yet again, I nitpick. I guess you could say this is my passion. After Goose the flerkin, my second favorite thing about The Marvels is the run time: one hour and forty-five minutes. I saw that and thought I must be dreaming, it was so shockingly reasonable. Did someone get fired so another person could finally come in and say it’s okay to stop making these movies as though we are pretending they’re epics? There are many complaints one can have about The Marvels, but at the very least it’s not bloated.

Instead, it’s a breezy hang with three very different women with great chemistry, and a mouth-tentacled alien cat. If we could just get more weirdness on the level of kitty tentacles and less in the way of tired plot tropes, we’d really be getting somewhere. On the other hand, even a meaningless good time is still a good time.

People aren’t talking enough about how Tango is the real star of the movie.

Overall: B