CONCLAVE

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

I have to respect a movie that throws out a last-act twist I not only absolutely did not see coming, but I never could have seen coming, and yet it works. This is the result of solid acting, skilled and assured direction, and most importantly, stellar editing. Conclave had me in its thrall from start to finish.

Admittedly, I struggled a bit at first to keep the characters straight, but this was partly by design: this is a story of people vying for power among 120 electors deciding on a new Pope. But, director Edward Berger, who brought us the great All Quiet on the Western Front in 2022 and is now presenting his first English language feature film, narrows the focus to four of them in particular: Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes), who is tasked with managing the conclave and its electoral process; Bellini (Stanley Tucci), a liberal cardinal who has public support and transparently pretends not to want it; Adeyemi (Lucian Msamati), an African cardinal with unprecedented support who faces predictable roadblocks; Tremblay (John Lithgow), another cardinal with dubious motives; and Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto), a deeply conservative cardinal whose support terrifies the more progressive cardinals.

As you can see, Conclave has quite the stacked cast. An ensemble packed with movie stars can often bog down a movie, but not here. Even if there were competing egos among the cast, that would only help the performances. Even the couple of more modest characters have an air of intrigue or mystery about them: Benitez (Carlos Diehz) is an unknown cardinal who has worked in parishes of several different war-torn regions; and Sister Agnes (a fantastic Isabella Rossellini) turns out to have a surprisingly significant role in the story. Granted, she’s the one solitary principal character in the film, who only ever speaks once to another woman—and yes, it is about a man. No passing the Bechdel test for this movie.

To be fair, this all makes sense in the context of this movie, set among the pillars of authority in a church that has infamously shut women out of real authority for centuries. This is brought up in the narrative, and it is directly relevant to the twist that comes at the end.

As such, Conclave is very much a genre film, a mystery thriller that happened to be populated by cardinals of the Catholic Church. It would be interesting to see how average Catholics respond to this movie. There is a lot of subtle implication to the plotting, from its fairly broad depictions of “liberal” or “conservative” views, to the separation of duty and authority by gender, to the human fallibility of vaunted individuals supposedly guided by God. For a genre film, there’s a lot of smart stuff going on here—perhaps not with the greatest individual character depth, but that’s beside the point. Conclave should be judged within the parameters of its genre structure, and within that context, it succeeds spectacularly.

I keep thinking about the twist, and how deeply happy I am that I did not have it spoiled. It would have changed everything about how the film is experienced, and the reveal that we get is especially delicious—not to mention a delicate subject that is handled with surprising respect. God knows this movie treats it with more respect than anyone can reasonably expect the Catholic Church would treat it in reality. There is an aspirational element to Conclave that is actually quite fun.

Sure, there is also an element of contrivance, particularly in a couple of speeches that veer into moralism pertaining to interfaith tolerance. There is little doubt of just about every person involved in this movie having bleeding-heart points of view, and my being aligned with them on very basic levels doesn't change how formulaic their presentation can be. Conclave is just so fundamentally entertaining that it’s easy to forgive these minor quibbles, especially with a a cast that works this well together.

Conclave has multiple plot turns, of the very sort that is to be expected of a mystery thriller. What makes this movie exceptional is how deftly they are handled. There is more substance at play here than it seems on the surface, with each character motivation given its own subtly provocative implication. There are many ways to enjoy this movie, and I had a blast on all fronts.

Deluded ambition never felt so good.

Overall: B+

THE PALE BLUE EYE

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

There are so many familiar faces in The Pale Blue Eye, it gets genuinely distracting. There are four Harry Potter series cast alumni, although to be fair Toby Jones was merely the voice of the house elf Dobby in those films; his actual face is familiar from countless other films. The same goes for Simon McBurney, to a lesser degree: he voiced Kreacher in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I. The genuinely jarring faces are two who were much larger characters in the Harry Potter universe but are much older and thinner now: Timothy Spall as Superintendent Thayer; and Harry Melling as Cadet Edgar Allen Poe—yes, the Edgar Allan Poe, played by the young man who once played the far heavier Dudley Dursley.

As it happens, Melling is inspired casting. This guy grew into a gaunt, almost crater-eyed young man, perfect for the aesthetic of a 19th-century poet with a taste for the truly morbid. He works well for ambiguity as well: Poe has a flair for the eccentric and dark, but it is well established early on that he is not the villain.

Who is the villain proves to be complex, arguably even convoluted, in The Pale Blue Eye, which is wrtier-director Scott Cooper’s version of a murder mystery. Cooper is the man who previously brought us such varied titles as Crazy Heart, Out of the Furnace, Black Mass and Hostiles, and this body of work evidently granted him a blank check from Netflix: this new film was granted limited release just prior to Christmas, and has otherwise been streaming exclusively on Netflix since January 6.

I rather wish I could have seen it in a theater. The Pale Blue Eye is the kind of movie that moves at a glacial pace but rewards patience, and strikes a compellingly melancholy tone that would far more successfully draw viewers entirely into its world from inside a cinema. As for whether it’s worth watching at home, at best that depends on your interest in the film’s genre, and particularly, its aesthetic.

To be honest, this movie isn’t quite dark enough. It establishes an eerie vibe, but never manages to be unsettling, or even particularly spooky. I dug it when Poe asked a woman out on a date to a cemetery, where she proceeds to have a seizure. More of this please! But really, even with its element of Satan worship—which itself is really quite sanitized—this film is really nothing more than a conventional murder mystery, grafted onto a 19th-century American setting.

That’s not to say I still didn’t find it worth watching, mind you. Christian Bale returns to work with Scott Cooper for the third time—that’s half of his feature films, to date—as the detective summoned to investigate grisly murders involving the removal of corpse’s hearts. He makes a rather unlikely but oddly workable pairing with Melling as Poe, as they team up to suss out clues together.

Charlotte Gainsbourg is underused in a supporting part as a passing love interest of Bale’s. Robert Duvall appears in two scenes as a crusty old academic. And Gillian Anderson is both virtually unrecognizable and iconic as Toby Jones’s tightly wound wife—the wife of the local doctor. The glacial pace picks up about halfway through the run time, which for me at least made it worth the wait. And then, about three quarters of the way through the story, there is a sequence climactic enough to feel like a solid ending to the film. Anyone not already familiar with the runtime would no doubt be surprised to find another half an hour left to go, in which we are treated to the final twist, turning everything we saw on its head.

It’s fun enough, I suppose. Not as thrilling in surprise as I might have liked. But, to its credit, The Pale Blue Eye offered a world I enjoyed inhabiting for a couple of hours.

We’re not on Privet Drive anymore: Christian Bale and Harry Melling have an unlikely meeting of the minds two hundred years in the past.

Overall: B

GLASS ONION: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY

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

Is Glass Onion as good as Knives Out? Not quite—but that was to be expected, the typical nature of a sequel. But, is it almost as good as Knives Out? Actually, yes. And do I hope Rian Johnson and Daniel Craig team up for more “Benoit Blanc” mysteries two or three more times? Absolutely!

Because, make no mistake: Glass Onion may not quite match the acting pedigree of its predecessor—which, frankly, has some effect on its performances—it’s still a hell of a good time. I had a blast, and even look forward to watching it again.

I can’t really decide whether I find it disappointing that this movie is getting a strict one-week theatrical release, starting today, with its Netflix release exactly one month from now, on December 23. This is a very different approach from its predecessor, this offering being much more definitively “a Netflix movie.” But, such is the state of the film industry: it could easily be argued that this is the most appropriate approach for a movie of this sort. Viewers aplenty will thoroughly enjoy the film on a streamer in a month, and movie theatre purists like myself are satisfied for now.

I loved seeing this in the theater, but do I have any reason to insist you see it in the same way? Not really. I’ll watch it again at home with my husband next month. The level of “prestige” a film is perceived to have depending on its medium of release is changing.

I will say this: some might think Glass Onion is less, say, “sophisticated” than Knives Out was, even in light of both films’ similar streaks of wit. Glass Onion seems more inclined to lean into its cornier humor, but a bit knowingly so. This was but one of many things I really enjoyed about it.

Here’s my only real nitpick. Glass Onion not only fully acknowledges the pandemic, but is literally set in 2020, a curious choice on writer-director Rian Johnson’s part. One wonders if he came up with the idea during lockdowns, as it feels a little like a “covid movie,” the nine principal characters spending the vast majority of the film alone together on a secluded island. Only one scene features a genuine crowd of people, all of them at a huge party inside a woman’s house, and it is played for laughs: “Oh, they’re all part of my pod.”

That’s not the nitpick, though. Eight guests, all but one of them friends and colleagues of billionaire Miles Bron (Edward Norton), are invited to this weekend island getaway. And then, shortly after the slightly jarring sight of these characters wearing face masks—to Johnson’s credit, each character’s differing level of care in wearing them properly effectively illustrates their personalities—they are each somehow immunized by a random guy walking to each of them in turn and shooting something into their throats with a sort of gun. “Immunize” isn’t even a word used; the guy just says, “You don’t have to wear your mask anymore. You’re good.” Huh? I’m not sure why we couldn’t just get some throwaway line about having all of them take a covid test, which would have been far more realistic. I suppose Johnson’ felt this would be more “cinematic,” and to be fair, we regularly forgive far less plausible things in movies. Nevertheless, I found it distractingly dumb.

That was the only such moment for me, though. Johnson is proving to be a master at whodunnit storytelling, always with the clever misdirects. You go into this movie primed to think, and fully expecting, Miles Bron to be the murder victim. Then, there is a second-act time shift so sudden the only thing it’s missing is a record scratch, and we get to see a whole lot of what we just saw, from different characters’ perspectives. And plot turns are still left after that, all of them satisfying. This movie offers plenty of what we expect of it, just in surprising flavors.

A lot of these murder mysteries are very easy to figure out, at least for the viewers trying to figure it out. I am not one of those people; I like to give myself over to the story, without making any effort to solve the mystery myself. I only get annoyed when the answer is so obvious I can see it without even trying. That never happens with “Knives Out Mysteries,” and I think even the people who usually figure out the answers will find it a fun challenge.

Some media attention has been given to the fact that Glass Onion makes Benoit Blanc’s sexuality more explicit, although it’s brief and surprisingly subtle. The brief moment when we see Blanc's partner is one of a few delightful cameos in this movie. (Two of the others, seen onscreen during a Zoom call with Blanc in the bathtub, I won’t spoil, except to say they are both the very last roles of two legendary figures, one of them a kind of heartwarming in-joke.) I don’t know how others will take Blanc’s costume design in this movie, but as a gay man myself, I kind of loved its “old-school gay” aesthetic, complete with neckerchiefs.

As for the rest of the characters invited to the island, they are played by a brand new ensemble of name actors, including Janelle Monáe (maybe the best-cast of the bunch), Kate Hudson, Dave Bautista, Kathryn Hahn, and Leslie Odom Jr., along with Jessica Henwick as Hudson’s assistant and Madelyn Cline as Bautista’s girlfiend, amusingly named “Whiskey.” That’s not to mention the heavy sprinkling of cameos, several of them people playing themselves, and I won’t spoil who they are.

I get the feeling a lot of these people simply jumped at the chance to appear in a Rian Johnson movie, and particularly “A Knives Out Mystery,” largely on the strength of Knives Out. As naturally they would: Johnson is very good not just at casting, but for assembling an ensemble with effective chemistry. These movies are doubly impressive for their re-watchability even once you know the answer to their central mysteries. Which is to say, Glass Onion has no unattained aspirations, aiming only to be a delight from beginning to end, and that is a promise on which it delivers.

I suppose you’re all wondering why I gathered you here today.

Overall: B+

SEE HOW THEY RUN

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

There’s historically a bit of a problem with star studded ensemble casts—which is to say, they always disappoint under the expectation of their star power. In the case of See How They Run, the movie poster highlights fully twelve people in the cast, but the star wattage is basically limited to Sam Rockwell, Saoirse Ronan, Adrien Brody, and David Oyelowo. Your mileage may vary with the rest of the cast, as with Ruth Wilson, or if you were a big fan of “Moaning Myrtle” in a few of the Harry Potter films, Shirley Henderson pops up in a delightful performance as Agatha Christie.

Which immediately brings me to my other point: I can remember when I first learned what “meta fiction” was, after having it defined in my own creative writing in a college class. At the time it was a gimmick not widely discussed, and it was a point of pride. Now, every writer and their mother seems to be making their work “meta” in one way or another, and See How They Run hops right on that bandwagon. Most of the time it’s mildly amusing, and to the film’s credit. it never crosses the line into annoying.

Still, there’s no getting around that this is a movie with a large ensemble cast that is clearly very amused with itself, which is rarely a recipe for success. What I can say for this example is that, at the very least, it’s not a failure.

See How They Run is a “whodunnit” regarding a murder amongst the people in or involved with an Agatha Christie play called The Mousetrap, running in 1950s London’s West End. They play is also a whodunnit, and of course director Tom George and writer Mark Chappell offer us a movie with cleverly knowing beats that mirror those of the play. There is some debate among the players as to how the play should be adapted into a film, and the initial murder victim figures prominently into the discussion.

Even the opening voiceover narrator turns out to be surprisingly relevant. See How They Run has relative unpredictability going for it; I don’t think it’s easy for the average viewer to suss out who the murderer is—and, as always in stories like this, there’s a veritable crowd of suspects. I just wish that opening voiceover didn’t go on for quite as long as it does, or the movie itself for that matter: this film has a slight editing problem, even at only 98 minutes in length. This is a kind of movie that would benefit from much tighter editing, and keeping it at an even 90 minutes would alone have made a notable difference. This is clearly intended as a comedy, and it gave me a great many chuckles, but there’s a few too many lulls between them.

Still, See How They Run has surprisingly artful cinematography for a film of its sort, and the performances are as good as you could ask for across the board. I do find myself wondering if this would even have been considered for production without the success of the far superior Knives Out, which has its own highly anticipated sequel coming this winter. See How They Run certainly has its own tone and sensibility, but it’s not particularly memorable either. I had a nice time with it, at least. It’s amusing enough.

Inspector. Constable.

Overall: B

THE BATMAN

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

The Batman is markedly different from the many other iterations of movies, and movie series, featuring DC Comics’ most iconic superhero character. It’s certainly the longest, at 175 minutes. Too long? Perhaps; a good half an hour could have been shaved off this film and it would not feel as though anything were missing. On the other hand, given the style, tone, and pacing of this film, that run time gives it room to breathe. Some might feel that it has lulls, but those people would not understand the modern noir vibe that director Matt Reeves (War for the Planet of the Apes) was going for.

One could also argue that Reeves, who also co-wrote the script with Peter Craig, throws in too many characters, with Paul Dano, Colin Farrell, and John Turturro all playing villains—two of them iconic ones from Batman lore: The Riddler and The Penguin. This is not to mention Jeffrey Wright as Lt. James Gordon; Andy Serkis as Alfred; Peter Sarsgaard as District Attorney Gil Colson; and notably Zoë Kravitz as Selina Kyle, the cat burglar who will later become (but is never once referred to here as) Catwoman.

As always, I must reiterate that a film should be judged on its own terms. That proves a unique challenge with The Batman, which qualifies as a third reboot of a Batman film franchise in the past 33 years, and the fourth series of films featuring the same Caped Crusader character within a single film universe, when counting Ben Afleck in the “DC Universe” films that largely flopped with both critics and audiences. In other words, The Batman has to do a huge amount of heavily lifting in order to justify its own existence. What reason is there for yet another Batman?

There isn’t one, truthfully, except to keep raking in box office dollars. Only time will tell whether The Batman proves itself on that front; when I was leaving the theater, other patrons were overheard complaining about how long it was. Some people are finding it a “bland” take on Batman, but I wholeheartedly disagree. I fear I may be in the minority here, but if they had to cram this many significant characters into the story, giving it a three-hour run time actually allows The Batman to do what I have long wished more comic book superhero movies would do: prioritize story over spectacle.

And that’s not to say there isn’t plenty of spectacle to be seen here, which is kind of the point: once we get to its several stunning action set pieces, it works as a payoff few other blockbuster movies in recent years have achieved. The Batman does not open with a blowout action extravaganza, but rather a dark and creepy scene in which we the first in a series of murders by the serial killer we learn soon enough is The Riddler (excellently portrayed by the criminally under-seen Paul Dano). When we’re not watching action scenes, The Batman is unusually quiet, its characters uniformly speaking in hushed tones barely above a whisper.

A lot of this film brought to mind the first of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, the underrated Batman Begins (2005). Both films focus on Bruce Wayne’s early days as Batman, and both films feature several characters, some of them less well known, that would qualify as villains. The difference in The Batman is that the title character is still relatively new to Gotham City, yet already established as a known presence. And if I had any complaint about the Nolan films, it’s that he traded in the hyper stylized universe of the Tim Burton films (still the best ones) for a “gritty,” more realistic world much like our own—which doesn’t as effectively present a vigilante dressed as a bat and working with the local police as a plausible idea. It’s clearly a fantasy and should be contextualized in a world that is also fantasy.

Matt Reeves’s Gotham City isn’t anywhere near as stylized as Burton’s was, but it is much more so than Nolan’s was, a bit of a happy medium. Gotham City itself is largely made up in visual renderings, quite well done actually, but still grounded as a city that looks like a city in our world. It’s the film noir cinematography, lighting and coloring that gives The Batman its signature style, very distinct from the many films that came before it. Granted, there have been many Batman films and there have been countless examples of film noir, but Reeves blends them in a way that sets a new kind of mood. It’s a dark mood, with only occasional bits of humor, but it’s a mood that is very much my jam nonetheless. Combine that with an invigorating score by Michael Giacchino, and you’ve got a movie I will happily go see again, its length notwithstanding.

If I had any true complaint about The Batman, it would be that the sexual chemistry between Zoë Kravitz and Robert Pattinson is not well enough explored. In fact, although I must say I liked her better as Catwoman than I did Anne Hathaway in The Dark Knight Rises (2012), Kravitz’s Selina Kyle lacks a certain charisma; there is no bite to her. This is no fault of Kravitz’s, who does exceedingly well with the part she is given; the issue, really is how she is written—much more as a hero than as even a potential villain. And Catwoman works best as a character when she can’t seem to decide which she actually is.

The rest of the characters, however, are well written and very well cast, especially Robert Pattinson as The Batman himself, instantly becoming my second-favorite Batman ever (after the obvious, Michael Keaton). Pattinson is now the sixth actor to play Batman on film since 1989, and he succeeds better than most at the “Batman voice” used while in the bat suit. (Christian Bale, much as I liked him otherwise, really overdid it with his gruff delivery.) Pattinson’s delivery here works well because he speaks fairly low the same way all the characters do, and is hardly distinguishable from how he speaks as just Bruce Wayne.

I want to tell you that I found The Batman thrilling, but for the fact that so much of it is quite subdued in its tone and pacing. What I can say is this: it works. It works better than it even deserves to, perhaps. And it spends just the right amount of time slowly building toward its multiple genuine thrills, particularly a beautifully shot car chase with The Penguin (the impressive makeup for which renders Colin Farrell all but unrecognizable), and a climactic sequence in which a flooding Gotham is taken under siege. It took me a few minutes at the start to decide whether I was going to like The Batman, but then it settled into its noir tone, and I was into it. Then it moved toward its set pieces in an unusually organic way, and I found myself thinking, I love this movie. I can feel that way about it while acknowledging it’s not exactly a masterwork, nor is it even the best Batman movie ever made. But it’s a movie that delivers on its promise, and meets the moment.

Woman! Cat! Why can’t you be naughtier!

Overall: B+

DEATH ON THE NILE

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

Sorry to be a killjoy here, but it really should be noted that the 2022 version of Death on the Nile, which is set mostly in Egypt, was only shot in a studio in England. The Egytpian Pyramids are simply rendered with CGI. I will admit that a lot of the exterior shots are pretty impressive CGI work, but it’s still often identifiably visual effects work—which robs the visuals of their genuine majesty. What’s the point of “seeing” one of the great wonders of the world if it’s not actually what you’re looking at? That feels a little like saying you’ve “been” somewhere just because you saw it online. What’s more, several wide exterior shots are seen from far above the Nile river, with the camera swooping in an arc down toward the setting, such as an opulent hotel. The end result is less majestic than it is just like watching a computer simulation.

Did I mention Death on the Nile is a whodunnit? The central mystery of the story should always be the focus, but Kenneth Branagh, who directed this movie as well as its similarly mediocre predecessor, Murder on the Orient Express (2017), spends an oddly excessive amount of time distracting the viewer with obvious visual effects in a movie that should not necessitate such things. This movie was actually shot in 2019, and apparently there was intent to shoot on location in Egypt, but that “proved too difficult.” How or why, I couldn’t say—except that 2019 was before Covid-19, so that obviously wasn’t the reason.

Maybe shooting on location in Egypt is more complicated and difficult now than it was in 1978, when John Guillermin made his earlier version, starring Angela Lansbury, Maggie Smith, Mia Farrow, George Kennedy, Mia Farrow, and more. Honestly, my recommendation is just to find that earlier version and watch it instead. It doesn’t appear to be available anywhere streaming or even VOD right now; I found it on DVD at my local library and look forward to seeing a version that is by all accounts better. The story may be basically the same, but greater authenticity in locations can make a huge difference. Plus there’s that cast.

Granted, this 2022 version has a pretty star studded cast itself: Kenneth Branagh once again as Detective Hercule Poirot, with an ensemble cast including Armie Hammer, Gal Godot, Annette Bening, Black Panther’s Letitia Wright, and largely unrecognizable turns by Jennifer Saunders (using an American accent) and Russel Brand (as the boat’s resident doctor). Most of these people, I usually enjoy watching, although I will say Death on the Nile does suffer from the common problem of a star-studded ensemble cast watering down the star power of any one individual.

More than anything, this is Branagh’s movie, as expected given he’s both the director and plays the most famous character from Agatha Christie novels. This film does include a prologue before the opening credits that borders on camp, offering a totally unnecessary backstory for what, I guess, we are supposed to think of as his iconic mustache. I’ve heard debate as to whether audiences are supposed to take this at face value or if it’s meant to be funny. This did not come across as tongue-in-cheek to me at all. Not only that, but the severe war injury the mustache is supposed to have covered up doesn’t even make sense. We don’t see any scars at all around his ridiculous mustache. but based on the injury we are shown onscreen, we really should see scars, mustache or not. The scars do make an appearance at the end of the film and they don’t even match the facial real estate covered by the injury shown at the beginning of the film. So I was like: what?

None of this sounds like I enjoyed the movie very much, does it? I actually did have a relatively good time. But how much fun you have watching a movie and how good it actually is are not always directly correlated. My biggest issue with this Death on the Nile is how good it could have been, but then it just doesn’t bother to be. And yet, I still liked it better than Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express, albeit not by a wide margin. A chief complaint would be its 127-minute run time, which is wholly unnecessary, given the number of times Branagh cut away to totally unnecessary visual interludes. More than once he takes the camera either to the shores of the Nile or to the river floor, so we can see CGI-rendered wildlife feeding on prey. There’s a shot with a crocodile that cracked me up, but in most cases it just feels like filler, which is never needed in a movie that runs longe than two hours. Death on the Nile would have been noticeably improved were it, say, fifteen minutes shorter.

All of that aside, it’s still fun to see so many great actors just having a good time, chewing scenery. I did keep thinking about Ryan Johnson’s 2019 film Knives Out, a far superior film much better suited to 21sr-century audiences. Both movies are very much in the same genre, but Knives Out spends far less time taking itself seriously, and contains a lot more clever humor. Death on the Nile feels comparatively like a throwback to another time, in which case, why not just watch the movie that was already made in the seventies? In other words, Death on the Nile is fundamentally pointless and useless, with the sole exception of seeing current actors we love perform again what was already seen before. This movie does feature a few modernized twists, beyond a fairly noticeable racial diversification of the cast, but the overall plot still feels decidedly old-school. That’s not necessarily a bad thing—I was more entertained by this film than I expected, its obvious flaws notwithstanding—it just means there remain better offerings out there.

Famous fantasy cannibal and “Imagine” performer in Death on the Nile.

LAST NIGHT IN SOHO

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

Thomasin McKenzie still needs a truly high profile role that spreads far and wide her astounding talent. She first impressed with her incredible performance as a teenager living off the grid with her dad in Portland, Oregon in Leave No Trace (2018), a very good movie that not enough people saw. She’s impressive enough as a young British woman headed off to fashion school in London in Last Night in Soho that she is quite convincingly just a mousy English girl—she doesn’t turn any heads, which is precisely what the role calls for. If only people knew, in the case of both these films, that she is neither American nor British; McKenzie was actually born in, and started her acting career in, New Zealand. You would just never know it in these other roles because she’s simply that good—and she’s still all of twenty-one years old.

Her performance is easily the best thing about Last Night in Soho, which is, to its credit I guess, as entertaining as it is confusing. Director Edgar Wright is famous for his delightfully cheeky comedies like Shaun of the Dead (2004) and Hot Fuzz (2007), but although Last Night in Soho tracks with his affection for tweaking genres, it’s also much more straightforward than his usual work. There is no satire, or comedy of any kind, here. Instead, he mixes a heavy sense of sixties nostalgia, arguably misplaced as nostalgia often tends to be, with straight up horror. This movie does offer a pretty significant twist within its last half an hour or so, although I can’t quite decide whether I like it. It’s clever, but maybe too much so.

Furthermore, the conceit lacks clarity. Thomasin McKenzie plays Eloise, the young woman overwhelmed by her new arrival to London, which this movie literally calls “a bad place.” There’s no romanticizing the big city here. After she finds student housing untenable, she moves into a room for rent in a large old house in the old red light district. As soon as she moved into this house, and meets its old lady landlord (Diana Rigg, whom you may recognize as Olenna “Tell Cersei it was me” Tyrell from Game of Thrones), I kind of wished the movie had just started at that point. Edgar Wright spends quite a bit of time on Ellie and her grandmother (Rita Tushingham), then on Ellie and her classmates, spending far more energy than necessary on the establishment of their characters.

And then, we discover, this house Ellie has moved into is haunted—in a sense. Each time Ellie falls asleep, she is transported to 1960s Soho, and she follows the story of a young aspiring performer named Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy, her talents honestly fairly wasted in this part, aside from her looking stunning most of the time). How her story unfolds in such a linear fashion, picking up where it left off each time Ellie goes back to bed, makes little sense. And when we first meet Sandie, Ellie sees her reflection in a mirror, suggesting she is playing the part of Sandie in these visions. Except that she ultimately exists in these visions as separate from her, sometimes as another reflection in a mirror—sometimes actually mirroring Sandie’s movements, sometimes not—and other times just standing in the same room. Whatever the rules are to how these “visions of the past” work have no consistency, and I found it distracting.

There’s plenty I still liked about Last Night in Soho, though. It looks fantastic. It has very impressive editing, when sometimes we see Taylor-Joy onscreen and sometimes we see McKenzie, within the same scene in which they are embodying the same person. The issue I have there is the complete absence of explanation for what’s happening to Ellie. Is she being possessed? It doesn’t seem so. Then what is happening to her, exactly? It’s not even like it’s just a haunted house, as these visions follow Ellie to other parts of London (or at least Soho). It’s a lot easier for me to appreciate a film when it has a through line of logic.

We do get a key supporting part by Terence Stamp, always a welcome presence. That man is 83 years old now and I’m beginning to wonder how many more good movie roles we’ll get out of him. His exit from the movie is disappointingly unceremonious, and the story would have benefited from at least a brief follow-up.

Last Night In Soho is like a minor emotional roller coaster, in that it skates close to tediousness, and then becomes compelling, and then offers a climactic twist that gets you thinking it was worth the wait. Once the twist settles into its own clarity, though, it leaves a bit to be desired. I do love that this is ultimately a story about women, and women make up all but just a couple of notable speaking parts. That alone makes it worth supporting, especially considering the movie isn’t bad; it just falls short of its potential. If nothing else, it should easily satisfy horror fans without a penchant for critical thinking.

Sandie reflects on her life choices.

Overall: B

REMINISCENCE

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

I basically wasted two hours watching Reminiscence in the movie theater. It’s also available streaming on HBO Max, and I wouldn’t even recommend you watch it there. You’ll still wish you could get those two hours back. Well, if you have any taste or sense of quality, anyway.

This movie really strains to be what I like to call “future noir,” a genre both introduced and perfected by Blade Runner in 1982. Many films since have tried and failed to replicate (no pun intended—bit of an inside joke there) it, this one merely being the latest. It takes an old-school mystery plot and grafts it onto a quasi-apocalyptic future setting. In this case, it’s Miami after significant sea level rise.

A lot of the wide shots of the city are reminiscent (ha!) of the sea level rise depicted in the Manhattan of the 2001 Spielberg film A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. You may notice that when it comes to being derivative, there is a bit of a pattern here. And the renditions of all Miami’s skyscrapers wading in waters about two stories deep is a compelling one; in fact the most exciting shot in the whole movie is the opening one, starting with a wide shot from out over the sea, closing in until we’ve reached a section of the city where streets are only partially flooded with a few inches of water.

But, this world as presented by writer-director Lisa Joy, here with her feature film directorial debut, suffers from the same thing as the worlds in all those other Blade Runner rip-offs: it doesn’t feel sufficiently lived in. It’s more like a Sims version of a dystopian city—which, by the way, considering it’s Miami, has a curious and glaring lack of Hispanic characters. Oh, it has a couple, in very small, supporting parts. But they serve as little more than tokens when taking in the broad representation of the city, in a story that, of course, mostly centers white characters. Granted, the biggest part besides that of Hugh Jackman in the lead is Thandiwe Newton, but that doesn’t change the incongruity of a movie with such a large focus on a city whose population is 70% Hispanic or Latino, which treats that demographic as little more than window dressing. Or are we to assume the majority of them disappeared in this vision of the future?

That brings me to my biggest nitpick, which is that so many of the details of this world are just plain dumb. In several scenes on the streets where there is standing water on the road but not on the sidewalks, for some reason people are walking in the middle of the street and not on the sidewalk. I suppose that might be thought of as more“cinematic,” except that there is no logic in it. There’s also a battle scene in an old school band room, with instruments left by empty chairs as if the class once had to leave very quickly, presumably back when, as is mentioned several times, “the waves came.” But if the waves came, wouldn’t they have washed away the guitars and violins? Judging by this production design, the students all had to rush out in time for the room to fill with water like a slow stream from a corner faucet.

Hugh Jackson plays Nick Bannister, a guy who not only spends far too much time with hackneyed voiceover narration, but who makes a living selling time in a contraption that lets people relive the memories of their choice. (Shades of Strange Days meets Inception here.) Versions of this contraption, which for some reason necessitates stripping to your underwear and getting into a glass tube of water with a device clamped to your head, are also used to interrogate criminal suspects. Everything about how this whole process works, and especially the hardware necessary, comes across as wildly unrealistic: nothing of this sort would ever take up so much physical space. It even includes a giant circular platform over which a holographic projection of the memories can be seen by Nick, even though they aren’t even his own memories and he’s not attached to any of the apparatus. It’s all designed with cinematic aesthetics in mind, with no regard for practical realism. Memory is already well known to be wildly malleable and deeply unreliable; in what universe would these projections be so vivid it’s like watching a movie of what’s going on in someone’s head?

No one expects science fiction to be strictly accurate; given the “fiction” part, that would be impossible. But it still has to start from a jumping-off point of known truths, which Reminiscence seems to discard completely.

I’d try to share more about the plot, but on top of all this, Lisa Joy’s script tries way too hard to do way too much, using hollow dialogue in a delivery that often comes across as unrehearsed. Suffice it to say that a mysterious woman in the form of Rebecca Ferguson appears, and is the catalyst for Nick’s obsession after they have a three-month affair and then she disappears. Joy plays with the notion of memory as these scenes unfold in varying moments in the story’s timeline, a device that could be exciting and clever with a better story and actually has been done better by other filmmakers playing with memory and the perception of time.

Reminiscence feels like a first draft that somehow got filmed without any revisions or notes. And okay, so there is a lot of justified resentment out there for studio executives turning movies into something written by committee, but there also has to be a happy medium. Because if this movie is one person’s true vision, it’s a wildly underdeveloped one. This one could have used a pointer or ten.

Behold, the only compelling part of the movie.

Overall: C

THE DRY

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

The Dry is essentially a murder mystery which uses rural Australia caught in the grips of more than a year of draught as its backdrop—hence, the title. The draught has created economic desperation for many, and this plays into the motive for the murder case at hand. In that sense, “the dry” (a phrase no character uses in the film) is relevant to the story.

There was another film, starring Guy Pearce and Robert Pattinson, that set its story in a desperately dry Australia, that one a near-future and more of a chase than a mystery. Released in 2014, The Rover used that backdrop to far greater effect. I always felt that not enough people saw that movie. Side note: that movie is available on Showtime, or VOD for three bucks. It’s a much better deal than the $7 I spent to watch The Dry.

This movie stars Eric Bana, rounding out his portfolio with an independent production in his home country. This is actually playing in select theaters (albeit in a single theater in the greater Seattle area, in Tacoma), and I suppose there’s another way of looking at it: $7 VOD is a better deal than paying to see it on the big screen. Although it does have some nice cinematography, wide shots of increasingly barren Australian landscape, which probably renders well on a large screen.

Aaron Falk (Bana) is a police detective from Melbourne, returning to his rural home town several hours outside the city for a funeral. It seems his childhood friend Luke has shot his wife, his young son, and then himself, sparing only the baby. Or did he? Luke’s parents are convinced Luke could never do such a thing, and enlists the help of Aaron, effectively guilting him by bringing up how they know he lied about the circumstances of another death, Ellie, also from childhood. It seems everyone in this town, all of whom have secrets kept for the past twenty years and revealed in turn as the story unfolds, blame Aaron for Ellie’s death.

Thus, The Dry actually features two mysteries: whether or not Luke actually perpetuated a mass murder-suicide on his family; and the truth of how Ellie died twenty years prior. When Aaron was still a teenager, Ellie’s father essentially succeeded in running him out of town. Now, some of the townspeople are pissed to see him there again.

Based on a best-selling novel, I imagine The Dry is more gripping in literature form. Don’t get me wrong, I found the film compelling, but barely; it takes its time, really cultivating a lot more atmosphere than plot. It should be noted, though, that the film had one of the largest opening weekend box office takes in Australian history when it opened there in January: clearly there was an appetite for it. Then again, they were also headed back to theaters after months of pandemic lockdowns.

I suspect my tepid response to this film has more to do with the genre than anything else. Murder mysteries don’t often do much for me for their own sake, unless they’re cheekily complex, as in the wonderful Knives Out. That film doubled as a comedy, though, and The Dry is a drama, with some rather dark thematic elements. It’s a movie about broken people doing very broken things. For some people, that’s entertainment.

It’s well done for what it is, in any case. I suspect people into the genre—and god knows there are plenty—will enjoy it. I thought it was fine.

I mean, some might say just take a look at Eric Bana if you want to get wet.

Overall: B

THE KID DETECTIVE

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

I suppose The Kid Detective is a textbook case of under-promising and over-delivering, conceptually speaking. Who’s going to have high expectations of a movie about a washed up thirtysomething private detective who used to charm his entire town with his mystery-solving as a kid? That gives it a relatively low bar from which to exceed expectations, but the competence with which this movie is written, directed and performed is objectively impressive.

Writer-director Evan Morgan, in his feature directorial debut, establishes a fairly quiet, mellow tone early on, which somehow makes the humor work perfectly. Morgan has his actors deliver their lines with a certain stoicism, which in someone else’s hands might give the film an air of self-conscious “quirkiness.” Maybe it’s that The Kid Detective is a Canadian film, but the tonal sensibility here is both incredibly endearing and almost relaxing. It got several good laughs out of me, particularly with surprisingly clever callbacks.

You could call this movie a “dark comedy,” but it has more depth and more heart than that might insinuate. Adam Brody is well cast in the title role, Abe Applebaum, a guy with a private investigator practice whose life seems to be going nowhere. He has a goth girl for a receptionist (Veep’s Sarah Sutherland) who answers an old-school telephone, even while everyone else uses smartphones. How the hell Abe can afford to pay her is anybody’s guess, but we’ll just let that one go.

When a teenage girl named Caroline (Sophie Nélisse) comes to him to help her solve the murder of her boyfriend, Abe sees it as a chance to both prove himself and redeem himself in the eyes of a town that lost faith in him. His childhood charms faded in their eyes after the still-unsolved kidnapping of a young girl devastated the town a couple decades before.

And this is what I love about The Kid Detective: none of the details are insignificant, and they always prove important, worthy of attention, because something about them will always resurface in relevance. This movie brings to mind the much flashier 2019 whodunnit Knives Out, where the mystery is the central aspect of the fun. To be fair, Knives Out is a much snappier affair, a slightly better film, albeit one with its own, very different sensibility. But Evan Morgan makes The Kid Detective very much its own film as well, the crime a bit darker but the humor a bit more subversive. And this movie has its own dramatic flairs as well, with a genuinely shocking turn near the end. The Kid Detective isn’t concerned so much with multiple suspects, so much as with Abe’s journey on a path to redemption. It even gets so serious in its final shot, with a sudden outpouring of emotion, I wasn’t quite sure what to do with it, and I can’t decide if it even fits with the tone of the rest of the film.

When taken as a whole, however, The Kid Detective has a subtly seductive power to it, with a unique skill in narrative plotting. The editing particularly impresses, with not a single moment wasted, and scenes ending in places that leave certain events to the imagination when other films would indulge needlessly. It has a unique economy of storytelling, where what gets left unseen is nevertheless crystal clear in our minds thanks to what we did see. The pacing is only deceptively measured, where there is very little action onscreen but the story still seems to zip right along.

As if it’s not enough that the well polished script brings all the story threads neatly together, The Kid Detective’s central mystery is its most satisfying part. Abe may have a knack for solving mysteries, and particularly predicting the end of mystery movies, but The Kid Detective offers us resolutions that make perfect sense but were impossible to see coming. It’s a dark journey that doubles as a chill ride.

It’s so much better than you might guess.

Overall: B+