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+

REBEL RIDGE

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

Rebel Ridge is not like other thrillers, and not just because it just gets better as it goes on. This is the kind of movie I wish I could have seen in a theater, except the fact that it was released on Netflix this week instead is precisely why we are able to experience a purity of writer-director Jeremy Saulnier’s vision. Such is the contradictory state of the modern film industry, where certain compromises must be made in order to produce the highest quality product—at least this way a lot more people are apt to see this, a film that absolutely deserves your attention. I went into this expectng to enjoy it, and still it significantly exceeded my expectations.

What’s so great about it, I imagine you wondering. Where do I start? With the premise: a Black man, Terry Richmond (a stupendously controlled Aaron Pierre) is railroaded by local small-town Southern law enforcement when they knock him over on his bike, find a large amount of money on him, decide to declare it suspected drug money, and seize it. The rest of the film is an extended riff on the revenge thriller genre, and although it takes its time, the way Saulnier innovates the narrative really is a thrill to watch. We’ll come back to that.

Because we have to come back to how it starts: with a real thing, an actually-legal practice called civil asset forfeiture. As stated by Summer (AnnaSophia Robb), a helpful clerk Terry encounters, “Your property has no civil rights.” Law enforcement can take whatever is yours, keep it for as long as they want, and in many cases even sell it. This is a longstanding practice, often abused by local police departments to make up for budget shortfalls. Anyone watching Rebel Ridge may watch this play out in its opening scene and feel incredulous that it feels too unrealistic—but this is one of those things where truth is wilder than fiction. This shit actually happens, and you rightly feel infuriated on Terry’s behalf.

There are countless stories and countless ways in which civil asset forfeiture fucks people over. In Terry’s case, the reason he has all this cash is because he sold a car and is taking it in to post bail for his cousin, who has been detained for possession. Terry is facing a sort of countdown because there is a plan to transfer his cousin to a prison where he faces a lethal threat from a gang he testified against.

All of this is just setup. The thrill of the story is in seeing Terry get thwarted at enough turns to make him desperate, and force him to take drastic action. But here’s where the narrative innovation comes in: this is not Rambo. Spoiler alert, Terry never kills anyone in this movie. I can only think of one death at all, and it’s not part of any of the scenes of hand-to-hand combat. Among the many things that make Rebel Ridge stand out is that, while we do get some pretty significant injuries in an excellent climactic battle scene, all of the combat in it is nonlethal. And still it’s just as thrilling as the best-choreographed gun battles in other movies—in many cases more so. Just watching him disarm his opponents, over and over again, is incredibly cool.

It should be noted, however, that Rebel Ridge is still much more suspense thriller than it is action movie. There’s a lot of plot, which Saulnier simmers expertly. It may test some viewers’ patience, but I would argue such people are missing the point, not understanding what this movie is and should be. There’s a difference between “lackluster” and “restrained.” In another writer’s or another director’s hands, this could quickly go over the top. We’ve been served more than enough decades’ worth of those movies already.

Saulnier gives the story the time and space to breathe, allowing us to understand Terry’s motivations—and, as it happens, those of the local police upending his life (and the lives of countless others) for their own gain. They are headed by Police Chief Sandy Burnne, played by Don Johnson in a bit of perfectly inspired casting. Although Terry faces off with many different cops, several of whom get their own showcase of narrative thread—particularly Zsane Jhe as an officer caught in the cross-combat at the police station—ultimately this is a battle of wills between Terry and Chief Burnne.

Summer proves to be a much more significant part of the story as it unfolds, with many different turns you won’t ever see coming—she’s the very reason Terry returns to the town he’s been told to stay away from, at the halfway point. Rebel Ridge could be thought of as two one-hour episodes, but still they fit together exceptionally well. I do have some slightly mixed feelings about how Summer is handled as a character, particularly when it comes to agency. But, she remains a compellingly competent character drawn with dimension.

In any case, I was rapt and on the edge of my seat from start to finish watching Rebel Ridge. A significant amount of that could be attributed to the affectingly ambient score by brother-musicians Brooke and Will Blair. There simply isn’t any major misstep anywhere in the production of this movie, with exceptional direction, writing and performances. Much as it pains me to admit it, sometimes one of the best movies of the year is actually a streaming release. I would still argue Rebel Ridge would play better in a movie theater, but we’ll take great cinema wherever we can get it, from the screening room to the living room.

There are many more tensions at play than what’s first noticed in any given frame.

Overall: A-

LONGLEGS

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

We all know Nicolas Cage is in his “I just like to work” era. For some reason, anyone who works with him is also in their “Let Nicolas Cage do whatever he wants” era. It’s that second part that I don’t get—this idea that getting the man is enough. Even a man with massive talent needs creative restraints. Otherwise, you might get a supposedly demonic serial killer with an unnaturally white face singing “Happy Birthday” in a high pitched voice.

Cage isn’t even onscreen all that much in Longlegs. I can’t find a number with an official source, but in a film that’s 101 minutes long, I would guess we see him about twenty of them. To his credit—I guess—he’s certainly memorable in them. I’m just not convinced he’s the right kind of memorable. In a moody horror piece written and directed by Osgood Perkins (Gretel & Hansel), Cage isn’t so much scary as he is ridiculous.

Longlegs feels like a mashup of The Silence of the Lambs and Hereditary, two films that are far superior to this one, which doesn’t take its themes or its genre anywhere new—unless you want to count Nicola Cage playing a killer for the first time. It starts off promising enough, in a seventies winter flashback using an aspect ratio with curved corners reminiscent of printed photos from the time. There are cool transitions between then and the “present” which is the 1990s, where those curved corners slowly expand into a modern, standard cinema aspect ratio across the screen. This includes some nice sound mixing, as with the sound of a little girl’s steps in a few inches of snow.

These clever transitions would mean more if the story amounted to anything more. The protagonist is a very autism-coded FBI agent named Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), hyper-focused on her work and indifferent to social cues. We see her on the phone with her mother a few times, asking how she is in a way that fails to convince us she actually cares. Eventually we see her mother, Ruth (Alicia Witt), whose behavior is even odder than Lee’s.

I had been a little nervous going into this movie, expecting it to terrify me. Instead, I found myself wondering when it was going to get scary. Perkins has a skill for establishing and settling tone, but here it’s “relatively eerie” at worst, and then Nicolas Cage appears onscreen and you’re left thinking: what? The acting is generally competent, with Cage’s overacting bringing down the averages. The rest of them generally speak in deadpan tones, in a way you might expect from a movie that clearly aspires to be like others that are far better.

I might also have liked Longlegs better without the supernatural element at all, let alone one that brings in life-sized young girl dolls. Whatever happened to good old fashioned psychopaths? Evil people are scary in their own right. That evil is undermined by the presence of demon eyes in shadows. In other words, I really wasn’t feeling it with this movie, which starts off promising and then devolves into derivative nonsense. Longlegs is far from terrible, but at least terrible is potentially more entertaining than average. The many people who have declared this movie great have left me mystified.

Ironically, I did nod off during this dark lullaby.

Overall: C+

BLINK TWICE

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

Blink Twice opens first with a trigger warning. This is the first of many things in this film to be ambivalent about. In this case, it sets a tricky sort of precedent. On the one hand, surely some people will appreciate it. On the other hand, I spent the first half of the movie wondering exactly how horrible the “mature themes and depictions of violence, including sexual violence” we were primed to expect would be, as depicted onscreen.

How bad is it, then? The good news is, we get only one, relatively brief scene, which is not excessively explicit or graphic. It is still, however, objectively horrible—it depicts a kind of dark, unconsentual debauchery that might have fit in, more explicitly depicted, in a movie like Caligula. It also marks a sharp tonal turn from the rest of the movie, which has a lightness and even winking vibe to it, until we discover the billionaire tech bros hosting this private island getaway are horrible monsters.

I can’t decide whether the movie would have worked better without the trigger warning. There’s something to be said for a true reveal of monsters who seemed at first to be charming. As it is, we are primed not to trust these billionaire White guys from the start. Not that we need a trigger warning for that to be the case, mind you. But the trigger warning was apparently not part of the original plan, and was reportedly added just before release, because the movie It Ends with Us received criticism for not having one. (The trailers for that movie were relatively subtle about it but still made it fairly clear that domestic violence would factor in the story.)

There are plenty of insensitive people who love to poke fun at the very notion of “trigger warnings.” There are still times when such things are very much appropriate. I just can’t decide how useful it could possibly have been in Blink Twice. But this is mostly because I can’t decide precisely what to make of the movie overall. It would seem director and co-writer Zoë Kravitz, in her directorial feature film debut, took a wild swing with this one—and did not quite hit. I have a lot of questions.

I would love to know more about Kravitz’s intentions with several of her artistic choices. Casting a Black woman, Naomi Ackie, as the main character, Frida, has to have been a deliberate choice. The rest of the cast of women includes several White women and a few other women of color; the men who have brought them to this island are all exclusively White, all but one of them middle-aged (some of you may be disheartened to learn that this definitively includes Channing Tatum). But it’s a curious choice for this film never to address race directly at all, and by default place White women, women of color, and Black women on an equal playing field. This gives Blink Twice a problem shared with the Hulu series The Handmaid’s Tale, in that it simply does not reflect reality.

And Kravitz, while not directly depicting reality—we all know this is a movie—is clearly trying to reference reality with this movie. It directly quotes the “believe women” adage, and at times seems to be trying to be a version of Glass Onion, contextualized in the “Me Too” movement. Compounding matters is the inclination of Blink Twice to be “fun” in a similar way, which trivializes sexual assault at the same time it purports to be taking it seriously. The result is something a lot less fun than the marketers of this movie would lead us to believe. We get some “scorned woman” revenge, and an inevitable turning of the tables, but it rings hollow, engaging in the very tropes Kravitz seems to think she is innovating.

Without getting too far into spoiler territory, I will say that key plot points involve memory manipulation, and the insistence of tech billionaire Slater King (Tatum) that “forgetting is a gift.” It would seem there is a splash of Bill Cosby going on here, and as the story goes on, our heroine figures out a way to conjure her repressed memories. There’s a turn at the end involving King’s own memory that seems almost clever in the moment, but I now cannot make it make sense.

A movie like this only truly works when it has clarity of purpose, and that is the fundamental thing missing from Blink Twice. I cannot trash it completely, because it has excellent performances across the board, which alone would indicate that Kravitz has some bona fide directing talent. She got consistent performances out of a stacked cast, which includes Christian Slater, Simon Rex, Haley Joel Osment, and even Geena Davis, who hasn’t had a high-profile film role in a good 25 years (she’s had several high-profile TV roles, to be fair). Casting Davis is both clearly deliberate and a bit on the nose, given her founding of the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, 20 years ago now. Blink Twice has parity in male and female characters, although not one of the male characters is a good guy—something I’m sure will incense some far-right dipshits. Normally I would be here for it, but it only works if the movie sticks the landing.

Instead, I left Blink Twice with more questions than answers, and not in any satisfyingly provocative way. I’m talking basic plot points. This is a rare movie that is often beautifully shot and has intricately layered performances, but a baffling script and inscrutable editing. The actors perform with the conviction of people who understand the director’s vision, which leaves me to wonder what crucial details may have just wound up on the cutting room floor. Or maybe they are all just patting themselves on the back for being a part of a film that has “Something To Say,” but without fully understanding what the hell it’s saying exactly.

He’s not the only thing here worthy of suspicion.

Overall: B-

ALIEN: ROMULUS

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

Alien: Romulus plays a lot like it’s just “The Alien Franchise’s Greatest Hits.” Whether that’s a good or bad thing is a matter of opinion, but I mean it very much as a compliment.

There’s a fine line between homage and artistic theft, and this film often straddles that line. There’s a lot of fan service going on here, and if you’re familiar with the previous Alien films, you will find yourself watching, as if on a visual scavenger hunt, for the references and visual nods to virtually all of them. I, for one, had mostly a great time with this.

The score, by Benjamin Wallfisch (Blade Runner 2049), almost immediately features recognizable musical references to the Jerry Goldsmith score from Ridley Scott’s classic original 1979 Alien. (Side note: it’s a bit of a stunner to realize this franchise is now 45 years old.) The story takes place either on or just above a colonized planet very reminiscent of that featured in James Cameron’s 1986 sequel Aliens, complete with elevator shafts and high wind levels—only in this case, it has an established, bustling society rather than a decimated group of fledgling colonizers. Even the films widely considered “lesser” in the franchise get nods, including a pretty obvious recreation of the most famous shot from David Fincher’s 1992 sequel Alien3, in which the alien hovers harrowingly close to Sigourney Weaver’s face. And this film’s already controversial final act is a basic recreation of the infamous final sequence from Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s 1997 sequel Alien Resurrection, only with the concept inverted. Not even the prequel films are excluded, as we get introduced to a creature with a passing resemblance to (but clearly not narratively connected to) the humanoid aliens from Ridley Scott’s 2012 semi-prequel Prometheus.

I have not seen the two prequels anywhere near as many times I have seen the so-called “Quadrilogy” of original films in the franchise; as far as I can recall, I have still seen Ridley Scott’s 2017 follow-up to Prometheus, Alien: Covenant, the one time. Which is to say, for all I know, Alien: Romulus also has some kind of direct nod to Covenant as well, and I just don’t remember it well enough to recognize it. The same could be said of Paul W.S. Anderson’s 2004 crossover Alien vs. Predator (which I did see but very much wish I hadn’t) or Colin and Greg Strause’s 2007 follow-up Alien vs. Predator: Requiem (the one feature film featuring “xenomorphs” that I never bothered to watch, by all accounts wisely), although these are quite rightly not considered officially part of the Alien anthology, and I rather hope that, rather than there being references that I did not recognize, Romulus director and co-writer Fede Alvarez and writers Rode Savages and Dan O’Bannon simply did not bother with them.

The story beats of Alien: Romulus pretty faithfully mirror those of the 1979 Alien, right down to the team of working class miners getting picked off one by one until one of the women emerges as the unlikely hero. This gives the story a certain quality of predictability, but Romulus still has plenty about it that makes it stand apart. Perhaps most significantly, the principal cast is all quite young—all adults, but somewhat barely: Cailee Spaeney (Civil War), for instance, is all of 26 years old, and her character, Rain, could easily be read as several years younger. None of the previous films in the franchise featured a principal cast exclusively of characters so young, and the characters here get introduced to us behaving with a kind of dipshittery authentic to their age.

Of course, we simply cannot have an Alien movie without a “synthetic” (“I prefer the term artificial person,” we are told), here a character named Andy, played by David Jonsson in easily the film’s best performance. Andy is a nearly obsolete model, a lifetime companion to Rain who was long ago orphaned by the dangers of the mining work her parents did. Jonsson has a uniquely nuanced understanding of a robot programmed to convey the subtle emotions of someone with a childlike devotion to a functional sibling, yet a relentless drive towards his “directive.” Depending in what disc gets inserted into a port in his neck, his directive is either to serve what’s best for Rain, or what’s best for the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, causing subtle shifts in allegiances depending on where we are in the story—and, thankfully, Romulus never goes down the clichéd route of a robot taking on implausibly human motivations counter to programming.

It’s difficult to gauge how successfully Alien: Romulus might play to someone coming to this franchise for the first time with this movie. It’s certainly true that the experience is enhanced by a broad knowledge of nearly all the films that came before it. Even the obvious references land with somewhat varied success, and an iconic line from the 1986 Aliens gets uttered in a way that doesn’t work as well as the smattering recognition of appreciative chuckles through the audience might suggest. There is even an appearance of an actual character from an earlier film, which I won’t spoil except to say that it’s a digital recreation of an actor who has since passed on, and the one instance in the film of obviously subpar visual effects. (The rest of the movie looks great.)

The bottom line is that Alien: Romulus is a consistently and undeniably entertaining action-horror thriller, its most critical successes being its propulsive pacing due to skilled editing, and several sequences with exeptional cinematography. This feels like a lived-in world, fleshed out in new ways in spite of its admittedly unavoidable familiarity. If anything, it could be argued that it has a bit too much going on, but given the nesting layers of threats—not all of them from the xenomorphs—posed to these characters, it all clicks together surprisingly well. The most important thing I can tell you about this movie is that I had a blast, and it’s not often that can be said of the seventh film in a franchise.

Remember me? Remember this? It warms the heart to reminisce!

Overall: B+

TRAP

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

I’ll say this much about M. Night Shyamalan: his movies are no longer the utter disasters they once were.

They’re still hardly masterpieces. And his latest trend seems to be to take a premise that has great potential, and then squander it, in a disappointingly muted way. He can’t even fail dramatically. This was the case with last year’s Knock at the Cabin, and it’s the case with Trap, in theaters this weekend.

There’s an unusually strange tension with Trap, where it’s difficult to tell whether it’s deliberately not taking itself seriously. It has moments of levity that are funny because it feels unintentional, and yet everything about it feels like it’s also by design. One of the most frustrating things about Shyamalan is how clearly intentional he is in every aspect of his filmmaking. But if he’s so meticulous, how could he write such jarringly contrived, forcefully stupid dialogue?

I’m plenty ready to lock into a movie, even a contrived one, if it works on its own terms. But Trap takes a great premise and then totally abandons it in its third act. We spend the first two thirds of a movie following Cooper (Josh Hartnett) and his daughter Riley (Ariel Donaghue) as they attend an arena pop concert, and Cooper learns early on that the entire concert is a trap set for “The Butcher,” a serial killer who dismembers his victims. The twist, which comes early on and was already spoiled in all of the marketing materials, is that Cooper is, himself, “The Butcher.” The first two acts focus on his attempts to figure out how to evade the trap.

Of course, the idea that any law enforcement agency would set up an entire arena concert with a pop superstar performer as a trap for a serial killer is bonkers-preposterous. So is the “profiler” Dr. Josephine Grant (Hayley Mills—of The Parent Trap fame—get it??), an objectively old lady who is somehow the leader of this entire scheme. How often do you see a white haired lady step out of a car with the iconic FBI letters on the back of her jacket, and then wonder whether she should be using a walker?

In any event, there’s a lot going on in Trap that stretches the limits of suspension of disbelief. Still, I found myself very engaged and entertained by this movie, even as it takes sudden turns into the idiotic. When Cooper realizes the trap has been set for him, he manages to get past security doors, and eventually even backstage, with mind boggling ease. When Cooper meets merch salesman Jamie (Jonathan Langdon) and asks him why there are police all over the arena, Jamie’s dialogue is filled with so much overtly obvious exposition it’s literally laughable.

And yet. Still. Entertaining! There’s something to be said for the performances here—including Jamie, but especially Ariel Donaghue as the daughter who is fangirling out and yet perceptive enough to clock that her dad is acting weird. And 46-year-old Josh Hartnett, as the villainous protagonist, is exceptionally well cast as a guy who acts like a dorky dad on the one hand, and a total psychopath on the other. Alison Pill gets a chance to shine a bit in the final act as Cooper’s wife, Rachel, but by then Trap has lost its steam.

I do have some respect for Trap in that it is almost entirely built on tension, really no violence ever seen onscreen, only the threat of it. There are guns in this movie, and a some of them are fired, but very minimally and in ways you don’t expect. The story even loops in Lady Raven, the pop singer character played by M. Night’s daughter Saleka Shyamalan as a fairly significant supporting character (one of the weaker performances, unfortunately—on the more impressive side, Saluki wrote and performed all of the songs herself).

And here’s the thing. All the comically forced dialogue notwithstanding, and the wildly telegraphed intension behind the camera movements, I’d have enjoyed Trap a lot more if the entire film had that one setting, in the concert arena. When key characters started actually making their way outside, I was convinced something would hold them up and force them back inside, so that the climax of the film would still take place in the concert venue. This live concert is the thing that sets Trap apart from other movies like it, about a cat and mouse game between law enforcement and criminal. Why Shyamalan completely abandons it for the film’s third act is truly a mystery.

They just . . . wind up at a house. This is where the “climax” takes place. Granted, there’s also a pop superstar there, so that gives it some novelty. It’s still far less interesting than a serial killer scheming in the middle of tens of thousands of fans—even if we’re supposed to believe the FBI is questioning every single man there before they leave the venue, and yet Cooper somehow manages to evade the cops the arena is crawling with at every turn. Have I mentioned not a single thing in this movie is remotely believable?

I just wish Shyamalan knew that a movie doesn’t have to be believable to work, but being earnest about it undercuts its effectiveness. It can be difficult to tell whether he’s earnest or being dopey for fun. Either way, Trap is dumb as hell and still entertaining for roughly two thirds of its 105-minute runtime. At least its length is reasonable. And it’s long enough for the wind to go out of its sails after the characters leave the venue, and well before we have a chance to.

Oh I guess this movie doesn’t star Ashton Kutcher.

Overall: B-

A QUIET PLACE: DAY ONE

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

A Quiet Place: Day One is a serviceable science fiction thriller, which suffers by standing in the shadow of John Krasinski’s original and great A Quiet Place (2018), and its sequel that was nearly as good, A Quiet Place Part II (2021). The sequel has its own incredibly exciting opening sequence set during “Day One,” and it has more finesse than all of A Quiet Place: Day One, except that it’s just fun to return to this world, now in the setting of New York City.

We get opening title cards telling us what decibel the average noise level of New York City is, and that it’s equivalent to “a constant scream.” This is never spelled out explicitly. but the subtle implication is that this makes New York the primary target area of these predatory alien creatures that prey on anybody that makes noise.

I was relatively entertained by this movie, but I do have a lot of nitpick questions—at least one of which actually extends back to the opening scenes of the 2018 original film. In that movie, we see abandoned stacks of what look like the New York Post, with ironically screaming headlines that read, IT’S SOUND! At what silent printing press were these newspapers printed, I wonder?

In Day One, the discovery of how the alien creatures hunt happens astonishingly quickly. It’s set on the first day, right? No, wait—spoiler alert!—it does go through at least Day Two. The primary character we follow here is Samira, a terminally ill woman played by Lupita Nyong'o. She’s been granted a field trip into the city from her hospice clinic, and this is when the alien meteorites start crashing to the ground, and then mayhem ensues when the creators attack. Samira is blown against a glass wall by the force of an explosion and knocked unconscious. When she wakes up, apparently by magic, every human alive already understands that the way to protect themselves is to be quiet. Helicopters flying overhead shout through megaphones that “the attackers” can’t go into the water. All of this was apparently ascertained in a matter of hours, during which everyone alive would just be in a state of panic.

I have a lot of questions about these alien creatures, which apparently have no idea how much they owe their very existence to the Alien franchise. The predatory animal behaviors and reproductive practices of the “xenomorphs” in that franchise are made clear early on, though, and they make sense. The creatures in A Quiet Place hunt based on sound, that much is clear—but, to what end? We see them slash through people and snatch them, but we never see them eat people. Are people food to these things, or what? What bought them to Earth to begin with, anyway? How did they travel through space? Who designed the spacecraft, if all these guys know how to do is attack humans?

Day One is the first of these films not to be directed by John Krasinski, although he does get a story credit on the script. This film is otherwise written and directed by Michael Sarnoski, whose previous feature film was Pig, an unusually great acting showcase for late-career Nicolas Cage. The script here gives us an unprecedented glimpse into the alien creatures’ natural behaviors, a scene in which they pull open what look like eggs of some sort. But instead of hatching, the creatures open these pods and feast on their contents. We are given no context for this at all, no sense of what is actually happening there or why.

By the way, Samira has a cat, which she takes around with her everywhere, on a leash. The cat’s name is Frodo, and apparently Frodo is one of those rare cats, quite conveniently, who never meows. He runs off during chaos more than once, but he never gets lost. He’s less a cat than a convenient plot device. He captivates a random dude named Eric (Joseph Quinn) who winds up being the second lead of the film.

It doesn’t sound like I enjoyed this movie very much, does it? This is one of those movies I’m not sorry to have seen, that engages me just as much as it means to, but at which I cannot help but ask a great many nitpicky questions. It’s amusing to think of Samira, whose terminal illness changes the stakes of her fate as compared to everyone else around her, on a quest through New York City for one last meal of Patsy’s Pizza. Samira, Eric and Frodo walk deeper into the abandoned city while the other people still alive are making their way toward boats evacuating the city.

Among these people is Henri, the character played by Djimon Hounsou who was also featured in A Quiet Place Part II, the one clear strand of connective tissue between this and the previous two films. He even talks a bit about the boat evacuation in Part II, though a lot of what plays out in Day One doesn’t quite match the descriptions provided by characters in the other, definitively better movies.

A Quiet Place: Day One features a lot more action sequences than the other films, which relied much more on suspense—but, Day One also ratchets up the tension effectively in its own way. I did find myself wondering why we should care about these particular characters as opposed to anyone else barely escaping the city with their life. I suppose the terminal illness is a relatively clever conceit, in how it drastically changes the character’s motivations.

Ultimately, though, I’d have to say that A Quiet Place: Day One is really only for the franchise diehards. I never saw the first two films in theaters because I was afraid to; I literally saw them both for the first time only last month—and then was incredibly impressed by both of them. If you’ve never seen the others and you start with this one, it would just be a compelling but standard alien invasion action thriller, albeit with very good performances. If you have seen the other films, you’ll spend a lot of time thinking about how much better they both were.

The star making performances in this film are by Nico and Schnitzel, who play Frodo the cat.

CIVIL WAR

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

A movie about a modern American civil war should have a clear point of view, and it should have balls. Alex Garand’s Civil War has neither. It should be noted: the premise alone does not qualify.

I’m not even saying this movie has to make explicit what the political issues were across the country that resulted in armed forces in many states turned secessionists. Garland’s choice to avoid that kind of specificity is actually one of his smart ones. That does not, however, preclude a point of view, something beyond vague notions of “war is bad” or “journalists are soulless.” And notwithstanding the empty complaints among people on the right who clearly haven’t even watched this movie, Civil War really offers very little, story-wise, to hold onto. It’s just a road trip through war-torn country that happens to be America, with some incredibly well directed, gripping, beautifully shot battle sequences.

Even the comparisons of this movie’s American President (Nick Offerman, seen onscreen far less than expected) to President Trump are exaggerated. We know this president is in his third term, that he has ordered air strikes on American citizens (but not how or why), and we know that unlikely groups of people are allied against him. He’s never characterized as a buffoon, or of particularly low intelligence. And yet, the “Western Forces” of California and Texas are allied against him—something that has caused a great amount of chatter among people, on all sides of the political spectrum, as straining plausibility. My stance on this is that far weirder things have happened in times of war, which makes strange bedfellows. Besides, a line early in the film has really stuck with me: “When D.C. falls, they’ll turn on each other.” Indeed, once a common enemy is pushed aside, people previously on the same side are free to find fault with each other.

There are other references to aligned states in throwaway lines in Civil War, such as “The Florida Alliance,” or Midwestern states still loyal to the U.S. government, where small-town residents live their daily lives pretending like none of this is happening. Our protagonist, hardened photojournalist Lee Miller (Kirsten Dunst, truly fantastic) has parents in Colorado doing exactly this. Her very young acolyte photojournalist, Jessie (Priscilla’s Cailee Spaeny, actually 23 years old during production and playing 23, though she barely looks even 18), has parents in Missouri doing the same.

A major problem I have with Civil War is the same problem I have with many dystopian visions of a near future: its refusal to acknowledge race. Does anybody really think there would be a second civil war in the United States and race would have no relevance? There’s a very tense sequence in which Jesse Plemons plays a blithely murderous militia man, and the scene uses two men of Asian descent to illustrate his pointed xenophobia. This is in the same neigborhood as racism, of course, but it’s still distinct from it. But Alex Garland just isn’t interested in going that step further.

This is the fundamental problem with Civil War, which is the cinematic equivalent of a product with claims of nutrition when it actually has none. And don’t get me wrong, there is still a lot to recommend Civil War, which is genuinely gripping from start to finish. But, much like the 2006 film Children of Men, it has too many “why” questions it refuses to answer while it wows us exceptional production. (Children of Men, at least, is far more impressive on a technical and production level, creating a world that feels far more lived in, if just as implausible.)

It’s the ideas themselves that are the problem—or, the lack thereof. This is the kind of movie that you really get into while it’s happening, and can only leave saying it was great if you don’t think too hard about it. Garland, however, is challenging us to think about it, without fleshing out what it’s trying to say. There’s certainly the idea that there are not truly “good guys” in active warfare, and we are never given a side to root for—something these journalists don’t even want, as they pride themselves on supposed objectivity.

And yet, even with journalism being looked at through by far the most critical lense in this film, even that winds up muddled in presentation. Too many of the details make too little sense. “They shoot journalists on sight in the capitol,” we are told early on. Somehow, the armed forces closing in on the capitol welcome press with open arms, no questions asked. Come on, really? And this is hardly a new observation: far too few of the journalists in this film are seen taking video (in fact, I think we see only one or two doing so, and only with a professional news camera—literally not one single character is seen taking video on their smartphone). Lee and Jessie engage with still photography exclusively, albeit with many of the still shots they take being equal parts beautiful and horrifying.

A lot of Civil War is gorgeously shot, which is part of the deeply misleading journey it takes us on. All the plot connections are shaky at best, making this a kind of low-rent Apocalypse Now, even with its often beautiful imagery. I just watched this movie feeling a bit lost as to the actual stakes, and what I was supposed to take away from it. And what I took away from it was its top-notch cinematography, direction, and acting, particularly on the part of Dunst, who has never been better. But what is the whole thing that these parts are coming together to make? Yet another in a long line of supposedly anti-war movies that wow us with its rendering of war, in this case with nothing of any real substance to say.

The Expendables: four journalists face their various fates.

Overall: B

LOVE LIES BLEEDING

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

As 21st-century noirs go, Love Lies Bleeding is pretty great—until it takes an inexplicably wild swing at the end. I would recommend this film, but I would have to warn you about that at the same time. I won’t spoil what happens, except to say it’s somewhat debatable whether what happens is something we are meant to believe is actually happening, or if it’s a character fantasy. I am not averse to wild swings as a concept, mind you; I just want them to be clear in their purpose or what they represent, which is really lacking here—in spite of several allusions to it earlier in the film, which only make at least that much sense in retrospect. Without the wild turn at the end, I might have felt confident that this could be one of the year’s best movies.

It could be argued that, so far at least, it still is. There’s a lot of far worse stuff out there, after all. It’s just that there’s a sequence of maybe five minutes in this movie that really straddles the line between subversive and bafflingly weird.

All that aside, Love Lies Bleeding is a dark, twisted, violent, lesbian romance thriller that is absolutely worth a look. It’s beautifully shot in New Mexico, starting with an opening shot that we only realize well into the story later was the camera lifting out of a ravine that plays into the plot. And it’s edited with a unique sort of precision, moving the plot forward without any excess bloat while keeping the pace at a steady clip. Best of all, it’s exceptionally well cast, with Kristen Stewart as gym manager Lou, who falls for mysterious body builder Jackie, played actual body builder Katy O'Brian, wandering in from out of town. They both get increasingly mixed up with Lou’s gun range owner and insect enthusiast dad Lou Sr (Ed Harris, with both his telltale bald head and a ring of hair that is nuts-long, and somehow it fits the character.)

We learn early on that Lou doesn’t speak to her father, and one of many refreshing elements of Love Lies Bleeding is that this estrangement has nothing to do with Lou’s sexuality—evidently he couldn’t give half a shit about that. I expected some kind of cathartic confrontation between Lou and her father by the end, but much of the story goes by without giving a sense of any catharsis coming with an earned payoff. This is where director and co-writer Rose Glass’s expert construction of the story comes in, because eventually we get just enough revealed about Lou’s dark history with her father, and we understand perfectly why she doesn’t speak to him.

In the meantime, both Lou and Jackie find themselves suffering the consequences of impulsive, violent mistakes. It should be noted that, in at least two scenes, something pretty gruesome occurs. In the first, we see the same shockingly horrid wound so many times, it begins to feel like Rose Glass is toying with us. She’s certainly having fun with this movie: the comic moments are few and far between, but when they do come, they are pretty hilarious.

And that’s the bottom line with Love Lies Bleeding: this is a postmodern take on film noir, with its own sensibility, in a world that is dark and dangerous and yet you love being witness to it. It takes a brief detour into “Wait, what?” territory that I could have lived without—but then immediately reeled me right back in with one final bit of humor, and then a bit of interpretive dance over the end credits. You kind of have to be there. Just because it isn’t perfect doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go there.

I don’t know if you’ll root for them exactly but you’ll still want to know where they’re going.

Overall: B+

I.S.S.

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

I.S.S. isn’t smart enough to be a clever thriller, and it isn’t dumb enough to be “dumb fun.” Didn’t these astronauts ever learn about the “Goldilocks Zone”?

At least The Beekeeper has the decency to feature exciting fight choreography, fun explosions, innovative death scenes, and groan-worthy “protect the hive” metaphors. I.S.S. seems to think it can skate on the supposed novelty of its premise, with all of six characters—three of them American, three of them Russian—directed to “take control” of the International Space Station after nuclear armageddon occurs on the Earth below.

Here’s the question I couldn’t let go of. What’s the fucking point? Writer Nick Shafir and director Gabriela Cowperthwaite would have us believe it’s a sensible expectation that some of these characters have hope of returning home. They want to see their kids again!

Earth to I.S.S. crew! Your kids have been incinerated! Not once does any one of these characters even entertain this as a possibility. The nuclear flashes seen on the planet’s surface below are in the dozens, do they think all that radiation is just going to mind its own business on one side of the Earth?

Cowperthwaite once directed the very good 2013 documentary Blackfish, about the tragic consequences of keeping orcas in captivity. What the hell is she doing here? I’d say this is the cinematic equivalent of a corporate CEO winding up living in a ditch, but I should be fair, that’s a little harsh. It’s more like a corporate CEO winding up the manager of a regional Sizzler.

I suppose these metaphors are a little random. They’re definitely more creative than any of the boilerplate ideas presented in I.S.S., which seems on the surface like it’s . . . fine. If you’re at or below average intelligence, this movie might work for you. If you think about it for a minute, you might realize this movie is insulting your intelligence. You might be forgiven for missing that, given all the actors have a charismatic and competent screen presence. They’re kind of fun to hang out with, even if nothing they do or say ultimately makes a great amount of sense.

The story begins with two American astronauts in transport to the I.S.S.: John Gallagher Jr. as Christian Campbell and Ariana DeBose as newcomer bioengineer Dr. Kira Foster. I was skeptical of this film’s logic from the start, given a book I read recently that covered how strict NASA is about bringing personal effects into space, as the slightest added weight comes at exorbitant cost. But, Campbell rides the rocket with one of his kids’ squeeze toys in his hand.

Sure, I came in hot with the nitpicking: it’s just a movie, right? So, these two join the four others already on the station: Gordon Barrett (Chris Messina), evidently the highest ranking American astronaut; and the three Russians cosmonauts: Weronika Vetrov (Masha Mashkova); and brothers Nichoai Pulov (Costa Ronin) and Alexey Pulov (Pilov Asbæk). I guess I’ll give I.S.S. points for casting actual Russian actors.

We see them all settle in; Foster has brought some mice with her. We see the six of them pal around, exchange Christmas gifts. None of this is particularly interesting. The script neatly sidesteps any details about what might have prompted the assured mutual destruction: “We don’t ever talk politics,” they say. “And we definitely don’t talk about what’s going on down there.” What is going on down there, anyway? People gettin trigger happy, apparently.

To me, the most astounding thing about I.S.S. is that no one responds to the unfolding events with any kind of existential crisis. Somehow being stranded on a space station during a nuclear annihilation makes them all safe? Oh wait, one of the scientists on board was working on a radiation treatment! Okay, but why the hell would that research need to be done in space? No matter, we have four or five vials of it to return to the surface and save humanity!

This treatment is just used as a minor plot turn somewhere in the second half of the movie. What Cowperthwaite wants us to focus on is the idea of global conflict distilled down to these six characters, three on each side, with shifting allegiances. In more capable hands, this actually could have been a taut, gripping thriller, an exploration of the human psyche under extraordinary and desperate circumstances. Instead we’ve just got an entire film crew phoning it in.

I.S.S. could have been much, much worse. The script could have been utter garbage instead of just blandly ridiculous. They could have cast bad actors instead of the clearly talented ones here, evidently just getting a paycheck. Good for them, get that cash! If anything were to save this movie, it would be this cast. Unfortunately, once I finish writing this review, I’m going to forget this movie completely and just move on with my life.

Hang in there! This movie might get better. JKJK

Overall: C+