Author: Amy Diaz

The ABC Sports crew covers a terrorist attack at the 1972 Olympics in West Germany in September 5, a swift, tense re-creation of the historical event.

These Olympics are at the dawn of live-via-satellite coverage, we are told, with all the news networks sharing windows on one satellite. Working with a six-hour time difference between Munich and the east coast of the U.S., the ABC sports crew put together packages of sports as well as live sporting events broadcasts. These share screen time with stories from ABC News, such as on-site Peter Jennings (Benjamin Walker) interviewing David Berger (Rony Herman), an American-born Israeli weightlifter, about competing in Germany as the country tries to separate new West Germany from its Nazi past. Then, early, Munich time, in the morning on Sept. 5, the TV crew hears gunfire. They scramble to send out staff and with the help of translator Marianne (Leonie Benesch) they put together that shots were fired in the Olympic Village and that Israeli athletes have been taken hostage. ABC Sports head Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard) demands that the story stay with Sports, and not New York-based ABC News, and works with Geoffrey (John Magaro) to feed as much news and live footage as possible to on-air anchor Jim McKay (shown here in the real-world footage). They build the live coverage capacity as they’re airing it — sending Peter Jennings to a neighboring Olympic Village dorm building to report what he’s seeing in the Israeli rooms and pushing a studio camera out onto the lawn to get live shots of the building and the terrorists who occasionally step onto the balcony. Even the word “terrorists” becomes something of a spur-of-the-moment addition to the coverage, according to the movie — Peter Jennings uses “Palestinian guerillas,” guessing before there’s confirmation that the group Black September may be involved. Roone decides to go with terrorists, which is how the German police refer to the hostage-takers.

As they maneuver cameras and solder telephone wires to get Peter’s reports live on air, the team, in particular Roone, are laser-focused on the “how” of what they’re doing, only slowly realizing that, for example, Olympic village rooms have TVs that receive the ABC broadcast. Thus, they realize, does their ability to offer live coverage outstrip the inexperienced German police’s ability to take that coverage into account with their own plans to attempt to rescue the hostages.

September 5 is a tight retelling of the roughly day-long stand-off mostly focused on how the Sports crew is both watching history and making history for how they are telling the story and how it sets the template for future news coverage. There is no “we’re doing it for the ratings” mustache twirler here, it is just kind of a story of people trying to make the right decisions based on the limited information they have and the sometimes at-odds desires to get the story (and get it first) and not to cause harm. While the movie has solid performances all around, I can see why it is the movie’s no-slack-in-the-rope story that garnered the movie its one Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay. B+ Available for rent or purchase.

Nosferatu (R)

A young couple are terrorized, in different ways, by the demonic Count Orlok in Nosferatu, a remake of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu that is full of vibes.

Like, this film looks creepy-beautiful — even the scenes of, say, a coffin full of rats have a kind of grotesque loveliness. This movie reminded me a lot of Maria (which is on Netflix), its nomination-mate in the Best Cinematography category of this year’s Oscars (Nosferatu also got nods for costume design, hair and make up and production design — again, all praise for the look of the thing). Both Nosferatu and Maria (Angelina Jolie’s biopic of Maria Callas) are beautiful to look at and cast a spell that puts you in the art-book-worthy worlds they create. But I fell asleep multiple times during Maria, and Nosferatu crept along in a way that eventually stopped building tension and just had me wishing we’d get to the vampire factory already.

Newly married goofus Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) travels to Transylvania for a document signing with Count Orlock (Bill Skarsgård, looking like a living corpse) that even in the 19th century feels like it should have been an email. Melancholy-afflicted Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp), his wife, afraid at home, is wrapped up in foreboding, with moments of mania and what seems like possession. Herr Knock (Simon McBurney), Thomas’s boss, maneuvers for Orlock to, I guess, drain the life out of Thomas so Orlock can come and be with Ellen, who he first seduced years ago somehow. The movie hits all the beats, looks great doing it, but doesn’t push beyond. I feel like, with the plague, the dread of a mysterious plague ship, the inability of science (such as it is) to help Thomas or Ellen, the movie had all kinds of places to dig into something more, to make this story terrifying and relevant. Instead, the “innovation” here seems to be a few boobs shots. C+ Available for rent and in theaters.

Back in Action (PG-13)

Mild-mannered suburban parents are actually former super spies in Back in Action, a one-notch-above-average older-kid family comedy.

Matt (Jamie Foxx) and Emily (Cameron Diaz) were once fighting dudes on airplanes but now they are parents to sassy teen Alice (McKenna Roberts) and computer kid Leo (Rylan Jackson), who both just think their parents are standard-issue uncool Olds. But then Matt and Emily catch 14-year-old Alice and her fake ID at a club and when club muscleheads try to give them some trouble Alice is shocked to watch her parents lay waste to the thick-necked bros. Also shocked is Chuck (Kyle Chandler), Matt and Emily’s old boss who thought they were dead before their “Boomers fighting” video goes viral. If he can find them, so can all the various baddies who might be looking for them, he says right before he’s shot on their front porch. Thus must Matt and Emily grab their kids and go on the run to find a hidden MacGuffin item that they think might buy them some protection. Matt hid the item at the home of Emily’s mom — former MI6 agent Ginny (Glenn Close), with whom Emily has always had a difficult relationship.

This movie is not as cute-fun as the various Spy Kids movies that have done this general “secret spy parents” concept but more fun than the Mark Wahlberg movie (2023’s The Family Plan) that did this on Apple TV+. It is a perfectly cromulent movie for families in the PG-13 range, with fun-enough “parents are lame” and “teens, ugh” jokes, that benefits from the natural charisma of Jamie Foxx and Cameron Diaz even if their couple chemistry never really ticks above “sure, whatever.” It does, however, serve as a good reminder that it’s enjoyable to see Cameron Diaz in movies. B- Streaming on Netflix.

Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (PG)

Sonic and his increasing number of friends take on another angry hedgehog-thing in Sonic the Hedgehog 3.

In the second movie, Sonic (voice of Ben Schwartz) added Tails (voice of Colleen O’Shaunghnessy) and, spoiler I guess, eventually Knuckles (voice of Idris Elba) to his found family, which also includes humans Tom (James Marsden) and Maddie Wachowski (Tika Sumpter). Now they will all be tasked with taking on Shadow (voice of Keanu Reeves), another hedgehog-or-whatever treated shadily by the humans who harbors all sorts of grudges. He is working with Professor Robotnik (Jim Carrey), grandfather to Dr. Robotnik (also Carrey), to build a weapon and enact vengeance, yada yada. Mostly, this movie is Carrey physical comedy, cartoon character sassy jokes and occasional battles. I was neither particularly delighted nor demoralized by all of this while my kids seemed to have fun and I suspect that is kinda the point. The deeper into Sonic lore we go, the more it is about the world of characters and their doo-dads and magical gem things and, sorry, Sonic, Marvel has already used up all that space in my brain. I care less than I did back in the first Sonic when we were more about the Sonic-James relationship. But for the youngs, this mythology stuff seemed great — particularly in the credits scenes that they reacted to with a “Captain Marvel’s pager!” level of excitement to the appearance of a new character. So, like B- for the “kid entertainment for your dollar” ranking? In theaters and available for rent or purchase.

Featured Image: September 5

Questlove codirects Ladies and Gentlemen… 50 Years of SNL Music, a very Questlove-y documentary about the role of music in Saturday Night Live throughout the decades.

And by “Questlove-y” I mean wonderfully insightful about the music, not afraid of addressing controversy and exquisitely edited — see also his 2021 doc Summer of Soul (… Or When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised). Get a taste of what you’re in for with the six-ish-minute intro, which has been floating around online featuring a mashup of interviews and performances from 50 years of the show’s history. The doc proper keeps the energy going, with a look at the technical aspects of how a performer approaches an SNL appearance, the role that music has had in the show and some of the more memorable performances including the “riot” that wasn’t during a performance by punk band Fear, Sinéad O’Connor’s protest against the Catholic Church, Rage Against the Machine’s tumultuous appearance (as told by Tom Morello, a guy with a fair amount of insight into the music history presented here as well), Ashlee Simpson’s technical difficulties and more. Talking heads from Lorne Michaels, Justin Timberlake, Andy Samberg, Jimmy Fallon, Jack White and others don’t slow things down and help to give both context and, especially from the behind-the-scenes crew, some nice dirt on how the show and the musical elements come together. A must watch for fans of SNL, Questlove and music in general. A Streaming on Peacock and, like, however else you get your NBC. Summer of Soul, which is also awesome, is available on Hulu/Disney+, Tubi and for purchase.

Sing Sing (R)

Colman Domingo is my pick of the five actors nominated for a Lead Actor Oscar this year for his role in Sing Sing, a feature film based on the real-life Rehabilitation Through the Arts program at Sing Sing Correctional Facility.

Domingo, Paul Raci and Sean San Jose act alongside formerly incarcerated men who participated in the program and are here playing, more or less, themselves. These men clearly know how to draw from their experiences to present an entirely raw wallop of emotion that radiates out from them even when all they’re doing is just standing there. Domingo plays John, an author and one-time student at the Fame high school, who helped to found the theater program at Sing Sing. John says he has proof that he didn’t commit the crime he was convicted of and is hopeful that an upcoming hearing will lead to his release. Perhaps it’s his knowledge of his innocence and his belief that eventually he will be able to present his case to someone who will accept and believe his evidence that keeps him relatively optimistic. He writes plays, he helps scout new members for the program’s productions and he seems to work hard to hold up the men for whom the program is something of a life raft.

Divine Eye (Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin, a real-life program alum) is a new member who goes through the process of breaking down his prison defenses in order to perform in productions as varied as Shakespeare and a new comedy written by the group’s director Brent (Raci) that includes time travel, cowboys and gladiators. The tough-guy-ness that keeps them alive (and may have also brought them to the prison in the first place) is chipped away and the theater program becomes a place where they can all become vulnerable.

The actors here — both the RTA guys and the civilian actors — get to the heartbreak of the men’s situation (which includes the sense that, had they had an outlet like this for their emotions before they committed crimes or fell into a life of violence, they might not have made the choices that they did). Domingo in particular is excellent as the guy who believes in what he’s doing, has hope for the future, can find joy in the moment — until he can’t. The movie manages to mix moments of levity, moments of “let’s put on a show” goofiness and moments of devastation in a fully captivating way. A Available for rent and purchase.

You’re Cordially Invited (R)

The overly involved father of a bride and pushy sister of another bride find themselves sharing a double booked wedding venue in You’re Cordially Invited.

A single dad since his wife died, Jim (Will Ferrell) wants recent college graduate daughter Jenni’s (Geraldine Viswanathan) special day to be perfect, even if he thinks she’s way too young to marry Oliver (Stony Blyden). Meanwhile, Margot (Reese Witherspoon), a reality TV producer wants her baby sister Neve (Meredith Hagner) to have her dream wedding to Dixon (Jimmy Tatro), an Army National Guard medic and exotic dancer. Both Jim and Margot book the same weekend at a small inn, which can really only do one wedding at a time, on Palmetto Island in Georgia. Because Margot and Neve eventually feel bad for Jenni, they offer to share the hotel, making everything a little crappier for everyone. When slights trigger mutual animosity, both Jim and Margo turn to various degrees of sabotage.

This is an intensely stupid movie — an intensely stupid movie that I had to pause at one point because I choke-laughed so hard I thought I might need medical help. The movie also features a very dumb but enjoyable bit with an alligator, and “Islands in the Stream” is used twice for solid comic effect (as is Peyton Manning). To some degree I feel like the whole thrill here is watching Ferrell and Witherspoon play their standard characters — kooky and tightly wound, respectively — but with the “improbable nuttiness” turned up to 11 and a whole lot more swearing. That sounds hacky, and maybe it is hacky, but they win, they got me. Just ignore the 11th-hour attempt at rom-com-ery; the movie doesn’t seem to think much of it either. B Streaming on Prime Video.

Featured Image: Ladies and Gentlemen… 50 Years of SNL Music (TV MA)

A Complete Unknown (R)

Timothée Chalamet is Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown, a biography of Mr. Robert Zimmerman from his 1961 arrival in New York through 1965 when he “goes electric” at the Newport Folk Festival

This is an extremely straight-down-the-middle look at Dylan as he comes to New York City, befriends an ailing Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) and buddy Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), becomes a big noise in the folk music community and then itches against the fame and the expectation that he stay in a strict musical lane. Along the way he meets and has relationships with (fictional) folk music fan/artist Sylvie (Elle Fanning) and with fellow folk singer Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) — both women who the movie doesn’t do a lot for in terms of fleshing them out and making them more than reaction shots to whatever Dylan is doing. (Baez as a character feels particularly underserved.) Bob enjoys the money and to some degree the fame but he doesn’t like the getting-chased-out-of-bars side of fame or the part where people basically just want more “Blowin’ in the Wind” from him.

There are some nice elements to this movie that has the heavy lift of “introducing” Bob Dylan even though if you are inclined to see this movie you probably have your own built-in opinions of the man and his music. We get a bunch of standard biopic-rooted-in-time stuff, like Walter Cronkite delivering the news flash that JFK has been killed and snippets of the civil rights movement. And there is a fair amount of reaction to the news of the day that feels overly earnest. But I think generally the movie’s presentation of Dylan and his role in the capital S Sixties works — before he was Mr. Nobel Prize for Literature, Bob Dylan was just a talented, ambitious, annoying 20something trying to make it in the music business and also figure out his role in the culture, which was much more “mono-” than it is now. I also like the way the movie dips into the struggle between “old” folk and the “new” folk of the 1960s and how record companies were trying to bring in the kids but also keep whatever the old audience was with covers of classic folk songs. Folk can’t just be all Dust Bowl music, Sylvie argues, which helps inspire Dylan to write more about the Now (1960s). It’s a nice if stagey way to illustrate how today’s urgent issues become tomorrow’s nostalgia and helps to put us back there with Dylan in the 1960s headspace. At some point this tips into what basically becomes an argument about folk authenticity — “electric guitars!?!” — which is the same bummer to wade through as any argument about authenticity. And it feels like more of a stall in the movie’s energy than a lead-up to a dramatic climax. But overall I think the movie (and the Chalamet of it all) does do a good job of showing how Dylan’s lyrics and unpretty voice felt fresh for the time. B Available in theaters.

The Brutalist (R)

Adrian Brody gives a solid performance in The Brutalist, a movie with a three-hour-and-34-minute runtime.

There is a 15-minute intermission, which is either thoughtful of the movie or exhausting, depending on how you feel about what you’re watching and how much Coca-Cola Freestyle you drank in the movie’s first two-hour-ish chunk.

We meet Hungarian Lázló Tóth (Brody) as he arrives in America in 1947. Once a well-regarded architect of the Bauhaus school, Lázló survived the Holocaust with basically nothing, only finding out that his wife Erzébet (Felicity Jones) has also survived when he arrives in Philadelphia. There he meets up with long-ago-immigrated-to-America cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola), whose last name is now Miller and who has a Catholic wife and has himself converted or something — adding a layer of tension to the relationship between the cousins. Lázló lives in a small back room at their furniture shop and is meant to help up the design game of the shop while working to get Erzébet and their niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) out of what is now a Soviet-controlled country.

Lázló arrives in the U.S. with not just the psychological trauma of all he’s experienced but also a broken nose that has left him with severe pain — all of which leads him to eventually turn to heroin for relief. When we finally meet Erzébet and Zsófia, they also carry around the scars of their ordeal. Erzébet’s long starvation has left her unable to walk and she uses a wheelchair when she first arrives. She also takes pills for pain in her legs that, when it strikes, leaves her screaming. Zsófia, who we first see in the movie’s opening scenes being interrogated by the Soviets and who was a child when Lázló last saw her, has been so traumatized she doesn’t speak.

And then Lázló meets rich psychopath Harrison Van Buren Sr. (Guy Pearce) and his terrible son Harry Jr. (Joe Alwyn). Harry hires Lázló and Attila to turn his father’s messy study into a proper library for his fancy first editions. What Lázló creates is such a modernist piece of art that it eventually gets a feature in Life magazine, but Van Buren’s initial reaction is just to yell at everybody and refuse to pay. Eventually Van Buren realizes that he has stumbled on a genius and ensnares Lázló into building this ridiculous community center that will serve as a monument to Van Buren’s dead mother. It is immediately clear that Van Buren is very much a not-good guy but his lawyer, Michael (Peter Polycarpou), offers to help Lázló bring over his wife and niece and Van Buren offers Lázló a chance at regaining some of his past life as an architect, so Lázló begins the project that we see become an obsession for nearly a decade.

I realize it is deeply unsophisticated to complain about a well-made movie being too long — as though you’re admitting that your baby brain has been so TikTok broken it can’t hold complex thoughts. And, maybe, but also at some point the tonnage of a movie gets in the way of all the things a movie can accomplish. And The Brutalist — which really feels at least 40 minutes not just too long but too long without good reason — does attempt some interesting things. The production design and cinematography (both of which received Oscar nominations in this 10-nomination-receiving movie, including for Best Picture) are excellent, really putting the emotion on screen via colors and shapes and the way stone and shadow play such a big role in what we’re watching.

There is also a narrative that we’re used to in this kind of movie — where the refugee from the horrors of World War II comes to America and then just buckles down on the making of a new life and more or less assimilates — that this movie brilliantly argues with. In The Brutalist Lázló suffers in a way that feels more messy and genuine, can’t just close the door on the past and, as we eventually learn, works out some of his suffering through his architecture. And no amount of American hustle changes the fact that he was once a big deal with a full life of his own and is now at the mercy of the increasing awfulness of the racist, classist Van Buren to claw a little bit of that back. Likewise, Erzébet was a professional woman with a career as a foreign correspondent and isn’t here for everything’s-great-now housewife. Strong performances all around (even to a degree from Jones, I guess, saddled with another thin and thankless wife role) help break these people out of what you expect of them and give you something horrific but real. B In theaters.

Featured Image: A Complete Unknown (R)

An exotic dancer gets caught up in the rich-kid-nonsense of the son of a wealthy Russian family in Anora.

Ani (Mikey Madison), the titular Anora, dances at a strip club where one of her special talents is a working knowledge of Russian, even if her accent isn’t the best. When young Russian goofus Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn) comes in, she is sent out to dance for him. He gives her his cell number and she agrees to some hang-out time outside the club. Eventually their arrangement stretches into a week-long girlfriend experience, with Ani traveling to Las Vegas with Vanya and his entourage. Vanya doesn’t want to return to Russia, where it sounds like he will have to work and won’t be able to just get high and play video games all day. He suggests that he marry Ani and thus become a U.S. citizen and thus not return. Despite seeming like she’s worldly enough to see the pitfalls in this, Ani says yes and they head to a Vegas wedding chapel.

Vanya is 21 and Ani is 23. You act 25, Vanya tells her. Really, she acts like a 23-year-old who sees a ray of economic light and he acts like a 14-year-old for whom there have never been any consequences for his careless actions. Madison does a good job of giving us this very young woman who’s in way over her head and struggling to do the best she can with what she, at least for a little while, believes could be a real marriage and a real chance at a better future for herself. In its second half, the movie does feature segments that read more as kind of a comedy of errors with Vanya’s father’s American-based henchmen trying to find and hold onto Vanya while they “fix” what they see as yet another mess he has made. This part of the movie has its charms, with Yura Borisov, Karren Karagulian and Vache Tovmasyan playing workers in this family operation who have to deal with the increasingly enraged Ani and the increasingly petulant man-child Vanya. But I don’t know that this “Chris and Paulie in the Pine Barrens” comedy entirely fits with what otherwise feels like a portrait of Ani. I will also say that, for me, this movie had expectations working against it — it has been nominated for, like, every movie award this season. I enjoyed it fine, it is worth a watch, but there are visible seams and rough patches (Vanya’s parents, when they show up, feel very underbaked) I didn’t expect based on all the accolades. B+, I guess, but credit the + mostly to Madison.Available for rent or purchase.

A Different Man (R)

Sebastian Stan plays an actor with facial differences in the at-times comic, at-times sad A Different Man.

Edward (Stan) gets a role in what appears to be a human resources video about working with employees who have differences in facial structure or appearance. It’s only about a minute of screentime, but it’s an acting credit at least for struggling actor Edward, who has facial tumors. When he meets his new neighbor, a playwright named Ingrid (Renate Reinsve), her initial reaction is a gasp, though she later becomes friendly with him. Meanwhile, he agrees to take part in a new clinical trial, taking a drug that causes extreme pain. His skin begins to slough off his face and after a particularly dramatic skin peeling he discovers that his face is now, well, Sebastian Stan’s differences-free “normal” face. Basically disowning his old self, Edward becomes Guy, a Stan-ily handsome successful real estate salesman who tells Ingrid and others that Edward is dead.

Years later, he sees a notice for an audition specifically looking for an actor with facial differences for a play called Edward, written by Ingrid. He auditions and gets the part, which he plans to play while wearing a mask that looks like his old face. But then Oswald (Adam Pearson) shows up. Oswald has facial differences similar to Edward’s but he also has the confidence, positivity and personability — and charming English accent — that Edward never did. “Guy,” the real Edward, watches as Oswald eventually plays Edward better than Edward does and then becomes the life of the afterparty as well.

Is there anything more irritating than someone who can take your particular set of lemons and make wildly popular lemonade out of them? Stan is excellent as someone who realizes the limitations of “normality” and is torn between clearly admiring Oswald and kind of hating him for how much better he is at living their life. It’s a quiet, confused rage and Stan wears it very well, simmering and boiling over in a way that makes no sense to the other characters. Adam Pearson, who does have neurofibromatosis and facial differences in real life, does a good job of differentiating Oswald from Edward. Oswald seems to move through the world matter-of-factly, presenting himself openly and then pushing people to see him fully. The movie doesn’t show us the work this takes from Oswald but that kind of fits with our point of view, which is Edward’s point of view, which is of this guy who lights up a room and gets the girl, something that even “Guy” can’t quite pull off. B+ Available for rent or purchase and streaming on Max staring Jan. 17

Flow (PG)

A cat keeps on keeping on through floods, storms and hostile lemurs in Flow, a beautiful, watercolor-esque, dialogue-free animated story.

Wikipedia says the animation was done with computer graphics, which you can see, particularly in the way water is rendered, with a look that is sometimes almost photorealistic. But the animals themselves often have a picture book watercolor-painted look — vibrant in their color and well defined but with a softness. We follow the adventures of a black cat, who at the beginning of the movie spends its nights sleeping in a bed in a house surrounded by outdoor cat statues. We never see the artist who left one statue half-finished on their workbench, nor any other people in this world full of human structures and human items, like bottles or a mirror, but that otherwise gives the sense of humans being long absent.

The cat is chased by a pack of dogs for a while, before a sudden rush of water floods the forest where the cat is living. The cat eventually hops on a boat that floats by and finds a capybara also living there. They continue to float, meet other animals along the way and run into the dogs from the beginning of the movie a few times — with one dog seeming to be particularly attached to the cat and the group as a whole.

The movie is ultimately more meditative than plot driven, with the soft music and lovely visuals taking you more to a place of float-along wonder. I don’t know that it is action-packed enough to hold a young audience but it held me through all of its beautiful scenes of watery paradises and big eyed animals. A Available for rent or purchase.

Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (PG)

The cheese-loving inventor Wallace and his much smarter dog Gromit face off against the super criminal penguin Feathers McGraw in Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl.

Since Wallace and Gromit helped put away Feathers for stealing the blue diamond, the wordless, devious penguin has been locked in “prison” (a penguin exhibit at the zoo). Meanwhile, Wallace (voice of Ben Whitehead) has continued to invent — mostly semi-terrible gadgets like the automatic jam-on-toast applier and robotic dog-patter. But then, to “help” Gromit, he invents Norbot (voice of Reece Shearsmith), a garden gnome robot who is extremely overzealous about tidying up — he mows down Gromit’s newly planted tree and flowers and trims the hedges into squares. Gromit is annoyed but the neighbors are delighted and ask Wallace to hire Norbot out, which he does. The local news team shows up to do a story on this invention, which Feathers happens to see on TV. Feathers hacks in to Norbot’s operating system, turning his core setting from “good” to “evil.” Norbot then creates his own army of gnome robots to enact Feathers’ dastardly plan.

The animation here is fun, the usual Aardman look of clay creations in a world full of tactile items like a book with paper pages — such as Gromit’s copy of A Room Of One’s Own by Virgina Woof. Authority figures — Wallace, police chief Mackintosh (voice of Peter Kay) — are pleasantly clueless while brainier figures like Gromit and the young police officer P.C. Mukherjee (voice of Lauren Patel) know there’s trouble afoot. In Aardman style, there are “wrong’uns” and meanness without cruelty, making it very friendly for a wide range of ages, including older kids who can enjoy the overall goofiness. A Streaming on Netflix.

Featured Image: Anora

Cousins visit Poland in a trip meant to remember their grandmother and reconnect with each other in A Real Pain, a sweet, kind, frequently heartbreaking comedy written and directed by Jesse Eisenberg.

Comedy? I mean, it’s a movie about two grief-stricken men from a Jewish American family, one who has just suffered a mental health crisis, engaging in a Holocaust-centered tour of Poland. But I also laughed out loud at some truly funny, well-observed moments so — comedy like that.

David Kaplan (Eisenberg) is married with a demanding job and a young son but he has cleared his schedule to spend a week in Poland in honor of his recently deceased grandmother, who grew up there and survived Nazi concentration camps during the war before coming to America. He is also there for Benji (Kieran Culkin), his cousin who, even before we know all the particulars, we can feel that David is deeply worried about. Benji is, as he later says, someone who lights up a room with his charm only to later poop all over everything. Almost exactly the same age as David, Benji is clearly bright and exuding a desire for connection at all moments. He is also, it’s strongly implied, directionless, erratic and spends most of his time getting high.

The trip is a structured tour with non-Jewish, British leader James (Will Sharpe) walking through the history and tragedy of Jewish Poland with retired American couple Mark (Daniel Oreskes), whose Jewish family immigrated from Poland decades before the war, and his wife Diane (Liza Sadovy); the recently divorced New Yorker Marcia (a luminous Jennifer Grey), whose mother was a survivor, and Eloge (Kurt Egyiawan), a survivor of Rwandan genocide who converted to Judaism. Benji becomes something of the active ingredient in the tour mix — spurring fun, spurring introspection, causing chaos.

Culkin makes need pour out of Benji just as Eisenberg makes worry and anxiety radiate from David. Benji and David’s relationship, one that was clearly brotherly in their youth, is the warm center of this movie. They love each other intensely, just as they intensely want to smack each other. Everything about it feels genuine, which makes their actions — from their big outbursts to their moments of side-eye — feel real and lived in. When Benji rants at a tour dinner, for example, it doesn’t feel stagey, it feels awkward and sad and the responses by the other tour participants give you a deeper window into each of their characters. Excellent performances all the way around in this short, bittersweet movie that is well worth a watch. A Available for purchase.

Nightbitch (R)

Being a mom to a young son breaks Amy Adams’ brain — relatable — in the light-horror comedy Nightbitch.

Previously a visual artist, Adams’ character, who is just called Mother in IMDb, now spends her days caring for her son, who I think is just called Baby (Arleigh Snowden and Emmett Snowden). He’s sort-of early preschool age — still young enough to injure himself just toddlering through life but old enough to express opinions in words about his food or his unwillingness to go to sleep. Her husband, Scoot McNairy — whose character is called “Husband” — works a job that frequently takes him away on work trips, so not only is she with her son all day but frequently all day and all night, a job she can never clock out of. She loves her son intensely but she would also like to shower more than once a week and laughs with a kind of bitter, gleeful horror at the unflattering things she sees in the mirror: wrinkles, gray hair, facial hair, a patch of fur on her back, longer pointy-er teeth, maybe a tail? As she sort of spirals with her own identity — is she even an artist any more? — she is also sort of fascinated with this other thing she might be turning into, something decidedly more primal, more canine.

Nightbitch, based on the book by Rachel Yoder that is in my to-read pile (and thus I’m judging the movie entirely as its own thing), feels like it is “in conversation,” to quote one of Adams’ snooty art friends, with Tully, the Diablo Cody-penned movie about the brain-altering effects of motherhood. In Tully, Charlize Theron’s mother character is dealing with something like postpartum depression shortly after having a baby. Here, it’s the period when Baby has become just enough of an independent person to give Adams the space to wonder what the hell is happening to herself. She is initially prickly toward a group of moms with similar-aged kids — seeing only their “Wheels on the Bus” exteriors and not the thickets of rage, confusion and wildness that is underneath for them as well. She is also awkward around her former art friends; her kid-talk is silly or sad to them, at least that’s what she’s taking from their reactions. What to do with all of that white-hot frustration? Well, some of it gets thrown at clueless Scoot, who really does an excellent job crafting a character that is both basically a nice guy and also has no idea what his wife is going through. And maybe some of it is magical realism-ing Adams into a dog, a dog whose nighttime activities may or may not be resulting in the bodies of small animals being left at her doorstep.

I think Marielle Heller, who adapted and directed this movie, leaves a lot of the dog stuff for you to do with what you want. Are you watching Adams metaphorically succumb to her more feral instincts or is she a woman actually werewolfing out? “Yes” is a perfectly fine answer to me. And on that level, the alt-reality inner-is-outer level, I think Adams does a good job of finding the darkness and the humor of this very specific slice of the “longest shortest time” to borrow the name of a parenting podcast. She captures the blend of screaming-into-the-void and this-is-the-best-thing-ever really well and gives herself over to its body horror. This is a fun movie that takes its “weird places a mom can go after two glasses of wine” emotions seriously but isn’t self-serious. B+ Streaming on Hulu.

Emilia Pérez (R)

A Mexican cartel boss fakes her death and tries to become a sort of hero of the people while also hiding a secret from her wife and children in the high-drama musical Emilia Pérez, the winner of four awards at the recent Golden Globes.

Karla Sofía Gascón plays the titular character who begins the story living as Juan Manitas del Monte, the cartel boss whose violent crime-world life won’t allow for living as her true female self. She feels her only way to transition fully and live publicly as a woman is to “kill” Manitas — and even convince her wife Jessi (Selena Gomez) and two sons of this death. I’ve read criticisms by trans writers about how all of this is presented and how the movie treats both her gender-affirming surgery and her relationship to her family. These criticisms seem fair (as do criticisms of the cartoonish way Mexico is presented) and it feels worthwhile to consider the issues people have with this movie, especially for its handling of a trans character (who is played by a trans actress). The movie (and its whole awards deal) can feel a little like it’s patting itself on the back without seeing some of its problems.

I also don’t find this movie to be particularly grounded in reality on any level, and not just because lawyer Zoe Saldaña occasionally breaks into song. Rita Mora Castro (Saldaña, who won one of those Globes) is a talented lawyer in Mexico who sings that her gender and her skin color make it hard for her to live her ambitions. Because Manitas could see Rita’s talent propping up her empty-suit boss, Manitas hires (after first kidnapping) Rita to manage all the legalities of her transition, from moving money around to set Jessi and the boys up for a comfortable life in Switzerland to finding a doctor willing to do what appears to be full body surgery all at once in semi-secret. After cashing the check for that service and building a new life in London, Rita is scared when she realizes the Mexican woman she seems to just run into at a dinner party four years later is Emilia. Are you here to tie up loose ends, Rita sings. Emilia clarifies that her plan is not murder but getting her sons back. She wants to pose as a long-lost cousin of Manitas who Jessi and the boys will move in with back in Mexico.

Which they do? Despite Jessi not really wanting to? And meanwhile Emilia becomes a sort of patron saint of families who are looking for missing loved ones? She uses Manitas’ old criminal contacts to find out — consequence-free I guess? or why would they help her? — where victims have been buried to give people closure. The big public splash she makes for the cause would seem to be at odds with her fear of being “found out” but like I said, this isn’t a movie that’s grounded in any kind of realism.

Here’s the thing, though, in spite of all the “really?” story beats and questionable choices, I can’t entirely discount this movie. It’s sort of a dizzy, colorful, tragic fantasy story — very primary colors in its opinions and not all that thoughtful about its three female characters (joined in the third act by Adriana Paz as an abused wife delighted to learn that she is in fact a widow who then becomes the girlfriend of Emilia). It’s kind of a mess and kind of fascinating and features a definitely interesting performance from Gascón, more for what she’s doing than for the words on the page, and a big-swing performance by Saldaña. B- Streaming on Netflix.

Featured Image: A Real Pain

A look at 2024 at the movies

I was sort of bummed out about the whole movie-going experience in 2024 and then I saw Wicked.

I’m not a Wicked person, in the sense of owning the cast album or having seen a stage production. And has there been too much Wicked everywhere with everything? Yes, totally. But this candy-colored musical brought something I felt was generally lacking in 2024: a fun time at the movies. Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande are a great team — both are solid with the songs, have good chemistry as an enemies-to-friends duo and are good at the tone of this fairy tale with darkness around the edges. It’s a long movie but doesn’t feel like a slog and it is worth putting on your shoes and silencing your phones to see this in a theater, where the colors and whimsy will get their proper scale. With the numbers of local movie screens dropping in 2024 (RIP to Chunky’s theaters in Nashua and Pelham, Regal in Concord and AMC in Londonderry), it was good to feel excited about being in a theater. Wicked, which is still in theaters, will get a release of a special sing-along version on Dec. 25.

But Wicked wasn’t the only thing making me feel upbeat about movies.

• The “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)” Award for making me feel positive things about a superhero franchise: That would go to Deadpool + Wolverine (for rent and streaming on Disney+). If I think about the whole Ryan Reynolds thing or watch extended trailers for this movie, I feel sort of exhausted. But in the midst of the movie, watching Deadpool and Wolverine/Reynolds and Hugh Jackman, both just so game, I kind of couldn’t help having fun. Also, I enjoyed the goofy 20th Century Studios-Marvel cameos and how that universe was egg-white-foam folded into the Marvel Cinematic Universe proper. I even had a moment of “aw, cute” during the credits, which used the aforementioned song, to give that world its sendoff.

• The exact right kind of dumb: Recently, I watched Carry-On, a Netflix movie seemingly going for low-budget Die Hard. It was perfect — wheeee! — in the way that only an action movie that doesn’t take itself seriously but also doesn’t goof off can be. The Beekeeper (rent, purchase and on MGM+) is similarly such a movie. It stars Jason Statham saying “I protect the hive” a bazillion times as he punches dudes who stole money from the nice Phylicia Rashad, who was letting him live on her farm (keeping bees, it’s a whole theme with him). Did you have a tough week? Pour yourself a tall glass of The Beekeeper.

• Also fun: “Sexy tennis” was not a thing I ever thought or thought I needed in my life but then I saw Challengers (rent, purchase, Prime Video and MGM+), which is soapy silly fun with the trio of Zendaya, Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor.

• The M3gan Award for funniest horror: Abigail (rent, purchase and Prime Video) features a bunch of random criminals brought together in a creepy old house to do the simple job of kidnapping one little girl and keeping her alive and unharmed until her father pays the ransom. The trailer gives away both what will make this a challenge and a hoot.

• This horror movie has no stakes! (complimentary): I did not have high hopes for A Quiet Place: Day One(rent, purchase, Paramount+ and MGM+); the trailer doesn’t give you much and it’s not really a story plugged into the main Quiet Place universe. But as we get to know Lupita Nyong’o’s character the movie becomes a whole unexpected thing, with a whole different approach to what counts as stakes and what the big bad truly is. It’s great! Very much not what you expect from a prequel/sidequel.

• Horror movies doing a thing: These streamers might not work as big-budget, big-screen outings but I feel like the scale of TV allows them to focus on one element of their horror-ness and really amp it up. Woman of the Hour (streaming on Netflix), directed by and starring Anna Kendrick, is scary not for anything specific that happens in the movie but for the way it perfectly captures the “how do I keep this man at a bar/job interview/dark parking lot/apartment common area from killing me” anxiety of women in so many circumstances. Hold Your Breath(Hulu/Disney+) is set during the Dust Bowl but it has real pandemic-era vibes with how danger is in the air and how that plays with the mind of a woman who has already lost one child and is trying to protect the other three. Don’t Move (Netflix) is a suspenseful movie about survival. House of Spoils (Prime Video) has Ariana DeBose maybe going mad from the haunted house where she is trying to start up a trendoid fine dining restaurant or maybe the toxic chef culture or maybe it’s the strange greens from the garden possibly planted by a witch? Either way, it’s a fun time of a horror movie that kind of morphs into something else.

• Character-forward: Lily Gladstone in Fancy Dance(Apple TV+), Joan Chen and Izaac Wang in Didi(rent, purchase and Peacock), Danielle Deadwyler and John David Washington in The Piano Lesson (Netflix), and everybody in Rez Ball (Netflix) andThelma(rent, purchase and Hulu/Disney+) turn in great performances in solid movies that all blend comedy and drama, family relationships and people trying to figure out who they are now.

• Honorable character mentions: Wobbly movies can still have barnburning performances. Check out Jodie Comer going big with the hair and the accent work in The Bikeriders(Prime Video, rent or purchase). Kerry Washington (and the real life story) wins you over despite some shakiness in The Six Triple Eight (Netflix). Chris Hemsworth feels like the only person really having fun with the sandy craziness of Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga(Max, rent or purchase). But the “making his own fun, baby!” prize for this year truly goes to Denzel Washington in Gladiator II (in theaters).

• Animation! The Wild Robot(for purchase) is full of animal hijinks and it’s a tear-jerking look at parenthood — plus so lovely! Transformers One (rent, purchase and Paramount+) is a neat prequel of the Transformers universe we know and also a clever story about the ways people (er, transforming robots) respond to injustice. Big City Greens The Movie: Spacecation (for purchase and on Disney+) is a sweet story about family and it’s a musical and it’s in space and it has an early The Simpsons level of high joke density. Inside Out 2 (Disney+ and rent) mostly avoids the lessening effects of a sequel and turns in a really interesting look at what happens when anxiety (and Anxiety, as voiced by Maya Hawke) takes the wheel.

• The Once Upon a 1980s Time at the Movies Nostalgia Award: Kevin Smith gives us his The Fabelmans withThe 4:30 Movie (rent or purchase), a very cute riff on the filmmaker as a young goofus.

• The usual caveats: There are, as always, like a whole slew of late season movies I haven’t seen yet — in theaters now Flow and Mustafa: The Lion King; Christmas Day releases Nosferatu, A Complete Unknown, Babygirl and The Fire Inside; Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (Netflix on Jan. 3); thus-far only limited release films like Nickel Boys, Nightbitch, The Return, The Brutalist, September 5 and now-harder to find movies like A Real Pain (Forbes.com reported it should be on VOD on Dec. 31). There are several awards attention-garnering movies that we can all catch up on now — Anora (rent or purchase), Emilia Pérez (Netflix), Memoir of a Snail (rent or purchase), Heretic (rent or purchase), We Live in Time (rent or purchase), Maria (Netflix), and Here (rent or purchase).

• Real world: Martha Stewart would be a fun person to three-martini-lunch with, is my takeaway from Martha (Netflix), her documentary where she offers crisp observations about everything from her romances to her legal woes. In Will & Harper (Netflix) longtime friends and comedy co-conspirators Will Ferrell and Harper Steele road trip across America in this documentary about friendship, the never-ending journey of figuring yourself out and Harper’s desire to travel to the middle America places she’s always loved and see if, as she says, they will love her back now that she’s out as trans. The song about friendship Kristen Wiig sings at the end might actually be one of the sweetest things in movies this year. In Piece by Piece (purchase), Pharrell Williams not only tells his life story but also is able to illustrate his relationship with music via the use of Lego animation.

• Just some really great movies: In Janet Planet (Max, rent and purchase) Julianne Nicholson and Zoe Ziegler are an unconventional but loving mother-daughter pair. In My Old Ass (Prime Video), an 18-year-old Maisy Stella meets her 39-year-old Aubrey Plaza-self with bittersweet passage of time and yet very funny results. The Substance (Mubi, rent or purchase) features a very good Demi Moore performance and a very funny bit of body horror about beauty standards. His Three Daughters (Netflix) features absolute top-shelf performances by Natasha Lyonne, Elizabeth Olsen and Carrie Coon as three sisters gathered for their father’s final moments — but it’s funny and smart and a well-crafted story about family and grief. And then there’s Conclave (Peacock and for purchase), just an absolute delight about clashing ambitions at a Vatican gathering to pick a new pope.

Hopeful about 2025

All dates extremely approximate.

• Dog Man (Jan. 31) Dav Pilkey’s books are a treat. My kids are excited for this movie — and I agree!

• Love Hurts (Feb. 7) Ke Huy Quan plays a former criminal enforcer turned mild-mannered real estate agent.

• Black Bag (March 14) Steven Soderbergh gives us sexy spies Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett.

• Mickey 17 (April 18) Bong Joon Ho’s new movie features a promising cast — Robert Pattinson, Toni Collete, Mark Ruffalo, Steven Yeun — and a goofy-fun sci-fi premise.

• Thunderbolts* (May 2) I can’t help it — Marvel’s kickoff to summer featuring Florence Pugh and David Harbour in their Black Widow characters looks like it has the potential to be scruffy fun.

• 28 Years Later (June 20) That trailer, featuring Rudyard Kipling’s poem “Boots,” is creepy-great. I am officially excited for the third of Danny Boyle’s zombie movies.