Category: Film Reviews by Amy

The Menu (R)

Diners at an exclusive, multi-thousand-dollar-per-diner restaurant realize their evening is about more than foams and locally sourced seafood in The Menu, a thriller that’s probably more cute than clever but does leave you hungry for a really good [spoiler alert].

Let’s just say the food item in question isn’t quite the Chef grilled cheese sandwich but it’s in that vein and I will be thinking about it long after I stop thinking about the rest of the movie.

Hawthorne is the kind of restaurant that patrons have to wait months to get a reservation for and then can get to only by taking a boat out to a secluded island where only a dozen customers are served per night. Before even getting to the restaurant, front-of-house manager Elsa (Hong Chau) takes the diners on a tour of the island and the restaurant’s gardens and chicken coop and smokehouse — the base camp of bull—- mountain, as Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy) observes. Of all the guests, she is the least impressed by all the artisanal nonsense of the restaurant. And she’s the date of the guest who is most obsessed with the idea of each dish’s umami and presentation and Instagramability, Tyler (Nicholas Hoult). She is not, we quickly understand, the date he was supposed to bring, and when she and another guest, older man Richard (Reed Birney), recognize each other and then pointedly look away from each other, we can guess pretty quickly how she came to be with Tyler. Richard is there with his wife, Anne (Judith Light). Other guests include three finance bros (Mark St. Cyr, Arturo Castro, Rob Yang); a restaurant critic (Janet McTeer) and her editor (Paul Adelstein); a past-his-prime movie star (John Leguizamo) and his assistant (Aimee Carrero), and an older woman (Rebecca Koon).

Chef Julian Slowik (Ralph Fiennes) commands great respect — or something — from his kitchen staff, who snap to attention and “yes, chef” him loudly when he gives an order. The dishes come out, one by one, each with a story (and accompanying title card), and each one gets a little more conceptual and insane than the next. When a taco course comes out featuring a chicken thigh with small scissors stuck it (to go along with a story about Slowik stabbing his abusive father in the thigh) and tortillas laser-printed with the guests’ various misdeeds, the guests realize that the uneasiness they’ve felt all evening was the correct emotion.

What if Jigsaw from Saw went to culinary school and started to take food really seriously while still wanting to mess with people — is what I’m getting from this movie. Yes, the title cards are funny and there are a few genuine laugh-out-loud moments, often juxtaposing the la-di-da nature of foodie talk with menace or outright violence. But the customers are more monied sadsacks than monsters and the kitchen staff come off as either either dead-eyed cult members or wild-eyed lunatics. Which, fine — but the movie spends a lot of time on speechifying and seeming to have characters believe they’re making a point about class and the shallowness of high-end foodie culture. The movie acts like it’s saying something but really every statement of purpose boils down to “people suck,” which kind of takes the air out of that part of the movie and makes it feel more like window dressing to the suspense than a clever message. It is, as Paul Hollywood would say poking his thumb into these sections of the movie, underbaked.

We are also boxed in to only rooting for Taylor-Joy (well, maybe her and Judith Light, who is able to do great things with the tiniest of looks or motions). This is by design but the movie doesn’t give her much more than “Girl You Root For” as a character or personality. Fiennes, as the Big Bad, doesn’t get a whole lot more than that — his character basically delivers Chef Julian’s whole deal during one of many pre-course monologues — but he does seem to be having fun with this Great Man gone off the rails.

For all this, I enjoyed The Menu — it’s gleeful about its different kinds of villainy and really relishes, ha, sending up needless extravagance and foodie culture. B

Rated R for strong/disturbing violent content, language throughout and some sexual references, according to the MPA at filmratings.com. Directed by Mark Mylod and written by Seth Reiss and Will Tracy, The Menu is an hour and 47 minutes long and distributed by Searchlight Pictures in theaters.

Featured photo: Ralph Fiennes in The Menu.

New York Times reporters Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor investigate reports of sexual harassment and assault by Harvey Weinstein in She Said, a movie based on the real-life investigation and the subsequent book by the same name.

When we first meet Twohey (Carey Mulligan) she’s investigating allegations against then candidate Donald Trump — while also going to OB appointments as her pregnancy progresses. Kantor (Zoe Kazan) is covering refugees, while also juggling her two girls’ schedules with her husband, who is also a reporter. Kantor gets a tip about allegations of sexual misconduct, possibly years of misconduct, by Weinstein and starts looking into it, making calls and finding women with stories who can’t talk or won’t talk on the record out of fear of damaging their careers or because of non-disclosure agreements signed years ago. Twohey joins her on the investigation when she returns to work from maternity leave, still sort of reeling from what the movie depicts as postpartum depression.

The paper’s editors — including Rebecca Corbett (Patricia Clarkson) and Dean Baquet (Andre Braugher) — believe in the story but know that hefty on-the-record corroboration is needed. Twohey and Kantor chip away at the process of finding documents to back up the stories about settlements, charges that are dropped, HR complaints and the many non-disclosures. They also search for women with a story to tell about Weinstein, hoping they can find at least one who will go on the record, talking to the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow and Rose McGowan and Ashely Judd (who appears in the movie as herself). They also talk to former assistants who have spent years carrying the trauma of their interactions with Weinstein. The more they investigate, the more Twohey and Kantor are told that Weinstein himself will be coming for them, having shut down all previous attempts to tell these stories.

I almost feel like She Said isn’t quite about what it seems to be about. The trailer sells the idea that the movie is some John Grisham-meets-All the President’s Men high-pressure race to get Weinstein and go after the “whole system” or something — the trailer sort of feels like it’s just one explosion short of a Michael Bay movie. And there are moments in the movie itself where we get some real TV-exposition-style lines of the “what? Sexual harassers getting away with it?” variety that feel kind of silly coming from fully grown women in 2016 and 2017 who work in national media.

But the actual story, the meat of the movie, is more about the unglamorous work of investigating — a lot of phone calls and searching for documents and showing up at the doors of people who don’t want to talk — paired with the pushing-a-boulder-up-a-mountain quality of trying to work while parenting. Specifically, I think, of trying to work while being the mother of in Megan’s case a new baby and in Jodi’s case two young kids. The limitations, the constant sense of being behind and running late and keeping it all together with tape. At one point Jodi gets a pivotal call and, to get the time and quiet to have the conversation, she essentially bribes her daughter with Netflix time. That moment felt incredibly well done and true to life, as do scenes where Megan tries to find her work self again while swimming through her postpartum struggles. It captures the “backwards and in heels” aspect of what was involved for these two specific reporters to work this investigation and goes to the movie’s larger themes about women, the situations they have to deal with and the choices they make.

When the movie just lets itself be about this, about the work and Jodi and Megan and the way they try to honestly foster relationships with the women hurt by Weinstein without over-promising or being false about their motivations, She Said is absolutely riveting. The core duo of Mulligan and Kazan bring a lot that is unsaid to their characters, with facial expressions and little moments that fill their characters out and make them people. Mulligan even gets one really good explosion, a “had it with All Of This” moment, that is just a chef’s kiss. Clarkson is also solid; I wish she’d had even more to do.

She Said occasionally seems to get tangled up in the needs of a conventional movie versus the still-developing story that its characters are enmeshed in. But when it works, when its elements all come together, it’s thoroughly captivating.

Featured photo: She Said.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (PG-13)

Marvel says goodbye to Chadwick Boseman, his T’Challa and his version of Black Panther while expanding the ideas of Wakanda and its place in the world in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, a lovely, complex entry in the more thoughtful side of the MCU.

The movie opens on a desperate Shuri (Letitia Wright), sister to King T’Challa and Wakanda’s scientific genius, trying to save an off-screen T’Challa who is dying from illness. His death seems to not only shake her emotionally but sever some connection to her culture and family’s sense of spirituality. She sinks into extreme rationality and guilt about not being able to cure her brother.

We jump forward a year, when Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett) has become Wakanda’s leader. With T’Challa dead and the country’s Black Panther protector gone (the flowers that make new Black Panthers were destroyed by Michael B. Jordan’s Killmonger in the first movie), Ramonda has to fight off international attempts to obtain the country’s all-powerful element, vibranium. At the United Nations, Ramonda endures the insincere disappointment by Western countries who want Wakanda to willingly share (or just give up) their vibranium — while at the same time those countries try to steal vibranium via military raids.

Plan B when Wakanda’s Dora Milaje (the country’s army of female warriors) prove to be more than equal to fighting off those raids is for Western nations to find their own vibranium elsewhere. A machine designed by Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne), the Shuri-level genius who is still a college student in Boston, looks for vibranium in the oceans — and finds it in the Atlantic. But much like other things “discovered” by Western nations, this vibranium has been long claimed by another nation.

K’uk’ulkan, also called Namor (Tenoch Huerta Mejía), is the king of a people who live in Talokan, a nation under the ocean. Once living in Central America, the Talokanian ancestors escaped the colonizing Spanish and their diseases with the help of a plant that, similar to the flower Wakanda used for Black Panthers, offered extraordinary strength and an ability to live under the water. The people moved into the sea where their vibranium-dependent city has kept them safe for centuries. But now that the wider world knows about vibranium and its potential, Talokan is at risk and Namor blames Wakanda and T’Challa’s push for openness.

I like how this movie can be both about T’Challa and the grief over his (and Boseman’s) loss and about the unintended consequences of his response to Killmonger’s argument that the prosperous and powerful Wakanda owes something to the oppressed elsewhere in the world. Like Wakanda before the first movie, Talokan has chosen to hide its power from the rest of the world in response to colonialism and theft of resources. But Wakanda’s openness has made Talokan vulnerable. Does this make them natural allies, natural enemies or something else? I rewatched a bit of 2018’s Black Panther and that movie has a well-defined purpose and clarity of mission that this movie doesn’t. But this movie’s murkiness largely works, as some of the questions here are just messier and the overall story feels more contemplative.

Of course, we get great performances all the way around — including from returning players Danai Gueria, as the badass Dora Milaje general; Lupita Nyong’o as Nakia, who has been working as a school headmistress in Haiti, and Winston Duke as M’Baku, the leader of a Wakandan tribe. Bassett and Wright do an excellent job of giving us the weight of grief — a weight they each carry in a different way. Mejía offers a nuanced Namor — not a villain but not a saint either. The movie’s actual villains — represented by someone who I guess is one of the Disney+ Marvel TV show characters (it’s hard to keep up) — are the predatory U.S. and European powers and their plans for vibranium, which don’t seem great based on the CIA director’s near cackled “I dream about it,” a response to the question of what the U.S. would do if it had vibranium.

Namor isn’t quite the electrifying antagonist Killmonger was and, though cool, the watery Mesoamerican wonderland of Talokan isn’t quite as thrilling as the Afro-futurism of Wakanda (as with Aquaman’s Atlantis in the DC universe, making bright and majestic-looking stuff under water is just tough). And, despite its two-hour-and-41-minute runtime, there is a slight “sudden stop” quality to the movie’s final conflict (perhaps because of the nature of “the true villain is colonialism”). Wakanda Forever is nevertheless a deeply touching movie that holds your attention with enough Dora Milaje fighting action to add some pep. A-

Rated PG-13 for sequences of strong violence, action and some language, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Ryan Coogler with a screenplay by Ryan Coogler & Joe Robert Cole, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is two hours and 41 minutes long and is distributed in theaters by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.

Featured photo: Wakanda Forever.

Enola Holmes 2 (PG-13)

The case-solving younger sister of Sherlock Holmes returns in Enola Holmes 2, a very satisfying second chapter of this story.

Enola (Millie Bobby Brown) is trying to break out as a working detective on her own but her would-be clients seem surprised to see how young and female she is — is her brother (Henry Cavill) available? Just as she’s about to abandon Victorian London to return to the family home in the country, young girl Bessie (Serrana Su-Ling Bliss) shows up to hire Enola to search for her sister. Sarah Chapman (Hannah Dodd), a big sister-type whom Bessie lived with and worked at the match factory with, has gone missing, and Bessie dearly wants her back. Enola quickly takes the case, going undercover at the factory and trying to figure out what secrets Sarah had uncovered just before she disappeared.

As Enola digs into her case, Sherlock has a stumper of his own, and the two frequently cross paths, especially once Enola gets tangled up in the death of another matchgirl.

And then there’s Tewkesbury (Louis Patridge), the noble Enola befriended during her search for her vanished mother, Eudoria Holmes (Helena Bonham Carter) in the first movie (Eudora, you may remember, turned out to be a suffragette who had been cleverly siphoning family money to pay for the cause). Tewkesbury is now a progressive member of the House of Lords. Enola might not return his letters but she has been watching him walk to Parliament fairly regularly even if she won’t admit to having more than friend-y feelings for him.

Enola Holmes 2 is a big, yummy slice of cake — pretty and tasty frosting, lots of flavorful sponge and a thin layer of tartness in between the layers. There is actual there there in terms of the history — a real Sarah Chapman organized a strike of matchgirls over working conditions in 1888. And we have nice further development in terms of character relationships — Enola and Sherlock’s oddballs-with-mutal-respect-and-affection, Enola and Eudoria’s daughter-mother bond, Enola and Tewkesbury’s growing romance. We also get the beginnings of some canonically important Sherlock relationships as well, one with a really nice bit of backstory. It’s all well drawn, with each mini story getting just enough depth, just enough little moments that we can enjoy the characters as well as their adventure.

Brown remains the excellent star at the center of this solar system. She makes Enola plucky without being cartoonish and believable in her blend of confidence and occasional moments of uncertainty.

It was a joy to get to know these characters in the first movie and just as much fun to revisit them. I don’t usually say this but here’s hoping for Enola Holmes 3. A

Rated PG-13 for some violence and bloody images, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Harry Bradbeer with a screenplay by Jack Thorne (based on the books by Nancy Springer), Enola Holmes 2 is two hours and 10 minutes long and is available on Netflix.

Weird: The Al Yankovic Story (TV-14)

Weird Al Yankovic gets a — biopic I guess? with the excellent Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, which is streaming on the Roku Channel of all places, a fact which is kind of perfect, tonally.

Little Alfie Yankovic (Richard Aaron Anderson as a kid, David Bloom as a teen and a super game Daniel Radcliffe as an adult) grew up loving Mad magazine and the Dr. Demento (Rainn Wilson) radio show and sneaking Hawaiian shirts. His parents (Julianne Nicholson, Toby Huss) just wanted him to stop doing all the things he wanted to do and being the way he was so he could grow up and get a sensible job at the factory, like Al’s dad. But Al fell in love with the accordion and dreamed of one day writing his own lyrics for other people’s songs. Even after getting caught at a polka party as a teen — you know how teens like to peer pressure each other into playing polka — and incurring his father’s extreme wrath, Al never gave up. He moved out and started playing his music for audiences and eventually saw enormous success, even when he moved from parodies to writing completely and totally original songs, as the movie emphatically and repeatedly states, like “Eat It.”

Other things that happen in Weird Al’s life: He has a passionate relationship with Madonna (Evan Rachel Wood, who is having a blast), he is offered the role as the new James Bond, he sells more albums than The Beatles, he is an international assassin maybe. And through it all, what he really wants is the love of his father, whose violent reaction to accordions comes with a surprising backstory.

Weird is both the dumbest movie I’ve seen in a long time (and I mean that as a compliment) and possibly the only correct way to make a biopic of a living person. It isn’t just Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, it’s Walk Hardest — so committed to its own delightful stupidity that you can’t help sharing in the delight. This movie contains a requisite dark period where Weird Al basically turns into Jim Morrison. There is a running subplot involving Pablo Escobar. There is a Gallagher reference (kids, ask your dorkiest grandparent).Thomas Lennon has a small part as a door-to-door accordion salesman who is basically The Music Man’s Harold Hill. And everybody here, including the oddly buff Daniel Radcliffe, is playing everything absolutely unblinkingly straight. It is marvelous, in that it is a marvel to behold this much unfiltered ridiculousness in one movie, one Roku movie produced by Funny or Die Productions (which made a trailer for a Weird Al biopic as a bit nearly a decade ago).

Everyone here is a delight, from Conan O’Brien as Andy Warhol to Quinta Brunson’s Oprah Winfrey, but it is truly Radcliffe who wins the Just Going For It award. He is earnestly unhinged and it is great. A

Rated TV-14. Directed by Eric Appel and written by Weird Al Yankovic and Eric Appel, Weird: The Al Yankovic Story is an hour and 48 minutes long and is available on the Roku Channel.

Featured photo: Enola Holmes 2

Till (PG-13)

Mamie Till-Mobley, mother of the murdered child Emmett Till, is the focus of Till, a close-up portrait of a woman’s rage and grief.

Mamie Bradley (Danielle Deadwyler), as Till-Mobley (who died in 2003) is known for most of the movie, is worried from the moment she sends her only child, Emmett Till (Jalyn Hall), on a train to visit cousins in 1955 Mississippi. He has grown up in Chicago and even though the city is hardly free of racism, he doesn’t have experience with the dystopian apartheid of the South and the deadly consequences of running afoul of its hellish social conventions.

A sunny, friendly, baby-faced 14-year-old, Emmett seems to be generally enjoying himself with his cousins, even when he’s helping them pick cotton. While at a store buying sweets, he tells the clerk, who we later learn is Carolyn Bryant (Haley Bennett), that she looks like a movie star and later whistles at her. He thinks he’s being charming, we see a sweetly goofy kid, she goes for her gun. A few days go by and he and his cousins think the incident will come to nothing and don’t even tell their parents, Mamie’s uncle (John Douglas Thompson) and aunt (Keisha Tillis). But then men, including Carolyn’s husband, show up at the house and kidnap Emmett while holding his cousins at gunpoint.

When Mamie finds out Emmett is missing, she wants to hurry to Mississippi to find him, but family help her connect with the local chapter of the NAACP and Rayfield Mooty (Kevin Carroll), who tries to get political officials and the media involved in Emmett’s disappearance. When Emmett’s body is found, Mamie, nearly shattered already, insists on having him returned to Chicago and on seeing him. Emmett’s face and head are horribly disfigured and he is bloated from being in a river. Mamie decides that Emmett’s funeral will be open casket and she brings newspaper and magazine photographers in to take pictures of Emmett’s body to show the world what happened to him.

An extended trailer for this movie mentions the fact that we don’t actually see Emmett being murdered — an effective and possibly more emotionally devastating choice. While the movie shows us Emmett’s body and what seeing him does to Mamie, other family members and the larger public, it keeps the focus on Mamie, her heartbreak and her relationship with Emmett. The movie never lets us forget that he is a child and he is her child and it doesn’t waste a minute with sensationalizing his lynching or trying to get us to understand his murderers or the society that protects them. That sounds like kind of an obvious thing — that the murdered child and the effect of his murder on his mother would be the center of this story — but it feels so Hollywood-standard for a Civil Rights era movie to filter Black stories through some kind of white character that this “a movie about Mamie that puts Mamie at the center” approach makes Till feel innovative.

And Deadwyler’s performance absolutely holds us in her experience throughout the movie. She puts us in Mamie’s emotions, from the worry and dread that come with sending Emmett to Mississippi through the ocean of grief after his death and the anger that I think would completely consume most people. It’s not always easy (I think especially if you have kids and can call up worry about them with zero effort) to be with her in that headspace, but it is so well done, her feelings are so well examined and shown (not told), that when characters praise her out loud it almost feels unnecessary. Just making it through the day as a woman who has lost so much seems like an exceptional feat — and this movie makes us feel the effort this requires of her. When we see her doing so while being able to serve as an advocate for justice, Mamie displays an almost superhuman strength. A

Rated PG-13 for thematic content involving racism, strong disturbing images and racial slurs, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Chinonye Chukwu and written by Michael Reilly & Keith Beauchamp and Chinonye Chukwu, Till is two hours and 10 minutes long and distributed in theaters by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures.

Featured photo: Danielle Deadwyler and Jalyn Hall in Till.