Category: Film Reviews by Amy

The 40-Year-Old Version (R)

A nearly 40-year-old playwright feels stuck in her career and is facing life turmoil in The 40-Year-Old Version, a delightful comedy on Netflix.

Radha (Radha Blank, who also wrote and directed this movie) won a playwrights’ “30 under 30” award — but that was more than a decade ago. Now she’s pushing 40 and still struggling to “make it,” paying the bills by teaching a play-writing class to teens. She begs her best friend and agent Archie (Peter Kim) to get her most recent play, Harlem Ave., a shot at being produced by someone who will pay serious money. He gets her an invitation to a party to meet with J. Whitman (Reed Birney), a producer with cash but with a history of preferring stories that are what Radha calls “poverty porn.”

While Archie struggles to foster a Whitman/Radha partnership after their initial bumpy meeting — things take a turn when Whitman suggests Radha write his planned Harriet Tubman musical — a creatively wrung-out Radha considers returning to her teenage writing roots: hip-hop. She finds D (Oswin Benjamin) to make the beats to go with her lyrics and records a track, hoping to build the project into a mix tape. She might be hesitant, a bit rusty, but Radha clearly gets something from working on rhymes that she isn’t getting from her other work. D sees something special in her work and invites her to join in at an open-mic night. He also, a-hem, sees something special in her and while Radha clearly feels their age difference (he’s 26), she is also drawn to this quiet artist.

We see Radha blossom with rap; it seems to give her a way to express her frustrations and feelings that she can’t do in her other jobs. But she struggles with the urge to “stay in my lane” as she explains at one point. There is money and opportunity in letting J. Whitman and the white director he picks essentially gentrify her Black-characters-focused play about Harlem. But the rawer, more honest stories she tells in her lyrics are not a path to career stability — or even a clear path to career fulfillment, as we see Radha doubt herself even with this medium she enjoys.

And through all of this, we see her avoid calls from her brother who is cleaning out their mother’s apartment. Herself an artist, Radha’s mother recently died and clearly Radha is still figuring out how to handle this.

This movie is deeply charming. Without reminding me of any specific film, it gave me serious mid-1990s indie movie vibes. Like some of those movies, this one has occasional rough edges — but not many, and the overall tight focus of the story and understanding of its central character makes up for any flaws. The 40-Year-Old Version, with its scenes of walking and talking and its central character filled with relatable frustration and weary humor, is lovely. This movie is full of nice detail-moments that help build the real world of who Radha is and what it means to her to be almost 40.

The way we see Radha — presented as someone who is smart and talented but also grieving and struggling — work through this life rut is really engaging. Radha Blank, the real-life actress, is a magnetic person who can convey a lot with just her face (a few times she looks directly at the camera and the moments are not just nice comic beats but also create a real kinship with the viewer). She makes Radha, the character, feel like a fully formed real person, which makes her difficulties and her moments of happiness hit harder. A-

Rated R for pervasive language, sexual content, some drug use and brief nudity, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Written and directed by Radha Blank, The 40-Year-Old Version is two hours and four minutes long and distributed on Netflix.

Ava (R)

A lady assassin dealing with personal issues must keep herself from becoming the next target in Ava, a pretty amazing trainwreck of a movie.

Ava (Jessica Chastain) is an assassin who wears wigs and does some very stagey flirting to try to put her subjects at ease and then kills them totally professionally — she can make it look like an accident or natural causes or whatever because she is That Good. Except that she has developed this little quirk where she talks to them first, asks them why they think somebody wants them dead, what they did wrong.

I’m going to spoil something right here: I thought that maybe this was going to be a whole long-game thing where she, a cog in the murder machine, was gathering evidence that she’d eventually use for something — power, a way out of The Life, something like that. Nope! It’s just a dumb character element that is supposed to show, I guess, that she’s fraying around the edges, psychologically, and that even though she’s a professional hit woman she needs to believe there’s some kind of morality to what she’s doing. But, whatever the intention, it really just makes her seem like maybe she got this job yesterday.

The big boss at MurderCorp (not really its name, sadly), Simon (Colin Farrell), is not cool with her being so chatty. He tells middle-manager Duke (John Malkovich, taking this stuff a little more seriously than it needs to be taken) to get her in line but we know, because we’ve seen TV and movies before, that Simon has already decided to off-board her from the organization and has planned an exit package that involves getting her killed during her next job.

But Ava is a real crackerjack at killing henchmen so she survives. Duke tells her to take some time off so she heads to Boston to reconnect with her family: her angry younger sister Judy (Jess Weixler), her angry younger sister’s boyfriend/Ava’s ex Michael (Common) and her mom, with whom she has a prickly relationship, Bobbi (Geena Davis). Ava is also dealing with the struggle to stay sober — she had struggles with drugs and alcohol — which the movie doesn’t really know how to deal with and just kind of throws into a scene when it needs to serious-up a situation. Also, Ava has some sort of past with a lady gangster-type called Toni (Joan Chen) — she was a mentor? A buddy? An employer? — and the movie super doesn’t know what to do with that. I think Ava just shoves that plot line in so that Chastain and Common can be in a fight scene together.

Ava has the building blocks of a decent action movie: a solid cast, a basically workable story in the whole assassin dealing with Stuff both personal and professional, some solid ideas for action set pieces. And yet this movie feels like, in every scene, with every wonky acting choice or stilted bit of dialogue, everybody involved got together and said “what are the worst choices we could make here” and then they did that, went in those bafflingly bad directions. Even the score is weird and terrible — it feels like a low-budget 1980s action TV show but in, like, a bad way (versus, say, the series Cobra Kai, which also uses 1980s action TV show music and it’s awesome).

When thinking about this movie, I keep wanting to call it Anna, which is the name of a different dumb, lady-assasin action movie (from 2019). But that movie knows what it is. It leans in to its accents and improbable fight scenes and general goofiness. Ava could have been that too, expect, yikes, is it trying to say something about addiction? No, movie, you are not the movie for that. This is not the sort of movie where we need to take anything or anyone seriously. This is the sort of movie where everybody should be having so much fun it doesn’t matter when elements don’t make sense.

All that said, this movie is basically what I set out for when I decided to watch it: a no-effort action movie where Jessica Chastain beats people up. So I guess, until this movie ends up on some place like Neftlix where watching it costs no additional effort or money, the question is, is it worth the $6.99 rental fee? No, but if you ever see it available for 99 cents and have absolutely nothing else to do … maybe? C-

Rated R for violence and language throughout, and brief sexual material, according to the MPA on film ratings.com. Directed by Tate Taylor with a screenplay by Matthew Newton, Ava is an hour and 36 minutes long and distributed by Vertical Entertainment. It is available for rent.

Vampires vs. the Bronx (PG-13)

A group of young teens must fight a coven of real estate developers who are also vampires in Vampires vs. Bronx, a cute action/comedy/horror movie.

Miguel (Jaden Michael), Bobby (Gerald Jones III) and Luis (Gregory Diaz IV) basically grew up hanging out at the neighborhood bodega run by Tony (The Kid Mero) in the Bronx. Now Tony’s landlord is trying to raise the rent as area building- and business-owners are selling out to a real estate firm called Murnau (a name that drove me nuts until some Googling reminded me that it’s the last name of the director of 1922’s Nosferatu). In come the people with the canvas bags and the kale and the expensive lattes and out go the neighborhood stalwarts — like the nail salon run by Becky (Zoe Saldana), whom we meet in the movie’s opening scenes. Miguel tries at least to save the bodega with a block party to raise money to pay for the rent increase.

While biking through the neighborhood hanging up signs for the party, he witnesses one of the people from a Murnau property kill a guy from the neighborhood — well, first put him in a trance and then lift him up in the air as he drains the man of his blood. Vampires, Miguel tells Tony and his friends, Murnau isn’t just a group of real estate developers, they’re also vampires! The kids don’t completely believe him but they study up on vampire lore with help from the movie Blade and set out to prove that the undead walk (and gentrify) among us.

Though I’d definitely peg this at PG-13 and there is a fair amount of death and threatening of children in this movie (Miguel and his friends are teens I guess but read as, like, 10-year-olds) Vampires vs. the Bronx is very cute. There’s a plucky “save the community!” spirit to both Miguel’s quest to save the bodega and keep his neighborhood together and to his quest to find and defeat the vampires. The movie has a light touch even when it’s making a serious point, and is funny and smart (smart all the way around — in its humor, in the way it uses its vampire special effects). And it is narrowly focused on its central story with all the details serving that one storyline, which makes it feel like the movie is doing more than just its hour and 25 minutes would suggest. B+

Rated PG-13 for violence, language and some suggestive references, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Osmany Rodriguez and written by Rodriguez and Blaise Hemmingway, Vampires vs. the Bronx is an hour and 25 minutes long and is available on Netflix.

Enola Holmes (PG-13)

The 16-year-old little sister to Mycroft and Sherlock Holmes searches for their vanished mother in Enola Holmes, a light, fun mystery action romp with a sweet mother/daughter story wrapped in a cute take on the Sherlock Holmes-y characters.

Enola (Millie Bobby Brown) has grown up on the Holmes’ family’s estate, Ferndell Hall, with no real memory of her father, who died when she was little, or her two older brothers, Mycroft (Sam Claflin) and Sherlock (Henry Cavill), who moved to London shortly thereafter. She has spent most of her time with her mother, the free-spirited Eudoria Holmes (Helena Bonham Carter), who taught her jujitsu, chess, chemistry and a love of puzzles and mysteries. Eudoria also played tennis with Enola in the study, home-schooled her and apparently bilked a fair amount of money out of Mycroft, who is shocked to learn that the carriages and footmen and music teachers he had sent money for don’t exist.

Mycroft and Sherlock, who at this point is near the beginning of his career as a famous detective, return to Ferndell Hall after Enola wakes up on her 16th birthday to discover that Eudoria has disappeared. Enola seems genuinely excited to see her brothers, especially Sherlock, but is horrified to learn that Mycroft intends to send her to a finishing school and help her to become a true lady who will marry well and not embarrass her brothers. Enola likes no part of his plans and so, using a few clues her mother left her, a Sherlockian ability for deduction and a plucky can-do spirit, she sets out on a quest to find her mother. Along the way, she finds herself tangled up in the similar escape of a young marquess, Tewksbury (Louis Partridge), who is just smart enough and just floppy-haired enough to make the “blech, marriage” Enola feel teen-girl-ishly around him and want to help him.

Sherlock and Mycroft are very much side characters here but this is still a very Sherlocky kind of story, with a bit of fun visual “parsing the clues” stuff and a bouncy score that calls to mind, without copying, previous Sherlock music. Enola is a fun character to be around; quirky and assured in the way you’d expect a Holmes to be (especially one raised by a mother who, gasp, supports votes for women!) but also enough of a real person, especially when it comes to the relationship with her mother. Brown, whose Enola talks to us a fair amount, sells it all, makes it all feel like it’s coming from someone smart but still young and finding her footing.

This take on Sherlock and Mycroft are interesting as well; this is, at least I think we can infer, Sherlock before Watson, a person still more prone to push people away than draw them into his orbit. This Mycroft is also a kind of fascinating study of the character. In other recent versions of the story, he is often very Establishment and realpolitik but with a soft spot for his brother. Here he is rigid to the point of cruelty — which is maybe not a bad way to have the character start out. And Bonham Carter is clearly having a blast, which is always fun to watch.

Enola Holmes is buoyant and enjoyable — and offers a fun mystery. B+

Rated PG-13 for some violence, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Harry Bradbeer with a screenplay by Jack Thorne (from a novel by Nancy Springer), Enola Holmes is two hours and 3 minutes long and is distributed via Netflix.

Antebellum (R)

Janelle Monáe gives a good performance in the murky, underdeveloped Antebellum.

I don’t think I can avoid spoiling some of this movie’s plot. As others have noted, Antebellum takes 35-ish minutes to tell you something that you know going in if you have seen its trailers (which IndieWire says were first released in November 2019). If you want to see Antebellum innocent of spoilers, my advice is to wait for it to be cheaper than $19.99 to rent; despite the strong central performance by Monáe, there are a lot of elements to this movie that just don’t gel for me. I mean, that’s my advice for everybody but skip the rest of this if you don’t want to know more.

The spoilers start with the main character’s name. When we first see Janelle Monáe’s character, a man tortures her to get her to say her name is Eden. It is actually, we later learn, Veronica. Veronica is trapped at a plantation where violent men in Confederate uniforms run weird “military” drills and otherwise spend their time forcing captives (a few dozen people maybe, all African American, I think) to pick cotton and not talk. The only “civilians” here are Elizabeth (Jena Malone) — the daughter of the plantation’s owner (Eric Lange) and the wife, probably, of a “soldier” (Jack Huston) — and her young daughter.

This opening third of the movie drops details that suggest what we finally learn when we get to a flashback: Veronica is a present-day, successful and well-known author and speaker about race and gender. She engages in the familiar struggle to balance her family life, with her husband (Marque Richardson) and their young daughter (London Boyce), with her career which occasionally takes her away from home. We see her travel to a conference to speak and promote her book and then enjoy a dinner with friends (Gabourey Sidibe, who is So Fun here, and Lily Cowles). Her success affords her luxuries — a private yoga trainer, a high-end hotel suite — but it doesn’t shield her from racism, such as a brief encounter with a weirdly hostile hotel clerk or dismissive treatment at a restaurant.

So, persistent and pervasive racism in the modern day; a nightmarishly horrifying race-based system of enslavement from the past. The movie presents these two things (in detail) but I’m not sure what it’s saying about how they connect: maybe that the human evil that allowed for the horrors of the past isn’t gone but just barely hidden, still peeking out in small ways and waiting to be reanimated? Something like that? We get terrible evil and workaday evil but the wires between the two don’t completely connect, the “thoughts and ideas” element doesn’t illuminate and come to life. Because this movie graphically portrays the violence and despair of slavery, I felt like it needs to say something clearly, something beyond just “this is bad” and “the perpetrators are evil” (and “the perpetrators” as presented are either “these bad guys in this narrow outlandish circumstance” or “those bad people long ago” which prevents the movie from saying something more pointed about race in modern America). Slavery is a cataclysm that our country is still grappling with (and not) in key life-and-death ways but here it’s ultimately the backdrop for standard horror story beats.

Monáe’s brings more to this movie than seems to be on the page. We dive right into her character when she is in the middle of the nightmare situation. She says and does things that make sense at the time you’re watching them and more sense later on and hang together with the Veronica we meet in the flashback. It’s a demonstration of what a strong actress Monáe is and how good she is at portraying a whole complex person in small moments.

I feel like this movie wants to sit on the shelf with “horror but more” movies like Get Out and The Invisible Man and present itself as art that talks about race and gender while giving us a scary story. But this movie doesn’t deliver on the “more.” C+

Rated R for disturbing violent content, language and sexual references, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Written and directed by Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz, Antebellum is an hour and 45 minutes long and is distributed by Lionsgate. It is available for rental for $19.99.

Unpregnant (PG-13)

Two friends hit the road in search of an abortion clinic in Unpregnant, a sweet road trip comedy.

Seventeen-year-old Veronica (Haley Lu Richardson) finds out she’s pregnant. She can’t tell her group of best friends — or her very Catholic parents — for fear of their reactions. She tells her boyfriend, Kevin (Alex MacNicoll), but his response is to propose — and tell her too belatedly about a mishap with their birth control. Helpfully, though, he does give her a ring, which she pawns to help fund her planned-to-the-minute, two-and-a-half-day trip to New Mexico, the location of the closest clinic open to parentally-unaccompanied teenagers for this Missouri resident. But she needs a car and someone to be with her at the clinic.

Enter Bailey (Barbie Ferreira).

Bailey and Veronica were once best friends but had a falling out before high school. Bailey happened to walk into the girls bathroom just as Veronica learned the results of her pregnancy test and she owns a car. Despite their difficulties, Veronica feels Bailey is the only person she can get help from. The two set out on Friday night with Veronica having carefully scheduled a trip that will get them back by Sunday night, with her parents never knowing where she was. Naturally, things very quickly go awry.

Bailey and Veronica have a friendship that reminded me a lot of the Beanie Feldstein and Kaitlyn Dever friendship in Booksmart (and the Richardson and Hailee Steinfeld friendship in The Edge of Seventeen, which is the first place I think I saw Richardson, who continues to be an extremely promising young actress). I appreciated how this movie, like those movies, gets to some of what can pull close female friendships apart in their teens, as they’re figuring out who they are and how to deal with the world around them, but then also how nobody is the onehigh school stereotype they appear to be.

The girls’ relationship takes this movie to a really sweet place, which both is and isn’t jarring with the core story of a girl needing an abortion and a system that has turned a health care situation into an adventure quest. Never Rarely Sometimes Always, the excellent and terrifying movie from earlier this year with roughly the same story line, is the too-real dramatic version of this tale. There, the girls’ money woes and the distance they need to travel heighten the constant danger. Watching that movie was an edge-of-your-seat anxiety trip that I am happy to discuss (say, at Oscar season!) but don’t think I want to experience again. Here, there are money woes and long-distance travel and some of the people are still jerks but there’s a lightness (the problems are often setups for comedy situations; the girls also meet good people along the way) and a sunniness as the girls’ friendship is rekindled. And yet, both movies end up at a well-crafted indictment of the political situation that makes the premises possible. All that and Giancarlo Esposito singing a few bars of “Since You’ve Been Gone”? HBOMax earns its keep for another month. B

Rated PG-13 for mature thematic content, sexual content, strong language and some drug references, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Rachel Lee Goldenberg with a screenplay by Rachel Lee Goldenberg, Bill Parker, Jenni Hendriks, Jennifer Kaytin Robinson and Ted Caplan (based on a novel by the same name by Hendriks and Caplan), Unpregnant is an hour and 43 minutes long and is distributed by Warner Brothers Pictures and is available on HBOMax

A young woman becomes a warrior in Mulan, a very pretty, vaguely unsatisfying live-action remake of Disney’s 1998 animated movie.

From the time she is a little girl, the Force is strong with Mulan (Liu Yifei), who is expected to do girly things like be calm and put up with the matchmaker but would prefer to ride horses and sword fight. Her father (Tzi Ma) sees that Mulan has a strong life force (treated here as near superhuman agility and dexterity) but tells her to hide it because these skills aren’t something anybody has on their wife-qualities wish list.

But then invaders attack the empire and the emperor (Jet Li) tells his army to conscript one man from every family. This means Mulan’s dad must march into battle, since his only children are Mulan and her sister (Xana Tang). Mulan’s mother (Rosalind Cho) tells the girls that their father, who still has a leg injury from his previous military service, won’t live through this battle, so Mulan takes his sword and his armor and sneaks off herself, posing as a boy and immediately volunteering for nighttime guard duty so she can avoid showering with the guys, especially friend and competitor Honghui (Yoson An).

The invaders they’re training to fight are led by Bori Khan (Jason Scott Lee), a jerk, and Xianniang (Li Gong), a witch who is helping Bori Khan despite the fact that he is a super jerk to her, a witch, with all sorts of powers that would seem to make Bori Khan unnecessary to her goals.

And as I’m writing this, “super-soldier versus witch” sounds like a fun fantasy action tale but that pared down description is way more interesting than the movie we are given.

Mulan is beautiful to look at — eye-catching color and detail-rich when it comes to costumes, cinematography and production design. There are so many moments when I was ignoring the story and just taking in the shot of the Imperial City or a lone rider in the desert. This movie’s visuals are Oscar-worthy work and it will be interesting to see if top shelf work that went the home viewing distribution route gets the same award season consideration as theatrical releases.

Mulan’s visuals and my total lack of a connection to the 1998 animated movie probably resulted in my enjoying the experience of watching this movie more than I would based on story alone. This movie reminded me a bit of 2017’s Beauty and the Beast, where you could feel it trying to update-for-2020 elements of the story with mixed results. Mulan pushes romance to the very edge of the story (which is fine) and sets up a theme of “take your place” versus “know your place,” a promising idea that at times is presented clunkily, as though there is still some first-draft-iness that needs to be worked out. Xianniang and Mulan become the center of the story’s struggle and they meet a few times and trade extremely straightforward dialogue on their respective motivations. I feel like the movie hadn’t totally figured out what it wanted to say with these two characters and their different (sort of?) approaches to being powerful women in a man’s world. The result is an arc for Mulan that feels underwhelming and not as well developed as I’d expect for such an established character.

That said, the viewers Mulan is meant for (probably kids of about age 10 to 15 or 16; Common Sense Media gives it an age 11+) will be getting a decent, non-gory action movie in exchange for their $30. Liu Yifei is a solid enough lead who carries off the acrobatics of her fight scenes well; they are probably the most joyful scenes of the movie. And, while not quite the experience of seeing, say, a battlefield avalanche on the big screen, the movie is visually stunning enough to transcend even the limitations of a medium-sized TV. B-

Film Reviews by Amy Diaz

John David Washington is exactly the A-list blend of dramatic gravitas and action chops that he appeared to be in BlacKkKlansman and watching him is the best part of Tenet, Christopher Nolan’s two-and-a-half-hour movie that has been saddled with the job of Saving Movie Theaters.

Will it save movies? According to Variety on Sept. 6, Tenet made a little over $20 million during Labor Day weekend in the U.S. and was at a worldwide total of around $146 million (it opened internationally before it hit screens in the U.S.). When I saw the movie on Sept. 1, I was one of six people in the screening room (which is actually not terrible for a mid-week 6 p.m. movie, based on my experience). So … we’ll see?

About the movie itself: I’ll try not to spoil anything major, but I don’t promise anything, partly because I’m not entirely sure what would be a spoiler. The most basic description for this movie I’ve seen is something like “spy action with sci-fi elements.” To me, it falls in the “Christopher Nolan genre”: There’s a lot of deep bass “wahm wahm”-ing on the score, there’s a pervading sense of doom, there’s a fun Michael Caine scene.

Washington, whose character doesn’t have a name (I didn’t notice that while I was watching it but searching around afterward everything just calls him The Protagonist, which is how he refers to himself a few times), is a CIA-or-something agent whom we first meet while he’s on a mission in the Ukraine. The mission goes sideways but, after some torture and stuff, he is rescued and told he is now part of an even more secret mission, one he is given very little information about other than the word “tenet” and a little fingers-clasp-y gesture.

He partners with Neil (Robert Pattinson), a British intelligence operative, who helps him unravel the origins of some strange weapons he first saw in Ukraine. The movie becomes a series of heists: get into this impregnable place to meet this person, weasel into the orbit of this other person, steal this thing from this other impregnable place, etc, all leading up to a big battle.

The deeper we get into this movie the more I started to see its similarities to the Bill & Ted movies; there’s a fair amount of “because phone-booth time machine, just go with it” (though, strictly speaking, Tenet isn’t about time travel in the phone-booth sense). And I’m OK with that. I don’t need to see the math — one of the flaws of this movie is that it does a little too much trying to explain the math to us. Basically, the core idea of Tenet is based on a cool visual effect. It’s pretty cool the first time you see it and pretty cool throughout. If sliced down to its central elements, a pretty cool visual effect, a very compelling performance by its lead (Washington) and interesting chemistry in the core partnership (Washington and Pattinson, who does solid work here), Tenet has good bones.

But.

But the movie is at least 45 minutes longer than it needs to be. I get it — cool effect, look at all the ways we can use it. It gets exhausting after a while, especially in the final fight sequence, where I understood, in the macro sense, what was happening, but in the second-to-second sense it was frequently all a jumble of Stuff. I feel like we’re watching the same trick too many times and the more mechanics and repetition are piled on, the more the central performances and the urgency get lost.

Another “but”: I found myself annoyed by the handling of a character played by Elizabeth Debicki. I like Debicki (see also Widows) but there are a lot of irritating choices made with her. I don’t know that any of the Tenet characters act like recognizable humans but there are really only two female characters of any consequence and this one feels like she was written by an alien who has never met a woman.

The experience of watching Tenet was strange; I felt myself constantly alternating between thinking “ugh, enough, movie” and thinking “huh, cool.” The movie feels very self-aware, which I think is on purpose, but it is a little too impressed with its own cleverness. B-

Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action, some suggestive references and brief strong language, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Written and directed by Christopher Nolan, Tenet is two whole hours and then another 30 minutes on top of that and is distributed by Warner Bros. In theaters