Category: Film Reviews by Amy

Orion and the Dark (TV-Y7)

Voices of Paul Walter Hauser, Jacob Tremblay.

Based on the book of the same name by Emma Yarlett, this animated movie tells the story of Orion (Tremblay), an 11-year-old boy who is afraid of so many things — murder clowns, cell phone radiation, aging planetarium displays, girls, people in general, Sally a girl in his class in particular and especially dark. He plugs in half a dozen night lights and begs his parents to leave the door open but if his room goes dark he screams.

Enough with the screaming, says Dark (voice of Hauser). A large cloaked yet sort of cuddly entity, Dark is tired of being hated by everybody but he is especially tired of hearing Orion yell and scream every night. So he decides that the best way to help Orion conquer his fear of the dark — and of Dark — is to take Orion with him for a 24-hour trip around the world. Dark introduces Orion to other nighttime entities: Insomnia (voice of Nat Faxon), Unexplained Noises (Golda Rosheuvel), Quiet (Aparna Nancheria), Sleep (Natasia Demetriou) and Sweet Dreams (voice of Angela Bassett). Some of their tasks are a little odd — Unexplained Noises decide that a crash with a hint of scraping is what’s needed outside one house — but they are part of the rhythms of life. And they have to keep going so that Light (voice of Ike Barinholtz) doesn’t overtake them. Light would knock Dark out of existence.

As Orion travels with Dark and friends, he slowly and sometimes indirectly overcomes or at least faces a variety of fears. The Dark — like other things in life — can be scary and sometimes we will be afraid but we have to keep going and not let fear itself overtake us, is generally the message here. But the movie makes its points with a swirl of sweetness and cleverness that, in a particularly Charlie Kaufman way (he is the screenwriter), lets the story comment on itself. The result is a story full of fun cartoony kid adventure but nice moments for adults as well. B+ Netflix

Self Reliance (R)

Jake Johnson, Anna Kendrick.

Johnson also wrote and directed this dark comedy. Tommy plays a familiar Johnson character — sort of loveable shell-shocked goober in a life funk. He recently ended a two-decade-plus relationship and now lives with his mom, working a job that appears to barely keep him awake. Walking home from work one day, Tommy sees a limo pull up next to him with Andy Samberg (Andy Samberg) in the back. Andy, reading a script, offers Tommy a chance to compete in a dark web reality show. As he learns when he talks to the show’s creators, all Tommy has to do is stay alive for the next 30 days and he’ll win a million dollars. The catch is that other people — hunters — will be trying to kill him. The loophole is that he can’t be killed if he’s with other people. Tommy decides that not only does the loophole make the game winnable, it might actually be the reason to compete, so he says yes.

He explains to his mother (an excellent Nancy Lenehan, who at one point refers to “Sandy Amberg,” which is maybe my favorite part of the movie), sisters (Mary Holland, Emily Hampshire) and brother-in-law (Daryl L. Johnson) that they will need to trade off being with him around the clock to make it work. His family thinks he’s nuts and says absolutely not, leading Jake to hire a random guy he calls James (Biff Wiff) to follow him around. He also posts a call for someone to hang with on Craigslist — which is how he meets Maddy (Kendrick), who explains she’s also playing the game.

The movie quickly reaches a point of unhingedness when not only the characters, including Tommy, but we in the audience are not sure if Tommy is really competing for a million dollars or if he is in the midst of some kind of serious mental breakdown. It is, at times, unsettling but there is something about Johnson and his particular blend of earnestness, nuttiness, kindness and weirdness that makes it all work more often than not. B- Hulu

The Underdoggs (R)

Snoop Dogg, Tika Sumpter.

In The Mighty Ducks/Bad News Bears fashion, onetime football star Jaycen Jennings (Mr. Dogg) winds up coaching a down at the heels, down on its luck Long Beach kiddie football team. Actually, Jaycen is sentenced to do community service picking up poop at a Long Beach park (after crashing his car into a city bus due to unnecessary rage and some truly terrible driving) but when he sees high school sweetheart Cherise (Sumpter) pick up her young son Tre (Jonigan Booth) from the practice, he takes the advice of old friend Kareem (Mike Epps) to volunteer to coach to pull a Mighty Ducks and woo Cherise. Jaycen is at first just as selfish as a coach as he was as a player but slowly he learns about the beauty of teamwork and to truly root for these kids.

The kids in Underdoggs are young enough that this movie, with some slicing away of R-rated material (a lot of language and also weed talk), would make a fun family film. And really that’s what it should be. There’s only so “R “ you can be in an upbeat sports comedy about a kid team and I don’t think the movie benefits from the R-ness enough to make up for losing its natural family-film audience. As it is the movie feels like a fine-minus version of so many sports movies before it. C+ (the + is in part because it introduced me to the fact that Snoop Dogg actually has long supported a youth football league in the L.A. area and there is apparently a Netflix documentary series about it called Coach Snoop) Prime Video

Role Play (R)

Kaley Cuoco, David Oyelowo.

David (Oyelowo) and Emma (Cuoco) have a nice life with two children — Wyatt (Regan Bryan-Gudgeon) and Caroline (Lucia Aliu) — and a suburban house and a marriage that seems solid if a bit flat due to usual work-life balance stuff. Emma returns exhausted from a work trip to realize that the fancy dinner her husband has arranged is in celebration of their anniversary — which she completely forgot about. To spice things up they decide to head into the city and spend a night at a hotel — after first “meeting” in the bar playing the roles of new people, with the flirting etc.

Actually, inventing new identities is easier for Emma than David realizes. Her “work trip” wasn’t to the Midwest to talk to corporate middle managers. She went abroad to do a little light murdering. She works as an assassin, taking a contract or two every few weeks to help pay Raj (Rudi Dharmalingam), her handler who helps keep her image scrubbed from the internet and just generally keep her off the radar of Sovereign, the international assassination concern she used to work for before giving it all up for David and family life.

Before the couple can do their little sexy role play at the bar, Bob (Bill Nighy) buys Emma a drink and comes over to hit on her, drunken businessman style. Except not really, which Emma realizes. Eventually, Emma and David — pretending to be Alice and “Jack Dawson,” because David is bad at fake names — shoo Bob away and have their fancy meal. Later, when David falls asleep in their room, Emma goes to find Bob to deal with him, which doesn’t go as cleanly as she hopes. Soon there is police involvement and Emma is exposed for the secret assassin she really is. David isn’t sure what he believes, but he’s not entirely ready to turn his wife in to Gwen Carver (Connie Nielsen), the woman investigating Emma, who is really named Anna.

Not long ago, Mark Wahlberg starred in a similar super-assassin-turned-family-guy movie The Family Plan. That movie wasn’t great, but it had a more consistently comic tone. Role Play can’t quite decide if it is an action comedy or something darker, a drama with occasional comic hints but also kids in peril. Oyelowo seems to think he is in a comedy, Cuoco seems to think she’s in the darker thing. The actors are engaging enough together but they often seem like they’re operating on different frequencies. C+ Prime Video

Featured photo: Orion and the dark.

A successful writer of spy novels finds herself hunted by real-life spies in Argylle, an action romantic comedy thing that feels more like cool images and parts of ideas pinned to a bulletin board than an actual movie.

The suave, James-Bond-like Agent Argylle (Henry Cavill with just some of the most unfortunate hair ever given to a man so handsome) is on the trail of a hard drive that will expose the Directorate, the super spy organization he works for. Once a good guy organization, the Directorate is now in league with bad guys, and Argylle wants to bring them down.

But Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard), author of four published books and one unfinished book about fictional spy Argylle, is just sort of stuck when it comes to how the last part of Conway’s journey should unfold. On a phone call with her mom (Catherine O’Hara) she explains that her book ends on a cliffhanger. But her mom insists that she needs to finish the story — have Argylle go to London to meet the hacker, get the drive and take down his bosses. Elly tries but eventually Argylle is just standing on an empty page, giving her a confused look (possibly confused about why he would be given such a dumb green velvet-I-think suit and such terrible hair).

Elly decides to take a train to see her parents and is quickly accosted by a long-haired weirdo (Sam Rockwell) who claims to be a fan — well, first he says he’s a fan, then he says he’s a spy and he’s there to protect her. Before she can grab the cat-carrier-backpack containing her cat Archie and run, another “fan” stops at her seat to get an autograph — but the pen is really a stiletto and he seems ready to stab her. Long-hair fights him off and then fights off a series of other would-be kidnappers and/or assassins before grabbing Elly and parachuting her out of the train as it goes over a bridge.

When she awakens in some random cabin, long-hair is now shaven and shorn and says his name is Adrian Wilde. Adrian tells her that he is a spy who, like her characters, needs to find a hard drive to bring down the Division, a super secret spy agency very close to the one she described. The Division is who has sent its operatives after her because it, led by Director Ritter (Bryan Cranston), has read her fifth, unpublished book and wants to know how it ends, believing it will help him find the real-life hacker.

Adrian, looking for the hard drive just like Argylle, takes Elly to London so she can “write” what happens next and help him figure out where the hacker with all the Division-destroying information is. The Division remains hot on their trail, leading to a variety of shootouts and fight scenes and so much slow-mo this movie, played entirely at regular speed, is probably at least 15 minutes shorter.

In addition to Cavill, John Cena, Ariana DeBose and Dua Lipa play characters in Elly’s books, with Samuel L. Jackson and, briefly, Rob Delaney showing up in “real life.”

Argylle is a mess. Just writing the plot description, there are things we learn at the beginning of the movie that actually make no sense with what we learn later on or are just clunky or unnecessary. The movie doesn’t seem to figure out its vibe, maybe ever. It goes from wacky quiet-writer-lady-adventure (similar to Sandra Bullock in The Lost City) to full-on action cartoon like director Matthew Vaughn’s Kingsman movies. I think, based on where this movie goes, maybe more of that cartoony action all the way through would be the way to go here. Instead that shows up just long enough to suggest a more tonally coherent version of this movie but not long enough to make Argylle actually be that version.

There are other problems. Howard is fine I guess, Rockwell is charming — together they are basically sparkless. Cranston feels like he belongs in the cartoonier version of this movie. Here, he feels en-dumb-ened by the movie, like his scary villain boss character, in absence of a more comic-book-y world around him, feels not smart enough for the job we’re supposed to believe he has. O’Hara just feels sort of ill served by everything the movie asks her to do — every scene she’s in had the potential to be funny or fun or weird in that delightful O’Hara way but the movie chooses a direction that just sort of dims her star.

This whole movie has, not potential exactly, but maybe the possibility to have potential. There are ideas that reach “hey, maybe there’s something in that?” stage but don’t go beyond that. As a result, I found myself not really enjoying this movie or even wanting to enjoy it but wishing it was a movie that I could potentially enjoy. C+, with the plus being largely for Sam Rockwell and his dislike of Archie, who looked like a mostly CGI cat, though a cat named Chip (the cat of Vaughn and his wife Claudia Schiffer) is credited on IMDb. (Meanwhile: There is apparently a mid-credits scene, which I did not stay for but read about later, and everything about it sounds exhausting.)

Rated PG-13 because these things are always rated PG-13 but officially for strong violence and action and some strong language, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Matthew Vaughn and written by Jason Fuchs (though the “written by” has its own story, feel free to Google, that somehow pulls in Taylor Swift because I guess everything has a Swiftian element now), Argylle is an unnecessary two hours and 19 minutes long and is distributed in theaters by Universal.

Featured photo: Aargylle.

A writer creates a drunken joke that wins wide acclaim in American Fiction.

Fun note: that’s also kind of the plot to The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes and American Fiction also shares some structural similarities with Weird: The Al Yankovic Story and both those things make me love this movie even more.

We meet author Thelonious Ellison (Jeffrey Wright), called Monk by nearly everybody, as he tangles with a college student (who is white) in the class he’s teaching over assigned readings that use racial epithets. It’s literature of the American South, his prickly explanation goes, if he can get over it so can she. She leaves the class in tears and Monk is called into a meeting with various deans where it’s explained that maybe he should take some mandatory time off. He heads to a book festival in Boston where he finds himself on panel discussion with an audience that could be generously described as a “smattering” of people. He learns his panel is at the same time as an event featuring Sintara Golden (Issa Rae), whose book We’s Lives in Da Ghetto is the hot book of the moment. It’s gritty and real and honest and raw, says everybody. To Monk, it’s a crass money grab by Golden, an Oberlin graduate who works in publishing, who is just feeding white editors and white readers a stereotype of Black life.

Monk’s life frustrations continue as he spends time with his family: his sister Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross) is a busy doctor still recovering financially from her divorce and caring for their widowed mother Agnes (Leslie Uggums), who lives in the family home with longtime housekeeper Lorraine (Myra Lucretia Taylor). Lisa tries to explain that Monk and brother Clifford (Sterling K. Brown), who lives in Tucson (Monk lives in L.A.), haven’t been home enough to realize that their mom seems to be fading in terms of her memory and possibly her ability to live alone. When Lisa suddenly dies, Monk finds himself basically out of work and dealing with a mother who possibly needs very expensive care. With Lisa gone, Clifford struggling after his own divorce and Monk not receiving money, his only hope is his recent book, which agent Arthur (John Ortiz) is struggling to find a publisher for. It’s not “Black enough,” is what Arthur says he’s being told by the publishers, despite Monk’s arguments that he is Black and these are his stories.

Thus does a beleaguered Monk get drunk and get writing. He pens a story called My Pafology (after starting with “My Pathology”) full of every stereotype and flat depiction of hacky portrayals of African American life he can think of, with bad dialogue we see his characters work out in front of him. He jokingly sends it to Arthur and later tells him to send it around as something between a prank and a protest over what publishers seem to think constitutes “Black stories.” Except, of course, a publisher loves it, offers him more money than he’s ever been paid before for a book and quickly there’s talk of a film.

While the book by “Stagg R. Leigh” (Monk’s pen name for his prank) is receiving increasing acclaim (and even FBI interest because Arthur decides on the fly that “Stagg” is a criminal on the run), an ill-at-ease Monk is trying to find the nicest possible assisted living facility for his mom. He’s not delighted that cheeseball producer Wiley Valdespino (just a perfect Adam Brody) is looking to make a movie of his book but he also isn’t in a position to turn down an offer that includes the word “million.”

Of course the horrible thing is going to be the thing that hits — The Producers and 30+ years of the internet have taught us all this — but American Fiction tells this story through the lens of Monk’s late middle-age frustrations at all the things that have not worked out. Monk is funny like a sad three-legged dog, is how Clifford describes him to Coraline (Erika Alexander), the woman Monk starts dating. Jeffrey Wright perfectly captures this, sort of the quality of a guy tangled up in his own sweater and not able to fight his way out. He tries to operate as somebody on a higher plane, somebody who doesn’t see race (as he explains while not getting a cab that instead stops for the white guy half a block away) and doesn’t tolerate Gen Z discomfort. But he is also delightfully petty (attempting to move his books in a chain bookstore and getting into a fight with a college colleague about the quality of the colleague’s “airport novels”) and, as his family points out, is more emotionally detached than evolved. Even his frustrations with Sintara, who he eventually sits on a judging panel with, seem to have as much to do with the fact that she’s successful (and at such a young age, comparatively) as with his feelings about how she found that success.

The comedy of American Fiction is, of course, fun and has its laugh-out-loud moments. But the movie also has a lot of truly poignant little bits about family — the way Monk relates to his siblings, the way the family is still operating with the memory of their father who died years earlier, what it means to become a parent’s caretaker. And it’s all delivered via one killer performance after another. Wright and Brown both received Oscar nominations (for actor and supporting actor, respectively; the movie is also nominated for adapted screenplay and best picture) but Tracee Ellis Ross and even smaller roles, like Keith David’s appearance as a character Monk conjures up for his book, hit their notes just right. A

Rated R for language throughout, some drug use, sexual references and brief violence, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Written and directed by Cord Jefferson (and based on the novel Erasure by Percival Everett), American Fiction is an hour and 57 minutes long and distributed in theaters by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures & Orion Releasing.

Featured photo: American Fiction.

A look at some of the films on the nomination list

First and foremost, Oscar nominations are a list of movies worth checking out.

While the Oscar nerds among us might still be arguing whether Gretas Gerwig and Lee were robbed (yes) or if Saltburn should have been a contender somewhere (eh), it’s nice to occasionally remind oneself (me) that the Oscars can also help you catch up on the movies from the previous year you may have missed and the movies, like most of the International Film list and pretty much all but one of the shorts, that you (I) haven’t even heard of. (Find a list of all the nominees, announced last week, at oscars.org.)

And, many of these films are available at home.

Of the 10 Best Picture nominees, currently, American FictionandPoor Things (in theaters) and The Zone of Interest (in theaters in Boston and slated to come to Red River Theatres in Concord in February) are not available for home viewing. (The Zone of Interest is the one movie on the list of 10 I haven’t seen yet.) Anatomy of a Fall, Past Livesand Oppenheimer are available for rent or purchase. Barbie (Max), The Holdovers (Peacock) and Killers of the Flower Moon(Apple TV+) are available via VOD and through a streaming service. Maestro is only on Netflix.

Plenty other nominees are also available for home viewing.

Rustin (Netflix) was the one movie on the list of five acting nominees I hadn’t seen yet (and the only one that doesn’t have a movie in the “best picture” category). Colman Domingo plays Bayard Rustin, a civil rights activist for the middle chunk of the 20th century who had a hand in a variety of movements for racial and workers rights, including, as documented here, in the 1963 March on Washington. Rustin was smart, funny, highly competent — and gay, a fact that made him a target for those in (old guard politicians) and out (the FBI) of the movement. Though this movie was written by Julian Breece and Dustin Lance Black, it has that very Aaron Sorkin feel — with people listing off accomplishments, learning to compromise, finding common ground. I don’t know if that makes it competence porn, exactly, but there is a very “chicken soup for a politically liberal soul” feel to the way it shows Rustin working with all the coalitions involved in the event. We also get his friendship with Martin Luther King Jr. (Aml Ameen), drawn in a way that helps to remind you that this iconic figure was also a political person, who had to deal with the same pushes and pulls that would be familiar today. B+

Nyad (Netflix) is the actress category version of this (biopic, no Best Picture nomination, I hadn’t seen it yet). Annette Bening is Diana Nyad, an athlete whose claims to fame include distance swimming. After trying but failing to swim from Cuba to Florida as a twenty-something in the 1970s, she decides to try again in the 2010s, shortly after turning 60. This requires Nyad to train for distance swims again — first spending hours in a pool and then heading to more open water. In addition to just the physical differences of being 60, other challenges of the swim include strong (and changing) currents, weather, sharks and jellyfish. Jodie Foster, playing Nyad’s longtime friend and an athletic trainer who agrees to help Nyad train Bonnie Stoll, is also nominated for a supporting actress award. Bonnie and Diana are, as they both explain at various parts in the movie, each other’s person. Though not a romantic couple, they help to get each other through and bolster each other. Bonnie also helps Diana be more of a human who can relate to other humans. Diana Nyad as shown here is the personification of the phrase “she’s A Lot.” At a toast with her crew before one Cuban attempt, Nyad basically talks about herself and how great this is for her, with Bonnie having to step in to thank the team. Nyad is driven, sometimes to the exclusion of everyone around her. She is also extremely hard on herself and carries all sorts of baggage from a turbulent childhood and sexual assault by her swimming coach as a teen. Bening’s performance is a solid “great but flawed” athlete performance but there really is something extra to what Foster’s doing, something that gets to the emotions of a long-term partnership. B+

The only other acting nomination going to someone not in a Best Picture nominee is Danielle Brooks’ supporting actress nomination for The Color Purple, the musical based on the book of the same name and currently available via VOD and on Max. I reviewed the movie last week and thought it was fine, with Brooks definitely a standout performance.

In the writing categories — original and adapted — there is only one nominee not up for a Best Picture nod. Killers of the Flower Moon did not get a writing nod, but May December (Netflix) did. With a screenplay by Samy Burch, this Todd Haynes-directed movie (which I reviewed a while back) stars Natalie Portman playing an actress who has come to meet and study a woman (Julianne Moore) who decades earlier as a thirty-something had an affair/criminal relationship with a 13-year-old boy that sent her to jail. They later married; the movie is set when their youngest children are graduating from high school. It’s a dark, occasionally bleakly funny movie but it is also extremely hard to watch.

Some of the other nominees I’ve caught up with recently:

• The Creator(VOD and Hulu) This sci-fi movie starring John David Washington is set in a future where America is at war with a country called New Asia where AI robots of all sorts — from robots that kind of resemble those pointed-headed Phantom Menace bots to simulants that look almost human — live in relative peace with the human population. America is dead set on eliminating AI creatures and is on the hunt for a rumored weapon that could take down the U.S.’s NOMAD aircraft, a giant metaphor for drones, I mean, a large plane thing that blows up villages with both precision and widespread destruction. Washington plays a former Army sergeant lured back for one more mission with the hope that he will be able to find Maya (Gemma Chan), the wife he thought had died years earlier. It is a solid adventure story and is nominated in the sound and visual effects categories. B+

• The Last Repair Shop (Hulu & Disney+) Nominated in the Documentary Short Film category, this 39-minute film about Los Angeles students, the instruments they play and the adults who fix those instruments is a charmer. We hear the stories of kids talking about what music means to them and we hear from the adults talking about how they came to repair instruments, many with their own musical journeys. A

• The ABCs Of Book Banning (Paramount+) Another short that makes good use of kid interview subjects, this Documentary Short Film (27 minutes) talks to kids about books that have been banned, challenged or restricted at public school libraries. The standouts here are the incredibly thoughtful kids who don’t get why a picture book about two penguins adopting a baby penguin (And Tango Makes Three) or, for older kids, books about the Holocaust (The Diary of Anne Frank, Maus) are not appropriate. The other star: a 100-year-old World War II soldier’s widow speaking at a school board meeting against book banning. That lady deserves her own doc. B

• Ninety-Five Senses (on smallscreenings.org/mast/ninety-five-senses/film) I found this Animated Short Film nominee thanks to the Oscar movies guide on AllYourScreens.com. Tim Blake Nelson’s voice accompanies the beautiful watercolor and sketch visuals of the story. A man on what we come to learn is his last day discusses his life as connected to his five senses. B+

• The After (Netflix) This Live Action Short Film nominee (18 minutes) stars David Oyelowo as a grief-overwhelmed man just trying to get through his day as a driver for a ride service and facing what finally breaks him. Oyelowo’s performance makes the movie. B

• Four Daughters (rent or purchase or streaming on Kino Film Collection) A Documentary Feature Film nominee, this movie about a Tunisian mother, Olfa, and her four daughters is a blend of documentary and reenactment, with actors playing her two oldest daughters, who ran away to join ISIS (and are now in jail in Libya), the real life younger daughters and another actor occasionally playing Olfa. The movie is not what you think at first, not a straightforward afterschool special-ish take on teen girls being sucked in by a dangerous organization — there are shipping containers of baggage related to Olfa’s young life, her turbulent relationship with her daughters, the violent men who were in their lives and the violence that was a part of their lives out in the world. The movie is mournful and disturbing but you also can’t look away. B+

• 20 Days in Mariupol (available for rent or purchase and at pbs.org) This Documentary Feature Film nominee features footage shot by AP journalist Mstyslav Chernov, one of the very few journalists in Mariupol, Ukraine, during the Russian invasion. Though we hear some of Chernov narrating what he’s seeing or how the war makes him worry about his own family elsewhere, the documentary is at its strongest when it’s just showing regular people trying to get through the war — sheltering underground, trying to get information about how to keep their families safe, trying to get medical help after a bombing. Footage of a mother crying “why, why” after hospital staff telling her they couldn’t save her child or a father sobbing “my son, my son” after his teenager is pronounced dead — both children killed in bombings — is among the movie’s most impactful moments. B+

Featured photo: The Creator.

Joaquin Phoenix has some fun with the hat in the Ridley Scott-directed biopic Napoleon.

It’s not a practical hat, that big angry taco of a bicorn Napoleon wears, and figuring out what to do with it seems to be part of the “in this scene, I’m feeling…” prep for building the character. Sometimes it falls off, sometimes he yanks it off, sometimes he puts it on top of an Egyptian sarcophagus. The hats are busy in this movie.

Headwear in general is a thing here, from the frizzy hair of a guillotined Marie Antoinette to the Caesar-like golden laurels Napoleon wears as he crowns himself Emperor of France. When he first meets Josephine (Vanessa Kirby), she has the hairdo of an aristocrat about to be beheaded. It’s a whole spikey hair thing and she’s sporting it at a Survivor’s Ball, which I Wikipedia-ed and it is apparently a rich-kid party of people who inherited the fortunes of their Reign of Terror-felled relatives and these events may or may not have actually happened. I did a lot of Wikipedia-ing after (and occasionally during) this movie, which assumes I know a lot more about the French Revolution and its aftermath than I do.

Napoleon distinguishes himself at the siege of Toulon, recapturing a port from the British (who were supporting the Royalists). All flush with victory, he wins over Josephine, who seems like she knows how to pick boyfriends on the come up, and then heads off to I think Italy and Egypt. Going on a prolonged work trip right after getting married isn’t great for their relationship — Josephine starts an affair with some handsome young rake. Napoleon returns to France to pout about it — he puts her stuff on the lawn of their house and then they yell at each other for a while — but this visit home also gives him an opportunity to participate in a coup. After getting himself elected as in charge (with the help of some soldiers pointing guns at the representatives doing the electing), he allows himself to be talked into taking a more kingly title to better hang with the other heads of state in Europe. Also, clearly, republican loyalties aside, he wants to be solo ruler. He crowns himself Emperor and crowns Josephine Empress and they live happily ever after for like 10 minutes until he decides that since no amount of sex is leading to a Josephine pregnancy, it’s time for him to find a new, more fertile wife. But he also still likes Josephine, who maybe still likes him? I’d say the jury is out, in the way this movie portrays it, as to whether she was ever all that deeply in love with Napoleon or she just liked the proximity to power and doesn’t like the humiliation of being set aside.

The movie is all over the place with how it feels about this relationship. On the one hand, it uses Napoleon’s letters to Josephine before, during and after their marriage as a way to narrate both military events and his thoughts and feelings. After their divorce and then later after she dies, the movie seems to indicate that Napoleon is increasingly lost without her.

But the movie also doesn’t really seem to care much about their relationship. We don’t often see them relate to each other as husband and wife, and her great influence on him is never really explored. Napoleon’s real interest is in the battle scenes. And they are cool — whether it’s a sneak attack on a fortress or an open infantry charge in a snow-covered clearing, the movie is great about building tension and excitement with these battles. There are times when everything that’s not a battle feels like just time-killing until we get to the next battle.

There is about an hour of movie after the Napoleon/Josephine divorce and I feel like the movie gets a little more unhinged but also more interesting in that hour. While we get two great Phoenix “Napoleon as angry baby” line readings before this point — him yelling “you think you’re so great because you have boats” at a British representative and him snotting that “destiny has brought me this lamb chop” during a dinner fight with Josephine — it’s this last hour where he really starts to flail around in his alternative truth world and become more of a compelling character: his “we’re winning” statements to his troops while they Eeyore around in the rain at the Battle of Waterloo, his holding forth about his greatness with a group of young boys while he’s being held captive. The movie gives us a portrait of a man who, whatever his actual skills and strengths, is being consumed by his ego and his inability to look beyond himself at the objective truths of a situation. Not surprisingly, it’s in these moments where Phoenix feels like he has the best handle on what he wants to do with the characters.

At two hours and 38 minutes, it’s hard to recommend Napoleon for just its weirdo aspects and lovingly constructed battles. But I’m also not sorry I watched it. C+

Rated R for strong violence, some grisly images (for people who can’t take bad stuff happening to animals, be warned that this movie features some real bad days for a lot of horses), sexual content and brief language, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Ridley Scott with a screenplay by David Scarpa, Napoleon is two hours and 38 minutes long and distributed by Apple Films, which means that while it is currently available for rent or purchase it will probably eventually be available on Apple TV+.

The Color Purple (PG-13)

The life of Celie Harris gets the all-singing, all-dancing, full Technicolor treatment in the film adaptation of the stage musical The Color Purple, based on the Alice Walker novel.

Celie (Phylicia Pearl Mpasi as a teen, Fantasia Barrino as an adult) and her younger sister Nettie (Halle Berry as a teen, Ciara as an adult) are growing up in the very unhappy home of their father, Alfonso (Deon Cole). A widower since their beloved mother died, Alfonso has been raping Celie for so long that when the story starts she’s pregnant with his second child. Though Celie longs to have these children with her, Alfonso “gives them to God” after they’re born — with the sisters uncertain of exactly what that means until Celie happens to see a baby girl in town wrapped in a blanket she made. Alfonso basically sells Celie in marriage to Albert Johnson, who calls himself Mister (Colman Domingo), a widower with three small children he doesn’t take care of and a house that’s a wreck. Mister had wanted Nettie, but Alfonso refused and sort of strong-arms him into taking Celie, who is unwanted for anything other than her labor.

Though she cares for Mister’s children and brings order to his home, he is abusive to her and unkind even when they are in bed together, always pining for his mistress, the blues singer Shug Avery (Taraji P. Henson). When Nettie comes to live with Celie — escaping Alfonso’s attempts to rape her — Mister is equally awful to Nettie. He attacks her, she fights him off and he throws her out of the house, thus depriving Celie of the only kind person in her life. Which is perhaps why Celie daydreams about Shug, whose photo is on the table next to their bed. When, years later, Shug comes to town, Celie is just as excited to see her as Mister is.

Though plot descriptions call Shug Mister’s mistress and in the movie he makes some statement about how she’s the woman he should have married, you don’t get the sense that Shug feels at all this way about Mister. He is her extremely occasional fling who she can only stand so much of. As such, she seems to take a shine to (and take the side of) Celie, with the women even ending up at a movie theater enjoying some very sweet makeout time.

Though Celie is besotted with Shug, Shug eventually leaves to continue her music career and Celie remains stuck in her soul-crushing life with Mister, whose family now includes Sofia (Danielle Brooks), wife of Mister’s son Harpo (Corey Hawkins). Sofia’s take-no-poop attitude very slowly teaches Celie that she can also stand up for herself.

That song is called “Hell No!” and it’s peppy and upbeat and features some nifty choreography and the whole sequence is, like so many of the musical sections of this movie, fine. Not objectionable, not spectacular, fine. As with several of the musical numbers, the scene is of the “crowds of people singing and dancing along as a character delivers story information” variety. For me, much more successful were the sequences where the songs and settings were expressing something that Celie was feeling, as though we were going inside her head to see her, for example, falling in love with Shug while she helps to bathe and dress her. These songs, usually more intimate and featuring only Barrino singing, pull us close to the character in a way that is the opposite of the “scene on a big stage” feel of the crowd numbers. While those are pretty to look at they don’t offer quite the same charge. The one exception to that is maybe “Miss Celie’s Pants,” a group song about Celie’s pants store (selling some pretty awesome pants, by the way; I will take at least one pair of the red ones Barrino is wearing). Everybody in the scene has a narrative purpose beyond just filling out the stage.

I haven’t really sketched out all of the story here or even all of the significant characters. There is so much story packed into this movie that I feel like we’re speed-walking from this run-in with the corrupt legal system to that tale of early 20th-century colonial oppression in Africa to domestic abuse, picking up speed because we have to get to that long-buried family secret over there before the next big musical number. Which means that nothing feels like it has room to breathe or really leave an impact.

These criticisms aren’t a reason not to watch the movie, more an explanation of why I found myself not feeling more enthusiasm as the movie got to its (soulful, moving) conclusion. From the performances — Barrino, Henson and Brooks in particular — to the very lovely cinematography, The Color Purple is a movie worth experiencing. B

Rated PG-13 for mature thematic content, sexual content, violence and language, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Blitz Bazawule with a screenplay by Marcus Gardley, The Color Purple is two hours and 21 minutes long and distributed by Warner Bros. It is available for rent or purchase.

Past Lives (PG-13)

Childhood friends reunite in their 20s and again in their 30s in Past Lives, a charming story about memory and connection.

Twelve-year-olds Na Young (Seung Ah Moon) and Hae Sung (Seung Min Yim) are best friends and sort-of sweethearts in Seoul. Na’s mom (Ji Hye Yoon) suggests they go on a “date” — which is more playdate than anything else, with the kids running around a park while the moms watch. As Na’s mom explains, the family is emigrating and she wants Na to have some happy memories of her friend in Korea. And then, abruptly, Na says goodbye to Hae Sung after school one day and the family moves to Canada, where she becomes Nora.

Some 12 years later, after Nora (Greta Lee) has moved to New York City and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) has finished his mandated military service, she discovers a note on the social media page of her father, a filmmaker, from Hae Sung. He’s looking for Na Young, his childhood friend. She looks him up and responds. They begin a Skype relationship, talking about their lives and just sort of happy to see each other and the grown people they’ve become. Neither seems particularly able or willing to cross half the globe to visit the other and soon Nora decides that they need to take a break. She goes to a writers retreat and meets Arthur (John Magaro); we see Hae Sung meets someone too.

Another 12 years later and Nora and Arthur are married, with Nora attending casting sessions for the play she wrote and Arthur attending readings for his book. They live in New York City and Arthur is trying to learn Korean. Hae Sung comes to New York “for a vacation” — as he tells his friends and Nora tells Arthur. But Arthur, Hae Sung, his friends and maybe even Nora know that he’s coming to see her, even though he knows she’s married and he has no particular plans for, like, whisking her away.

At one point, Arthur talks about how in a story, Nora and Hae Sung would be lovers fated to be together. They weren’t lovers, Nora reminds him, and she’s meant to be where she is, in New York, with Arthur. And she means this, and yet it’s undeniable that Hae Sung is something to her, he’s connected. Maybe not, as Hae Sung says, in this life but in other lives. Their relationship gets to the heart of how people and our connection to them, especially if there’s a physical break in the relationship, get all tangled up in who we were when we knew them, where we were in life. Hae Sung is Nora’s childhood sweetheart, a boy she liked for a certain set of reasons then, but he is also herself at 12 and her life in Korea and how she felt before emigrating. When she sees him, first in her 20s and later in her 30s, she says a sort of astounded “whoa,” which feels like a “whoa” not just at seeing Hae Sung but at seeing that version of herself again. It’s some delicate work, getting us to see that story and perspective, but the movie and Greta Lee do a masterful job. There is a sweetness and kindness and sadness between these friends at every point in their lives (so far) and the movie gives both of them their emotional due. Lee and Teo Yoo have excellent chemistry, as do Lee and John Magaro, who have conversations that sound like real things married people might say to each other (a movie/TV rarity).

Past Lives is a soft, bittersweet story that has a joyfulness about it as well. A

Rated PG-13 for some strong language, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Written and directed by Celine Song, Past Lives is an hour and 45 minutes long and distributed by A24. It is available for rent and purchase.

Featured photo: Napoleon.

Fetch becomes retro cool in Mean Girls, a Tina Fey-penned feature film musical adaptation of the stage musical comedy based on the 2004 movie (also by Fey) based loosely on the nonfiction book Queen Bees and Wannabees by Rosalind Wiseman.

Once again, Cady Heron (Angourie Rice) has spent her life living in Africa and being homeschooled by her mother and now, in her junior year, arrives at an American high school. She finds the cliques and social rules and boys — particularly Aaron Samuels (Christopher Briney), who sits in front of her in math class — overwhelming. Luckily, she meets Janis ‘Imi’ke (Auli’i Cravalho) and Damian Hubbard (Jaquel Spivey), two “art freaks” as they’re later labeled, who check on her when she takes her lunch to the bathroom. Genuinely kind, Janis and Damian try to warn Cady about the Plastics — Regina George (Reneé Rapp) and her two followers, Gretchen Wieners (Bebe Woods) and Karen Shetty (Avantika). This trio of girls dominates the school’s social structure with queen bee Regina inspiring awe and fear in her fellow students. (Plus, she and Janis have an old beef.) But when Cady is invited to sit with these popular girls, Janis and Damian encourage her to do it so they can get a window into the world of the Plastics. Cady, trusting and unaware of what she’s getting into, goes along with the plan and gets sucked into the Plastics’ world. When Regina actively tanks Cady’s chances at dating Aaron, Cady decides to wholeheartedly participate in Janis’ plan to arrange for Regina’s downfall.

Returning as math teacher Ms. Norbury is Tina Fey, with Tim Meadows returning as Principal Duvall. Other grown-ups: Busy Philipps is Regina’s “cool mom” mom and Jon Hamm plays the coach.

There are moments of fun in this adaptation, many of them involving Cravalho’s Janis or Spivey’s Damian, and moments when those little Tina Fey sparkles of strategic weirdness hit their mark. But overall I got a real “flat soda” feel from this movie. The spikey bits of the original feel ironed out and replaced by earnestness that somehow made it feel darker and less specific. Instead of the “evil takes a human form in Regina George”-style exaggeration, we get Gretchen Wieners singing about how she feels deeply unloved and unlovable. I’m not sure if the act of having song replace Cady’s narration is what seems to throw a wet blanket of sincerity over things or if it is the result of replacing the elder millennial/Gen X sensibilities with Gen Z ones. I do think there are elements of the story that don’t quite fit because an earlier generation’s high school experience is being shoved into the present. TikTok, for example, is sort of wedged into the movie but it feels more like an excuse for jokey montage than some expression of how life is for Today’s Youth.

The 2004 Mean Girls was a broad, commercial comedy, sure, but it also had some insightful observations about girl world. Mean Girls 2024 feels more like high-quality IP. B-

Rated PG-13 for sexual material, strong language and teen drinking, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr. with a screenplay by Tina Fey, Mean Girls is an hour and 52 minutes long and distributed in theaters by Paramount Pictures.

Wonka (PG)

Timothée Chalamet is surprisingly charming in the surprisingly fun Wonka.

I’ve been “ugh, really?” with the best of them since I started seeing Wonka trailers. But Chalamet captures the personality of the eccentric chocolate maker we know from the 1971 Gene Wilder movie and gives him a youthful cast that is believable and not creepy or off-putting (cough, Johnny Depp, cough). There is genuine wonder and delight in this musical — none of which is what I expected from early images of this project or even after reading the “this movie is … good?”-type review headlines.

Willy Wonka (Chalamet) is just a guy with fluffy hair, some fun luggage and big dreams when he arrives in, er, Town where the speech patterns are London, the royalty is Bavarian and the big power is held by the chocolate cartel of Mr. Slugworth (Paterson Joseph), Prodnose (Matt Lucas) and Fickelgruber (Mathew Baynton). They use their exclusive high-end chocolates to bribe the police chief (Keegan-Michael Key) into doing their dirty work, like shooing away itinerant chocolatiers. Wonka is a particular threat to the cartel because his chocolates are very good, perhaps the best anybody has ever had, and affordable to all. Plus some of them briefly confer weightlessness, so they’re real crowd-pleasers.

After the police chase him out of the town square and take his chocolate proceeds, Wonka doesn’t have enough money to pay Mrs. Scrubitt (Olivia Colman, absolutely relishing this very Roald Dahl-esque kind of villain) for the room he leased from her. Or rather, he has enough for the room but not all of the extras he didn’t realize he’s on the hook for because he didn’t read the fine print of the lease. Soon he learns that he’s basically an indentured servant to Scrubitt and must work in her laundry with other trapped lease-signers (played by the likes of Jim Carter, Natasha Rothwell, Rich Fulcher and Rakhee Thakrar) and tween-aged orphan Noodle (Calah Lane), whom Scrubitt took in as an infant and who now owes Scrubitt for all that “kindness.” Because Noodle goes into town with the laundry, Wonka strikes up a deal with her wherein she smuggles him out during the days so he can sell his chocolate and he helps her pay down her debt to Scrubitt. With the help of the rest of the laundry gang — who are enjoying some down time thanks to a Wonka invention of a dog-powered scrubbing machine — Wonka is able to sneak through the town staying ahead of police, especially the increasingly out-of-shape chief whose recent payment from the cartel was so much chocolate that he is gaining pounds by the hour.

Meanwhile, cutting into Wonka’s chocolate supply is a small, green-haired orange man who Wonka claims to Noodle has been following him for years and who sometimes breaks into his room at night to steal his chocolates. Even after Wonka catches the man, who explains he is an Oompa Loompa named Lofty (Hugh Grant), Noodle isn’t quite sure she believes Wonka isn’t just eating the candies in his sleep.

Rowan Atkinson shows up as a chocolate-addicted cleric, a giraffe figures into the plot and Wonka half expects success at selling chocolate will lead his late mother (Sally Hawkins) to appear to him. And, shockingly, all of this comes together and works as something that feels if not exactly like a Roald Dahl creation, very close to it, very sweet-bitter-sweet in that Matilda kind of way, but perhaps with a less bleak world view. Noodle tells Wonka that the “greedy beat the needy” in a very Dahl-like recognition that the world isn’t fair, but there’s lots of credence given to good-hearted dreams and helping one another too.

Wonka also makes a good argument for seeing a movie in a theater — its big colors and storybook town are charming and particularly cinematic. The color of the Wonka candy factory here spreads out to every interesting element of the world, from the bright pink uniforms Wonka’s staff wears on their brief foray into running a shop to the fantastical hair colors created by tainted chocolate.

Wonka is a warm-hearted movie that actually delivers on the “world of pure imagination” promise. B+

Rated PG for some violence, mild language and thematic elements, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Paul King with a screenplay by Simon Farnaby & Paul King, Wonka is an hour and 56 minutes long and distributed in theaters by Warner Bros.

Poor Things (R)

Emma Stone plays a kind of baby-brained Frankenstein’s monster in the steampunk horror comedy Poor Things.

Bella Baxter (Stone) is basically a toddler in a woman’s body when we first meet her, sitting in a high chair and clapping at the loud burps of Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), the man who acts as her surrogate father. Baxter is a Victorian-era-esque surgeon, enthralled with anatomy (and disfigured by his own father, who passed off his torture as science), who has successfully, based on the creatures wandering his house, sewn goose heads on dogs and vice versa, with living results. Bella, we learn, is the result of an experiment by which the brain of an infant was placed in the body of its mother after the pregnant woman jumped off a bridge. A few “it’s alive!”-style jolts of electricity and Bella — not quite an adult, not quite a baby — opens her eyes.

Quickly Bella begins to talk, to reason to some degree and to ask questions of “God,” as she calls Dr. Baxter, and of Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef), an assistant he brings in to document her mental growth. Eventually Baxter feels her maturity has progressed enough that he suggests that Bella and Max get married, though he intends for them to basically live with him, never leaving his London house, forever even though Bella is of a more adventurous, see-the-world mindset.

Then Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), a lawyer Baxter calls in to read the marriage contract, seduces Bella into running away. Or maybe she just decides to run away and have an adventure before returning to marry Max. They travel first to Lisbon and then on a ship to Greece. Duncan is in it entirely for the passion, which Bella also enjoys, but Bella also wants to learn about the world. Thus when they’re detoured, penniless, to Paris and she’s offered a job by the madame (Kathryn Hunter) of a brothel, Duncan is horrified but Bella just sees it as an opportunity for study.

Ever seen the TV show Bones? As Bella goes from child-brain to adult brain or something, she starts to play like a kind of Temperance Brennan, Emily Deschanel’s scientist Bones of Bones. “What is this ‘emotion’ of which you speak?” is the vibe — though not always because Bella also becomes sort of enamored of philosophy and socialism and heartbroken by the horrors of poverty. She loves anatomy and discussions of Emerson but she doesn’t understand Duncan’s emotional whininess — not his ego about his romantic prowess nor his supposed great love for her nor his “heartbreak” (or bruised pride) at her brothel work. It’s — I don’t know, weird? Unsettling? Infantilizing in a way that makes all the sex cringey? All of those things? Throughout this movie’s two hour and 21 minute run time, I maybe did a “ha” once or twice or thought “neat visual” or “Stone’s doing an interesting thing” but I was never entirely certain how I felt about what I was watching. (Stone’s performance in particular both has its moments and feels like you’re watching a prolonged exercise in an acting class.) I wasn’t bored but also not delighted or all that amused or “hmm, this makes me think.” And though the movie presents everything as kind of a dry comedy lark, scratch half a millimeter into what is being said or done and the movie really does feel like a kind of horror movie, a horror movie where one of the horrors seems to be the movie periodically telling you it’s doing feminism and you’re welcome. (No thank you.)

This movie feels like a bunch of ideas and visuals sort of mushed together in the hope that they’ll congeal into something living and breathing but ultimately missing that jolt of energy that would make it a world I was fully invested in. C-

Rated R for strong and pervasive sexual content, graphic nudity, disturbing material, gore and language, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos with a screenplay by Tony McNamara (from a book by Alasdair Gray), Poor Things is two hours and 21 minutes long and distributed in theaters by Searchlight Pictures.

Featured photo: Mean Girls.