Category: Film Reviews

All Quiet on the Western Front (R)

A group of very eager, very naive school boys sign up to join the German army a few years into World War I in this most recent, German-language adaptation of the novel by Erich Maria Remarque. Paul (Felix Kammerer) and his buddies sport goofy grins as they listen to a local official charge them up, all fatherland this and manhood that. When Paul finds another man’s name on the uniform he’s handed, he accepts the army official’s story that it probably just didn’t fit that guy — even though we’ve seen, in one of the movie’s best sequences, that uniform go being worn by a young German soldier when he’s sent over the top of the trench to the laundry where his blood is cleaned out and the factory where bullet holes are patched up.

It’s telling to watch all the older soldiers just sort of “yep” with their eyes as these eager new soldiers get to the Western front, cheering and ready to shoot their French enemies. After about 24 hours — of mud, of shelling, of collecting the dog tags of freshly killed comrades — Paul seems to let go of his childhood ideas of military glory and adventure.

We catch up with him 18 months later as he and the friends he has left are just surviving in roughly the same spot where they’ve been dug in for years. Intercut with this are scenes of German officials (including one played by Daniel Brühl) trying to negotiate an armistice over the objections of the military.

This movie — nominated for Oscars for Best Picture as well as extremely well-deserved cinematography and score nods, International Feature Film, Makeup & Hairstyling, Adapted Screenplay, Visual Effects, Sound and Production Design — really does wow with its visuals. The trench warfare is an impressive blend of absolute horror and surprising beauty, particularly in the long shots of the forests and fields around the battlefield. The score is impressive too — there’s a kind of machine-like quality that helps underline the idea of the soldiers as just raw materials for industrial-scale killing.

I think the movie’s greatest strength — that it takes the time to show us the nature and the small details surrounding these men at war — can also be a weakness in that it leads the movie to underline and repeat itself on the futility of what’s happening. At two hours and 27 minutes, this movie could have afforded to slice some scenes and still get its message across. B+ Available on Netflix, where you can watch it in German with subtitles or with English dubbing.

Triangle of Sadness (R)

Woody Harrelson, Harris Dickinson.

Director and writer Ruben Ostlund, also known for The Square and Force Majeure, presents this satire of wealth, class and status with just a bit of gender roles and colonialism thrown in. It’s a lot. It’s a whole college freshmen discussion about “the system.” It can charm in moments but also wear on you. And there’s an extended puke and poo situation that is — well “on the nose” feels like a very “ew” way to describe it.

The movie takes a while to get going as we see models Carl (Dickinson) and Yaya (Charlbi Dean) and their relationship, which is at least 50 percent about building their social media presence. They go on a cruise — influencer perks — where all of their fellow guests are fabulously wealthy, sorta nuts and some kind of a caricature, such as the polite British couple named Winston (Oliver Ford Davies) and Clementine (Amanda Walker) who used to manufacture land mines but now focus on hand grenades. The crew, managed by Paula (Vicki Berlin), has been told to smile through all the insanity in hope of a big tip. But perhaps they should have “no, ma’am-ed” a request by Vera (Sunnyi Melles), wife of Russian fertilizer magnate Dimitry (Zlatko Buric), for all of the crew members, including the kitchen staff preparing the raw seafood, to go for a swim.

At one point, the ship’s oft-drunk captain (Harrelson) and Dimitry trade quotes about communism — the captain presenting himself as sort of a half-hearted Marxist and Dimitry as a capitalist. It’s cute, they have a chummy conversation as the guests puke and the ship is cast about on the waves; it’s also, you know, “yeah, OK, movie.”

And that for me was the movie — cute moments, some fun performances and a whole lot of “OK, calm down.” I get how this can be a better-than-OK viewing experience (except for the puking) but for me this wouldn’t have added up to Best Picture, Best Director and Original Screenplay Oscar nominations. BAvailable for rent or purchase.

Encanto at the Hollywood Bowl (TV-G)

Stephanie Beatriz, Lin-Manuel Miranda.

I know, I know, do you really need to hear the Encanto songs again? Yes! This filmed concert of the songs of Encanto as presented at the Hollywood Bowl is a delightful celebration featuring the original vocal talents from the animated movie as well as some beautiful staging with sets, light projections and dancers as everything from townsfolk to animals. It’s fun, a nice introduction for kids who have seen more movies than live theater and a nice reminder that the Encanto songbook is stuffed with dancy gems. AAvailable on Disney+.

Roald Dahl’s Matilda the Musical (PG)

Lashana Lynch, Emma Thompson.

Roald Dahl works through more childhood terrors — a bleak school, a sadistic headmistress, awful parents — in this charming if occasionally PG-ily violent and mean musical starring Alisha Weir as the titular heroine. Matilda is smart, a lover of stories and only occasionally naughty with vengeful acts against her negligent parents (Stephen Graham, Andrea Riseborough). When she is sent to a grim day school run by tyrannical, joy-hating headmistress Agatha Trunchbull (Thompson, having the most fun), Matilda can’t stand for the bullying of her fellow students and begins a revolution against Trunchbull, which even extends to the kind Miss Honey (Lynch), Matilda’s teacher. Miss Honey has her own difficult past with Trunchbull but tries to teach her children with respect and kindness nevertheless, cheering them on, if quietly at first, in their rebellion.

I think because of the cruelty of Trunchbull and the indifference and abuse by Matilda’s parents, I’d peg this one at somewhere in the 11-year-old-and-up viewership range. For kids old enough not to be scared, the story involves some lovely set pieces with songs (“When I Grow Up” is nicely done) and a sweet tale about the vindication of a bookish girl. And, as mentioned, Thompson, a sort of fairy tale witch-as-dictator, seems to be having an absolute ball. B+ Available on Netflix

Strange World (PG)

Jake Gyllenhaal, Dennis Quaid.

This Disney animated feature introduces us to Searcher Clade (voice of Gyllenhaal), who, when he was a kid, was forced, like it or not, to join his famous father, Jaeger Clade (voice of Quaid), on his explorations to find a path beyond the mountains that surround (and keep cut off) their city-state. On one exploration, Searcher discovered pando, the electrified fruit that becomes a source of power to their previously horse-and-buggy world. Jaeger was uninterested and plunged alone through the mountains.

Twenty five years later, Searcher is a successful pando farmer and himself the father of teenage son Ethan (Jaboukie Young-White). Searcher farms, his wife/Ethan’s mom Meridian (voice of Gabrielle Union) flies a crop duster and Ethan dreams of a life doing something else — maybe exploring like the grandfather he never knew.

Searcher wants nothing to do with exploration, but when president (and former expedition member in his dad’s explorations) Callisto (voice of Lucy Liu) shows up on Searcher’s farm, it looks like he might have to hit the trail once again. Across the land pando plants have been dying and Callisto needs to find out why to save everyone’s modern way of life. They discover that pando isn’t separate plants but one big plant and decide to follow a hole deep in the earth to find the source of the plant and see if they can figure out what’s killing it.

Naturally, Ethan stows away on the subterranean ship making the journey and Meridian shows up to tell Searcher that Ethan is there, putting the whole family on the trip into the mysterious deep and the Strange World they find there.

Where and what is this Strange World? I kind of feel like if you’ve been through middle school biology you’ll know pretty quickly, thus making the wait for the reveal feel extremely draggy (and the very straightforward “here’s what’s been happening” explanation is oddly deflating of the cool concept).

I get now why this movie, which spent like a minute in theaters around Thanksgiving, had such odd, vague marketing. To explain the story feels like you are tangling yourself up in details and characters and themes. Strange World has some beautiful visuals, moments of action and an interesting central quest but it also has a lot of talking about characters’ feelings and motivations and parent-child relationships. Like, a lot of talking. Those text-heavy scenes, often between adult characters, slow down the action and make the movie feel less kid-compelling. By its nature, the setting of the movie doesn’t lend itself to lots of high-personality new creatures and characters (we get one, basically, which, as a character in the movie calls out, feels like it’s primarily there for merchandising purposes), leaving only the humans. Sure, I thought to myself, this is a lovely reminder to me, a grown parent, to listen to my kids and their dreams and ambitions without imposing my ideas about what their dreams should be. But what are my kids going to do during the moments that inspire these thoughts? In my experience, that’s when they go to the bathroom or start searching for another screen to watch until the action starts up again. B- Available on Disney+ and through VOD.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover (R)

Emma Corrin, Jack O’Connell.

In this adaptation of a book that I feel like I should have read but probably won’t ever, dissatisfied Lady Chatterley, a.k.a. Connie Reid (Corrin), starts an affair with Oliver (O’Connell) the groundskeeper at her husband’s, Lord Clifford Chatterley (Matthew Duckett), big family estate. The pair got married during what sounds like a brief mid-World War I romance, after which Clifford returns to the front. After the war, he comes home paralyzed from the waist down and drags Connie from London out to the family’s country home. She seems initially interested in making the best of things, but Clifford is not interested in finding new ways to, uhm, show affection. He is, however, interested in having an heir — so long as Connie doesn’t catch feelings for the guy she chooses to hang out with for just long enough to get pregnant. Connie is actually appalled by this idea and increasingly annoyed by Clifford himself — first with his dumb literary friends as he tries to be a writer and then by the businessmen who appear when he decides to take over the running of the local mine. By the time we get to the “workers should be grateful for whatever crumbs we brush their way”-type discussion, we’re well out of sympathy for Clifford and just fine with Connie pursuing her affair with the kindhearted Oliver, who made it to lieutenant in the war but just wants the peace and quiet of groundskeeping.

This movie is very pretty and filled with lots of scenes that I think are supposed to be steamy and romantic of the pretty Corrin and the very pretty O’Connell in various states of undress. But the movie, which takes nearly 50 minutes of its more than two-hour run time to get to the Lover part of things, feels like it is running at .75 speed. We get a lot — A Lot — of scenes of people walking through fields at less than a brisk pace or just staring off into the middle distance or looking after someone who is leaving the shot. It’s maybe supposed to help build tension but mostly it made me want to fast-forward.

Joely Richardson shows up as a character who seems mainly like she’s supposed to deliver information but she does help to highlight some of the more interesting aspects of the movie. There is this whole post-war labor-management tension that runs through the story as well as some nods to the idea that, after the calamity of the war, maybe some prewar societal conventions are just less important to some people (Oliver seems to represent, to a degree, the idea that after the battlefield people might be less willing to just “know their place”). But the movie doesn’t do much more than present these ideas — you know, between long walks. B- Available on Netflix.

Descendant (PG)

This documentary from Higher Ground Productions (the Obamas’ production company) looks at the current residents of Africatown, a neighborhood near Mobile, Alabama. The community was founded by people who had been enslaved and transported to Alabama from Africa shortly before the start of the Civil War. The trip, which was an illegal smuggling operation some 50 years after the international slave trade had been outlawed in the U.S., ended with the people being offloaded from the ship, the Clotilda, which was then burned to hide the crime. After the Civil War, many of the Clotilda survivors and their families moved to Africatown, which is still home to many of their descendants. The documentary follows both the rediscovery of the Clotilda and the attempts by community members to memorialize their families’ histories and place them in the larger context of the calamity of slavery in the U.S.

The movie serves as a nice companion piece to Zora Neale Hurston’s book Barracoon, which was published in 2018. It features her 1927 interviews with Cudjoe Lewis, one of the last living survivors of the Clotilda. The movie focuses not only on the stories of the Clotilda survivors but also the way land grabs and indifferent zoning have led to Africatown’s being surrounded by industry and to the hollowing out of the area’s main street. As much as its story contains an important slice of American history, the community is shown as a vibrant, energetic and hopeful part of the present. A Available on Netflix.

Sr. (R)

Robert Downey Jr. makes a documentary about his father, the filmmaker Robert Downey Sr., who died in 2021. The movie features interviews with Sr. starting in about 2019 — and while Jr. put together his film, Sr. worked on his own cut. He also dealt with worsening health due to Parkinson’s disease, a situation that pushed Jr. to learn and discuss as much as he could with his father while they could still be together. While giving us the professional life of Downey Sr. (an idiosyncratic filmmaker in the 1960s through the mid aughts),the movie also tells an intergenerational story of a son (Jr.) attempting to embrace the good and make peace with the bad from his childhood while also raising his own children. The movie reminded me a bit of Dick Johnson Is Dead, another documentary about a filmmaker coming to terms with a father’s mortality. Sr. is incredibly sweet with Robert Downey Jr. being shockingly vulnerable and honest as he examines the relationship with a father he clearly loves and admires. A Available on Netflix.

The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special (TV-14)

Chris Pratt, Dave Bautista.

And in addition to Quill (Pratt) and Drax (Bautista) we get Nebula (Karen Gillan), Kraglin (Sean Gunn), Mantis (Pom Klementieff), Groot (voice of Vin Diesel), Rocket (voice of Bradley Cooper), Cosmo the Russian cosmonaut dog (voice of Maria Bakalova) and, as the credits say, “introducing Kevin Bacon.” The gang decides Bacon, the awesome hero of Quill’s pre-space Earth memories, would be the perfect gift for a still-bummed-about-lost-Gamora Quill, especially since this happens to be the Earth season known as Christmastime. The Guardians retro rock vibe meshes well with some low-fi elements and the satisfying selection of modern rock Christmas music. The overall tone of this brisk 40-ish minute special is exactly the right mix of goofy (blessings to the very game Bacon), Marvelly and sweet. B+ Available on Disney+.

Spirited (PG-13)

Will Ferrell, Ryan Reynolds.

Ferrell and Reynolds work on exactly the level they should in this breezy musical riff on A Christmas Carol that feels like the spiritual descendant of 1988’s Scrooged, with Clint Briggs (Reynolds), labeled an unredeemable jerk by Jacob Marley (Patrick Page), as the focus of a Christmas-Carol-ing. Clint is a PR guy whose whole shtick is creating conflict and ruining lives to help his clients. To the Ghost of Christmas Present (Ferrell) that makes him a perfect candidate. His bad actions touch a lot of lives and he offers a much-needed challenge. But, despite the year of planning that goes into the project, the night doesn’t go as planned. For starters, Past (Sunita Mani) and Clint hook up and she exits his look-back early, because awkward. When Present steps in, he is irritated by Clint, particularly by how Clint has him questioning matters from his own life. Not helping is the fact that Present has a crush on Clint’s second-in-command, Kimberley (Octavia Spencer), who can see and talk to Present.

Spirited is cute, in the best way. It is fun to watch; there are some well-used cameos and a nice running joke about spon-con, and the songs are thoroughly enjoyable despite any lack of expertise by the actors called on to sing. B+ Available on Apple TV+.

The Hip Hop Nutcracker (TV-PG)

Cache Melvin, Dushaunt Fik-Shun Stegall.

A teenage Maria-Clara (Melvin) enjoys the start of a young romance with the Nutcracker (Stegall) while trying to rekindle the romance between her mom (Allison Holker) and pop (Stephen Boss) at a neighborhood block party on New Year’s Eve in this 44-minute remix reworking of the Nutcracker ballet. Toymaker Drosselmeyer (Comfort Fedoke) is still bringing the magic but this time the Land of Sweets is a dance club in a nonspecific back in the day when Maria-Clara’s parents first met. The staging is a fun way to play around with the familiar story, and the blend of classical ballet (including a short cameo from Mikhail Baryshnikov) with hip-hop dance is beautiful and technically impressive — something the special takes care to really let you see. If you like a good riff on a holiday standard, this fits the bill and I feel like it is a good way to introduce kids who might have only meh interest in standard ballet to the music and story elements. B+ Available on Disney+.

A Christmas Story Christmas (PG)

Peter Billingsly, Julie Hagerty.

Ralphie, the boy pining for a BB gun at Christmastime in 1940, is now Ralph, married to Sandy (Erinn Hayes), with kids — Mark (River Drosche) and Julie (Julianna Layne) — and living in Chicago. When his mom (Hagerty, taking over from Melinda Dillon, who played the mom in the 1983 A Christmas Story) calls to tell him his father has died, Ralph decides to take his family back to his Indiana town to spend Christmas with her in his childhood home. His mom insists that the family not be gloomy — Dad would have wanted us to have a great Christmas, she tells him. But Ralphie is not sure he can live up to the gold standard for Christmas celebration set by his dad. He also has an approaching deadline — he has spent the year trying to make it as a writer and finding no takers for his 2,000-page sci-fi novel.

This movie has cute moments featuring cast members of the original movie. But it is long and wearingly eager. Be Nostalgic! Feel the Holiday Cheer! Oh, That Ralphie! I would say, “It’s fine to have on while doing your holiday tasks,” but the original is available on the same streaming service, so why bother with this so-so imitation? C+ Available on HBO Max.

Tár (R)

Cate Blanchett, Noémie Merlant.

Lydia Tár (Blanchett) is the conductor of a symphony in Berlin. She has professional success; a large apartment; a child with her wife and the symphony’s first violinist, Sharon (Nina Hoss); a book about to hit shelves, and a much-awaited recording of a Mahler symphony in the works. But behind all of this are the increasingly desperate emails from a young woman Lydia had some sort of relationship with and has now blackballed from work with other symphonies. Her assistant Francesca (Merlant) seems aware that this relationship has the potential to do real damage (there are regular suggestions that this relationship is not the first of its kind) but Lydia pretends not to be aware of the mounting darkness — nor does this gathering storm stop her from pursuing a new young musician in the symphony.

The movie is very clever in the way it puts all the Bad Man behavior in this female character. And I find it interesting how it shows us the power dynamics, the fragile self-esteem, the carelessness and the selfishness but not the sex. We’re seeing the wreckage, not the crash, and Blanchett does great things (particularly with the way she uses her voice and with small gestures) as the person walking through the scene and trying hard to stay convinced that they didn’t cause the disaster. Truly, Blanchett is the movie, and I can see why Oscar predictors have been labeling hers as the performance to beat this year. The movie is long with deliberate, not-at-all speedy pacing but Blanchett makes the destructive Lydia impossible to look away from. A Available for rent or purchase.

Causeway (R)

Jennifer Lawrence, Brian Tyree Henry.

Lynsey (Lawrence) is recently home from military service in Afghanistan, where she suffered a traumatic brain injury, and has had to relearn basics like walking, holding things and sleeping without spiraling into panic. James (Henry) is a mechanic she meets when her family’s truck needs work. Both Lynsey and James have lived in New Orleans all their lives; both have suffered familial tragedy in the city, which led Lynsey to run to the Army and James to stay put.

Joe Reid and Chris V. Feil, hosts of This Had Oscar Buzz, frequently talk about “friendship cinema,” which this very much is — a movie where the development of a non-romantic relationship is the heart of the story. Lynsey and James find in each other something Lynsey isn’t getting from her mother (Linda Emond), with whom she is staying while she tries to recuperate, and that James can’t get from his empty house. And both Lawrence and Henry are bringing so much unsaid to their performances, so much we aren’t specifically told about their characters but can understand from what they do with their eyes or the way they smile. Causeway is a calm surprise of a movie built on these standout roles. A- Available on Apple TV+.

The Wonder (R)

Florence Pugh, Toby Jones

Pugh is an English nurse hired to go to mid-1800s Ireland to report on the case of Anna O’Donnell (Kila Lord Cassidy), an 11-ish-year-old girl who appears to be healthy despite, as her family claims, not eating for more than four months. A group of men in this small, very religious village including the local doctor (Jones) and priest (Ciaran Hinds) have called in Nurse Elizabeth Wright (Pugh) and a nun, Sister Michael (Josie Walker), to watch Anna and report what they observe. Wright thinks this is all nonsense — as do a good number of the townsfolk — but Anna seems sincere in her belief that she is existing only on manna from heaven and has attracted quite a bit of attention for what people seem to believe is a kind of saintliness.

It doesn’t take a psychologist to make some guesses about what might be in the intersection of a “miracle” for a young girl deeply invested in the stories of female saints, denial of food by a tween and a recent family death. But the journey of Wright finding out what is behind this supernatural-seeming happening is nonetheless captivating. The men in the story have some personal gains to protect — the religious members of the town want a saint; the doctor thinks Anna might be the beginning of some scientific discovery (for him to make, of course); William Byrne (Tom Burke), a journalist from London who has his roots in this village, is chasing a story. Wright may have limited agency and some personal baggage but she is determined to figure out what’s really happening and, eventually, find a way to keep a girl from starving to death for dumb reasons. Pugh makes this investigation compelling. B Available on Netflix.

Armageddon Time (R)

Anthony Hopkins, Anne Hathaway.

This movie about Paul Graff (Banks Repeta), a tween from a Jewish family growing up in 1980 Queens, has a very novella, moment-in-time feel. Paul and public school classmate Johnny Davis (Jaylin Webb) are fast friends with a real George-and-Harold energy (for those who know their Captain Underpants), with Paul having a love of drawing and both of them disliking school and very much liking goofing off. The consequences of their goofiery are not equal, though — Johnny, one of the few Black kids at the school, seems to get punished harshly whether he’s done something or not. One particular misadventure has Johnny, who is cared for by a grandmother in poor health, dodging foster care officials while Paul is sent to his older brother’s private school to set him straight.

Surprisingly to Paul, the advice to his parents —Esther (Hathaway) and Irving (Jeremy Strong) — to send him to the tonier school came from Esther’s dad, Paul’s beloved grandpa (Anthony Hopkins). Having struggled against antisemitism throughout his life, Paul’s grandpa tells him to take the opportunities he gets. But he also urges Paul to stick up for the non-white kids that the students at his new private school disparage; be a mensch, he tells him.

The movie has its compelling moments, with characters like his mother, his often angry father and his grandfather often presented to us from his kid’s-eye-view of them. But the pieces of this movie don’t always hang together. Each of the adult characters, while well-performed, feel like they’re working at slightly different frequencies. Armageddon Time isn’t bad but it lacks a certain clarity. B Available for rent or purchase.

See How They Run (PG-13)

Saoirse Ronan, Sam Rockwell.

In 1950s London, Inspector Stoppard (Rockwell) and Constable Stalker (Ronan) investigate the murder of Leo Kopernick (Adian Brody), an American director tasked with turning Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap into a film. As in any English country house murder, there are an assortment of potential suspects with an assortment of connections to (and disagreements with) the victim. Eager and slightly star-struck Stalker and uninterested, world-weary Stoppard make an odd-couple pairing as they interview the various players — an ego-filled star (Harris Dickinson), an ego-filled writer (David Oyelowo), the play’s no-nonsense producer (Ruth Wilson), the potential producer of the movie (Reece Shearsmith) and his mistress (Pippa Bennett-Warner) — and try to figure which of the many reasons for wanting Leo dead actually moved someone to murder.

This movie has all the trappings — in how it’s shot, in the very Character-y characters, in its wry dialogue — of a buoyant murder mystery. But somehow it’s missing the bounce, the spark that would make it the kind of fun it seems to want to be. See How They Run seems to be aiming for “Knives Out but cozier” but instead it’s merely inoffensive and mildly pleasant. B- On VOD and HBO Max.