Oscar, Oscar, Oscar! Part 1: THE PERFECT NEIGHBOR (2025), Best Documentary Feature

We can tell what she’s doing right from the beginning. The repeated police calls and the carefully chosen words. Words that plant the seed of a pattern that’s completely hollow but might be enough to convince a judge or jury. Because she lives in a Stand Your Ground state, the perpetrator, Susan Lorincz of Ocala, Florida, commits her crime in full view of the police, who are benevolent but hobbled. We watch in horror as Susan, a white woman, weaponizes the substantial benefit of the doubt that the law grants her in order to eventually shoot and kill a Black woman in cold blood. She is not the only person to have done this, a horrific murder by any definition except Florida law’s. They all hum the same refrain. I feared for my life. I thought they were going to kill me. And so I aimed and fired.

Geeta Gandbhir’s film is constructed entirely (until the epilogue) out of police body cam, surveillance, local news, and court footage. No dot-connecting is necessary. Police arrive at Susan’s house as she complains that the local children, mostly Brown and Black, are playing on her lawn. She claims one child threw a lawn sign at her: dubious, but it’s the first piece in her puzzle that will lead to her “self-defense” plea. The neighborhood children are silly, funny, irritating in the way kids are. They include the four children of Ajike Owens, whose life would be cut short on Susan’s porch. The police calls continue. We hear how Susan transforms a mild annoyance into a mortal threat. It’s sociopathically methodical.

The police are skeptical of her claims, if not exactly wise to what she’s planning. Should they have been? I suppose so: their casual dismissal of Susan’s complaints and sympathy with the local children and parents might be suitable in a state without such a generous Castle Doctrine. They offer warnings—just keep them off her lawn so there’s no trouble, they say—that would be reasonable if the law were.

The night of horror arrives. Children are devastated as their mother is torn from the world. Everyone behaves as we would expect. The police do what they can. But exactly how much they can do is in doubt. The uphill battle that follows becomes steeper because the state law is fashioned to favor Susan and not her victim. The charge that’s filed is manslaughter, when it should have been murder. Even then, the privilege she’s grown accustomed to still holds. When she is arrested and charged, an uncommon grace is granted to her. Only because I had no more tears, I laughed at this moment: how else to respond to such calm patience when law enforcement has shot people in the streets for less?

The movie is punishing in its depiction of how frustrating the process of justice is. Every situation seems to favor the aggressor. The grieving family is given excuses until eventually they’re able to claw some response out of the system. The takeaway is that but for the efforts of the victim’s family, Florida state law (and by extension other states’ similar laws as well) makes murder very easy to get away with if you’re a certain kind of person. The movie’s ending offers a small relief. Very small.

*** 1/2 out of ****

BRING HER BACK (2025)

If Bring Her Back were the Philippou brothers’ first film, I’d feel the urge to be kinder to it. It has all the hallmarks of an early feature from filmmakers who show promise and move on to more daring, polished, and interesting projects. It displays a lot of the same thematic and visual elements that made their Talk to Me such a gripping film, but lacking the terrifying logic that guided it. It’s like looking back at Killer’s Kiss after watching The Shining, and seeing the filmmaker play the right notes but not quite master the music yet. The trouble is that Talk to Me was their first film, and Bring Her Back their second. It’s definitely a film by the same artists, but it backs off before ramping to the heights of terror that Talk to Me did. It feels like a less mature work.

It does, admittedly, feature two exceptional lead performances by two young actors, Billy Barratt and Sora Wong, that elevate it above what its facile story offers. If this movie puts them on the map, it's done its job.

When step-siblings Andy (Barratt) and Piper (Wong) find their father dead, Family Services has no option but to place them both in foster care. Because Andy will turn 18 in a few months, they're confident they can tough it out until then. Laura (Sally Hawkins), a former social worker who lives in a remote mid-century modern labyrinth of a house (an effective horror movie setting for any A24 movie like this one), is eager to take in Piper, who is sight impaired, but needs some convincing before she allows Andy to come along. It isn't long before Andy begins to notice warning signs that Piper doesn't, particularly the feral child named Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips) who appears to be living there. When we learn (early on--not a spoiler) that Laura had a daughter who was also blind, and who recently passed away, it's pretty easy to put together who the Her is in the title, and who will need to go away for Her to be brought back.

Even with only their second feature, the directors already display a unique style that many filmmakers are likely to mimic in the years ahead. They have a way of composing a shot, through the use of close-ups as well as slow zooms, pans, and turns, that subtly suggests something is wrong even when everything seems to be in its place. The high point is in their portrayal of Oliver as the linchpin to the movie's plot: he's the only part of the movie with any mystery behind it, and a kitchen table scene between him and Andy is probably the only scene in the movie where I had truly no idea what would happen, and was gleefully and gruesomely surprised.

The directors mine a good bit of tension from Andy's growing frustration at knowing what his happening to him and his sister and having no way to get them out, and Barratt believably plays Andy as a flawed and often impulsive teenager who nonetheless still wants to be a good older brother. The relationship between Andy and Piper always feels genuine.

The story, though, isn't strong enough to sustain the movie. The plot feels very much like a Goosebumps novel: for better or worse, it pretty much goes where you think it will, and doesn't make many detours. Once we surmise what's happening, very early, a lot of it feels like going through the motions. Great horror filmmakers are able to tease us with what's going to happen but leave some mystery as to how it will get there, and there are some great moments in Talk to Me where we can sense what's coming but not exactly how. Here we mostly know how as well, especially in the last act, which involves a lot of characters driving back and forth to and from places, and features my least favorite movie trope: a car coming out of nowhere and smacking one of the characters by surprise. It should have been retired after Final Destination, and even the newest entry in that series chose to cheekily make fun of this cliche rather than repeat it.

The best I can say about Sally Hawkins's performance is that she embodies Laura in exactly the way the filmmakers need her to. They ought to have been more ambitious with her. Hawkins is capable of easily transitioning from an eccentric to a monster, but the filmmakers make her a little bit too much of each. The more subtle ways she tries to split up the two siblings are appropriately eerie, including baiting Andy into violence as well as one especially nasty way of gaslighting him that I won't reveal. However, certain scenes seem to set up a different, more explicitly cruel and crass character that doesn't jell with what follows. For instance, the scene at their father's funeral feels like it was included so the filmmakers could get something gross and off-putting into their movie; it paints Laura as a dangerous kook rather than a calculated villain. The horror might have arisen from her outward friendliness and trustworthiness while her devious side would come from her grief and desperation.

Bring Her Back is a swing and a miss, even if it's a more satisfying miss than most. Those who haven't seen Talk to Me will find a similar frightening intensity in that film that ratchets slowly throughout it, but with a better story. The Philippous are still the real deal, and I'm still excited to see what they come out with next.

** 1/2 out of ****

FINAL DESTINATION: BLOODLINES (2025)

One thing I appreciate about the Final Destination series is that it's managed to mine unthought-of opportunities for bloodshed and brutality on screen, yet it's usually stopped a thin, thin hair short of becoming cynical. As many tightly choreographed elaborate death scenes as there are, it always runs the risk of becoming Friday the 13th with the figure of Death as the killer instead of Jason. The better entries (1, 2, 5, and this one) treat their characters as more than just fodder for destruction; rather--and this is thanks to Glen Morgan and James Wong, who made the first and still the best one--they have actual questions and actual fears about (small D) death that are exacerbated when (big D) Death comes for them. The only truly bad entry (4--er, forgive me--The Final Destination) had characters that merely filled in the dull blank spots between the big death set pieces. (I have complicated feelings about Final Destination 3, which is some people's favorite but didn't quite do it for me.)

Because the series has become famous for its increasingly gruesome Rube Goldberg-esque death scenarios, it's easy to forget how meditative the first Final Destination was. It wasn't afraid to be about these kids truly emotionally grasping with surviving a plane crash they were supposed to die on, and coming to terms with having been psychically granted a second chance. This direction is especially clear if you watch the film's original ending, available on the DVD but rejected by test audiences for being too somber and having no big twist. I kinda like that one better. 

It was the sequel that upped the gore ante, and Final Destination: Bloodlines is much more in line with 2 than 1 in that regard (it even contains multiple cheeky callbacks to That Log Truck, which are welcome). Death is the star here, and the character drama often takes a back seat. That doesn't make the emotional side of the film less important, though I do wish the filmmakers would have put a little more than cursory effort into defining the family at the center. People come in and out of the movie with some perfunctory explanations for their presence or absence, and only the slightest justification for their existence beyond being impaled or immolated or crushed to death.

But still: ho boy, it is thrilling. The opening sequence is a stunner, probably second only to the highway disaster at the beginning of 2 as the best anchor scene for one of these movies. I won't reveal what happens: only that it involves a Very Tall Tower similar to the Space Needle in Seattle, a band playing "Shout" to a happily stomping crowd on the dance floor, and a kid who's the most awful little shit not born in Midwich or Derry. It's seen from the point of view of Iris (Brec Bassinger), but after her vision of mass destruction we fast forward two generations to Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana), Iris's granddaughter, who after a series of nightmares drives home from college to investigate the grandmother she'd never known. This, of course, leads to Death targeting Stefani and the rest of her family in excitingly terrifying ways.

The family drama around Stefani's absence, her relationship with her brother Charlie (Teo Briones), and the disappearance of their mother (Rya Kihlstedt, wasted here*), seems like a rushed and functional way to get to the bloodshed. Still, the movie isn't exhausted of an emotional core: the relationship between Stefani's two cousins, brothers Erik (Richard Harmon) and Bobby (Owen Patrick Joyner), is surprisingly heartfelt and provides some moving moments amid the destruction.

The other surprisingly touching element of the film is the presence of the late Tony Todd, whose last film this was. He's become a staple of the series, even though his character has never quite been pinned down. He's either the devil, or an angel, or a survivor, or a psychic, or maybe he's all those things. His exact identity is revealed in this film, but that's not even the real point. His tall imposing figure and deep voice seem in themselves to intone some kind of knowledge from the Beyond. Here we see him visibly withered (he was already dying of cancer during filming) and there's a hint of resignation to his sage advice. It's a sort of farewell that I didn't see coming, and a cinematic sendoff that truly understands who Tony Todd was and what he meant for horror. In a series infamous for preferring the sloppy over the sentimental, this is a powerful moment.

The other welcome appearance from beyond the grave is Shirley Walker, who contributed the theme music that's been used for every one of the Final Destination movies. She was also one of the greats, and her haunting score has always perfectly suited this series. It's one of the many elements that has generally lifted these movies above simple slashers and into something a little more ambitious, and fun.

*** out of ****

*Note: Everyone should see Kihlstedt in Sebastian Gutierrez's made-for-cable remake of Roger Corman's The She Creature. She played the title and titular she creature.

THE SUBSTANCE (2024)

You've heard of a satire being too on-the-nose. The Substance is on the nose, in the eyes, all over the face, and gummed up in your hair. That works to its advantage sometimes, but at other times the whole-plane absurdity undercuts the truly interesting logic of its premise. As it is it’s an enjoyably wacko excursion in Cronenbergian body horror, but it might have been more.

Demi Moore plays Elisabeth Sparkle (no relation to the Japanese detergent magnate, I assume), a Jane Fondaesque actress who’s made her living in middle age by hosting a daytime women’s fitness show. When the network executive (a snarlingly disgusting Dennis Quaid, having a blast) fires her on her birthday, she coincidentally receives an invitation to partake in a treatment to make her younger again. I won’t reveal how it works (that’s part of the fun), but it involves injecting herself with the title and titular Substance, a vial of neon green liquid that looks like Ecto Cooler™️. This creates a young doppelganger (Margaret Qualley) with whom Elisabeth is allowed to trade places for a week at a time. The kit comes with an ominous message: “Remember, you are one.”

The shadowy corporate bioengineering surrounding the Substance is one of the movie’s more satisfying creations. Elisabeth is led through cryptic phone calls and professional but foreboding mailers to a property deep in the slums of Hollywood, through a rollup door that only opens halfway (forcing her to supplicate herself), to a sanitized white locker room where she picks up her equipment without any contact. The room mirrors the sanitized white bathroom at her apartment where most of the movie’s more gruesome action takes place. 

Like Coralie Fargeat’s previous film Revenge, The Substance is a gradually spiraling horror drama about a woman trying to claw her way back after being destroyed by men. But Revenge began with a truly terrifying situation (a young woman trapped in a remote location with a group of violent rapists) and gradually built to an oddly logical level of absurdity (if I recall correctly, a climactic scene featured the heroine attempting to evade her attacker while he slowly bled to death, all the while trying not to slip and fall in the blood). The Substance, unfortunately, is wafting through crazytown all the way through, with too little of the real horror it hints at. 

The male villains representing the sexist system that envelops Elisabeth and then rejects her are sometimes funny, but are generally too goofy to be as insidious as they ought to be. Buffoonish and threatening certainly aren’t mutually exclusive—just look at Christoph Waltz in Inglourious Basterds, or Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet, or anyone in the Trump Administration. But Fargeat can’t find the right balance and the men end up as caricatures rather than as logical exaggerations of their real-world parallels. Harvey Weinstein, the namesake of the Quaid character, didn’t merely reject older actresses in favor of nubile youngsters; he used his position to take advantage of them physically and held their careers hostage for it. 

The movie’s version of that systemic assault is absolutely chaste by comparison. The symbol of the lowest level of cultural degradation is… a fitness show that allows people to stare at boobs and butts? Give me a break. All this cartoonishness does is allow any of Fargeat’s possible targets to escape unscathed. Would any of the Harvey Weinsteins of the world feel confronted here? Even Quaid himself, a vocal Trump supporter married to a yoga instructor half his age, seems not to have felt his ears burning. 

Though Qualley is believable as Elisabeth’s younger self and later nemesis (named Sue), her scenes are not as interesting as Moore’s if only because her dalliances in her younger body are conventional and expected. She sleeps with young hot guys, she drinks and does drugs, she uses her younger body at the older one’s expense. Her inevitable disobedience of the “rules” of the Substance leads to horrific transformations. Don’t google it before you see it, but the creators here seem to have taken a lot of inspiration from Rob Bottin. If that means something to you, you’ll know what to expect. 

The movie’s lone oasis of subtlety is Moore herself, whose performance is a deeply felt essay of a fallen idol whose self-loathing has been set in concrete by the men who control her career (much like her Hollywood Walk of Fame Star, the image of which begins the movie). She’s the reason the movie works at all, and imbues all of her physical transformations with a genuine hope and sadness. When the Substance takes its toll on her, her growing sense of being trapped in her aging body, while a younger person reaps the benefits, makes for the movie’s best and most heartbreaking scenes. A sequence in which Elisabeth is preparing for a date is probably the most tense in the movie, and it depends on no body horror or physical deformations or anything that isn’t in Moore’s performance. She’s fantastic, and deserves to win the Oscar for this.

It’s too bad that Fargeat doesn’t follow through on everything Moore brings to it. As she’s in the movie less and less, it loses its uniqueness. The climax follows through on the literal bloodbath it promises, and without giving away too much, I’ll say the makeup artists show quite a bit of respect to Beryl Lerman and Michael Morris’s work on The Elephant Man. But the ridiculousness of Lis/Sue’s surroundings comes too close to meeting the ridiculousness of what happens to her, and the line between them is never clear enough for it to be truly effective. It needs a bigger moment of catharsis. Think the ending of Rose Glass’s Saint Maud, which examines this sort of degradation in a way that The Substance fumbles. Still, I must admit I take some joy in this being the first Oscar-nominated movie in which… well, see for yourself. 

** 1/2 out of ****

I SAW THE TV GLOW (2024)

Jane Schoenbrun's magnificent debut feature We're All Going to the World's Fair was a definitive tragedy of cultural emptiness. Its lead character's cynical mining of a fictional arcade game as a replacement for a personality, as well as a bevy of niche internet content creators' eagerness to do the same, pointed to, as I wrote in 2022, "a culture that's been completely drained from all sides, has even run out of the fumes of past successes, and is now running on the fumes of past failures. To paraphrase Daniel Plainview, we're a milkshake that's been drunk up."

Their second film, I Saw the TV Glow, not only is a brilliant film itself, but lays even another layer onto World's Fair in its use of a retro pop culture reference point as a gateway to self-realization. Where World's Fair despaired at its characters grasping for human connection through pop culture that's been reduced to ashes, I Saw the TV Glow creates a piece of young-adult nostalgia that finds two lost souls and binds them together.

When 12-year-old Owen (Ian Foreman) sees a commercial for a Saturday-night young-adult show called The Pink Opaque, his life is changed. Then he sees 14-year-old Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) reading an episode guide for the show, and asks her about it. His parents won't let him stay up to watch it. Maddy invites him to sneak away one Saturday night so they can watch it. Soon, the show becomes the conduit for both of them to discover themselves in ways they've otherwise been unable, and Owen (played as a teenager and grown-up by Justice Smith) is led to confront... something about himself that the show gives him an avenue to confront.

I say "something" because the movie does not express Owen's dilemma explicitly. It doesn't express it because Owen cannot. He has no emotional language to deal with it apart from what The Pink Opaque gives him. It most closely parallels the transgender experience--Schoenbrun is trans and has been open about how the isolation in their work springs from being trans in an unsupportive environment--but is not completely exclusive to it. When Owen is asked whether he likes girls or boys, he replies, “I dunno. I think I like TV shows.” He doesn’t know who he is, and the show is the only way he’s gotten close to finding out. 

Repression is the evil at the center of I Saw the TV Glow. Owen's home is not exactly conducive: Mom (Danielle Deadwyler) is loving but fragile, and often needs Owen's protection more than vice versa; and Dad (Fred Durst, who's very good) is aloof and dismissive. It isn't long before Owen is given the ultimatum of setting out on his own with only Maddy by his side, or retreating into the world of the devil he knows. The movie has clearly been delivered by someone who has tried the second option, and Schoenbrun’s portrayal of a closeted life here is as unnerving as anything in World’s Fair, or for that matter, Skinamarink (a movie that was championed by Schoenbrun on its festival circuit, also by a queer filmmaker, also about a child waking up to realize that his parents cannot help him).

It's a risk for Schoenbrun to include a fictional TV show within their movie, as art-within-art is often less credible than its characters claim it to be. That is not the case with The Pink Opaque, which feels as real to us as it does to Owen and Maddy. It's a blend of Are You Afraid of the Dark? with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a horror anthology show on the Young Adult Network about two young girls (Helena Howard and Lindsey Jordan) who meet at summer camp and discover that they have a psychic connection. They live "on the other side of the county" from one another, and after summer camp they only communicate psychically. There's a "Monster of the Week" format a la The X-Files, as well as a "Big Bad" called Mr. Melancholy, a sinister Man-in-the-Moon who constantly hovers over the two heroines, a visual nod to the imagery of Georges Méliès's "A Trip to the Moon" as quoted by The Smashing Pumpkins in the video for "Tonight, Tonight" (covered by Jordan's musical alter ego Snail Mail on the soundtrack). 

It's the sort of show that early-to-mid millennials like Schoenbrun (born in 1987) and myself (1982) remember as being more genuinely scary than its tweener marketing seemed to suggest. But what appeals to Owen and Maddy is not just the scary monsters, but the idea that there's a kind of friendship that transcends an unsympathetic world. That even in Mr. Melancholy's world, there's someone out there who gets you. I'd have watched that show.

But just as we become comfortable with the idea that The Pink Opaque will be our savior, Schoenbrun pulls the rug out and immerses us in pain and confusion. Owen's few moments of clarity are buried, both literally and figuratively. Maddy disappears, and so does The Pink Opaque, in a crushing final episode sequence featuring a performance from Emma Portner (as a character I will not reveal) that is among the most visually arresting I've seen, and truly scary. 

Schoenbrun reminds us that as much as pop culture can offer us connection, friendship, commonality, it can be a scapegoat as well. It's the "real" world that morphs into the nightmare, and it becomes clear that what Maddy has offered Owen is not a TV show but a way out: of the closet, of town, of an unloving home.

In the end, Owen is submerged into a fantasy nightmare, but not the one we expect. Smith's and Lundy-Paine's deeply felt performances anchor the movie as their characters pass each other in the night: she going out, he heading further in. Her posture gaining more composure and confidence, his shrinking to the point where he is both figuratively and literally suffocating. A choice Schoenbrun makes which seems at first to be too on-the-nose is to have Owen break the fourth wall and narrate directly to us, but as the movie goes on we realize why it is Owen telling us this directly rather than showing us. We realize why Owen only hears what Maddy is telling him through the lens of a TV show.

I think the key is the central scene at the Double Lunch bar, where there are two musical interludes that function as Owen’s pivotal point, kind of like the Club Silencio scene in Mulholland Dr. The two songs, respectively by Sloppy Jane and King Woman, parallel Owen's state in the final scene: first a sedated, passive acceptance, then a guttural primal scream.

**** out of ****

Note: I Saw the TV Glow is rated PG-13. This is correct, as there are young people not represented sufficiently in media who will feel very seen by this movie.

UNFROSTED (2024): The toaster pastry exposé that the woke left doesn't want you to see

There's a moment in Jerry Seinfeld's 2002 documentary Comedian where we see an up-and-coming standup by the name of Orny Adams receiving notes from Seinfeld's close associate, George Shapiro, on his comedy. Adams, portrayed as the heel of the movie against Seinfeld's consummate professional, resists the criticism, insults Shapiro, insists that his jokes are funny the way he wrote them. 

I thought of that moment a lot while watching Unfrosted, Seinfeld's goofy supposition about the creation of the Pop Tart. Seinfeld, I assume, thought it was funny the way he wrote it, and I assume no one had the clout to tell him the truth. It is a movie severely in need of a note, and the note should have been "Stop."

Tongue-in-cheek docudramas are in vogue right now: spit into a Roku and you'll hit at least three seriocomic narrations of some innovation or another of varying significance. The iMac. The Blackberry. The Flamin' Hot Cheeto. I vaguely remember a movie from a few years ago about the inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper. Not the wiper itself, mind you--someone else did that--but the thing that makes it intermittent.

However saturated the market is, a somewhat ironic retelling of Kellogg's legendary breakfast treat's inception might actually have been an interesting idea, but that's not what Unfrosted is. Instead, director/co-writer/producer/star Seinfeld has spun what are presumably a few true details into a broad comedy of anachronisms, slapstick, and anthropomorphized commercial characters. He populates the movie with almost every comic actor alive. It's less like its docudrama and biopic brethren than it is an overloaded overbudgeted action comedy like The Cannonball Run. And like that movie (and the windshield wiper) its effectiveness is intermittent.

At least one critic has already deemed Unfrosted the worst movie of the century. It isn't, and it's not even the worst of the young year: the aftershock of Matthew Vaughn's dizzying, flavorless and brightly colored Froot Loop of a comedy Argylle still lingers. It would be very difficult with this cast for Unfrosted to come up completely empty. But with this much fruit pectin hurled at the wall, more should have stuck. If it isn't the worst movie of the century, it's bad in a way I never imagined it could be.

Bob Cabana (Seinfeld), a high executive at Kellogg Inc., run by the eponymous Edsel Kellogg (a made-up character played by Jim Gaffigan), happens upon a couple of street urchins in the rival Post company's dumpster. The little rascals are snacking on some jelly from an experimental treat. Cabana tastes it, and it's delicious. Right away he commissions a similar venture from Kellogg, and enlists the help of Donna Stankowski, a NASA technician (also not a real person).

Okay, I thought: he's making a point about how corporations capitalize even on their refuse. That would have been an interesting movie: putting Pop Tarts alongside Bunch'a Crunch, Oreo bits, broken lasagna, and all the other products that amount to packaged garbage. But nope, that's not followed through. In fact, it seems Seinfeld, along with co-writers Spike Feresten, Andy Robin, and Dave Marder, has made every effort to avoid any cultural significance whatsoever. Characters enter the film with only a passing resemblance to the real life figures they represent: Amy Schumer as a cunning Marjorie Post; James Marsden as a bright and buzzy Jack Lalanne; Bobby Moynihan as a Mario-esque Chef Boyardee; Jack McBrayer as a hesitant Steve Schwinn (of the bicycles). References are made to the Cuban Missile Crisis and January 6th, without much substance. I don't know why they choose to portray Walter Cronkite (Kyle Dunnigan) as a hostile drunk, or legendary Tony the Tiger voice Thurl Ravenscroft (Hugh Grant) as a prissy self-centered hack. Someone thought it was funny, I suppose.

A few disparate moments are amusing. I like the two scrappy kids (Bailey Sheetz and Eleanor Sweeney) who keep getting involved in the operations. As two Kellogg employees, Ronny Chieng and Sarah Cooper (remember her?) have some good lines. There's an in-character cameo appearance from Jon Hamm and John Slattery that works because there's some funny writing in it, and Seinfeld & co. don't simply rely on their appearance for a sole laugh. As President Kennedy, Bill Burr breaks through the hacky joke of the situation (JFK likes girls???) and gives an actual good comic performance.

I'd invoke these moments as whispers of what could have been, but to paraphrase Dr. Ian Malcolm, "could" doesn't necessarily mean "should." Unfrosted will leave no cultural footprint, has no social relevance, and has no real reason for existence other than to be funny for 90 minutes, which it mostly is not. Seinfeld, in his recent emergence as an anti-PC activist, has claimed he wanted to make his movie the opposite of Barbie. Mission accomplished, sir.

** out of ****

Note: Orny Adams is still working and he is very funny. Some of his shows are available on YouTube.

30 NIGHTS OF NIGHT, Night #2: NEFARIOUS (2023)

I should have pegged Nefarious as a Christian film before I started watching, but it pulled a fast one on me. I was expecting a regular ol' nasty demonic thriller like Sinister and Insidious and Malignant and other vicious adjectives, and it wasn't until the halfway point that I realized it had other aspirations. I like to consider myself smart enough to know a trojan horse when I see one, but the Devil is a wily one, as they say.

It's a shame that Nefarious doesn't know what a deft job it did at reeling me, a pro-choice liberal Catholic, into its procession, because that doesn't seem to be what it's trying to do. Rather, it seems squarely aimed at its own choir. It's one of those alternate versions of popular entertainment that's repurposed for the evangelical set: there's Christian rock, Christian pop music, Christian theme parks, and now there's a Christian horror movie. Sinister for Jesus Camp.

Except, well, Sinister itself should probably play pretty well at Jesus Camp: it was at heart a moral fable about ignoring one's family for fortune, and even cast a former Republican Senator--Fred Dalton Thompson--as the moral authority. A lot of mainstream horror movies tend to portray Christianity generally positively, from the questionable exploits of the benevolently portrayed Warrens in the Conjuring series to the admirable clergy in the Exorcist films. Nefarious doesn't realize that it actually doesn't need to stray far from the norm to make its point. So it's a shame when it stakes its claim firmly in its own yard and doesn't seek to go anywhere else. 

Dr. James Martin (Jordan Belfi) arrives at an Oklahoma state prison to deliver the final psychological analysis of a prisoner about to be executed, Edgar Wayne Brady (Sean Patrick Flanery). Mr. Wayne Brady (Whose Line fans laugh there) claims to be inhabited by an ancient demon who used him as a vessel to commit the murders. Nefarious, the closest approximation of the name of the demon inhabiting Edgar, boasts to James that he wants Edgar to be executed so he can return to Hell. James, an atheist skeptic, is confident he'll be able to see through the supposed demon's facade, but his confidence soon falls apart when the demon begins to tell him things no one else knows.

Nefarious doesn't take long to get under James's skin, and that's because writer-directors Chuck Konzelman and Cary Solomon (adapting a novel by right-wing media personality Steve Deace) make James into such a soft-headed bozo that he caves to the demon's will immediately. James is the evangelical bubble's version of an atheist secularist, with a self-assured cockiness that crumbles upon the first challenge. He's a human "Share this and make a liberal cry" meme.

The movie's best moments are the early ones between James and Nefarious in which the demon establishes his pomposity. It's here that Flanery really shines in one of his best performances, playing Nefarious as a properly dismissive and arrogant eternal being who's disgusted to be in the room with inferior humans. The writing shows some cleverness too, and Flanery and Belfi have a fun rapport in their early exchanges as Nefarious explains the origins of the human world through a fallen angel's eyes. Tom Ohmer, recognizable as the cop who tells Detective Crashmore that he "do[es]n't care who gets in [his] way" in I Think You Should Leave, has some fun as a tough-as-nails warden.

But around the end of the first act the directors lose their confidence in the audience and start catering to the lowest common denominator within the evangelical bubble. James turns from a formidable opponent to the easiest mark in the world, and all Nefarious need do is provoke him in the slightest for him to break down, as the filmmakers assume all atheists would. It's a common fantasy among the truly isolated faithful that nonbelievers need only to be confronted with something they're unfamiliar with in order to be convinced. Lots of their literature revolves around "told you so" rapture porn and "you can't explain that" question-begging: check the Left Behind series or Kirk Cameron's banana video for more examples. 

It's no fun to watch the movie pander for the rest of its running time. It's clear that it speaks a language that only the devout will respond to. If you guessed that the movie wheels in the old favorite enemies by having Nefarious confront James's history of both (1) assisted suicide, and (2) abortion for a one-two punch, a shiny red apple for you. Amid a U.S. political climate where about 70% seem to be in favor of abortion rights in at least some capacity, this movie still speaks of it as if it were a secret shame, with James's cries of "It was her choice" serving only as a weasely shirking of masculine and fatherly responsibility. (The woman in question, of course, never appears and her voice isn't heard but for a too-late outgoing voicemail message. The decision-making, of course, lies entirely with men.) And his assisting of his mother's suicide during a terminal illness is written off as a ploy to quickly gain an inheritance; I certainly pray to my own God that none of the filmmakers are faced with such a situation only to have this assumption made of them.

It at least manages a modicum of consistency by coming out against the death penalty as well, but by the end it's beyond recovery. The ending is a debacle of a literal deus ex machina, the worst "God did it" resolution with no real catharsis or confrontation. And what's more, it subjects us to an unbearably long epilogue in which James explains the aftermath on a talk show hosted by Glenn Beck (!), followed by a final ending that doesn't so much "twist" as it does writhe.

The movie really had me in its first act, and were the filmmakers interested in reeling in nonbelievers, it might have worked. They could conceivably have gotten some non-Christians to watch a good solid horror movie with a Christian message. But no movie that features Glenn Beck as its version of a mainstream talk show host is interested in reaching a mainstream audience at all.

And it's a shame: Flanery is really good in it.

** out of ****

30 NIGHTS OF NIGHT, Night #1: THE BOOGEYMAN (2023)

The Boogeyman is a pretty good movie based on one of the scariest short stories ever written, and the thing that distinguishes the story is sadly largely left out of the movie. What’s left is some tried-and-true monster-in-the-closet madness, which, because the director Rob Savage is very deft at this sort of thing, is very exciting and fun to watch. Those who’ve never read Stephen King’s short story won’t know any better, but probably won’t see it as anything better than the myriad other Boogeyman or Boogeyman-adjacent movies that we admittedly love for what they are.

It’s a spooky fun good time and that’s enough, though I’d still like to see the real heart of King’s story adapted into a movie someday. The trouble is it doesn’t expand well to feature length, mainly because the main character of the story is an unreliable narrator and a selfish, rotten person. Lester Billings, who tells much of the story and is here played with a wan complexion of pure terror by David Dastmalchian, is the father of three children who have all suddenly died, one at a time, all after professing to have seen a “boogeyman” in their closet. The movie features Lester as an ancillary character who walks into the office of therapist Dr. Will Harper (Chris Messina), who’s recently lost his wife. The grief in the Harper household naturally attracts the title monster to Will and his daughters Sadie (Sophie Thatcher) and Sawyer (Vivian Lyra Blair). 

And so The Boogeyman is an allegory for grief and loss, as a violent monster fills the space where Will, Sadie, and Sawyer are reluctant to confront their emotions. Fine—a lot of horror movies mine this ground, and Savage along with screenwriters Scott Beck and Bryan Woods do it well—though King’s story treads an uneasier path that would have been more rewarding to see on screen. 

The arc of King’s story runs more like The Shining. It deals not with grief but with resentment, less with feelings that are uncomfortable to discuss and more with desires that are impossible to discuss. Lester Billings, like Jack Torrance, is a bad person trying minimally to be good, and failing. Just as the Overlook Hotel is a reflection of Jack’s violent tendencies and his alcohol dependency, the Boogeyman is a manifestation of Lester’s reluctant fatherhood and bitterness toward his wife for favoring the children over him. 

That’s hard to expand to a full movie, though Savage, whose first two features Host and Dashcam are both brilliant in their own regard, probably would have been up to the task. Woods and Beck are the proper writing team too: they were done dirty by John Krasinski in his diluting of A Quiet Place, and their debut feature Haunt is delightfully nasty. The movie works best when it’s taunting us with apparitions in corners and hazy figures in the dark. The main image the movie takes from the story—a cracked-open closet door—is used effectively. 

And so even if The Boogeyman ditches the more appealing aspects of the source material, it’s still superficially fun to watch. The performances are all very good, notably Thatcher, who plays the teenage Juliette Lewis on Yellowjackets and anchors the thrills here quite well. I can’t gripe that the movie is merely an effectively presented monster story. We need those too. 

*** out of ****

THE WHALE (2022)

The Whale is a no good, very bad movie with a collection of very good, admirable performances in service of an unworthy screenplay. The film doesn't appear bad until we've had a chance to think about it: its director, Darren Aronofsky, is no fool with this sort of emotionally wrenching drama, having delivered such truly raw tragedies as Requiem for a Dream and The Wrestler. It's the sort of movie that's very good at tricking you into thinking it's profound, with its cathartic confrontational dialogue and its carefully crafted authentic performances. But make no mistake: it's as empty as its main character's chicken buckets and pizza boxes.

It garnered an Academy Award for Brendan Fraser as Charlie, a college professor who's housebound with extreme obesity, barely able to move without assistance. The win is not undeserved. Fraser's performance is a marvelous, genuine display of despair and submission. Some have questioned the ethics of whether Fraser, who appears comfortably overweight but not dangerously obese, should have donned a fat suit to appear larger than he is. That isn't quite as troubling as the fact that the character he's playing is a phony concoction to force the audience into pity.

When his friend Liz (Hong Chau), a nurse who also happens to be the sister of his recently deceased boyfriend--and don't worry, all of this backstory is explained in full detail in long exchanges of dialogue--tells him that he's in congestive heart failure and will die if he doesn't seek medical help, Charlie instead contacts his estranged daughter Ellie (Sadie Sink) to try to make things right before he goes. She resents him, of course, as he left her and her mom (Samantha Morton) when he came out of the closet. But he offers to ghost-write a few essays for her to make sure she graduates high school, in exchange for her company and for the inheritance he's about to leave her. 

It's only because of the honesty in the two actors' approaches that this arrangement is believable at all. Ellie is a cipher who's a boomer's idea of what a zoomer behaves like (TV programming in the background reveals that the film takes place amid the 2016 election, a setting which adds absolutely squat to the story). She takes odd pictures for her Facebook page (strike one right there), and gives little hints of a sense of humor beneath a tough exterior, sure to project to everyone around her that beneath every traumatized youth is a Gal Friday just begging to be let loose. Compare Ellie to Stephanie, the daughter of Randy "The Ram" Robinson in The Wrestler, another estranged kid whose strained relationship with her father is believable and relatable at every step. Aronofsky has proven that he knows how to do this sort of thing; it's unthinkable that he'd struggle so much here.

The other main character who pops in and out at convenient times is Thomas (Ty Simpkins), a young door-to-door evangelist from a nearby church who happens to knock on Charlie's door at a crucial moment. Thomas, like all of the others who Charlie interacts with, has a journey that seems cathartic but is only contrived: the plot twists surrounding his character are unrealistic even by this movie's standards, and his final revelation to Charlie negates a lot of what the movie seems to have been using him to say all along. His whole arc might have just been removed and the movie would have been no worse.

Sometimes a good melodrama can strain credibility and still work wonders. Look at Dark Victory, or Now, Voyager. Maybe if this movie were in black & white and starred Bette Davis I could take it more seriously. I'm not familiar with the source material, a play by Samuel D. Hunter, but it's not surprising that The Whale originated as a stage play. It takes place entirely in one location: Matthew Libatique's cinematography, complete with the choice to frame the film tightly in a 4:3 ratio, does a good job at enhancing Charlie's locked-in environment. But Hunter, also the screenwriter, fails to adapt his play in any significant way for film. Characters speak as if they're beholden to Aristotle's three unities, loading themselves with exposition and emotional heft, to speak out loud what Aronofsky might otherwise have depended on, say, film techniques to reveal. Every scene has at least one character baring at least one monumental revelation. This may be the first film constructed entirely out of audition monologues.

The conclusion comes with a moral lesson--Hunter works in a perfunctory theme about being honest and writing your heart or something like that--but it barely reads amid the machinations and emotional manipulation. Those unfamiliar with Aronofsky's work might find the last act somewhat effective. I found it infuriating. It ends with one of those sudden magical-realist transitions where a character's tragedy is ironically transformed into a victory. Aronofsky is very good at this, in a way that many directors aren't. But it's the same trick he pulled in Requiem for a Dream, and The Fountain, and Black Swan, and The Wrestler. Slapping it onto this maudlin wreck is little respite.

But again, the performances from Fraser, Sink, and Chau, even Simpkins as the movie's least believable character, and Morton as another function of the plot, always threaten to elevate it. It's the sort of Oscar movie that might have appeared as a trailer in Tropic Thunder, between Simple Jack and Satan's Alley. It might have lost the award to Home for Thanksgiving.  

* 1/2 out of ****

SKINAMARINK (2022)

I fear that not enough people in the Year of Our Lord Twenty Twenty Three will allow themselves to experience Skinamarink in the appropriate way. There's a reason it's set in 1995 and not in the present day. Technology offers us an escape, and Skinamarink is designed to offer no escape. The director, Kyle Edward Ball, arrived at the premise when he polled Redditors on what their worst nightmares were, and found that many people responded with the same or a similar dream from when they were kids.

The dream: I wake up in the middle of the night to find that my parents are gone, and there's something in the house. I don't know what, but I know it's something bad. Ball personifies this primal fear in two children, four-year-old Kevin (Lucas Paul) and six-year-old Kaylee (Dali Rose Tetreault), who wake up to find that their parents are missing, and that the windows and doors on their house have disappeared. They respond the way a kid their age would. They travel the lengths of the house calling for Mom and Dad: Jamie McRae's masterful cinematography makes the normal house (Ball's parents' house, which he grew up in) seem positively expansive and labyrinthine, the way it would seem to a very young child. They watch an endless loop of cartoons and play with Legos. They call 911 (the phones are out, of course). And then something makes itself known.

For 100 minutes, the film sits on the waking verge of a nightmare. It occupies the moment when we're aware we're dreaming, but that awareness doesn't make the danger any less real. The surroundings are hazy but familiar. The cartoon images and sounds that pump constantly from the TV--assembled from various public domain sources, including Ub Iwerks's impressive and mildly terrifying "Balloon Land"--provide a kind of anchor into childhood reality, until a key moment at which whatever the presence is begins to manipulate them. Voices echo in the dark hallways. There are subtitles to help us decipher what's being whispered. Sometimes they don't seem to match the sounds.

What sets in after the first act--and yes, like a lot of David Lynch's work, Skinamarink does have a plot that can be analyzed and divided into very traditional acts, despite the outward appearance of being a fluid dream sequence--is the crushing sense of abandonment that's often felt in a nightmare. That a previously felt sense of security is suddenly gone without explanation. I do not use hyperbole when I say that one scene in which Kaylee journeys upstairs to her parents' bedroom might be the most tragic and devastating moment I've ever seen in a horror movie. Not because of any shocking imagery or manipulation of the child's presence for cheap sympathy, but because of what's implied in the dialogue, and what emerges from the darkness as her eyes adjust, and what she is left with in the end. It's the moment the greatness of the movie settled in.

The tension ratchets but rarely releases. Even the jump scares--and there are a few--don't provide the relief that usually comes with such moments. After the jolt, we're still in the nightmare. In directing the child actors, Ball shows a surprising sensitivity. We rarely ever see their faces, which works to several advantages: it provides a sense of removal from reality, and it allows Ball to distance the child actors from the terror in the movie. The horror is created in the editing and cinematography, never really explicitly on screen. The two children are directed to deliver the dialogue innocently and straightforwardly, mostly on ADR, and I have to assume phonetically, similar to the child voice actors in Peanuts specials. This prevents us from being yanked out of the nightmare by any fear for the actors' safety.

It's this intricate work that makes Skinamarink into more than the terror roadshow event that it's gotten the reputation for being. I expect it will be very divisive. Many will hate it. Others will shut themselves off from it. It's an extraordinarily immersive film made by a filmmaker who is in tune not only with nightmares but with film language. Like Lynch, Ball knows how to use traditional film to tell a nontraditional story. His fascination with nightmares may have given birth to Skinamarink as a concept, but it's his deftness as a director and editor that has made it a great film, and has allowed him to deliver--and again, I use no hyperbole--a shot late in the film that is the scariest thing I have ever seen in a movie.

**** out of ****

Kyle Edward Ball's short film "Heck," which is the basis for Skinamarink, is available on Youtube. I would recommend watching Skinamarink first and checking out "Heck" afterward.

WE'RE ALL GOING TO THE WORLD'S FAIR (2021)

One of my favorite anecdotes about film comes from Roger Ebert, from a review he wrote of the passable but forgettable Linda Blair vehicle Hell Night from 1981:

It was that legendary Chicago film exhibitor Oscar Brotman who gave me one of my most useful lessons in the art of film-watching. "In ninety-nine films out of a hundred," Brotman told me, "if nothing has happened by the end of the first reel, nothing is going to happen." This rule, he said, had saved him countless hours over the years because he had walked out of movies after the first uneventful reel. 

I seem to remember arguing with him. There are some films, I said, in which nothing happens in the first reel because the director is trying to set up a universe of ennui and uneventfulness. Take a movie like Michelangelo Antonioni's L’Avventura, for example. 

"It closed in a week," Brotman said. 

"But, Oscar, it was voted one of the top ten greatest films of all time!" 

"They must have all seen it in the first week."

Ennui, isolation and distance are difficult to portray in any movie, but they're particularly challenging for a horror movie. In a horror movie you have to sympathize with someone, or otherwise you're not scared when they are. The Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa does this very well, in films like Pulse, in which ghosts invade the internet and destroy humanity by breaking friends apart and spreading isolation like a virus, but I'm having a hard time thinking of another filmmaker who's been able to capture the fear of loneliness so effectively, except for Jane Schoenbrun, whose debut feature We're All Going to the World's Fair is a quietly wrenching chronicle of emptiness. Emptiness of life, emotion, character, entertainment, culture. There's a treacherously thin line between a movie about vapidity and a vapid movie, which is what makes World's Fair all the more impressive. Its ability to thread this needle is thanks in no small part to Anna Cobb, the lead performer who's on screen alone for most of the film and is going to be a star.

Movies like this always risk closing in the first week. World's Fair will be discussed forever when anyone asks what 2020s American culture was like. It is not a flattering portrayal. Early scenes establish a suburban corporate graveyard marked by the husks of once-dominant Toys-R-Us-es and K-Marts. The town is in upstate New York but it might as well be in a post-nuclear wasteland. During the opening credits young Casey (Cobb) wanders like the Road Warrior. No school is mentioned: maybe it's summer, or maybe it just doesn't matter anymore. We get glimpses and hear distant voices of parents in the background, but they never really enter the picture. Casey goes home to her attic room, where she opens her Youtube channel. She announces that she's "taking the World's Fair Challenge."

We learn from glimpses of other Youtubers' clips that the World's Fair Challenge is the "scariest game of all time," based on an innocuous-looking arcade game (hints of "Five Nights at Freddy's"). Someone takes the challenge by performing a "Candyman"-like ritual in front of their computer screen. Various Youtubers report differing results: one believes his insides have been turned into a Tetris game, another turns to plastic, another's arm breaks out in an odd pattern of sores (in what turns out to be a very funny scene). We follow Casey as she documents what happens to her after she takes the challenge. At first the seeming effects are maddeningly normal and expected. Then, a stranger known only as JLB contacts her. The message: "You're in trouble."

Schoenbrun's storytelling method is fluid and inconstant but intricately balanced. Some scenes take place entirely within the screen, Unfriended-style, complete with clips of seemingly unrelated videos from other users as well scenes from TV shows and movies related to the Challenge, revealing it for the cultural phenomenon it is. But it often extends outside of the screen to give us a view of who Casey is outside of her online performance. We also meet JLB, who's revealed to be a significantly older man (played by Michael J. Rogers, from Beyond the Black Rainbow) living in what appears to be a mansion. He, like Casey, is always alone. Is he an orchestrator of Casey's fate in some way? A predator? A hero? Someone who's lonely like she is, seeking a friend? Schoenbrun allows for him to be all and none of those things.

The horror in World's Fair comes from how easily we tend to be yoked into interesting stories and swindled by interesting frauds, and how our need for connection and involvement in isolating times draw us into conspiracies and cults. But we are never quite sure who is the victim and who is the predator. Maybe neither exists. Maybe, as comedian Bo Burnham posits, they're "performer and audience melded together" as "the market's answer to a generation that demanded to perform... perform[ing] everything to each other, all the time, for no reason." 

Schoenbrun reveals an unsettlingly real world where this constant-performance expectation has replaced real culture. All that's left to do is mine old properties for new entertainment, to project a ludicrous mythos onto an arcade game that, we see in some clips, is painfully innocuous, primitive, and functional. At a time when most movies are repackaged versions of old IP--check the imbecilic Space Jam 2, or the umpteenth version of Batman and Spider-Man etc., or the new horror version of Winnie the Pooh that's coming soon thanks to the expired copyright--World's Fair explores the sadness in a culture that's been completely drained from all sides, has even run out of the fumes of past successes, and is now running on the fumes of past failures. To paraphrase Daniel Plainview, we're a milkshake that's been drunk up.

Many will be frustrated by World's Fair's reluctance to fit into a traditional demonic possession story. The final scenes very subtly and unexpectedly switch our sympathies. The last moments dangle catharsis and then snatch it away. There's no real end because the performance, not the resolution, is really what the characters crave. Without it, they have nothing. There have been lots of movies where the main character is possessed by a malevolent game. In this one the tragedy is that they're possessed before they play.

**** out of ****

Note: This movie contains extensive use of strobing effects. Those affected should proceed cautiously.

White Male Rage! White Male Rage! NOBODY (2021) and WRATH OF MAN (2021) in Catharsis vs. Damnation

I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s about fed up with the Middle-aged Family Man With Tortured Past Whose Rage Gets Triggered By Traumatic Event movie that regained its popularity in 2008 when Liam Neeson rocketed from prestige actor to Action Star in Taken. At their worst, these movies can be a troubling appeal to fascist tendencies, like Charles Bronson gunning down multicolored street thugs in the Death Wish series. At their best they can be fun, but an interview with Neeson a few years ago revealed a real sinister force behind even a throwaway thriller like Taken: the actor’s revealing that his motivation for the Man on a Mission role he’s become synonymous with was an incident in which he almost committed a hate crime is hard to separate from the shoot-‘em-ups and chases in what’s supposed to be an escapist movie.

Regardless, this role has become a rite of passage for a lot of aging male actors: Russell Crowe, Kevin Costner, Keanu Reeves, and now Bob Odenkirk. Though it’s interesting to see a considerably non-buff performer like Odenkirk kick ass, his vehicle Nobody isn’t much different from its predecessors. 

It starts promisingly, introducing a hero entrenched in his averageness and not eager to leave it. Hutch (Odenkirk) has a good life as a regular old auto parts factory manager with a teenage son and a wife (Connie Nielsen) who’s a successful realtor. When their house is broken into one night, Hutch stops just short of going postal on the burglars. He instructs his family to stand back, lets the burglars take what they want, and calls the police. No one realizes that Hutch is a former special ops soldier who could, if he wanted to, take out an entire battalion singlehandedly. Like they do.

With this setup, Nobody could have been an interesting comment on the hypermasculine revenge drama rather than just another example of it. Director Ilya Naishuller makes it look like Hutch chickened out. Neighbors and co-workers all offer their thoughts on what they would’ve done if their house had been broken into. Hutch just smiles and nods. He knows what he was capable of doing, yet chose not to do. We learn later on that Hutch was being hypervigilant, not hesitant: he noticed the fear and desperation in the burglars’ voices, and that they had no bullets in their gun.

I thought that writer Derek Kolstad, who also wrote the John Wick movies, would take a similar approach here and create a righteously rageful hero whose driving force is empathy rather than wrath. The scenes where the men around Hutch belittle him for refusing to stand his ground are the best in the movie because they ironically play on masculinity rather than trumpet it. While the average Liam Neeson film is about a man protecting his castle, Nobody is about Liam Neeson living among a bunch of guys who think they’re Liam Neeson. Only he knows who he is.

As inventive as the idea is, it doesn’t last long. When Hutch saves a young girl from a gang of loud abusive Russians on a bus, he attracts the ire of a Typical Russian Mobster and the movie plunges headlong into dullsville. There are a few well-choreographed fight scenes, but they all seem so familiar. If you’ve seen John Wick, you won’t be surprised. The only real highlight is an appearance by Christopher Lloyd as Hutch’s father, where… I’ll just say that I thought I knew, and I didn’t.

On the complete flip side of this premise, Guy Ritchie (of all directors) does not spin his revenge thriller Wrath of Man into a lighthearted bruiser, but rather drives his characters straight to hell and lets us dwell there with them. His movie is also about a Man on a Mission, but he doesn’t glorify it. Ritchie’s men are broken and unfixable. There is no redemption, only pain.

At the center is Jason Statham, who unlike Odenkirk is the exact person we expect to be on a revenge mission. Ritchie knows this. Early scenes show him behaving calmly, patiently, unobtrusively, when we know something is bubbling underneath.

Statham is H, who’s hired by an armored car company at which the employees have names like Bullet, Boy Sweat Dave, and Hollow Bob. Everyone there is hiding something for one reason or another. We see H go through the hiring process. He barely passes the test: we see him fire a few stray bullets and almost fenderbend the truck. But he seems to be doing it on purpose. Instinctively, Jason Statham doesn’t seem like someone who messes up. 

Our instincts are right. I won’t reveal what he’s up to, but H’s plan is a credible and fascinating one. Ritchie tells us the story in chapter format, starting with H's job interview, then changing points of view and revealing the surrounding events little by little. Characters played by the reliable and underappreciated Holt McCallany, as well as Josh Hartnett, Andy Garcia, Jeffrey Donovan, Scott Eastwood, and (oddest of all) Post Malone, factor into H's plot in ways I won't reveal. Once we know why H has embedded himself in with this crowd, the movie culminates in a heist sequence that's among the most exciting I've ever seen.

It’s anchored by Statham in a role that departs from his expected wiseguy character from the early Ritchie films and his smarmy antihero from Hobbs and Shaw. Since Ritchie and Statham started their careers together, maybe Ritchie is the only director who could have coaxed this performance from Statham, without ironic distance or smirking nihilism. He plays a hurt man, and he and Ritchie drag us into the hurt with him. The L.A. setting recalls Michael Mann’s work in its sun-drenched days, neon-drenched nights, and labyrinthine roadways and tunnels. 

Ritchie’s victory is in the tone. He refuses to lighten it or let us bask in H’s brutality. A lot of thrillers like this don’t treat violence with real weight. This one does.

Nobody: ** out of ****

Wrath of Man: *** 1/2 out of ****

I CARE A LOT (2020) and ME YOU MADNESS (2021): On Steely Blonde Sociopaths Both Real and Fictional

It's hard to make us care about the three female villains at the center of the two recent black comedies I Care A Lot and Me You Madness, the first two of which are the respective main characters, the third of which is Louise Linton, the writer-director-star of the latter, who happens to be the wife of thankfully-now-former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and a onetime guest of Fort Knox who notoriously scoffed at critics who suggested that her photo op--next to a sheet of money that could have paid a full salary for a laid-off hospitality worker during the pandemic--was a tad out of touch. Linton was an actor before her foray into Marie Antoinettedom, and will no doubt be one again now, but by grace, will never write or direct again.

Both comedies revolve around steely blonde girlbosses who do horrible things with glee, but only I Care A Lot is a gleeful experience to watch. There's a movie somewhere in Me You Madness, a self-aware American Psycho parody about a hedge fund manager/serial killer who unexpectedly finds love in her latest conquest, but Linton isn't the director to make it happen. It's not only that she stumbles as a filmmaker--although she does--but her proud identity as a real-life Cruella de Vil lends too much sobriety to what's supposed to be a bitterly funny satire.

Catherine Black (Linton) does stonks by day, and by night seduces and murders unsuspecting men in her sanitized Malibu dream house. But when she strikes up a rapport with her latest mark, Tyler (Ed Westwick), she grudgingly decides to spare him. And then he steals her car.

It's a decent idea for a comedy, and Linton and Westwick sometimes have an easy chemistry in their banter that's fun to watch, and would certainly be more fun were it not for the real-life sins of both actors threatening to creep in (Westwick has several credible sexual assault allegations against him). There are bright moments: I admit I enjoyed a back-and-forth in which Tyler holds a white sofa hostage with a glass of red wine, and an extended fight sequence which involves a curling iron, thankfully not in the way you expect.

But Linton's idea of black comedy has a pretty high floor. Perhaps her marriage into the Family Values administration makes her reluctant to go too far. I'm probably not spoiling much in revealing that Catherine has a penchant only for murdering bad people--what a cop-out!--and that her idea of "partying" involves a setting on her phone that makes her house play Taylor Dayne. At least Hannibal Lecter was into creepy stuff, like opera. The confounding ending is so maudlin that it feels like it was tacked on by Jerry Falwell (before the throuple scandal). I kept watching through the credits, thinking Linton was saving something snarky for the last minute. Nope: just a reminder that she, like a lot of the Trump ilk, is a conservative traditionalist wearing the temporary skin of a provocateur. Doesn't take much to bring her from knife-wielding badass to smiling handmaid.

 I Care A Lot, meanwhile, is the bizarro version of this story that I expected when I started Me You Madness: a thriller about a sociopath just as cruel as either Catherine or Louise, which doubles down on her cruelty and doesn't hedge. Writer-director J Blakeson takes a huge risk asking us to follow a main character based on audacity alone, because Marla Grayson (Rosamund Pike) isn't merely cruel; she's irredeemable. But the risk pays off because Blakeson's screenplay is clever and Pike's embodiment of the character is fascinating to see.

Because Blakeson doesn't try to make us like Marla, but rather entices us with her cleverness and brazenness, we remain with her all the way. Marla is a "state-appointed guardian" who, with the help of a corrupt doctor (Alicia Witt), gets herself assigned as conservator for well-to-do elderly women, commits them to a nursing home, and sells their assets for profit. Pike's portrayal of complete remorselessness, accented by the frequent casual power-puff on a vape pen, actually anchors the film: we want to see her comeuppance, and at the same time we want to see how far she'll get.

Marla eventually digs her claws into Jennifer (Dianne Wiest), an early-stage Alzheimer's sufferer who seems too good a mark to be true, because she is. I won't say why, but Marla soon finds herself the target of a mob boss (Peter Dinklage) who is as ruthless as she is.

Where I Care A Lot could have been an average potboiler and gotten away with being merely diverting, Blakeson's writing elevates it to art. Take the scene where Marla first discovers that the mob is after her. An average movie puts her immediately in the victim role, while this one instigates the plot with a scene between Marla and a mob lawyer (Chris Messina) that is one of the funniest I've seen in a thriller since North by Northwest. Messina, who is absolutely flawless at playing a sleazeball, offers to buy her out; her response, and his response to her response, are the confirmation of this movie's greatness.

The final climax and conclusion are disappointing only because the setup has been so gripping. We expect an explosion, and we only really get a spark, which is still fine. And Blakeson doesn't cop out like Linton does, in that he gives Marla the coda she's earned.

Me You Madness: * 1/2 out of ****

I Care A Lot: *** 1/2 out of **** 

I Care A Lot is available on Netflix. Me You Madness is available in hell's car wash discount bin.

THINGS HEARD & SEEN (2021)

 

Things Heard & Seen, which to my displeasure is not a sequel to Things Smelt & Dealt, is a 90-minute comedy lurking inside a very roomy two-hour ghost story. I think all that would need to change is the editing, and maybe the ending, for it to become a bitter but funny satire of academic life, with a hint of mysticism. It's the sort of thing Woody Allen excelled at, right down to the lecherous male lead who makes women pay for his own misdoings (not unlike Woody himself). Surely Shari Springer Bergman and Robert Pulcini, the directors who debuted with the brilliant American Splendor, realize that what distinguishes it is not the lame ghosts but the truly odd real-world figures.

Catherine (Amanda Seyfried) and George (James Norton), with their young daughter Franny (Ana Sophia Heger), move from the city to distant upstate New York, where George has gotten a position as assistant art professor at a small private school. The head of his department (F. Murray Abraham) loves him, and the students--mostly female--adore him, but Catherine, who had been an art restorer and painter, is out of her element. There's nothing for her there, but she goes where her husband goes. They move into a beautiful 19th-century house, which the realtor (Karen Allen, who's very welcome) neglects to mention has a devious past.

The typical events happen: lights flicker, things break, gusts of wind fly, voices whisper, images flash in front of people and then disappear. The academics around them are all enamored of Swedenborg, the Christian mystic who believed he could pass back and forth between heaven and hell (we spend more time in the latter than the former). Swedenborg's name is invoked more often here, I think, than in Lars von Trier's The Kingdom, which is a lot. While Catherine contends with the spirits, and with two helpful neighbors (Alex Neustaedter and Jack Gore) who have a connection with the previous owners of the house, George takes a special interest in a young townie (Natalia Dyer) who enjoys Caravaggio.

Norton is terrific at playing the grinning, superficially charming, boundlessly narcissistic professor whose boorishness matches his desperation. George might be the best on-screen sociopath since Zac Efron took on Ted Bundy, one who knows he's secured a lot in life that feeds his pride and lust endlessly, and he needs to make sure he holds on to it. There's a dignity to Seyfried's performance too, in that she manages to be convincing as someone who would be married to George, while still playing Catherine to the height of her intelligence and avoiding horror-movie mistakes (at least to a point). She's allowed to be better here than in You Should Have Left, where she also played the wife of a white dude who behaves badly, the sort of role she needs to branch away from as soon as possible.

The main plot, in which Catherine experiences ghosts that wouldn't scare a Goosebumps reader, is a total bore, but never mind that: take a look at the world the movie takes place in. As the goofy spiritualist art professor, Abraham is effortlessly likable. Pay attention, too, to Michael O'Keefe's performance as the sheriff, who's also the realtor's husband: his fish-out-of-water demeanor as a townie among a gaggle of seasonal academics is one of the movie's little subtle joys. Natalia Dyer needs more to do as the object of George's dalliance; her first couple of scenes suggest that she's going to be a formidable challenge to his little plot, refusing to be the virgin or jezebel he seems to expect, but she sadly fades into the background.

The same goes for Rhea Seehorn as Justine, an adjunct weaving professor (ho, ho) who befriends Catherine and quickly becomes hip to George. She's the movie's version of a Strong Woman, which is not that strong at all: she's mostly there to function as the detective and then the target of George's ire. James Urbaniak steals every scene as her husband, a wayward author who moved upstate to write a book but now says things like "We should go outside and look at the alpacas before they nap." I would watch a documentary about their marriage.

The ending is unacceptable. I had thought we were beyond stories where women's martyring themselves to punish cruel men is considered heroic rather than tragic, especially in one co-directed by a woman, but here we are. Let's have a story where the guy gets his comeuppance and the women get to live fulfilling lives without him. The last shot, in which the action of the movie is seamlessly blended into a painting, is pretty neat, or would have been, if it weren't so artificial.

The premise and plot of this movie scream out for ironic dark comedy rather than the dull earnest gothic romance it's trying to be. Picture Noel Coward writing it, and the arc being less focused on the supernatural events and more focused on Catherine and company gradually realizing, possibly with some spiritual help, that George is a total fraud and a cheat. Don't even change Norton's performance: George's increasingly audacious efforts to save face are perfect for comedy. Woody Allen made a movie called Melinda and Melinda, which was not one of his best, or even very good, but had an irresistible premise: a story centering around one woman told alternately as a tragedy and as a comedy. Things Heard & Seen is Melinda, when what we need is Melinda.

* 1/2 out of ****

THE HUNT (2020)

The Hunt would be a more or less disposable thriller but for one single performance, on which the film rests almost entirely.

Even though the film has come with more than its share of overcontroversy, it doesn't do much to earn that weight. Like the otherwise forgettable Seth Rogen/Evan Goldberg comedy The Interview, it wouldn't likely be associated with any serious political movement if not for the ridiculous rightwing campaign against it. Just like The Interview, The Hunt's real-life political context is far more significant than any message it has to offer. The themes about the divide between left and right in the Trump-era U.S. are about as complex as a JibJab video. The idea that any right- or left-winger would feel seen enough to be offended by this film--a "Most Dangerous Game" story about a group of cartoonishly reactionary working-class conservatives who are kidnapped and hunted by a band of elite liberals--is preposterous. The cynical and very easy message is that both these sides are stupid and we are all better than them. All too relatable in the social media world.

Twelve people awaken in a nature preserve and discover they're being hunted as prey. It doesn't take long to discover that the prey share a conservative ideology, ranging from the cosmopolitan to the conspiracy theorist. The early scenes, in which the hunted scramble to orient themselves and strategize to escape, are punctuated by some fun if facile moments that poke fun at the partisan presumptions of the conservative victims and their complacently liberal hunters. I was surprised to find that the credited writers were Nick Cuse and Damon Lindelof, both writers on HBO's Watchmen, a show that effectively balanced an action/suspense plot with real significant social commentary. The Hunt feels like a very sloppy first draft of that.

And then, in walks Betty Gilpin, and the clouds open. We assume at first that she's going to be the headstrong Final Woman who outsmarts everyone, which is sorta what she is, but there's more to the character than that, and most of it is in Gilpin's performance. This might have been a simplistic hero role in the hands of a less talented actor, but Gilpin's choices make the character--a participant of mysterious origin named Crystal--into a human person rather than a satirical target. She appears stoic and wooden at first, but look more closely and you'll see how she subtly portrays someone who's always thinking two or three moves ahead, and who's reluctant to let anyone from either side see her next move. It's the sort of performance that will make you want to watch the movie again to see what she's been doing all along.

Mostly because of Gilpin, the last two-thirds of the movie are significantly better than the setup. The supporting performances--I won't reveal the cast because the reveals are part of the fun--are amiably silly even if the writing fails them much of the time. Some of the easy punchlines do land, some are real groaners. The main villain, not revealed until the 3rd act, is played by an Oscar-winning actor who doesn't often appear in movies like this. At first we think, ho ho, what a surprise cameo. But then this person stays in the movie and goes on to show why they're there.

The moral of the story, I suppose, is to not judge a book by its cover: an easy message that Cuse and Lindelof flout by making all the characters except Gilpin's into caricatures who are book-covers all the way down. The other message, less obvious but no less ham-fisted, has to do with self-fulfilling assumptions: that the more we presume about our political opponents, the more likely they are to fulfill our judgments. It's the excuse that alt-righters make all the time: "Hey, the more you call me a racist, the more I'm gonna be a racist." The hunted--and later, we learn, the hunters--lean so far into the stereotype that they become it: the deplorables become deplorable. It's not a particularly astute observation, and so the movie isn't being as powerful as it thinks when it gives us a heroine who dares to be her own person. It falls completely upon Gilpin to bring any complexity to the role. But boy, does she do it.

*** out of ****

The 100 Worst Movies of the '10s, #63: SOLO: A STAR WARS STORY (2018)

63. SOLO: A STAR WARS STORY (2018)



Hot on the heels of Rian Johnson's The Last Jedi, which was the best Star Wars film since the original trilogy and may have been better than a couple of those, comes Solo, the most cynical and mainstream-friendly to come out of the Disney era, and the worst movie to boast the Star Wars title. There were many disagreements among the creative team as to what direction it should take; Phil Lord and Chris Miller, who made The Lego Movie and would go on to produce the dynamic Into the Spider-Verse, were fired from the film because producer Kathleen Kennedy thought their cut was unconventional.

Maybe their version would have worked, maybe it wouldn't have, but at least it would have taken the time-tested series somewhere. Instead, we have Ron Howard's version, which--unlike its title character in the Kessel Run--takes the road much, much more traveled by, and plops us essentially where we started. There is no insight into Han Solo as a person, which is not to say that he's a particularly complex character to begin with. We learn nothing about him that we didn't get from the previous entries. Alden Ehrenreich is the correct actor to play the role, but so what? There's nothing much for him to do except be as cocky and self-assured as Harrison Ford. The same goes for Donald Glover, who's a proper heir to Billy Dee Williams as the young Lando Calrissian, but aside from some plot details as to how Han and Lando met--pretty much all of which have been told to us in the series--his emulation is fairly empty.

The early scenes show promise, and the film's first third concerns an exciting heist plot that might have made for a fun thriller if writers Lawrence and Jonathan Kasdan had more up their sleeves. When Han hooks up with Chewie and some rebel thieves (Woody Harrelson, Thandie Newton, a creature voiced by Jon Favreau), the team plans to steal a freight of fuel. When the heist goes belly-up, Han finds himself at the behest of the sinister mob kingpin Dryden Vos (Paul Bettany), and on the hook for one big job, for which he will need a very fast ship. Perhaps one that can make the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs (one of the movie's cleverer moves is that it explains that faux pas from the first film).

Technically, all the bells and whistles are there, but it's no fun. The plot careens from reference to reference so that it can end up bridging into the Star Wars universe as we know it, but unlike Rogue One, which ended just as the first one began with a clear purpose and place, Solo feels like pure fan service for fan service's sake. The women are given precious little to do: Emilia Clarke, who was burning cities to the ground on Game of Thrones, has been inexplicably tamed here, and Phoebe Waller-Bridge, creator of Fleabag, fails to elevate the very poorly written role of a "feminist" droid enlisted by Han. If Waller-Bridge had been allowed to contribute to the script, the character may have been a lot sharper. Or at least there would have been a lot more droid side-eyes.

The Top 100 Movies of the '10s, #72: I, TONYA (2017)

73. THE LITTLE HOURS (2017)
72. I, TONYA (2017)



I, Tonya is the biopic that Tonya Harding deserves. It's a complex story, fitting her neither into the villain role in Nancy Kerrigan's fairy tale that the media concocted in 1994, nor into the victim role that she might project onto herself. She is both. And neither.

Margot Robbie, far too versatile to have been shoehorned into Suicide Squad, plays Tonya from her mid-teens into her thirties, with a loud and sharp dignity and a quieter deviousness. Sebastian Stan endows her on-and-off boyfriend-and-husband, Jeff Gillooly, at once with a dangerous hair-trigger and with an immature innocence. They are two kids thrust into marriage and into professional sports without much of an idea of how to handle either.

The victory in Craig Gillespie's handling of this story is that he dares to tell it all, from the horrific to the ridiculous. A lesser director would fall prey to this very true story's unwillingness to settle into a conventional tone. Moments of silly comedy lead into moments of shocking abuse, because after all, that's how it happened.

The movie is funny, and then it's horrifying. Light moments of goofy comedy--like the hilarious sequence of the knee-bashing itself by Sean Eckhardt (Paul Walter Hauser), which plays as if Ernest P. Worrell starred in Ocean's Eleven--give way to dark moments of terror. The tonal shifts are smoothed by occasional cuts to present-day narration by both Tonya and Jeff, which assure us that not only are both alive today, but they are thankfully separate from each other.

Allison Janney won a deserved Oscar for playing Tonya's chainsmoking and abrasive mother, though any of the three leads would have been deserving. The movie doesn't ask us so much to believe Tonya's story as to sympathize with her perseverance. She trained from near-infancy to fit a mold that had rejected her, and made the Olympics anyway, and might have left untarnished if not for her alleged attack. Without being naive, Gillespie finds what's admirable in that.

The 100 Worst Movies of the '10s, #64: BRIGHTBURN (2019)

80. CABIN FEVER (2016)
79. THE AWAKENING (2011)
78. THE PYRAMID (2014)
77. LEFT BEHIND (2014)
76. PARANOIA (2013)
75. SAVING CHRISTMAS (2014)
74. A HAUNTED HOUSE (2013)
73. THE APPARITION (2012)
72. JONAH HEX (2010)
71. SCRE4M (2011)
70. THE DARKEST HOUR (2011)
69. SAW 3D (2010)
68. COP OUT (2010)
67. VACATION (2015)
66. THE DARK TOWER (2017)
65. THE GALLOWS (2015)
64. BRIGHTBURN (2019)



While we're on the topic of nasty supervillain movies, here's another that begins with an interesting premise but succumbs to its lowest-common-denominator instinct. Brightburn ought to have been a knockout of a twist on the comic book legend: a spacecraft lands in a Smallville-like town and births an alien child with superpowers, but instead of a Man of Steel, we get an adolescent maniac who inflicts his pubescent hormonal mood swings on the world. If the movie were more interested in exploring the complexities of that idea and less interested in shoving blood and guts into our faces, it might have been something.

Tori (Elizabeth Banks) and Kyle (David Denman) discover their new son Brandon (Jackson Dunn) in the same way Ma and Pa Kent discover Clark: a spacecraft lands in their backyard with a child inside, and they decide to raise him on their own.  Fast forward about 12 years and Brandon is hitting puberty, and coincidentally beginning to discover his powers.

The parallel between the body change of puberty and the discovery of a superpower is far from a novel one; the X-Men and Spider-Man, as well as Superman himself, have trod this ground many times. The new ground that Brightburn tries to go for is to make Brandon's transition as disgusting and toxic as possible. He torments the classmate he has a crush on, as well as her family; he brutally punishes a family friend who tries to rein him in; and finally he takes his aggression out on his parents.

There's a real movie here, but director David Yarovesky and writers Brian and Mark Gunn aren't equipped to explore it. The sub-plot about Brandon's "claiming" of a young classmate, which starts as an innocent crush and escalates into horrific incel revenge, might have been an honest depiction of toxic masculinity, if the movie weren't mostly concerned with portraying graphic torture for gory amusement. Eyes are pierced, heads are smashed, one poor fellow's jaw is ripped clean off for us all to enjoy.

The writers' brother, James Gunn, produced the film, and it feels like the work of someone who has seen his better work and not quite understood how to emulate it. Having come up making Troma films, Gunn of course has an appreciation for the disgusting, as is evidenced by his first mainstream film as director, Slither, which was slimy and icky and lots of fun. But no matter how icky, James Gunn's films have always been grounded in real humanity. Look at his own superhero satire Super, which supposed a vigilante played by Rainn Wilson who attacked petty criminals with a hammer. That movie had lots of skulls being split open, but never let us forget that it was about real people.

The Top 100 Movies of the '10s, #74: FIRST REFORMED (2017)

75. COSMOPOLIS (2012)
74. FIRST REFORMED (2017)



If the planet survives the existential threat of climate change, First Reformed will be the movie that people look to if they want to capture the muted dread of some combined with the total complacency of others that defines this era.

You would think it was directed by a millennial, or someone who fears having to live with the effects of climate change for more than the last half of their life. But the director is septuagenarian Paul Schrader, who's no stranger to quiet tension. First Reformed concerns a group of people who must continue on with their daily lives, even knowing the end is coming, and what happens when one of them won't take it anymore.

Ernst Toller (Ethan Hawke) is the pastor of a small upstate New York Protestant church that has a claim to fame as a stop on the Underground Railroad, but is mainly eclipsed by a nearby megachurch that--for the most part--pays to keep it open as a historical curio. Mary (Amanda Seyfried), a pregnant parishioner visits him, concerned about her husband Michael (Philip Ettinger), who's reluctant to bring new life into a world that he believes is dying. Michael is an environmentalist who's been radicalized, and she is concerned he will do something drastic.

Toller is the complement to Michael: he is also facing his own mortality--he has symptoms of stomach cancer--but is facing his impending death quietly and passively. Confronted with a parishioner who refuses to take his mortality lying down, Toller's entire worldview is thrown into chaos. The usual answers he gives his parishioners lose their meaning. He discovers something about the megachurch, run by the slick Rev. Jeffers (Cedric Antonio Kyles, a.k.a. the Entertainer, who plays Jeffers as 20% holy man, 40% showman, and 40% hustler) that he'd rather unsee.

The ending is infuriating because there is no closure to Toller's conundrum. It ends with a scream of pain followed by a gesture of love which is insufficient to save the planet but, Schrader hints, it may be all we have in the face of apathy and destruction.

The 100 Worst Movies of the '10s, #81: SUICIDE SQUAD (2016)

82. ATLAS SHRUGGED: PART I (2011)
81. SUICIDE SQUAD (2016)



DC movies seem to want us to like them so, so badly. While Kevin Feige and the Marvel crew seem to be able to spin out some decently entertaining narratives out of nowhere--even the lesser ones like Doctor Strange have a lot going for them--Geoff Johns and DC are obviously trying very hard to make something that fits the public's desire. Suicide Squad was reportedly overhauled pretty heavily in post-production because the studio determined that what audiences wanted was an irreverent but overall pleasant antihero story like Guardians of the Galaxy.

Apparently what director David Ayer, the writer of Training Day and director of End of Watch, delivered to them was too abrasive, so they lightened it up, and boy, does it show. Suicide Squad seems to have been made entirely out of chaff. Its story is perfunctory, its characters forgettable, and its centerpiece--the romance between the Joker (Jared Leto) and Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie)--is barely even addressed.

Ayer reportedly directed Leto to method-act during filming, which led to his essentially being a jerk to all the other actors. This is already a pretty silly and unproductive way to get a performance, but it's made all the more pointless when we realize that Leto is barely in the movie and in some cases shares no screen time with his castmates. The only actor who doubles significantly with Leto is Robbie, and even she has to spend most of the movie without him.

The premise is interesting, even if Ayer doesn't do much with it. Government official Amanda Waller (Viola Davis, who I hope took home a lot of money for this role) assembles a Justice League of her own, but one of villains instead of heroes. Why villains? For one thing, it's better to have the worst people working for you, I suppose. For another, since they're already incarcerated, they can be easily controlled. In addition to Harley Quinn, the crew includes Deadshot (Will Smith), Diablo (Jay Hernandez), Killer Croc (Adewale Akinnouye-Agbaje), Slipknot (Adam Beach), Captain Boomerang (Jai Courtney), and Katana (Karen Fukuhara). The team is soon dispatched to stop an evil Enchantress (Cara Delevingne) from bringing about the apocalypse.

The pieces are in place for a fun adventure--and might still be, if James Gunn's inauspiciously-named sequel The Suicide Squad is up to par--but nothing comes together. The plot and characters are overpopulated and no fun. The only actor who registers is Robbie, who delivers a knockout performance as Harley, endowing a difficult character--how do you play someone whose primary characteristic is being controlled by another person?--with agency and power despite the lazy writing.