With Oppenheimer, filmmaker Christopher Nolan has made nothing less than the Lawrence of Arabia of the 21st century. Like David Lean’s 1962 masterpiece, Nolan’s picture is epic and grand in both scope and scale, while delicately humanizing a figure about whom most of the populace – myself included, at least, until I saw the movie – know little-to-nothing.
While the grandeur of recreating the first human-made atomic reaction has transfixed media coverage and those anticipating the film’s release, Oppenheimer’s true triumph is in unlocking the mystery of the man. By the time we reach its conclusion, Nolan’s film has given us a crystal-clear understanding of who J. Robert Oppenheimer was. We understand what drove him to unleash an unimaginable weapon upon mankind and how that work tortured him for the rest of his life.
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You might be forgiven, especially considering Hollywood’s reputation, for expecting a movie titled Tetris to behave more like the 2012 screen adaptation of the popular board game Battleship and less like an intricately plotted spy picture, an 8-bit Bond. Thanks to Noah Pink’s tightly paced screenplay, Jon S. Baird’s crowd-pleasing direction, and a true story that the pair embellished in order to make it sing on the big screen, 8-bit Bond is what we get. Tetris is a raucous good time. It also has more on its mind than how seven geometric game pieces might fit together.
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Director Jordan Peele’s much anticipated third outing of big-budget, spectacle horror filmmaking, Nope, has a lot of big ideas swirling around inside it. The comedian-turned-horror-maestro explored the horrors of racism in his debut, Get Out, and the horrors suffered by an American underclass who exist in order to make life easier for everyone above it in Us. With Nope, Peele’s ideas never quite gel into a cohesive whole. The story is ambitious, the storytelling is thrilling, but Nope ultimately feels like a blockbuster-budgeted episode of The Twilight Zone.
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The greed, duplicitous plotting, double crossing, and murder in Fargo make that film feel like a Shakespearian tragedy, so, in retrospect, it seems obvious that the Coens would tackle the Scottish play, one of the Bard’s most famous and celebrated works.
Only, for the first time in their filmmaking lives, The Tragedy of Macbeth isn’t a collaboration between the Coen brothers. After nearly four decades of making movies together, The Tragedy of Macbeth is the first solo film by Joel Cohen. His stripped down, almost ascetic, version of the Shakespeare work is, simply put, a masterpiece.
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The Woman in the Window is so indebted to the work of director Alfred Hitchcock that a scene from one of the Master of Suspense’s movies is incorporated into the film itself. It’s the most avant-garde sequence Hitchcock ever directed, the dream sequence from Spellbound in which he collaborated with surrealist artist Salvador Dalí. The other two central touchstones in Joe Wright’s adaptation of the bestselling novel by pseudonymous author A. J. Finn are Rear Window and Psycho. Those movies never make an appearance in Woman in the Window, but you can feel their presence hanging very heavy over every element of the new thriller.
As talented a director as Joe Wright is – I remember quite liking his adaptation of the novel Atonement and his thriller Hanna, less so his Oscar bait-y Darkest Hour – he’s no Alfred Hitchcock. Woman in the Window is cheap Hitchcock pastiche. By the gory final reel, it becomes rather distasteful Hitchcock pastiche. Its twisty nature is derivative and it presents a troubling, retrograde vision of mental illness.
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I’m doing something a little different with this review. My wife, Rae, felt so strongly about Promising Young Woman when we finished watching it together that she felt compelled to write about it. I thought it would be cool to get a male and female perspective, for this movie especially. Whenever I write about a movie that focuses on a historically oppressed class of people, I try to seek out someone in that particular group to give me feedback before I publish, to make sure my white, straight, cis, male point-of-view isn’t causing me to write insensitive or unintentionally ignorant things. For this review, I’m including the entire perspective in the form of Rae’s review. I hope you enjoy the experiment. Please let us know what you think in the comments section!
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Christopher Nolan has made an absolutely thrilling James Bond-style spy movie filled with breathtaking action set pieces. Too bad it’s in the middle of a mind-bending sci-fi plot that’s ludicrous and nearly incomprehensible. Tenet frustrates the mind as much as it dazzles the eye. It reportedly took Nolan five years to write the screenplay for Tenet, after puzzling over the movie’s main ideas for a decade. I don’t know if he spent too long on the project or not long enough, but either way, Tenet presents audacious ideas with unforgettable imagery, but the nuts-and-bolts of the plot make zero sense after any amount of scrutiny. The antagonist’s motivation is banal; his ultimate plan is laughably grandiose. And of course, as with most Christopher Nolan movies, the sole purpose of the main female character is to give the male characters their motivation.
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The new film from directing team the Safdie brothers is a kinetic roller coaster ride of a movie. It imparts the exhilarating highs and soul-crushing lows of its main character, the inveterate gambler (who is also a conman in his own right) Howard Ratner. Adam Sandler, in a role he was born to play, gives Howard – and the movie – an unseemly, queasy propulsiveness. He’s aided in this by the Safdie brothers’ singular directing style and their breakneck-paced screenplay – which they wrote with long-time collaborator Ronald Bronstein.
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The Park family aren’t bad people, per se. They’re just completely oblivious to anything and anyone that doesn’t involve them directly. Their obscene wealth allows them that luxury. So, late in Parasite – director Bong Joon-ho’s savage satire on class – when a heavy rain storm causes catastrophic flooding in poor neighborhoods, Mrs. Park, Yeon-kyo, can only perceive how it has affected her. The heavy rains have washed away the grime of the city, she says. In fact, it’s really a blessing. And besides, the next day has brought sunshine and a beautiful afternoon, perfect for celebrating her son Da-song’s birthday. She says this to one of her servants, a member of the Kim family, whose semi-basement apartment was devastated by the flood.
That moment offers a stinging observation, one among many, of how the rich move effortlessly through the world, while the less fortunate struggle to survive. Just like Snowpiercer, Bong’s 2013 dystopian take on class struggle, Parasite is as socially conscious as it is wildly entertaining. His use of virtuoso camera technique, dense structure, surprising plot twists, and pitch-black humor coalesce into an unforgettable piece of cinema.
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At very specific moments throughout The Nightingale, director Jennifer Kent has her characters look directly into the camera. Her main character, Clare, does so both as she’s singing a song to entertain English troops posted in the Australian outback and as the commanding officer of those troops is brutalizing her. Kent even manages to catch a shot of an infant – within the movie, it’s Clare’s baby – looking into the camera as the little one falls asleep.
These moments set Kent’s film apart. They implicate every member of the audience in the horrific violence happening on screen. They also tie the oppressed and dehumanized characters to Kent herself. We’ve seen this kind of story many times before, but almost never from a female perspective. Kent’s vision is a shattering one.
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Even in the climax of his superhero movie trilogy, which took him nearly two decades to complete, M. Night Shyamalan had to add one last twist. The director, who is divisive among critics and audiences alike, has made shock revelations in the final minutes of his movies his signature ever since his 1999 breakout hit The Sixth Sense. Shyamalan and surprise endings are like peanut butter and jelly or Oreos and milk. The twists tend to fall into three general categories. There are the effective ones that also have the benefit of being bolstered by characters and a story that make repeated viewings a rewarding experience. The best example of that is the revelation at the end of Sixth Sense. Then there are the ones that just sort of sputter out, like the climax of Signs. Finally, there are the ones that not only disappoint after the initial viewing but collapse completely when you apply any scrutiny at all. The ludicrous ending to The Village fits here.
Having only seen Glass once, I’ll classify its surprise ending as a mix of the first and last categories, although it will probably hold up fairly well on repeat viewings.
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Writer and director Drew Goddard’s latest picture, the pulpy, ultraviolent Bad Times at the El Royale, entertains even as it loses its way with countless subplots and narrative red herrings. The movie’s flabby runtime of two hours and twenty-one minutes engenders a sense of interminability rather than rapturous suspense, the latter undoubtedly being Goddard’s goal. Royale’s bleak worldview – the movie’s happy ending feels like it’s going through the motions and rings a little hollow considering the nihilistic killing and suffering in its climax – makes me hesitate to call it fun. But in more than a few ways, it’s just that. Royale’s phenomenal production value, stellar cast, and creation of a heroic rooting interest (once it finally comes) make it more enjoyable than it otherwise would be.
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It isn’t easy getting close to Emily. Even her own husband, Sean, sometimes feels like an outsider in his own marriage. The mercurial Emily is a high-powered public relations director for a premier fashion company, and her take-no-bullshit attitude allows her to tell her own boss to get lost on occasion. You have to be willing to treat powerful people like dirt, she says, because sometimes that’s the only way to get through to them. The only thing that can compete with Emily’s job is her devotion to her son, Nicky.
When Emily allows Stephanie – whose son Miles attends the same elementary school as Nicky – into her orbit, Stephanie feels both elated and intimidated. She runs a somewhat successful mommy vlog where she posts about things like making friendship bracelets. Stephanie doesn’t quite know how to handle Emily’s sophistication and no-nonsense demeanor. One day Emily asks Stephanie to pick up Nicky from school and watch him for a few hours while she deals with a minor emergency. Five days later, Emily has vanished. Determined to find her new friend, Stephanie plays detective and uncovers dark secrets from Emily’s past. What she finds will change her life forever.
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Early in You Were Never Really Here, Joaquin Phoenix’s character, Joe, takes a violent blow to the back of the head. Movie convention has programmed us to expect one single hit like this to knock a character out cold. You Were Never Really Here is no conventional movie. Joe stumbles for a second, then he turns and gives it right back to his assailant. Joe punches the man in the face and he goes down but is also not out. It’s a quick and brutal exchange that sets the tone for the next 90 minutes. Director Lynne Ramsay’s new film is a rescue/action movie like Taken, by way of the avant-garde experimentalism of Maya Deren. It’s by turns vicious, stomach-churning, elliptical, ethereal, and staggeringly beautiful. It’s a movie that will haunt me for a long time.
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Free Fire is an outrageous little movie. It shouldn’t be as entertaining as it is. This hilarious gun-deal-turned-shoot-out is provocative and cathartic, with cartoonish violence aimed mostly for laughs. It’s Tarantino, but straight-slapstick.
It would be reasonable to think a movie that consists almost completely of people shooting each other would become tedious, not to mention a little hard to watch considering the unimaginable spate of mass shootings constantly featured in the news. Director Ben Wheatley and writer Amy Jump – who co-wrote the script together – pull it off, though. Set in 1978, the movie begins with two factions traveling to a Boston warehouse to complete an illegal weapons deal. An intermediary, Justine, represents the buyers: a group of IRA members, led by Chris, who want firearms for use against their enemies in The Troubles. Justine’s colleague, Ord, is bringing the seller, a South African gun runner named Vernon, who is accompanied by his own group of associates. An uneasy tension hangs in the air as all the interested parties, ten people total, attempt to exchange cash for guns.
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Movies, like just about every other art form, are manipulative. For each one, there are hundreds of people working together to make the audience laugh or cry, feel uplifted or depressed. The best movies, and the best filmmakers, can achieve the desired emotional response without the audience ever being aware it’s happening. That is not the case with Aftermath. This is a movie that is relentless in telling the audience just how they should feel, and whose makers – most egregiously, director Elliott Lester, and composer Mark Todd – throw subtlety completely aside. There are elements that work against this trend, one performance in particular, but they aren’t enough to salvage the rest.
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