Kendrick Lamar: Super Bowl 2025

 

Kendrick Lamar has never been an easy lift, so I'm not surprised many folks didn't pick up on the messaging last night.

Many words have been written since then and no doubt more will come in the next hours and days.

Even if you didn't catch a single lyric in his intentionally densely coded flow, the visual presentation alone -- the colors of the dancers and the colors they wore -- was serious counter-MAGA Nation signalling, trust that.

A demonstrated hip-hop genius from Compton, performing in New Orleans, sending a message to D.C. that the whole world was party to. Righteous!

I spend a lot of time watching and thinking about how performers construct themselves and their messages. Not all are successful, and audiences will be divided over Lamar's 20 minutes. That's inevitable.

For me, I channelled a bit of Divine G from Sing Sing when he said to Divine Eye after he'd nailed Hamlet's soliloquy, "You did your thing, Beloved!"

Captain America: Brave New World

 

Julius Onah's Captain America: Brave New World scores major points with the earnestness of its intentions -- and the enormous appeal of its title star Anthony Mackie -- but it feels draggy and inert in more places than it should.

That's not for the lack of spectacular fight scenes -- both close quarter and aerial -- and some villainous characters -- Tim Blake Nelson as the brainy and bitter Dr. Sterns and the ever-watchable Giancarlo Esposito as the assassin Sidewinder -- that promise to expand the Marvel Cinematic Universe of perils even more.

This might actually invite some to wonder when will it all end? Probably not soon.

In Avengers: Endgame (2019), Mackie's Sam Wilson inherited Captain America's togs and shield from Steve Rogers (Chris Evans). Wilson refused to take the Super Soldier Serum that turned Rogers into an invincible fighting machine. He preferred to go natty, but he is still formidable as the winged Captain America, a sterling inspiration to all.

Cap' has an ace computer geek apprentice named Joaquin (an engaging Danny Ramirez), who doubles as Falcon, another flying avenger (small "a"). They make a winning, trash-talking, homeboy team of Top Dogs, and I wish they had been given more screentime for their amiable banter.

Brave New World's 8-member writing team has packed a lot of exposition into this picture -- partly as fan service and partly to move the larger narrative forward, if only a few inches.

Harrison Ford plays newly elected President Ross, a formerly unscrupulous agent who is now trying to get himself straight. He is working on a treaty with other nations concerning an enormous piece of space debris that landed in the Indian Ocean. It contains an alien substance that would be of great benefit to humankind.

Nelson's Dr. Stern has been slowly poisoning Ross with pills the president believes are keeping him alive. They're actually altering his body chemisty and turning him into glowing red rage monster, to misquote Tony Stark / Iron Man -- The Avengers (2012).

An assassination attempt by a former Super Soldier (Carl Lumbly) sets in motion a series of investigations and interventions that ultimately result in American and Japanese battle cruisers facing off and a knock-down drag-out between Cap' and the Red Rage Monster.

Brave New World plays to the MCU formula, which might be why it felt so under-energized at times. Its production values are certainly on par with other Marvel Studio pictures, but the story feels a bit too grounded. It's polemical when it should be pulverizing.

Companion

 

Drew Hancock's imaginative "love story" Companion might just as easily have been titled "Iris" because Sophie Thatcher's captivating performance as the love slave of Jack Quaid's Jake is a role and a half, work that carries the substantial weight of the picture's wicked little heart and soul.

Thatcher, who played the defiant and deadly Mormon missionary in last year's Heretic, takes Hancock's deftly constructed character -- a kind of 21st century Stepford, if you will -- and lends her wonderful dimensionality, even as the layers of the movie's narrative onion are peeled away.

Iris and Jake arrive for a weekend at a remote "cottage" where friends Kat (Megan Suri), Eli (Harvey Guillén) and Patrick (Lukas Gage) are partying with Kat's paramour Sergey (Rupert Friend). Everyone except Iris is clued in on a major secret around which the movie's central premise turns. It is that secret, which involves Iris, that leads to a tragic encounter between her and the mysterious Sergey and the mad scramble to not only save the weekend but the group's hides as well.

Hancock, a young director whose credits are mostly in television, has crafted a clever story that twists notions of identity into knots, and invites audiences who are inclined to think big thoughts to ponder what is it that makes us who we are, and is it, as the picture's soundtrack of '80s A.M. radio hits suggests, all about who loves us ... and how much.

Hard Truths

 

Celebrated British writer / director Mike Leigh's latest film, Hard Truths, is described in some promotional materials as a comedy-drama.

It would more appropriately be described as a harrowing psychological family drama with humorous leavening that lightens, somewhat, the enormous weight of the movie's distressing story of the toll mental illness can take on a family.

Marianne Jean-Baptiste, who appeared in Leigh's wonderful 1996 film Secrets and Lies, carries this heavy picture on her back as Pansy, a wife and mother in London who appears to be suffering from at least a half-dozen mental and emotional problems ~ paranoia, agoraphobia, social anxiety, bipolar, obsessive compulsive, narcissistic disorders and hypochondria. She's an unholy mess, a terror to her emotionally trampled plumber husband, Curtley (David Webber), and her diffident and depressive son, Moses (Tuwaine Barrett), who receives the bulk of Pansy's verbal abuse because he's 22, unemployed and living at home, arrested in his development to adulthood.

Pansy's beautician sister, Chantelle (played with wonderful bonhomie by Michele Austin) is at a loss for how to help her older sister, whose anger and resentment seem to grow worse by the day, if not by the hour.

A visit to their mother's grave followed by a Mother's Day gathering at Chantelle's home with her daughters (Sophia Brown and Ani Nelson) turns into a nuclear meltdown that only hints at the extent of the damage has been done to Pansy, herself.

To its great credit, Hard Truths is not delivering easy answers or sunny platitudes. There are no bromides about the healing power of love and devotion because in Pansy's world, even the most innocent gesture is a threat, every extended hand holds a knife, every compliment is condescension and relief only comes in sleep.

Leigh, who wrote the wonderful screenplay, keeps the story free of psychological diagnoses, preferring to "show" rather than "tell" the audience what life is like in Pansy's world, that seems to be shrouded in darkness and misery, and determined to keep the curtains drawn.

One of Them Days

 

Lawrence Lamont's One of Them Days, written by Syretta Singleton, is a vibrant and profane laff riot that follows the surefire day-of-disaster formula that is a staple of urban feature films (Friday, The Hangover, Go, to name just three).

This energetic treat finds Angeleno besties and roommates Dreux (Keke Palmer) and Alyssa (SZA) on the verge of being evicted from their decrepit apartment in The Jungles, a predicament created when Alyssa entrusted the rent money to her leeching but sexually gifted boyfriend, Keshawn, (Joshua David Neal), who, rather than pay the landlord (Rizi Timane), used the dollars to start a line of T-shirts -- "Cucci." (Yes, the humor is broad and utterly adults-only.)

Dreux (pronounced "Dru") is rightfully livid and collars Alyssa into a series of money-making schemes to collect the needed $1,500, each more outlandish the one before. Both Palmer and SZA are ablaze here, giving the "buddy picture" a complete, sistah-girl makeover.

The movie straddles the line between "street" and "slapstick" but presents the struggles of the urban underclass with keen insight, I thought. In the Jungles, work is precarious, sketchy hustles abound, and opportunities for advancement must be seized when they present themselves, even when the sky is falling. Relationships run the gamut from diehard to predation, with many women missing out on genuine connections because potential mates are swallowed up by the streets.

Lamont does a lot in the film's 90 minutes; the leads are totally winning, the laughs are steady and the raucous conclusion as neat as a pin curl.

Yura Borisov in Anora

 

It's not always clear why performers get nominated for supporting roles in films. Major star turns are more obvious. Featured players, not so much.

I think in the legitimate cases -- not those overly freighted with social relevance or cultural importance -- the performer's presence in the picture -- no matter the part's length -- is so impactful that the engaged viewer cannot imagine the movie being the same product without it.

I think this is very much the case for Yura Borisov's Igor in Sean Baker's multiple Oscar-nominated Anora. Igor is a muscle man who works for a fixer (Karren Karagulian), who has been babysitting the son of a wealthy Russian family (Mark Eydelshteyn), who has on a whim married a Brooklyn sex worker.

Igor's expressionless demeanor during the escapade hides his great empathy for the young woman Anora, played with amazing vitality and heart by Mikey Madison. He sees her as caught in the oligarch's web, invited in by the trifling son. Igor's is the most physically demanding supporting role in the picture, and having to match Oscar-nominee Madison's energy and focus is no small thing.

Even so, I think it's the picture's quieter moments between the combative Anora and the big-hearted and, frankly, smitten Igor that sell not only his wonderful character to the audience but the entire picture as being so much more than a comedy about bad people getting what they deserve (or not).

To me, it's about what so many of the more affecting films in this age of moviemaking are about -- missing and making connections, knowing oneself and accepting that knowledge as often painful truth. Yes, during this period of great deception, Hollywood seems to be peddling authenticity and honesty.

Anora the film is brutal and profane and satirical and political and vulgar ... and tender and beautiful because of Borisov's performance.

The Brutalist

 

Like the architectural style at the center of its story, writer / director Brady Corbet's The Brutalist is about unadorned truth, stripping away artifice and falseness to reveal the raw material underneath. It's a large, monolithic masterwork that I feel will stand the test of time.

Corbet uses enormous aesthetic sweep in presenting images of form and space, both interiors and exteriors, which serve as metaphors of the spiritual condition of America and its people. Aspiration and indulgence, racial and cultural supremacy, insecurity and exploitation. There's much to unpack here.

Corbet's outstanding performers -- led by an introspective Adrien Brody as Hungarian concentration camp survivor and architect László Tóth -- are not just full-bodied people but emblems of America and Europe's collective past.

This past is marked by prosperity for some -- as described in the film's brief prologue and in the bristling narcissism of Guy Pearce's nativistic millionaire Harrison Van Buren -- and its startling inhumanity, as revealed in the lives of Tóth, and his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), also a camp survivor and journalist, and the continuing pain and indignity the two must endure.

Tóth's jubilant arrival in a town near Philadelphia in the '40s is quickly dampened by his discovery that his beloved cousin Attila, a chilling performance by Alessandro Nivola, has changed his name, converted from Judaism to Catholicism and married a Gentile. Attila explains that it’s the only way to be successful in America, and though Tóth is at first skeptical, he slowly, gradually discovers the truth beneath the surface of superficial cordiality and politesse.

"They do not want us here," he tells his wife, who must use a wheelchair because her health was destroyed by famine and imprisonment. She's reluctant to agree and resists, but finds her husband, contracted by Van Buren to build a cultural center in town, becomes obsessed with work, pulling away from her as if possessed. (Audiences discover in the film's epilogue the reason for his extraordinary meticulousness.)

The Brutalist will undoubtedly test many filmgoers' patience -- it's more than 3 and half hours long, with 15-minute intermission -- and its themes and depictions of cold, emotional, psychological and physical abuse are troubling, disturbing, frightful.

Is it a comment on contemporary matters? Many will make those connections; it's difficult to imagine anyone not seeing this as not so much a cautionary tale as a mirror reflection of the toll unbridled power and pride can take on the human soul. But it might also be read as a celebration of a person's refusal to submit.

Midway through Ridley Scott's Gladiator 2, enslaved warrior Lucius said to another slave as they were being carted into a corrupt and chaotic Rome for battle in the Colosseum, "This city is diseased. " Corbet might be saying the same thing about America.

Emilia Pérez

 

Jacques Audiard's extraordinary genre-busting and award-winning Emilia Pérez might become the nexus for Hollywood's renewed reflection on questions of gender / sexual identity in light of Trump's executive order establishing only two genders in the U.S.

This reflection will be more fraught for those living comfortably in a binary world but that's not to say the questions have been fully resolved in communities accepting of gender / sexual fluidity. It's this fluidity that is the central thread coursing through the film, which is as bold in its execution as it is in its premise.

Karla Sofía Gascón, a transwoman, plays the title character in the film, whom we first meet as a male Mexican drug lord named Manitas. Manitas is married to Jessi (Selena Gomez) and is the doting father of two boys. Unknown to his family, he has been undergoing hormone treatments in preparation for a full transition to female.

Manitas contacts unappreciated Mexico City attorney Rita (Zoe Saldaña) and hires her to be his agent in the search for a reassignment surgeon. He's offering to pay her millions, which would free her from the thankless job of pursuing justice in a system that is as corrupt as the drug cartels themselves.

She accepts and identifies a surgeon in Tel Aviv (Mark Ivanir). Rita also plans the relocation of Manitas' family to Switzerland because he will fake his own death and never see them again.

Several years after the transition, Manitas, now Emilia, meets Rita at a party, makes herself known and asks her to help move Jessi and the boys back to Mexico to live with her, as she assumes the identity of Manitas' wealthy cousin.

Thus begins the core intrigue of the film, which blends conventional narrative with musical numbers, several large-scaled elaborately staged production. How long will the deception last? Will secrets and confidences hold?

This uncertainty grows more pressing as Emilia takes on the cause of finding some of the thousands of people who had been kidnapped, killed and buried all over the country. Emilia is on a high-profile mission (seeking redemption?) to uncover the truth, even as she shields her past and the role she played in these horrors.

We would not be wrong to anticipate disaster awaits, but Audiard's film is not a disaster. In fact, it is a triumph. A daring, bold vision about social and individual truths that won’t change anyone's mind on the matter of gender / sexual identity but that's no matter.

It's not so much about societal acceptance, anyway. As Selena Gomez sings at one point in the film, English translation:

I want to love myself

Love, yes, my life

Love, yes, what I feel

I want to love myself

Love myself fully

Love myself just as I am.

Nickel Boys

 

Director RaMell Ross's bold debut feature film, Nickel Boys, is based on Colson Whitehead's prize-winning novel of the same name, about the abuse and exploitation of Black boys in a Florida reform school called Nickel Academy.

Nickel Boys is based on events at a reform school in the pandhandle where boys were abused and some killed and buried on the property in unmarked graves. The story is told through variations on first-person perspective, an imaginative approach that broadens the viewers' perception of the things, large and small, that give life meaning.

In the film, Nickel Academy houses boys of all races but only actually "schools" the white boys; the other boys get a smattering of teaching. They mainly work at the school or on neighboring farms to produce income for the school. It's a type of chain gang imprisonment for children. The boys are poorly nourished, except when inspectors come. They are policed endlessly and punished brutally if / when they misstep by the school superintendent (Hamish Linklater).

The film is set in the early '60s; the Civil Rights Movement sits prominently in the background as a historical marker and reminder that institutional discrimination permeated all aspects of life in the South. Sixteen-year-old Elwood (Ethan Herisse) is walking to enroll in a trade school when he hitches a ride, unaware the vehicle was stolen by the driver. Audiences don't witness Elwood's trial, if there was one; we presume he was found guilty of being an accessory to a crime and sentenced to Nickel. His grandmother, Hattie, (another wonderful performance by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), promises to win his release, but her attempts to do so and even to visit her grandson are stifled.

Elwood becomes friends with a streetwise boy named Turner (a terrific Brandon Wilson), who is weary of the talk of changes coming for Blacks because he has seen no evidence of that at Nickel or even in Houston, his hometown. The boys become close. Turner helps Elwood navigate the harsh terrain and secures for him lighter duties working for a young white man, Harper (Fred Hechinger), who for a while adds a deceptively benign presence to the picture.

Ross and the film's director of photography, Jomo Fray, move the camera fluidly and unexpectedly around the events in this harrowing story, often switching between points-of-view. Some audiences might find the dynamic lensing disorienting or affectatious. I appreciated the immediacy of the camera and Ross's discretion in how much of the visual horrors he would include -- almost none.

Many have heralded Nickel Boys as a stunning cinematic achievement. I won't disagree in the least, but do worry some audiences might not embrace this important story because of it's unorthodox approach. Their loss, I say.

Sing Sing

 

Indie writer / director Greg Kwedar's Sing Sing stars powerhouse player Colman Domingo (Rustin) as wrongfully imprisoned "Divine G," the co-founder and creative soul behind a unique program in the eponymous maximum-security prison that gets inmates on the stage and in touch with their humanity and worth -- some for the first time.

When we meet G, he and the dozen or so other men in the program, called Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA), are planning their next production, having successfully staged A Midsummer Night's Dream. Hard new arrival named "Divine Eye" (Clarence Maclin, who like most of the film's cast are alums of RTA) presents a challenge to G, G's close friend Mike Mike (Domingo's longtime collaborator Sean San José) and the rest of the group because of his wary combativeness and reluctance to "trust the process." G accepts the challenge, however.

The company's director, Brent Buell (Paul Raci), writes a sprawling, genre-crossing play that incorporates the cast members' wide-ranging tastes and re-energizes the group, the members of which are waging individual battles with confinement. Meanwhile, G is working on a clemency hearing, hoping new evidence he's uncovered will prove his innocence and lead to his release.

Kwedar's film weaves together the preparations for the RTA's ambitious show, the work the men must do to connect with this more personal piece, G's persistence with Eye and pursuit of his own freedom into a tale that forces the "institution" further and further into the background (the absence of correctional officers during long stretches of the story is notable), until, inevitably, prison presses in again and threatens to mar the beauty and hope we, the audience, have embraced -- maybe naively.

Still, Sing Sing's message about the indomitable human spirit and the incalculable benefit of the arts on one's peace and happiness endures and wraps its arms around you in the end.

Better Man

 

What Aussie director Michael Gracey's The Greatest Showman (2017) may have lacked in historical authenticity, it certainly made up for in spectacle and verve.

Gracey has applied his substantial chops for creating high-powered music videos to his latest feature film, "Better Man," the blood-and-sinew biography of British pop star Robbie Williams, who was a member of the boy band Take That in the early 90s and later a record-breaking solo performer.

Williams' rise-and-fall story involves the all-too-familiar catastrophic descent into drug and alcohol addiction and mental illness that accompany stardom. As an ingenious twist, Gracey subs a CGI chimpanzee for Williams, whom we meet as a child in the English Midlands (motion-capture actor Asmara Feik) who idolizes his father (Steve Pemberton), a modestly talented crooner, and dreams of being not just a great singer but a great "entertainer," like Frank, Dean and Sammy.

Williams begins battling the demons of insecurity and isolation as a child, and the skirmishes get worse as the years progress and his fame builds. He finds stability during this time in his loving grandmother Betty (Alison Steadman), who stokes young Robert's need to be special and makes up for his father's inattention and then absence and his mother's (Kate Mulvaney) busyness keeping the food on the table and a roof over their heads.

Though Williams narrates his story, Jonno Davies is the motion-capture actor playing the mature Williams with stunning agility, and Adam Tucker provides the soaring vocals on the baker's dozen songs in the picture.

To Gracey's credit, the CGI chimp doesn't come off as gimmicky as one might think. In fact, it's amazingly seamless, even during the big production numbers. Rock DJ is a mind-blower.

Williams' legion of fans -- among whom I do not count myself, to be honest -- will undoubtedly lap up the movie's cinematic indulgence and party fever like kittens to milk. Cinephiles, like myself, will be delighted by the film's audacity, which matches Williams' own bravura, beat-for-beat.

The Fire Inside

Rachel Morrison's The Fire Inside is an uplifting and provocative sports movie that, like sports themselves, is about more than competition -- even though it is about winning and losing. 

Singer / actress Ryan Destiny stars as the real Olympic gold medal boxer Claressa Shields, who under the tutelage of her devoted coach Jason Crutchfield (the always enjoyable Bryan Tyree Henry) rose above the challenges of urban distress in her hometown of Flint, Michigan, to stardom in a male-dominated sport.

The screenplay by writer / director Barry Jenkins, who won an Oscar in 2017 for Moonlight, is by-the-numbers in plotting and structure but goes beyond a run-of-the-mill recitation of overcoming adversity and landing the killer blows over cheers and a triumphant soundtrack. In fact, half of the story is about life after getting the medal. It asks, "What comes next?" -- especially for women in unconventional arenas, even those at the elite level.

Sheilds, at 17, was juggling a fractured, dysfunctional family to which she was committed, being the person best positioned to make a difference in their fates. Despite her coach's attempts to help Claressa temper her expectations and set aside disappointments, she grew increasingly bitter, feeling she was being unfairly penalized for being female -- which, of course, she was.

Ryan Destiny's scowling fierceness conveys Shield's intensity in and out of the boxing ring for most of the picture. When she finally moves beyond self-defeating fixations, her face blooms and radiates, which is the point of the movie, I think.

Female athletes are not free to "brutal" ... they must in the end be "beautiful"  or they will be denied the benefits of their achievements. 

As Claressa says with her usual unvarnished candor, "That's bullshit." 

Nosferatu (2024)

Robert Eggers has directed only four films, but his list of pictures for which he served as a director of art or production or both is much more substantial. This might explain the extraordinary visual impact of his movies -- The Witch, The Lighthouse, The Northman, and his latest, a wonderful remake of the silent classic Nosferatu (1922)

Eggers' auteurism pays homage to the work of masters like James Whale (Dracula), Jean Cocteau (Beauty and the Beast) and Orson Welles (Citizen Kane) while retaining a bold originality, especially in the worlds he creates. I suspect Eggers felt especially free to experiment with the familiar Dracula story in his crafting of the narrative for his Nosferatu. 

Eggers turns the tale of the undead predator sideways. As played with shadowy menace and pounds of prosthetic make-up by everyone's favorite beastie Bill Skarsgard, Eggers' ancient bloodsucker is a victim of grave misfortune (pun intended). The Transylvanian Count Orlok is entrapped by the beautiful Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp), a young woman who is married to the handsome Thomas (Nicholas Hoult), a clerk for a dodgy real estate agent named Knock (pronounced Ke-nock) who is also Orlok's ravenous toady (Simon McBurney). 

Ellen is barely aware of the power she has over the haunted Count Orlok, but warns Thomas not to go on the mission to the count's castle, an assignment he'd received from Knock. Danger awaits, she warns, having developed clairvoyance and somnambulance. Her condition draws the attention of a local master of the occult (Willem DaFoe), who is convinced she's possessed by a demon but eventually concludes it's Nosferatu.

As we know, Thomas arrives at the count's castle, falls under the vampire's spell but escapes and finds his way back to Ellen, just as Orlok arrives, having devoured the crew of the ship that brought him from Transylvania. Orlok means to move into a delapidated castle and claim Ellen as his own. His plan does cannot withstand the light of day, however.

Eggers Nosferatu is marvelously constructed -- as one might expect from a director with his gifts -- but the writing is also quite grand. Theatrical. Shakespearean. The picture is as delightful to hear -- especially Skargard's guttural intonations as Orlok -- as it is to see. Those early 19th-century streets, overstuffed interiors and diaphanous gowns (watch for the dust rising off of DaFoe's robe as he is patted on the back) gives testament to Eggers eye for telling detail.

It's a feast (pun intended) for the eye and ear.

A Complete Unknown

 

The rootlessness that comes from pride and calamity threading through Bob Dylan's 1965 hit single "Like a Rolling Stone" also courses through James Mangold's biopic "A Complete Unknown," a phrase from the chorus of the aformentioned song.

The picture features another transformative performance by Timothée Chalamet as the youthful Dylan, who we meet when he has just arrived in New York City, seeking an audience with his hero, the ailing social justice songwriter Woody Guthrie (Scoot Mcnairy). It was during his first visit with Guthrie at the psychiatric hospital where he is receiving treatment for Huntington's disease that Dylan met Guthrie's close friend, singer and activist Pete Seeger (Edward Norton in wonderfully assured performance), who would become the early Dylan's champion, recognizing the taciturn singer's talent immediately and ushering him into the vibrant musical underground that would launch his career.

It was during these early days of playing coffee houses and old haunts that Dylan met Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), the celebrated folk singer who would have a storied, fiery romantic and creative relationship with Dylan, and the young painter and civil rights worker here named Sylvie Russo but based on Dylan's actual girlfriend Suze Rotolo (Elle Fanning). It was she who posed with Dylan for the cover of his "Freewheelin'" album.

In Mangold's compelling recreation of Dylan's nascent musical exploration, these women are alternately mates and muses, confessors and competitors, and "Bobby," a charming but unreliable companion. He's an unapologetic, preternaturally gifted user.

Mangold tracks Dylan's emerging brilliance along with his emotional and professional evolution, culminating in his "switched-on" appearance at the formerly acoustic Newport Folk Festival in 1965. In the picture, which is based on Elijah Wald's Dylan Goes Electric!, the act, familiar to pop culture mavens, reflects Dylan's need to rebel, the changes in contemporary music and the shifting underground folk scene of the late '50s and early '60s.

As delivered through Chalamet's remarkable portrayal, Dylan is driven to be an iconoclast, growing increasingly dissatisfied with the expectations held by Seeger, his manager Albert Grossmen and record producer James Hammond (Dan Fogler and David Alan Basche, respectively), all of whom have their own agendas -- some noble, some commercial. 

The picture doesn't reveal the reason for Dylan's self-absorption and perennial coldness but neither of these qualities dims his creative spark or his need to push himself to higher creative levels while pushing away those closest to him. He was enigmatic then and continues to be at age 83.

A Complete Unknown is not as thoroughgoing in its story as some would like, but it has enough narrative heft -- and wonderful musical performances -- to satisfy even the most critical of audiences. 

The Six Triple Eight

 

Tyler Perry's The Six Triple Eight takes an inspiring story of the crucial role Black women in the Army Corps played during World War II and cleaves it into two unequal parts. 

The first part is a romance between an African American high school student living near Philadelphia and her "secret" Jewish boyfriend (the beauteous Ebony Obisidian and dreamy Gregg Sulkin, respectively). This being the '40s and Perry being Perry, their relationship is more of a chaste abstraction in the film, so the boyfriend's death on the battlefield, which devastates young Lena, feels as remote as the shores of France. We've seen little of the ardor they claim to feel for each other, and a scene of the two at a social gathering where she is part of the wait staff and he an invited guests doesn't serve the grounding purpose I think is intended by Perry, who wrote the screenplay with Kevin Hymel. 

The second part is a more fulfilling story of defiance and dignity, as Kerry Washington's Captain Charity Adams takes command of a ragtag group of female enlistees, young Lena among them, and turns them into a force to be reckoned with. Despite Adams' insistence that the women under her command can do more than work switchboards and prepare meals, her superior officers deny her requests at every turn, sometimes in stark, racists terms -- until a task they are convinced is beyond the  ken of Black women arises. The generals are certain the Black WACs will fail, Adams disgraced and the notion of equality scuttled.

The matter at hand? Letters to and from the battlefield are not being delivered. Rather, they're being stored in hangars where they are subject to the elements and rodents. Morale among service members is suffering, which undermines the war effort. Both President Roosevelt and the First Lady (Sam Waterston and Susan Sarandon) demand something be done.

Though the two parts of film are intertwined -- young Lena is inspired to join the ranks to "fight Hitler" after her beau goes missing -- it's the mobilization of the women to take charge of a seemingly impossible task that carries the greater weight and importance for me, despite Perry's signature speechifying and sass. 

The scenes of the Six Triple Eight's transformation into a logistics powerhouse are stirring, and Washington is a formidable actress and presence. Despite some narrative weaknesses, the pictures carries and delivers a message that is valuable, and timely, considering recent events, about the resilience of the human spirit in the face of searing doubt and stifling disrespect.

Queer

 

Luca Guadagnino's sweaty and smoky adaptation of William S. Burroughs' 1985 novella Queer might strike some as oddly retro in subject matter, considering the amount of LGBTQ+ themed film and television content being produced now. But this fever dream of stifled desires strikes familiar notes in different ways.

Burroughs' story tells of William Lee, a drunken junkie writer in Mexico in the 1950s, and his obsession with a younger ex-Navy man of opaque sexuality, Eugene Allerton. It stars Daniel Craig as the boozy and blistered Lee and Drew Starky (Outer Banks) as Allerton.

Craig trimmed a bit of his famous James Bond musculature for the role of the anxious intellectual in linen and fedora searching for love (or its approximate) in all of the wrong places. Though he doesn't look like he would have any trouble in that respect, Lee wears misery like a cheap suit. He finds solace with a coterie of equally verbose lonely hearts, primarily his friend Joe (a plump Jason Schwartzman in good form), with whom he frequents the local watering holes to trade gossip.

For his part, Starky's Allerton presents an inscrutable figure: his bearing is ramrod straight, spit and polish, and he keeps company with a local woman but doesn't shut down Lee's pursuit of him. He gives little away, aside from tales of his military exploits. He seems to be innocently oblivious at times, and at other times, cagey and cruel.

This uncertainty only fuels Lee's desire to explore a rumored jungle plant that supposedly enhances human telepathy, which might help him make fulfilling human connections. Though he seems impervious to ridicule, it's clear that he wants more out of life, though what that would be in its totality, like so much else in this picture, is not apparent.

Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name, Challengers) is an exacting director with an eye for environmental detail. When the story takes Lee and Allerton into the jungles near Quito, Ecuador, in search of a botanist (Lesley Manville), the heat and primordial vegetation press in, just like Lee's lonely desperation. It's stifling.

But with the help of herbal hallucinogens, Lee's anxiety takes flight, and the audience accompanies him in the last quarter of the picture on a lengthy trip that finally offers the realization that maybe what's in front of us is all there is. This table, this drink, this friend, this day.

The Piano Lesson

Netflix's 2024 adaptation of August Wilson's Pulitzer Prize-winning play The Piano Lesson is a family affair, both within the story world and behind the camera.

Directed by Malcolm Washington, one of Denzel Washington's sons, The Piano Lesson stars John David Washington, Malcolm's brother and high-wattage screen performer, and was produced by their father.

Set in Wilson's beloved Pittsburgh, The Piano Lesson is part of the American Century Cycle, ten plays, each set in a different decade of the 20th century, that tell stories of Black life among the African American diaspora, mostly in Wilson's neighborhood, the Hill District. 

The plays are expansive and poetic, many bridging the gulf between history and myth, incorporating large passages of monologue and memory. Though varied in focus and execution, the plays are all robust representations of Wilson's view of the American experience, a mix of drama and comedy, realism and fantasy, dreams realized and deferred. They are hugely important parts of the country's theatrical and literary history. 

(Denzel Washington has appeared in several Century Cycle productions and has committed to adapting Wilson's work for the screen.)

The Piano Lesson, first staged in 1986 and filmed for television in 1995, is set in 1936 and tells the story of the Charles family, whose members have gradually moved from the segregated South to Pittsburgh. Doaker (Samuel L. Jackson) is the patriarch of the family home that he shares with his niece, Berniece, (Danielle Deadwyler) and her young daughter, Maretha, (Skylar Aleece Smith). They are visited one night by Berniece's brother Boy Willie (Washington) and  a family friend, Lymon (Ray Fisher). 

Boy Willie and Lymon have driven a truck filled with watermelons to sell in hopes of raising part of the money Boy Willie needs to buy land once owned by former slavers.  He means to stay in Mississippi, despite the hardships, and farm the land.  Boy Willie wants to get the rest of the money by selling a cherished piano that was engraved by their grandfather with images of the enslaved family members. The piano was taken from the slave owners 25 years before and moved with the family to Pittsburgh.

Berniece reveres the instrument, even though she refuses to play it, prizing the memories it contains. Her brother sees it as a wasted opportunity, and most of the play, which is set mainly in the living room and kitchen of Doaker's house, is the battle of wills between the siblings, which, in turn, represents the tension between the Black past and Black future, both haunted, literally, by spirits of injustice and pain.

The performances in Malcolm Washington's adaptation of Wilson's staging are superb, with Jackson, Deadwyler and John David Washington solidly delivering the emotional peaks and valleys of this stirring and punishing study of a family struggling with their individual and collective identities. 

Highly Recommended.

Wicked

 

John M. Chu has transferred Act 1 of the theatrical phenomenon Wicked to the big screen with an abundance of imagination and vitality and two award-worthy performances that will make everyone associated with this behemoth even wealthier than they already are.

Why didn't I LOVE it as much as I wanted? I've not come to a definitive answer to that, but I just didn't. I certainly liked it and was entertained but I couldn't fight the feeling there was a lot of hard work on the screen but not enough "heart."

There is no arguing with success, and the 2003 Broadway musical based on Gregory Maguire's 1995 iconoclastic recrafting of the L. Frank Baum 1900 classic The Wonderful Wizard of Oz as a defense of the much-maligned Wicked Witch has been nothing but successful, despite receiving weak applause from theater critics early on. It received a handful of Tony Awards and quite likely will be among the list of Oscar nominations, if not wins, in 2025, in both performance and technical categories.

Why do I say "if not wins"? I think even if I set aside the endurance of Baum's venerable story and the 1939 film (which has a much more memorable score, BTW), there is something familiar about Chu's directing choices, i.e., the inestimable opulence of the production design and the hugely bankable leads and stunt cameos. It's all stunning work but ... hmmm.

There is no question in my mind that film and stage diva Cynthia Erivo and pop songstress Ariana Grande-Butera, both diminutive powerhouses, are commanding presences in the picture who can handle the stratospheric score by Stephen Schwartz (Godspell, Pippin). And the show's story of fraudulence, injustice, manipulation and vengeance is even fresher now than it was 20 years ago.

The huge ensemble of supporting players is delightful to watch in the big numbers -- as they usually are in such films -- but there is so much book here that I wished there was more music and less talk.

Having seen a touring company of Wicked some years back at the Fox in Atlanta, I know how grand a show it can be and the film is both more and less grand. It's a wonder but is it wonderful?

Gladiator 2

 

Director Ridley Scott is a master of both spectacle AND character study films. He has blended those thematic emphases in Gladiator 2.

Some folks are arguing about the narrative merits of this sequel to Scott's 2000 original, debating whether it can stand on its own without the connective tissue to the first picture, whether it does enough that's new.

I think it does and remarkably so, even though it doesn't really need to. If it had simply built on the richness of the first picture, more sword and sandal battles, gristle and brio (Are you not entertained?), that would have provided plenty for most audiences to enjoy, I think.  But Scott has more things on his mind, this time.

The Russell Crowe starring original felt romantic, love and loss and envy and vengeance.  This sequel -- with the young Irish actor Paul Mescal in the lead -- has a bit of that but feels more political. Roman corruption, decadence and impoverishment abound, and the twin emperors' (Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger) insatiable appetite for conquest and sport serve as the backdrop for the blood sport in the Colosseum that gives the picture its title and the means to bring the city down.

2 summarizes the central plot from 1 during the opening credits and makes references to other important points as its complex story unfolds. 

Mescal is Lucius, the son of Crowe's Maximus, an arena champion who died at the end of 1 and was last seen by audiences walking through Elysian fields. Lucius, who has been known as Hanno, has been living in North Africa since he was a boy and sent away from Rome by his mother Lucilla (Connie Nielsen), daughter of Emperor Marcus Aurelius, to save his life from plotters and schemers.

During a siege of his adopted homeland by Roman soldiers under the command of General Acacias (Pedro Pascal), Lucius, who was reared and trained for battle by the nation's chief, is captured, taken to Rome and sold to a menacingly oily merchant named Macrinus (Denzel Washington in American Gangster form). 

Lucius distinguishes himself in the ring and draws the attention of the emperors and the admiration of the crowd. This is exploited by Macrinus, who hopes to build his personal wealth and position himself within proximity of the throne, which he covets and is actively plotting to take in due time. Lucius's consuming hatred of Rome, and particularly Acacias, who has married Lucilla, serves Macrinus well. 

Thus, Scott and screenwriter David Scarpa have placed the major pieces on the board, with other notable characters set strategically about, one of the more pivotal being a former gladiator Ravi (Alexander Karim), who bought his freedom but patches up wounded fighters. He becomes Lucius' counselor and guide.

Screws are tightened. Identities are revealed. Trusts are betrayed. Plots are uncovered. Revenge is executed. And around all of this are   wonderfully staged arena battles. (The fight with the voracious apes is ferocious.)

I think Scott has given Washington more than just the pivotal role of merciless schemer but the film's overarching message to those angered by corruption -- rage is both a gift and a weakness. It's a gift that keeps us invested in finding a better way. It's a weakness when our rage blinds us and others can turn it against us.

Secret Television

TV babies of a certain age (read "old") no doubt remember the sitcom trend of the '50s and '60s where the lead character, usually a guy, was keeping a big secret from family and friends, and around which many of the shows' storylines revolved.

I've come to believe this theme spun out of national paranoia about commies and other "enemies within" [see McCarthyism, '47-'59], especially in show biz. Series creators were taking those worries and suspicions and making hay of them.

There was Leo G. Carroll's TV-adapted stage character Topper and his ghostly friends ('53-'55), Alan Young's Wilbur Post and his talking gentleman horse in Mr. Ed ('61-'66), the original My Favorite Martian ('63-'67) with Bill Bixby as a newspaper reporter and Ray Walston as the stranded alien passing as his "Uncle Martin," David Crabtree (Jerry Van Dyke) and the vintage car through which his dead mother (Ann Sothern) spoke to him in My Mother the Car ('65-'66), Maj. Tony Nelson (Larry Hagman) and his winsome genie housemate (Barbara Eden) on I Dream of Jeannie ('65-70) and the especially long-running ('64-'72) "my wife is a witch, but in a good way" series Bewitched (Elizabeth Montgomery).

Some of these venerable shows were remade more recently as movies -- I never could bring myself to see any of them. I guess I resisted wanting to reframe them into something more contemporary. They'll always represent for me that time when Tinsel Town struck back against lingering insulation and distrust and helped us lower our guard just a bit, if only for a while.