Malcolm and Marie

Sam Levinson's Malcolm and Marie is more trial than triumph. Though Zendaya and John David Washington deliver Levinson's abrasive lines capably, the animus between them feels inconsistent and so unpersuasive. Zendaya is the more persuasive as the addictive and self-loathing Marie, than is Washington as the genius filmmaker who has used his lover's pain as inspiration. They take turns butchering one another with revelations and confessions, tearing at each other because they both love and despise the other -- and themselves. Malcolm and Marie is exhausting and exasperating and left me wondering "Why?"

Director Tim Story also has a recent releases. Story has directed the live action/animated rehash of the classic cartoon Tom & Jerry.

Story made his name with music videos. He has directed one commendable movie -- Barbershop (2002) -- but mostly blockbuster movie dreck that are panned by critics but generate dollars for the studios. For example, the blustering and bombastic Ice Cube / Kevin Hart vehicles Ride Along and Ride Along 2 drew in more than $200 million at the box office. Story's films aren't deep. Thematically, they're far from the emotional convulsions in Levinson's M&M. That Story's T&J, which I have no intention of seeing, will be judged as a banal money-grab is assured. And, frankly, that's fine with me.

Levinson's Malcolm and Marie is a race and sex minefield through which the two characters meander, setting off explosions for an hour and half for no apparent reason other than, perhaps, to feed the public's fascination with warring couples and to address the near absence of vitriol at this level being voiced by Black actors. Levinson is a relatively new filmmaker whose pictures are generally well-regarded but they don't make money. Why he chose to try to articulate the complexities in the relationship between a Black man and woman is not clear. But I'm cool with it.

I would love it if Levinson's Malcolm and Marie were truthful but he should be free to try and fail. And Story should be free to direct brainless fodder, the cinematic equivalent of the wings special at Applebee's.

That's what a post-racial America looks like.

Mank

 

David Fincher's homage to delusional power, Mank, is a self-reflective tribute to Hollywood screenwriting. The crackling script was written by Fincher's father, Jack Fincher, who died nearly 20 years ago. The elder Fincher has no other screen credit. Mank is a fictionalized retelling of injured booze-hound and master wit Herman Mankiewicz's writing of Citizen Kane, which many critics consider the GOAT among motion pictures, despite it winning only best original screenplay in 1942. Mankiewicz, played by an always riveting Gary Oldman, constructs a thinly veiled parable about newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst's vain ambitions and outsized influence not only in Hollywood but in national affairs. The writing is initially hobbled by Mank's broken leg, from an auto accident, and his alcoholism, which would eventually kill him. But, with support from a young Orson Welles (Tom Burke) and a dutiful British secretary Mrs. Alexander (Lily Collins), Mank is able to produce his best work ever. Fincher, shooting in black and white, recreates the silvery shimmer of the '30s and '40s and dazzles with sumptuous production design and his trademark, often counter-intuitive camera work. Fincher's stunning visuals combined with his father's whip-smart erudition -- the words! the words! -- make Mank a thrill to watch and to listen to.

News of the World

 

British movie director Paul Greengrass is a master of the set piece, a fairly self-contained, highly charged narrative moment that lets virtuosic filmmakers strut their stuff. Greengrass may be best known to many for taking over the directing of the Jason Bourne franchise after the initial Bourne Identity. Both Bourne Supremacy and Bourne Ultimatum featured intricately choreographed scenes of pursuit in vehicles and on foot and close quarters hand-to-hand combat.

Greengrass's latest film, News of the World, is set in 1870 Texas and so does not have the thrilling complexity of the Bournes or the international intrigue of the 2013 Tom Hanks vehicle Captain Phillips -- but it does deliver the menace of a forbidding landscape as the backdrop for skirmish and slaughter by bitter, defeated hordes, chafing under the bridle of Yankee occupation.

In News, Hanks plays a former Confederate army officer, Captain Jeff Kidd, who travels the Texas badlands reading newspapers to townsfolks for a dime. In a sense, he's taken this as a calling, and Greengrass films the readings as if they were revivals. And that fits because before the war, Kidd was a minister and newspaper publisher (yes, an ironic combination when viewed through contemporary lenses). He answered the call and left his home and wife in San Antonio for the war but never returned. His agitation, palsy and itinerancy suggest lingering post war trauma.

The film's arc, which is neither sparkling nor cliche, has the Captain discovering the wreckage of a wagon and the body of a Black man hanging from a tree, a supremacist message tacked to his chest. The young white girl he was escorting to safety is hiding in the brush. She'd been rescued from a tribe that had killed her family six years before and raised her as a Kiowa. The Captain is charged with her safe delivery to her family, hundreds of miles away.

The young German actress Helena Zengel plays Cicada / Johanna, a fairly demanding role for a child, which has won her a Golden Globe supporting role nomination. The story evolves as one might expect, with Greengrass staging two especially intense sequences -- one in a canyon as the Captain tries to hold off three men who traffic in young girls and a night reading in a settlement run by a racist tyrant.

Hanks, who will be 65 this year, is a Hollywood senior statesman, and -- like Washington, Streep, Clooney -- has a magnitude that brings others into vehicles in which they can shine. Hanks is Hanks throughout News; he can be no one else. But the film also features solid moments from featured players. In addition to Miss Zengel, Michael Angelo Covino as the lead trafficker, Elizabeth Marvel as a Dallas hotelier and Captain's paramour and Fred Hechinger as a good-hearted young marauder are especially good.

Judas and the Black Messiah

 

Like the best of "true story" cinema, Shaka King's Judas and the Black Messiah operates in the past and present. As a dramatized re-telling of the FBI's infiltration of the Black Panther Party in Chicago using a car thief as an informant, the film, which is gripping in its construction and performances, documents J. Edgar Hoover's fixation on suppressing civil rights groups while making oblique references to modern-day protests against police violence.

Daniel Kaluuya and LaKeith Stanfield play, respectively, Chicago Black Panther commander Fred Hampton -- who was killed by city, state and federal agents in a raid on his home in 1969 -- and informant Bill O'Neal, who is depicted as giving crucial intelligence about Panther movement and strategy to field agent Roy Mitchell (Jesse Plemons), who recruited him. Kaluuya and Stanfield present Hampton's energizing oration and O'Neal's agitated duplicity with assurance. They're both captivating.

Kaluuya's performance, with his long speeches and face-offs with rival resistance groups, is the showier piece, and unquestionably deserving of praise, but Stanfield, to me, covers more emotional and psychological ground as a man trapped by his own petty criminality in a scheme that he cannot control. His scenes with Plemons are infused with anxiety and dread.

Hampton was a martyr to the cause of Black empowerment, but O'Neal is also a tragic figure. As presented in King's masterful film, the "betrayer" was collateral damage in a mission he could neither embrace nor would benefit from. O'Neal died in 1990, after running into traffic on a Chicago freeway in the middle of the night and being hit by a car. His death was ruled a suicide.

The White Tiger

Ramin Bahrani has set his ponderous "amorality" tale, The White Tiger, in modern-day India, the world's most populous democracy and a nation of rigid class divisions, crushing poverty and political corruption. His hero is Balram, the cagey driver for a wealthy family, whose obsequious demeanor masks the young man's bitterness. This bitterness sets the sardonic tone of the film's voice-over, but this is no comedic piece, like the similarly themed Parasite of 2019. Bahrani's story is cleverly written but, more than anything, it is unsettling.

Over the course of the film, Balram (a remarkably expressive Adarsh Gourav) is, by turns, treated like a beloved member of the household and like human refuse. The shifts are jarring and, quite likely, are reflective of the deep disdain the rich "big bellies" have for the poor "small bellies," i.e., decency, consistency and other-regard don't matter to those who control everything. (Sound familiar?) This treatment is maddening and there are moments in the film when Balram's sanity (or, at least his reliability as a narrator) seems to be in doubt. His encounter with the eponymous creature, a freak of nature whose birth presages great change, was one such moment.

The film's narrative is a variety of Bildungsroman, but in the case rathe than pushing through challenges to become a better person than circumstances would ordinarily permit, the hero grows up and corrupt, dehumanized by his country and by his relationship with two young members of the household -- Ashok (Rajkummar Rao) and Pinky (Priyanka Chopra). Ashok's seduction and Pinky's self-involvement light the fuse for the story's explosive conclusion.

Sound of Metal

 

Darius Marder's Sound of Metal on Amazon Prime, along with pushing sound editing and sound mixing into new realms, asks some profound questions about human pain and resilience.

Riz Ahmed (in an excellent performance) is rock drummer Ruben Stone, who loses his hearing while touring and must adjust to permanent deafness. Stone is a recovering heroin addict in love with his performing partner, Lou, a woman with a history of self-abuse (Olivia Cooke). To say Ruben does not handle his new reality well would be to rob the character of his intensity and the film of its resonance.

Ruben eventually finds support in a program for the deaf run by a teacher / father confessor named Joe (Paul Raci), who challenges Ruben to do what appears to be the hardest thing for him to do -- sit with his deafness, be present for the world and others, learn to love himself.

Yeah, it's a little 12-Steppy but in the hands of a fine director and a winning cast it not only rings true but echoes long after the screen goes black.

The Little Things

I'm not surprised that John Lee Hancock's picture has provoked praise and scorn and ambivalence from critics. The thriller teams a gristly older detective with a spit-and-polish younger officer to track and capture a serial killer in Los Angeles.

It is fueled by fine performances from Denzel Washington, who is nearly 70, and Rami Malek, 40. They take Hancock's script, which is too often oddly elliptical when it should be more straightforward, and lend it vitality, needed focus and some emotional weight. Without their substantial talents, questions would pester and distract more than they do.

When Jared Leto as the jokey prime suspect is introduced, the tone of the film, which is fairly humorless, becomes, ironically, more menacing. This is welcome because prior to Leto's Albert Sparma's entry, the movie lacked essential tension. Then, the character and the story take a turn (literally) and set up the last act, which will either delight or enrage the viewer.

I found it strange that a film about a series of murders has no on-screen attack and only one crime scene procedural. The story is mostly trailing and fretting and a bit of unproductive navel gazing, which I think is a bigger deal. While I welcomed Joe Deacon's (Washington) weary cynicism at first, in the end it seemed to be more of a device to introduce the crisis for Malek's Jim Baxter than a legitimate exploration of a spiritual conflict among law enforcement agents.

Yes, the ending is jarring but when viewed through a lens of moral relativism -- and when considering the uneasy ground we find ourselves standing on these days -- it might not keep one up at night -- or at least as long.