Last Night in Soho

 

I believe Edgar Wright (The Sparks Brothers, Baby Driver) is a music lover, as evidenced by how he so thoroughly integrates music, often of another era, into his pictures. I also believe Wright is fascinated by artifice, constructed personas and discovery. Shaun (of the Dead) discovered his inner zombie-killer and Sergeant Angel (Hot Fuzz) discovered his inner bad ass and the evil that lurks in picturesque small towns. Wright also loves puns.

Wright's subject matter in Last Night in Soho (the double meaning is clearly intentional) is darker than most of his previous films but familiar thematic elements are present. Ellie, a young and ambitious English country girl (Thomasin McKenzie) is accepted into a London fashion school in the Soho district, where she hopes to fulfill both her dream and that of her mother, who died by suicide in London when Ellie was a child. After one sleepless night in the student residence hall, she finds lodging in the home of a elderly woman, Miss Collins, played by Diana Rigg.

Nearly immediately, Ellie begins to have visions of a young woman named Sandy, an early resident of the room (Anya Taylor-Joy), who explores Soho night life in the '60s, looking for work as a singer. Music of the period replaces the noise of the city streets, and Ellie is entranced by what appears to be a glamorous and exciting life, with a charming potential love interest and talent scout (The Crown's Matt Smith). 

Wright's camera does astonishing work seamlessly blending the two young women deeper and deeper into Sandy's world as they trade places on the dance floor, in lounge mirrors and, ultimately, in more dangerous encounters with lurking patrons. Wright wraps a clever murder mystery around this spooky tale of the powerless clairvoyant who watches as an ambitious young woman gets devoured by London. 

This film's weaknesses take place outside of the narrative's main story -- an unconvincing romance between Ellie and an agreeable classmate John (Michael Ajao) and the animus of a mean-girl quartet of classmates toward Ellie. The movie's big reveal is immediately impactful but will likely raise more questions than it answers after the credits have rolled, not the least being "how was this possible?"

Fire Shut Up In My Bones

Jazz trumpeter and composer Terence Blanchard’s earnest and heartfelt Met opera Fire Shut Up In My Bones, based on Charles M. Blow’s stirring memoirs, is often powerful with many moving performances by its principals (Will Liverman, Latonia Moore, Angel Blue), including a boy soprano as the young Charles (Walter Russell III), but I didn’t love the work as much as I wanted to.

Blanchard and librettist Kasi Lemmons have crafted a collection of beautiful pieces — borrowing from classical, jazz and gospel traditions — for solo and multiple voices. The opera is set in Blow’s Louisiana hometown and nearby Grambling University but the narrative — aside from young Char’seBaby’s (Russell) sexual assault by an older male cousin — is pretty inert. And the piece has a sameness of perspective and tone, inward directed and woeful, due, of course, to the nature of the source material, a first-person account of childhood isolation and abuse.

Even so, the opera does offer audiences levels of meaning, and an interesting storytelling device in that Destiny and Loneliness appear as characters played by the same actress (Blue) who then plays college-age Charles’s (Liverman) short-lived love interest. Other elements — a baptism and a fraternity step show performance were entertaining but seemed to serve more as African American cultural markers than fully integrated narrative pieces.

As the first piece by a Black composer on the Met’s main stage, the pressure was great and expectations high, of course. Some will wonder why such a contemporary piece that veers away from the modes of more traditional works? Why not present an established work by a Black composer or commission a work with more expansive scope and historical perspective? Fair questions.

It is clear the Met — and many of the other keepers of the venerable canon created by white males — are looking to diversify their seasons and their audiences. Fire Shut Up In My Bones is a worthy though not truly spectacular beginning.

Dune (2021)

 

Denis Villeneuve's Dune is an expansive visionary interpretation of an "unfilmable" work; a stunning, production department masterpiece that will likely sweep art direction, sound design and costuming categories during award season, but its performances may be a tad more intuitive and translucent than the complex story needs. Finding the balance between over- and understatement will always plague this material because the novel is so immersive.

The Rescue (2021)

Directors Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi won an Oscar for their vertiginous 2019 documentary Free Solo, which focused on Alex Honnold's untethered climb up El Capitan. Their cameras scaled the sheer face of the rock along with Honnold, putting viewers as close to the action as possible.

Chin and Vasarhelyi have taken the same intrepid approach in depicting the 2018 heroic campaign to rescue a team of 12 young Thai soccer players and their coach who were trapped in one of the country's labyrinthine caverns during monsoon season, which meant most of the caves were underwater and eventually every inch would be submerged. The directors' primary subjects are an international team of cave divers who have the skills and equipment to navigate the darkness and rushing waters that the Thais lack.

Just like Free Solo, The Rescue is crystalline in capturing the obsession and peculiarities driving the team of cave divers, who readily admit being an odd lot, drawn to challenges from which others would cower -- finding deep satisfaction in the solitude of cave discovery. Each talks about fearing only one aspect of the Thai rescue, however -- being responsible for another person's life.

The film is gripping, nerve-wracking and occasionally overwhelming, but also, in the end, tremendously life-affirming and a testament to the human capacity for selfless goodness.

Lamb

 

Valdimar Jóhannsson's film debut, Lamb, is unsettling and disorienting, evoking feelings of uncertainty and distress. But it's also beautifully made and quite a story.

Noomi Rapace (of The Girl With .... series) plays Maria, the sturdy wife of an Icelandic farmer Ingvar (Hilmir Snær Guðnason) with whom she raises sheep and plants potatoes on a sprawling and remote farm. They are childless, but we discover deep into the film that they were not always. Their lives change dramatically one day as they are in one of their barns helping ewes with birthing. And the film, which aside from a curiously ominous prologue, takes a turn away from reality toward the supernatural.

What audience members do with Johannsson's film, he is also co-writer of the screenplay, will depend on how much grace they are willing to give the filmmaker and the attractive young couple, whom Johannsson has invested generous amounts of kindness and fortitude.

Still, some viewers will undoubtedly feel betrayed by them, especially Maria, whose drastic action midway through the film signals darkness will ultimately descend in this land of endless daylight, where the young couple tell a visitor they have rediscovered happiness.

The Last Duel

 

In Ridley Scott's gripping adaptation of Eric Jager's The Last Duel, everyone and no one gets what they desire or deserve -- which is probably true of most of life and those living it.

In 1386, the French knight Jean de Carrouges (Matt Damon) challenges his former friend and fellow vassal to a vain count (Ben Affleck) to fight to the death because Carrouges' wife, Marguerite, a remarkable Jodie Comer, has accused Jacque Le Gris (Adam Driver) of raping her while she was alone in the Carrouges castle home earlier that year. Jean must avenge his and his wife's honor and so he petitions the king (Alex Lawther) to permit him to duel Le Gris, who denies the charge -- thus letting God decide what is true.

Scott's film relates the events in three chapters, each devoted to one of these three principal character's perspective. Though the particulars in each version vary, the fact that Le Gris entered the home uninvited and forced himself upon Marguerite is not disputed. Both the assault and the aftermath are in keeping with the conventions of the day: women were the property of men -- first their father's then their husband's, if they were to marry -- and men were free to do pretty much as they wished, as long as they did not violate the rights and privileges of other men.

That Carrouges, a brutish, battle-scarred bruiser, is not favored by the count, despite being a fearless warrior, does not help his cause. But the assault on his wife is the latest in grievances he has against Le Gris, who enjoys the count's beneficence because Le Gris is well-educated, handsome and a fellow libertine.

Further complicating matters is Marguerite's not incidental attraction to Le Gris and her growing dissatisfaction for her much-absent husband. That she expressed to a friend liking the cut of Le Gris' untrustworthy jib does not help her case but is not enough to exonerate the accused. The men mount their horses in full chainmail and leave the outcome to the angels.

Scott, an accomplished and celebrated director who has yet to win an Oscar though he's been nominated many times, has created an immersive period epic that feels meticulous in its historical accuracy. it is nonetheless also a compelling comment on contemporary issues that is free of sanctimony and anachronistic sloganeering. It is an intelligent and provocative picture.

No Time to Die

 

At its best, the James Bond 007 series has celebrated clear-eyed heroics in service to humankind. At its worst, it's been about the objectification of women and the diminishment of actual threats to life for cartoonish perils and psychotic villains who were more mincing than menacing.

The Daniel Craig era maintained the testosterone of the classic Sean Connery series and amped it up even more with phenomenal physical feats that Craig insisted on doing himself. Now that the Craig era is over -- and good for him for bowing out on a thunderous high note -- the question for some has become what and who is next.

I don't care as much about those as some -- as the decision will no doubt be focus-grouped and tested for optimal bankability -- because the latest feature is such a whiz-bang send off, with delightful grace notes for diehards (look for Craig's delivery of the signature Bond turn and fire during the last reel) and tips of the cap to the Bond legacy and the actors who breathed so much life into the most recent iteration -- Craig, Jeffrey Wright as Felix Leiter and Judy Dench as M -- by those who, presumably, will carry the torch.

This story of No Time to Die, directed with finesse by Cary Joji Fukunaga, features a "retired" Bond being matched with the new 007 (a sleek Lashana Lynch) to pursue a scarred and vengeful madman (a deliciously understated Rami Malek) who has plans to rid the world of all that he finds upsetting (which is to say most things) using biological warfare created by a Russian scientist (a hilariously madcap David Dencik). Complicating the chase is Bond's lost love Madeleine (Léa Seydoux) who is harboring a secret present and past.

The action sequences are, as expected, pretty epic, and, in keeping with most films in the series, high on body count but low on bloodletting -- to retain that PG-13 rating -- and the tender moments are not mushy or clanging downers but hearty hails for jobs well done. Bravo.

Black as Night

 

Amazon's Black as Night, directed by Maritte Lee Go, is monster horror in the age of BLM and black girl magic.

Asjha Cooper stars as Shawna, a New Orleans teen born during Hurricane Katrina. Her mother (Kenneisha Thompson) has fallen into drug addiction and is living among the homeless and dispossessed in one of the city's last housing units for the poor. Shawna lives with her father (Derek Roberts) and brother (Frankie Smith) and is best friends with an out-and-proud Hispanic boy Pedro (Fabrizio Guido).

One night while walking home from a party at which she tried and failed to connect with her crush Chris (Mason Beauchamp) she is attacked by a vampire who draws blood before being scared away. Shawna discovers her mother was also attacked but did not survive. She recruits Pedro, Chris and a white girl who leads a vampire lore interest group (Abbie Gayle) on a quest to hunt the blood suckers.

Writer Sherman Payne has laced throughout this fairly standard fare notes about racism and colorism, Black enslavement, empowerment and restitution, though not the sort generally mentioned these days.

These embellishments give the film, which is often moribund, some vitality but it is not sustained, even with the always-entertaining Keith David as a community activist on a secret mission. Still, it's a fairly commendable attempt to breathe life into a creaky genre.

Venom: Let There Be Carnage

 

The Venom series is a minor Marvel franchise that turns the villainous alien symbiotic creature in the comics and previous film appearances into a more-or-less devourer of bad guys. The "more" is due to the creature's ravenous appetite for human brains, and the "less" to the restraint of his host Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy, who also voices the wisecracking slime beast). It is the "relationship" between the haggard San Francisco reporter and the entity living inside of him, introduced in the original 2018 film, that turns a fairly routine MCU actioner into something almost heartwarming.

In Venom: Let There Be Carnage, directed by performance capture artist Andy Serkis (Gollum of the LOTR's series), Brock meets with lunatic death row inmate Cletus Kasady (a bewildering Woody Harrelson) who bites Brock and contracts alien blood into his system. The Red Venom that emerges while Kasady is being executed is not suppressed by his better nature because Kasady doesn't have one and so all hell breaks loose as he wreaks vengeance on those who did him wrong and sets out to free his lethally shrill girlfriend (Naomie Harris) from a sanitarium.

Midway through the picture, Brock and Venom have an acrimonious parting of the ways, with Venom "coming out of Brock's closet" and jumping between unwitting hosts, none of whom seem to be compatible.

At one point, Venom wanders into the middle of what appears to be a combined Pride and Day-of-the-Dead celebration. Partiers compliment him on his outfit as he grabs a mic and makes a speech from the bandstand about not being afraid to be who you are. I'm not sure the moment works entirely but props to Hardy and co-writer Kelly Marcel for going there.

The Many Saints of Newark

 

Alan Taylor's The Many Saints of Newark assumes a familiarity with the world of organized crime David Chase created so convincingly in The Sopranos, which ran for six seasons on HBO. Fans will nod knowingly at Vera Farmiga's battle-axe of a Livia Soprano and John Magaro's hunched and bouffanted Silvia Dante and, of course, Michael Gandolfini (the late James Gandolfini's son) as the diffident miscreant teen-aged Tony Soprano, the mobster-in-waiting.

The brutality and treachery ring true and authentic but the film's backdrop of the urban riots of the late '60s feels less so. Expanding the mobster universe to include black folks trying to get a piece of whitey's action lacks a full-bodied treatment, and feels like a diversity and inclusion gesture that might be read by some as commendable and by others as opportunistic. Coupling lawlessness with black consciousness is also problematic.

Still, A-gamer Leslie Odom Jr. (One Night in Miami) delivers a fine performance as Harold McBrayer, a bag man for Dickie Moltisanti (screen-idol handsome Alessandro Nivola), who becomes leader of his family's enterprises after his rage-fueled murder of his tyrannical father, played by Ray Liotta. That young Tony Soprano idolizes his handsome and successful uncle is of little concern to anyone except Dickie's imprisoned / jazz-loving / Buddha-quoting uncle Salvatore, also played by Liotta.

That McBrayer and Moltisanti would turn on each other was inevitable but the animus between the upstart black gangster and his former associate is scrubbed of racial invectives, which struck me as odd. Even when the Sicilians are alone in their lair, their conversation is blessedly free of slurs. Most instances of the n-word being used are among the black characters when they're referring to themselves. Dickie uses it to refer to McBrayer after his mistress tells him she'd had sex with the black man, a stale and predictable trope.