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.

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.

Blue Bayou

Korean-American writer/director/actor Justin Chon has created in Blue Bayou an insistent modern fable set in New Orleans that packs devastating impact. In this beautiful and painful film, Chon plays Antonio LaBlanc, a Korean immigrant brought to American by adoptive parents when he was three and raised in Louisiana. Antonio is married to the loving and pregnant Kathy (Alicia Vikander), and is the doting step-father to Kathy's precocious daughter Jessie (Sydney Kowaslske). 

Events lead to an encounter with the police, among them Kathy's ex-husband and Jessie's father Ace (Mark O'Brien), who abandoned the family shortly after his daughter was born. Antonio, who makes "honest money" as a tattoo artist and "dirty money" boosting motorcycles, is threatened with deportation after the run-in with the cops and the vise of America's immigration policies begins to tighten around him and his family. 

Watching human and system failures is always gut-wrenching, but Chon mixes Antonio's personal agony with the story of a Vietnamese woman named Parker (Linh Dan Pham), who is dying of cancer. She wants a tattoo of a fleur-de-lis as it reminds of her home. From that encounter, Parker shares some of her life and wisdom about being both rooted and rootless, as so many of the Dreamers are. 

Chon, who is not an immigrant, has rich insight about the mental and emotional terrain inhabited by those who are brought to the land of opportunity, conditionally, and with little recourse if access is suddenly denied. All many of them have are tears and broken hearts -- much like the audiences for this wonderful picture.

Copshop (2021)

Joe Carnahan's grindhouse feature film Copshop is set in a remote Nevada police station but has as much to do with law and order, strictly speaking, as Swan Lake has to do with ornithology. The film's set up is a mysterious bad man (Frank Grillo) is being chased by a mysterious worse man (Gerard Butler) and Officer Val Young (Alexis Louder) is the only person standing between them and an even worse man (a brilliantly unhinged performance by Toby Huss), and the whole posse is in the sights of a bad cop. The rest is layer-upon-layer of vulgarity and balderdash between and among the officers of the station and the prisoners.

Carnahan and co-writers Kurt McLeod and Mark Williams have included red herrings and complications that are not fully explained or resolved; they just energize some action and place characters on needed markers. In other words, they're plot devices. The writers do seem to be interested in demonstrating how seemingly unstoppable criminal psychopaths can be, until confronting the proper force. They aren't extolling lawlessness in this brutal and bloody modernized Western showdown. Rather they are resurrecting the Lone Ranger mythos and merging it with Black Girl Magic.

Young, who is terrific as the Lone Ranger, is introduced in the film performing gunslinger quickdraw tricks for her boss (Chad L. Coleman of The Wire, The Expanse, Walking Dead) that will come in handy during the film's final reel, as everyone who has ever seen a movie would expect.

Dear Evan Hansen

 

No, Steven Chbosky's film adaptation of the Broadway musical sensation Dear Evan Hansen is not the horror-show some movie critics have deemed it. And star Ben Platt only sporadically looks too old for the role of the high school senior of the title. I found it entertaining and think the degree to which one will enjoy it will vary based on one's appreciation for the staginess of the show, the starkness of some of its viewpoints and the patness of its final act. The story itself might be revealing or off-putting, depending on an audience member's proximity to teenagers, depression or suicide.

The music by Justin Paul and Benj Pasek, the film's greatest asset, is tuneful and infectious, every performance on the money, and will likely lead many to set aside that the film is about an emotionally distressed young man, Evan Hansen, who crafts out of whole cloth a relationship with a classmate, Connor (star featured player Colton Ryan), who has killed himself. A letter Evan wrote to himself as part of his therapy is discovered and confiscated by Connor and later found in the dead boy's pockets. His parents (Amy Adams and Danny Pino), finding the letter, conclude Evan and Connor were friends and they press Evan for information about the son neither they nor their daughter Zoe (Kaitlyn Dever), whom Evan is pining for, barely knew. Thus begins what is at first a dream and then a nightmare for Hansen.

I was bothered a bit that the narrative does not explore the cause(s) of the mental or emotional illness on display in the film's characters -- primarily Evan and Connor but also by a high-powered student leader Alana (the lovely Amandla Stenberg), who identifies with Evan's immobilizing fear but is on meds to treat it. Perhaps the reasons are too complex to deal with in 2 1/2 hours, but the storyline seems to point to divorce and abandonment and familial fragmentation. In fact, Evan's tearful confession to making up the lies refers to his desire to be a part of Connor's family, despite having a loving and dutiful mother of his own (a fantastic Julianne Moore).

That Evan was abetted in creating a history of email exchanges between himself and Connor by a jokey "family friend" named Jared (Nik Dodani) turns what began as misguided empathy into callous manipulation. This, more than anything, might set some viewers off.

The film is by no means for every taste. Many will likely avoid it because people do indeed break out in song as part of the movie's exposition. Others will object to the subject matter or Platt's hair. In the final analysis, its message about authenticity and connectedness are worth considering. And the songs are pretty.

The Eyes of Tammy Faye

Director Michael Showalter's riveting The Eyes of Tammy Faye proposes that the Bakkers (Jim and the eponymous Tammy Faye) were lovable loons who turned piety and pity into a global bonanza first through The 700 Club and later The PTL network.

The film's tone is split between the parodic (delivered mainly by Andrew Garfield as the boyishly goofy Jim) and the pathetic (captured in Jessica Chastain's uncanny impersonation of Tammy Faye). Though Showalter skewers evangelistic arrogance and fraudulence on occasion, the film is not at all condemning. In fact, it feels sympathetic and quite often kind toward the highly flawed Bakkers, who fell from grace after taking millions from listeners and supporters for their own enrichment.

Showalter begins the film with young Tammy Faye's conversion, which invites the audience to see later events through the eyes of a person desperate for love, perhaps imitating the spirit baptisms she'd observed to show she was accepted by God, and so must be by his followers, namely her disapproving mother, Rachel (a wonderful Cherry Jones).

Tammy Faye fed her need for love and attention through an ecstatic religious sect and later through amateurish puppetry, a marriage given to its own kind of fakery, mediocre vocalizing and make-up grotesqueries. Showalter's film sets Tammy Faye's life inside a frame of both devotion and delusion. And it's thoroughly captivating.

Cry Macho

Clint Eastwood's latest film is a sauntering tale of a broken-down bronco buster sent on a rescue mission to retrieve a friend's (Dwight Yoakum) renegade teenage son (Eduardo Minett), who is running wild in Mexico City with his fighting rooster, Macho. Most of the movie is about the old gringo and the young firebrand busting each other's chops on a circuitous journey to Texas.

Eastwood is a steady and reliable filmmaker, even with material as relatively uninspired as this. He has included some beautiful desert vistas and a sweet romance between Eastwood's aged saddle tramp and the winsome proprietress (Natalia Traven) of a homey cantina in a lonely Mexican village. That may be the picture's saving grace.

Cry Macho, while not up to Eastwood's usual standards, is warm and by-the-numbers, awash in dust and fading sunlight and charm.

The Card Counter

 

Those of us who have acquired a taste for director Paul Schrader's films -- especially those he also wrote -- know he sets many of his stories in the territory between the lead character's interior and exterior worlds. These men -- and they are almost always men -- are often struggling with self-examination while negotiating some troubling event or circumstance. The cerebral quality of Schrader's texts sometimes belie the films' reptilian intensity.

In The Card Counter, Schrader's subject is a pathologically fastidious professional gambler who calls himself Will Tell (it's unclear whether the irony is deliberate), played by Oscar Isaac. Tell joins the World Series of Poker casino caravan with the help of a gambling broker La Linda (Tiffany Haddish), who secures backers for Tell's high-stakes gaming. La Linda is curious about the circumspect Tell and tries, unsuccessfully, to get his story, but that doesn't keep sparks from igniting.

When Tell has a chance encounter with a young man named Cirk (pronounced Kirk), played by Tye Sheridan, we learn Tell was a guard at Abu Ghraib, under the supervision of the sadistic Major John Gordo (Willem Dafoe). Cirk, recognizing Tell as one of the men who along with his now-dead father was prosecuted for torturing prisoners, invites Tell to join him in executing murderous retribution against Gordo, who was not prosecuted. Tell counter-offers by inviting Cirk to join him on the road, for reasons that become clearer as the story burns on it.

Schrader's pacing is deliberate, and the story is punctuated with voice-over notes from Tell taken from journal entries and others that explain gambling strategy. I did not find this gaming metaphor, if that is indeed what it is, altogether successful but the dynamic among the film's three principal players was interesting.

Haddish, who is not often cast in dramatic roles, was fine in a part that was oddly underwritten, especially in light of the film's final frame, and Sheridan's character was nearly as much of a puzzlement as Isaac's, with the young actor offering a combination of naivety and malice.

Malignant

James Wan's movies (Saw, Insidious, The Conjuring) are not known for subtlety. In his horror-hackemup pictures, actors are walking, muttering bags of viscera, lurching from frame to frame, waiting to be gutted or bludgeoned. Everyone is fair game and the endless bloodletting is all in good fun.

For his latest film, Malignant, which he also co-wrote, Wan has cast a group of highly exchangeable, mostly unfamiliar faces, no doubt because a hairy, hateful demonic force in Seattle is laying waste to all who have crossed him, which means the audience shouldn't get attached to anyone.

Young Madison Mitchell (Annabelle Wallis), a tour guide to underground Seattle (who knew?) sees the killings as they are happening because she has a mysterious connection to the fiend, the explanation of which is the thread that drives the story.

Madison is aided in her quest to greater or lesser degree by her sister Sydney (Maddie Hasson) and two Seattle police officers, the handsome and gutsy Detective Kekoa Shaw (George Young) and his older and short-tempered partner Detective Regina Moss (Michole Briana White). To say the big reveal is hair-raising is too bad of a pun to be avoided.

Wan's Malignant is riddled with plot holes and implausibilities that are outlandish even for a horror flick but, darn it, the picture still manages to be audaciously entertaining.

The Sparks Brothers

For the familiar, "idiosyncratic" does not begin to describe Ron and Russell Mael, better known as Sparks. Director Edgar Wright (Baby Driver), a smart and crafty Brit who is also a huge fan, uses the venerable band (50 years old and counting) to explore the nature of creativity and orthodoxy in a most engaging way in the loving documentary The Sparks Brothers.

I was introduced to the group's recordings while on staff at my college radio station. Sparks had released two albums --Kimono My House (a punning recast of the title of Eartha Kitt's Come On a My House) and Propaganda the year before -- that garnered much attention by the alternative music crowd for the cleverness and complexity of the songwriting. Ron Mael has been the principal songwriter of the group's enormous catalog (close to 1,000 songs) and Russell has been the indefatigably nimble singer (some of the vocalizations are herculean feats). 

Wright interviews the Maels, former band members, and other fans (many of them musicians with more prominent profiles, who were inspired by the group) to carry viewers through what is ostensibly the group's impressive discography of 25 studio albums. In so doing, Wright delves into the brothers' intuitive creative process, their hits (there have been several) and misses (more than a few), their need to push themselves and their vision, and, yes, Ron's mysterious moustache. (Hitler or Chaplin?)

It will be apparent from the film that Sparks has remained overwhelmingly the darlings of white audiences, despite their ventures into techno and dance music in the late '70s. Their image as a cult band for Euro posers may not have been helped by the tongue-in-cheek "White Women" on Big Beat (1976), whose chorus intoned

"White women everyday

To me it doesn't matter that their

skin's passe

As long as they're white

As long as they're white

As long as they're white from head to toe

As long as they're white

As long as they're white

As long as they're white I'll have a go"

Full disclosure, I mistook the song's meaning when I first heard it, failing to consider the entire album's edgy facetiousness and mockery of cultural standards. Wright argues that this and similar sharpness, which eluded many a record company, has endeared the "Sparks Brothers" to a core fan base that has aged and grown over the past two generations. In this way, the film is an affectionate biography of a group too outré for true commercial success and a statement on the nature of celebrity and compromise.

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings

 

Director Dustin Daniel Cretton's athletic, nimble and robust Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings amazes with cinematic acrobatics and warm family tension but doesn't quite stick the landing in an overlong climactic cacophony of dragon magic and blurry martial arts.

Simu Liu is every bit the leading man the picture needs as the fantastically gifted Chinese immigrant running from a tyrannical father (Tony Chiu-Wai Leung) who possesses the mystical rings of the title and has used them to extend his life and dominate the world (echoes of the Lord of the Rings). That father and son would ultimately face each other is a given, but the road to the battle royal, set in a hidden mythical realm that was the home of Shang-Chi's lustrous mother (Fala Chen), is circuitous and occasionally foggy.

Most mysterious is the presence of Shang's best friend Katy, a winning Awkwafina delivering her rat-a-rat comic timing and, as befitting perhaps the biggest player in the screen aside from the venerable Michelle Yeoh, getting to strike a winning blow for the good guys. Katy is not Shang's love interest and not quite a totem to feminine agency -- the picture has Chen, Yeoh and the wonderful Meng'er Zhang as Shang's sister, Xialing, bringing truckloads of Asian Girl Magic. Her role is unclear.

Katy's uncanny transformation into a warrior princess in the final reel pestered me, and indications that she will be Shang's companion through the rest of the enterprise is even more mysterious. It may be a brilliant calculation or nagging casing gaffe.

One thing is sure, Cretton's staging of the "Bus Boy" fight early in the film is for the ages and is not bested by any other action sequence in the picture.

Reminiscence

 

The exactitude that Lisa Joy commits to the creation of Westworld is largely missing from her first feature film, Reminiscence. Joy's stringy sci-fi rumination on love and lawlessness and memory is set in a time when the oceans have risen, flooding coastal cities, and the heat of the day drives human activity to after sundown. That is a rich concept and the production elements are highly effective but aren't enough to sustain interest in the doings of the humans in this world.

Hugh Jackman plays a former soldier / now memory guide named Nick, who helps people mine better times by connecting them to a device that is not fully explained and immersing them in a tank of water, pulling their remembrances from the recessed soup of their consciousness. Helping him is Thandiwe Newton (one of the stars of Westworld) as an alcoholic fellow vet, Watts, who is actually the most interesting character in Joy's drippy story. Into their bleak world comes the mysterious Mae, an oddly tuneless nightclub chanteuse played by Rebecca Ferguson, whom Nick falls for and when she disappears obsesses over. Little time is devoted to Nick and Mae's romance and even less time to building the underworld that Mae and a gallery of rogues inhabit. Much is left to supposition, which isn't sufficient when trying to sell characters as worthy of empathy or enmity.

Candyman (2021)

 

Writer Nia DaCosta's second full-length feature as director, Candyman (2021), is a grisly hodge-podge of cinematic and cultural references that builds on the original 1992 film's commentary on racial injustice and other evils men do.

DaCosta and film producers / co-writers Jordan Peele and Win Rosenfeld have enhanced the original picture's mythology but not altogether for the betterment of the storytelling. The picture pulls some interesting threads but it doesn't successfully tie them off, making arduous work parsing the meaningful from the trivial and the gratuitous.

In the film, the hook-handed avenger of Chicago's South Side has been reawakened by the brutalization of black men by the police. Stifled artist Anthony McCoy (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II of Watchmen) is introduced to the Candyman story by a gregarious laundry operator (Colman Domingo of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom) for reasons that aren't immediately clear. The story of the murderous spirit who is summoned by the recitation of his name before a mirror (yes, a Bloody Mary allusion) inspires some disturbing painting by Anthony, who is living with his curator / girlfriend Brianna (Hopkins, South Carolina's own Teyonah Parris). Brianna is at first intrigued by Anthony's new vision but soon her fascination turns to dread. Her backstory could have been handled more effectively to lend more gravity to her fears.

Anthony's work takes a disfiguring toll on him and leads to the bloody deaths of some fairly unpleasant folks but these two events are not as neatly connected as they could have been. More explication and less bloodletting would have served the film well, and made its important and relevant message more impactful.