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.

Thoughts on a Tale of Two Faces

 

Thoughts on a Tale of Two Faces --

Ben Platt and Timothée Chalamet are roughly the same age (27 and 25, respectively) and they both attended Columbia but are occupying entirely difference spaces in the cinematic universe right now.

Platt is being savaged as the star of what many critics say is the grossest miscalculation in movie history, that is, turning the celebrated Broadway musical Dear Evan Hansen, which starred Platt, into a movie musical starring Platt. Setting aside the subject matter -- mental illness and suicide among teens -- Platt's appearance is way out of character and because the film spends so much time on his face, the camera is not his friend, critics say.

On the other hand, there's Chalamet, who seems to go from strength to strength, moving between contemporary and period pieces, from comedy to drama, anchoring each performance in what appears to be studied discipline. His choice of material is age-appropriate; he plays the youthful Paul Atreides in the upcoming Dune, directed by Denis Villeneuve. The film has received nothing but critical and movie-goer praise, mostly for Villeneuve's fresh and authentic treatment of the source material.

Platt is first and foremost a stage performer with a truly wonderful voice and he's a decent songwriter. He lacks Chalamet's striking visual presence and the younger man's acting range, but Platt's no chump.

Except, perhaps, for saying yes to playing Evan Hansen on the screen. It was no doubt a safe choice, in that he knew the role by heart and his father is one of the producers, but it probably wasn't wise.

Chalamet has demonstrated impressive professional wisdom in his choices, working primarily with auteurs -- Villeneuve, Christopher Nolan, Woody Allen, Greta Gerwig, Luca Guadagnino, Wes Anderson. He is as sagacious a judge of material and his craft as they come. He also has a disarming, ingratiating manner that seems to come from a place of generosity. He may have the bone structure of a Grecian statue but he's no prima donna.

Platt, meanwhile, has responded to criticism of his film -- which, granted, has been brutal -- a bit more defensively than his agent would likely recommend. But I guess that's what happens when the distance between you and your role has shrunk to nearly nothing. Still, he has many fans and will weather this storm, wiser for the wear.

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.

The Protégé

 

Veteran action director Martin Campbell works convolution overtime as he puts Maggie Q through her paces as seemingly indestructible top-dollar assassin Anna in The Protégé, which co-stars Samuel L. Jackson and Michael Keaton, as fellow wetworkers, Moody and Rembrandt, respectively.

Anna, as an orphaned Vietnamese child, was saved by Moody, smuggled out of Vietnam and brought up in the ways of the hired gun. When Moody and Anna become targets of a nefarious Mr. Big (David Rintoul), Keaton's Rembrandt and others are brought in to shut down nettlesome inquiries, which leads to a little globetrotting (Bucharest, London) and a showdown during a charity gala back in Vietnam.

Maggie Q.'s Anna is lethal in both form-fitting black leather and Manolo Blahniks, and her banter with Keaton is sharp as her aim. Both Jackson, 73, and Keaton, 70, are especially impressive as seasoned bagmen who can still take a punch and deliver a stinging line with the best of them.

Move Captions

 

I chose the captioned version of “Respect” at the AMC and left with two annoying observations.

In two prominent instances when the N-word was used in the film, the captioner spelled the first one ending with an -a and the second ending with -er. In the first instance, Rev. Franklin was referring to daughter Aretha’s shifty beau, Ted. In the second instance, shifty Ted was challenging a white Alabama studio producer, saying the producer was itching to use the word. This was an interesting example of code switching by the captioner, that is, apparently -a was the form used intra-racially and -er was the interracial form of the epithet, even though both instances were hostile.

The other observation was the mislabeling of Aretha’s considerate second beau Ken Cunningham as Ted White, her malicious first husband. Such a rank amateur mistake, even
though both men sported a short Afro and mustache. They represented two very different periods in Aretha’s life.

Long-in-the-tooth copyeditors shouldn’t watch captioned movies. *Sigh*

The Night House

 

David Bruckner's The Night House is a tour de force for Rebecca Hall, who plays the grieving widow of a man who before the film's action has taken his own life. Hall's Beth wanders through the couple's beautiful lake house trying to piece together possible reasons why her loving husband (Evan Jonigkeit) would shoot himself in the head. She stumbles upon clues between tumblers of whisky, failing to heed warnings from best friend Clair (Sarah Goldberg) and neighbor Mel (Vondie Curtis-Hall) that she should step back from what has become an unhealthy obsession. Night visitations from whispering specters keep Beth, and the audience, on edge as she uncovers one mystery after another about the man she'd loved but, apparently, did not know very well.

Bruckner and writers Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski have crafted a clever mind-bender that doesn't commit to one genre -- it's part mystery, part thriller, part horror, part psychodrama -- but it's wholly Hall's picture; she owns every frame of it as her character careers from heartbroken to spiteful to delirious and back. And the ending is sure to prompt many exchanges long after the credits have rolled.

Don't Breathe 2

 

Uruguayan writer / director Rodo Sayagues takes the helm in the sequel to 2016's home invasion thriller Don't Breathe. In that picture, a blind former Navy Seal thwarts a trio of adolescent thieves who break into his home to steal the man's insurance settlement for a wrongful death. Stephen Lang played the blind man whose combat training is more than a match for the three, who are not without their own set of skills. It was a pretty good ride.

In Don't Breathe 2, Sayagues amps up the gore considerably and ratchets down the plausibility substantially, as a grungy gang of organ harvesters led by the psychopathic meth dealer Raylan (Brendan Sexton III) go after Lang's daughter Phoenix (played by Madelyn Grace) in an exhaustingly depraved series of attacks where every sharp weighted object will be turned into a weapon.

The picture has little real cinematic value, if you don't count the imaginative ways Sayagues has devised of snuffing out human life when all the bullets have been spent.

Respect

Singer/actress Jennifer Hudson shoulders the weight of audience expectations as Aretha Franklin, the iconic subject of Respect. Hudson (who won an Oscar for Dreamgirls) acquits herself through force of will and vocal performances that are so much better than the film's narrative, which feels like a pastiche of religious and secular tropes.

This feeling is present from the start, in the film's first scene, when 10-year-old Aretha (Skye Dakota Turner) is roused out of her bed by her father, Rev. C. L. Franklin (Forest Whitaker), to sing for the crowd of luminaries assembled downstairs, whom she greets as Aunt and Uncle. She performs a sassy blues for the likes of Dinah, Ella and Duke, and is accompanied on piano by Art Tatum. This fantastic scene capsulizes not only the child Aretha's verve but her father's vise grip on her body and spirit.

The theme of domination and control is carried through the picture, and epitomized later by her abusive husband Ted (a terrifically menacing Marlon Wayans) and alcohol and ultimately became the clarion call for her own liberation. They're infused in the lyrics of her biggest hits.

With Franklin as the subject, music must be a central element of the story. Director Liesl Tommy -- in her first feature -- stages wonderful showcases for Hudson's pipes and fans of Franklin will not be disappointed. And yet tissue connecting these stellar moments often feels incomplete, scattered, wispy. For example, aside from the young Aretha, the half-dozen or so other children in the film are never fully placed within the story world, the ages of principal characters are poorly defined, locations are suggested and not firmly planted, except for Aretha and Ted's trip to Muscle Shoals, Alabama, for an early recording session. That segment of the film has substantially more color and flavor than the rest of the film. So much important stuff seems to be going on beyond the frames, in different spaces. And that's frustrating.

The film weaves together love and sexual frankness, domestic violence and tenderness, vulgarity and Jesus in ways that will likely be familiar to many moviegoers, who will compartmentalize the disparate elements of the picture. They will heed the wisdom of Rev. James L. Cleveland (Titus Burgess) who counsels a dejected Aretha to set aside her demons (they never existed anyway) and just be in church.

That might be the best way to fully enjoy a movie that shines but not nearly as brightly as it could.

Free Guy

 

Ryan Reynolds has real bankability. Not only is he tall, square-jawed and handsome, he chooses roles that call for full-bodied expressiveness. In that way, he's like a latter-day Buster Keaton, whose commitment to physical comedy during the Silent Era is legendary.

Reynolds' most celebrated role is as Deadpool, a costumed crime fighter who put both the "smart" and "ass" in the Marvel Universe as a horribly scarred but seemingly indestructible bad boy / good guy. To my mind, Reynolds IS Deadpool; both seem to be indifferent to others' expectations, plowing ahead, cracking heads and cracking wise.

In Shawn Levy's Free Guy, Reynolds is a non-player character named Guy in a popular video game, Free City, who, following an encounter with a winsome avatar Molotov Girl (Killing Eve's Jodie Comer), discovers he has a mind of his own and does not have to settle for being highly dispensable fodder for virtual gunplay.

Guy's journey to individuation tracks along with the "real world" story of Millie (the player behind Molotov) and her game-writing partner Keys (Joe Keery), who are trying to wrest their original game design from the clutches of a greedy corporate clown played by the always reliable Taika Waititi.

The game-world machinations involve eye-popping visual effects and some pretty heavy social commentary -- mainly personal liberty and freedom of choice. A cameo by another fully committed actor -- Channing Tatum -- is a high-point of the film's second reel, when Reynolds' Guy and his best friend Buddy (Lil Rel Howery), meet an adoring avatar (Tatum) who is taken with Guy's liberation crusade.

It's two enjoyable hours of smirks, slapstick and satire.

Nine Days

 

In his first feature film, Nine Days, writer/director Edson Oda reframes ancient questions about life and conscience into an original meditation. Set in a lonesome house in the middle of what appears to be desert salt flats, the story (an extended allegory) depicts the work of a solemn, humorless man named Will (Black Panther and Us's Winston Duke in an award-caliber performance) who must choose which of five unborn souls (played by Zazie Beetz, Tony Hale, Bill Skarsgård, David Rysdahl, Arianna Ortiz) will get a chance at life.

In retro form befitting his character's personality and previous existence, Will has his subjects watch television screens that are windows into the worlds of previously selected souls. The unborn must take notes on what they see. Will reviews the notes, looking for evidence not that the unborn souls are spiritually worthy, as one might expect, but that they will survive the harshness of human existence, which Will himself was unable to do.

Will's companion in the selection is Kyo (Benedict Wong of Doctor Strange), who is sunny counterpoint to his friend's darkness. Kyo is also concerned about Will's peculiar obsession with one long-ago selected soul who seemed to have everything but committed suicide. This seems to be making Will even more tentative and guarded in his selection process.

Yes, much of the film is brooding but there are also moments of joyfulness, channeled mainly through Zazie Beetz's (Atlanta) wonderful character Emma. The final three minutes of the film -- an extended monologue by Will -- is the most remarkable exhibition of pure acting craftsmanship I've seen so far this year. The script is a melding of Whitman and Shakespeare; and Duke is exuberant and thrilling.

Highly recommended.

The Green Knight

 

Writer / director David Lowery's The Green Knight is a beautiful puzzle, whose visual elements might over-power the 700-year-old legend's core allegory of triumph over baser concerns. The term "trippy" has been aptly attached to the film.

Dev Patel, who never fails to engage, stars as Sir Gawain, a member of the household of King Arthur (Sean Harris) who is elevated to a seat at the Round Table one Christmas. Emboldened by this demonstration of the king's favor, Gawain accepts a blow-for-blow challenge from the mysterious Green Knight (Ralph Ineson), beheads him, and promises the revivified corpse that he will submit to the same blow the following year.

Most the film is about the journey to the knight's Green Chapel, and Gawain's encounters with the mystical and the mundane. Some sequences are opaque, quite disorienting, and will likely leave audiences scratching their chins to parse the meaning. Gawain's visit with the spirit Winifred (Erin Kellyman) and a generous Lord and Lady (Joel Edgerton and Alicia Vikander) are important, dreamy encounters whose meanings may become more apparent as time passes.

The film is stunning and frustrating, taking viewers on a quite a trek but we're not sure where we are once we've arrived.

Old

 

M. Night Shyamalan may not always hit it out of the park but he always swings for the fences. The auteur of twisty thrillers evokes eye-rolls from many serious movie goers, but I'm usually entertained by the audacity of his ideas -- when they work and when they don't.

"Old" doesn't work completely -- the dialogue is stilted and implausibility (something Shyamalan is rarely burdened by) rules the day -- but it's not as bungled as other pictures in Shyamalan's oeuvre. Maybe having source material kept the movie from going off the rails.

In the film, a group of resort vacationers are taken to a secluded beach to spend the day. Soon, the youngsters in the group begin to show signs of aging, the oldsters start dying, minds get muddy, wrinkles settle into brows, and hearing and vision begin to fade. And there's no way to leave.

Shyamalan is a stagey creeper who knows how to balance nuance and grotesquerie, so his films are not full-blown horror blood-fests but they have enough gruesome spiciness to jolt callous viewers and enough out-of-frame suggestiveness to unnerve the rest.

"Old" cast is led by Gael Garcia Bernal and Vicky Krieps as a feuding couple and parents to two children. It is through this quartet that much of the movie is told and through whom the big reveal is delivered.

Stillwater

 

In Tom McCarthy's Stillwater, a bulky Matt Damon plays Bill Baker, an Oklahoma roughneck on a mission to free his daughter, Allison (a fine Abigail Breslin) from a prison in Marseille. While studying at university, Allison was found guilty of killing her Arab girlfriend. During one of their visits, Allison asks her father to pass along a tip to her lawyer that might clear her of the murder. The information is not persuasive to the lawyer but leads Bill to enlist the help of his neighbor, Virginie (Camille Cottin) in finding the real killer.

Damon's Bill is a dutiful but dour mass of regret, as he lumbers through the winding streets of Marseille, hoping to prove his daughter's innocence and earn her respect, which he lost during his years as a drunken ne-er-do-well. Damon's performance, and he appears in nearly every scene of this beautifully shot film, feels measured and meticulous, and lends gravitas even to some of the narrative elements that don't quite square. Damon's scenes with Breslin are especially compelling.

Despite its length (2:20), Stillwater is does not drag; the narrative, while ostensibly a murder mystery, is mostly an insightful exploration of the foreign in the age of raging nationalism.