The Stew Database

Reviews and articles by Stewart Smith, award-winning film critic.

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Monkey Man

Dev Patel was already one of the most promising and interesting talents within his generation of actors. But with Monkey Man, Patel shows he’s got the chops to be just as interesting and talented behind the camera as well. 

Monkey Man is being marketed as “John Wick But In India.” And while it’s clear that Patel has taken at least some action lessons to heart from the Wick films (a character in the movie even specifically name drops the character), this inaugural directing effort from the Slumdog Millionaire star is something much more jagged and raw, both in terms of action and vibe. 

Patel plays “Kid,” a name he’s never actually called as he only ever offers “Bobby” as an identifier. The name is swiped at a moment’s notice from the container of kitchen cleaner he’s using, but it’s meaningless. He has no identity. He has no life. He has only a heart of rage and vengeance burning inside of him. His sole mission is to kill the policeman who killed his mother and destroyed his village, and he’ll go to any lengths to accomplish this. 

What ensues is, at its core, a fairly standard and by-the-numbers revenge flick. Desperation leads to anger, anger leads to failure, then training, then a final and thrilling showdown. Every beat is familiar, bordering on rote. What fuels Patel’s film, though, is less its common tropes and more the ways he fills in the gaps between these all-too-familiar elements. Monkey Man is a movie with a lot on its mind and Patel wants very much to say meaningful things about the state of India’s politics, religion, poverty and corruption. I am (as it is likely quite obvious) not even passively knowledgeable on India’s political state, nor the state of its Hindu leaders. Some of the specifics and nuance may be lost to a Westerner like me, but the heat of Patel’s anger at these institutions remains palpable. 

Does that anger translate to depth? Obviously Patel is using this film as an outlet for his frustrations, but it’s difficult for someone in my position to gauge just how much he actually has to say beyond “The State Of Things Is Bad.” Not that the audience is owed more than that, but it often feels like the message comes at the expense of making the contained elements feel more fleshed out. Bobby is little more than a cipher. He goes for most of the film never having a meaningful interaction with anyone that he wasn’t using as a means to an end in his quest for violence. There are flashes to his youth, fleeting memories of his mother and the heroic tales of the Hindu god Hanuman that color his childhood. I suspect this is part of Patel’s grand statement, that a heart hollowed out by anger is only capable of vengeance, but it does make the character less interesting on the whole.

Despite this, and the film’s somewhat sluggish start, Monkey Man is still a remarkably confident first outing. Patel paints the screen with a palette of deep hues and a visceral attention to the details of a life lived amid the slums. It’s a film that feels visceral in its depiction of a world that is inherently violent, even (and especially) when led by those professing peace. Anchoring it all is Patel’s tightly wound performance. Whatever shortcomings there are in Bobby’s characterization on the page, it is at least partially ameliorated by the fire found in Patel’s eyes from beginning to end. 

If nothing else, Monkey Man is a terrific calling card for future projects, an undeniable statement of arrival and intent. Whatever shortcomings are threaded through this first film, it’s evident that Patel has the drive, chops and vision to be something greater. I can’t wait to see what his next work will be. 

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Dune: Part Two

In my review of Dune: Part One three (!) years ago, I described it as a compelling and arresting “half” of a story. It’s an assessment that held up nicely on a recent revisit. But now that Part Two has arrived, how does Denis Villaneuve’s adaptation of this sci-fi cornerstone shake out? Dear reader, allow me to tell you.

Epic filmmaking comes along only rarely. James Cameron wants his Avatar films to feel this way, but they come across as technologically impressive and little else. Not since Peter Jackson’s adaptation of The Lord of the Rings have we seen a series of films that feels fully awe-inspiring and materially impactful in the way that Dune: Part Two often feels. But this is not an emotionally riveting drama, this is an intergalactic tragedy that serves as an epic-scale warning about the dangers of unbridled power and ambition, as well as the poison of religious manipulation and fervor.

The ending of Part One served as a fitting cliffhanger. It was half the tale, but it was the end of Paul Atreides (Timothee’ Chalamet). Forced into exile by the treachery of the Emperor (Christopher Walken) and the vengeful violence of Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgard), Paul was no longer intergalactic royalty. He is now, as Part Two opens, at the mercy of Arrakis’ Fremen, and thus begins the journey of Paul Maud’Dib.

But where Part One was a film composed largely of exposition, explanation and setup, Part Two is almost entirely payoff. If your lingering complaint with Part One was its somewhat passive tempo and lack of action, boy are you in luck. While I wouldn’t go so far as to describe the film as “action packed,” it’s a consistently thrilling ride as the insurrection unfolds. Villaneuve displays a mastery of scale and impact, delivering setpieces that recall moments like the Battle of Aqaba in Lawrence of Arabia (if T.E. Lawrence had stormed that city riding a titan-sized sandworm, of course). It is, at its core, as stark a battle of good versus evil as anything we’ve seen in a while on a scale like this.

But while there is a stark morality found in the core of the film’s values, its characters are often much more complex. With the Harkonnens having laid waste to House Atreides and taken over spice harvesting, Paul and his mother, Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) are now at the mercy of the Fremen. But it isn’t long before he ingratiates himself into their tribe and proves himself a capable ally in the fight against Arrakis’ destructive new overlords. This happens in no small part due to the fanaticism of Fremen leader Stilgar (Javier Bardem), who fully believes the “prophecies” seeded millennia ago that point to a man like Paul arriving to become their messiah, the Lisan al Gaib. And while Paul himself considers such prophecies nonsense, he becomes more and more willing to play into them for his own aim of avenging the murder of his father and the slaughter of his House. This all culminates with events and a decision that are chilling and horrifying in equal measure.

And that’s what ultimately makes this now completed film so compelling. There are no real heroes in the story of Dune. There are no noble motives being pursued (by the major players, at least). There are only murderers, manipulators and those seeking raw vengeance at the expense of all else. And yet Villaneuve’s craftsmanship makes such sordid trappings feel engaging and even relatable. Paul’s descent into becoming a vengeful warrior and religious scion is, in its own way, heartbreaking, especially given the emotional toll it takes on Chani (Zendaya), the woman he comes to love. Their relationship is the emotional throughline of the whole story, and it’s anchored by the terrific performances from Chalamet and Zendaya. Chalamet becomes far more formidable as a leadership figure than I honestly thought he had in him when Part One began, but he more than capably sells the dramatic shifts Paul makes both internally and externally. Zendaya’s work is much more subdued at times, but her magnificently expressive face provides the necessary window. If nothing else, few in Hollywood have a better “mean eyes” expression than her.

The entire cast is as on-point, as they were in Part One. Those wishing Javier Bardem had more to do last time out ought to be beyond pleased as Stilgar becomes a dominant presence as his zealotry evolves from mildly comedic to spine-chilling. It’s a true sight to behold and Bardem fully sells the weight and intensity and genuine passion this character experiences. The true standout, though, is Austin Butler as Feyd, the psychotic nephew of Baron Harkonnen. He disappears under a pale sheath of facial prosthetics and weirdo vocal choices to deliver a truly unnerving and hateful villain.

Butler’s look and performance meshes perfectly with the stunning monochrome aesthetic of his homeworld, Giedi Prime. A stark, nearly sterile landscape overtaken by hauntingly smooth architecture that looks sort of like what you’d get if H.R. Giger tried to blend his work with the Art Deco style. It’s as memorable a sci-fi landscape as we’ve seen in ages. At minimum, you’ve never seen fireworks like these people fire off.

At the end of it all I was left in mild awe at what Villaneuve had accomplished. Dune, the novel, was a work that I had to force myself to get through. It always kept me at arm’s length, I felt. And yet somehow Villaneuve and company have managed to translate that into one of the most enrapturing and engaging epics that Hollywood has seen in its modern era. Some may be frustrated at the feeling that we are once again left on a cliffhanger (of sorts), but the point at which Dune: Part Two cuts to credits feels as natural an endpoint as Part One. This is the conclusion of yet another definitive chapter in Paul’s journey, even as it immediately begins a new one. I can’t wait to see how Villaneuve pushes it further.

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Killers of the Flower Moon

Barring unforeseen tragedy, Killers of the Flower Moon will likely not be director Martin Scorsese’s final film, but what a remarkable bit of punctuation it would be if it was.

It’s not uncommon for filmmakers to use their art as a way to criticize portions of society or to use it as a spotlight to bring awareness to historical injustices. What’s uncommon is for the criticism and that spotlight to be turned by the filmmaker onto themselves and that is precisely what Scorsese does with his latest work.

Killers of the Flower Moon is a difficult film to watch due to the harsh and unrelenting nature of the material, compounded by the extended runtime of nearly four hours. There is no levity in Killers of the Flower Moon. There is only the harsh, grim reality of what happened to dozens of members of the Osage Nation who were murdered by the white men who were enraged that Native Americans in Oklahoma had laid claim to spoils of the Earth (and the subsequent riches they afforded). There are no moments of humor or lightness or comfort here because there are none for these characters, in particular Mollie (Lily Gladstone).

Mollie is an Osage, and as such controls oil drilling rights and is heir to a large fortune. Like the rest of the Osage, she considers local cattle baron William “King” Hale (Robert De Niro) to be a genuine ally and friend to their people. She becomes even closer to King when she eventually marries his nephew, Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), freshly free of fighting in World War I and aimless in life. Children and a doting husband are the only joys Mollie is afforded, though, as death surrounds her at nearly every turn. Her mother dies. Her sisters are systematically murdered, as are dozens of her fellow natives. Her life is one of near-constant grief made worse by a losing battle with diabetes.

Unbeknownst to her, however, is the fact that her people’s benefactor and her now-husband are conspiring behind her back to lie, kill and steal from her and her people. There is no respite for her. There is no respite for her people, wealthy though they may be. Money can buy comfort, but it cannot buy empathy or equality, especially when they are intentionally denied by those who hold true power.

This would make for a harsh story were it fiction. But the fact that Mollie Burkhart was a real person who endured real oppression and suffering makes Killers of the Flower Moon all the more harrowing. Most filmmakers would be content to present this story as a whodunnit, a ripping mystery to be unraveled, gripped with suspense from beginning to end. Scorsese goes the opposite route. It’s obvious, if not outright stated from the beginning who’s behind the murders and why. Scorsese isn’t interested in suspense. He’s not interested in entertainment. He’s interested in the brutal, harsh truth of who holds power and the uncaring lengths these men will go to in order to get and keep more of it.

Scorsese’s film shows a side of American history that many would care to forget or ignore, or in far too many cases work to otherwise obscure or erase. But history doesn’t care about your feelings, and neither does Martin Scorsese. He is very clearly interested only in communicating the facts of history. He’s interested in examining his own culpability in the way that his livelihood and passion as a filmmaker and artist has played a role in whitewashing history, diluting it so that it is palatable and entertaining for the masses, and not a means of reckoning with a bloody past that left countless dead and future generations suffering. This is a work made by a man furious that we, collectively (himself included), would prefer to pretend that a bloody history relegated to a few pages of a few textbooks can be translated into entertainment. It’s as honest a reckoning with one’s own choices and place as an artist as I have seen any filmmaker make in ages, possibly ever.

And while the film is incredibly heavy and perpetually serious, it is not bereft of elements to enjoy or admire. What struck me throughout from a production standpoint is how wonderfully palpable the film felt. In a cinematic landscape where so many sets are either heavily supplemented by or conjured whole cloth via digital effects, Scorsese’s commitment to keeping his actors and audience immediately in the moment via practical sets and props pays off with massive dividends here. It is vital that this story feel as real and tangible as possible in order to relay the intended message, and as such Killers of the Flower Moon feels as real and immediate as anything Scorsese has ever made.

The film also has a trio of superb performances carrying us through. DiCaprio gives what is perhaps his most understated work for Scorsese as Ernest, an impish lunkhead who seems capable of little more than poorly following the directives of his greedy uncle. I felt uncertain how well DiCaprio could pull off this role based on the trailers, but he truly absorbs the character and manages to find a certain complexity in this man who all too easily falls into destructive schemes. Robert De Niro meanwhile delivers the best work of this late chapter in his career, perfectly blending the facade of earnest gentility and support with a subdued, selfish evil bubbling beneath it.

It’s Lily Gladstone, however, who is the film’s MVP. Relegated often to acting while laying in bed or simply reacting to horrible news, Gladstone nevertheless communicates all the complexity, strength, intelligence and naivete of Mollie, often through little more than soft-spoken words and her eyes. It’s a remarkable feat of acting as good as anything Scorsese has ever put into one of his previous works.

I’m not sure I could ever say I enjoyed Killers of the Flower Moon, but I am thankful for it as an examination of American history, as the work of an artist being honest with themselves and their audience, and as a genuine work of cinema. It’s often uncomfortable film to watch, but that simply makes it all the more engaging and necessary.

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A Haunting In Venice

How do you find a suitable challenge for the world’s greatest detective? You force him to confront and consider the unexplainable. 

To the rational, calculating mind, ghosts are a laughably naive concept. Such is the stance of the now-retired Hercule Poirot (Kenneth Branagh). As we encounter him in Venice, he seems content to live a solitary life of retirement, tending his garden and indulging in pastries, all while fending off constant streams of people desperate to employ his impeccable deductive skills. But when the closest thing he has to a friend, best-selling murder mystery author Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey), implores him to try and debunk the work of a spiritual medium on Halloween night, it’s not long before he is thrust out of retirement and back on the case. 

Poirot is certain he’ll make short work of Joyce Reynolds (Michelle Yeoh) and her sham seance’ as she claims to be in contact with the spirit of a girl who jumped to her death from the house’s balcony one year ago. But when someone is murdered with no immediate suspects and seemingly inexplicable occurrences begin filling the house, the master detective is forced to reckon with what is and is not impossible. 

There are twists and reveals and jump scares a-plenty. But what A Haunting In Venice may lack in originality, Branagh more than compensates for with good old-fashioned style and a satisfying (albeit straightforward) execution of its story and characters. 

The visuals are by far the film’s strongest suit so let’s start there. This is an absolutely gorgeous film to take in and I recommend seeing it in the largest format available. Is it in IMAX near you? It’s absolutely worth the premium format fees. This is a sumptuous movie to behold with deep shadows and a superbly established sense of place. The palazzo where the majority of the film takes place isn’t your typical haunted house locale but Branagh shoots it to be perfectly disarming. I’m not the first writer to make this comparison, but it bears repeating that Branagh clearly took more than a little inspiration from Orson Welles’ 1962 surreal film adaptation of Franz Kafka’s dystopian novel The Trial. Welles’ film uses unusual and disarming camera angles and depths of field that create a deep sense of unease and paranoia. It’s done in a way that I’ve rarely seen imitated, making Branagh’s point of inspiration all the more clear. It’s a lovely tribute to an underrated, underseen film that also serves to further underscore the psychic duress these characters, but especially Poirot, endures. It deserves to be seen as large as possible because much of the film’s sense of dread and oppression comes from seeing this house and its shadowy structures tower and overwhelm. 

As for the substance beyond the style, Branagh and the film’s script are a bit more subtle. It’s a Poirot mystery so it shouldn’t shock anyone that a murder happens within the first 20 minutes, but to whom it happens may be a bit more of a surprise. Each surviving character has their own ultimately sympathetic (though some more than others) motivations and connections, but it’s seeing the measured ways in which Branagh shows the cracks in Poirot’s confidence and the roots of his dedication to logic and deduction that I found most endearing. Heroes are at their most interesting when they’re vulnerable in one way or another, so seeing this nigh-invincible mind forced to confront mysteries he may not be able to solve as he’s forced to consider concepts he’d long since evolved beyond is right where Poirot should be at this point in the series.  

If there’s a complaint that lingers, it’s that a single casting choice stuck out like a sore thumb. This is due almost entirely to the character’s unmistakable similarity to another played by the same actor in a contemporary piece of entertainment. I’m trying to be vague in the hope that no one else will be immediately distracted as I was, but it took me out of the moment multiple times. I realize this is almost entirely on me and through no fault of the actor’s but there it is all the same. 

All that said, I can’t recommend this enough, especially if you’re looking for a more old-fashioned haunted house mystery now that we’re on our way into this year’s Spooky Season. 

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The Equalizer 3

Now a full trilogy, the Equalizer films present a fascinating moral juxtaposition. 

Robert McCall is a very violent man. He kills people with ruthless, unerring efficiency, to the point where some have described past entries as a sort of reverse-horror film, wherein the unstoppable killer is the hero and the largely hapless victims are the villains. What dawned on me as I walked out of the third film last night, however, is that these movies are basically the physical manifestation of Jules Winfield's version of Ezekiel 25:17. 

The notion of a man forced by his sense of justice into performing acts of violence in defense of innocents isn't a new concept. But the execution of it in these films is made palatable and even exceptional given that it is buttressed by the moral decency, fortitude and conviction of Denzel Washington's on-screen persona. A persona that, let's be clear, is what's really the driving force here beyond anything the script says or does. 

That McCall now (albeit briefly) wonders if he’s a good man feels somewhat inevitable at this point in the franchise. On the verge of death, he’s rescued by the residents of a seaside village in Sicily. None but the doctor and local policeman question his origin or past actions. He is, instead, slowly welcomed and embraced by the community as he questions whether he can truly leave his old life behind. It’s possible, but he invariably gets drawn into one more fight only he is capable of winning. 

It’s difficult to think of another action film franchise that so starkly puts its protagonist at odds against what we know he’s there to do. Even John Wick, reluctant though he is to re-enter his underworld of violence, has more of an emotional reaction to the body count. What’s even more interesting, though, is that it is this very dichotomy that gives The Equalizer films their appeal. Robert McCall lives in a world that is decided black and white. 

Violence for Robert McCall is never a first resort. A warning is always given before he metes out justice. And yet the films perpetually depict violence as a necessity, brutally so. The third film's violence is the series at its most brutal. There's less of it than in past films, but when it erupts, the results are notably more visceral. No one ever dies a simple death. Quickly, sure, but rarely so simply via a knife or gunshot. You never see Robert McCall smile as he performs these acts, but the films themselves understand that it is incredibly satisfying to see these cartoonishly horrible men face cartoonishly brutal ends. Robert McCall doesn't enjoy it, but we do. Though you also get the sense that McCall would almost certainly look down on us for doing so. 

But back to the Bible. In Pulp Fiction, Samuel L. Jackson's character takes more than a few liberties with the recitation of this verse. While the original text (translations notwithstanding) certainly has in there lines about striking down with great vengeance and knowing that his name is the Lord, there's absolutely nothing about the tyranny of evil men, shepherding the weak and being a brother's keeper. But it is these tenets by which Washington's Robert McCall lives his life. They serve as his moral center, the beacon of light within a soul that, in this film at least, he is no longer certain is righteous. It’s an interesting dichotomy, especially for a movie franchise three films deep.

None of this would work without Washington in the role. As mentioned earlier, it’s Washington’s innate decency and moral certitude that grounds the character, but it’s an essential ingredient because without it McCall becomes a psychotic murderer. But as one of cinema’s most inherently likable actors, we go along with it. We know he wants peace for himself and this village, and if this is the only means to achieve it, so be it. Peace is on the horizon, but it’s going to take McCall wading through blood to get there. 

All in all this makes for a very satisfying cap to the character and his path. I’m not sure I’d ever have pegged a movie remake of a 1980s network television show to ultimately inspire such a moral and conceptual clash, but here we are. Hopefully Robert McCall finally gets to enjoy his tea in peace.

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Oppenheimer

Undoubtedly the culmination of every theme, motif and filmmaking maneuver that Christopher Nolan has every been obsessed with or employed, Oppenheimer is The Most Christopher Nolan movie ever made. 

Is it the best? No. That honor still belongs to Memento, a film that puts all those themes and cinematic tricks to terrific use with an emotional attachment that his films have rarely seen since. Oppenheimer, however, is the film that comes closes to achieving Memento's sense of emotional attachment. Like Leonard, J. Robert Oppenheimer is framed by Nolan as a tragic figure, a man wholly engulfed by his circumstance and incapable of seeing or thinking beyond the immediate moment. Though unlike Leonard, Oppenheimer's inability to do so isn't due to a debilitating brain disability, it's because he's so consumed with the theoretical. Oppenheimer may view the world on a macro scale thanks to his brilliant grasp of physics, but it comes at the cost of rarely, if ever, considering consequence. And once the reality of consequence seeps in, it's too late. The damage is done and the world is irrevocably changed in ways no one could previously have fathomed. 

Such is the weight and tragedy of genius. 

Cillian Murphy communicates that weight and tragedy brilliantly through one of the most sublimely subdued physical performances I've seen in years. It's not the kind of dangerously showy transformation that Christian Bale or Matthew McConaughey have done, but in a way it's more convincing. He channels the totality and complexity of J. Robert Oppenheimer entirely through his posture, his hands and, most particularly, his face. Nolan wasn't joking when he said that it's important to see this projected as large as possible in order to understand and observe the nuance of Murphy's facial performance. 

Giving a more visually theatrical performance is Robert Downey Jr., who finally reminds us why he's more than just Iron Man. Nearly any scene will be perfect for when the Oscars show a brief clip as he's named among that year's Best Supporting Actor nominees. 

It's too bad that so much of his material in the aftermath of the Trinity Test feels like a bit of a drag to get through. The film spends so much of its run hopping between three different points in time. But after the Trinity Test and the drama of conceptualizing and constructing the bomb is no longer looming, hopping between two different political hearings simply doesn't have the juice to sustain the remainder of the film. 

Until then, though, it's a testament to Nolan's skill as a craftsmen that a movie with scenes of little more than men talking about math in front of chalkboards remains so gripping and even accessible.

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Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning, Part One

It’s time to fully acknowledge the Mission: Impossible series as one of the great achievements in action cinema, and with it Christopher McQuarrie as one of the medium’s great action directors.

Knowing what little I do about McQuarrie as a person (via podcasts and various interviews), it’s a label he would likely brush off, content to merely cast himself as still a novice. And while such modesty might be expected given he only has five directing credits to his name, the visible results of his talent and proficiency at the art of crafting kinetic, white-knuckle action sequences speaks for itself. He might claim he’s merely paying homage to the works that inspired him and standing on the shoulders of the cinematic giants who came before him (and he wouldn’t be wrong), but the ways in which he has raised the bar for blockbuster action filmmaking simply cannot be ignored. His latest opus, Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning, Part One, all but sets this in stone.

Before Dead Reckoning, I was certain John Wick Chapter 4 would run away with the title of “The Year’s Best Action Movie.” Now I’m not so sure. Because while Wick 4 unquestionably contains a cornucopia of stunts, shootouts and car chases (sometimes in the same scene), it lacks the grandness and the overall scope of Dead Reckoning, which also is no slouch when it comes to punching, shooting and driving. Wick 4 lacks a jaw-dropping fight atop a speeding, runaway train in the Swiss Alps. Nor does it have one of the most creatively handicapped vehicle chases since Tomorrow Never Dies. And while Keanu Reeves has proven himself beyond capable at being a fully convincing action hero, there’s truly something to be said for the raw audacity of Tom Cruise’s death-defying antics as he quite literally throws himself into the wind to perform stunts that few people in the world (much less in their right mind) would do.

All of that to say, Dead Reckoning Part One is a symphony of action filmmaking that has nearly everything you could want out of a four-quadrant crowd-pleasing blockbuster as this now-familiar team of secret agents trots across the globe and does what they do best: Navigate their way through white-knuckle mayhem and save the world. And they do it with the flavor of classic action cinema fully spread across its surface. This is McQuarrie once more pushing the boundaries of practical stunt work while keeping his mind set firmly on the genre-defining works that came before. There are moments here that would make John Frankenheimer, Buster Keaton, Steven Spielberg and William Friedkin equally proud.

But for as much as its action is rooted in the past, the thematic core of the film has its gaze dead-set on the near future. If Top Gun: Maverick was Tom Cruise’s defiant stance against the aloofness of digital visual effects and its proliferation in the medium, then Dead Reckoning Part One is him standing against the threatened onslaught of artificial intelligence usurping the role of writing and design. And it does so in a much more blatant manner. Top Gun: Maverick communicated this stance through a few lines of dialogue. Dead Reckoning makes it the entire plot.

Dead Reckoning is less a spy movie and more an international chase sequence. It’s not unusual for Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his crew to be chased by agents of his own government, but it’s a little different this time since they’re not just out to keep him from doing something crazy. They’re out to stop him because the people at the top of the food chain want control over the very fabric of truth. The artificial intelligence entity known as, you guessed it, The Entity, threatens to eradicate the lines between fact and fiction, throwing the world into chaos unless it can be controlled. It probably can’t, but that’s not stopping the U.S. government from trying and they’re not about to let Ethan Hunt get in their way. The twist, though, is that The Entity has become self-aware and has enthralled an acolyte to serve its interests: Gabriel (Esai Morales).

Gabriel is one of nearly half a dozen newcomers and he almost immediately establishes himself as Ethan’s most formidable nemesis of the series. This is augmented by Morales’ confident performance, making Gabriel suave and slick and charismatic, but in a subdued, dangerous manner. Hayley Atwell’s fast-fingered thief, Grace, is the other major standout. She quickly finds she’s in way over her head after stealing and re-stealing the film’s MacGuffin: A key that grants access to The Entity. She becomes entangled with Ethan and the team, who are then pursued by a pair of government enforcers played by Top Gun: Maverick’s Greg Tarzan Davis and consummate “That Guy” character actor Shea Wigham.

The ensuing mayhem is, effectively, a nearly three-hour long chase that spans the sands of Abu Dhabi to the canals of Venice to the mountains of Switzerland. It’s breathless and exhilarating and moves so fast I was actually shocked to find out its actual runtime. McQuarrie has paced this one to near-perfection, transferring the blistering momentum he so superbly captures in his chase sequences and infuses it into the film writ large.

If there’s a chink in the armor of the film, it’s that the freewheeling process that McQuarrie and Cruise employ in crafting these films threatens to buckle under the weight of the approach. The pair are notorious for rewriting characters on the fly as filming goes on, often abandoning whole arcs or concepts entirely in favor of a new approach inspired by a cast member’s comment or line delivery. The collaborative nature of the approach is laudable, and on the whole it works far better than it should given how roundly entertaining McQuarrie’s entries have been thus far. But there are specifics at play here that can feel muddled, particularly in regards to when certain characters know what or how, that is either confusing or outright nonsensical. Thankfully, McQuarrie, the cast and crew are nimble enough to never fall through the cracks, but the cracks show perhaps more than in past entries.

But for however many cracks do show, the strength of what is accomplished far outweighs nits to be picked from the details. In a macro sense, this is one of the most impressive, thoroughly entertaining tentpole blockbusters of the last decade, easily, and I can’t wait to see how it all comes to a final head in Part Two.

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Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

We don’t allow our heroes to age. James Bond gets recast every couple decades. Comic book heroes rarely get older in any meaningful way. Et cetera. It’s understandable that the characters we’ve immortalized into the modern canon retain an air of (variable) youthfulness, but it also means that they are all but required to have the same sorts of adventures and largely stay the same as a person.

Harrison Ford has no interest in allowing Indiana Jones to achieve immortality, as his fifth and final outing as the character proclaims loud and clear.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny never hits the highs of any of its predecessors, but I posit that it’s not necessarily trying to. Indy does plenty of Indy things (and lightly stretches audience credulity in the process), but by and large Ford and director James Mangold treat the character like he’s aged into his late 70s, both in action and in thought. This movie isn’t intended to be held up as an equal to its genre-defining predecessors. It’s a coda for an icon and in that respect it’s a fully entertaining and occasionally poignant work.

The film kicks off with an opening sequence that’s as fun and rousing as any of the preceding films. The voice modulation on Ford could have used some tweaking but the de-aging special effects are remarkable and for about 15 minutes or so, it’s easy enough to believe that we’re looking at Indy still in his prime, punching lots of Nazis and performing incredible feats of derring do.

Then we cut to the film’s present day. It’s 1969 and Henry Jones, Jr. is now a man out of time. The world around him has passed him by as men are landing on the moon (put there by Nazi scientists hired by the U.S. government). Socio-political movements are upheaving everyday life. Ironically, while he’s no longer a nigh-absent professor, none of his students have any interest in ancient history. Although even his career is leaving him behind with retirement imminent and Marion is filing for divorce.

The only connection he seemingly has left to a life gone by is his goddaughter, Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge). So when Helena shows up out of nowhere, proclaiming she knows how to find a the second half of a dial that can supposedly turn back time, he plunges head-first back into action. The search for Archimedes’ Antikythera nearly drove Helena’s father crazy, but it’s also clear that Indy sees a darker side to Helena’s search and he refuses to let her go down the darker path of seeking artifacts for “fortune and glory” as he nearly did. Throw in some Nazis seeking the dial to rectify Hitler’s megalomaniacal mistakes and you’ve got all the trappings of a classic, globetrotting Indiana Jones adventure.

So why can’t it fully capture the magic of The Man in the Hat’s previous (good) escapades? Well, for one, James Mangold is no Steven Spielberg. No one is. Not even Spielberg, at times (see: Kingdom of the Crystal Skull). There’s simply a magic to the entire affair that is incapable of being replicated in full, try though Mangold does. And to his credit, there are portions of the film that have the spark and kineticism of Spielberg’s Indy films at their best. The World War 2-set opening on a Nazi transport train is simply outstanding and presents a near-perfect mini-adventure for the character. It’s got just about everything you could want from an Indy action setpiece. The car chase through Morocco is also well-staged and full of humor and thrills (even if I couldn’t stop giggling at the idea that little tuk-tuk carts characters drive are somehow capable of traveling at blazing speeds enough to keep pace with full-engine cars). But even once the film is fully rolling, it’s still centered on a character on the cusp of turning 80 years old. And while Indy’s age never fully defies believability, there’s only so much a movie can do if you want to maintain that hold.

Thankfully, the film’s best material leans into the fact that Indiana Jones is in his twilight, and that it’s impossible to defy time and that it is, in fact, essential to embrace it, to understand that some things must pass, that some things are impossible to change. But also, that living in the past (both literally and figuratively) is a fool’s errand.

Dial of Destiny is a reminder that we are more than just the best memories of our lives. Heroes age. Heroes make mistakes. Heroes go beyond what they’ve been immortalized as. That may be a slightly depressing thought, but Mangold and Ford lean into the humanity of it. This is Indiana Jones at his most vulnerable, but it becomes a story about a man finally coming to terms with the good and bad that has weaved in and out of his life as he finally realizes what’s important is what’s in front of you, not behind you.

What makes the Indiana Jones movies so special and different from so many other action adventure movies is that they obliterate cynicism. In Raiders of the Lost Ark, Temple of Doom and Last Crusade, each of those adventures ends with Indy learning more about himself, about the world he knows and the parts of it he can’t explain. He starts each of those stories cynical about something, and ends them with his eyes opened to how he was wrong. That element, that destruction of cynicism is what drives the heart of Dial of Destiny. It may lack the dynamism of Spielberg’s entries at their best, but it retains the beating heart of the character and his evolution. It’s a touching, meaningful ending to an immortalized character who has never felt more human than he does now at the end of his adventures.

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Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is one of James Gunn's best movies, one of Marvel's best movies and the movie that perhaps best personifies Gunn's personal ethos. 

Though his movies are known for their outrageous weirdos, flurry of jokes and shocking bursts of violence or gore, James Gunn is one of Hollywood's most compassionate filmmakers. His movies are often stories about society's rejects, the kinds of people we'd like to ignore, laugh at, or otherwise consider to be "the least of these." These are the characters he elevates and within whom he finds a beating heart of gold. Nowhere is this more evident than in this emotionally -charged trilogy-capper that's centered on an animal that humans typically treat, at best, with disdain and disgust. 

It may feel odd for the final film of a trilogy to focus so strongly on the origin of one of its central characters, but Gunn threads that needle expertly and uses the flashback structure to more fully drive home his central theme of "Compassion is the most vital force in the galaxy." That he successfully brings this to the forefront even amid a cavalcade of pratfalls, one-liners, intergalactic weirdos and even a little bit of body horror feels nothing short of miraculous, even if it is expectedly on-brand for Gunn at this point. 

It’s also an emotionally-charged, highly satisfying conclusion to the character arcs that were seeded nearly a decade ago with Vol. 1. This isn’t the first trilogy in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but it’s by far the most cohesive and satisfying. It’s the one where every one of the main players feels like they have well and truly evolved beyond who they were at their point of introduction. No small feat within the MCU stable, which hasn’t had a super stellar track record of maintaining various points of character development (see: Stark, Tony). This is Gunn’s swan song for the MCU and it definitely feels like a love letter and final farewell to these characters and the universe surrounding them. 

It’s also the most narratively thin movie in the trilogy, though that’s not necessarily a bad thing. They’re not out to guard any particular galaxy, they’re not trying to retrieve some cosmic doo-hickey. They’re out to save Rocket. After he is assaulted and nearly kidnapped by Adam Warlock (Will Poulter), the Guardians discover they can’t administer any kind of meaningful, life-saving first aid due to a technological lock put into place by Rocket’s creator. They have roughly two days to save their friend. 

Though the proceedings may lack anything resembling major intergalactic stakes (though their actions do have far-reaching consequences), there’s no shortage of cosmic weirdness on display, whether the team is traveling to a space station made entirely of organic matter or landing on a planet that’s a carbon copy of Earth but it’s populated by humanoid animal creations. The Guardians of the Galaxy movies have always let their freak flag fly and that’s certainly no different here. 

But even with as weird, witty and exciting as things get, what propels this to become one of the MCU’s best entries is reveling in the sense of family and friendship this motley crew has fostered. Gunn is effectively saying goodbye to these lovable weirdos and it results in every member of the team getting their own time to shine, their own moments to show they’re greater than the sum of their (often outlandish) parts. Drax (Dave Bautista) proves he’s more than just a lunkheaded mass of muscle. Nebula (Karen Gillan) allows us to peek behind the perpetually annoyed facade. And even as annoyed as I can get with Chris Pratt’s career choices these days, he once again shows exactly why Peter “Star Lord” Quill is the role he was born to play. 

It’s also a bit of parting wisdom, too. The central villain is known as The High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji), a brilliant but callous scientist who creates entire worlds and conducts experiments on animals as he forces them to endure borderline unnatural transformations. All of this is done with a casual cruelty stemming from a cosmically-sized superiority complex. He crafts innumerable worlds and creatures and pursues ideas but has little regard for what those pursuits actually mean. The High Evolutionary is in search of “perfection,” but seems to have little notion of what that actually means. There is no why, only the how. It’s a warning against the use of power for the sake of personal edification, even if it’s done in the pursuit of creating something “perfect” for others. No accomplishment is worth chasing if it’s achieved through cruelty. For Gunn, compassion is the most vital force in the galaxy. 

As far as final notes go, that’s a perfect one to strike. 

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The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023)

If you’re not a little kid, how much you enjoy The Super Mario Bros. Movie will likely be in direct proportion to how much you love Nintendo’s marquee characters. 

I’ve been a fan of Mario, Luigi and crew since I first laid eyes on a Nintendo Entertainment System back in 1987. As I grew up, Shigeru Miyamoto was my Walt Disney: A creative visionary capable of conjuring delightful characters and worlds that sparked my own imagination. That love has never faded. 

There have been other attempts to translate Super Mario Bros. into forms beyond its 8-bit origin, but those efforts were either half-baked (The Super Mario Bros. Super Show) or too bizarre for their own good (the 1993 live-action movie.) This is the first time that Mario has made the leap beyond a video game into something that could unequivocally be described as “good.” No small feat, given that at its core Super Mario Bros. as a game concept is little more than “man jumps over/onto things.” 

So how do you spin “man jumps, saves princess” into a tale worth 90 minutes of an audience’s time? You lean heavily into the iconic imagery of the source material and emphasize the familial nature of the title characters. 

Mario (Chris Pratt) and Luigi (Charlie Day) are the eponymous Super Mario Bros. (though it never specifies if their last name is also Mario), a Brooklyn-based duo desperate to make their mark as newly minted self-employed plumbers. When their first paid gig is a disaster-and-a-half, the brothers attempt to save face by helping solve a plumbing crisis that erupts from below their NYC burrough. But before they can wrench victory from the jaws of defeat, they find themselves sucked into a pipe transporting them to a magical land. With Luigi now captured and the fiendish Bowser (Jack Black) intent on laying waste to the rest of the Mushroom Kingdom, Mario teams up with the headstrong Princess Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy) to find a way to rescue his brother and help save the day. 

The movie wastes no time in setting things into motion. Directors Michael Horvath, Aaron Jelenic and Pierre Leduc fully grasp that you’re at a Mario movie to see Mario do and be surrounded by the things gamers have spent decades seeing in the games, and they cut right to the chase. And if there’s a lingering, substantive complaint I have with the Super Mario Bros. Movie, it’s that never stops moving at a breakneck pace. With the world and characters such direct translation of their game counterparts, it can be more than a bit overwhelming seeing this whirlwind of colorful chaos whiz by you with nary a spare moment to truly soak it all in, much less spend time truly getting to know any of the characters. Though that’s also a testament to the chemistry that Pratt and Day share and how relatively well the movie immediately establishes the relationship between Mario and Luigi that it really feels like a bummer that they don’t share more time together until the big finale. 

Speaking of Pratt and Day, the entire voice cast has to be commended for their work here. The Internet has been awash with cringing and complaints about Pratt’s vocal work since even before we heard a peep from him in a trailer, but he ends up fitting quite nicely with how the character is written in the movie. He’s doing a slight approximation of a Brooklyn accent, but it works. We’ve typically only heard Mario’s video game avatar shout and whoop or otherwise speak in cartoonishly over-the-top catchphrases, a style that would in no way serve a 90 minute movie with conversations and expositions and Pratt makes it work. 

The real stars, though, are Black and Taylor-Joy as Bowser and Peach. Jack Black is perhaps the most “no brainer” casting bit of the whole lot, and he delivers exactly the sort of performance you’d want and expect. Taylor-Joy, however, is the movie’s anchor. No longer relegated to merely being a damsel in distress, Peach is more than capable of taking care of herself (she mostly lets Mario come along to try and rescue Luigi) and Anya Taylor-Joy finds the perfect balance of “girlboss” energy and sunny disposition to present what will likely be to a new generation of kids what Carrie Fisher’s Princess Leia was to me growing up. 

The result is a movie that sounds great (composer Brian Tyler’s renditions of classic tunes from across the game series are superb), looks great and moves like a rocket. It’s unquestionably the best movie that Illumination has ever made. But it’s a cotton candy movie, as colorful and sweet as it is thin. And that’s fine. It’s a kids movie and a better one at that than almost anything not made by Pixar these days. 

But for a longtime fan such as myself? As someone who learned to draw because he loved Mario and spent countless hours in the backyard and on the playground pretending to be Mario, seeing Miyamoto’s creations brought to such vibrant, lovingly rendered life was a joy enough in and of itself to be satisfied. 

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JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 4

In the lead up to its release, I’d heard no small amount of seemingly-hyperbolic praise heaped up on John Wick: Chapter 4 by friends lucky enough to see advanced screenings. Surely, I reasoned, this is merely pre-release hype fed by the thrill that comes with seeing something highly anticipated before everyone else.

I was wrong.

Believe the hype. This really is an incredible feat of moviemaking. John Wick: Chapter 4 is the rarest of sequels. Most film franchises are barely running on fumes by their third film, much less a fourth. Director Chad Stahelski and star Keanu Reeves, however, have delivered a movie with such ferocious style and breathtaking intensity that I walked away wondering if I’d hallucinated half of it.

The John Wick series has been one of consistent escalation. The first film feels almost quaint now with its eponymous protagonist leaving a miles-long trail of bodies through New York City on his sympathetic quest for vengeance. Now fully drawn back into the neon-drenched underworld he so desperately fought to leave, Mr. Wick brings his unparalleled expertise across multiple continents as we are immersed even further into this alternate reality of assassins and shadowy rulers. Chapter 3 never found the right balance of world building and characters, resulting in more than a bit of cinematic wheel-spinning, a problem Chapter 4 solves by shifting the focus from John as a loner against all odds to him navigating a web of relationships old and new in an all-out battle royale for his ultimate emancipation

He’ll just have to go through the toughest, most ruthless opponents he’s ever faced, including a former best friend, to get there. What unfolds is something exhilarating.

Chapter 4 is as much a love letter to every twin-fisted action flick Chad Stahelski has ever loved as it is a modern classic of the form. This may be the fourth time in a row that Keanu Reeves has pumped boxes of bullets into endless waves of underworld goons and assassins, but it’s an experience that he and Stahelski have honed to a mirror sheen. Throw in the likes of Hiroyuki Sanada, Scott Adkins, Rina Samayawa, Shamier Anderson and the godlike Donnie Yen and the result is the most relentless action movie since Mad Max: Fury Road. Every time you think the movie has topped itself with inventive ways to beat, slice, stab, bludgeon, whip and otherwise maim both heroes and villains, Stahelski says, “Nah, hang on.” Save for the aforementioned Fury Road, this may well be the ultimate form of an action movie, delivering a perfect blend of Asian-influenced mayhem and Stahelski’s own decades of experience as a Hollywood stuntman.

It’s a visual knock-out, too. The complexity of Wick’s action successfully escalates with each film and Chapter 4 delivers a symphony of destruction to the point where it’s nigh impossible to pick a favorite. The siege of the Osaka Continental featuring what may be the single best use of nunchucks ever in a movie? John’s rampage through a dilapidated apartment building viewed largely from a top-down perspective? A fight in and around traffic at Paris’ Arc de Triomphe that has to be seen to be believed? Any one of these would be considered the high watermark of any action director’s career.

These scenes are electric thanks to the outstanding choreography and a level of visual panache that puts every other recent film of this kind to shame. Any given environment is stunning to look at thanks to phenomenal production design and art direction (as well as Dan Laustsen’s gorgeous cinematography). But what makes these scenes as impactful as they are is something far more fundamental than fancy moves and good photography: Stahelski lets you see what’s going on. You’d think something this basic would be a principle more widely embraced, but getting a Hollywood action movie where the lighting is intentional, the edits are minimal and the camera movement precise and steady is maddeningly rare. The John Wick films at large have embraced this fundamental approach, but Chapter 4 takes it to an echelon above where even its predecessors unquestionably succeeded.

What really makes this one sing is the cast, though. Stahelski has made a habit of putting fantastic character actors throughout this series, but the additions in Chapter 4 are, as with most everything else, a cut above. Even ignoring the fact that I could listen to Clancy Brown read the phone book, the gravitas he brings to a role like The Harbinger cannot be understated. It’s abundantly clear that Bill Skarsgaard was put on this Earth exclusively to play movie villains. And Hiroyuki Sanada reminds us why he’s been a mainstay of Asian cinema since the 1960s. But it’s Donnie Yen who completely steals the show as John Wick’s friend-turned-nemesis Caine. Yen has been a mega-star of Hong Kong cinema for years, but he’s either been woefully underutilized (a la Blade II) or been cast to play second-fiddle (XXX: The Return of Xander Cage) and never given a true chance to fully shine for audiences in the West. Stahelski lets Yen cut loose in a way that is sure to blow the minds of at least a few moviegoers, and that’s on top of him playing a character that feels every bit as sympathetic as Keanu’s.

And speaking of Keanu, I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk about his work in these films. Say what you will about the quality of his acting, I dare say no award-winning actor could bring the level of commitment to authenticity and the bottled fury Reeves lets loose across these four films. Keanu Reeves could play Forrest Gump, but Tom Hanks probably couldn’t go toe-to-toe with some of cinema’s greatest martial artists. The amount of pain and abuse John Wick endures is basically superhuman at this point, but Reeves manages to make the impact land and be felt because he believes in this character and the exaggerated world he inhabits.

It feels almost miraculous that this series exists, much less that it has flourished in such a way. In a landscape filled with movies based on pre-existing intellectual property and remakes, we now have four movies bursting with creativity and originality that also serve as love letters to the inspiring source material. If this is the last we see of John Wick, there’s no better way to send him off.

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Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

I’ll just cut right to the chase. Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves has a real shot at being one of my favorite movies of the year. It almost certainly won’t be an awards contender and no one’s likely expecting this to break box office records. But as a work of pure entertainment? A high bar has been set for the rest of 2023 to try and clear.

There was reason to think otherwise, however. High fantasy films both before and after The Lord of the Rings have largely been underwhelming duds. The genre is difficult to truly nail, but co-directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein (along with their co-writer Michael Gilio) have managed to channel everything fun, fanciful and fantastic (in the older sense of the word) about swords and sorcery into a rocket-propelled adventure that satisfies at nearly every turn.

And if you’re completely new to the realm of D&D and have no idea what a displacer beast is, can’t point out where Neverwinter is on a map, or know the difference between magic missile and mage hand, fear not! Honor Among Thieves does a fantastic job of introducing the audience to this world and its inhabitants.

Guiding us through this adventure is Edgin (Chris Pine), a bard and thief who pals around with Holga (Michelle Rodriguez), a barbarian warrior exiled from her people. They’ve broken out of prison and are scheming a way to rescue Edgin’s daughter and get payback on the man who stabbed them in the back during a theft that went horribly wrong. To do it, they’ll need the help of a struggling wizard, Simon (Justice Smith), a shapeshifter, Doric (Sophia Lillis) and paladin Xenk (Rege’-Jean Page). As you can probably guess, what they see as a very straightforward mission at the start becomes something much more dangerous and complicated the deeper into it they get.

The particulars of the plot aren’t terribly interesting and feel like a fairly standard setup at play if it was a Saturday night and you’re sitting at a kitchen table with some friends, rolling a D20 and waiting for your older brother to further unfurl his scenario as Dungeon Master. What makes Honor Among Thieves such a cracking good time at the movies is the playful spirit Daley and Goldstein infuse into the proceedings, the superlative chemistry among the cast and a script that delivers a very precise balance of humor, pathos and swashbuckling adventure.

Part of why this movie had my audience eating out of the palm of its hand was due largely to how funny it is. There’s an abundance of laughs to be had with sarcasm and one-liners to spare, though it blessedly avoids that Joss Whedonesque trap of simply making everyone a snark-machine that fires off identical-sounding quips at the drop of a hat. The members of our heroic quartet each react to the escalating escapade with humor at various moments, but it all feels organic to who they are. These characters are all archetypes (each a literal class you can choose in the tabletop game), but the script never treats them specifically as such. We’re given ample backstory, but never so much as to bog down the proceedings. Each gets their time to shine. Page deftly steals his scenes by being charmingly dense. Smith and Lillis are new to my eyes but keep up with the veterans. And this may be the most fun I’ve seen Rodriguez have since the first Fast & Furious movie.

But even as well-balanced as the party is, it’s safe to say that this is Chris Pine’s show. I’ve been a fan of Pine’s since he pitch-perfectly played a slack-jawed yokel assassin in the schizophrenic action flick Smokin’ Aces. It was clear then that he had a wicked comedic sense and he was unafraid to bury himself in a character. But he was also burdened with leading man looks, which of course only confuses Hollywood producers who seem incapable of letting pretty people do wild and weird things. (See also: Pitt, Brad.) The joy of Honor Among Thieves is that it perfectly splits the difference for Pine. He’s certainly a capable leading man, but his role as Edgin finds the perfect balance between his strengths as a character actor and his leading man charm.

I can’t stress enough, though, just how fun this is. The villains are villainous. The heroes are (mostly) scoundrels with hearts of gold. There are no existential moral conflicts at play. It’s just a good old-fashioned magic-fueled romp with high (but not world-ending) stakes and a healthy dose of heart. And, perhaps most importantly for a high-fantasy flick, it doesn’t skimp on the stuff you want to see. Dragons. Black magic. Danger-filled caves. Mythical beasties of all stripes. A deadly maze. Mimic chests. Gelatinous cubes. It’s all here. A movie of this pedigree demands these elements show up in excess and Honor Among Thieves delivers.

I hope these early screenings are a sign that Paramount Pictures knows how great this movie is and they’re trying to build as much positive word of mouth as possible. I want sequels. As many as I can get. This was a delight from end to end and if nothing else, I’m happy with that.

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Creed III

Creed III is an impressive and rousing boxing movie in its own right, as well as being a cracking good directorial debut for Michael B. Jordan.

Though this is technically the third Rocky spin-off film, it’s the first without a single appearance by The Italian Stallion himself. In fact, I’m not sure Rocky Balboa’s name is even mentioned once in passing. This is entirely a story about Adonis Creed (Jordan) and his fight, both literally and metaphorically, to break free of the past and stand firm amid his own legacy and accomplishments. As such, while the warmth and wisdom of Rocky is missed, his absence is at least thematically fitting.

Jordan has been one of my favorite young working actors since I first saw him as Wallace in HBO’s The Wire many, many moons ago. He was terrific then and he’s only gotten better since. He’s ably made the Creed films his own as an actor despite dancing in the shadow of Sylvester Stallone as Rocky, so it makes sense too that he’d want to prove he can go the distance completely on his own both in front of the camera and behind it.

This is mirrored in Adonis Creed’s story. Having now officially retired as the reigning heavyweight boxing champion of the world, Adonis is living a life of stature and comfort. His biggest concerns are his daughter’s behavior at school and training a protégé’. All of that is upended when a ghost from his past resurfaces for the first time in nearly 20 years: Dame Anderson (Jonathan Majors). The two were like brothers and Dame had the talent and momentum to become a heavyweight champ. Until, that is, he took the fall for Adonis and spent most of his life behind bars. Resentful of Adonis’ success, Dame aims to take what he sees as rightfully his own.

Like the previous Creed movies and the Rocky series as a whole, Creed III isn’t a boxing movie so much as it’s a deeply felt human drama that just so happens to have characters who are boxers. Adonis and Dame could be swordsmen or race car drivers and the thematic crux of the film would remain firmly in place. As such, this is in some ways the most personal movie in the Rocky-verse since, arguably, Rocky IV.

Although it’s also an interesting inversion of the original Rocky’s setup. It asks: What if the first Rocky movie was from Apollo Creed’s perspective and what if Rocky, instead of being his humble self, was bitter and angry and out for blood? As a director, Jordan digs into all of this with aplomb. It’s all very basic stuff and Jordan can often make subtext glaringly obvious with certain shot choices, but it works. The movie isn’t subtle, but it’s also not trying to be.

It helps that Jordan and Majors are both exceptional talents and inhabit their characters with a sincerity that helps ground the broad nature of the proceedings. Majors in particular inhabits Dame with an intensity and ferocity that would make Rocky III’s Clubber Lang wary, while also managing to make him almost wholly sympathetic. There’s a point mid-film where Dame lets his mask drop, revealing his true intentions. Until now, it was easy to feel almost entirely on Dame’s side. But even with such a blatant heel turn, Majors makes it feel like an inevitable development while never betraying the sympathy he’d previously built. It’s stunning work and positions Dame as one of the truly great villains of the Rocky-verse.

What I find most interesting about Creed III, though, is the window it provides not only into Jordan’s future as a director, but possibly the generation of filmmakers coming up alongside him. At age 36, Jordan has grown up right alongside the skyrocketing popularity of Japanese anime. For him, shows like Gundam Wing and Naruto are as influential as the likes of Spider-Man and Batman to past generations. And while Creed III never gets as over-the-top as any given episode of, say, Dragon Ball Z, the way Jordan approaches character archetypes, motivations, and even fight choreography is clearly drawn directly from the well of Japanese animation. Anime stories are often those of brothers-in-arms forced to fight against the other. Anime action scenes often have a very specific dynamic energy and flow. Both of these are qualities that Jordan brings to the forefront here.

This isn’t to say Michael B. Jordan is the first American filmmaker to be openly influenced by anime, of course. The Wachowskis were quite vocal about The Matrix being influenced by the likes of Ghost in the Shell, for instance. But it is a fascinating look into his influences and it lends Creed III a tone, particularly in the final fight, that helps it stand out from the rest of its forerunners. But it’s also, I think, a glimpse at how visual styles for Western-made movies in general could further evolve. Plenty of live action anime adaptations have been made in Japan. But the style has only become more widespread and popular in the West over the last couple decades and I’m willing to bet Creed III is just the beginning of how we’ll see its overt influence in a new generation of American filmmaking.

Where Creed III largely falters, though, is in its lack of a strong emotional core. The damaged brotherhood that Adonis and Dame navigate is felt, but it never takes root enough to feel like it matters that Adonis might lose his friend all over again. The gap in their relationship is too vast to make it feel like enough is at stake. Exacerbating this is the fact that not much is otherwise at stake. Adonis is already retired and with titles and belts won. He’s got plenty of money and a wonderful family. With none of those things truly at stake if he just walks away from a challenge by Dame, it lessens the impact of emotional and physical battle that goes down.

Still, Creed III manages to rise above these shortcomings and cements itself as a terrific boxing movie in its own right and Johnson proves himself more than capable behind the camera so much that I’ll be first in line when he decides to take another swing.

[stewblog]

The Banshees of Inisherin

As quietly devastating a movie as I've seen in a long time as Martin McDonagh delivers a thoughtful and heartbreaking examination on aging and friendship.

The core conflict is an existential conundrum that I've long contemplated in the age of social media's dominance: How long are friendships meant to last? As platforms like Facebook or Twitter become one of the key ways we (re)connect and communicate with people, it can sometimes be challenging to simply move on. It used to be, you'd meet someone, develop a friendship, and then time and age and even distance would mean that those relationships would simply run their course as you become different people with different goals and priorities. Drifting apart is a natural part of our evolution as humans. Sometimes it's sudden, sometimes it's natural, sometimes it happens over the course of years. But now that anyone from any point in your life can ostensibly hop back into it, how does that affect our natural inclination to let some relationships remain and others fade? Obviously individuals have the ability to block or mute or otherwise ignore people on social media, but (from my experience, at least) there is some modicum of expectation that you be courteous or welcoming to people who are reaching out in a friendly, good faith manner.

It feels harder than ever to simply move on and be a person different from what others want or expect of the person they know. That is the burden shared by both Colm (Brendan Gleeson) and Padraic (Colin Farrel). Colm is weary of his, apparently longstanding, friendship with Padraic. Colm, bogged by the existential angst that he'll be forgotten in the decades to come, wants to write and teach music and leave behind his "boring" friendship with Padraic.

Padraic, however, cannot fathom why his best friend would turn on a dime. The resulting feud is at times hilarious, at times frightening, but always heartbreaking. Gleeson and Farrell are a tremendous pair here, Farrell in particular delivering what may be the most heart-wrenching performance of his career thus far.

McDonagh understands the difficulty in wanting to move on. He groks the necessity of it for some people. But even he feels unable to answer the question of how to navigate this conundrum in a way that leaves all involved without lasting scars. We as humans are meant to connect, to give our laughter and friendship and love to others. What is the point of our existence without these things, but at what cost? What is the cost of that need and how long must we remain in debt to it before society says we're allowed to move on? There is a balance to be found, but that balance is illusive at best, McDonagh says.

My wife expressed relief at having not watched this with me due to its elegiac tone and conclusion. In a way I can't blame her. And yet this movie is a perfect example of the strange sort of comfort I can find in a story of this sort. You ache for these two men whose lives are in varying ways torn asunder, both through their own actions and the reactions of the other. And yet it is an odd comfort to know that others struggle in the same way with relationships, with identity, with unmet desire and the inherent sadness that can often sweep its way through a life. That is what McDonagh expresses so well in this film and for that alone I am grateful for it.

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Avatar: The Way of Water

Avatar: The Way of Water has a lot going on, but there is one thing abundantly clear throughout its (interminable) 3 hour and 15 minute runtime: Director James Cameron has a boundless love for the world he has created and all of its native inhabitants. When the credits finally rolled, I was left wishing he had simply made a couple of faux documentaries about Pandora narrated by Sigourney Weaver.

Cameron takes particular pride and care when depicting Pandora’s flora and fauna. His passion for marine biology shines particularly bright in this long-awaited sequel as the majority of it takes place in, under and around water. A Pandoran whale ends up becoming one of the most endearing characters in the film. He also has a palpable love for the new family unit(s) that are introduced here. This sequel may have taken more than a decade to finally arrive, but James Cameron wanted this to be about something and not just contain wall-to-wall spectacle.

Personally, I would have preferred the spectacle compared to what we got.

For as much obvious affection as Cameron has for this world and these characters, very little of that translates into an engaging story or characters that register. This would have been forgivable and perhaps even understandable in a 90 minute, or even two hour, movie. But when you have no real story to speak of and not a single character, new or returning, feels fleshed out in a meaningful way with a runtime that outlasts The Godfather by about 20 minutes, something is horribly amiss.

Following a bit of a recap, The Way of Water picks up in earnest roughly 15 years or so after the events of the original film, which saw humans pushed out of Pandora en masse and Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), now fully integrated into his avatar body. Jake is now a father to three children with Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), as well as adoptive father to two wayward kids as well. There’s Spider (Jack Champion), the wayward human son of Col. Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), and Kiri (Sigourney Weaver), the immaculately conceived daughter of Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver), who died while inhabiting her avatar in the previous film. All of whom are forced into exile when the regrouping human colonists are determined to kill Jake and dissolve the insurgency he leads.

These kids are the driving force of the whole thing, both mechanically and thematically, for good and ill. What story exists on the page is theirs. Sorry, Jake Sully fans, he’s only going to show up sporadically to get mad at his sons for disobeying him and little else. Neytiri has even less to do. The rest of the time we’re largely stuck with these kids attempting to settle into their new lives among a new tribe of Na’vi who have adapted and taken to the sea of Pandora the way Neytiri’s tribe flourished in its forest. This, naturally, leads to all sorts of fish-out-of-water hijinx, both literally and figuratively. The boys, Neteyam (Jamie Flatters) and Lo’ak (Britain Dalton) just want to fit in. Kiri begins to more fully realize the spiritual and physical connection she has with the planet itself. The youngest, Tuk (Trinity Jo-Li Bliss), is also accounted for.

Dull and unengaging as most of their escapades are, though, it’s during this middle stretch that Cameron shows where his heart remains. As in real life, his passion is for the sea and its inhabitants. If James Cameron could grow gills and never rise to the surface again, he would likely have already done so. You’ll not find a more vividly rendered and realized environment in a movie than the seas of Pandora. It is a space that is at once familiar and yet wholly, rivetingly alien. He presents us a dreamy vista of a submerged paradise and intentionally lingers there for extended stretches. It’s entirely digital, and yet it feels as tangible and real as anything else on a movie screen this year. There are other talented special effects houses out there, but the work that WETA Digital has put forth for this movie is something an echelon above anything else I’ve seen in recent memory.

But sumptuous underwater escapades only retain their engagement for so long here. There reached a point where I stopped being able to tell which blue alien cat boy which. Kiri’s connection to the planet can only be so meaningful without some engagement deeper than “she just feels it.” There was certainly space to play here. At its core you could say this movie was, at least on paper, intended to be an examination of fatherhood and the ways that expectations of fatherly behavior are often at complete odds with how children, and sons especially, are failed by living up to those expectations. Fathers need to be more than just a stern voice and a “protector” (the latter of which Jake Sully fails fairly spectacularly at being).

This could have been especially interesting given what’s at stake for Quaritch. Despite becoming Neytiri’s new arrow quiver at the end of the first movie, he’s now back but in Na’vi form. Ostensibly implanted with his former self’s full batch of memories and even personality, New Quaritch must now wrestle with inhabiting the build and visage of the very thing he once tried to annihilate, all while reckoning with the (now grown) son he may or may not have even known he had. A tale of two fathers, both at odds with their brood, their life and their purpose.

All of it is largely ignored. We don’t even get a perfunctory moment where Quaritch finds himself even slightly contemplating the nature of his existence and why he must remain on the path his former self set in motion despite the fact that he’s only technically that person still.

At least the final hour of The Way of Water is an absolute banger and an explosive reminder that almost no one else does large-scale, big budget action like James Cameron. It’s cleanly executed, thrilling from moment to moment and brimming with the kind of kinetic spectacle that you’d expect from the man.

And in full honesty, it’s hard to be fully mad at a mega-budget movie that is such an unsubtle diatribe against destructive environmental practices, annoying dudebros who love to play the part of military tough guys and historical atrocities enacted by colonizers. No other director would likely dare to be so brazen in their messaging with so much money at stake. But when central themes are left unexplored and characters remain frustratingly underdeveloped, all the audacity in the world can’t keep your movie from bellyflopping onto the immaculately rendered ocean surface.

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The Fabelmans

Every movie, in one way or another, is a chance to peer inside the mind and soul of its director. Steven Spielberg’s movies have never shied away from this but, for reasons both obvious and not, The Fabelmans is by far his most revelatory. 

The Fabelmans is many things. It’s a (mostly) autobiographical coming of age tale that mirrors his own experiences growing up a Jewish kid in the suburbs. It’s a confessional about his struggle to relate to any family member other than his (would be) concert pianist mother, the only person who encouraged or even understood his artistic inclinations and dreams. But more than anything, The Fabelmans is Spielberg waxing nostalgic about why he loves movies. 

Sammy Fabelman (Gabriel LaBelle) isn’t great at talking to girls. He can’t play sports. He mostly argues with his father and three younger sisters. Not much in life seems to make sense to him, except for movies. And not just watching them, though he is entranced from the moment he first sits in a theater. Sammy becomes obsessed with storyboarding, cinematography, editing. It’s like he’s found a missing piece of himself. He makes movies because it’s all he knows how to do, because it’s all he can do, especially when his life begins slowly spiraling beyond his control. 

Spielberg has long used his movies to communicate his lived experiences. It’s impossible not to read elements of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and even Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade as anything other than metaphors for his own relationship with his father, for instance. He’s talked at length about how E.T. was born from an attempt to write a story about his parents’ divorce. The Fabelmans takes things several steps further (via the help of writer Tony Kushner) and pushes the subtext into text. Granted, not every element is a direct lift from his own life, but the broad strokes are there with his aforementioned mother and a brilliant electrical engineer father who frequently moves his family to new states as he pursues work on the cutting edge of computers. 

The only constant in life for Sammy is movies. The soft flicker of the projector is a comfort. The stories he conjures are the only things he has control over. But more than anything, he slowly comes to understand the power those stories have on the people he shares them with. It takes a fateful encounter with his Uncle Boris (Judd Hirsch) for Sammy to realize that his hobby can be and is something more than just entertainment. But once that epiphany is reached, he knows he’s incapable of doing anything else. 

All of this is intertwined with the rollercoaster of being a child, and often the only Jewish one around (save for his siblings). He’s ruthlessly mocked and even beaten simply because of his family’s faith. And yet it is a movie that helps him rise above it. 

Thankfully, none of this comes across as navel-gazing or self-aggrandizement and is instead a warts-and-all love letter to everything that brought Spielberg to where he is. He isn’t shy about pointing out how aloof Sammy is. For as clearly frustrated as Spielberg was with his father, he still paints Burt (Paul Dano) as a highly affectionate, if awkward, parent who just wants to do right by his family. It may well be my favorite performance Dano’s ever delivered. 

Judd Hirsch gives a bone-shaking performance as Sammy’s bombastic uncle. It’s the kind of work that can only be compared to Alec Baldwin’s similarly brief appearance in Glengarry Glen Ross. You never see him again, but his words reverberate throughout and set the course for everything else to come. Hirsch is tremendous here and were it not for Ke Huy Quan’s incredible work in Everything Everywhere All At Once there’s no one else who I’d want to win Best Supporting Actor at next year’s Oscars ceremony. 

It’s Michelle Williams, though, who delivers the standout performance, finding a perfect balance of joy, elation, love, frailty, sadness and fallibility. It’s a layered, often heart-wrenching display of acting that in some ways is the very soul of Spielberg’s story.  

If there’s a significant flaw within it’s that for a movie titled The Fabelmans, we never get a complete picture of the entire Fabelman family. Sammy’s three sisters are all drastically under-written as characters and we really only get a single major bit of interaction between him and one of them (good though it is). Granted, this is intended to be Sammy’s story and it’s entirely possible this approach was by design and Spielberg’s own relationship with them was just as sparse, but it stands out all the same. 

The Fabelmans is as heartfelt as anything Spielberg has ever made or likely ever will make. It’s a movie that proudly and with great delight and love wears its heart on its sleeve. In a popular culture where biting sarcasm and post-modern deconstruction are frequently favored, it almost feels lightly daring for The Fabelmans to embrace its audience with such blatant affection and sentimentality. Not that I would expect anything less from its director. I’m just glad he’s still doing what clearly means the world to him. 

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The Menu

It’s best to go into The Menu knowing as little about it as possible. As such, if a pitch-black comedic (somewhat macabre) condemnation of foodie culture (from inside the kitchen and out of it) that also serves as a searing indictment of artists who forget why they’re even creating to begin with is your bag, then you’ll probably love The Menu. That’s all you need to know. Come back after.

You’re back? You don’t care about spoilers? Intrigued but too turned off by the darker elements teased? Let’s go.

The easiest way to describe The Menu without getting *too* deep into spoiler-territory is: “What if David Fincher, director of Fight Club and Gone Girl, directed his own version of Ratatouille?” Granted, The Menu is bereft of Ratatouille’s more outrageous elements. For instance, you won’t find an anthropomorphic rat hiding beneath Ralph Feinnes’ chef’s hat controlling his every move (though, frankly, the movie reaches a point eventually where even that wouldn’t have phased me). What the two share, however, is a common spirit expressed in often wildly disparate ways.

If you’re like me, the trailer gave the distinct impression the whole affair eventually devolves into a gastronomic riff on The Most Dangerous Game. Suffice to say it does not. The flavor of The Menu’s is one that slowly unfolds and doesn’t fully reveal the depth of itself until well until you realize things have sailed past the point of no return. Because for as much as The Menu’s marketing wants you to think this is some kind of slow-roasted horror movie, it’s really something closer to a modern day fable with a grounded premise but with sufficient splashes of absurdity to make you question the nature of its depicted reality.

Caught up within this smorgasbord of surreality is Margo (Anya-Taylor Joy). She’s a nonplussed plus-one who finds herself dragged along by her foodie culture-obsessed date, Tyler (Nicholas Hoult), into the pomp and circumstance of an evening at Hawthorne, the isolated, island-bound hyper-exclusive restaurant led by the world-renowned Chef Julian Slowik (Ralph Fiennes). This isn’t the kind of high-level restaurant where you can simply order the world’s most expensive steak to pair with a couple glasses of a 15-year-old cabernet. No, the food at Hawthorne must be An Experience. Forget bread as an appetizer. You’ll stare at the concept of bread on an empty plate right after you’ve eaten a seaweed crisp covered in fake food snow and you’ll be in awe as you do so. That’s the idea, at least. Save for Margo, everyone’s come to Hawthorne in order to flaunt something, be it status, money, idol worship. But as the courses become increasingly unhinged, the clearer it is that Chef Slowik has become tired of chasing Michelin stars and has far darker intentions for his guests.

What unfolds is a story that takes aim at chef and guests alike. At what point does passionate fandom become obsession? At what point do successful creatives who achieve the height of fame and success lose their way? What good is achieving that success if it ultimately comes at the cost of losing sight of the thing that made you happy in the first place? This is where it becomes truly of a piece with Ratatouille: Both films are about remembering what’s important when both creating and consuming art. The Menu just has 100 percent more stabbings.

Director Mark Mylod and writers Seth Reiss and Will Tracy have their knives out for everyone from sycophants to cheaters to smarmy tech bros, too. To say nothing of the utter contempt it has for the way kitchen culture has transformed into a near cult-like formation, both from inside the kitchen and out even as these chefs devolve into something resembling self-parody.

The Menu is largely an indictment of the ways fame and fandom have become something of an ouroboros slowly eating itself alive, but the filmmakers are just as angry at the ways modern society nourishes people who had little beyond their own perception of inherent value. Don’t mistake this for some finger-wagging missive, though. Even in the moments when the subtext becomes text, it’s handled with panache and humor and never feels preachy.

Even ignoring the thematic elements, though, it’s a joy just to watch the truth of this mystery slowly come into full view. It never achieves Agatha Christie levels of intrigue, but it’s a playfully tense affair that is happy to subvert expectations at nearly every turn.

If I have a single complaint, it’s that the script seems to run out of ideas on what to do with at least one or two members of its ensemble, leading to a violent encounter that feels borderline obligatory if only because the writers couldn’t figure out how else to inject some needed tension into a particular sequence.

Otherwise, this was a marvelous surprise that delighted my palette with every bite and I’ll happily take seconds.

Oh and it must be said that The Menu also features what may be the single best-looking double cheeseburger ever seen in a movie.