Monster in the mirror

I blame Trump.
I blame Weinstein.
I blame this nagging cold.
I blame advancing age.

Why the hell have I been so lax about blogging this year? Even this year-end, best-of post, though I'm backdating it to late New Year's Eve, is actually being composed on the first morning of the new year.

But at least it's being composed, which is more than I can say about posts for Darkest Hour, Downsizing, and All the Money in the World, all of which I saw over the holiday break, and about each of which I'll have something to say if you ask me at the Elvis's Birthday party next week. Which is to say I'm not seeing fewer movies, I'm not thinking about them less, I'm not enjoying them any less. It's just to say that the sitting down at the computer part, always something a chore (made more so by my compulsion to link to performers' IMDb pages and to mention all the first-looks at trailers) has this year (well, last year) tilted the sloth scale with guilt-producing frequency.

Not that I have any illusions about letting down a vast "you." This, like everything else in the universe, has always been almost exclusively about me: I see so many films that I completely forget some of them, even down to the essential "Did I like Your Name.? And remind me: why the period in the title?" (Yes, very much; it's complicated.) So I'd like to keep on keeping on, but how to overcome the ennui?

The obvious Jan. 1 response would be a new year's resolution, but somehow forcing myself to do something I find tedious doesn't sound like the way to renew genuine enthusiasm. Limiting links to those that people (i.e., I) might actually find useful: that's a plan, I think. And forgoing the impulse to waste time blurbing the trailer for every new crap film that I'd never intentionally waste time on in any other fashion? Yeah: maybe Trailers becomes Noteworthy Trailers.

No promises; a year from now we may be sitting here in the ruins, the smell of cordite and burned cheese thick in the air. We'll see.

And now on to the reason we're (ahem) up so late on New Year's Eve, to reprise the movies that got my attention in 2017, some of them even enough to make me blog them . . .

• January--As always, catch-up month, with 20th Century Women making a bid for me to rework the 2016 top ten list.
• February--Forushande (The salesman), a searing tale of love, faith, and violation, won the Best Foreign Film Oscar but wasn't released in the U.S. until this year, so I'm claiming it as top 10 eligible; the poetic Paterson, though, is undeniably a 2016 leftover, though a tasty one. Damn, I had forgotten that I Am Not Your Negro, the James Baldwin documentary, was also a December 2016 release, else it would have been on the list without a doubt. Fortunately, another very different stunner about being someone else's Negro came to town right after, and that one will be on the list, near or at the top.
• March--In a bit of a blah month (Personal Shopper disappointed me, e.g.), my favorite film was probably Kedi: cats (including one named Psikopat) in Istanbul.
• April--Frantz, a postwar melodrama, makes us think we know where it's going, then pulls the rug out from under us. Similarly, the anime Kimi no na wa. (Your name.) flirts with every cliché of time travel and soulmates yet delivers something fresh and moving. Then days later, the manifestly goofy--tragically goofy--Colossal works the time-space-big freakin' monsters continuum some more.
• May--Bacalaureat, a Romanian father-daughter story of moral compromise and guilt, painfully complex. Let's make room for one of those liked-it-way-more-than-I-expected-tos: Richard Gere in Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer. Wait, and another: Tracy Letts and Debra Winger in the gratifyingly grown-up The Lovers. And from Israel, a silly comic premise turned profound and beautiful: Laavor et hakir (The wedding plan).
• June--This seems to be when I started getting blog-sloppy. For example I never posted for Wonder Woman, even though it was one of my favorites of the summer, a brilliant treatment (brilliantly and often wordlessly performed by Gal Gadot) of the stranger in a strange land, until the obligatory final act dumb battle to save the world. Fortunately, though, I did post for a film I'd since forgotten just how much I liked: It Comes at Night, not to be confused with It or It Follows (though a triple feature of the 3 could deprive you of sleep for a month and of sex for, like, ever).
• July--The Big Sick is right in my sweet spot: smart (largely autobiographical) writing, makes bigotry as funny as it is dangerous, makes me laugh, makes me cry, has two generations of my favorite actors in Holly Hunter and Zoe Kazan.
• August--A Ghost Story is just that, but unlike any other you've seen. Detroit has gotten a lot of blowback, but it left me nearly paralyzed in my theater seat, and that has to count for something. Brigsby Bear is Dogtooth in English, with a Napoleon Dynamite vibe, only lots better. Ingrid Goes West is unremittingly ugly, and stunning.
• September--Failed to blog it (It), but good golly, I couldn't forget It even if I wanted to, and not just because clowns are creepy, though duh. Followed by another I'm glad I did blog, to remind me how much I liked it, or at least was wowed by: the horror omnibus mother! And then the non-occult horror of meth and Modernism in the Midwest: Columbus.
• October--Visages Villages (Faces places) is a buddy picture like none you've seen, by and with Agnès Varda. Ex Libris, Frederick Wiseman's loving 3½-hour stalk of the New York Public Library is another I didn't blog, but I remember saying, as I left the theater, "Best movie ever." Whoa, really: I also didn't blog (October is clearly when the blog went completely to hell) The Florida Project, so I guess I should point out here that, my daughter's wrongheaded demurral notwithstanding, Brooklynn Prince gives the best juvenile performance in a film since . . . I dunno, Abigail Breslin in Little Miss Sunshine, maybe?
• November--Speaking of remarkable performances by young actors, Millicent Simmonds in Wonderstruck, which is itself mostly wonderful. Lots of people were disappointed by Yorgos Lanthimos's latest weird film, The Killing of a Sacred Deer; not me, but it was a damn tough watch. And then there was Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig's near-perfect directorial debut.
• December--The rare Holocaust film that pokes nerves not already numb from decades of prodding: 1945. And the film that should have waited another week before coming to town so that it could have been my Christmas Day movie: Guillermo del Toro's haunting interspecies romance The Shape of Water.

So I end up with an unusually American list, the foreign films starting the year in the middle of the pack and getting pushed progressively lower: apologies to Visages Villages, to Bacalaureat, and to Frantz, among several others foreign and domestic. It was a very good year, and on my list perhaps even more competition than usual between "best" and "favorite." But here's what the list feels like:

• 10. 1945
• 9. The Big Sick
• 8. Lady Bird
• 7. The Florida Project
• 6. Columbus
• 5. A Ghost Story
• 4. Ex Libris
• 3. Get Out
• 2. The Shape of Water
• 1. It Comes at Night

Some other way to prove

The Shape of Water

Crit

It's official: as I suspected I would, I regret that this didn't come to town a week later so that it could have been my Christmas Day movie, for which it would have been practically perfect. (If you're asking "Why didn't you just wait a week to go?" I wonder how you even happened onto this blog, since you obviously don't know me.)

Anyway, I want to get that "practically perfect" out of the way first, because the issue that irked me is a pretty big deal, but I don't want it to be the thing I leave you with. Zelda (Octavia Spencer) jokes with Elisa (the transcendent Sally Hawkins at her very most transcendent) throughout the film about her shiftless husband, which is a tired trope regardless of race, though not necessarily toxic, given the distancing of a potentially unreliable reporter, but when we finally meet Lou (Deney Forrest), in a brief but critical sequence, he proves to be not only stereotypically shiftless but also cowardly, both physically and morally--about the worst advertisement for African-American masculinity you could make of the only African-American male with more than a single line in the film. And I can't really see why it's necessary.

An ugly scar on the neck of a film that otherwise works on every level: as a retro monster pic, as a Cold War adventure, as a plea (notwithstanding the treatment of Lou) for tolerance and commonality (but with a sly shot at Stuckey's-style commercially manufactured homogeneity), and especially as a romance. Hawkins has a history of playing characters who fall for the wrong man; maybe the problem all along was that she was falling for the wrong species. Loving the blessedly unnamed "amphibian man" from the South American rain forest (Doug Jones, whom Guillermo del Toro has been hiding in prosthetics for his whole career, but who finally gets to dance this time!) brings a joy into her face unlike any I've seen, and it's joy that's a joy to see.

And finally: Richard Jenkins. Do I need to say any more?

Trailers

• The Post--Do you need to ask? Only if you're that guy who wandered into the blog without knowing me.
• A Quiet Place--This, though, looks like a pretty rote horror film, though the cast is great, including Millicent Simmonds, the most wondrous wonder of Wonderstruck.

Porg: the other white meat

Star Wars: The Last Jedi

Crit

Yeah, OK, that was a pretty good Star Wars flick, worth a big chunk out of my day. Key intertwined takeaways are (relax, no spoilers, unless you start overthinking it right now and continue into the theater) the parentage of Rey (Daisy Ridley, still kicking ass but now being studious too) and a revelation (or articulation: I mean, we've always pretty much known this, right?) about the Force.

Trailers

• Ready Player One--Spielberg directed, so it must be smarter than the dystopic video game gimmick seems, right?
• Pacific Rim: Uprising--Let's see, I pretty much hated the first one, even though one of my favorite directors was in charge. I'm'a say probably not.

Do not forsake me

My Friend Dahmer

Crit

This portrait of the cannibalistic serial killer as a young boy is based on the memoir of a high school classmate, but it seems more like a literal-minded guess by an outsider of what must have made Dahmer Dahmer: the worst parents and the worst teachers ever, plus repression of his sexuality, plus a cadre of friends-in-the-sense-that-only-self-involved-adolescents-can-conceive-of-friendship, who, by exploiting the entertainment value of Jeff's inherent weirdness, may or may not have exacerbated it.

Not a bad film, but a surprisingly bland one.

1945

Crit

Small town, wedding day, and angst aroused by the arrival of a train--anybody else put in the mind of High Noon? It doesn't stop there, either, as the townspeople, some morally bankrupt, some just morally weak, try to repel or finesse the potential loss of the source of the town's economic comfort.

I don't want to go into too much detail because this is actually a bit of a mystery, but I will say that it's the first Holocaust (technically post-Holocaust) film I've seen in ages that has discomfited me in a completely new way. This is a film I'll be considering when I assemble my top ten list in 22 days (actually 19 days; this is a postdated post).

Given name

Lady Bird

Crit

Where to begin? Here, I guess: I hope writer-director Greta Gerwig decides that all the kudos she's getting for this means she should quit acting. As for the kudos itself, well, I don't think this will probably be #1 on my top ten list at the end of the year--in other words, pace A. O. Scott, it's not a perfect film; I found that it runs out of gas before the finish line. If it ended with her on the phone with her father, after reading what she has read on crumpled pages from a yellow legal pad--well, that would have been a nearly perfect film. Moreover, what follows could be the beginning of a sequel that everyone who saw this would buy tickets for right now.

But I quibble. It made me laugh, it made me cry. That's all I ask.

Trailers

• Father Figures--Twins (Owen Wilson and Ed Helms; yeah, I know) discover that their father might be Terry Bradshaw, among various other candidates--probably awful, but could be a hoot if not.
• I, Tonya--Yes, Winter Olympics, 1994, that Tonya. Trailer suggests an appealing narrative playfulness but gives little hint to what we really want to know: can Margot Robbie act? 

Major medical

The Killing of a Sacred Deer

Crit

OK, Suburbicon director George Clooney take note: this is how to make a study of people so despicable that to watch them makes us literally queasy. I am a huge admirer of writer-director Yorgos Lanthimos, and I'll go so far as to say I admire this film about banal crime and creepy, supernatural punishment, but I won't go so far as to say I'd ever be tempted to subject myself to it again.

Trailers

• Phantom Thread--Daniel Day-Lewis in what may or may not be his screen farewell, in Paul Thomas Anderson's worst-titled film without a doubt.

Passage to power

LBJ

Crit

What an odd movie. From a production standpoint, it's basically a big Halloween party: lots of people with clothes and makeup and prosthetics and accents trying to impersonate famous politicians and members of their families and circles. Thus it's cheesier than all the cows and ewes in Texas could account for, if Texas went in for sissy shit like cheesemaking.

But if Robert Caro's biography (astonishingly not given even a thank-you in the credits that I noticed) is to be believed, this is historically accurate far beyond the Hollywood biopic standard and could serve as an excellent primer to anyone hoping to understand how a son of the Confederacy could be the best civil-rights president we've had since Lincoln, and how he managed to bend his fellow southerners in the Senate to his will.

It also helps that Woody Harrelson, though the Dumbo ears and all the crap they put on his face make him look ridiculous (and sometimes disconcertingly less like Johnson than like his successor in office), brings his usual level of conviction to the role, and that goes a long way. And Jennifer Jason Leigh, as Lady Bird, is the one element of the film that never seems false in any way.

Trailers

• 12 Strong--Bruckheimer patriotism.
• Just Getting Started--Looks like a waste of Morgan Freeman and Tommy Lee Jones.
• The Leisure Seeker--This, on the other hand, looks as if it could be a good fit for Donald Sutherland and Helen Mirren.

Night at the museum

Wonderstruck

Crit

What a wonderful cinematic era, when one can, as I have, on consecutive postwork Fridays see My Future Wife Julianne Moore fill four roles in two films.

This is much the better film, though Julie has relatively little to do with its excellence. Millicent Simmonds, playing one of two runaway-to-New York deaf children a half-century apart (and deaf herself), owns this wondrous film, her wonder so evident in her eyes that you see familiar sights through her eyes and feel that wonder too.

Mind you, Oakes Fegley is fine as Ben, the 1977 Odysseus, but when the quick cuts between their stories cede the story to the later time, it's a letdown, and only a spectacular and completely illogical climax (but oh, what a thrilling climax, almost enough so to make you ignore its silliness) can level the playing field. We want to see lots more of Simmonds. And we might want to read screenwriter Brain Selznick's YA novel whence the film comes.

Trailers

• Isle of the Dogs--Full disclosure: I impatiently watched the trailer a few weeks ago online. Wes Anderson, animated, yes, please.
• I Can Only Imagine--Personally, I cannot. Imagine, i.e., that this "inspirational" true story can be remotely palatable.

Portrait of the jurist as a young man

Marshall

Crit

For a film about racism and false rape accusation in the tony corner of 1941 Connecticut, this veers awfully close to comedy at times, and it's certainly a buddy picture from the get-go. The buddies are a young NAACP attorney named Thurgood Marshall (Chadwick Boseman, completing a hat trick after previous cinematic portrayals of Jackie Robinson and James Brown) and Sam Friedman (Josh Gad), a Jewish Bridgeport lawyer whose specialty is finding technicalities to absolve insurance companies of their fiduciary responsibilities, who is enlisted to get Marshall, a member of the New York bar, certified to sit at (but not speak from) the defense table. They meet cute, they resist each other, and their mutual surrender is as inevitable as a black man someday sitting on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Not a great film, but both an entertaining and a moving one, which makes it more rewarding than some stodgily great ones.

Trailers

• Wonder Wheel--The latest from Woody.
• Roman J. Israel, Esq.--Denzel as a pain-in-the-ass (uppity, say?) lawyer; if nothing else, a good trailer to precede the feature.

You oughta be in pictures

Visages Villages (Faces places)

Crit

A buddy movie and a road picture, filmmaker Agnès Varda aiding, abetting, and documenting the artist JR's ongoing project of taking photographic portraits, printing them huge, and affixing them to walls. There are subtexts political, architectural, and geographical, and even a sort of cameo by that prick Jean-Luc Godard, but mostly this is about two charming and brilliant people charming us and illuminating the world.

Under the boardwalk

Beach Rats

Crit

Frankie (Harris Dickinson) doesn't "consider [him]self gay," but he surfs a gay Brooklyn chat site looking for men to hook up with, while his beautiful ostensible girlfriend, Simone (Madeline Weinstein), somehow can't inspire much ardor in him. What's wrong with this picture? And how is Frankie's deepening commitment to the oxy prescribed his dying father connected to his sexual self-deception? A sad bastard film about a very confused sad bastard.

Meth and Modernism

Columbus

Crit

My favorite moment: Jin (John Cho, making us think: hey, he's a grown-up [just checked: he's FORTY-FIVE]) finds his dying father's floppy hat in a closet and just holds it, staring at it as if it's Yorick's skull. My favorite repeated visual motif: hallways, alleyways, byways, bridgeways; standing still is going somewhere, but somewhere predetermined and enclosed.

This is everything we used to love about independent film, back when that phrase meant something: quiet, unhurried, painfully human, rewardingly inconclusive. And educational: I won't ask whether you knew Columbus, Indiana, is an architectural mecca; did you even know there is a Columbus, Indiana?

Feature debut by writer/director Kogonada, known (if at all) for his quirky shorts. More, please.

Piece of my heart

mother!

Crit

OK, you start with an open marriage between Rosemary's Baby and Night of the Living Dead, encourage liberal liaisons with The Shining, Alien, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Life of Brian, Saving Private Ryan, Do the Right Thing, Carrie, the Manson murders, and the riots outside the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, filtered through the sensibilities of David Lynch and Alejandro Jodorowsky, and against all odds you end up with something so bizarrely original that it takes my breath, as well as the majority of my cortical function, away. I'm pretty sure I liked it, dead certain that I admire writer/director Darren Aronofsky's chutzpah and Jennifer Lawrence's fearlessness, and pleasantly surprised to discover that I know the musician covering Skeeter Davis's "The End of the World" over the end credits (having, oddly, recently heard the original serving the same function in the JFK-assassination episode of Mad Men).

Trailers

• Downsizing--Woot! Trailers from two of my can't miss directors; first, an absurdist turn on life in the 21st century from Alexander Payne, and then . . .
• The Shape of Water--an apparent E.T. riff starring Sally Hawkins from Guillermo del Toro.

Justice deferred

Crown Heights

Crit

Another angrymaking documentary-ish account of an innocent black man ground up for decades in the wheels of what in often called with a straight face the American justice system. Or, looked at another way, another paean to persistence and enduring friendship and love. But if this is what it takes to elicit those qualities, . . .

Very bad wizard

Patti Cake$

Crit

A narrative trajectory older than rap, older than showbiz, even, older than the original Jersey, say nothing about the New one--as old, in fact, as aspiration--but made irresistible by J, Jheri (Siddharth Dhananjay); B, Basterd (Mamoudou Athie); and especially P, Patti (Danielle Macdonald). And by their beats--before I wrote this, I bought the soundtrack.

Trailer

• Stronger--The second film to come from the Patriots Day bombings stars Tatiana Maslany in what appears to be a single role and Jake Gyllenhaal as her boyfriend, who lost his legs and blames her. Directed by David Gordon Green.

About the rabbits

Good Time

Crit

Wow, twice in one weekend a character so far skewed from reasonable and self-preserving behavior that to watch is to cringe. This one, Connie (Robert Pattinson, leaving vampire romance behind forever), plots the perfect crime, enlisting the assistance of his mentally challenged brother Nick (Benny Safdie, who codirected with brother Josh). What could possibly go wrong? Right: that, and then some. An excellent adventure in Sad Bastard Land.

Trailer

• The Killing of a Sacred Deer--Yorgos Lanthimos, director of the wonderfully weird The Lobster and Dogtooth, is back. Hell yeah.

Lost in La Mancha

The Trip to Spain

Crit

For a third time, we follow Steve Coogan and Rob Bryson on a gustatory Odyssey featuring gorgeous scenery, gorgeous food, and gouging jousts of celebrity impersonation, with just enough real-life-seeming problems to suggest that someone thought, mistakenly, that a semblance of plot was necessary. I'm in for wherever's next--France seems a fair bet.

Single White Album

Ingrid Goes West

Crit

OK, I've seen more disturbing films about genocide, and about war. Famine, yeah. Ecocide, maybe. But you get past the heavy hitters in the woozy-making genre, you get down to one fucked-up person making you cringe, making you desperate to shake some sense into her, making you somehow have sympathy for her no matter how awful she is, and there aren't many to compare. There's Young Adult, which comes to mind in part because neither that film nor this one ever flinches from its misanthropic principles, and I'd call Aubrey Plaza here as courageous as Charlize Theron there except that Plaza has already built a body of unpleasant work, whereas Theron had more to lose.

Still: wow.

Trailers

• Gemini--Crime & mystery. Skeptical.
• Beach Rats--Just released in NYC to strong reviews.
• Last Flag Flying--Steve Carell, Laurence Fishburne, and Bryan Cranston in a buddy road movie. A possibility.

Dope as shit

Brigsby Bear

Crit

Dogtooth meets Napoleon Dynamite, except it's not in Greek, like the former story of overprotective parenting, and while it shares a gangly adolescent sensibility with the latter, that sensibility engaged me a lot more here. Add to that a spot-on depiction of the lovefest that grows up around the making of an independent film, and we have maybe my favorite weird pic of the year, and one of my favorite pix.

Trailers

• Novitiate--Oh, this looks scary good, with Melissa Leo as an anti-Vatican 2 mother superior in 1964.
• Call Me by Your Name--Another homoerotic teacher-student teaser.
• The Florida Project--If it can avoid oversweetness (trailer suggests it can), this might be in Little Miss Sunshine territory.

Ocean's 7-Eleven

Logan Lucky

Crit

Very smart, very Soderbergh. Did I laugh my ass off? Only in one sequence that I'd rather you discovered on your own (and that you might not laugh your ass off at anyway, depending on your specific nerd zones). But did I laugh, and did I appreciate the intricate plot and the intelligence of ostensibly dim country folk--not to mention the neck tattoo in the shape of West Virginia? Yes, I did.

Trailers

• Black Panther--Sadly, this does not look as kickass as the Marvel character (who was, as far as I know, the first mass-marketed black superhero) deserves.

Reservation sniper

Wind River

Crit

Second feature (and first for a while, and first mature one, looks like) as a director for Taylor Sheridan, who wrote the screenplay, as well as those for Hell or High Water and Sicario. This one, as intense as those, is a gripping story of murder on the rez, and the collateral victims thereof. Jeremy Renner, who just seems to get quieter and better with every film, plays another guy good at killing from long range but less good at dealing with rifleless life.

Trailers

• Suburbicon--This looks like a Coen movie, particularly like Fargo, and there's a good reason for that: Ethan and Joel collaborated on the script with director Clooney, and lots of the repertory company is in it, including Matt Damon, Oscar Isaac, and My Future Wife Julianne Moore. In the old days, I'd call this a 5, as in only the worst reviews imaginable could keep me away.
• Polaroid--Another creepy movie for kids that looks like a remake of something that was probably better in Japanese.

Breathe

Sage femme (The midwife)

Crit

Oh! The French title is the idiomatic term for the English rendering. Catherine Frot is wonderful in the title role as a woman dealing with the potential collapse of her career, an unambitious son with a pregnant girlfriend, her late father's self-centered longtime mistress (Catherine Deneuve, as good as she's ever been), and a cultured, sexy truck driver.

Menashe

Crit

You know how I feel about religion in general, and about religion that interferes with love in particular. So Menashe (Menashe Lustig), whose marriage was arranged and loveless, and who would otherwise would be better off widowed, can't keep his son unless he remarries (and even then, apparently his new wife won't be able to touch the first wife's offspring). A fascinating slice of a life I want no part of.

Trailer

• Brad's Status--Mike White wrote it, and directs Ben Stiller; I'm a strong maybe. 

Call me maybe

Landline

Crit

Apart from a great cast--and that's not nothing, as Jenny Slate, Edie Falco, John Turturro, Jay Duplass, and Abby Quinn nearly convince us that we haven't seen the cheating-father-angry-mother-engaged-but-cold-footed-daughter-rebellious-younger-daughter bit a jillion times before--the main selling point here seems to be returning us to those days of yore when we didn't all have phones and computers in our pockets or purses.

Life during warmtime

An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power

Crit

Another fine angrymaking documentary, as former president Al Gore, as I call him, magically rescues the Paris Accord from the recalcitrance of the Indian government, the financial sector, and technocrats, but can he rescue the planet from that guy in the White House now? Stay tuned for An Inconvenient Apocalypse: I Fucking TOLD You, Dammit!

Trailers

• Victoria and Abdul--Wait, hasn't Dame Judi already played Queen Vic?
• Breathe--Wait, isn't this just that Stephen Hawking movie again?
• The Mountain between Us--Good cast, plausibility problem.
• Only the Brave--Ditto.

Battle of Algiers

Detroit

Crit

Yes, I suppose it's possible that someone more Rust Belt and more urban could have tunneled ever more unerringly into the essence of the 1967 uprising and the Algiers Motel killings than did white southerner Kathryn Bigelow, but if that had happened, I'm not sure I'd have been able to lift myself from the theater seat afterward. This is an absolutely brutal gut blow, its picture of race relations and police attitudes depressingly timely a half-century on.

Oh, and John Boyega, whom I should have but didn't call to your attention when I saw Attack the Block? He's going to have lots more than a Star Wars career.

Trailers

• Death Wish--Didn't see it w/ Bronson, and it looks equally despicable w/ Willis.
• Justice League--Best I can say is that I'm a lot more likely to see it than before Wonder Woman.

Good sheet

A Ghost Story

Crit

Truth in packaging: this weird, beautiful, quiet, smart, unique, nonscary-but-nonetheless-creepy film really is the story of a ghost, of the sadness of a ghost, who, as Marley tells Scrooge about some despairing spirits he sees, wishes still to be a force for good on Earth but has lost the power forever. The closest analogue I can think of (and it's really not that close) is Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life, except that this one is a million times less pretentious and more engaging.

Trailer

• Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri--Frances McDormand as foul-mouthed and unpleasant and irresistible as can readily be imagined; I'm in.

Why are you silent?

Lady Macbeth

Crit

The details are sketchy, but Katherine (a steely soft Florence Pugh) has been left no choice but to marry into a family of deplorables. Apart from her husband (Paul Hilton) and father-in-law (Christopher Fairbank) being despicable, even murder-worthy, each on his own merits, the former is either incapable of or uninterested in conjugal relations in the usual sense of the term.

So thank goodness for the servant Sebastian (Cosmo Jarvis), more than willing to supply the want in Catherine's life. And everything is fine until it isn't.

Not a particularly convincing film, but a useful showcase for Jarvis and especially Pugh, whom we will want to see again.

City of Ghosts

Crit

Some of the bravest ever amateur journalists founded Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently in order to publicize the atrocities of Daesh/ISIS, and this is a documentary about their precarious-from-minute-to-minute lives, a story simultaneously inspiring and terrible and depressing.

Once from this island

Dunkirk

Crit

Damn, those Germans really fought dirty. Wow, the Brits were heroic almost to a man. And we have confirmation: sexiest job in a war is fighter pilot.

Counting Their Finest and the upcoming Churchill and Darkest Hour, Dunkirk is getting more attention than at any time since it was happening.

Trailer

• It--Stephen King, scary clowns.

Ice cold war

Atomic Blonde

Crit

Golly, I generally feel like one of those moviegoers who has become desensitized to violence, but this had me cringing and squirming pretty much constantly. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Trailers

• Darkest Hour--Gary Oldman pits his Churchill against Brian Cox's.
• The Snowman--Good cast, creepy psycho movie.

Mistah Kurtz--he ape

The Hero

Crit

Just what an old guy needs: a movie about an old dude (Sam Elliott, older than me, much older! Well, older) confronting death with sex (with a woman less than half his age [Laura Prepon, whom we know as Alex in Orange Is the New Black]), drugs (weed, Molly, shrooms), and rock & roll (and country).

Oh, and meanwhile he's trying to make up for 34 years of neglect of his daughter (Krysten Ritter--oh, right: Jessica Jones!), who, unsurprisingly, isn't in a forgiving mood. Fortunately, I confronted my lousy parenting when I was still relatively young and healthy, and my once-neglected daughter is now my best friend.

Elliott is Elliott, and that's a lot, but that's about it here.

War for the Planet of the Apes

Crit

The tunnel graffiti "Ape-pocalypse now" plagiarizes my post for Kong: Skull Island and can be read as an acknowledgment that Woody Harrelson's character, "the Colonel," and every shaved-head-caressing element of Harrelson's performance, ape Brando's same-rank Kurtz in Francis Ford Coppola's nearly great Vietnam War film.

I dunno, maybe this film is nearly great, too--it certainly looks great and wants to be great--but if so, I was too distracted by the larceny to appreciate it. Oh, and by another bit of much less advisable theft: Steve Zahn's groveling appropriation, as Bad Ape, of Jar Jar Binks. Less offensive was the ripoff--well, let's call this one an hommage--to Deuteronomy, where (spoiler alert!) God tells Moses he may only glimpse the Promised Land, not live to enter it.

This is my front-runner, I think, for most overrated film of the year.

Trailer

Daddy's Home 2--Wait? How'd I miss the first one?

What's my number?

Baby Driver

Crit

Meh. Well reviewed but just gimmicky for me, and none of the humanity that's supposed to make us care struck me as insufficiently human. Good playlist, though: particularly fun not only to hear Jonathan Richman's obscure "Egyptian Reggae" but to have a character title-check it. I spent most of the movie wondering whether we'd finally get to hear the title song over the end credits. Spoiler alert: yes.

Trailers

• Flatliners--Honestly? Can't even remember whether I saw the original, and don't much care about the remake.
• The Dark Tower--Stephen King, of course.

It's the other white meat

Okja

A huge fan of Joon-Ho Bong's Snowpiercer and a reasonably large fan of his Mother and Memories of Murder and The Host, I was really looking forward to this enthusiastically reviewed (Net)flick, especially since the adorable title genetically enhanced piggish animal befriended by a determined young girl seemed to suggest a possible recommendation for the grandchildren.

Well, no, I don't think the grandkids need porcine rape or abattoir nightmares, and one of them is a vegetarian already. But that's a filmmaker's choice, and I respect that. My disappointment has more to do with the stacked moral decks--the villains are too easy, and the legitimate question of how we feed a burgeoning population deserves a more thoughtful answer than "not this way."

We lost 19 of our best men

The Big Sick

Crit

Damn, I do love me a pic that can make me laugh and cry, sometimes simultaneously. And nowadays, I do love a pic that embraces the difference of a foreign culture while making it clear that that culture is a threat only to those in it, and people who get close.

The threat here is posed by Pakistani arranged marriage, and to a lesser extent by Islam as a manifestly apolitical force. Kumail (Kumail Nanjiani) has no interest in either, and wonders why his parents brought him to America if they didn't want him to be an American male. He and Emily (Zoe Kazan)] fall in love without his having resolved this issue (or given her any hint of it), and then things get really weird (see movie title spoiler).

Lots of chances to go clichéd here (and I understand that there have been some complaints that screenwriters Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon [his wife; yes, this is largely autobiographical] fall into that trap in its portrayal of South Asian women, an issue I'll let others who are better attuned hash out), but there was never a time when I didn't find the film unique and human, with all the messiness that entails. Wait, I take that back: there was exactly one moment that came across as a cheap and obvious narrative trick (find it for yourself). So it's not perfect.

This has to be classified as a romantic comedy, I guess, in which case Kazan has now starred in 2 of my favorite wildly unconventional romcoms, the other being the excruciatingly dark Ruby Sparks. 

Trailers

• The Glass Castle--Fathers and daughters and issues, again.
• A Bad Moms Christmas--Um, probably no.
• Home Again--Reese Witherspoon as cougar? Too soon!
• The Only Living Boy in New York--If memory serves, the song titled thus immediately followed "Baby Driver" on Bridge over Troubled Water, and now the movie will follow that one into the theaters.

Beyond good and evil

The Exception

Crit

So, did you know Kaiser Wilhelm II was still alive in 1940? I didn't, and neither did the titular exception to Nazi nastiness, SS Capt. Stefan Brandt (Jai Courtney), until being assigned to guard the exiled king against a British agent said to be in Holland, presumably to assassinate him. The identity of the agent is clear to the audience in about 3 seconds: it's the beautiful servant Mieke (Lily James). To be fair, it takes a while longer to establish that the SS officer and the (Jewish, as it turns out--when she tells him) Allied spy have fallen in love, truly and deeply.

I suppose someone whose favorite film is Casablanca has no business complaining about a World War II soap opera, but this one is so soapy--it employs just about every cliché of the genre except amnesia and the evil twin. What saves it--barely--from being simply risible is that the aforementioned kaiser is played by Christopher Plummer, his nervously meddling royal consort by Janet McTeer, and--in what must have been fever-dream casting--a Hall of Fame Evil Nazi by the quintessentially nice-guy English schlemiel player Eddie Marsan, absurdly (and accurately) coiffed and absurdly perfect.

The role is that of Heinrich Himmler, who is--as we are explicitly told, twice--the head of the SS. I was inclined to feel insulted until I realized that my ignorance had already been established vis-à-vis the kaiser's still being around.

It's not a party until . . .

Beatriz at Dinner

Crit

Gee whiz, rich white people suck. That fish is securely in the barrel and shot repeatedly and multiply fatally. Personally, I'd have gotten that from their inability to get the name of their new-agey holistic health guru (Salma Hayek) right.

As a fan of screenwriter Mike White, director Miguel Arteta, and just about every actor in the cast (with particular delight in seeing the selfish Pfefferman siblings Amy Landecker and Jay Duplass together between seasons of Transparent), I wanted to love this, but I'm afraid it falls into the category of more-theoretically-interesting-than-good.

And I don't think I was prejudiced because the snooty majordomo Evan (John Early) boasts one moment of having both Grey Goose and Stolichnaya (and are those really vodkas that rich people would boast about?), then moments later asks a guest who requests wine whether she wants red or white. OK, the wine requester is the outsider, so maybe that's the source of the different level of proffered choice, but that's more of a reach than either of the possible outcomes of the story.

Fatale

My Cousin Rachel

Crit

For a Hitchcock wannabe, a good place to turn for source material is the fiction of Daphne du Maurier, who provided the sources of Rebecca and The Birds (and yeah, OK, also Jamaica Inn). And it's fair to say that Hitch made a lot of films worse than this one (cf. 3rd du Maurier title above), adapted and directed by Roger Michell, and it's also accurate to observe that Rachel Weisz has everything it takes to be a mysterious Hitchcockian maybe-heroine-maybe-villain.

And yet . . . kinda meh.

Trailers

• Battle of the Sexes--Emma Stone as Billie Jean King, Steve Carell as Bobby Riggs? Oh, hell yeah.
• Patti Cake$--Big white girl raps.
• Rough Night--Yeah, we get it: women can behave as badly as men.

Thicker

It Comes at Night

Crit

And the golden age of horror films continues--in fact, this may be the most golden yet. Mining the tropes of out-of-control virus (thus, by extension, AIDS), isolation, race, lost trust, sexual tension, and lawlessness in defense of family, and setting his story in dark, scary woods in which Nathaniel Hawthorne would have felt shiveringly at home, Trey Edward Shults, whose Krisha was on lots of top ten lists last year, though not mine, perhaps only because I haven't seen it, has unsettled me in a thoroughly original yet eerily familiar way.

The infallible Joel Edgerton fronts a tiny, perfect cast, and Brian McOmber gives us a score that perhaps demands a bit too much attention early but then settles into the job of keeping you primed to have the bejeebers scared out of you. One of the best horror films I've ever seen, and one of the best films, with no other adjectives, of the year to date. 

Trailers

• Good Time--Mistakes were made, and now the clock is running.
• Annabelle: The Creation--OK, I'm not saying every horror film being made these days is great.

Tweed pressed, best vest

Laavor et hakir (The wedding plan)

Crit

What a silly, lazy-Hollywood-flick premise this is: her engagement ends, but she goes ahead making plans for the wedding, needing only to snag a groom by Hanukkah. In fact, there will doubtless be a lazy Hollywood remake of this, but accept no substitutes: this is a moving film about faith, doubt, and desperation. Any film that can make me feel the tug of religious orthodoxy, even Orthodoxy, is doing something special. A gem.

Cross purposes

Alien: Covenant

Crit

I'm sorry, I can't remember anything that happened in space, because I was so distracted by the prologue, wherein a scientist/industrialist so brilliant and wealthy and powerful that he has acquired some of the great artworks of the Western world, and a home that fairly reeks with 22nd-century style and class, displays Michelangelo's monumental David in a room with such a low ceiling that he has to put holes in both ceiling and floor to accommodate the height of the sculpture, which thus can't be viewed properly from anywhere and presumably can be viewed completely only by standing near its silo and craning your neck up and down. Wtff?

OK, I lied: I do remember one thing that happens in space, or rather on the mysterious planet on which the Covenant ill-advisedly lands: someone quotes a famous poem and attributes it to the wrong Romantic poet.

Clearly, we need to do everything we can to keep the NEA and the NEH alive.

The Lovers

Crit

Well, yes, that really is one of the most misleading trailers ever. I saw it roughly a hundred times, over what seems like a year, and it promised a wacky, slapstick bedroom farce. Despite a cast of people I love or at least like a lot--Debra Winger, Tracy Letts, Aidan Gillen, and Melora Walters--it looked pretty dismal.

But no. A bit of bedroom farce, yes, but there's nothing wrong with that, and one bit of slapstick that's funny even after a hundred viewings of the trailer. But also: weight. Weight unimaginable from the trainer. This is a serious (and seriously funny, make no mistake) plumbing of the reasons people come together and why they sometimes stick beyond the point either one much wants to.

One of the best films I'll see against my will this year.

Trailers

• Kingsman: The Golden Circle--I guess I really need to have a look at the first one.
• War for the Planet of the Apes--I'd forgotten that even really smart apes fall prey to cliché.
• Dunkirk--Christopher Nolan gets his Spielberg on.
• Menashe--Another movie about idiotic religious regulations. 
• A Ghost Story--An unusually weird one, and from what I've heard, an exceptionally good one. 
• The Big Sick--Another one for which I have high expectations.

No rematch

Chuck

Crit

Liev Schreiber portrays the Jersey palooka (hated nickname: The Bayonne Bleeder) who went 15 rounds (minus about 80 seconds) with Muhammad Ali and inspired another palooka from across the Hudson River to make a movie about a palooka with heart who gets an improbable title shot against a brash, mouthy, poet of a fighter and wins moviegoers' hearts while losing the fight.

This one is nonfiction and thus a lot less appealing, but Schreiber and director Philippe Falardeau make it one memorable sad bastard movie.

In his shoes

Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer

Crit

A surprisingly gentle and moving portrait of a guy who initially seems to be angling for the next big score but turns out only to want to be in the game. Be careful what you wish for . . .

Richard Gere has never been one of my favorites (in fact, he wouldn't rank any higher than fifth in this great cast, behind Steve Buscemi, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Michael Sheen, and Hank Azaria), but this is an engaging performance, and ultimately a heartbreaking one.

Trailers

• Maudie--Sally Hawkins as an untutored artist
• Paris Can Wait--Wow: I immediately recognized Diane Lane (attired unprovocatively) from almost directly behind. The film looks dumb, though travelogue pretty.
• The Wedding Plan--Goofy-premised but apparently very good Israeli film.

I never read a blog--I never streamed AP--

A Quiet Passion

Crit

So languorous. So languorous. In none of Emily Dickinson's tens of thousands of impatient lines of tetrameter and trimeter is there a moment of languor, so I find director Terence Davies’s pacing an odd choice.

Equally strange is the expansion of an obscure friend of Dickinson's sister Vinnie, one Vryling Buffum (Catherine Bailey) into the poet's bosom friend and a full-fledged Oscar Wilde character.

That said, never for a moment did I disbelieve that Cynthia Nixon was Emily Dickinson, and if the core of the film is believable (as well as the nearest satellite to the core, if you'll pardon the mix, the eternally welcome Jennifer Ehle as Vinnie), I'll put up with elements that seem ill-considered.

Credit Davies, too, for smart use of the poetry--never obvious, save for a forgivable triplet of greatest hits near the end. And the one diegetic poem creates by far the sweetest moment of the film, maybe the only sweet moment, which only the crankiest tenure-denied associate professor could begrudge.

Extra credit

Bacalaureat (Graduation)

Crit

Oh, you know I'm a sucker for a good daddy-daughter story. The daddy (Romeo, Adrian Titieni) and daughter (Eliza, Maria-Victoria Dragus, putting me in mind of a young Lauren Ambrose) in question live in Cluj, Romania, which, strictly from the evidence of this film, is where you'd start if were gonna give Europe a colonoscopy. So you can understand what it means to Romeo and Magda (Lia Bugnar) that their daughter is on the cusp of a scholarship to Cambridge.

But she is assaulted a few days before the first part of a clinching examination, and though she escapes being raped, she takes the test with the sprained wrist of her writing hand in a cast and with her mind understandably unfocused. So Romeo, a doctor at the local hospital, calls in some favors in order to tilt her final score toward what it would have been without the disruption.

A couple of problems with this plan: first, Romeo is circumstantially complicit in the assault, because instead of delivering her to the door of her school that day, he accepted her offer to hop out a short walk through a construction site away--accepted her offer because it was more convenient for his next stop, at his mistress's flat. So onto his ambition for her is ladled guilt.

But the second problem is bigger, because in a culture of corruption, Romeo and Magda have raised Eliza to recognize the right thing, and to do it. And since the plan requires her to make recognizable marks on her test paper, the plan can't be executed without her knowing the moral compromises at hand.

Another story I'm a sucker for: good people drawn into badness by a randomly hateful universe. Another such I liked was 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days, which shared with this one a writer and director: Cristian Mungiu.

Fetch another round

Guardians of the Galaxy, vol. 2

Crit

Was the first one as grotesquely uneven as this one? I know it had scenes as hilarious as the hilarious scenes here, but did it have long, draggy, aimless sequences too, like this one? And it may have had some soppy sentimentality, but I'm pretty sure it didn't sop as soppily as this one does. One thing's certain: while that one violated the First Cheeseblab Commandment--Thou shalt not let your comedy run past 2 hours--its violation was a venial one minute, while this one mortally sins by 17 minutes, which (duh, why the commandment exists in the first place) seems much, much, much, much longer.

On the upside: best Stan Lee cameo ever.

Trailers

• Thor: Ragnarok--I'm sorry, but with Noah Syndergaard on the disabled list I can't even think about this.
• Star Wars: The Last Jedi--Yeah, right, "last."

Technically, the procedure is brain damage

Battle of Memories

Crit

Huh! You take Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and adapt it into a tortuous Hitchcockian mystery plot made with Chinese actors in Thailand--that might just work.

There'll always be an England

Their Finest

Crit

One might think that a film whose cast includes Gemma Arterton and Bill Nighy had enough charm to be forgiven the most obvious romantic twist in cinema history, and truth to tell, I think it would have, but the filmmakers apparently feared otherwise, else why toss in a random tragedy? Yes, yes, I know: people died randomly and tragically in London during the Blitz, not to mention all over Europe and the Pacific. But rarely have I felt randomness more cynically calculated.

Trailers

• My Cousin Rachel--Based on a Daphne du Maurier novel, stars Rachel Weisz. Not to be confused with My Cousin Vinny.
• An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power--Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the earth's atmosphere.

Amazon.qualm

The Lost City of Z

Crit

Monomaniacal explorer neglects loving family but finds what he's looking for in the end. Wanted to love this, but could barely stay awake. I've been told the final shot is brilliant, but I barely remember it.

Trailers

• Megan Leavy--A marine and her dog.
• The Wall--No, not that wall. The one between the U.S. soldier and the Iraqi sniper.
• The Beguiled--Looks potentially creepy, but great cast directed by . . . [wait for it] . . . Sophia Coppola.
• Baby Driver--Young, preternaturally slick getaway driver falls in love. What could go wrong?

Seoulmates

Colossal

Crit

What a wildly weird mashup of juvenile sci-fi tear-in-the-space-time-continuum nonsense with thoroughly adult themes of manipulation, obsession, and substance abuse. And I mean that as a compliment. Here there be monsters.

Trailers

• Ingrid Goes West--I have no idea what this is about or why the trailer was a red band (adult audiences only).
• The Book of Henry--Yet another in the endless stream of films about a genius kid persuading his mother to murder the neighbor who's sexually abusing his stepdaughter.

Attack of the zombie cars

The Fate of the Furious

Crit

Hey, wait, this isn't about primeval golf, before Americans or even the English got excited by it. That film was promised but not delivered, but I was at the theater, and I was up for a holiday movie, and it was already paid for (via MoviePass), so I talked myself into the wisdom of having some dumb.

Well, I don't know about the wisdom, but I came to the right place for the dumb, and much of it (like virtually every moment with Dwayne Johnson, and the Manhattan zombie cars chase) was fun. I knew going in that there was one Oscar winner in the cast; the second, uncredited and Cockney-accented, was a pleasant surprise, as was the presence of two favorite supporting actors from Game of Thrones.

But dumb tends to be less fun in, say, the fourth half-hour than in the first three. Suffice it to say I won't be spending the rest of the long weekend bingewatching the first 7 films in the franchise.

Trailers

• The Mummy--Talk about your femmes fatales.
• Atomic Blonde--Ditto, as Fate's Ms. Theron keeps playing the action number on the wheel.

I feel you

Kimi no na wa. (Your name.)

Crit

So many clichés lurk, so many traps loom when your themes include:

1. soulmates
2. soul sharing
3. déjà vu
4. time shifting, especially
5. time shifting to undo a past disaster

Yet this animated adaptation of a novel by the director, Makoto Shinkai, skates around all the potholes to be one of the smartest, most original, most moving, and most visually beautiful films to employ those well-worn tropes. A meteoric, yet quiet, stunner.

Trailers

• Leap!--Kids with dreams, animated.
• Spark--Monkey with dreams, animated.
• Everything, Every Thing--I think the second iteration is supposed to be meaningfully split into 2 words, though the online sources don't support my perception. Anyway, another teen with a medical problem that keeps her in a parent-bubble until the arrival of a liberator of the opposite sex (and here, different race). I shouldn't be so cynical--I've loved 1 or 2 of those pics--but this looks unlikely to rise above the goo.

The first casualty

Cézanne et moi

Crit

A meditation on the incompatibility of art and friendship, as the moi of the title, Émile Zola (Guillaume Canet) and the Cézanne of the title (Guillaume Gallienne) spend their adult lives dueling with the respective phallic implements of their respective vocations.

Of particular note, and doubtless where virtually the entire clearance budget went, is an end titles sequence morphing through version after version of Cézanne views of Mont Sainte-Victoire. Spectacular.

Frantz

Crit

Though a fan of François Ozon (Under the Sand, Swimming Pool, Ricky), I was ready to express disappointment with the predictable turn this film, about the visit of a young Frenchman to the family (prewidowed fiancée included) of a German killed in the Great War, takes in the third act--until I realized that there was a whole nother act left, with nothing remotely predictable about it. I've never seen Lubitsch's 1932 Broken Lullaby, on which this is based, but if it was as subtly and delicately poised between expectation and revelation as this one is, well, credit Ozon for excellent thievery at worst.

#chooselife

T2 Trainspotting

Crit

Gee, last time we saw the boys, their futures all seemed so bright. What could have gone wrong? Turns out it wasn't the heroin that was a problem so much as the existential Glaswegian despair. Who knew?

Against all odds, director Danny Boyle has wrestled the original cast back into harness and made a solid sequel to a film that had no business ever having a sequel made. No, the energy's not as high as in the original, but everyone's had 20 years of hard living; is your energy as high?

Trailers

• The Lost City of Z--Pronounced "zed," as the searchers are British. 

Ink and brush

Umi yori mo mada fukaku (After the storm)

Crit

Yes, there's a storm--typhoon number 24 for the year, to be specific--but Hirokazu Koreeda's film is mostly irenic. Cloudy, to be sure--as Ryōta (Hiroshi Abe), a long-ago-award-winning novelist who now would be making enough as a slightly crooked private eye if only he didn't gamble so much of it away, sees his ex-wife and son being wooed by a conventionally better man--but quiet and satisfying, not tempestuous.

Sometimes I admire what a hypocrite I am

Song to Song

Crit

OK, I think maybe I've had enough of Terrence Malick. Were I an admirer of this film, I'd tell you it's about love, compulsion, betrayal, power, guilt, and regret. As it is, though, I'm telling you that it's 129 minutes (seems like 300) of banality encased in a Lucite globe of pretentiousness.

One class of exemptions from this verdict: a handful of scenes brought to life by rock artists--Iggy Pop, John Lydon, and especially Patti Smith, who gets more screentime than I expected, though not nearly enough to save the film. You should hold out for the Rock Stars Cut.

It's fun until somebody loses 40 months to hard time

Wilson

Crit

Yeah, I guess I get why the critical response has been lukewarm, or maybe a little cooler than that. But you know I'm a sucker for a redemption-ish story about a misanthrope with a heart of . . . well, not shit, anyway, initial appearances notwithstanding. And Woody Harrelson is the guy to play the protagonist of a Daniel Clowes graphic novel about a screwed-up ex-couple (Laura Dern plays Wilson's behaviorally challenged former wife, Pippi) stalking the teen daughter (Isabella Amara, nailing surly-needy) Wilson just discovered wasn't aborted when they broke up.

Then add 10 points for Judy Greer as a warm-hearted dog sitter. Always add 10 points for Judy Greer.

Trailer

• Baywatch--Even a foundation of Dwayne Johnson seems unlikely to hold this up. [Congratulate me: unlike the trailer, I didn't make a cheap boob joke.]

Media

Personal Shopper

Crit

Really expected to like this more. Really expected Kristen Stewart to sell the implausible ghost story about Maureen, a twin waiting for her brother to give her a sign from the beyond (he died of a congenital heart ailment that she shares--get it? Their hearts are fragile, prone to break! Literally!). Really expected to find it less goofy. Really expected to care more about the weird and annoying and ultimate fatal shit going on around her. Really expected the mysterious string of texts on her phone to be more mysterious. Didn't know there was going to a murder, but once there was a murder, would have expected the perpetrator to be less obvious and the potential legal and metaphysical consequences for Maureen to be more credible.

Expected it, I guess, to a little less ectoplasmic.

Fake news

Beauty and the Beast

Crit

I never recognized this before, and in fact I didn't get it until well into the film, but this is the story of an egotistical blowhard who is harmless enough until he takes up demagoguery and stirs up the people to rise up against people who are different, whom they don't understand and thus fear.

There's also a subplot, with songs I found universally blah and special effects I found mostly meh. But it became magical for me at about the same time it did for Belle (Emma Watson): you can see her feel an unaccustomed moistness at her first glimpse of the Beast's enormous . . . library. When their love begins to develop as the marriage of true minds, I confess I got a little soppy myself.

Trailers

• Coco--Guitars and generations, appropriate in the wake of the Chuck Berry obit.

A name that they never get right

The Sense of an Ending

Crit

A clockwork memory/mystery/sort-of-ghost story elevated by (wait for it!) great English actors. I mean, come on: Jim Broadbent, Charlotte Rampling, and Emily Mortimer could have sold The Shack.

Trailers

• (Dean)--Writer and debutant director Demitri Martin is precisely as old as my first marriage would be if it still existed, but he looks about 60% of that.
• Tommy's Honour--I'm always wondering why there are so few biopics about nineteenth-century Scottish golfers.