There will be blood

EMMA.

Crit

Title typography [sic]; see, it's a period film . . . OK, forgive them; the picture itself is much cleverer.

Anya Taylor-Joy is a perfect Austen heroine, and her Emma is perfectly dreadful, throughout the first several reels but especially at one dreadfullest moment; don't worry: you'll know it when you see it. Everyone does, even the dreadful one herself.

Brave of screenwriter Eleanor Catton and director Autumn de Wilde (and of Taylor-Joy herself) to turn moral ugliness to 11, but of course they still can't hide the inevitability of Emma + Knightly (Johnny Flynn). Oops, spoiler. But then you've read the book.

• Holy crap! In the Heights! Yes, please.

Now you don't

The Invisible Man

Crit

Gee, whilikers, what a well-made scary! What has this Leigh Whannell done before? Uh, a buttload of Saw flicks and nothing I'd seen. Nonetheless, a masterpiece of tease and terror, shot with an eye both atmospheric and narrative, a score that underpins the belly swoops, and a star, Elisabeth Moss, we've seen terrorized before, but not this way. And no, I'm not gonna say a word about the plot. Just see it. Get it? SEE it?

• Only notable trailer is notable only because the film is cowritten by Jordan Peele: Candyman.

The same old story

Premature

Crit

Nothing in this story of young love that we haven't seen before, nothing very dramatic except to the extent that young love is the quintessence of drama, but it all feels fresh, and yes, that's partly because the film is set on and around 145th Street and populated not by the pretty white people we're accustomed to seeing young and in love the screen but by pretty brown people who stake a hungry claim to that screen. Quotidian colorblind heartbreak, cowritten and directed by Rashaad Ernesto Green.

Ordinary Love

Crit

Likewise, nothing here we haven't seen before: cancer as it affects not just one body but the body that is couplehood. And the sharp writing (by Owen McCafferty) is  sometimes too sharp to be contextually believable. But Lesley Manville and Liam Neeson sell it, and raise it. But what kept distracting me was: where in Northern Ireland is this set?

• Trailer for Military Wives: Kristin Scott Thomas and Sharon Horgan, but it looks like a clichéfest.

Should never have taken the very best

Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band

Crit

Get this straight: nothing was Robbie's fault. It was all those secondary guys in the (The) band (Band), especially crazy paranoid junkie Levon.

I have no idea what the truth is. This is a truth, certainly; certainly there are others. But this truth is emphatically Robbie Robertson's, with the other talking heads confirming it or providing easily dismissed (or ignored) countertestimony. Which, OK, fine: it pretends to nothing else, and for someone who has enjoyed the music without getting much into the mythology, it's a chance to hear some of the former and get a one-facet primer on the latter. Fair enough. But don't try to tell that to my Levon-loving friends.

Enter the dragon

Latter-day M4

So called because while I did only 3 movies, the final M is for Mormon, as in Book of, which was just as much fun as I'd long anticipated (it celebrates its ninth anniversary next month!), but we don't do live here.

Dolor y gloria (Pain and glory)

VE

The scattered past as heroin dreams in Pedro Almodóvar's largely autobiographical and literally titled film. Always been a big Pedro fan, always struggled to say why. Let's just say this: humanity in extremis. Banderas the best I've ever seen him, Cruz plays frustration perfectly, and the kid cast as young Salvador, Asier Flores, gives one of those kid performances so good it seems like it's not acting.

This came to the hard-to-get-to theater on the edge of town and left before I knew it was there, so while I wouldn't ordinarily have included it in a Manhattan trip, it was a must today.

Portrait de la jeune fille en feu (Portrait of a lady on fire)

VE

This, in contrast, probably will come to my downtown theater [update: yup], but because it was so convenient and I didn't have a crowded itinerary of musts, I treated myself to a screening on Village East's big screen.

A film about gaze, female in this case, and perhaps more sympathetic and less unwelcome for that, but still complicated, especially as the gazed-at turns gazer, both at the gazer and at herself through an imagined perspective of the gazer's eyes. As I said, complicated.

Also a thrilling festival of sisterhood, with men onscreen for maybe 5 minutes, and pretty much just in the way for that. No surprise that we're so disposable.

Buffaloed

Quad

Not remotely a great film, but it manages one great feat: makes us sympathize with and root for a character whose behavior and moral standards are despicable. Credit Zoey Deutsch for making debt collection seem like something a human being might do.

• A wealth of trailers, most notably for the documentaries Ella Fitzgerald: Just One of Those Things and The Booksellers, the extra-odd Extra Ordinary, and the wtf? Run This Town.

#TheBusinessWe'veChosen

The Assistant

Crit

Jane wants to be a film producer, so she doesn't mind the Uber commute from an Astoria that seems to be somewhere east of the Hamptons, and she doesn't mind the 15-hour days of work that includes making the coffee and doing the lunch runs and cleaning the boss's sofa (don't ask) and other tasks they apparently teach at Northwestern; she doesn't even mind (much) her hierarchical debasement before two colleagues who aren't much more experienced and are substantially less professional but who have been blessed with penises. She is going to make it in this biz, and she knows there are exorbitant dues to be paid.

But Jane has a problem. No, don't be silly: her problem isn't her Harvey Weinsteinish boss, a bullying sexual predator. She's lucky, you see, as an unsympathetic HR drone tells her: she's "not his type."

The problem, Jane's potentially professionally fatal flaw, is a conscience. Which might explain her not-his-typeness: Jane wears that disfiguring flaw on her face from the start of her commute to the donut she tries to choke down for dinner. This is a spare film, soft-spoken and elliptical, and it's that face--of Julia Garner--that does most of the heavy lifting. Garner (who is about the 15th-best reason to binge The Americans if you somehow missed it--and there are so many reasons to watch the series that 15th-best is still a very good reason), like the film, doesn't do flash, but few actors her age can do stoic defeat as well. Contemplating the career the actor should have ahead of her is some consolation for having to contemplate the career probably awaiting the character.

• Holy crap, new Wes Anderson movie coming, with all my favorite actors! The French Dispatch. And the few favorite actors who aren't in that are in Sally Potter's upcoming The Roads Not Taken.

Soft focus

The Photograph

Crit

Woo, boy, is this ever a Valentine's Day date movie! Is this ever not an old unattached bull elephant's weekday popcorn lunch movie.

That said, if you're in the market for an intergenerational pair of love stories, and if you're not bothered by the fact that the feminism/independence/career subtext is decidedly sub- and the takeaway from it is that that triad is just a palatable consolation prize, then you could do lots worse than spending 100 minutes in love with these 4 beautiful and engaging people. And if you've never heard Al Green sing a Kris Kristofferson song, here's your chance. Plus I think there's a Yale University Press book behind Lil Rel Howery in the safe-from-the-hurricane scene, but you'll have to confirm that yourself.

• Two first-view trailers for me: F9: The Fast Saga (probably not) and The Secret: Dare to Dream (oh, good god, no).

Slice of life

Pizza, a Love Story

Crit

Spoiler alert! The most surprising thing--of many surprising things--I learned from this documentary of heart, head, and belly: The Spot is the original location from which Frank Pepe began (in the 1920s) selling pizza (and bread). Only after he sold enough pies to establish the business as a going concern did he buy the building where he and Filomela rented an upstairs apartment, as well as the building next door, and converted the downstairs to the world's biggest pizza restaurant. 

Those of you who know me as an Illinois boy by birth won't be surprised that I love Chicago-style pizza, though to any of my Wooster Square neighbors I will claim that this paragraph is the work of a hacker who reinstates it as fast as I can delete it. But there's no more point comparing brick-oven pie with Chicago-style than there is in asking the Sistine Chapel ceiling to slug it out with the Córdoba Mezquita. If what the Dominican Sisters taught me about God's omnipresence is even metaphorically accurate, it applies to all forms of genius, from the flat and oven-charred to the thick and chewy. But let's face it: in the years that remain to me I'll be eating a lot more pies from Pepe's than from Papa Del's, so I know which side my crust is oiled on.

All you really need to know is: if you love pizza, or if you love New Haven history, or if you love love, see this film, and maybe see it this week, because that may be the extent of its run, though the crowd that packed in to the screening I saw suggests that a 10-week run would remain profitable.

One last thing: either on the way in or the way out during my Illinois visit this July, I gotta check out this place, even though it's way off the path I beat in Chicago. It is apparently the most successful of a couple of dozen of New Haven-style apizza joints across the country.

Boundary lines

Oscar-nominated live-action shorts

Crit

Nothing terrible, and one verging on brilliant.

• Une soeur--Dim-witted probable rapist and certain kidnapper, opportunistic victim, and eventually perceptive emergency dispatcher.
• Brotherhood--The eldest son of an unforgiving Tunisian goatherder returns from jihad in Syria with a young, pregnant wife.
• The Neighbors' Window--Porno voyeurism in Dumbo with an ironic and ostensibly poignant but in fact just cheap ironic twist.
• Saría--A narrative of sisterhood and the need to breathe freedom, based on the true story of an Guatemalan orphanage and its abusive staff.
• Nefta Football Club--The old story--this time set on the Tunisian-Algerian border--of accidentally discovered and purloined criminal property, with a particularly clever final twist.

Harmony

Oscar-nominated animated shorts

Crit

Is it just codgery old me, or did this category used to be a lot better and a lot smarter? And a lot more challenging? Yeah, it's probably just me.

• Hairlove--Dad to the rescue as young African-American girl cannot get her hair to behave properly. Tragic transition near the end.
• Daughter--More tragedy in what I read to be a treatise on the importance of empathy, and of recognizing love when it's there.
• Sister--Wow. This is about abortion as tragedy for all the would-be big brothers who never got to have little sisters.
• Mémorable--Poignant exploration of a painter's age-related dementia; maybe the most visually arresting nominee.
• Kit Bull--Achingly cute treatment of interspecies harmony.

That's all the nominees, but as usual, the program is padded out with a few also-rans:

• Henrietta Bulkowski--Interspecies harmony within a single handicapped/gifted body.
• The Bird and the Whale--Interspecies harmony both literal and metaphoric.
• Hors Piste--Brutally wacky rescue comedy.
• Maestro--Multispecies harmony.

The fear is in our bodies

Oscar-nominated documentary shorts

Crit

The review in the Times warned all the O-nom'd shorts programs were even more downers than usual, and since the docs are traditionally the most unremittingly depressing, I took the precaution of leaving all razor blades and barbiturates home. But with expectations in the abyss, I left the theater feeling relatively chipper.

• Life Overtakes Me--Though the program starts as dark as the grimmest Grimm tale: refugee children who become so traumatized that they retreat into a comatose condition called resignation syndrome--a situation bizarrely epidemic in Sweden.
• Learning to Skateboard in a Warzone (if You're a Girl)--This one, whose title is not a metaphor, manages to be simultaneously depressing and exhilarating: Kabul women teaching girls reading, math, and yes, skateboarding--all skills, of course, that have no use for them outside their academic cloister.
• In the Absence--Even more angrymaking than depressing, this film narrates a 2014 ferry disaster that killed more than 300 people, most of them schoolchildren, and the astonishingly inept and blasé response to the crisis by South Korean authorities from the coast guard to the president, who eventually lost her job partly as a result.
• Walk Run Cha-Cha--This story of immigrants from Vietnam is the most upbeat but also the least coherent of the program. Their youthful whirlwind romance was interrupted by Paul's escape with his parents but resumed 6 years later when Millie finally followed. Now they dance competitively.
• St. Louis Superman--Bruce Franks was politically roused by the Michael Brown shooting, and as a state representative he worked for 3 years to pass a bill declaring youth violence an epidemic, and also commemorating his brother, murdered on the street at age 9.
  

Of our own device

Clemency

Crit

Huh! Had no idea that this is a film about retirement. Not quite my situation, though: I didn't leave work every day feeling as if my soul had received a lethal injection. That's pretty much the situation for Warden Bernadine Williams (Alfre Woodard), and her husband, Jonathan (Wendell Pierce), is another victim, and the one who suggests that maybe it's time to move on.

But no, the point is not boo-hoo, how sad for those nice people who have to put criminals to death. Anthony Woods (Aldis Hodge) has maybe fifty words of dialogue in nearly as many minutes onscreen and commands our sympathy, respect, and yes, as the prison chaplain assures him, love.

So the point is more subversive: does anyone get any good out of this? Even the victim's kin? The answer is unsurprising but not ineffective.

On the row

Just Mercy

Crit

The insistent early appearance of Basil Exposition is the first clue that this is going to be narrative challenged, and indeed, we have unambiguous heroes and easy villains and a plot that goes exactly where it needs to for maximum effect (and affect). But then, maybe the story of Equal Justice Initiative founder and sustainer Bryan Stevenson (Michael B. Jordan) and his railroaded client Walter "Johnnie D" McMillan (Jamie Foxx) has fewer gray areas than most.

In any case, this is an actors' movie--not just the above-the-title ones like Jordan and Foxx and Brie Larson but also Johnnie's death row mates, played by O'Shea Jackson Jr. and Rob Morgan. Morgan, in fact, as Herbert Richardson, who set off a bomb under a house after returning from Vietnam with PTSD, steals the role as emotional center of the film from some pretty potent candidates.

Not a great film, but one whose heart is so firmly in the right place that its flaws are forgivable.

• New trailers: The Lovebirds, which looks like a mashup of Queen & Slim and Stuber (I'll leave it to you whether that's a good idea); and Tenet, which looks like a Christopher Nolan film, and is.

The meaning of life, part III: Fighting each other

1917

Crit

Not sure I align with my Famous Movie Critic Friend Whose Opinion I Trust More Than Manohla Dargis's (henceforth, let's just call him FMC) in judging this the best film of 2019, but I'm certainly closer to him than to Dargis and her N.Y. Times colleague A. O. Scott, whose noses must have been strained by the force with which they were upturned.

Where I think this film is great--is, in fact, the best war movie I've ever seen--is in its depiction of the war between the fighting, especially in its concentration on how nature, in the form of rats, flies, and water among the less visible forces, works as quickly as possible to reclaim the victims. The widely praised simulation of a single 110-minute shot is impressive but unavoidably gimmicky, demanding that you devote some of your attention to finding the seams (which are eminently findable), and the bookend Big Movie Star cameos are pretty close to insulting.

But George MacKay, as Lance Corporal Schofield, who is onscreen for what seems like about 107 of those minutes, imbues the film with the humanity that the gimmicks don't serve: stripped successively of (spoiler alert!) comrade, of bayonet, of helmet, finally of the one thing a soldier cannot be stripped of and still be a soldier, his rifle, he contracts into an indomitable man with a mission. MacKay, whose familiar face I just this moment identified as that of eldest son and emotional linchpin Bodevan in Captain Fantastic, has a chance to be a big enough star someday to be given a cheesy cameo in a film maybe as good as this one.

• Why all the horror trailers? In addition to a nasty-looking The Invisible Man with Elisabeth Moss and an unnecessary (but forgivable for giving Millicent Simmonds another gig en route to being recognized as an actor, not just that young deaf actress) A Quiet Place Part II, one that I'd already seen: The Turning, a reboot of Henry James's "A Turn of the Screw." And the rest, which I'd seen, were yet more literary adaptations: Emma (psyched; do any of you YUPpers think Anya Taylor-Joy could play Hannah Kolb in a movie?), and The Call of the Wild (ugh--animatronic animals, including the dog, really?). 

Better to suffer evil

As I was saying 18 months ago, when I so rudely interrupted myself, . . .

Today I yam a man, a retired man, and I've been thinking for some time that when that happened would be a good time to start writing brief, shallow comments on films I see. So let's crank this Model T and see whether we can't get it restarted.

A Hidden Life

Crit

Honestly, a 3-hour Terrence Malick film on moral courage in the face of a wicked state is more a "I guess I gotta" than an "oh boy!" for me, but man, is there any filmmaker as unafraid of the biggest of the big questions? Why all the wickedness, why all the suffering, why all the injustice, and what the heck are we here for anyway? No answers, of course, but plenty of big questions.

Also big is the gorgeous setting: if you were a person who believes in God, and who believes that the voice of God can, under the right conditions, be heard, the mountains and valleys--partly wooded, partly cleared for farming--of Austria would be conditions that would make sense. Of course, as just about any biblical prophet could tell you, there's zero worldly, practical value to hearing God's voice, unless you happen to have a death wish. Then again, those who hear God's voice tend not to be much about practicalities.

OK, this is my first time doing this in a while, and I realize that I sound awfully flip, as if I didn't admire this film, as if I didn't find it moving, even awe-inspiring, and, at bottom, as if I didn't like it a ton; not so, i.e., negative all those negatives. And see it.

• Let's do trailers that excited me in brief, like so: Downhill, clearly a comic remake of Force majeure, with Julia-Louis Dreyfus and Will Ferrell and a script credited in part to Alexander Payne's writing partners for The Descendants; Kelly Reichardt's next, First Cow; and a wild-looking spin on Peter Pan, Wendy, by Benh Zeitlin (remember Beasts of the Southern Wild?).