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.