American legal dramas are an instantly recognizable genre, from the cookie-cutter crime shows of Dick Wolf to John Grisham’s noble underdogs.  Plain-speaking country lawyers butt up against slick guys in expensive suits, turning the trial into a contest of charisma more than anything related to the law itself.  There’s a preening theatricality to most representations of the American court system that can provide opportunities for great/big acting, but the manipulation too often becomes apparent.  Two French legal dramas in 2023 provided an antidote to the Few Good Men and Times To Kill of the world.  Saint Omer and Anatomy of a Fall presented a vision of a legal system that didn’t need to pretend anyone was stupid, that took its time with the case and kept a low but focused volume.  Both are intensely interested in the psychological state of the accused, spending far more time on that than any forensic pseudo-science.  Anatomy of a Fall especially is just as, if not more, entertaining and compelling than a legal drama, or most any other genre of film.  Whatever the mysterious mechanics of the French legal system, Justine Triet’s phenomenal work is bursting with ideas, making its American counterparts look tawdry and immature.  It’s therefore a perfect French export.

Actor Sandra Huller, poised for a breakout after 2016’s Toni Erdmann, instead chose to continue working in Germany in films that didn’t penetrate the American foreign/indie bubble.  That changed in a titanic way in 2023 with her lead roles in both Anatomy of a Fall and The Zone of Interest.  Back on cinephile radars, Huller is exceptional in the lead as Sandra Voyter, a novelist living in the French Alps with her husband Samuel (Samuel Theis) and vision-impaired son Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner).  Introduced giving an interview with reporter in their home, Samuel obliviously, or not, interrupts with a blaring instrumental cover of 50 Cent’s P.I.M.P.  This burst of passive-aggression quickly sets the tone for their marriage, though it won’t last much longer.  Sandra asks the reporter to come back at a better time, and she then says goodbye to Daniel as he goes for a walk with the family dog Snoop (red carpet star Messi).  Daniel returns to find his father dead in a puddle of blood, having fallen from an attic window.  Sandra has no idea what happened, having lied down for a nap.  Immediately suspected in the media by the tabloid nature of the incident, various other lines of evidence point towards some kind of involvement in Samuel’s death, and she’s arrested and tried for murder.
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What follows in the courtroom is more than the material facts of the case, such as they are.  Forensics don’t rule anything out; the trauma on Samuel’s head might have come from a blow from Sandra or by crashing into a shed on his way out the window.  Maybe he jumped in a pique of despair from his failed writing career, failing marriage, and the guilt he carries over his son’s disability.  Maybe the lacerating verbal fight that he and Sandra had the previous day, secretly recorded by Samuel, continued when Daniel left the house and escalated into the physical.  Both are credible, but there’s no way to prove it.  In an American criminal trial, there’s a sense that the trial would be over once it’s clear that there’s plenty of reasonable doubt.   Here, the trial continues as an exhuming of Sandra and Samuel’s marriage, with the intent to prove motive and perhaps get a flustered Sandra to say something incriminating.  Again, the rules of the court bear little resemblance to what’s been drilled into the average American viewer, as Sandra takes an active role in the trial far beyond that of a typical defendant.  The combination of the novelty, the actors, and Triet’s dialogue make the film’s lengthy runtime fly by, buttressed not by cheap trial tropes like surprise witnesses but by new approaches from the prosecution or defense.  Each opens up a fascinating new thread in that particular French way.

Like fellow 2023 release May December, Anatomy of a Fall puts its thumb in the eye of true crime.  The media aspect of Anatomy of a Fall isn’t as sharp as Todd Haynes’ melodrama, but it’s in the background how ravenous the public is for a good story, and for a novelist who wrote a story about a wife murdering her husband, murdering her husband in real life is a pretty good story.  That literary angle, where the scene is inseparable from the total work and vice versa, is where Anatomy of a Fall keeps ascending and becomes a meta work.  Triet chose to place as brutal a marriage argument as has ever been depicted within the film that is about Samuel’s death, but is also about the death of the marriage.  Why did she go with that one instead of a scene from a more content time, which the viewer only knows exist because Sandra insists that they do?  The impossibility of defining a life or a life shared with others through one small window, or how slanted the telling of a true story can be without context muddles the question of guilt or innocence, especially when the state of Sandra’s marriage is subjected to the blunt instrument of a court proceeding.  If the legal system can’t dissect it, what chance does a seedy, grasping media have?

Huller dominates the film, and her domination is made all the more impressive by the quality of the actors she shares the screen with.  Dueling lawyers, with Swann Arlaud’s Vincent on Sandra’s side and Antoine Renartz for the state, are joys to watch in the courtroom, by turns incredulous and imperious with their questions and rebuttals.  Vincent has a history with Sandra, and it gives them a relaxed chemistry and yet another facet to an already complex film.  Machado-Graner is preternaturally composed when he gets his turn in the courtroom, and effectively agonized at home over what’s going to happen to him if the worst is true.  His companion, the impassive Snoop, has the kind of dog face that implies something deeper, but he’s only witnessing without taking anything in.  Theis, as Samuel, embodies a particular kind of middle-aged man, and though we only see him in this reduced state, it’s so lived-in in his few scenes that imagining something better becomes impossible.

As great as the supporting cast is, the film belongs to Huller and Triet.  Anatomy of a Fall is the welcome return of a major force, capable of boiling drama as she was farce in Toni Erdmann, and the emergence of a brilliant new voice whose three earlier films now become must-watches.  This is intelligent, adult filmmaking, stripped of cheap tricks and larded with the fascinating unknowability that is so much of human behavior.  A

David Fincher’s well known as a director for a lengthy repetition of takes.  Like similarly meticulous director’s before him, he wants dozens and dozens of versions of the same conversation, breaking down his actors and getting the most natural reading possible.  That level of organization and obsession is sometimes shared in his characters, but rarely his protagonists.  John Doe in Seven might have a detailed plan, but Mills and Somerset do not.  When his characters do have plans, like Amy Dunne or the unnamed killer in Fincher’s latest, The Killer, the god of the film (Fincher) laughs at them and makes them change their strategy.  No one but him is allowed to be so in control, even when characters are sure they share a level of omnipotence.  This has never been more true than in The Killer, a gun-for-hire story that pairs Fincher’s unreliable narrators with his singular mastery of the frame.  It’s a unity of Fincher’s career-long desire to get his arms around every aspect of film production and his frustration with a failure to do so, while also being an immaculate action film and cry into the void about the impersonal nature of corporate hierarchy. ​

​When Martin Scorsese makes a crime movie, he starts slowly, like in Casino or Wolf of Wall Street where the first crimes, like bookmaking and pump-and-dump penny stock schemes, have ill-defined victims, if they even exist.  Conversely, in Goodfellas, it begins with a vicious murder immediately undercut by Sinatra and a warm childhood flashback.  The knife thrusts are remembered, but they fade.  In Killers of the Flower Moon, however, nothing fades.  In depicting the murders visited upon the oil-rich Osage nation in the 1920’s, Scorsese gives the viewer nowhere to hide from the cruelty, betrayal, and savagery that defined those deeds.  He can’t help but make an entertaining and propulsive film, even with material as dark as this, but he hasn’t made something this bleak and oppressive since Raging Bull.  Scorsese’s previous film, The Irishman, felt like the final statement on mob movies.  Killers of the Flower Moon shows that there are other, darker ways into organized crime, especially when the targets take center stage.

Frequent Scorsese collaborator Leonardo DiCaprio has never been as grubby and charmless as when playing Ernest Burkhart, returned from the battlefields of Europe to join his uncle William King Hale (Robert De Niro) on Hale’s Oklahoma ranch.  Hale lives amongst the Osage, a Native American tribe whose reservation contains vast oil deposits which earn royalties for the tribe members, thanks to their canny negotiating with the US government.  Ostensibly their friend and ally, Hale is immediately revealed as a fox in the henhouse, and he plots to have Ernest marry into an Osage family and potentially inherit their ‘head rights,’ as they’re defined.  Ernest and Hale land on Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone) as their target, and Ernest does his job in charming her and convincing her to marry.  The problem is that Mollie has three sisters, all of whom will have to die for Ernest to get the greatest amount of head rights possible.  The film focuses on the threats to Mollie and her sisters as it becomes clear that many other white men have this exact same plan, working in tandem or opposition to kill as many Osage as possible while thwarting Osage attempts to solve the many murders that plague their community.  Mollie has to go all the way to President Calvin Coolidge to beg for federal help, which comes in the form of the nascent FBI and Thomas Bruce White (Jesse Plemons), knocking on the Burkhart door.
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Killers of the Flower Moon, adapted from David Grann’s book of the same name by Scorsese and Eric Roth, started life with DiCaprio in White’s role and took on the shape of a detective story before DiCaprio posed to Scorsese whether or not this was the best way to tell this story.  The thrust was subsequently moved into the house that Burkhart and Kyle shared, with him actively involved in murdering her family and she struggling to put the pieces together.  This poses integral problems that the film has to solve, especially coming from Scorsese.  He cannot make these racist murderers into the kind of carefree charmers who are funny in spite of their misdeeds, as so many Scorsese characters are.  This is remedied by making Burkhart and Hale into bumbling lunkheads who only want what the Osage have because, as Burkhart says multiple times, he likes money.  It’s just greed and resentment that someone other than them, meaning white men in general or they themselves, has something that they don’t.  Everyone, including DiCaprio, is sallow or gaunt or jowly or otherwise unattractive, afflicted with cauliflower ears or milky eyes or some other carefully considered disfigurement.  The rubes who failed film criticism 101 have long nagged at Scorsese with their confusing of depiction for endorsement, but here, it’s never been more clear how repugnant he finds these characters.

However, the complementary problem to how Scorsese depicts the murderers and plotters is in direct opposition to how they are viewed by their prey.  By making Burkhart and Hale and everyone else so transparently venal and malicious, it becomes difficult to view the Kyles and all the Osage as anything other than fools who’ve taken these obviously venomous snakes into their community.  In the period of the film, the Osage are some of the wealthiest people in the country, but their very recent history is plagued with broken treaties and double dealing in the same way as other, poorer tribes.  They surely would have understood this as happening because they had something, land, that white people wanted.  Now, the Osage have this vast oil income, so of course white people would want that to.  There are feints towards the community’s growing paranoia, especially after the Tulsa Massacre in 1921 when a wealthy Black community, not unlike the Osage, were driven out and killed by mobs with the backing of the military.  In those same tribal meetings to address this paranoia, there’s Hale to assert his loyalty and be applauded rather than viewed with suspicion.

The biggest test comes in the Burkhart house.  Gladstone brings a lot to her character, from poise and dignity to grief and desperation.  What she doesn’t bring is a convincing attraction to this man.  Of all the men this woman might marry, white or Osage or whoever, it’s never apparent that she would pick him for any other reason than history requiring it.  This again is the poles of the film at war with themselves, as any depiction of the Osage clashes with the inclusion of the murderers as primary characters.  One cannot watch Burkhart get spanked with a Mason paddle by Hale and have anything but disdain towards this pathetic weakling.  The film fails to overpower that vision of the character with how Mollie sees him.  There is a thread in the film about how the Osage have turned away from their ancestral ways, providing a potential out in their relationship where perhaps marrying a white man is a source of cultural cachet.  Drive the expensive car, have the expensive jewelry, pay a white husband’s allowance.  However, one leaves Killers of the Flower Moon unclear how or why that gradual process ever happened.  Did every Osage adopt white customs with all their money, or are there Osage with full bank accounts who live in the traditional way.  What kind of conflict is there within the tribe about this, and is there a formalized process to reclaim the old ways and resist the new?  There should be few unanswered questions in a 206 minute movie.

If the film left me frustrated, it does also awe on multiple occasions.  These lengthy Scorsese epics are packed with material, such that some pieces are bound to land and land hard.  No stranger to violence, this film contains some of the most disconcerting aftermath scenes that Scorsese’s ever filmed.  Gladstone looks like she’s leaving her body in a few scenes of her having to bear witness to what befalls her family.  Far away from the blood and gore, the most chilling frame of the film is the one that ends the masterful first trailer, where all of the conspirators are gathered in a dimly lit room, turning to face the camera as one.  When the film does briefly turn into the crime procedural that was originally intended, the film moves and sings with the long-delayed satisfaction that comes with any kind of comeuppance or at least admittance of what happened here.  Even if the film isn’t successful in all its aims, it ends on exactly the right note, recontextualizing much of its runtime and leaving the viewer feeling mournful and shattered.  Killers of the Flower Moon cannot be the best-told version of this story, but if that version ever gets made, it’ll have a hard time topping that finale.  B

​When a movie like Top Gun: Maverick or Spider-Man: No Way Home dominates the box office, it’s reassuring that good-to-great output gets rewarded but it’s not surprising.  What is surprising is when a three hour period biopic, partly in black and white and heavy with technical dialogue, packs theaters for weeks while also managing to be one of the finest films of the 2020’s.  Christopher Nolan’s best work hasn’t needed comic book or sci-fi trappings.  His WWII nail-biter Dunkirk was his previous peak, but that’s now been supplanted by Oppenheimer, a dense and meaningful historical thriller that doubly serves as a coherent primer on the entire 20th century.  For me, Nolan has never been a director who’s made something that works to this degree.  It’s nice to finally understand what everyone’s been talking about.

Longtime Nolan collaborator Cillian Murphy gets rewarded for his loyalty with the role of J. Robert Oppenheimer, depicted from his beginnings as a squirrely but brilliant physics student through his time as the leader of the Manhattan Project and its aftermath.  Befitting a Nolan film, the timeline is broken into segments titled Fission and Fusion, where the former proceeds from Oppenheimer’s point of view and the latter, in black and white, takes the perspective of Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr), a rival set on destroying Oppenheimer’s reputation.  The combined narrative takes the viewer through Oppenheimer’s development of quantum mechanics, his elevated academic status, the building of the atomic bomb, the decision to use it on Japan, and the subsequent ramifications.  Operating from the dense tome of American Prometheus, no detail is too small for Nolan to find space for.

​Nolan uses every second of the film’s runtime in furtherance of the film’s themes.  Oppenheimer may best be known for his paraphrasing Hindu texts at the detonation of the first atomic bomb, saying ‘Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds.’  That line is in the film at an unexpected time, but Nolan seems to be starting from that quote and the person who would not only think it, but tell the story of thinking it after.  The picture of the man that the viewer comes away with is of a person who knows how his peers,  i.e. professors and scientists, want him to act and feel, and pretends to do so.  Nolan’s Oppenheimer is always performing, withholding his true feelings from even the people closest to him.  He does this to please all parties, to maintain his security clearance without jeopardizing his dinner party invites.  Multiple parties beg him to make a stand in a period where a stand needed to be taken and he repeatedly weasels away, making himself the patron saint of a particular form of bureaucratic cowardice that allows governments to do terrible things.  His inaction does nothing to slow the unfolding tragedy of his life, where what was once his greatest source of joy is poisoned by his own hand.

That this man would rise to become a central figure in mid-20th-century science and government is to be reminded of how differently the world might’ve been were different people in charge.  Before it becomes a tragedy, Oppenheimer is a synthesis of the joy of discovery and human potential.  Two rising forces dominate the early parts of Oppenheimer’s professional life: quantum physics and socialism.  Inspired by mentor Neils Bohr (Kenneth Branagh), PhD candidate Oppenheimer begins to ‘hear the music’ of the universe, uncovering hidden mechanisms at the atomic level.  He passes this new knowledge to the next generation of students in a montage that is my favorite thing Nolan’s ever done.  One student becomes dozens as the semesters progress, and Oppenheimer becomes a brilliant professor and researcher, breaking down an interpretation of the universe that would judge things as separate and introducing the idea of the cosmic swirl of molecules whose boundaries are only illusory.  Out of the classroom, faculty consider what else could change about their understanding of the world and toy with the idea of socialism and communism while their students form on-campus labor unions and go fight against Franco in Spain.

From the romantic possibility of the theoretical classroom comes the organization and precision of the lab.  All the idealism and optimism grinds to a halt when WWII breaks out.  Nuclear fission has been discovered a few years prior, and Oppenheimer can’t join the top secret government projects that will guide its further development if he’s playing footsie with communists.  At the prompting of colleague Ernest Lawrence (Josh Hartnett), he immediately backs away from his prior associates and gets brought into what will become the Manhattan Project by Colonel Leslie Groves (Matt Damon).  The film briefly turns into a heist story here, as Oppenheimer and Groves criss-cross the country, recruiting scientists and playing catch-up to the Germans, but all of Oppenheimer’s previously established flaws keep cropping up.  The fundamental incompatibility of a scientific project conducted with tight security means he has to play all sides, and though the job gets done, his successes in one part of the project mean failures in another.  A people-pleaser and someone desperate for applause, this lengthy segment ends in the film’s centerpiece moment.  After the bomb has been dropped and Japan has surrendered, Oppenheimer understands what has happened but gives the triumphalist speech anyway, speaking of retribution and the missed opportunity to use the bomb on the Germans as he imagines the crowd with strips of skin falling off them and dissolving into ash.  None of this imagery stops his cadence or alters his poise, as Nolan demonstrates what he thinks of this man.

After that kind of exclamation point, the film could justifiably end, but Oppenheimer still has an hour to go.  The rest is given over to how quickly people forget the lessons of history.  An earlier scene conveys that the Nazis will lose the race for the atomic bomb because of anti-Semitism, where their racial hatred will keep them from utilizing all the knowledge otherwise available to them.  Once it becomes clear that the Soviets will seamlessly step into the place the Nazis and Japanese just occupied, Oppenheimer’s higher-ups clamp down on communication with the Soviets and guarantee that they’ll have no choice but to develop their own bomb.  Strauss’ hatred of Oppenheimer comes down to a difference of opinion on the arms race, with Strauss firmly on the side of building up the arsenal while Oppenheimer flirts with the disarmament side but can’t fully endorse them without putting his powerful position at risk.  The Fusion section of the film takes full control here, as Strauss’ Cabinet confirmation hearing is intercut with an unofficial determination of Oppenheimer’s continued security clearance.  The result is a man making himself a martyr, turning his rival into a public villain while he escapes unscathed.  The battle is over his legacy, foreshadowed by an earlier scene of scientists talking about Einstein (Tom Conti) as a guy who once had a brilliant idea but now putters around the edges as a consultant, receiving awards but not really contributing.  This is Oppenheimer’s reward, plus existential dread that haunts his waking life. 

Throughout this long journey, Nolan is assembling seemingly every actor in Hollywood.  Emily Blunt plays Oppenheimer’s wife Kitty whose ambivalence towards being a mother fits perfectly with her husband’s go-along approach to his work.  Florence Pugh plays Jean Tatlock, Oppenheimer’s lover and a card-carrying communist who the security apparatus that follows in Oppenheimer’s wake finds very interesting.  Branagh is the emotional center of the film in what’s undoubtedly the best and most grounded role he’s taken on in years, while Hartnett vividly returns to the big screen to kick off the square-jawed voice of reason phase of his career.  Benny Safdie is the omnipresent specter of greater destruction as Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb, while Casey Affleck stuns in a five-minute role as a counter-intelligence operative who coldly grills Oppenheimer.  These and so many others wow in roles of all sizes.  When even Rami Malek is putting in his best work, one knows they’re watching something special.

All cylinders are firing under Nolan’s guidance, from the huge cast to Jennifer Lame’s heroic editing and Ludwig Goranson’s score that is not so overpowering that it drowns out the dialogue, as the last several Nolan films have.  Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema incorporates surrealist asides as Oppenheimer visualizes things at the atomic level, while also turning everyday imagery into the stuff of Armageddon nightmares.  However, it’s Nolan’s script that most impresses.  The writing has so often been the biggest disappointment in his films, but the experience of Tenet may have been instructive.  That was a film that Nolan labored over for years, only for bosses above his head and global circumstances to mangle its release and dictate events.  If this allowed him to find a level of camaraderie with Oppenheimer, then the result is a perceptive and damning picture that is far and away the creative peak of his career.  Tenet, a movie I otherwise hated, begets Oppenheimer, and therefore justifies its existence.  A

​No one knows what’s going to be the next blockbuster trend in Hollywood, now that superheroes are no longer a surefire path to a billion dollars.  The director of Lady Bird and Little Women has perhaps provided the way forward with highly choreographed, tongue in cheek toy commercials featuring game A-list stars.  Greta Gerwig’s third film thrilled global audiences and is now in the thick of awards season, cementing her as one of the industry’s most powerful directors.  Barbie’s domination of the 2023 summer box office and the preceding marketing blitz put movies back in the cultural driver’s seat, a primacy that would’ve lasted longer had studio executives not sabotaged themselves in the worst possible moment and driven their creative teams to strike.  Regardless of how its moment was squandered, Barbie is going to have continued ramifications for years to come through sequels and imitators that either fail to replicate its success or build on Gerwig’s imaginative but flawed entry.  

Gerwig has already achieved the status of awards season staple and critical darling, and there was a career path for her where she occupied the shrinking space of the 8-figure production budget, becoming a more successful version of her husband and writing partner Noah Baumbach but never really breaking out to a global audience.  Perhaps sensing that a film like Barbie would sever that path, Barbie begins with a blatant 2001: A Space Odyssey ripoff, demonstrating her reverence for the filmmaker’s filmmaker while also distancing herself from his self-seriousness.  Narrated by Helen Mirren, Margot Robbie’s Stereotypical Barbie stands in for the monolith, only instead of inspiring apes to use weapons, she causes little girls to cast off their baby dolls.  Having triggered this revolution, the film transitions to Barbieland, a plastic pastel Eden where the various Barbies have high-powered job titles by day and retire to their dream houses at night for dancing and pajama parties, though it’s unclear what anyone would talk about in their utopian dystopia.  Everyone’s smart and beautiful and the same.  Their male counterparts, the Kens, laze around at the beach and desperately vie for the attention of a Barbie.  No Toy Story or LEGO Movie, everyone knows they’re a doll being played with in a linked world, but because Barbie’s are believed to be icons of female empowerment, it’s all conflict-free back-patting, accompanied by a ubiquitous “Hi, Barbie!”

​Things take a turn when Stereotypical Barbie begins to notice slight imperfections in herself and her environment, most hilariously in a creeping existential dread.  On the advice of Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon), so named because she’s been significantly altered by whoever’s playing with her, Stereotypical Barbie ventures out to the real world to find out what’s going on with her child owner.  Her Ken counterpart (Ryan Gosling) stows away in her car, accompanying Stereotypical Barbie into a modern-day Los Angeles that is decidedly not the matriarchy of Barbieland.  Where Barbie is immediately made into a sex object by leering passers-by, Ken discovers a world where know-nothing hunks are catered to and idealized.  He takes this newfound confidence to Barbieland, while Barbie stays in LA and discovers that though her teen girl owner Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt) is viciously uninterested in her, Sasha’s mother Gloria (America Ferrara) works at Mattel.  The CEO (Will Ferrell) can’t have a living Barbie walking around, and he and his executive goons pursue Barbie, Gloria, and Sasha back to a Barbieland that Ken, now in the persona of late-70’s Sylvester Stallone, has transformed into a dumbed-down patriarchy.

Lady Bird and Little Women both follow an emotional pattern of building worlds and characters that the viewer wants to be a part of, and then shifting the tone from warmth and humor of that world towards loss and melancholy as it inevitably changes.  With its crowd-pleasing aims, Barbie is outside of that pattern, providing a constant stream of laughs and elaborate set-pieces with the occasional break for sincerity.  Gerwig is not as accomplished with this approach as she was out of the box in Lady Bird.  I can’t believe I have to say this, but the emotional beats in a Greta Gerwig movie don’t work.  They’re either didactic or ungrounded in a character that hasn’t bridged the gap between her plastic beautiful world and the real grimy one.  Rhea Pearlman plays Ruth Handler, the creator of Barbie, or maybe her ghost, and whatever is actually happening with this character is too unclear and thus overshadows what she’s imparting to Barbie in the film’s nakedest pitch towards the heartstrings.  The characters of Gloria and Sasha are complete misfires who would have been better off in deleted scenes, especially Sasha who moves from the ‘Barbie is an anti-feminist symbol of unattainable beauty’ stance to gawping along in the back of Barbie’s car on the return trip to Barbieland.

While Barbie is the first Gerwig film to not trigger vast swells of complex emotion, it makes up for this by being the funniest.  The Kens are constant figures of good-natured fun, even after they’ve been transformed into guitar-playing bros.  Led by Gosling’s wide-eyed lunkhead, they’re all pathetic and needy and thoroughly discounted by their Barbie counterparts.  If the film doesn’t totally convey why the Kens are so successful transforming Barbieland into a frattish landscape of mojo dojo casa houses, it doesn’t have to work hard in conveying how easy it is to distract and usurp them.  Ferrell’s as funny as he’s been in years as he returns to his staple character of moron with too much power and an inflated ego, while McKinnon and Michael Cera as Ken’s friend Allan are both hilarious outsiders exasperated by so much of Barbieland.  Gerwig’s camera finds visual gags in the world itself and in characters like Emerald Fennell’s Midge, a pregnant doll with no lines that everyone’s freaked out by.  Befitting a comedy, Barbie is oftentimes infectious through its use of a knowing, poppy soundtrack and several dance sequences, one of which harkens back to the prologue’s thumb-in-the-eye approach to naysayers as an intra-Ken battle turns into a Golden Age of Hollywood production number. 

It was perhaps impossible that Barbie would measure up to Gerwig’s first two films, each one of the best of their respective years.  Barbie won’t get to those heights with this viewer, but it is a fun experience that struggles to find its message between corporate interests, poorly calibrated tone, and a version of feminism that has little room for anything other than beauty and excellence.  Nonetheless, far worse films have entered the billion dollar club.  If this is what Gerwig wants to do with her career, better her leading expensive films than the Michael Bay’s and David Leitch’s of the world.  B

​Top Gun: Maverick, the film in which Tom Cruise supposedly saved cinema, worked as a metaphor for Cruise’s career in multiple flattering ways, from its analog-versus-digital prologue to its ultimate choice to stop trying to replace Cruise’s Maverick and just let him save the day himself.  These kinds of readings are the only way that Cruise is going to engage with filmmaking beyond giant spectacle.  His days of serious dramas seem to be dead, but the viewer can keep analyzing Cruise through his death-defying stunts, the latest series of which takes place in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning: Part One.  In Cruise’s seventh franchise entry and third with writer/director Christopher McQuarrie, Ethan Hunt and the IMF squares off against a rogue AI, which the world’s major powers are all racing to acquire and control themselves while Hunt is trying to destroy it.  Cruise as the lone man stopping the advance of harmful technology places him exactly where he wants to be at this phase of his career.  He is on a mission to show that filmmaking isn’t broke and therefore shouldn’t be fixed.  Meanwhile, Disney is replacing extras with AI-generated oddities who are several iterations away from looking human.

As great as the Mission: Impossible movies have often been, however, this is not the film to make the argument.  This franchise has famously been created stunts first.  Cruise wants to do a HALO jump in this entry, so find a place in the story to do so.  In Dead Reckoning: Part One, this has never been as apparent.  In having to constantly explain what’s happening, the dialogue has never been as flat and expositional as it is here.  Longtime franchise staple Ving Rhames, as team member Luther Stickell, is clearly done with action movies, and it was a missed opportunity to not free him from his contract and kill him off in the previous film.  New addition Haley Atwell, playing pickpocket Grace, is a poor substitution for Rebecca Ferguson’s Ilsa Faust, who gets sidelined in this film for seemingly no other reason than a fear that the viewer will confuse two British actors who look similar, or even worse, a more flattering mentor-mentee dynamic between Ethan and Grace as opposed to the equal footing that Ethan and Ilsa have.  Human antagonists Gabriel (Esai Morales) and Paris (Pom Klementioff) fare better, though the film is saving more information about who they are for Part Two.  The franchise is trending downwards from the heights of Ghost Protocol and Rogue Nation, both films with tighter scripts that were less indulgent of Cruise’s monomaniacal vision.
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None of that is to say that Dead Reckoning: Part One is lacking in the franchise’s ability to thrill.  A prologue in a submarine succinctly demonstrates the AI threat in a technology-dependent world without the need for the endless monologues that bog down later sequences.  Previous Mission: Impossible films have maintained a consistent parceling out of mind-blowing stunts, while this one builds to an unbelievable climax that single-handedly justifies the film’s runtime and is in the running for some of the best scenes in the franchise.  Cruise and McQuarrie know how to leave the viewer wanting more.  There’s also a geopolitical intelligence to the script that Rogue Nation had but Fallout lacked, where the global powers have decided on a path that will guarantee a decent outcome for themselves but a terrible subjugation for everyone else.  Someone could form a political theory out of the gamesmanship on display here, giving the viewer who just wants to see Cruise court his onscreen death something else to chew on.

Dead Reckoning: Part One is no one’s idea of a franchise peak, especially seeing as it’s half of a movie.  The franchise isn’t racing towards its conclusion at full speed, because how could it as it approaches its fourth decade and its actors start to draw down their Social Security accounts.  There are some baffling choices here, not including the stubborn refusal of a man in his 60’s to stay earthbound.  However, the cinematic world is better with Cruise’s force of will, at least as long as it’s directed towards practical stunts and not whatever’s going on at SeaOrg.  B-

My favorite Wes Anderson film, The Grand Budapest Hotel, takes its first several minutes to introduce a story within a story within a story.  The center of this tangled device is where the vast majority of the film takes place, before unwinding in a brief epilogue back to where it started.  Asteroid City, Anderson’s latest, does the same thing but in a much more intrusive way.  The setting that formed the basis of Asteroid City’s marketing is a theatrical play, but the viewer also gets a reenactment of the production and the behind-the-scenes drama of the play.  That none of this was tipped to the viewer before Asteroid City made its way to theaters is an off-putting move by the promotion department, but once settled in, the themes he’s trying to pull out of the most complicated structure he’s ever attempted begin to appear.  Anderson’s intermittently successful in the least of his last four live-action releases, but then, Grand Budapest also was a grower for me.  On the fourth or fifth rewatch, maybe Asteroid City will suddenly click into place.

A source of frustration in Asteroid City is that its central setting provides another of Anderson’s evocative environments, heightened in plot but deadened in delivery.  It also helps that this is the only part of the film shot in color.  Jason Schwartzman plays Augie Steenbeck, a morose war photographer driving his son Woodrow (Jake Ryan) and three young daughters out to the desert for a science contest that Woodrow’s competing in.  Augie’s wife has recently died, and he hasn’t told his children yet, much to the annoyance of his disapproving father-in-law Zak (Tom Hanks).  In the shadow of mesas and atomic testing clouds, other teenage contestants arrive, including the daughter of Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson), an actor who recruits Augie to run lines with her.  As everyone gathers to show off their inventions, the ceremony is interrupted by a flying saucer and its alien inhabitants, one of whom drops down to grab the space rock that gives the desert town its name.  All this is intercut with Bryan Cranston as a TV host describing how the play was made by effete Southern playwright Conrad Earp (Edward Norton) and his mercurial director Schubert Green (Adrien Brody), with Schwartzman’s actor character Jones Hall jumping back and forth between both.
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Being able to untangle what is happening on which emotional plane is the part of Asteroid City that will make it last, provided one has the patience to do so.  The test of the film is if, in spite of the artifice and the purposeful world-breaking within the play, the beats still work.  This has always been my takeaway from David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, where Lynch is telling the characters and by extension the viewer that they’re being manipulated, and then proceeds to pull the emotion out anyway.  Asteroid City flirts with that level of success at times, but it’s a primal success as opposed to an informed one.  Anderson has long built his films in anticipation of the one big moment.  Life Aquatic lives or dies on one, as does each segment of The French Dispatch.  There are two such moments in Asteroid City, both of which take place in the black-and-white world, and if they work, I have no idea why.  They have the feeling of something that does, shot and scored to be meaningful, even as what’s happening is either puzzling or artificial.  It’s a rare film experience to have that kind of disconnect between head and heart.

By producing that kind of experience, however, Asteroid City might be pulling off a genius synchronicity between theme and execution.  A common thread between both spheres is unknowing.  The characters at the science contest are all looking for knowledge, and repeatedly butt up against the edges of their understanding.  Tilda Swinton’s scientist has been close to a breakthrough her whole career but can’t make the final leap.  Jeffrey Wright’s general dismisses his life’s twists and turns with a melancholy ‘that’s life.’  Augie doesn’t have answers for his children about why their mother died or where she is now, and the girls invent witchy rituals to make sense of it.  No one knows what the alien wants.  In the black-and-white acting world, unknowing takes the form of dissecting Earp’s writing for the why’s of character choices.  There are many reasons why a character might make a strange choice, but Earp refuses to definitively land on one.  The setting of the film in the burgeoning atomic age and the wake of WWII adds to the futile questioning of it all.  Perhaps a film about the urge to ask why and the universe’s impassive refusal to respond could only land its emotional beats in ways that are just as opaque to the viewer as they are to the characters.

Anderson’s tradition of giant ensembles continues with Asteroid City, bringing in his usual actors like Schwartzman and Swinton and incorporating new faces like Johannson and Hope Davis, who’s somehow never been in an Anderson film.  In the former basket, Schwartzman finds grace notes within what’s ostensibly a flat performance, like the flatness is a rut that the character knows he’s in but can’t break out of, while Brody’s director has a bit of physical business with a fake speed bag that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.  For newcomers to Anderson’s stable, Hanks brings a gruffer tone to a role that Bill Murray clearly said no to for some reason.  It’s Maya Hawke who’s making the play for a bigger role in Anderson’s next film.  She plays a schoolteacher taking her class on a field trip, and her response to the film’s events is to act like everything’s normal.  It’s a thematically-related D or E plot, and she and her kids provide a cheerier outpost.

After two viewings, Asteroid City has yet to fully click despite its Andersonian charms.  A major upgrade seems possible, provided the stereotypical bulletin board with pins and colored strings gets worked out over what each character is feeling in each of the film’s spheres.  Anderson hasn’t made a linear live-action film since Moonrise Kingdom, and with the spate of Roald Dahl shorts he just released, his attention span may have shortened to the point where he’s no longer interested in a straightforward 100 minute story.  He’s proven capable of greatness in all kinds of forms.  Asteroid City might be a step too far in one direction.  B

​Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse has become one of the most influential films of the last decade.  Its fantastical animation style has provided a counterpoint to the photorealism of Pixar, and is being aped by animation titans like Dreamworks.  It proved that audiences would turn out for multiverse storytelling, a theme that has overtaken superhero franchises and the Oscars.  Into the Spider-Verse’s sequel, Across the Spider-Verse, isn’t likely to have that kind of historical footprint, as it’s building upon what the original started, but it is the rare second-chapter that eclipses its impressive predecessor.  Across the Spider-Verse enlarges an already-huge world, adding more new characters and environments and challenges while also deepening the characters the audience is familiar with, and it does so with a stunning color palette and an aesthetic sense that makes it the latest embodiment of cool.  It even manages to squeeze in new ideas about superheroes after fifteen years of general audiences drowning in  them.  Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is a high-water mark for both animation and comic-book movies, validating all the imitators who have hitched their wagons to the correct train and undoubtedly inspiring new ones.

Brooklynite teen Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) led Into the Spider-Verse, but he doesn’t show up in the sequel until after a lengthy prologue starring Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld).  In her universe, marked by a watercolor motif that looks like the walls are melting, she’s going about her business as Spider-Gwen, evading the detection of her widower cop father (Shea Whigham) and being an alienated teen who misses Miles.  When her version of the MOMA is attacked by a Renaissance-era Vulture, she acquits herself well in front of other Spider-people who appear through portals to help her fight him.  Miguel O’Hara (Oscar Isaac) and Jess Drew (Issa Rae) are leaders in a gang of universe-hopping Spider-people, and having wrecked her life in her own universe, Gwen asks to join them.

​Back in Miles’ universe, he’s living the typical Spider-Man life.  Juggling school and crime-fighting while managing a secret double life are all in a day’s work.  What makes him extraordinary doesn’t keep him from having typical teen problems, namely heated fights with his parents as he chafes against their expectations for him.  Cop dad Jeff (Brian Tyree Henry) and mom Rio (Lauren Velez) know something’s going on with their elusive son, and though Miles desperately wants to let them in on it, he can’t do it.  On a more metaphysical scale, Miles is confronted with disembodied villain The Spot (Jason Schwartzman) who demands to be his nemesis, and Gwen suddenly reappears. Miles dispatches the former and follows the latter back to her headquarters, a sprawling central hive of web-slingers.  Their mission to uphold the proper timeline across infinite universes, particularly around each universe’s Spider-person and the things that are supposed to happen to them.  As The Spot grows in power and gains the ability to jump between universes, the Spider-Society takes action against him with Miles’ help.

The stunning visuals that predominate in Across the Spider-Verse extend far beyond the dense background gags that they were largely limited to in Into the Spider-Verse.  The three original directors have each been replaced by Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, and Justin K. Thompson, while Phil Lord and Chris Miller are two of the few holdovers in the writing/producing departments.  What Dos Santos, Powers, and Thompson bring is a wholesale commitment to differentiating every environment the film encounters.  Miles’ looks the most typical, having been introduced in the original, but the several other universes visited have their own look.  Gwen’s lighter, pastel world is contrasted with the angry pencil drawings of Hobie Brown aka Spider-Punk (Daniel Kaluuya), a barely intelligible Londoner from a fascist dystopia armed with a guitar.  The sleek design of the Spider-Society is a respite from the chaotic megalopolis of Mumbatten, where Parvitr Prabhakar (Karan Soni) is Spider-Man.  Each new place is considered, with an animation style to match.  Into the Spider-Verse was about visual density while Across the Spider-Verse is more artful.  The MCU’s attempt at putting Doctor Strange in a multiverse landed him on a gray bureaucratic version of earth, while gray isn’t a word in Across the Spider-Verse’s vocabulary.

All the pretty screengrabs in the world wouldn’t matter if the characters inhabiting them weren’t worth following, and Across the Spider-Verse complements its visuals with some of the genre’s best characters.  Miles and Gwen are both highly credible as teenagers, far moreso than Tom Holland’s fun-but-empty portrayal.  They have the moodiness and temper and flakiness that makes real teens so frustrating, while also embodying the beating hearts and enthusiasm that makes that irritation worth it.  Romance is something this genre has mostly lost the ability to convey, but here, the major rooting interest is not so much saving the multiverse as it is for these two teens to make it work.  Across the Spider-Verse takes a deep breath when Gwen and Miles reconnect, letting them sit together and catch up in a sequence that feels like the most important part of the film.  Outside of the leads are a welcome reemergence of Miles’ mentor Peter B. Parker (Jake Johnson), now with an adorable toddler, and Isaac’s smoldering intensity as Miguel.  Stuck in a Star Wars purgatory for years, it’s extremely gratifying to have Isaac get to operate in a blockbuster world that recognizes his talents.  The other new Spider-people are compelling in different ways, while Velez gets a larger role and does excellent work with it.

The animation and the writing converge for a film that’s bursting with ideas but not to the point that the film becomes overstuffed.  There’s commentary about comic book arcs and tropes, plus parenting and growing up and how precarious our futures can be, but it’s the film’s dedication to a teen sensibility that becomes the most compelling.  Gwen’s particular idea that she has to leave her universe is in line with adolescent catastrophizing, and a painful lack of trust in her father that Whigham does beautiful work in eliciting.  The way that Spider-people are drawn to each other is affecting, again from the teenage perspective of trying to find one’s people.  Even the way that Spider-Man gets around the city, reckless and care-free, finds an invincible flow state that cannot help but bring a smile to any viewer’s face.  So many superhero movies become pseudo-fascist power fantasies, but this is a freedom fantasy, a joy simulator.  Across the Spider-Verse is an evocation of the best parts of being alive.  A