By Jon Kissel

As far as special effects laden blockbusters go, it's impressive that Terminator 2: Judgment Day still looks as great as it does.  After almost 25 years, it holds up as a technical achievement, retaining all the seamless thrills it had on its release.  Three attempts to replicate that success have mostly failed, falling at Sarah Conner's and the T1000's feet.  James Cameron might not be great with dialogue, but he knows how to build an unimpeachable action set piece. 

Terminator 2 effortlessly skips between genres over its runtime.  There's multiple heist sections that turn into high-octane action.  The sci-fi nature of the story merges with the Halloween-esque horror movie, with the T1000 in Mike Myers' mask.  Cameron trades the romantic subplot of the prior film with a father-son dynamic, keeping the spectacle grounded with recognizable emotion.  That it can be all these things, while also experiencing a complete shift in objective halfway through, and not feel jumbled or muddled is a testament to Cameron's command of the material.

Strong acting isn't always required in big-budget filmmaking, but the cast of Terminator 2 has their moments.  Linda Hamilton is fantastic as the iron-willed Sarah Conner, seasoning her intensity with moments of vulnerability in the assault on Miles Dyson's home, or in the transition from her elation at potentially escaping the asylum only to run into the T800, turning her hope into abject terror.  As the T800, Arnold Schwarzeneggar is playing his most iconic role, spitting out catchphrase after catchphrase and having fun doing it.  As monotone as he is, the viewer can see his CPU taking in new information and adapting accordingly.  Robert Patrick as the T1000 is a great foil for the T800.  Patrick's more natural tone and inflection reflects not just the casting of an American, English-as-a-first-language actor, but also the technological leap between Terminator models.  It's a nice form-function intuitive relationship that works inside and outside the world of the film.

That's not to say all the performances hold up, though the script is just as much a culprit.  Sarah's narration is pretty rough and makes the character seem inarticulate and dumb.  It could've easily been excised, as Sarah's vivid nuclear nightmare is all that's needed to communicate her fears.  The recurring playground imagery shows, where the narration tells.  The real victim of the dialogue is Edward Furlong's John Conner, a character completely stuck in the amber of the early 90's.  His look and his vocabulary irrevocably date the film, not in a nostalgic way, but a corny one.  When not asked to speak in Cameron's version of teen vernacular, Furlong does much better. His reaction shots cut through his bluster, and it feels very real in the handful of instances when he's asked to cry.  It's disappointing that Cameron couldn't have found a way to make him sound more natural, because the character's behavior is perfectly appropriate for his circumstances.  As is, some of the things Hamilton and Furlong end up saying strike a black mark against the film.

Those dialogue fails are plentiful, but so are the set-pieces that remain thrilling after several viewings.  Cameron has a mastery on the logic and space of a scene, exemplified in the T1000 getting his gun stuck in the asylum bars.  As CGI driven as that character is, he still exists in a physical world.  The set-pieces also are ably doling out catharsis in small doses, giving the Conner's and their robotic protector small victories in a larger war.  The iconic shattering of the frozen T1000, preceded by another Arnold catchphrase, is immediately undercut.  It's a victorious moment that only manages to buy a couple minutes, earned, but still not enough.  Cameron also includes playful little extras throughout, never keeping things from getting too serious.  The little blob of liquid T1000 rejoining its master shone through on this viewing, as well as the truck driver's little yelp as he dove out of the T1000's way in the final car chase.  Terminator 2 has enough of these kinds of touches that another viewing would bring out something different. 

The craziest thing about Terminator 2 is that it may not even be Cameron's greatest action film.  Plenty would say Aliens trumps it, and a few morons would prefer Avatar.  Wherever it falls in his ultimate legacy, Terminator 2 remains a superior action film, marred though it may be by an often-irritating child performance.  It's not a surprise, and frankly not all that bad a reflection on them, that directors like McG or Alan Taylor haven't been able to live up to its reputation.  Cameron's a hard act to follow.  B

By Jon Kissel

Space operas live and die by the amount of information they try and parcel out.  Star Wars is a straightforward hero's journey, good versus evil set against a backdrop of hyperdrives and mystical religion.  It doesn't explain much, and doesn't need to.  Battlestar Galactica muddies the morality of the conflict, but it's still an understandable world that parcels out information at a reasonable pace.  The irreverence of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy puts a darkly comedic spin on the whole genre, where anything can happen and the viewer can accept it or be lost in the shuffle.  The Wachowski's Jupiter Ascending wants to find a place in this genre, but it miserably fails by making its world too complicated.  The amount of made-up nouns comes at a blinding clip, and by the time the bee-man hybrid shows up, I've completely checked out, leaving me nothing in the tank for the thrilling space bureaucracy montage.

The Jupiter of the awful, sequel-threatening title refers to Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis).  Her birth 20-something years earlier took place on a container ship traveling from a Russian port to the US, and her astrologer aunt predicted great things based on the kind of gibberish astrologers talk about.  Now in Chicago, Jupiter cleans houses with her family in Chicago, scoffing at her prophesied greatness.  Little does Jupiter know, through completely random chance, she happens to be genetically identical to a recently deceased matriarch of the House of Abrasax, one of the wealthiest and most powerful families in the universe.  This happenstance, combined with notarized wills, makes her the owner of Earth, which is actually a free-range factory for genetic material used to keep the universal 1% eternally refreshed and young.  It also makes her a target of the three Abrasax children.  They send bounty hunters after her, but the first to get to Jupiter is Caine Wise (Channing Tatum), a wolf-man hybrid equipped with rocket boots, pointy ears, and guy-liner.  Once Jupiter is in hand, the siblings attempt to circumvent the ironclad inheritance laws and take Earth for themselves.

As far as Manichean morality plays go, the harvesting of all life on Earth is as straightforward as it gets.  However, the Wachowski's stumble in making this resonant, because there isn't a single likable or interesting person to care about.  Kunis and Tatum are both playing everything straight, with no humor or awe or wonder backing up their line readings.  In Kunis's case, her character should be the audience surrogate into this world, as her entire sense of herself and humanity's place in the universe has been upended in the course of a few days.  However, because so much time is wasted with nonsensical exposition, there's no time for just taking the world in.  She adapts remarkably well to suddenly being one of the richest beings in the universe.  Though I'm dismissive of it, at least Avatar, another space opera, was able to communicate how mind-bending and unique its world was.  The result is a totally bland experience, though all $176 million of the budget is on the screen.  All the pretty visuals in the world are not enough when the Wachowski's are incapable of connecting me to the characters. 

The villains are more interesting based solely on how strange they're portrayed.  Douglas Booth plays the youngest Abrasax, a space playboy given to space orgies, while Tuppence Middleton plays the middle daughter, whose only purpose is exposition.  Both are forgettable in the face of Eddie Redmayne, who plays the oldest, Balem.  Redmayne inexplicably chooses to mumble and whisper through his line readings, except when he punctuates sentences by SHOUTING AS LOUD AS HE CAN.  As an attempt to appear dangerous, it only comes off as laughable.  I can't decide if it's a Norbit-level performance that should have ruined his chances at the Oscars or if he saw the ridiculousness of the film he was in and tried to exacerbate it.  Balem has a never-ending army of alien grays and lizard beasts and cat-man hybrids behind him, none of which make much of an impression beyond being on the receiving end of his SUDDEN OUTBURSTS.  

In addition to the over-the-top or barely-registering characters, the logic of Jupiter Ascending further breaks the film.  Caine is repeatedly captured and escapes his braindead jailors in the most obvious way possible.  Plot holes are papered over with devices from better movies, lifted wholesale to keep the interminable story moving.  A whole system of rules and laws have to be devised so Jupiter won't be killed on sight, and apparently the Wachowski's are the only people in the world who watched the Phantom Menace for the trade disputes.  Except there are still instances when assassins are ready to kill her, have her defenseless and alone, and don't kill her, so it's all for nothing.  The makeup and costuming are like something out of an 80's sci-fi convention, especially Wachowski favorite Doona Bae, playing a bounty hunter in an inconceivable hairstyle.  She's still a human, but they have to make her look insane so we know she's not from Earth.  The stealth technology she possesses isn't enough on its own. 

Jupiter Ascending is two-plus hours of gibberish and nothing characters attempting to make this huge expenditure not a complete waste of time.  There are snippets of interesting ideas, like humanity's place in the universe, genes as destiny, and the most valuable asset of a space-faring civilization being time.  However, those ideas are crumbs of meat in between two giant, tasteless slices of CGI Wonder Bread.  This sandwich is not worth eating, and the Wachowski's continue a Shyamalan-style descent into absurdity.  D-

By Jon Kissel

David Chase, and probably most writers, writes what he knows.  There are some autobiographical components to The Sopranos, in the family and manipulative mother department, and less in the numbers running and general Mafia activity.  Where David Chase made his opus semi-autobiographically, his follow-up film Not Fade Away feels even more personal.  Writer/director and protagonist share difficult parents, a love of music, and the same basic coming of age in the early tumult of the post-Camelot sixties.  It also trades the Sopranos' foundational pessimism for something approaching optimism, an unavoidable byproduct of creating a film about teenagers set in this time period.    

Chase stand-in Douglas Damiano (John Magaro) is entering his senior year of high school in New Jersey at the film's outset.  His relationship with his father Pat (James Gandolfini) is heated but warm at its base, in direct contrast to his neurotic, depressive mother Antoinette (Molly Price).  Neither athletic, which would get him girls now, nor smart, which would get him girls in the future, his romantic prospects are brightened when he sees how much his female classmates gravitate towards the drummer during the talent show.  Cut to Douglas practicing on his new drum kit, and forming a band with his friends Gene (Jack Huston) and Wells (Will Brill).  They experience some small successes playing at house parties, and Douglas eventually takes over lead vocals from Gene.  After spending a few months in college a year later, Douglas returns to his home having completely bought into youth culture, with platform shoes, long hair, and a rebellious attitude that enrages his father and seduces his high school crush Grace (Bella Heathcoate), who's going through her own counter-culture issues at home.

Not Fade Away attempts to grasp as much of this time period as it can, sometimes to its detriment.  It wants to cover music and the thrill of performance and the possibility of breaking through, while also examining Douglas and Pat's relationship in depth, Douglas and Grace's relationship, and the counter-culture as well.  A tighter focus would've relegated the latter aspect to the background, and it's so central to the music and the fashion the music pushed onto millions of teenagers, that the viewer would've gotten the gist.  Instead, Chase spends a fair amount of time with Grace's family, and her hippie sister's clash with their ultra-conservative father.  The whole affair doesn't especially color Grace's character, and the yawning chasm between generations is equally communicated in Douglas's decaying relationship with his father.  The film feels both too long and too short at the same time, as Grace's subplot might've been lengthened to give it more depth, or just cut altogether.

Chase is most successful at depicting a father and son.  Gandolfini is phenomenal as Pat, a frustrating and frustrated man anchored to a woman incapable of joy.  His pre-college scenes with Douglas have the aura of Italian-American Rockwell, as they both watch the Twilight Zone while eating ice cream.  The son tries to explain it to the dad, the dad doesn't fully get it but humors his kid, the son talks about joining the army, the dad responds back with cliched advice that the son readily absorbs.  In a lesser actor's hands, it would come off as condescending, but Gandolfini is loving that moment, and Magaro is giving it back.  Once Douglas gets back from college, all that is gone, the rebellious son now anxious to leap at every opportunity to remove a brick from his father's worldview, not out of a desire to enlighten but a desire to hurt.  Holiday dinners are ruined, breakfasts turn hostile.  Chase walks some of this back as the film continues and some reconciliation is allowed, but the wounds are still too fresh for real honesty and vulnerability.  As cinematic father-son relationships go, this is a strong one, so specific in some of its nuances that it must be taken partly from Chase's life.

While Chase succeeds the strongest in the aforementioned area, he seems most interested in the experience of forming a band, which Chase did when he was Douglas's age, possibly also to get girls.  The film opens with pre-Rolling Stones Keith Richards and Mick Jagger meeting on a train, discussing their interests in music and the kind of instruments they practice on.  If these two guys could do it, why not Douglas and his friends?  It's hardly a spoiler to say that The Twylight Zones don't break out, due to a mix of inter-band politics, bad luck, and an unwillingness to fully commit.  They are talented enough, and Chase does a great job with the musical scenes, filming them in as sensual a way as possible.  However, the band's progress is muddled, as large stretches of time pass between performing.  It's not the least interesting facet of the film, but it's another too-small piece in a film with big ambitions.

Perceived flaws continue in some of the film's characterization. For half the film, Magaro is fully inhabiting the prototypical know-it-all teenager who comes home from two months of college and now knows everything about the world.  He plays it well, and the character is often right in what he's saying, but is so insufferable as to turn the audience against him.  Chase also recycles wholesale from the Sopranos, especially the mother character who is a cut-and-paste job on Livia Soprano.  Price is fine, but she'll never surpass Nancy Marchand.  These issues, plus the noble problem of biting off more than it can swallow, make Not Fade Away somewhat disappointing as it comes from the creator of one of my favorite TV shows and the ostensible father of the current Golden Age of Television.  An inventive, enthralling ending, something Chase is known for, can't quite erase my misgivings.  C+  

By Jon Kissel

Sunshine Cleaning shares a lot with another dark indie comedy about economic difficulty and family dysfunction.  A me-too attempt to replicate Little Miss Sunshine's success, Sunshine Cleaning casts Alan Arkin as a foul-mouthed, swindler grandpa, a very similar role to the one that won him an Oscar.  There's also a precocious kid that is only understood by his family, and plenty of pathos mixed in with the mostly light tone.  The most important thing Sunshine Cleaning shares with Little Miss Sunshine is that they're both plainly good movies, stumbling into cutesiness on occasion, but still about recognizable people going through recognizable problems.

Sunshine Cleaning trades a VW van with a starter problem for a van filled with biohazard removal material.  For down-on-their-luck sisters Rose and Norah Lorkowski (Amy Adams and Emily Blunt), that van is the key to a better life, kick-started by the lucrative world of scrubbing blood off bathroom tiles and disposing of mattresses that people have died on.  Their first jobs are fueled by elbow grease and over-the-counter cleaners, leaving the viewer to question if they're doing this right.  Turns out they aren't, as mattresses stained with blood and infected with maggots don't go in the dumpster.  As they learn about standard practices from helpful clerk Clifton Colllins Jr., their titular business steadily grows, though Rose is overconfident and Norah has a nagging curiosity that leads her to connect with the surviving daughter (Mary Lynn Rajskub) of one of their 'clients.'

The business is the effect, and Sunshine Cleaning also addresses the causes that put Rose and Norah on this path.  Both are squeaking by when the film opens, with Rose working as a maid and Norah being fired from her waitressing job.  Rose's young son Oscar (Jason Spevack)is being difficult at school, to the point where he's recommended to be medicated, and her and Norah's father, played by Arkin, is one failed scam away from destitution.  It's a succinct picture of the working poor, barely keeping it together.  They'd be much worse off without each other, and the chemistry the actors have with each other is readily apparent.  Norah is the permissive aunt, Oscar loves spending time with his grandpa, and as the responsible one, Rose is not just a hectoring killjoy.  It's easy to root for this family's success.

As the leads, Adams and Blunt are both excellent.  In 2008, Adams was just leaving the buoyant Junebug/Enchanted stage of her career for the more serious Doubt/David O. Russell stage, and she has a foot in both worlds here.  Rose is a pessimist masquerading as a sunny optimist, certain things will fail but constantly trying to paste her happy face on anyways.  Her aspirational mantra, recited every day, might lack conviction, but when things are going well, there's no one better at selling the depths and relief of infectious joy as Adams.  As the hipster-y sister, Blunt is a nice counterweight to Adams.  She gets most of the laughs in the film, but can be cutting when called for.  Her Norah sees through her sister's facade and isn't afraid to call her on it.  Norah is also given to indulge in the raw emotion that Rose doesn't have time for, and a scene involving her under a train bridge proves to be one of the film's best, pure catharsis that Blunt luxuriates in.  Most importantly, the two actresses are believable as siblings with a long history, as their relationship is the key to the film.

The body-disposal elements are opportunities for emotion and black comedy.  Setting aside the human suffering that exists in the background, Rose is just happy to get a gig, accepting calls with way too much enthusiasm.  Writer Megan Holley wisely doesn't use Rose's excitement to embarrass her or teach her a cheap lesson.  It's always clear that a person died in this home or apartment, but it's also clear that this is going to bring Rose to the next level of income.  She can be solemn and happy at the same time.  The inclusion of the Rajskub character emphasizes the dual nature of the business.  All that's left of the deceased's body might be a stain on an easy chair, but they also leave family and friends who shouldn't be left with their loved one's gore after they're gone.  It feels like an accurate and fair portrayal for anyone that does this kind of work.

Sunshine Cleaning engages in indie tropes that keep it from greatness, mostly revolving around Oscar, and it's obvious how much it's in debt to Little Miss Sunshine.  Still, director Christine Jeffs' film can stand on its own with the aid of its empathetic script and the endearing lead performances.  Even when maggots are falling on their heads, Adams and Blunt are supremely watchable.  B

By Jon Kissel

Yorgos Lanthimos's Dogtooth remains one of the wackier films I've ever seen, a perfect balancing act between wanting to know more about the setting, and wanting the characters to escape it.  As Dogtooth looms so large, Lanthimos's follow-up Alps cannot help but be compared to it, conditioning me to expect the unexpected.  There are some similarities, but Alps separates itself by expanding the world with more uniquely-written characters.  

Like Dogtooth, Alps deliberately parcels out information about the characters and the plot.  It isn't until a good chunk of the film has elapsed that the viewer gets a good sense of what's happening, though most of the characters are never named.  Lanthimos starts his film by introducing four characters; a dancer (Ariane Labed), her coach (Johnny Vekris), a nurse (Angeliki Papoulia), and a paramedic (Aris Servetalis).  Initially shown going about their lives, some irregularities crop up, like the nurse and the paramedic asking the parents of a gravely-injured teenage girl for the girl's personal likes and dislikes.  Eventually, the four main characters are brought together and reveal themselves as part of a moonlighting acting troupe called the Alps.  The characters they inhabit are actually the recently deceased or broken-up-with, and grieving families/ex-boyfriends hire them to help grapple with the loss.  Led by the paramedic, this endeavor appears to be in high demand, as all four regularly pretend to be someone else outside of their day jobs.

Of the Alps group, the most attention is paid to the nurse.  Lanthimos follows her throughout the day, at the hospital, where the group generates most of their business, at the acting gigs, and at home, where she takes care of her elderly father (Stavros Psyllakis).  She also generates the bulk of the film's conflict, as when the teenager dies, the family hires her without the knowledge of the rest of the group.  The nurse grapples with the good she perceives her acting job to do, and her desire to have a life of her own.  She bitterly sits alone and watches her father at senior gatherings, dancing the night away, while the rest of her free time is spent serving the emotional needs of her clients.  Dogtooth trapped its characters in an estate, while Alps traps its main character in a prison of her own making, drowning in her good intentions.

The other Alps get less screentime but do get their own plots within the strange world of the film.  The dancer, specializing in rhythmic gymnastics, is frustrated that her coach makes her dance to classical music, instead of the pop music she wants.  This battle frames the film, serving as the opening and closing scenes.  Lanthimos does love to film people dancing.  The relationship between the dancer and the coach is unsettling, with the age difference suggesting father-daughter but there's also an incestual dynamic reminiscent of Dogtooth.  The paramedic is shown as comforting with the clients, but mercenary with their payments behind their back, disappointed when told a possible gig is off because the patient lived.  He's also a tyrannical leader, putting those who disobey through cruel punishments.  A scene involving a club is an exercise in unbearable tension, as the inevitable result is delayed until the last possible second.  Though no backstory is related, the players are all fleshed-out enough that for each of them, the viewer can draw enough of a conclusion about why they're doing what they're doing.

Growing the world of Alps from the small estate of Dogtooth is both a plus and a minus.  In the plus category, it's good to see more reactions to the oddities Lanthimos constructs, but on the other hand, the various subplots aren't as concise and focused.  Alps is a more diffuse film, with several characters spinning off in their own directions.  It might not be Dogtooth, but Alps is another odd and singular experience.  Lanthimos stuffs this film with so many unique scenes and images that each new scene is anxiously awaited.  Things might be bad in Greece now, but they can at least count one of cinema's most interesting filmmakers as one of their own.  B

By Jon Kissel

Mumblecore practitioner Lynn Shelton goes back to the well of young adults questioning the path their lives have taken in Laggies, but compared to something like Humpday or Your Sister's Sister, this is as mainstream as she's likely to get.  I've always considered her lighter than genre compatriots like Noah Baumbach or Nicole Holofcener, and Laggies further solidifies that opinion.  Shelton's latest is shooting for wide appeal, and while it unfairly flopped, it remains a film with a lot of life in it. 

After a brief intro depicting her memorable, decade-previous prom, Keira Knightley's character Megan is brought into the present waving a sign on a street corner for her father's (Jeff Garlin) business.  Fully aware of her station in life, she's making the best of it, barely bothered by how much her friends have surpassed her, both economically and in adult milestones.  At a friend's (a severe, against-type Ellie Kemper) wedding, her boyfriend Anthony (Mark Webber), who she's been dating since before that prom, starts to propose, and Megan immediately cuts him off and runs out of the reception hall.  Desperate for a drink, she heads to a liquor store and meets a group of kids led by Annika (Chloe Grace-Moretz), an obvious high schooler trolling for booze.  Megan's game, and helps them knock back the two-buck chuck she subsequently buys for them.  The next day, she sits down with Anthony and agrees to elope, but after she takes a week for a previously-scheduled wellness/career retreat.  However, instead of going to the retreat, she crashes with Annika and her divorcee father Craig (Sam Rockwell), regressing back to her idealized high school existence before she has to make the biggest decision of her life.

In her prior, script-driven films, Shelton has had to rely on her actors, and she knows how to get those actors to give good performances.  The same is true in Laggies, as the main cast is all able to inhabit their roles convincingly.  Knightley is perfectly cast as Megan, a buoyant presence with little patience for sincerity.  Her suppressed chuckles at Kemper's overwrought wedding vows and interpretive first dance are completely endearing, and the way she throws herself over her parents' couch implies an act done many times before, and not in her teenager days either.  For a character that's willfully not getting her life together, Knightley keeps the viewer from wanting to dismiss her as lazy.  Once Megan gets into Annika's house, Rockwell steals the film.  His relationship with his daughter is nicely lived-in, especially a running gag involving his box of wine that feels like something Shelton or writer Andrea Siegel has personally experienced.  The high school characters avoid the pratfalls of snarkiness or disdain so many other films give characters their age, and while Grace-Moretz is fine, her friend Misty, played by Kaitlyn Dever, is hilarious, brimming with confidence and owning every room she walks into.  All the actors have strong chemistry and a nice rapport with each other, making it easy to imagine why Megan would want to be around people so much younger than her, and vice versa.

As a hang-out movie, Laggies is great fun in individual scenes.  Thematically, it's tragically simplistic.  The film manages to create these recognizable characters but loses respect for them as the movie reaches its ending.  Megan and Annika both have a lot of the same problems of indecisiveness and a tendency to perseverate around their real wishes, a twinning that doesn't go anywhere, outside of their romantic interests.  Annika is chasing a high school boy, and the crux of her plot revolves around asking him to prom.  Her problems in school or deciding what to do in her future are elided in favor of this stock high school kid straight out of central casting.  The objects of Megan's affections, Anthony and Craig, give her a real choice, but again, the film ends with her having made a decision about which of them to be with, not what to do with her life.  In a presumed epilogue, Megan, having made her romantic choice, goes back to waving signs the next day and her new boyfriend brings her a smoothie.  For two of its female characters, the biggest decisions are which man should they be with, and other questions are introduced but not answered. 

That reduction of the main character's problems makes Laggies a small film, though one elevated by its performances.  Knightley, Rockwell, and Dever are all great, Grace-Moretz continues to make impressive choices at this stage in her career, and personal favorite Kemper successfully tries on a new character.  More straight romantic comedy than introspective character piece, it lacks the depth of Shelton's earlier work while retaining the well-drawn characters.  If that ending hadn't felt like such a studio cop-out, Shelton would be much better suited to bridge the gaps between the two worlds of mainstream and indie cinema.  C+

By Jon Kissel

The Dear in Dear White People is less 'beloved' and more 'to be addressed.'  There's plenty of white people behaving badly here.  This semi-autobiographical ensemble piece about a liberal arts university struggling with its race relations remains as depressingly timely as ever.  As a debut from director Justin Simien, Dear White People successfully mixes character and satire before building to a stomach-churning climax.

At Winchester University, the historically black dorm is being integrated, and the reactions from several prominent black students are varied.  For film student Samantha (Tessa Thompson), who deejays the campus radio show Dear White People, she's outraged that the administration would try and dilute the decades-old culture of the dorm.  Troy (Brandon Bell), the outgoing dorm president and dean's son, is too consumed with academic pressure from his father (Dennis Haysbert) to really care, and even if he had more time, he's fine mixing in both worlds with his white girlfriend.  Fashionista Coco (Teyonah Parris) can't get excited about it, as she's more concerned about the reality show producer on campus and growing her youtube channel.  As the debate consumes the students, self-proclaimed above-it-all satirist and son of the school president Kurt (Kyle Gallner) decides to take the piss out of the self-serious Sam and her comrades, enlisting Troy and Coco.  Chronicling the goings-on is Lionel (Tyler James Williams), a black, gay journalism student unwanted by all groups.

Amidst the debate over the dorm integration, the characters take every opportunity to talk about race.  Sam is the loudest and clearest voice, always ready with a historical perspective on a microaggression, thus turning it into a macroaggression.  Those not with her are varying levels of sell-outs from the oofta Troy, comfortable being white dudes' one black friend, to the nosejob Coco, clad in weaves and unwilling to make people uneasy with her blackness.  Troy's relationship provides for the depressing scenario of a white girl dating a black guy for the exoticism.  Kurt and his father (Peter Syvertson) get to be the voices of unexamined privilege, declaring affirmative action a scam and racism a thing of the past.  Lionel is largely above the proceedings, but he's so desperate to fit in with someone that he'll let a white acquaintance touch his large afro.  Race suffuses every interaction.

This would be hectoring if the characters weren't sufficiently interesting.  Lionel is the most sympathetic, given a puppy-dog appearance by Williams that fits with the character's loneliness.  Coco's the most interesting, grappling with her reality-show goals and the self-hatred generated by their pursuit.  Troy and Sam are slightly problematic, as Troy is a typical overstressed student and Simien leans heavily on Sam's mixed race heritage pulling her between two worlds.  Bell isn't really elevating the character, but Thompson is and then some, giving her character the charisma to not be an insufferable mess of righteous indignation.  Kurt is also underwritten as a stock oblivious bro.  Dear White People isn't a subtle movie but its antagonists are painted in broader colors than are necessary.

Simien's film is perceptively written and consistently well-shot, starting from its opening intro of characters perfectly framed.  His film scoffs at the idea of a post-racial America, culminating in a grotesque themed party replete with body paint, grills, and fake guns.  That Simien adds pictures and video from real-life examples of the same over the end credits demonstrates that the talking points stressed in Dear White People need to be discussed.  That his film is not just a surreptitious lecture in movie clothing is a testament to his talent.  B

By Jon Kissel

Seeing as the images that spill out of Park Chan-wook's brain suggest a very unique mind, it's fitting that the Korean auteur would set a film in a mental institution.  This setting, seen through the eyes of the patients, allows him to enter the world of magical realism and communicate characters' delusions in his typical, over-the-top fashion.  The result is that I'm a Cyborg But That's OK is Park's most visually striking film, skimping on his penchant for violence while indulging his knack for world-building and memorable characters.

Beginning in a sea of uniformity, red-scrubbed factory workers are putting together electronics equipment while a cheery supervisor gives instructions and corporate pick-me-up's over the intercom.  As Park's camera lands on one particular worker named Young-goon (Im Soo-jung), the instructions shift from their prior exhortations of cleanliness and order, and she is told to cut open her wrist and feed wires inside.  Young-goon happily complies, and the next time the viewer see her, she's catatonic in a mental hospital.  Believing herself to be a cyborg, she needs to get her power recharged so she can kill the staff and return her grandma's dentures to her at her nursing home.  Young-goon's beliefs convince her that she doesn't need food, and she instead nourishes herself by licking batteries.  Unmoved by the staff's interventions and therapies, helpful patient Park Il-soon (Rain) takes a break from 'stealing' the other patients' best qualities to convince Young-goon that she needs to eat while not breaking the news to her about her humanity.

As a Korean Cuckoo's Nest, I'm a Cyborg But That's OK shares that film's disdain for the hospital staff.  Chaotic group sessions are depicted as a waste of time, devolving into chaos, tears, and shouting.  Some of the procedures may be warranted, but since this film is solely focused on the patients, those procedures become cruel instead.  Shock therapy, deadening pills, and a painful scene of force-feeding, in which the nutrient paste is traced as it snakes its way around its tubing and into a nose, are all difficult to watch. 

Where I'm a Cyborg and Cuckoo's Nest part ways is that the patients here are decidedly ill.  Il-soon is a compulsive thief and Young-goon has a serious disorder.  Besides the threat to her health that her refusal to eat poses, she also lays out her cyborg philosophy in the film's strangest discursion.  In a series of children's book illustrations, the seven deadly cyborg sins are described by pictures of little girls being mean to cartoon cats.  The deadliest sin is sympathy, the one thing keeping Young-goon from killing the staff and escaping.  If she was able to cleanse herself of that, plus the other deadly sin of hesitation, she would surely kill everyone, though probably not in the cybernetic way she imagines. 

Striking that balance between harsh medicine, and watching the charismatic ill go about their jolly business is a difficult needle for I'm a Cyborg to thread.  Park comes uncomfortably close to mental illness as an excuse for quirkiness, but the majority of the film allows for a surprisingly tender tone, in which Il-soon has to find a way to help Young-goon in the confines of her delusion.  He treats her cyborg problems seriously instead of insisting that she's purely human.  Both lead actors sell their dilemma, with Rain wrestling with the best way to talk to Young-goon, and Soo-jung fundamentally unable to keep her human emotions poking through her cyborg worldview.  Less expressive actors would've tilted the equation towards patronizing or ridiculous, but as is, their chemistry is apparent.

Given free rein to play in the minds of the mentally ill, Park goes as far as he's ever gone in creating some indelible scenes.  Young-goon is the center of several of these, particularly an outdoor, methodical, imaginary shootout captured from above in one shot, but the other patients add to the world as well.  An older patient swears by the power of her fuzzy slippers to make the wearer levitate, and sequences revolving around those slippers are like something out of Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli.  In fact, this easily could've been one of that studio's animated productions, with all its bright colors and sudden transformations. 

I'm a Cyborg But That's OK would be a patronizing, romanticized disaster in lesser hands, but with Park at the tiller, it treads the narrow path between making mental illness seem fun and making it seem intolerable.  There's no social justice angle here, in which those that think differently are branded as crazy and locked away, but it does allow that drastically different perceptions of the world might be valuable in their own way.  Like his protagonist, Park's whimsical film is wholly unique in its approach, and there's certainly a place for it.  B