As soon as Ember earns her dad’s trust, he can retire and she’ll run his shop in Fire Town. Unless her hot temper ruins everything. Or she falls for that sweet guy from Water Town. Or both.
Daddy issues. Romance. Coming of Age. There’s a lot about Pixar’s latest, Elemental, that feels familiar. Common, even. And if there’s one thing the animation giant’s managed to avoid for most of its almost 30 years in the business, it’s being predictable.
It doesn’t help that the characters immediately put you in mind of Pixar’s wildly imaginative Inside Out. But there’s little about the film that will strike you as wildly imaginative, although the animation is sometimes breathtaking, beauty spilling off all four sides of the screen. Animators explore and exploit all opportunities to find wonder in the glow and fluidity of characters and the magnificent 3D experience is well worth annoyance of the glasses.
The magic in this story’s telling lies less in an inspired, imaginative plot and more in the nuances of the execution. Ember, a child of immigrants, is seen as a danger to most of the rest of the city. And yet, as she traverses a landscape of people made of water, she’s the one who’s actually in danger.
John Hoberg, Kat Likkel and Brenda Hsueh’s crisp writing deftly navigates microaggressions, misunderstandings, and the anger associated with helpfully advising someone to “water down” their culture.
Back in 2015, Elemental director Peter Sohn made the unduly overlooked The Good Dinosaur. It was a beautiful piece of visual storytelling, charming and well-acted, although, like this one, the plot itself lacked imagination. I hope more people give Elemental a chance. It lacks the uniqueness of Pixar’s greatest or most enduring efforts, but it’s a touching, gorgeous, emotional and forgiving tale.
Don’t be late or you’ll miss perhaps the best reason to see Pixar films, the shorts that precede the feature. In Carl’s Date (which will also appear as episode 1, season 2 of the Disney+ show Dug Days), our beloved Carl (Edward Asner) from Up! needs a little courage to go through with his first date since Ellie. Crushingly lovely.
If you are looking for a wondrously macabre fairy tale, a nightmare that’s both fanciful and terrifying, writer/director Ryan Stevens Harris has a tale to tell.
Moon Garden delivers a journey through the fertile imagination of 5-year-old Emma (Haven Lee Harris). We know from Act 1 that she funnels what she picks up from the world around her into delightfully odd, even spooky fantasies for her toys to act out. So, when trouble that’s been brewing at home (and spilling into Emma’s playtime fantasies) unexpectedly puts the tot in a coma, that fantasy world drowns out reality and Emma finds herself on a very big journey indeed.
Of its many successes Moon Garden can boast set design, creature design and stop motion work at the top. All are very solid, and all collaborate to evoke a big, dark, scary world where logic bends but wonder never dies.
Creature design – particularly the first creature – lives up to the expectations set early when we see Emma’s toys. And the film benefits immeasurably from a charming and believable central performance by young Harris. Excellent editing helps to make her physical journey seem more plausible, but her laughter and tears never feel less than genuine.
Augie Duke, playing Emma’s distraught mother, and Brionne Davis as Dad Alex are less impressive, although it may be that the artistic vision is so much stronger in the fantastical storyline that the real-world of the parents received short shrift.
Other characters glimpsed briefly within the otherworldly realm are more compelling, aided by stagey old school costuming. Wisely, the filmmaker blurs lines between good and evil, giving the story itself a kind of fluidity that feels appropriate to a dreamscape and also keeps you constantly surprised.
The story, and to a degree the entire film, is hokey but Moon Garden generates more than enough of the macabre in old school fairy tales to evoke a wondrous nightmare energy.
When a human being just doesn’t have enough meaningful ways to invest their time, they can go a little nuts. Here’s to the horror of life as the underappreciated, boxed-in, cast off and/or misused housewife. May they all draw blood.
5. Jakob’s Wife (2021)
Director/co-writer Travis Stevens (Girl on the Third Floor) wraps this bloodlusty tale of the pastor’s wife (Barbara Crampton) and the vampire in a fun, retro vibe of ’80s low-budget, practical, blood-spurting gore.
To see a female character of this age experiencing a spiritual, philosophical and sexual awakening is alone refreshing, and Crampton (looking fantastic, by the way) makes the character’s cautious embrace of her new ageless wonder an empowering – and even touching – journey.
With Crampton so completely in her element, Jakob’s Wife is an irresistibly fun take on the bite of eternity. Here, it’s not about taking souls, it’s about empowering them. And once this lady is a vamp, we’re the lucky ones.
4. The Stepford Wives (1975)
Ira Levin’s novel left a scar and filmmaker Bryan Forbes and star Katherine Ross pick that scab to deliver a satirical thriller that is still surprisingly unsettling. What both the novel and the film understand is a genuine fear that the person you love, whose faults you accept and who you plan to age and die with, has no interest in what’s inside you at all. You – the actual you – mean nothing at all.
It’s the idea of trophy wife taken to a diabolical extreme (as even the outright trophy wife isn’t long to last, what with the inevitability of aging and all). The term Stepford Wife worked its way into the lexicon, and there’s a clear pot boiler, B-movie feel to this film, but it still leaves a mark.
3. Dumplings (2004)
Fruit Chan’s Dumplings satirizes the global obsession with youth and beauty in taboo-shattering ways.
Gorgeous if off-putting Aunt Mei (Bai Ling) balances her time between performing black market medical functions and selling youth-rejuvenating dumplings. She’s found a customer for the dumplings in Mrs. Li (Miriam Yeung ChinWah), the discarded wife of a wealthy man.
With darkest humor and sharp insight, Chan situates the horror in a specifically Chinese history but skewers a youth-obsessed culture that circles the globe.
The secret ingredient is Bai Ling, whose performance is a sly work of genius. There are layers to this character that are only slowly revealed, but Ling clearly knows them inside and out, hinting at them all the while and flatly surprised at everything Mrs. Li (and you and everyone else) hasn’t guessed.
Gross and intimate, uncomfortable and wise, mean, well-acted and really nicely photographed, Dumplings will likely not be for everyone. But it’s certainly a change of pace from your day-to-day horror diet.
2. Swallow (2019)
Putting a relevant twist on the classic “horrific mother” trope, writer/director Carlo Mirabella-Davis uses the rare eating disorder pica to anchor his exploration of gender dynamics and, in particular, control.
Where Mirabella-Davis’s talent for building tension and framing scenes drive the narrative, it’s Bennett’s performance that elevates the film. Serving as executive producer as well as star, Haley Bennett transforms over the course of the film.
When things finally burst, director and star shake off the traditional storytelling, the Yellow Wallpaper or Awakening or even Safe. The filmmaker’s vision and imagery come full circle with a bold conclusion worthy of Bennett’s performance.
1. Watcher (2022)
If you’re a fan at all of genre films, chances are good Watcher will look plenty familiar. But in her feature debut, writer/director Chloe Okuno wields that familiarity with a cunning that leaves you feeling unnerved in urgent and important ways.
Maika Monroe is sensational as Julia, an actress who has left New York behind to follow husband Francis (Karl Glusman) and begin a new life in Bucharest.
Monroe emits an effectively fragile resolve. The absence of subtitles helps us relate to Julia immediately, and Monroe never squanders that sympathy, grounding the film at even the most questionably formulaic moments.
Mounting indignities create a subtle yet unmistakable nod to a culture that expects women to ignore their better judgment for the sake of being polite. Okuno envelopes Julia in male gazes that carry threats of varying degrees, all building to a bloody and damn satisfying crescendo.
A timely deconstruction of patriotism as convenient excuse for violence – xenophobia, homophobia, you name it – filmmaker Ted Geoghegan’s latest genre film costumes a contemporary message in WWII army greens.
Brooklyn 45 spends a single, specific evening with a handful of war buddies. It is Christmas Eve. The war has just ended. Lt. Col. Clive “Hock” Hockstatter (Larry Fessenden) probably shouldn’t be alone for Christmas. He’s been lost in grief since his wife Suzy took her own life on Thanksgiving, raving about Nazi spies in the building. So, pals Mjr. Archibald Stanton (Jeremy Holm, The Ranger), Mjr. Paul DiFranco (Ezra Buzzington), master interrogator Marla Sheridan (Anne Ramsay) and her husband, Pentagon pencil pusher Bob (Ron E. Rains) head to Hock’s Brooklyn apartment to make merry.
What they don’t expect is a séance, but to their surprise, that’s what they get. It doesn’t go well. Lights flicker, candles light themselves, there’s ectoplasm, phantasmic voices – and an unsettling knocking in the closet.
Geoghegan’s crafted a highly theatrical, even stagey, production. Almost exclusively set on a single space, as the full cast is trapped in Hock’s dining room for nearly the film’s full 92-minute run time, the movie could easily have taken shape as a stage play. Or, given the spot-on era the filmmaker creates, it could have succeeded as a radio play. The theatricality works, even when the dialog is occasionally overwritten or expected to deliver too much exposition.
The success comes in equal parts from fine performances and Goeghegan’s nimble thematic work. By pressing these people – war heroes of the “greatest generation” – hard enough, he not only depicts an all-too-familiar slippery slope to self-justified violence, but chips away at a whitewashed American history.
Ramsay is particularly impressive, her performance layered and authentic despite the movie’s theatricality. Kristina Klebe – a surprise guest – is a bit hamstrung with the film’s most stilted dialog, but she and Ramsay share an unsettling chemistry that heightens tension.
Goeghegan delivers some jump scares and some gore, but what his film finds scariest is what lies in a beating human heart.
An awful lot of people have reimagined Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in an awful lot of ways. What makes writer/director Bomani J. Story’s take, The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster, so effective is that it tackles a lot in very little time and handles all of it heartbreakingly well.
Laya DeLeon Hayes is Vicaria, a gifted student whose heart and brains overtake her wisdom when she decides that death itself is the disease that must be cured, and that she’s the one to cure it. It was Dr. Frankenstein’s vanity that pushed him to discover the secret to life itself. For Vicaria, the reason is far more tragic, but the result is the same.
To say that Story situates Shelley’s tale in the context of drug violence would be to sell his film short. He’s moved the story from European castles and laboratories to the projects, where Vicaria’s mother fell victim to a drive-by shooting, her brother was shot to death on a drug deal gone wrong, and her father deals with his grief by using. But drugs are just part of the larger problem, the almost escapable, systemic and cyclical nature of violence and poverty.
One of the reasons the Frankenstein monster is so effective so often is that he is tragically monstrous. He is violent through no real fault of his own but as a reaction to an environment that hates him, treats him with cruelty, fear and malice. We simultaneously root for and against this monster.
The trick is to make us root for the creator, and DeLeon Hayes delivers a layered, touching performance that accomplishes this. Vicaria is so young, so hopeful, and so full of fight that we forgive her short sightedness and her immediate (and understandable) fear. Vicaria’s missteps are understandable because she’s a kid, and her heart’s in the right place, which is why she keeps making the worst decisions. It’s a powerfully compelling performance.
Story’s chosen genre may feel slight, even campy, but the tropes belie some densely packed ideas, and there’s a current of empathy running through the film that not only separates this from other Frankenstein tales, but deepens the film’s genuine sense of tragedy.
Not every performance is as strong as DeLeon Hayes’s, and sometimes Story’s dialog is asked to carry too much historical significance. But there’s no denying the power he wrung from the source material.
In 1970, former Air Force pilot Gene Burkard launched a mail-order fashion catalog that would ultimately help revolutionize post-‘60s men’s attire: International Male. His goal was to craft and sell clothing to men – queer and straight alike – that moved beyond the drabber business and business-casual attires of post-World War II America. He succeeded.
All Man lays out the history of both Gene Burkard’s life and his magazine creation, from its beginnings to its ultimate closure in the late-2000s. Nary a stone is unturned, as the documentary speaks to Burkard, his business partners, designers, models, photographers, sales reps, store managers, office workers, and more than a few subscribers – including those who are now celebrities (such as narrator Matt Bomer).
The magazine’s journey runs hand in hand with that of the LGBTQIA+ community’s history in America, so the fact that none of these macro issues are overlooked is a major positive. So too are the more personal issues tied to the magazine, such as gay men of all types being able to use the magazine as an outlet for their fantasies and their own personal self-expression through fashion across multiple decades where being out and proud was less culturally acceptable than it is today. This also holds true for straight men, who – through the changes in fashion pioneered within the magazine – were also able to express themselves with more colorful and dynamic clothing than just the suits, slacks, and dress shirts that had a stranglehold on men’s styles in post-war America.
Documentarians Bryan Darling and Jesse Finlay Reed have crafted a thoroughly engaging and deeply informative piece of filmmaking that is well worth seeing, regardless of your background in life. All Man focuses on a piece of history that many may not be aware of – very likely, given that the publication’s current Wikipedia page is shockingly shorter than this review.
The above title “Masculinity is a spectrum” comes from a statement in the film and it couldn’t be more accurate. It IS a spectrum and we all can choose how we want to express ourselves on that spectrum, in part because of the work done by the people behind this magazine.
Do you remember how cool Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse was? It was the coolest! A film that celebrated everything a comic book film could be, everything a hero could be, and everything a cartoon could be.
Expect all that again as Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) returns, this time sharing screentime and character arc almost 50/50 with Spider-Woman Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld), who starts us off with her own troubled tale of balancing great responsibility with great power. Things get so bad she has to abandon this universe, and her one real friend.
That friend has his own troubles. Mr. and Mrs. Morales (do not call them by their first names) know Miles is keeping something from them, a problem that’s only exacerbated by some goofy villain-of-the-week (Jason Schwartzman, priceless).
Or is Miles taking The Spot less seriously than he should?
He is! No matter, he gets to help Gwen and bunches of other (often hilarious) Spider-Men (and -Women and -Cats and -Dinosaurs). But it all goes to hell in a riotous celebration of animated style and spot-on writing that simultaneously tease and embrace comic book lore.
Schwartzman is not the only killer new talent crawling the web. Daniel Kaluuya lends his voice to the outstanding punk rock Spider-Man, Hobie; Issa Rae is the badass on wheels Jessica Drew; Karan Soni voices the huggable Pavitr, or Spider-Man India. Rachel Dratch plays essentially an animated version of herself as Miles’s high school principal, and the great Oscar Isaac delivers all the serious lines as Spider-Man Miguel O’Hara. Add in the returning Brian Tyree-Henry, Luna Lauren Velez and Mahershala Ali, and that is a star-studded lineup. Studs aplenty!
That wattage is almost outshone by the animation. Every conceivable style, melding one scene to the next, bringing conflict, love and heroism to startling, vivid, utterly gorgeous life.
Writers Phil Lords and Christopher Miller (The Lego Movie, The Mitchells vs. the Machines) return, bringing Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Ringswriter Dave Callaham along for the sequel. Their story is wild but never illogical, delivering a heady balance of quantum physics, Jungian psychology and pop culture homages while rarely feeling like a self-congratulatory explosion of capitalism. Heart strings are tugged, and it helps if you’ve seen the previous installment. (If you haven’t, that’s on you, man. Rectify that situation immediately.)
If there is a drawback (and judging the reaction of some of the youngsters in my screening, there may be), it’s that Across the Spider-Verse is a cliffhanger. If you’re cool with an amazing second act in a three-story arc (The Empire Strikes Back, The Two Towers), you’ll probably be OK with it. Maybe warn your kids, but don’t let it dissuade you from taking in this animated glory on the biggest screen you can find.
Tell me you’re having a bad day without telling me you’re having a bad day.
Argentinian filmmaker Valentin Javier Diment knows how to articulate desperation with nothing more onscreen than a sidewalk, heavy rain, and a broken heel. From there, The Attachment Diaries sets up an eerie power dynamic between forlorn Carla (Jimena Anganuzzi) – pregnant, alone, very wet and in need of help – and Irina (Lola Berthet).
It’s 1970-something. Irina is a doctor willing to perform abortions, but Carla, is too far along. If she’s willing, Carla can stay with Irina, give birth and make some money with an arranged adoption.
Diment invests time in both characters, neither of whom is quite what she seems. The more we learn about each the less we really know, but trouble’s brewing, that’s for sure. And the greater the intrigue, the stranger the film.
The filmmaker wades hip deep into triggers: abortion, self-harm, sexual assault. And his approach unsentimental. No, it is blunt. Nothing is sacred, or to be honest, even interesting enough for Irina’s thoughtful consideration. Trauma and mental health are not treated delicately, either. No kid gloves, but loads of intentionality – Carla is often as shocked by Irina’s blasé attitude as we are, and Carla’s no delicate flower.
Berthet and Anganuzzi deliver everything a moviegoer needs from the heroes and villains of this twisted tale. Berthet is the hard candy shell to Anganuzzi’s messy middle, and neither character is easy to root for. But together, their almost hostile yet somehow tender chemistry fuels the human madness developing in the film.
Flashes of Hitchcock and Almodovar (that’s a fun pairing!) flavor the film’s aesthetic and movement, Diment blending inspiration with his own impeccable sense of detail to create a film full of intensity, eccentricity and style.
The filmmaker sets up gorgeous shots, both to keep you off balance and for the sheer odd beauty of them. His use of color is also fascinating. At first it feels a little too on-the-nose, but the truth is that, once again, he’s underscoring a change in the power dynamic.
The escalating lunacy nearly tips to melodrama or even parody, but the duo at the center of it all manages to hold it all together somehow. The Attachment Diaries is a dark, bizarre mystery thriller that flirts with B-movie status in a way that somehow makes the experience richer than it had any real right to be.
