Nothing like a homophobic township with the power of God behind it to execute a modern version of the “Crucible,” complete with supernatural manifestations. Adrian Chiarella’s directorial debut depicts two teens who are tormented for who they are by the usual posse of bullies, as well as a supernatural manifestation.
We meet the boyishly naive Naim (Joe Bird) and edgier Ryan (Stacy Clausen) as two kids exploring an abandoned mill. They get to horsing around, trading punches and falling to the ground in a violent bear hug that quickly relaxes into a loose hug and ultimately a kiss. There it is, they’re rebel lovers going against the grain in the deeply religious rural Australian town where they live.
Naim later witnesses Ryan intimately grappling with another classmate, Hunter (Jeremy Blewitt). Jealous, Ryan tells the town’s pastor (Ewen Lesley), who happens to be Hunter’s dad. What ensues is an exorcism performed by a “deliverance preacher” (Nicholas Hope) brought in to force the gay out of the lads (Naim’s mom, Mia Wasikowska of “Alice in Wonderland,” forces him to endure the ritual because he’s too close to Ryan).
It seems hokey at first, but the brief fire and brimstone rite unleashes a personal demon that torments each boy in isolation, by taking the form of the person each boy desires most (Naim for Ryan, and vice versa). Lust is its lure, bloodlust its mission. It’s a frightening change that no one else can see, and it leads to terrible ends first for a young woman and then for Hunter. Yet somehow, their bullying classmates manage to be worse.
The film’s title refers to the Bible’s third book, which contains Old Testament laws defining sin, purity and sexual conduct that some use to condemn homosexuality.
The small-town dwellers are shepherded into an angry horde by Hope’s outsider. The performances by Bird and Clausen are pivotal, and the rest of the ensemble are also strong. But the characters of Naim and especially Ryan feel underdeveloped. The supernatural element also is wispy. The message, however, is not. Chiarella creates effective eerie and edgy moments. He’s another budding horror auteur like Kane Parsons (“Obsession”) and Curry Baker (“Backrooms”), who know how to craft mood and scene beyond their years, but have room to grow to conjure spirit and soul.
The latest installation of the “Toy Story” franchise extends its record as one of the most adaptable film franchises. Perhaps its success comes from its palpable themes of vulnerability — being replaced, being outgrown or forgotten, becoming irrelevant. Maybe it’s the potpourri of misfits, voiced by A-list talent, that come together to seal the rift du jour dividing them. Of course, the initial 1995 “Toy Story” set the gold standard of CGI animation and pretty much was the catalyst for the Oscar for Best Animated Feature that came into being in 2001 — the 1995 film won a special Oscar for ground-breaking animation, while “Toy Story 3” (2010) and “Toy Story 4” (2019) both won that “Best” award. It also has creative continuity — this new version is directed by Andrew Stanton, who’s been involved in the script and story from the get-go, back in the John Lasseter/pre-Disney years. Stanton’s no slouch behind the lens, with “Finding Nemo” (2003) and “WALL-E” (2008) to his credits (he did also direct the 2012 box-office flop “John Carter”).
In “Toy Story 5,” co-directed by McKenna Harris, Cowgirl Jesse (Joan Cusack) takes center focus, during an all-out effort to find a like-minded companion for eight-year-old Bonnie (Scarlett Spears), who is having difficulty making friends. In “Toy Story 3” Bonnie was gifted the olio of toys when older brother Andy grew up and went off to college.
A myth reconsidered in this grim but powerfully told version of a life that might not have been heroic.
Revisionism is a powerful dispeller of myth. Consider how Oliver Stone, Francis Ford Coppola, and Stanley Kubrick reframed the public understanding of the Vietnam War. Or how Sergio Leone, Sam Peckinpah, and Clint Eastwood cut the morally righteous reins on the American Western.
What about Robin Hood, the legend who stole from the rich and gave to the poor? A regular champion of the poor, like Mother Teresa, and a candidate for a Nobel prize? Not so much in Michael Sarnoski‘s dark reckoning, where Mr. Hood is looking for atonement before his book closes on his not-so-noble reputation. He’s played by
Hugh Jackman with world-weary gravitas, conveying sadness in his eyes and the simmer of rage in his heart.
The film is gorgeously shot by Paul Scola, who worked with Sarnoski previously on “Pig” (2021) — then again, the bare north mountains of Ireland do a lot of this movie’s heavy lifting. We learn early on that this is not Errol Flynn’s swashbuckling Robin Hood. Our Robin has been enmeshed in the cycle of violence all his life, hunted by the kin of those he killed. He’s adroit at bloodshed. There’s no flashback to show us whether the younger Robin’s deeds were derring-do or thuggish savagery.
Who knew that the timing of D-Day was much ado about dueling meteorologists? Obviously, David Haig, whose play about this little-known chapter of the war gets the big-screen treatment in the capable hands of Anthony Maras (the deft thriller, “Hotel Mumbai”) — and Haig, who co-wrote the screenplay. The setting is the Southwick House — a sprawling mansion in England — some 72 hours before the planned invasion that would change the course of history. General Dwight D. “Ike” Eisenhower (Brendan Fraser) tries to hone the fine details of the landing with the other commanders, including British general Bernard Montgomery and his U.S. counterpart, Omar Bradley. The big question is the weather.
Churchill recommends his chief weather guy, Scottish meteorologist Group Captain James Stagg (Andrew Scott, stoic and complex), who gets posted above Ike’s weather guy, Irving Krick (Chris Messina, Michael Jordan’s brash agent in “Air”) — and that’s where the rub comes. Krick, who notched great success in the North Africa campaigns, lives by almanacs and historical trends, while Stagg works from real-time data and tracks the current conditions. Two different methods, two different calls drive Ike and the command team bonkers with just two days until the launch. Stagg predicts 10-foot waves that would blow the landing force off course.
History books chronicle how it all plays out, but Maras and the inspired ensemble reenact it to a deeply compelling effect. Scott and Fraser, a long way from “Mummy” (1999)— anchor the film, with Damian Lewis stealing scenes as Montgomery, both anxious and devilishly cheeky. Kerry Condon makes Kay Summersby, Ike’s indispensable aide, feel essential, her warmth and resolve a counterweight to the chaos around her. Backstories about a failed earlier attempt, led by Ike, that got a lot of young men killed, and the bombing of the hospital where Stagg’s pregnant wife is convalescing, lend human depth. Some of the best insights of “Pressure” are the stark contrast between the British stiff upper lip and American maverick arrogance. The title is a play on weather pressure, the decision to go or not, and the weight of the world. Towards the end, the film shows some ancillary staging of the landing (the 82nd anniversary is nigh), but nothing that will end up in conversations with “Saving Private Ryan” (1998) or “The Longest Day” (1962).
Complicated people in places that are characters in their own right
“Ladies First”
Speaking of gloriously gonzo, Sacha Baron Cohen, the hot mess (said with respect and gratitude) behind the devilishly caustic “Borat” films, stars in this rom-com-lite, gender-reversal spin with a side of nasty. The movie has a killer cast (Charles Dance, Rosamund Pike, Richard E. Grant, Fiona Shaw, Emily Mortimer and the ever-underrated Kathryn Hunter), yet can’t find the footing to distinguish itself.
Director Thea Sharrock based it on the 2018 French comedy “I Am Not an Easy Man,” but the updating triggered “What Women Want” (2000) vibes in me. Maybe that’s because both Cohen and Mel Gibson play chauvinistic ad execs who get gendered comeuppance when a reality-altering happenstance changes the fabric of their universe — Gibson’s self-centered id can hear the thoughts and desires of women nearby, while Cohen’s crass conqueror gets a bop on the head and comes to in a female-driven world where fast food staples are now Burger Queen and Five Gals.
The big timestamp — side note here — is the instantiation of #MeToo. “What Women Want” and “I am Not an Easy Man” predate it, leaving “Ladies First” to walk a delicate line — which it does so with clunky awkwardness. Cohen’s Damien Sachs ascends to head of the Atlas ad agency and promotes newly hired creator Alex Fox (Pike) to be his Guinness team lead for gender optic reasons. Fox overhears Sachs’s pleasing-the-client logic, but before the ugly truth can gain any traction, the world flips and Fox is suddenly Sachs’s boss. We are in a universe where men are used as sex symbols to sell product, and at church it’s the Mother, the Daughter and the Holy She.
The best part of the movie is Shaw as the CEO (in the man’s world she was a lowly receptionist) who wants Sachs’ middle manager as a play thang. Also fun is Hunter’s Glenda, a cleaning woman in one reality and the minter of CEOs in the other. Her gravely British baritone and accompanying demeanor bring a brash bubbly element to the otherwise drab formula. In the she-ocracy Cohen does get to belt out some “Sex Farm” nonsense that’s humorous for a nanosecond, but overall, “Ladies First” is a lot of sharp edges that never find ripe fruit to cut into. Sexism at its most basic is skin deep, but films about It — comedic or not — shouldn’t be.
Based on the bestselling 2022 novel by Shelby Van Pelt and directed by Olivia Newman (“Where the Crawdads Sing”), “Remarkably Bright Creatures” channels Nicholas Sparks by way of centenarian wildlife expert David Attenborough. If that sounds like a lot of tentacles, it should, as the film is narrated by an aging giant octopi named Marcellus. Marcellus lives in an aquarium on the Puget Sound and likes to get out and scamper about at night, which brings him into contact with Tova (Sally Field), a retiree who works the late-night janitorial shift, both to keep busy and to help settle past traumas. One affectionate tentacle touch and Marcellus can tell that there is a “hole” in Tova’s heart. Things get more complicated when Lewis Pullman’s Cameron, a broke struggling musician, takes over Tova’s shift after she twists an ankle. The Sparks-ian angle — human trauma distilled into an airy lite confection — has all three finding closure on that past and healing in the now, through interaction with each other. For the audience, there’s an unsolved mystery to add intrigue.
Marcellus, voiced by Alfred Molina, gives us all the Attenborough octopi factoids we need, and while the film is best when Marcellus is at the center (the FX and such are excellent), Field and her gaggle of aging gal pals — the “knit-wits,” a sewing club with Joan Chen, Beth Grant and Kathy Baker — charm in devilishly understated ways. It’s heartwarming for sure, but never maudlin. Field, a veteran presence, carries the film and knows when to cede the stage to her eight-armed co-star.
Watching “Creatures” sparked the desire in me to go back and watch the Academy Award-winning documentary “My Octopus Teacher” (2020), which plays like “Creatures” IRL. It also has me wanting to reread Sy Montgomery’s excellent and emotionally insightful “The Soul of an Octopus,” which, like Tova, is about the author’s interaction with a polypous named Athena at our beloved New England Aquarium.
Reviews of “The Devil Wears Prada 2” and “Is God Is”
“The Devil Wears Prada 2”
It’s been 20 years since the original “Devil Wears Prada” made office politics and the pandemonium of high fashion intoxicating. While the main cast — Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Stanley Tucci and Emily Blunt — barely look a decade older, times have definitely changed. Social media, micro-aggressions and HR rules have changed life for Streep’s Miranda Priestly (fashioned after famed “Vogue” editor Anna Wintour, whose former junior assistant penned the book the first movie was based on). She has to have her latest assistant (Simone Ashley) police her language in board meetings.
At the end of the last Manhattan fairytale, Hathaway’s Andy Sachs left “Runway” magazine for the world of hard-hitting journalism—an endeavor that pays considerably less. When we catch up with Andy, she’s collecting a coveted award for her integrity-driven stories, only to learn that she and everyone at the paper have been sacked by the paper’s new parent company (a scenario all too familiar and real these days). Simultaneously, “Runway” gets egg on its face for a feature it ran on a fashion line that it didn’t know uses sweatshops for its threads. Nothing like an out-of-work scribe and a company in a PR tailspin to get the team back together again. Natch, Miranda barely remembers Andy (or feigns such) and per usual sets her up to fail. Still at Miranda’s side is Nigel (a well-postured Tucci bringing back his blasé-faire élan), loyal vanguard of haute fashion and barbed witticisms, with Emily (Blunt) now over at Dior and a chief buyer of ad-space from “Runway” (the real-life model for the Emily character recently fessed up and the parallels are to-the-curb tight).
In the first “Prada” we had Paris, here we get Milan and a meandering side thread about a takeover of Elias-Clarke, the parent company of “Runway.” What that does besides putting too much yarn in the air is to weave Lucy Liu, Kenneth Branagh with an enviably rich mane, Justin Theroux (unrecognizable as a goofball tech-bro) and B.J. Novak as the mealy-mouthed scion of Elias-Clarke’s CEO, into the fold. The sharp script, again written by Aline Brosh McKenna, and tight direction by David Frankel — also returning — go far, but nearly falters along the final walk as the overly complicated corporate mega blah ties up. The cast, though, is all in, lovingly bringing back the personas so many identified with and rooted for. Miranda may not be the firebrand she was back in 2006, as time and mega-mergers have tamped her down. She’s less a pop-off-the-screen paw scratch, but also more vulnerable and human. “Prada 2” is a comfortable nostalgic fit, with clean lines and even seams.
“Is God Is”
Adapted from her own stage play, Aleshea Harris’s “Is God Is” is a slow burn of a revenge tale that twists in strange, stylized ways as it follows the travails of twin sisters Anaia (Mallori Johnson) and Racine (Kara Young, the upcoming “I Love Boosters”). The twins, after receiving a letter from their disfigured mother (an unrecognizable Vivica A. Fox), set off on a quest to avenge her by killing their father (Sterling K. Brown, “Moonlight,” “Paradise”). What ensues is something of a lo-fi spaghetti western filtered through the lens of a Greek tragedy with bubbles of Afrofuturist hip — in a loose stylistic sense, think “Sinners” and, to a lesser degree, “Him.”
Of the twins, Racine is as — if not more — scarred than her mother from the fiery act of cruelty inflicted by Brown’s father—the flashback of which is dark, eerie and hard to watch. The credits list him only as “Man.” Mom is referred to as Ruby God, which, I guess, is what gives her agency to command the act of vengeance from her long-simmering death bed somewhere in the dusty fields of Virginia.
The command that Ruby has over the girls is curious as she has been long absent from their lives — since the incident. They grew up in foster care hell. The two also have a form of ESP, where they can look at each other and communicate in full sentences — for the rest of us it helps that we see them on screen in closed-captioned psychic subtitles.
The violence that comes — and there’s lots of it — is fast, bloody and brutal. It’s also at times comedic, with a touch of mean poetry to it — something Quentin Tarantino elevated to an art form and Harris is not too bad at. The girls’ tools of choice? A rock in a bloody white sock — looking like David’s sling — and a pair of pruning loppers.
As the twins, Johnson and Young are asked much of, and shoulder it well, but the film feels too long for what it is as the quiet moments of talky contemplation before the next, far-too-intimate beat down, often feel flat and don’t add anything new. Brown and Fox smolder in their brief parental parts, and the ever-elegant Janelle Monáe is a portrait of troubled grace as Man’s current wife. “Is God Is” comes out swinging and fierce, but there’s a hollowness to it that resonates more than the searing anger it postures.
Renny Harlin heads back to the deep blue — but this time the sharks aren’t the problem so much as the movie around them.
This return to shark-infested waters is a rote exercise compared to Harlin’s quirkier, “Deep Blue Sea” (1999), since “Deep Water” unspools as a by-the-numbers disaster flick. We’re introduced to a cast of personalities in Los Angeles, boarding a jumbo jet bound for Singapore. On the flight deck, Ben Kingsley is our captain, with a dutiful Aaron Eckhart as the first officer — one’s a karaoke-crooning charmer chasing a golden girl in every port; the other’s a straightlaced, former Air Force pilot with a few trauma skeletons in the closet. The X-factor in the misadventure is a bellicose, self-entitled slob (Angus Sampson) — basically everything that’s wrong with America — who chain-smokes wherever he pleases and leaves an e-device plugged into a charger in his checked luggage. Not good; you know it’s only a matter of time (though, given the film’s long developing arc, about halfway through the movie) before a fire breaks out in the hold and the plane goes down in the middle of the oceanic nowhere. A coral reef holds a few severed sections tenuously above water.
The crash also serves as a dinner bell for a shiver of ravenous sharks that take opportunistic pounds of flesh — limbs make for tasty hors d’oeuvres. The pat survivor-hell bears all the trappings of the cheesy, B-level disaster thrillers of the 1970s (“The Towering Inferno” and “The Poseidon Adventure”), but none of their lean-in bravado (and the special effects are lame, especially by today’s standards — “Sharknado” included).
Harlin cut his teeth on sequels in the “Die Hard” and “Nightmare on Elm Street” franchises. He never really found a directorial footing to call his own, and most recently helmed the god-awful chapters of “The Strangers.” He again reverts to a banal retread that no one will remember.
Samara Weaving seems to be typecast as an onscreen punching bag. In the “Ready or Not” films and now this dour rom com/thriller, she plays a fetching can-do femme transformed by the masochistic madness of the plot into a purple bloody mess. Directed by Jorma Taccone, “Over Your Dead Body” is a remake of 2021’s grim Norwegian film “I Onde Danger” (lamely rebranded as “The Trip” in the United States).
The story begins with Weaving’s Lisa and her husband Dan (Jason Segal) having marital problems, not least of which are a two-year drought in the conjugal bliss department. He’s an indie film director who scored critical success early but now is relegated to making “pop-up ads.” Lisa is a struggling stage actress cheating on Dan with a fellow thespian. Money is another sizable problem. A getaway to Dan’s dad’s cabin on a lake in Upstate New York during a stunning fall season (the landscapes are shot in Finland but look legit) becomes an opportunity for Dan to off Lisa and cash in an insurance policy. But when he hesitates to apply Chloroform, she tases him and ties him to a kitchen chair to put her own permanent separation plan in play. But then, murder interruptus — a trio of escaped convicts (Timothy Olyphant, Keith Jardine and Juliette Lewis) drop through the ceiling. The couple have to team up or die.
The main problem with “Over Your Dead Body” is that neither Lisa nor Dan is all that interesting or likable. It’s the trio of malevolent misfits that hold our attention, especially Olyphant’s smooth but demonic mastermind and Lewis’s edgy Allegra, who is sexually aroused by the clamor of violent confrontation. The movie may be even more gruesome than its Norwegian inspiration, though “Dead Body” somehow manages to make whimsy from the severing of fingers, ears and noses. Turns out romantic separation is always messier than it has to be.
The title of this slack crime comedy-cum-love triangle calls to mind Paul Mazursky’s open relationship romp “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice.” That 1969 curio starring Natalie Wood and Elliot Gould played on character and the times. Here, as directed by BenDavid Grabinski, “Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice” pretty much steals concepts from elsewhere and mixes them together in the blandest, nod-and-wink, not funny way. Vince Vaughn (“Swingers”) and James Marsden (such a good JFK-like prez in “Paradise”) play Nick and Mike, hitmen who are the target of a local mobster named Sosa (Keith David and his glorious baritone, sadly wasted). Allegedly, it’s because Marsden’s Mike ratted out Sosa’s son Jimmy Boy (Jimmy Tatro, “You’re Cordially Invited”), who got collared and had to do time.
The film’s set in the aftermath of Jimmy’s release. Why Sosa, a Black man, refers to Jimmy, who is not Black, as his son is never fully explained — though both spew the same low brow rhetoric and spend much of their time at strip clubs, ogling and hooting. But then there’s the two Nicks, who happen to be one and the same. Did I mention there’s a time machine? There is, and so Vaughn’s Nick from the future comes back to get the Nick of the present to help save Mike. Adding further complications is that Nick’s estranged wife Alice (a fiery Eliza Gonzalez, who is about the best thing in the movie) is hooking up with Mike.
Much of what transpires is four talking heads hatching overly complicated plans to save Mike from Sosa, who has dispatched the feared cannibal hitman, “The Baron,” to extract his pound of flesh. It’s all punched up pulp pablum made further infuriating by the ersatz use of Wong Kar-wai’s slow-mo, “gun-fu” flare. It’s as insulting to the viewer as it is to Wong. Then there’s the gotcha ending that’s palm plant worthy and then some. If I could hop in a time machine and go back, I’d skip this inanity and spin up Wong’s cool Asian-noir “Chungking Express” (1994).
For What it's Worth 