Not sure this fourth flick was necessary, but I’m happy it exists. Renée Zellweger’s goofball heroine has always been a lovable hot mess of miscues and tribulations, and is again here. Of course the series being so British – dry and droll, with cheeky nods and winks – only deepens the buttoned-up hijinks. In the last chapter (“Bridget Jones’s Baby”), Hugh Grant’s Daniel Cleaver, one of the two gents who vied for Bridget’s love in the 2001 original, is presumed dead; in this nearly 10-year follow-up, Mark Darcy (Colin Firth), the guy who won her heart and had two children with her, really is dead. (Something about a humanitarian aide mission gone awry in the Sudan.) As a single mom, Bridget can’t boil a pot of water and has zero romantic prospects, though her friends push her to Tinder and other romantic meetup venues. “Labia adhesion is a thing,” one friend tells her when Bridget admits to not having sex in more than four years. Relief comes in the form of a handsome 29-year-old bloke named Roxster McDuff (Leo Woodall, “The White Lotus”), who rescues Bridget (she was 43 when she had her son in the last installment) and her children (a younger daughter in the mix now) from being treed in a park. Bridget does slowly get her groove back and returns to her old gig as a TV producer. How the happily ever after or never not pans out, I won’t say. Returning players include Emma Thompson as Bridget’s old ob-gyn who extols the virtues of a rife sex life and Jim Broadbent and Gemma Jones in a requisite cameo as Bridget’s parents. Strangely enough, Firth and Grant show up too, though I won’t spoil how. Also in the mix is the always excellent Chiwetel Ejiofor (“12 Years a Slave”) as Bridget’s son’s music teacher. Just who “the boy” is, is a bit unclear; is it Bridget’s son, William (Casper Knopf), the hunky Roxster or maybe even Hugh Grant, who starred in a movie called “About a Boy” in 2002? The answer doesn’t much matter, as it’s Bridget’s world and we‘re just happy to spend a few madcap moments in it.
Reviewed “The Order,” “Love Hurts” and “The Gorge”
‘The Order’ (2025)
Relatively new to streaming and taking a recent dip in rental price, this crime drama from Justin Kurzel (“Nitram”) dials back the clock to the 1980s Pacific Northwest, where the rise of white supremacist hate groups was a thing. The gritty take-’em-down thrills start as burned-out FBI agent Terry Husk (Jude Law) settles into the remotes of Idaho to decompress after a heart attack and years of wrangling with the mafia in NYC. But Husk is a gruff, suspicious sort who won’t let it go after he walks into a missing-person case that the local police don’t want too much exposure on – they know the terrain and are widely deferential to the well-armed Aryan Nation groups in the area that believe the time has come for the white man to take back his soiled lands. That missing soul was part of the sect of the title, a militant group led by Bob Mathews (Nicholas Hoult, looking even more boyish than usual, if that was even possible), an extremist ideologue and master planner. Bob and “The Order” are behind the missing (because he talked too much), a series of brazen bank and armored car heists (all staged deftly) and the murder of Colorado Jewish talk radio personality Alan Berg (Marc Maron) for sparring on-air with antisemitic callers. Much of this, based on Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt’s “The Silent Brotherhood,” is factual (Berg’s on-air battles and demise was portrayed with riveting aplomb by Eric Bogosian in Oliver Stone’s 1988 “Talk Radio”), through Law’s agent is a fictionalized insert – and a highly effective one. In the mix are Tye Sheridan (“Ready Player One,” “The Card Counter”) as the lone officer in the sheriff’s department willing to step in and help Husk chase down leads, and Jurnee Smollett (“True Blood”) as Husk’s fellow FBI agent and a voice of reason. The film doesn’t work without Law, who’s nearly unrecognizable as the disheveled, on-the-edge sort – his usual British charm and disarming accent are nowhere to be found. His Husk is more junkyard cur than fine-fleeced Westminster purebred, and not too far off from Don Johnson’s hot wreck of a cop in John Frankenheimer’s “Dead Bang” (1989), who also tangled with militant supremacists in the Pac-Northwest. It’s a transformative turn that should have been recognized by the Academy, but Law’s gritty go, and the film, somehow dropped off the radar; here’s your chance to get it on yours.
Reviewed “Presence,” “I’m Still Here” and “You’re Cordially Invited”
‘You’re Cordially Invited’ (2025)
A pat comedy with few surprises and several gags that don’t quite land makes it over the hump – just barely – on the likability and natural chemistry of Will Ferrell and Reese Witherspoon. They play Jim and Margot, charged with coordinating and executing the weddings of their daughter and sister, respectively. Los Angeles-based Margot is a bit distant from her Atlanta clan but dutifully books the revered Palmetto House, a quaint island inn on a Georgia bay that the family has always gathered at. Jim, who married there – but a single parent since his wife got sick and died years ago – books his daughter’s wedding for the same day. Whoops: Old-school pen and paper and a sudden heart attack are to blame for a booking gaffe at an inn not really equipped for two large parties. After some push and shove, all agree to make a go of it, but infringements, jealousy and sabotage turn the happy nuptials into something of “The Wedding Crashers” (2005) by way of “The War of the Roses” (1989). Jim is also having a hard time letting go of his daughter, Jenni (a fiery Geraldine Viswanathan, “Drive Away Dolls”), while Margot wrestles with the down-home narrow-mindedness of her extended family around her sis’ choice of husband, a Chippendale dancer. A rogue alligator, “Islands in the Stream” duets, Nick Jonas and Peyton Manning all make their way into the jumble with varying effect. Comedians Rory Scovel and Leanne Morgan are effective in small parts as part of Margot’s “chaos monkey” inner circle, and Jack McBrayer works as the befuddled innkeeper. The strength of the film, written and directed by Nicholas Stoller (“Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” “Get Him to the Greek”), is the rom-com power pairing of Farrell and Witherspoon, who seem like they could do this all day long and we’d be only happy to tag along.
Football legend Upton Bell of Porter Square, Cambridge, with a model of a statue dedicated to his father at the University of Pennsylvania’s Franklin Field.
This weekend is the big one, Super Bowl LIX – which is likely not that big of a deal around these parts now that the Patriots are the doormat of the AFC East. Sure, the team went to nine Super Bowls from 2000 to 2020 and still holds the record for the most appearances by any NFL franchise (11), but those glory days are in the rearview and there’s little hope on the horizon (other than Drake Maye and a coaching reboot).
The ad blitz campaign contest on tap features a rematch of Super Bowl LVII (2023) in which the Kansas City Chiefs and all-world QB Patrick Mahomes beat the Philadelphia Eagles in a 38-35 thriller. It was the Eagles too in Super Bowl LII (2018) who notched their first Lombardi Trophy by beating the Brady-led Patriots 41-33. (The mystery and sting of the Malcolm Butler benching still lingers like the scent of floral flatulence in the wake of a weekend cleanse retreat.)
There is one here among us who has deep ties to the Chiefs, Eagles and Patriots alike and a personal and professional portfolio that’s a veritable who’s who from the gridiron to the White House: Upton Bell, who walked and talked for a series of catch-ups last week on the street, on the phone, at the gym and over email.
If the name doesn’t click, the Porter Square resident was the Patriots’ general manager in the early 1970s – the youngest in the NFL. His father, Bert Bell, founded and was owner of the Eagles. The connection to the Chiefs is something a bit more complicated (but we’ll get to that later).
Payal Kapadia’s somber meditation on womanhood and companionship amid the bustling streets of Mumbai feels like a living and breathing document. It follows the lives of three intertwined women, two of whom are nurses and roommates. The more dour of the duo, Prabha (Kani Kusruti), is estranged from her arranged husband, who is now working in Germany, and moves through her days with restrained and wistful introspection. The younger of the two, Anu (Divya Prabha), is bright-eyed, perky and naively idealistic as she constantly overspends and often asks Prabha to cover her rent. She has a secret Muslim lover who asks her to wear a burka when sneaking over for their trysts. That’s one of the interesting things about Kapadia’s portrait of Mumbai – it delves into and illuminates the myriad subtle cultural, linguistic and religious identities that coexist nearly seamlessly in the dense urban setting. The movie places the patriarchy under a microscope, not by lambasting double standards and gender inequality, but by showing the sisterhood formed through common causes and tribulations. Prabha and Anu are busy working out their romantic and professional futures while the third woman, the hospital’s cook, Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), a steely, no-nonsense, middle-aged widow, rails in vain against a developer who wants to displace her. “All We Imagine as Light” is a quiet film that affects the viewer in ebbs and flow, and Kapadia’s poetic cinematic flourishes add a dreamy, hypnotic affect to the deeply emotional sojourn. Kapadia was recently in Brookline to show the film at the Coolidge Corner Theatre and was rightly praised as a breakthrough filmmaker. The texture and tenor of “All We Imagine as Light” is reminiscent of Deepa Mehta’s Elements trilogy, which bodes well for Kapadia’s future endeavors.
The Revolutions per Minute Festival hosts 10 works by Somerville experimental filmmaker Saul Levine at The Brattle Theatre on Sunday.
Not sure what experimental films are? If you’ve ever been to Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art and seen trippy, surreal video installations, you’re on your way. Experimental or avant-garde film is usually deeply personal, often sociopolitical in context and reflective of the artist’s life in the moment.
Levine, born 1938, has been producing films for nearly 60 years; he was a professor in the Visual Arts Program at MassArt for 39 years.
Levine started his filmmaking career with “Salt of the Sea” (1965), featuring footage of his friends hopping from a boat to a buoy in the New Haven harbor. “I tried to make the jump with the camera,” Levine said, “and I fell into the water but held on to the camera.” The waterlogged footage, which Levine described as “abstract swirls of magenta and turquoise,” was turned into a four-minute short that ended with a clear shot of his friend perched upon the buoy.
If you watch Levine’s later works, such as his series “Driven (Boston After Dark)” (2002-present), in which Levine rides around in a car filming subjects and captures moments in time, or “Sun Drum Moon Note” (2018), which screens Sunday, you’ll notice shaky camera work. Part of that is Levine’s editing style, but adding to it are genetic neurological ticks – what Levine refers to as “tremors” – that he’s had since birth. As a result, Levine also speaks with a noticeable stammer.
Age and neurological affliction keeps Levine from getting behind the camera as much as he used to. Levine’s time at MassArt was also cut short, ending with his resignation in 2018. He said he felt “forced out” after school administrators accused him of harming students by showing his compiled film “Notes After a Long Silence” (1989), a collage that includes scenes of him having sex with his then partner. “It was ridiculous,” Levine said, as he’d screened “Notes” over several years without complaint and “the film was posted on the school’s website.” Levine gave passionate commentary on the situation in a video on Facebook, saying he felt “ambushed” by the school’s administration. The same year, fellow MassArt professor Nicholas Nixon, a Guggenheim fellow and photographer, came under scrutiny in a Boston Globe article for more severe, yet similar allegations of inappropriate academic behavior. The Globe mentioned Levine in conjunction with Nixon, who also resigned.
It’s amazing, given how Draconian the Iranian government has been about censorship and control over its own narrative, that the voices of filmmakers Mohammad Rasoulof and Jafar Panahi persist. Both have been arrested and spent time in jail because they make films critical of the oppressive regime. These films are usually shot and edited secretly and often bootlegged out of the country to gain distribution in the West. Panahi struck the first blow with the sublime and frightening “The Circle” (2000), which detailed the systemic imprisonment of women for morality violations that most people in a free state would consider little more than jaywalking. Rasoulof goes further with “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” crafting a domestic gender rift against the backdrop of the real-life death of Mahsa Amini in 2022 after being taken into custody for a hijab violation. The event galvanized the Woman, Life, Freedom movement and led to protests in the streets. In the home of Iman (Missagh Zareh), he and his wife Najmeh (Sohelia Golestani) and teenage daughters Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and Sana (Setareh Maleki) come at the headline event differently. Iman, who works for the state judicial department and reviews and signs execution orders, believes the theocracy’s line that Amin died of a stroke; his wife and daughters, like all those protesting, believe the death was the result of abuse and torture. Iman has a gun as part of his position, and as tension in the house rises, the firearm goes missing. Ultimately the action leaves the confines of the family’s apartment and the distrust threatens to turn violent. Just before the film played Cannes, Rasoulof was sentenced to eight years in prison with a flogging and fled the country, another reflection of a theocratic patriarchy holding authoritarian reins chokingly tight.
‘Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat’ (2024)
A perfect companion to RaMell Ross’ superb “Nickel Boys,” as both deal with a grotesquely unjust Black experience on the cusp of the civil rights movement. “Nickel Boys” is a microcosm of racial injustice, whereas “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat” looks globally. The doc by Johan Grimonprez details the dubious events surrounding the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, inaugural leader of the Democratic Republic of Congo – just liberated from Belgium and quickly becoming a Cold War conflict because its rich uranium deposits were coveted by the United States and Soviet Union for use in nukes. It is astounding to see archival footage of the smooth and charismatic Malcom X and an animated Nikita Khrushchev making the same condemnations at the U.N. of the West for its colonialism and denial of rights to Black people. Insert into the mix Louis Armstrong as a Trojan horse cultural ambassador to the Congolese while Eisenhower, the CIA and Belgian operatives scheme against Lumumba in ways troublesome, embarrassing and downright heinous out of fear the nation (and its uranium) would fall into Soviet hands. Grimonprez, employing frenetic freestyle editing, homes in on socially active jazz greats of the time – among them Nina Simone, doing her amazing “Sinnerman,” Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach bringing the beat and emotional heat and Dizzy Gillespie – as well as X and Maya Angelou (she, Lincoln and Roach stormed the U.N. in the wake of Lumumba’s death) to fill the frame with sound and voice. The frequent shards of quotes he flashes onscreen are stunningly effective. Grimonprez has tapped into an incredible intersection of time, place and players that he turns into an immersive experience that entertains and informs unlike any Wikipedia page or history book.
‘The Room Next Door’ (2024)
Iconic Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar (“Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down,” “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown”) makes his first English-language film, and with the double-barrel casting of Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore on paper it seems like a can’t-miss collaboration. While it definitely hits, it’s not the boom you’d expect from such a loaded lot. Based on Sigrid Nunez’s novel “What Are You Going Through,” “Room Next Door” is a contemplation on mortality – something that seems to be on Almodóvar’s mind these days given this, “Parallel Mothers” (2021) and most personally, “Pain and Glory” (2018). Novelist Ingrid (Moore) and war correspondent Martha (Swinton sporting a neat crop top), Manhattanites but distant for years, reunite because Martha is terminally ill and wants Ingrid to spend the end days with her in a quaint VRBO upstate. The performers are all in, yet the characters somehow feel shallow and contrived and the dialogue too meted, as if were a stage play. It’s gorgeous and affecting, but ephemeral and wispy.
RaMell Ross’ adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s 2019 novel about racial injustice and worse at a detention school for boys in 1962 Florida (the tail end of Jim Crow and eve of the civil rights movement) stuns in its dreamy, hypnotic use of POV shifts, abstraction of violence and subtle yet powerful commentary on the inhumane ills we do to each other. The effect of “Nickel Boys” is intentionally unsettling as we embed with Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson), two Black boys at the Nickel Academy, where kids are divided into white and nonwhite under the ever-present eyes of glowering guards, not far off from the “boss man” in “Cool Hand Luke” (1967). As you can guess, the former get better food, longer recesses and lighter labor. They also don’t run the risk of “disappearing”; the real-life school Whitehead modeled his novel on, the Dozier School for Boys, was shut down in 2011 after an investigation by the Department of Justice found 55 unmarked graves. The causes of death were varied: fire, malnutrition, disease and blunt trauma, all grim, if not criminal.
Ross and co-writer Joslyn Barnes choose to go at Whitehead’s straight-ahead arc in fragments and wispy Terrence Malick-esque glimmers. It is as mesmerizing as it is terrorizing. Much of the early part of the film is told from Elwood’s point of view – we don’t see Elwood, just see and experience what he does, from being harassed and assigned extra work by overseers to becoming friends with Turner. When we jump into Turner’s view, we finally see Elwood: lanky, languid and demurely charming. The film slips into omniscient POV at times too, not entirely consistently, but it’s in the boys’ blinders, with each reining in emotions to survive, that the film’s at its most evocative and immersive high.
The backstory for the tour of horrors at Nickel (the beatings and abuse tend to take place just off frame, the way atrocities at Auschwitz were layered in obliquely in Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest” last year) is that Elwood was imprisoned wrongly; he was an early enrollee in college and, on his first day of school, innocently caught a ride with a car thief and was held as an accomplice when stopped. In the flash of a badge, his life goes from promising future to dire straits. Fortunately he has a caring nana fighting for him (the always excellent Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, going a long way here as the woman who raises Elwood after his parents abandoned him when he was 6), which is more than most (and why those 55 graves went unquestioned for so long). Her efforts to raise him are stymied regularly by bureaucracy, systemic racism and shithead shysters and wind up making Elwood a target inside.
The pit of despair is deep and wide, but hope never dims.
In texture and tenor, the reimagining of Whitehead’s text by Ross (a documentary filmmaker making an impressive feature debut) and Barnes is a radical departure while hewing to its narrative structure and barbed social agenda. It’s a jumping-off that adroitly leverages the language of cinema (the camerawork by Jomo Fray is ethereal and transportive) to evoke on a deep level. It wouldn’t work without Herisse and Wilson’s transformative turns and fluid onscreen chemistry, as well as the surrounding cast of boys and jailers. “Nickel Boys” is a subtle yet haunting condemnation of racism in America and one that doesn’t feel as far off as the measure of years in between tell us.
It was a strange year in cinema, a year where blockbuster success at the box office was rare (“Inside Out 2” was the top grab, followed by the overdone “Deadpool & Wolverine” superfrenemy romp) and outshone by adult-themed animation, non-English-language and documentary offerings. Also strong were films featuring women’s voices and indie creep-outs – a combination best embodied and exemplified by TJ Mollner’s “Strange Darling,” Anna Kendrick making her directorial debut with “Woman of the Hour” and the gonzo body-horror spectacle “The Substance.” None of which made mt top 10, but were squarely in the hunt.
A sardonically black political comedy that’s right out of left field, powered by witty takes on hot topics (Andrew Tate, Putin and Pornhub, to name a few) and a killer performance by Ilinca Manolache, without whom the movie could not be. Manolache plays Angela, a feisty Romanian woman looking to make it in the gig economy as a filmmaker and TikTok sensation. Her main hustle is as a production assistant for a company that makes safety videos, kind of – on many shoots, Angela coaches accident victims, often in wheelchairs, to talk about the safety measures they should have taken to have avoided injury despite the clear negligence of the employer to provide a safe workplace. They’re more CYAs than PSAs, and that’s the degree of biting humor imbued by writer-director Radu Jude (“Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn”)
2. “Flow”
The official Oscar nominee from Latavia, is a mesmerizing, dialogue-free animated adventure about a cat and all the other birds, dogs and capybara that out feline encounters. Themes of climate change—flash floods and tsunamis are the reason the cat and fellow animals find themselves adrift on a sailboat—and a peaceful world sans the presence of man and mankind’s destructive ways pervade Gints Zilbalodis’s gorgeously stylized of an Eden like end to the world. Visually “Flow” has all the beauty and poetry of a Hayao Miyazaki masterpiece and the way it navigates mature matters makes it multi-tiered and applicable for all members of the family regardless of age.
Not a claymation romp for the whole family – not even close. No, this very dark and very adult animated tale has twins (voiced by “Succession” and “Power of the Dog” stars Sarah Snook and Kodi Smit-McPhee) separated after the death of their father and placed in foster homes on opposite coasts of Australia, as well as edgy, plot-driving incursions into swinging, fat feeding, pyromania and religious zealotry. Wickedly funny yet tenderly bittersweet, “Memoir of a Snail” has the dark, loving embrace of Tim Burton done with the edgy verve of Trey Parker and Matt Stone of “South Park.”
Robert Eggers’ remake of F.W. Murnau’s indelible 1922 classic is more akin in plot and scope to Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 film “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” than Murnau’s inaugural cinematic adaptation, which was inspired by Stoker’s classic 1897 vampire tale. What’s the difference between Dracula and Nosferatu? Drac’s more dashing and suave, whereas the nosferatu named Count Orlok is a bald, withered being, grotesque by most human norms of comeliness and hygiene. Murnau, a master of practical effects, cranked up the mystical mind control aspects and educed a once-in-a-century performance from Orlok portrayer Max Schreck. Here, as played by Bill Skarsgård, whose brother Alexander worked with Eggers on “The Northman” (2022), Orlok is a shadowy incarnation that never comes into the light the way Schreck or even Klaus Kinski did in Werner Herzog’s 1979 take. Despite the title “Nosferatu the Vampyre” on the Herzog version, Kinski’s count is listed as “Dracula” and was something of a blend of the Bela Lugosi and Schreck incarnations. Eggers, who has made his name with eerie ambient immersions into the outré – “The Witch” (2015) and “The Lighthouse” (2019) – does more of the same here with strong black-and-white visuals delivered by director of photography Jarin Blaschke, who’s worked with Eggers on all his films, and the sonorous bolstering of Orlok’s gravelly intonations. The object of the carnivorous count’s desire is Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp), a young German woman with whom he forges a psychic connection despite residing far away in Transylvania (a picture can do that). To meet IRL, Orlok summons Ellen’s real-estate lackey husband, Thomas (Nicholas Hoult, now on-screen in “Juror #2”), to his castle to receive a deed to the flat across the way from their apartment in Wisborg. The count drains half the hemoglobin in Thomas’ body – nothing like weakening your rival in love before moving in. Once ashore in Wisborg (the scenes of Orlok dining on the crew while at sea are the most grim and gruesome), Orlok unleashes a plague and takes over the souls of a few townsfolk to employ as minions in pursuit of Ellen. In his adaptation, Eggers pays sincere homage to Murnau and Herzog’s versions. The result feels new in look and posture, but it doesn’t innovate much in the vampiric pantheon. Depp turns in the film’s most palpable performance, and for a Christmas treat, Eggers regular Willem Dafoe drops in as a batty academic and occult expert intent on sending Orlok back to the beyond for good.
‘Babygirl’ (2024)
Keeping with the psychosexual power games, Nicole Kidman notches her second Christmas film that features her bare derrière. That other movie, Stanley Kubrick’s 1999 swan song, “Eyes Wide Shut,” has grown on me over the years, especially the theme of small indulgences having larger, unintended ripples. Here Kidman plays Romy, the very in-charge chief executive of an e-commerce company named Tensile Automation – basically Amazon on crack. Romy lives in a palatial Manhattan condo with her husband Jacob (Antonio Banderas), a noted New York theater director, and two precocious teen daughters (Esther McGregor and Vaughan Reilly), but something’s clearly amiss. After sex, Romy runs off to another room to watch incest porn; then there’s the new intern Samuel (Harris Dickinson) who seems to know how to push every one of Romy’s buttons and regularly challenges her authority and proclamations in public forums – something few if any in the C-suite of Tensile Automation would dare to consider. Samuel chooses Romy as his mentor, and in their one-on-ones, keeps on pushing. Outside the office, the relationship turns physical with Samuel subjecting Romy to the kind of erotic B&D shenanigans that made “9½ Weeks” (1986) a kinky cultural staple for decades. Like Todd Field did with “Tár” (2022), writer-director Halina Reijn (“Bodies Bodies Bodies”) does a deft job of flipping the gender power paradigm. Kidman is superb as she riffles through the masks her character wears – nurturing mother, caring wife, nonapologetic CEO, lonely, unfulfilled soul and object of sexual subservience – often on a dime. Dickinson’s Samuel, by contrast, feels underwritten and hollow, which is a letdown given the strong performances he delivered in “Beach Rats” (2017) and “Triangle of Sadness” (2022). We never get the why of Samuel doing what he does, and when he starts threatening to upend Romy at the office or her coddled home life (he shows up uninvited for one of the girls’ birthday parties), he takes on the role of cruel manipulator as well as wormy opportunist, one we find ourselves rooting for a billionaire exec to take down. Also notable in the web of desire and deceit is Sophie Wilde (“Talk to Me”) as Romy’s protégée, who ends up dating Samuel as the affair becomes combative.
‘The Fire Inside’ (2024)
Cambridge-born filmmaker Rachel Morrison, the first woman cinematographer to receive an Oscar nod (“Mudbound”) in the category, makes her directorial debut with this biopic about Claressa “T-Rex” Shields, the first U.S. woman to win gold in Olympic boxing. The focus of Morrison’s film (working from a script by “Moonlight” director Barry Jenkins), is not her current pinnacle of pow, however, as she is still stalking opponents in the ring and undefeated as a pro, but Shields’ challenging early years in Flint, Michigan, where she was raised by a distracted single mother (the father was in jail) and lacking resources to get by. As Shields, Ryan Destiny brings a fierce pugnaciousness to the part. It’s an impressive, all-in performance not without nuance and a vein of vulnerability. The heat – and heart – of the film lies in Shields’ relationship with trainer Jason Crutchfield (Brian Tyree Henry), who backfills as a father figure. Bigger matters around Shields’ rise to prominence are a persisting gross gender disparity when it comes to compensation, respect and beyond, with a U.S. Olympic Committee publicist on Shields constantly to be more “ladylike.” Well-crafted and shot (by music video pro Rina Yang, not Morrison), with deep, palpable performances from Destiny and Henry, “The Fire Inside” strangely plays out somewhat flat-footed. Part of that’s the overuse of genre clichés (something you would not expect from the normally reliable Jenkins, but then again, consider his new “Mufasa”) and the knowledge that Shields would go on to become the Tom Brady of her sport. I’m not sure what’s next on Morrison’s plate, but “The Fire Inside” displays enough poise and promise to to get me off my stool for another round.
‘Homestead’ (2024)
Angel Studios, the family-themed, faith-based production company behind last year’s box office wonder “Sound of Freedom” (made for a cool 14 mill, it grossed near 200) saddles up with this post-terrorist-attack survival drama in which food, water and other life-sustaining needs become scarce as infrastructure and the law crumbles. The what and the why is a dirty bomb delivered by sailboat, detonated just off the L.A. coastline. Communications go silent, and the folks living on a sprawling, vineyard-esque estate of the title go into lockdown mode. The patriarch of the gorgeous grounds, billionaire Ian Ross (played by the steely eyed Neal McDonough) hires his own security detail headed by ex-Green Beret Jeff Eriksson (Bailey Chase) to keep out the riffraff (people seeking food and shelter). Based on the “Black Autumn” series by Jeff Kirkham and Jason Ross and directed patly by Ben Smallbone, “Homestead” wafts wisps of provocations – the haves versus the have-nots, what to eat when the corner market is bare and commitment to community, i.e., helping your fellow human in the wake of a societal collapse, but none really excite. Part of that is because Ross and his crew are so inherently entitled that you half want to see the hordes at the gate come for them Marie Antoinette style, and Chase’s operative is cold, aloof and always sizes up a situation with a finger on the trigger; neither character is particularly empathetic. The film does work its way around in the end, but feels rote. Alex Garland’s “Civil War,” released this year, covered similar territory with more bite. You do have to marvel at the spread that Ross and his family are holed up in, and much of the film feels like a grand mansion tour (despite the California setting, it’s in Bountiful, Utah, not too far from Angel Studios HQ).
For What it's Worth 