Author: jose

Last summer, Tom Cruise was given credit for saving the theatrical experience with the widely beloved “Top Gun: Maverick.” One of our last true movie stars returns over a year later as the blockbuster experience seems to be fading with high-budget Hollywood endeavors like “The Flash” and “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” falling short of expectations. Can he be Hollywood’s savior again? I hope so because “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One” is a ridiculously good time. Once again, director Christopher McQuarrie, Cruise, and their team have crafted a deceptively simple thriller, a film that bounces good, bad, and in-between characters off each other for 163 minutes (an admittedly audacious runtime for a film with “Part One” in the title that somehow doesn’t feel long). Some of the overcooked dialogue about the importance of this particular mission gets repetitive, but then McQuarrie and his team will reveal some stunningly conceived action sequence that makes all the spy-speak tolerable. Hollywood is currently questioning the very state of their industry. Leave it to Ethan Hunt to accept the mission.

While this series essentially rebooted in its fourth chapter, changing tone and style significantly, this seventh film very cleverly ties back to the 1996 Brian De Palma original more than any other, almost as if it’s uniting the two halves of the franchise. It’s not an origin story, but it does have the tenor of something like the excellent “Casino Royale” in how it unpacks the very purpose of a beloved character. “Dead Reckoning Part One” is about Ethan Hunt reconciling how he got to this point in his life, and McQuarrie and co-writer Erik Jendresen narratively recall De Palma’s film repeatedly. And with its sweaty, canted close-ups, Fraser Taggart’s cinematography wants you to remember the first movie—how Ethan Hunt became an agent and the price he’s been paying from the beginning.

It’s not just visual nods. “Dead Reckoning” returns former IMF director Eugene Kittridge (Henry Czerny) to Ethan’s life with a new mission. Kittridge informs Hunt that there’s essentially a rogue A.I. in the world that superpowers are battling to control. The A.I. can be manipulated with a key split into two halves. One of those halves is about to be sold on the black market, and so Ethan and his team—including returning characters Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg)—have to not just intercept the key but discern its purpose. The key only matters if IMF can figure out where and how to use it.

After a desert shoot-out that ushers Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) back into the series, the first major set piece in “Dead Reckoning Part One” takes place in the Dubai airport, where Hunt discovers that there are other players in this espionage chess game, including a familiar face in Gabriel (Esai Morales), a morally corrupt mercenary who is one of the reasons that Hunt is an agent in the first place. Gabriel is a chaos agent, someone who not only wants to watch the world burn but hopes the fire inflicts as much pain as possible. In many ways, Gabriel is the inverse of Ethan, whose weakness has been his empathy and personal connections—Gabriel has none of those, and he’s basically working for the A.I., trying to get the key so no one can control it.

At the airport, Ethan also crosses paths with a pickpocket named Grace (Hayley Atwell), who gets stuck in the middle of all of this world-changing insanity, along with a few agents trying to hunt down the rogue Ethan and are played by a wonderfully exasperated Shea Whigham and Greg Tarzan Davis. A silent assassin, memorably sketched by Pom Klementieff, is also essential to a few action scenes. And Vanessa Kirby returns as the arms dealer White Widow, and, well, if the ensemble has a weakness, it’s Kirby’s kind of lost performance. She has never quite been able to convey “power player” in these films as she should.

But that doesn’t matter because people aren’t here for the White Widow’s backstory. They want to see Tom Cruise run. The image most people associate with “Mission: Impossible” is probably Mr. Cruise stretching those legs and swinging those arms. He does that more than once here, but it seems like the momentum of that image was the artistic force behind this entire film. “Dead Reckoning Part One” prioritizes movement—trains, cars, Ethan’s legs. It’s an action film that’s about speed and urgency, something that has been so lost in the era of CGI’s diminished stakes. Runaway trains will always have more inherent visceral power than waves of animated bad guys, and McQuarrie knows how to use it sparingly to make an action film that both feels modern and old-fashioned at the same time. These films don’t over-rely on CGI, ensuring we know that it’s really Mr. Cruise jumping off that motorcycle. When punches connect, bodies fly, and cars crash into each other—we feel it instead of just passively observing it. The action here is so wonderfully choreographed that only “John Wick: Chapter 4” compares for the best in the genre this year.

There’s also something fascinating thematically here about a movie star battling A.I. and questioning the purpose of his job. Blockbusters have been cautionary tech tales for generations but think about the meta aspect of a spy movie in which the world could collapse if the espionage game is overtaken by a sentient computer that stars an actor who has been at the center of controversy regarding his own deepfakes. There’s also a definite edge to the plotting here that plays into the actor’s age in that Ethan is forced to answer questions about what matters to him regarding his very unusual work/life balance, a reflection of what a performer like Cruise must face as he reaches the end of an action movie rope that’s been much longer than anyone could have even optimistically expected. Cruise may or may not intend that reading—although I suspect he does—but it adds another layer to the action.

Of course, the most important thing is this: “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One” is just incredibly fun. It feels half its length and contains enough memorable action sequences for some entire franchises. Will Cruise save the blockbuster experience again? Maybe. And he might do it again next summer too.

In theaters on July 12^th.

Whether you still know every word to “Wham Rap!” four decades later or only remember the British pop duo as “George Michael and that other guy,” you’ll find everything you want in the Netflix documentary “Wham!”

Full disclosure up front: I am very much in the former category, having listened to and loved Wham!’s music and Michael’s stratospheric solo career during a formative time in my adolescence. I even saw them in concert during the “Whamamerica!” tour on my 13^th birthday—in a white, stretch limousine, no less. I can still smell the toxic fumes from the hair spray in my teased-up bangs.

But the film from documentarian Chris Smith (“Fyre,” “Operation Varsity Blues”) is a total blast, regardless of your level of fandom. On the most superficial level, it’s just a joy to relive this time of pop culture excess and sing along with these insanely catchy tunes. It’s hard to believe the duo was only around from 1982-86, with the two coming to stunning global prominence at age 20 with such perky hits as “Young Guns” and “Club Tropicana.” The shorts were short, the hair was high, and the energy was knowingly, playfully hedonistic. Michael and Andrew Ridgeley were beautiful, and their music was effervescent; even the early songs with a social conscience were made for the dance floor.

Beneath their tanned, heartthrob exteriors, though, the two had a deep, brotherly connection from childhood and an evolving power dynamic that’s unexpected. Ridgeley’s mum maintained meticulous scrapbooks documenting Wham!’s meteoric rise, which provide much of the substance here, along with never-before-seen footage and unheard audio from the personal archives of both men. Michael died on Day 2016 at age 53; Ridgeley mostly has lived a quiet life outside the spotlight for the last several years (although he did have a cameo in the 2019 romantic comedy “Last Christmas”). Hearing them speak fondly of their youth, their early days as struggling artists and the thrills and perils of dizzying success provides a feeling of immediacy, as if we’re eavesdropping on a conversation between two old pals who haven’t caught up with each other in a while. If there is any deficiency here, it’s that the movie just stops when Wham! ends; a title card briefly reminds us of Michael’s subsequent superstardom, but Smith offers nothing of the sort about Ridgeley’s post-Wham! career.

The friendship endured, and that’s much of what makes “Wham!” stand out from other music documentaries: the warmth, the fondness, and the absence of the kinds of creative struggles and egotism that so often turn these tales into cliches. George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley met at school when they were 11 and 12 years old, respectively. Michael (who then went by his given name, Georgios Panayiotou), was the new kid in class who just happened to be assigned a seat next to Ridgeley. A shared love of music quickly became their bond; Ridgeley refers to Michael by the nickname he gave him, Yog, throughout the film, which adds an element of sweetness. What’s interesting is that Ridgeley was the dominant one in the beginning—he was more confident and stylish, he had the vision for what Wham! ultimately would become. Michael, while obviously talented at a young age, was a little chubby and awkward. And despite the ass-shaking bravado he exuded in the group’s videos and concert performances, he had a hard time thinking of himself as a sex symbol.

A lot of that probably has to do with the fact that he was a closeted gay man singing songs about women he longed for, women who’d wronged him, women who were using him for his credit cards to go on shopping sprees. The recent Max documentary “Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed” similarly explores this topic: the need these famous men felt to maintain the façade of heterosexuality at a time when coming out would have destroyed their careers. One of the more touching moments in “Wham!” is when Michael comes out to his best pal in Ibiza in the early ‘80s, and Ridgeley is nothing but loving and supportive. And as we see here, as Michael reveals his abilities as a vivid, prolific songwriter, he weaves traces of his true self into his songs. “Nothing Looks the Same in the Light,” off their 1983 debut album Fantastic, is about his first gay encounter.

Here’s where we see the balance of power shift in fascinating ways. The recording of their sultry torch song “Careless Whisper” teaches Michael that he needs to produce the group’s music if he wants it done the right way. His need for control and his driving obsession with chart success inspire him to write and produce Wham!’s second album, Make It Big, which they happened to record at the studio at Miraval, the French winery Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are currently fighting over in their divorce dispute. (The origin of the song from that album that’s arguably their best-known hit, “Wake Me Up Before You Go Go,” provides an amusing anecdote.) 

“Wham!” depicts Ridgeley as being totally fine with taking a step back and letting his best friend’s talents shine through. But he remains a confident, crucial contributor to the duo’s image, especially as Michael begins having an existential crisis: “Oh my God, I’m a massive star, and I’m gay,” Michael says in voiceover. The fact that they can rely on each other is essential as they become hugely popular worldwide, performing as the first Western act ever in China before taking on the United Stated in a 1985 tour. Around this time, Michael dazzles with his soulful vocals in a performance of “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me” alongside his idol, Elton John, at Live Aid. His ascendence is undeniable, but as Ridgeley wisely puts it, “Wham! was never going to be middle-aged.”

That’s what provides much of the movie’s emotion: the fact that it is this wistful time capsule, a fleeting moment of infectious happiness. Drinks are free. Fun and sunshine. Who doesn’t want to be a part of that?

On Netflix now.

“Every Body” is a moving, fascinating look at a too-often-ignored subset of the world’s population, filled with empathy and understanding but also a cool, analytical anger about what history has put them through. The subject is intersex people, the slightly-more-than one percent of individuals who were born with a condition that complicated the state’s ability to identify them with one of the only two options listed on hospital paperwork: female or male. 

As the movie explains, there are many variants of intersex people, born with atypical chromosomes or sex characteristics and not clearly male or female. There are those whose genitals were malformed or damaged by genetics or other external factors (including doctor’s mistakes, a scenario touched on in “Every Body”); those who might have ambiguous genitals or undescended testicles that are initially mistaken for ovaries; and those who might appear male on the outside but have female reproductive parts, or the reverse. Such individuals are usually assigned a gender at birth that doesn’t really reflect who they are in terms of body parts, and burdens them with the obligation to perform the assigned role for the rest of their lives no matter what they might personally want. However the individual ultimately chooses to identify can still be overruled by the state and by society as a whole (a dynamic that’s playing out every day for trans people). 

Medical professionals would usually advise parents of intersex children that they were better off raising their offspring as a “boy” or a “girl” to make things easier on the child and their family. Whose ease was really being prioritized, though? Not that of the children, who would then have to spend most of their youth, perhaps their whole lives, acting a part they didn’t wish to play for fear of being ostracized or persecuted. Not that of the parents, who had to constantly reinforce a kind of “cover story” handed to them by others and might decide to stop discussing it altogether, except in doctors’ offices, leaving the kids to grapple with the psychological fallout without allies. The doctors’ advice on gender assignment was usually paired with a recommendation of “corrective” surgery (often foisted on the too-stunned-to-think-clearly parents during recovery from childbirth) to remove any parts that didn’t serve the binary.

Three intersex activists anchor the movie while also serving as commentators, guides, and in some scenes, a kind of focus group, looking at archival material and older news stories and reacting. Alicia Roth Weigel is a lobbyist who often participates in high-profile protests and hearings on intersex issues and other issues affecting the wider LBGTQIA community; she also wrote a book of essays on the topic titled “Inverse Cowgirl.” River Gallo is a non-binary and queer actor and filmmaker who is the first openly intersex person to play an intersex character (in the 2019 short film “Ponyboi”). Sean Saifa is, per his description, an intersex man of color; he made headlines by going on the ABC News show “Nightline” and confronting the doctor who performed an unnecessary gonadectomy on him when he was thirteen. 

This latter story is, unfortunately, typical. Unnecessary surgery on intersex infants was once common. (The first hospital to publicly apologize for it did so in 2019, four years before the release of this movie.) Gallo was born without testicles and urged to have artificial ones implanted and undergo hormone therapy to appear more stereotypically masculine. Gallo functionally “passed” as a cisgender straight man at his suburban New Jersey high school with everyone except those closest to him, and didn’t begin to thrive until after embracing a more feminine look, speaking openly about being intersex, and pledging to try to play roles that reflected that identification. Weigel, a slim blonde white woman, says that as an activist in her home state, Texas, she was hit on by straight male lobbyists and politicians who had no idea she was also carrying an internalized set of nonfunctioning testes. After several years on dating sites, Weigel got tired of the anxiety of wondering how a partner might react when she finally described her physical reality and started putting “intersex” at the top of her page. That winnowed the applicant pool and made the experience less fraught.

Director Julie Cohen (“RBG”) and her editor Kelly Kendrick interweave the three main stories and troves of accompanying historical and medical facts with admirable economy and imagination. Stylistically this is one of the cleanest American documentaries of the year. A lot of information is packed into the movie’s brief running time, but “Every Body” never feels cluttered. Nor do the array of visual and graphic devices deployed by the filmmakers feel like they’ve been added to create artificial excitement or fool viewers into thinking this is entertainment that can be passively “enjoyed” rather than actively processed. 

The decision to tie everything into the experiences of Gallo, Seidel, and Weigel grounds the movie in simple and universal emotions, but the subjects’  expertise as communicators and mastery of facts ensures that nobody can accuse the film of basing arguments on “feelings.” These traumatized people have used their pain as fuel to make sure no one else has to endure what they did. 

Things get very dark and disturbing in the middle of the film, which focuses on how intersex people were perceived and treated by the medical establishment until recently. “Every Body” becomes a lesson in how editing can be a critical and analytical tool by cutting between archival footage of medical professionals stating false and psychologically damaging “facts” about intersex people and their bodies; the main subjects reacting as they watch the material; and childhood videos and still photos of the subjects, which remind us that they were burdened with certain instructions and expectations many years before puberty or sexual relationships would have started to take up mental real estate. Weigel speaks of how a doctor gave her a dildo to when she was barely pubescent and instructed her to use it to enlarge her vagina to get ready for the day she’d have sex with a man. A lot of the stories of intersex childhood are like this: you’re not the thing society wants you to be, so you have to be something else, and your wishes aren’t even acknowledged, much less prioritized.

The film is also a great example of how social criticism and irony can be conveyed just by pairing one piece of footage with another, or selecting a piece of music that complicates or comments upon what the film is showing you without being literal-minded or redundant. Too many documentaries are content with the low-hanging-fruit approach to editing and needle-drop song usage: for instance, a subject talks about an important event that occurred on a rainy day, and a director cuts to stock footage of rain scenes and plays “Have You Ever Seen the Rain.” “Every Body” is smarter. It gets a lot of conceptual mileage, for instance, by gender-swapping songs that are typically associated with a male or female “narrator” (such as “Born to Run”), subtly reinforcing the universality of basic human experiences.

The opening credits sequence of “Every Body” is so perfectly realized in this regard that it feels like a movie unto itself. A joyous, jangly cover of “Be My Baby” plays over snippets of videos of gender reveal parties where clouds of blue or pink smoke are released in spectacular and sometimes violent ways (one parent releases the smoke by shooting a compound bow at a target; another fires a tripod-mounted sniper rifle). The point of this sequence is not to make fun of the parents. It’s to establish how much of a typical parent’s identity is invested in which of those boxes a doctor checks on a birth form. And it prepares viewers for the rest of the movie, which shows how the children spend their lives either contorting to fit into that box or fighting to escape. 

This review was filed from the 2023 Tribeca Film Festival. “Every Body” will be in theaters on June 30th. 

“Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” is somehow both never boring and never really entertaining. It walks a line of modest interest in what’s going to happen next thanks to equal parts innovative story beats and the foundation of nostalgia that everyone brings to the theater. It’s an alternating series of frustrating choices, promising beats, and general goodwill for a legendary actor donning one of the most famous hats in movie history yet again. It should be better. It could have been worse. Both can be true. In an era of extreme online critical opinion, “Dial of Destiny” feels like a hard movie to truly hate, which is nice. It’s also an Indiana Jones movie that feels difficult to truly love, which makes this massive fan of the original trilogy a little sad.

The unsettling mix of good and bad starts in the first sequence, a flashback to the final days of World War II that features Indy (Harrison Ford) and a colleague named Basil Shaw (Toby Jones) trying to reclaim some of the historical artifacts being stolen by the fleeing Nazis. Jones looks normal, of course, but Ford here is an uncanny valley occupant, a figure of de-aged CGI that never looks quite human. He doesn’t move or even sound quite right. It’s the first but not the last time in “Dial of Destiny” in which it feels like you can’t really get your hands on what you’re watching. It sets up a tone of over-used effects that is the film’s greatest flaw. We’re watching Indiana Jones at the end of World War II, but it doesn’t feel like we are. The effects are distracting instead of enhancing. Again, this won’t be the last time.

It’s a shame too because the structure of the prologue is solid. Indy escapes capture from a Nazi played by Thomas Kretschman, but the important introduction here is that of a Nazi astrophysicist named Jurgen Voller (a de-aged Mads Mikkelson), who discovers that, while looking for something called the Lance of Longinus, the Nazis have stumbled upon half of the Antikythera, or Archimedes’ Dial. Based on a real Ancient Greek item that could reportedly predict astronomical positions for decades, the dial is given the magical Indy franchise treatment in ways that I won’t spoil other than to say it’s not as explicitly religious as items like the Ark of the Covenant of The Holy Grail other than, as Voller says, it almost makes its owner God.

After a cleverly staged sequence involving anti-aircraft fire and dozens of dead Nazis, “The Dial of Destiny” jumps to 1969. An elderly Indiana Jones is retiring from Hunter College, unsure of what comes next in part because he’s separated from Marion after the death of their son Mutt in the Vietnam War. The best thing about “Dial of Destiny” starts here in the emotional undercurrents in Harrison Ford’s performance. He could have lazily walked through playing Indy again, but he very clearly asked where this man would be emotionally at this point in his life. Ford’s dramatic choices, especially in the back half of the film, can be remarkable, reminding one how good he can be with the right material, and it made me truly hope that he gets a brilliant drama again in his career, of the kind he made more often in the ‘80s.

But back to the action/adventure stuff. Before he can put his retirement gift away, Indy is whisked off on an adventure with Helena Shaw (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), the daughter of Basil and goddaughter of Indy. It turns out that Basil became obsessed with the dial after their encounter with it a quarter-century ago, and Indy told him he would destroy the half of the dial they found. Of course, Indiana Jones doesn’t destroy historical artifacts. As they’re getting the dial from the storeroom, they’re attacked by Voller and his goons, leading to a horse chase through the subway during a parade. It’s a cluttered, awkward action sequence that’s only power comes from seeing Harrison Ford on a horse again—a hero riding through a parade being thrown for someone else.

Before you know it, everyone is in Tangier, where Helena wants to sell her half of the dial, and the film injects its final major character into the action in a sidekick named Teddy (Ethann Isidore). From here, “Dial of Destiny” becomes a traditional Indy chase movie with Jones and his team trying to stay a step ahead of the bad guys while also basically leading them to what they’re trying to uncover.

James Mangold has delivered on “old-man hero action” before with the excellent “Logan,” but he gets lost on the journey here, unable to stage action sequences in a way that’s anywhere near as engaging as the way Steven Spielberg does the same. Yes, we’re in a different era. CGI is more prevalent. But that doesn’t excuse clunky, awkward, incoherent action choreography. Look at films like “John Wick: Chapter 4” or a little sequel that’s coming out in a few weeks that I’m not really supposed to talk about—even with the CGI enhancements, you know where the characters are at almost all times, what they’re trying to accomplish, and what stands in their way. That basic action structure falls apart often in “Dial of Destiny.” There’s a car chase scene through Tangier that’s incredibly frustrating, a blur of activity that has no weight to it, and no real stakes. It should work on paper, but you can’t get your hands on it. A later scene in a shipwreck that should be claustrophobic is similarly clunky in terms of basic composition. I know not everyone can be Spielberg, but the simple framing of action sequences in “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and even “The Last Crusade” is gone here, replaced by sequences that cost so much that they somehow elevated the budget to $300 million. I wished early and often to see the $100 million version of this movie.

“The Dial of Destiny” works much better when it’s less worried about spending that massive budget. When Indy and Helena get to actual treasure-hunting, and John Williams’ all-timer score kicks in again, the movie starts to click. And, without spoiling, it ends with a series of events and ideas that I wish had been foregrounded more in the 130 minutes that preceded it. Ultimately, “The Dial of Destiny” is about a man who wants to control history being thwarted by a man who wants to appreciate it but has arguably allowed himself to get stuck in it, either through regret or inaction. There’s a powerful emotional center here, but it comes too late to really have the impact it could have with a stronger script. One senses that this one was sanded down so many times by producers and rewrites that it lost some of the rough edges it needed to work.

Spielberg reportedly gave Mangold some advice when he passed the whip to the director, telling him “It’s a movie that’s a trailer from beginning to end – always be moving.” Sure. Trailers are rarely boring. But they’re never as entertaining as a great movie.

In theaters now.

This lively and engaging documentary could just as well be titled “The Labyrinths of Umberto Eco.” The Italian scholar, essayist, novelist, lecturer, and polymath, who died in 2016 at the age of 84, owned not just a prodigious number of books, many of them antiquarian oddities; he absorbed over his lifetime a repository of knowledge that led down many corridors and around corners and snaky paths, allowing him to make astonishing and sometimes disquieting cultural connections. What he did was called semiotics—and the practice is just as crucial to his popular fictions The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum as it is in his academic work. Very often, the result of his enthusiastic investigations demonstrated the truth of the Biblical adage about there being no new thing under the sun. 

So you think Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire, a “fake” poem followed by an addled “annotation” that adds up to a sardonic yet tragic narrative, is some kind of triumph of modernism? Well, yeah, it is, but in Eco’s collection, there’s an 18th-century book by Thémiseul de Saint-Hyacinthe called The Masterpiece of an Unknown, which is a long mock-commentary on a nonsense verse, written about by Eco in his book La Memoria Vegetal, which I think has yet to be fully translated into English, which is a shame. 

The movie, directed by Davide Ferrario, combines archival interview footage of the ever-lively Eco, contemporary scenes of his family and friendly scholars poring over his incredible volumes and their often macabre illustrations, and readings of Eco’s work by actors. These latter moments are sometimes staged in a style that gets a little cute (complete with animation that gets a little cute), but they convey, to some extent, the breadth of Eco’s thought. These components are pillowed by beautiful shots of notable libraries the world over, one so futuristic in design that I doubted it was real, but the end credits confirm it is. There’s not much Eco Origin Story here; he tells a funny story about how as a student, he entered an arrangement with a theater manager to see plays cheap or free if he and his friends applauded rousingly enough, then recalls that he always had to leave before the last act, so he spent many years, for instance, not knowing “what happened to Oedipus.”

While the twists and turns of Eco’s mind, and his delight in what are called “fake books,” have a mind-blowing force to them, Eco himself is not blind to how manufactured knowledge can harm or kill. He calls our own brain the source of “organic memory.” Books, physical books, are vegetal memory. The silicon chips in our phones and computers represent mineral memory. A great memory isn’t always a good thing. Eco cites one of his (and everybody’s, really) favorite writers, Jorge Luis Borges, whose short story Funes, The Memorious is about a man who remembers everything. “And is an idiot,” Eco bluntly states. A good memory is a selective one. Hence, according to Eco, the Internet is “the encyclopedia, according to Funes.” 

Later, he muses that it is only in fiction that we encounter irrefutable truths. To this day, some people insist that the world is flat, and yet, Eco wryly notes, nobody questions that Clark Kent is secretly Superman. After the screening of the movie, I found Eco’s pronouncement borne out as I lunched at a well-known West Village pizza joint. Some guy came in with his kids and said loudly, “This is where Spider-Man works,” for indeed, the joint, albeit at a slightly different location, is where Tobey Maguire has a delivery job in the first Sam Raimi Spider-Man picture. 

Because this documentary intends to celebrate Eco’s life, work, and books, it doesn’t follow through on the darker currents that the work uncovered. It’s funny when Eco compares himself to The Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown and says, “He and I read the same books; only he believed them.” It’s not so funny when Eco speaks of the anti-Semitic forgery of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. For as much as Eco saw how the written word could elasticize reality, he invariably spoke up for that reality while delighting in some ways that literature could distort and codify it. His theorizing on whether Sir Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare’s works is a hilarious debunking that some souls might not actually see as a debunking. The best way to explore Eco’s world is via his actual body of work, and this picture made me want to revisit some of his literary labyrinths immediately. 

Now playing in theaters. 

A few compelling emotions and themes are suggested but rarely well expressed in “Nimona,” a sometimes cute but mostly hyper and overextended animated sci-fi fantasy about the title teenage shapeshifter and her disillusioned (and very literal) knight in shining armor. Overstuffed with Pinterest-ready details and set in the distant future, “Nimona” follows the unlikely duo of the title character (Chloe Grace Moretz), a bubbly, post-manic pixie dream girl, and Ballister Boldheart (Riz Ahmed), a disgraced “medieval”-style knight of some unnamed realm who must defend himself after he’s framed for murdering Queen Valerin (Lorraine Toussaint). 

“Nimona” feels more like a dramatized checklist of stylistic tics and emotional beats from both Pixar and Dreamworks’ animation studios’ greatest hits. There’s some lightly likable dad-friendly puns, sight gags, and a bunch of angsty declaiming about questioning authority, being true to yourself, and other bumper-stick-ready slogans. 

“Nimona” also features a bunch of post-post-punk anthems and punk-adjacent music of variable quality, including at least one Metric song (“Gold Guns Girls”) and some guitar riffs by ex-Sex Pistol Steve Jones. The characters, whose designs were partly modeled after the styles of the formative Disney background artist Eyvind Earle and the “minimal realist” illustrator Charley Harper, fly around the screen with enough keenly observed, fluid grace to remind you that many passionate animators made and put serious thought into the making of this movie. Unfortunately, several of the main characters’ facial expressions seem more like dutiful mimicry—“Nimona” was based on ND Stevenson’s graphic novel—than a convincing vehicle for the characters’ emotions. Their hearts are in the right place, but their mouths—and doe eyes, and glass-cutting jawlines—just pay lip service.

Case in point: While Nimona obviously matters to the plot and exhaustively detailed themes, she’s eventually prescribed with the sort of backstory that even Nimona, in an early scene, scoffs at. She laughs at Ballister’s paternal concern and also shields herself from easy typecasting by waving away his “small-minded questions.” The why of Nimona doesn’t matter, she says, but she eventually provides an origin story later on, which ostensibly endears her to us even more. She’s not a monster, as Ballister fearfully assumes, but a well-meaning misfit. Nimona is also the only friend that Ballister has after the hilt of his sword mysteriously fires a laser at the Queen and instantly kills her. 

You might have questions about that abrupt and surprisingly dark plot twist, but not much about “Nimona” is developed beyond precisely enunciated dialogue and well-designed animation. This isn’t a bad movie in the sense that it’s poorly made. But it often leaves something to be desired whenever the characters talk or muscle their way past the details that might make you want to root for Ballister and his proudly irreverent sidekick. For example, he’s got a concerned but fearful partner, Ambrosius Goldenloin (Eugene Lee Yang), a fellow knight who’s also different than Ballister in that he’s a descendant of the mythic hero Gloreth. Ballister, by contrast, is a commoner, which briefly makes him look like an underdog.

Ambrosius overcomes his wayward sense of duty as he chases after and inevitably tries to protect Ballister from the imperious Director (Frances Conroy), the kingdom’s snobby officiating protector. But why is Ambrosius, the kingdom’s favorite presumed favorite, not more hung up on Ballister’s relatively low upbringing? In other words, why is a movie so clearly trying to be about indoctrination—ignore your programming and trust your inner monster!—only so interested in its characters’ feelings? 

Nimona should, in theory, synthesize the movie’s two modes—leaden speeches and light-hearted chases—but doesn’t get to do much beyond defend her right to exist. Her in-your-face character will seem bubbly and spunky to some; others might find her a well-crafted but empty collection of third-hand quirks. She has all the right moves, as when she shape-shifts into various animals and repeatedly saves Ballister from capture and punishment. But when she talks, she sounds more like a tough-talking authorial sock puppet than a righteous adolescent. 

It’s hard to take a movie like “Nimona” seriously when it often tries to have it all ways. Moretz’s performance injects some appreciable irreverence into the movie’s stuffy anti-authority narrative, but Nimona’s creators go too far out of their way to applaud viewers for knowing that we’re watching a fractured fairy tale with rules that were made to be tweaked. Sounds great, but wouldn’t you rather watch a movie that’s more than a proof-of-concept showcase for its sometimes charming but mostly loud counterprogramming? Nimona is too calculating and savvy to be credible during her big heart-on-her-sleeve moments. She’s not a character; she’s whatever the scene needs her to be. Clever, sassy, goofy, wounded: “Nimona” is a big mood board.

On Netflix now.

When Max (Brian Cox) is released from prison early due to good behavior (and pancreatic cancer), he has nowhere to go. He still has contacts from his former life as a “heavy” in the Las Vegas underworld, but he has no desire to get back into all that. What he wants to do with the months he has left is reconnect with his daughter Maxine (Kate Beckinsale). Unfortunately, she wants nothing to do with him. She is the struggling single mom of son Ezra (Christopher Convery), piecing together random jobs so she can pay for Ezra’s epilepsy medication. Maxine doesn’t have the bandwidth for some delayed affectionate reunion with her father, who let her down in many ways. But she caves. Max moves in with Maxine and Ezra. “Prisoner’s Daughter,” directed by the talented Catherine Hardwicke, details the chaos and catharsis of what comes next.

With a script by Mark Bacci, “Prisoner’s Daughter” unfolds on fairly predictable lines: the slow melting of Maxine towards her father, the bond formed between grandfather and grandson, etc., and Brian Cox and Kate Beckinsale fill their thinly-drawn characters with backstory and fleshed-out complicated emotions. Every scene is loaded with baggage from the past. Ezra, bullied at school for his seizures, needs a father figure since his own dad is a drug-addicted loser named Tyler (Tyson Ritter), who plays in a “band” and lives in what he calls “an artists’ co-op” (really just a drug lair). Ezra wants to see his dad more. Tyler demands to be a part of his son’s life. Maxine knows the dangers and is willing to be the “bad guy,” refusing Tyler access. Max, ensconced in the small house, tries to intervene. Sometimes this goes well, other times, not so well.

Good scripts make you forget they are scripts. The script for “Prisoner’s Daughter” is quite talky and never takes wing. You can almost see the words on the page, despite the strong efforts of Beckinsale and Cox. Young Convery (very good in a similar role in “Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game“) doesn’t fare as well. While Ezra is what you’d call “precocious,” his dialogue tilts into cutesy and sounds like it was written by someone who doesn’t know kids. The self-aware wisecracks grate, as does the calm ability to initiate difficult emotional conversations with adults, using therapeutic-speak, like a sit-com kid, circa 1987. It’s hard to get past this problem. If dialogue doesn’t sound real, nothing else has a chance to lift off. The film is betrayed by its final sequence, where Max takes matters into his own hands, a plot development from a different type of movie altogether. And so what could have been character-driven is plot-driven after all. “Prisoner’s Daughter” deflates.

If you only saw Las Vegas in film, you’d think it was solely made up of the neon strip and populated by gangsters, high-rollers, and showgirls. But Las Vegas is, of course, a place where normal people live. Similar to Alexander Payne’s “The Descendants,” taking place in a Hawaii rarely shown in film, “Prisoner’s Daughter” evokes Las Vegas in all its desert beauty and squalor (the “artists’ co-op” is the grungy stuff of nightmares). Maxine refers to her little house as a “dump,” but it has a backyard, and an unfinished garage, and she’s done her best to make it homey despite her limited means. 

The film’s best moment is a small one where Maxine is offered a job in a corporate laundromat. The awestruck look on Beckinsale’s face when “health insurance” is mentioned during the job interview is piercing and eloquent. Emotion doesn’t have to be conveyed with words. The moment is an indictment of the entire stinking system, where the ability to pay for your son’s crucial medication is tied to employment. It’s inhumane.

In “Lords of Dogtown,” Catherine Hardwicke did a very difficult thing: she captured the vibe of a specific scene. Subcultures are sometimes impenetrable to outsiders, and skateboarding/surfing in ’70s California was a real vibe, and Hardwicke nailed it. Hardwicke’s first film was “Thirteen,” a frightening look at two newly-teenage girls, hungry for experiences far beyond their years. Hardwicke approached the material with fearless intimacy. She also helmed the vibe-iest film of the 2000s, “Twilight,” with moody teenage love unfolding in the chilly light of the Pacific Northwest. “Twilight” is the best of the franchise, made fun of by those who pooh-pooh films championed by teenage girls. Meanwhile, teenage girls are cultural weathervanes, and Hardwicke caught that spirit. Teenage girls often spot things first and point the way. Hardwicke reveled in the spectacle of gloomy Kristen Stewart and glittery Robert Pattinson. She understood the subtext. These three films make up an extremely strong start.

“Prisoner’s Daughter” is tepid by comparison, but Hardwicke does her best to embed herself in the story, trying to catch the vibe. However, there is no vibe. She tries to create something that isn’t there to begin with. This is the job of any talented director, particularly with a script as clunky as this one. Hardwicke has a good eye, a good ear, and a sensitive feel for atmosphere. Hopefully her next project will give her the space to show what she can actually do.

Now playing in theaters. 

Dramatic occurrences crop up throughout “The Passengers of the Night”: a separation, a near-overdose, a workplace affair, a loss of virginity.

But director and co-writer Mikhaël Hers is just as interested in the rhythms of everyday life in 1980s Paris that provide the connective tissue between these events: kids riding bikes, a quiet conversation on a park bench, sneaking into a movie matinee, the Eiffel Tower in the pastel hues of dawn.

At the center of this low-key hang is Charlotte Gainsbourg as the newly single Elisabeth, effortlessly chic as always. She’s the middle-aged mother of two teenagers, and she’s searching for purpose and identity after her husband leaves her. Gainsbourg has long made herself vulnerable for the camera in her many film roles, but here she shows a tender fragility that steadily evolves into a warm, earthy confidence and even an unexpected sense of joy. It’s a lovely performance.

“The Passengers of the Night” takes place from 1981—with jubilation in the streets over the election of President François Mitterrand—through 1988. But a constant throughout the movie’s many life changes is the presence of the late-night radio show that gives the film its title. During the wee hours, people call in to share intimate, personal stories with the veteran star Emmanuelle Béart, formidable as ever, playing the host, Vanda.

Hers and cinematographer Sébastien Buchmann indicate Elisabeth’s loneliness —and the way the radio show gets her through the night—by framing her in silhouette, standing before the expansive windows of her high-rise, corner apartment, gazing at the city’s lights. It’s a gauzy but arresting image. So taken is she with Vanda’s program that she shows up at the station in the middle of the night and quickly accepts a low-paying job running the switchboard. You can feel how significant this human connection is; similarly, she’ll find contentedness years later with a daytime job at the library. Helping others becomes a calling, and watching her subtly blossom is a real pleasure. Is she exhausted from working double duty with weird hours? This film can’t be bothered with such realistic troubles.

The ease with which Elisabeth finds this job suggests early on how little interest Hers and co-writers Maud Ameline and Mariette Désert have in exploring conflict. Instead, they show us characters talking about books and films, listening to records, and smoking—always smoking. It is SO French. The younger of her two kids, 10th-grader Matthias (Quito Rayon Richter), wants to be a poet; her older sister Judith (Megan Northam) is a political activist. Everything is cool; there’s never any parental judgment or interference.

Even the film’s one potential source of tension or danger—Elisabeth’s invitation to a young vagabond to stay with the family for a little while—turns out to be a pleasant addition. Eighteen-year-old Talulah (Noée Abita) came into the radio station to tell her story of dropping out of school and living on the streets of Paris. Maybe it’s the mom in her, or maybe she relates to this sweet creature with her big, brown eyes and birdlike demeanor, but Elisabeth feels enough of an instant connection with this stranger to take her into her spare bedroom upstairs. Abita has a beguiling presence, reminiscent of a “Gia”-era Angelina Jolie. But even Talulah’s warning to Matthias not to fall in love with her—“I’m not a girl for you,” she says before beginning an ill-advised but inevitable fling with him—doesn’t result in the kind of melodrama most films would include.

Allowing us to luxuriate within the languid pacing of this slice-of-life story is actually refreshing during these big, noisy summer days. The period-specific production and costume design are spot on and give the film a lived-in feel (Gainsbourg wears many belted, cowl-neck sweaters, but nothing ever feels like a flashy ‘80s parody). Hers includes various pieces of archival footage from the era to give a feel for what Paris was like back then and even includes home movie-style images of these characters in the same boxy aspect ratio, a nice touch that enhances the feeling we’re watching a time capsule. And seeing Elisabeth find her voice within this realm—literally and metaphorically—is an understated delight. 

Now playing in theaters. 

“Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken” is a cheerful, colorful animated film about a shy, academically gifted young girl with a protective mother and devoted friends who transforms into a huge creature as a metaphor for adolescence, with multi-generational conflicts. Yes, it is similar to the terrific “Turning Red,” but this story has its own delights. One of the best family films of the year, “Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken” has humor and heart, buoyant energy, witty and imaginative visuals, and never-less-than brilliant voice talent.  

Ruby (Lana Condor) and her family live in a coastal village called Oceanside. Her mother, Agatha (Toni Collette), is a successful realtor, her father, Arthur (Colman Domingo), runs a gift shop, and she has an energetic little brother Sam (Blue Chapman). Ruby does not look like the other kids at school. She’s blue. And where a human’s hair should be, she has something fishy. Agatha tells her to explain that the family is from Canada, which seems to satisfy everyone. Her mother also cautions that she can never go in the water or even on a boat. That puts a lot of limits on her social life in a beach-centric town. 

Ruby has a crush on Connor (Jaboukie Young-White), a boy she’s tutoring in math, but she cannot find the nerve to invite him to the prom. When he falls into the ocean, though, she impulsively jumps in to rescue him. And then, well, you saw the title. Her transformation leads to connections to relatives on her mother’s side of the family she never knew existed, including Uncle Brill (the always-delightful Sam Richardson) and a deliciously imperious grandmother Kraken queen (voiced by Jane Fonda) known as Grandmamah (emphasis on the third syllable, please). 

At first, Ruby is shocked and embarrassed by her Kraken-hood. But thanks to Grandmamah’s encouragement, and a new bestie classmate, Ruby sees how her new abilities have the potential for doing good. The new friend is the instantly popular new girl at school, Chelsea Van Der Zee (Annie Murphy of “Schitt’s Creek”). They have something in common. They are both sea creatures; Chelsea is a mermaid. Grandmamah has told Ruby about the war between the Kraken and the mermaids, but Ruby thinks her friendship with Chelsea could lead to a new era of peace and unity. 

The film’s settings are beautiful, with charming seaside buildings and an ocean environment so marvelously tactile we can almost smell the sea spray. The movements underwater, whether peaceful or turbulent, are vivid and realistic. The high school environment is funny and evocative, with the prom variously described as “a post-colonial patriarchy construct” and “a hormone-fueled benchmark of adolescence.” And there are very funny jokes about topics not often the subjects for humor: escrow and ASMR. 

The film’s characters are endearing and expressive, with thoughtful, vivid detail (Connor’s hair is a wonder), all voiced with warmth and spirit. Ruby’s human legs have a slight rubbery elasticity suitable for a gawky teenager. As a Kraken with glowing suckers on her tentacles, her personality still shines through. Chelsea’s glorious red hair is a bit of a wink to Disney’s Ariel but also a signifier that this supremely confident high school alpha girl seems to have it all together while everyone else is just trying not to do anything too humiliating. Fonda is clearly having a blast as the Queen of the Oceans; she’s supremely magisterial, a warrior at heart, but also a doting grandmother delighted to teach the newest heir to the Kraken legacy about her new world and her new powers. I got a particular kick out of Richardson’s Brill, the goofy but affectionate and always-on-your-side uncle everyone deserves. And watching Condor’s Ruby go from being ashamed and terrified to being proud of her authentic self should help us all wonder what more we are capable of. 

Now playing in theaters. 

The topic of motherhood has long provided the horror genre with some of its greatest stories. From “Rosemary’s Baby” to “The Babadook,” there is something inherently scary about watching your beloved child be overtaken by evil forces or reckoning with the idea that becoming a parent makes us vulnerable to just about every terrible thing in our world (and beyond). In Daina Reid’s new film “Run Rabbit Run,” fertility doctor Sarah (Sarah Snook) meets these tensions head-on when her precocious seven-year-old daughter Mia (Lily LaTorre) begins to claim she’s actually Alice, Sarah’s sister who disappeared when she was Mia’s age. 

Reid’s ghost story uses innocuous objects to layer on the film’s sense of unease. First, Mia shows up with a white fluffy rabbit, and she quickly becomes obsessed with it, to the point where she begins wearing a self-made pink rabbit mask. The bunny, which she names Rabbit, ominously hops around the house, a harbinger of the bad things still to come. When Sarah tries to get rid of Rabbit, it bites her, the first of many injuries she will incur as she spirals over memories of her missing sister, her estranged mother, and recently departed father. The film’s conflict is centered between mother Sarah and daughter Mia, but it also includes a thorny relationship with Sarah’s mother, Joan (Greta Scacchi), creating a cycle of guilt from childhood sins and feeling like she’s not doing enough for her kid. 

Rabbit is not the only troubling thing in Hannah Kent’s script. In setting up Sarah’s narrative, Kent shows the audience how much Sarah’s been pushed to the brink even before anything unexplained begins. She’s divorced and co-parenting with her ex-husband, Pete (Damon Herriman), who has moved on and in the process of starting a new family of his own. Sarah is also dealing with the death of her dad, his things still piled up in her garage yet to be sorted through. And then there’s her mother, an ominous figure also losing her memories to dementia. When Mia’s problems escalate, she at first tries to be the strong parent doing what’s right for her child, but then, she starts to hurt herself in the process, and by extension, hurts Mia. 

In a marvelous departure from her best-known role as Shiv Roy in “Succession,” Snook brings a motherly sense of care and duty to her character. She’s attentive and affectionate in ways many of us haven’t seen her. Her calm, collected demeanor quickly erodes in the face of so much uncertainty and stress. Snook’s attention and care for LaTorre’s Mia is deeply felt, and their bond is evident from the first scene when mother wakes up her daughter with a birthday gift. LaTorre looks at Snook with large expressive eyes that shift from confused and scared when she’s inexplicably bleeding to burning with rage when she screams that she’s actually Alice. But in moments of Mia’s clarity, LaTorre runs to Snook and embraces her tightly for safety, establishing the close relationship between the pair early on; giving us a sense of what will be lost once Rabbit enters the frame.  

Sarah’s descent to madness mirrors the haunting landscape of the film’s setting in Waikerie, Australia.  There ate windswept horizons, imposing cliffs, stormy clouds over luscious green hills, flutters of birds flying in droves by her old home, and what looks like trees sprouting out of a purple river. The film wallows in a weatherbeaten palette, with lots of pale yellows and dusty grays, in the daytime. At night, darkness takes over, and even well-lit homes and cozy bedrooms start to feel unsafe. Cinematographer Bonnie Elliot carefully plays with these moods to create a visual sense of Sarah’s spiral. The film’s aesthetic becomes increasingly erratic as she loses her grip on reality. When Sarah goes in and out of a dreamlike state, images may look hazy or disorienting in their closeup, then harshly come into focus when she returns to reality. When Sarah starts to lose control, Snook physically takes her character to that dark place, but the film’s camera immerses the viewer in her unease. 

Motherhood, like extreme moments of grief, can be among the most life-changing experiences – a clear demarcation of life before and after the event. Sometimes, it can also be coupled with extreme feelings of isolation, which in this horror movie, makes a person vulnerable to the ghosts of their past. “Run Rabbit Run” is a solid spooky tale without anything too flashy like a Babadook to haunt our dreams and memes but chilling enough to make us sit up in our chair and scan the screen for the next sign of danger. While a fluffy white rabbit may be a symbol of innocence, it leads Sarah down a nightmarish version of “Alice in Wonderland.” The mothers in this film are haunted by the mistakes they made. Joan never seemed to have recovered from Alice’s disappearance, and Sarah’s barely buried trauma resurfaces her own feelings of regret over failing her daughter. And once Sarah is through the looking glass, are she and Mia safe? Are any of us?

On Netflix now.