Category: Movie Reviews

For all the pre-release speculation about how analog epic-maker Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” would re-create the explosion of the first atomic bomb, the film’s most spectacular attraction turns out to something else: the human face. 

This three-plus hour biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) is a film about faces. They talk, a lot. They listen just as often. They react to good and bad news. And sometimes they get lost in their own heads—none more so than the title character, the supervisor of the nuclear weapons team at Los Alamos whose apocalyptic contribution to science earned him the nickname The American Prometheus (as per the title of Nolan’s primary source, the biography by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherman). Nolan and cinematographer Hoyt van Hoytema use the large-format IMAX film system not merely to capture the splendor of New Mexico’s desert panoramas but, far more often, to contrast the external coolness and internal turmoil of Oppenheimer, a brilliant mathematician and low-key showman and leader whose impulsive nature and insatiable sexual appetites made his private life a disaster, and whose greatest contribution to civilization was a weapon that could destroy it. Closeup after closeup shows star Cillian Murphy’s face staring into the middle distance,  offscreen, and sometimes directly into the lens, while Oppenheimer dissociates from unpleasant interactions, or gets lost inside memories, fantasies, or waking nightmares. “Oppenheimer” rediscovers the power of huge closeups of people’s faces as they grapple with who they are, and who other people have decided that they are, and what they’ve done to themselves and others. 

Sometimes the closeups of people’s faces are interrupted by flash-cuts of events that haven’t happened, or already happened. There are recurring images of of flame, debris, and smaller chain-reaction explosions that resemble strings of firecrackers, as well as non-incendiary images that evoke other awful, personal disasters. (There are a lot of gradually expanding flashbacks in this film, where you see a glimpse of something first, then a bit more of it, and then finally the entire thing.) But these don’t just relate to the big bomb that Oppenheimer’s team hopes to detonate in the desert, or the little ones that are constantly detonating in Oppenheimer’s life, sometimes because he personally pushed the big red button in a moment of anger, pride or lust, and other times because he made a naive or thoughtless mistake that pissed somebody off long ago, and the wronged person retaliated with the equivalent of a time-delayed bomb. The “fissile” cutting, to borrow a physics word, is also a metaphor for the domino effect caused by individual decisions, and the chain reaction that makes other things happen as a result. This principle is also visualized by repeated images of ripples in water, starting with the opening closeup of raindrops setting off expanding circles on the surface that foreshadow both the ending of Oppenheimer’s career as a government advisor and public figure and the explosion of the first nuke at Los Alamos (which observers see, then hear, then finally feel, in all its awful impact). 

The weight of the film’s interests and meanings are carried by faces—not just Oppenheimer’s, but those of other significant characters, including General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon), Los Alamos’ military supervisor; Robert’s suffering wife Kitty Oppenheimer, whose tactical mind could have averted a lot of disasters if her husband would have only listened; and Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey, Jr.), the Atomic Energy Commission chair who despised Oppenheimer for a lot of reasons, including his decision to distance himself from his Jewish roots, and who spent several years trying to derail Oppenheimer’s post-Los Alamos career. The latter constitutes its own adjacent full-length story about pettiness, mediocrity, and jealousy. Strauss is Salieri to Oppenheimer’s Mozart, regularly and often pathetically reminding others that he studied physics, too, back in the day, and that he’s a good person, unlike Oppenheimer the adulterer and communist sympathizer. (This film asserts that Strauss leaked the FBI file on his progressive and communist associations to a third party who then wrote to the bureau’s director, J. Edgar Hoover.)

The film speaks quite often of one of the principles of quantum physics, which holds that observing quantum phenomena by a detector or an instrument can change the results of this experiment. The editing illustrates it by constantly re-framing our perception of an event to change its meaning, and the script does it by adding new information that undermines, contradicts, or expands our sense of why a character did something, or whether they even knew why they did it. 

That, I believe, is really what “Oppenheimer” is about, much more so than the atom bomb itself, or even its impact on the war, the Japanese civilian population, which is talked about but never shown. The film does show what the atom bomb does to human flesh, but it’s not recreations of the actual attacks on Japan: the agonized Oppenheimer imagines Americans going through it. This filmmaking decision is likely to antagonize both Asian viewers who wanted a more direct reckoning with the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and reactionary Americans who have bought into the arguments advanced by Strauss and others that the bombs had to be dropped because Japan never would have surrendered otherwise. The movie doesn’t indicate whether it thinks that interpretation is true or if it sides more with Oppenheimer and others who insisted that Japan was on its knees by that point in World War II and would have eventually given up without atomic attacks that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. No, this is a film that permits itself the freedoms and indulgences of novelists, poets, and opera composers. It does what we expect it to do—dramatize the life of Oppenheimer and other historically significant people in his orbit, in an aesthetically daring way—while also letting all of the characters and all of the events be used metaphorically and symbolically as well, so that they become pointillistic elements in a much larger canvas that’s about the mysteries of the human personality and the unforeseen impact of decisions made by individuals and societies.

This is another striking thing about “Oppenheimer.” It’s not entirely about Oppenheimer. even though Murphy’s baleful face and haunting yet opaque eyes dominate the movie. It’s also about the effect of Oppenheimer’s personality and decisions on other people, from the other strong-willed members of his atom bomb development team (including Benny Sadie’s Edwin Teller, who wanted to skip ahead to create the much more powerful hydrogen bomb, and eventually did) to the beleaguered Kitty; Oppenheimer’s mistress Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh, who has some of Gloria Grahame’s self-immolating smolder); General Groves, who likes Oppenheimer in spite of his arrogance but isn’t going to side with him over the United States government; and even Harry Truman, the US president who ordered the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (played in a marvelous cameo by Gary Oldman) and who derides Oppenheimer as a naive and narcissistic “crybaby” who sees history mainly in terms of his own feelings.

Jennifer Lame’s editing is prismatic and relentless, often in a faintly Terrence Malick-y way, skipping between three or more time periods within seconds. It’s wedded to virtually nonstop music by Ludwig Göransson that fuses with the equally relentless dialogue and monologues to create an odd but distinctive sort of scientifically expository aria that’s probably what it would feel like to read “American Prometheus” while listening to a playlist of Philip Glass’s film scores. Non-linear movies like this one do a better job of capturing the pinball-machine motions of human consciousness than linear movies do, and they also capture what it’s like to read a third-person omniscient book (or a biography that permits itself to imagine what its subjects might have been thinking or feeling). It also paradoxically captures the mental process of reading a text and responding to it emotionally and viscerally as well as intellectually. The mind stays anchored to the text. But it also jumps outside of it, connecting the text to other texts, to external knowledge, and to one’s own experience and imaginings.

This review hasn’t really delved much into the plot of the film or the real-world history that inspired it, not because it isn’t important (of course it is) but because—as is always the case with Nolan—the main attraction is not the story, itself but how the filmmaker tells it. Nolan has been derided as less a dramatist than half showman, half mathematician, making bombastic, overcomplicated, but ultimately muddled and simplistic blockbusters that are as much puzzles as stores. But whether that characterization was ever entirely true (and I’m increasingly convinced that it never was) it seems beside the point when you see how thoughtfully and rewardingly it’s been applied to a biography of a real person. It seems possible that “Oppenheimer” could retrospectively seem like a turning point in the director’s filmography, when he takes all of the stylistic and technical practices that he’d been honing for the previous twenty years in intellectualized pulp blockbusters and turns them inward, using them to explore the innermost recesses of the mind and heart, not just to move human pieces around on a series of interlinked, multi-dimensional storytelling boards.

The movie is an academic-psychedelic biography in the vein of those 1990s Oliver Stone films that were edited within an inch of their lives (at times it’s as if the park bench scene in “JFK” had been expanded to three hours). There’s also a strain of pitch-black humor, in a Stanley Kubrick mode, as when top government officials meet to go over a list of possible Japanese cities to bomb, and the man reading the list says that he just made an executive decision to delete Kyoto from it because he and his wife vacation there. (The Kubrick connection is cemented by the presence of “Full Metal Jacket” star Matthew Modine, who costars as American engineer and inventor Vannevar Bush.) As an example of top-of-the-line, studio-produced popular art with a dash of swagger, “Oppenheimer” draws on Michael Mann’s “The Insider,” late-period Terrence Malick, nonlinearly-edited art cinema touchstones like “Hiroshima Mon Amour,” “The Pawnbroker,” “All That Jazz” and “Picnic at Hanging Rock“; and, inevitably, “Citizen Kane” (there’s even a Rosebud-like mystery surrounding what Oppenheimer and his hero Albert Einstein, played by Tom Conti, talked about on the banks of a Princeton pond). Most of the performances have a bit of an “old movie” feeling, with the actors snapping off their lines and not moving their faces as much as they would in a more modern story. A lot of the dialogue is delivered so quickly, with the lines sometimes slightly overlapping, producing a screwball comedy energy. This comes through most strongly in the arguments between Robert and Kitty about his sexual indiscretions and refusal to listen to her mostly superb advice; the more abstract debates about power and responsibility between Robert and General Groves, and the scenes between Strauss and a Senate aide (Alden Ehrenreich) who is advising him as he testifies before a committee that he hopes will approve him to serve in President Dwight Eisenhower’s cabinet.

But as a physical experience, “Oppenheimer” is something else entirely—it’s hard to say exactly what, and that’s what’s so fascinating about it. I’ve already heard complaints that the movie is “too long,” that it could’ve ended with the first bomb detonating, and could’ve done without the bits about Oppenheimer’s sex life and the enmity of Strauss, and that it’s perversely self-defeating to devote so much of the running time, including the most of the third hour, to a pair of governmental hearings: the one where Oppenheimer tries to get his security clearance renewed, and Strauss trying to get approved for Eisenhower’s cabinet. But the film’s furiously entropic tendencies complement the theoretical discussions of the how’s and why’s of the individual and collective personality. To greater and lesser degrees, all of the characters are on trial, or appearing before a tribunal, and being called to account for their contradictions, hypocrisies, and sins. The real tribunal is out there in the dark. We’ve been given the information but not told what to decide, which is as it should be.

It takes a certain kind of person to be a free diver. All need not apply. Not everyone wants to plunge into the blackness of the ocean without oxygen, pushing the limits of the human body, swimming what is essentially the height of the Statue of Liberty twice, once down, once back up. These people are “built different,” as they say, and, similar to big-wave surfers or any athlete devoted to extreme sports, are not afraid of the things most humans fear. They run towards the limits. Life-or-death risk is built in.

Laura McGann’s documentary “The Deepest Breath” profiles Alessia Zecchini, an Italian free diver determined to break the world record, and Stephen Keenan, a skilled safety diver (who accompanies the free divers partway down, to help in case something goes wrong). “The Deepest Breath” is a visual stunner, with intimidatingly beautiful underwater photography showing tiny humans surrounded by the vast underwater world, a forbidding space of blues moving into blacks. The visuals give you an awe-inspiring and terrifying idea of what these people experience, what they seek and crave. The pursuit is psychological as much as it is physical. Former world champion free diver Natalia Molchanova said in an interview, “Mental relaxation is the foundation of free diving.” The sport requires you to empty yourself of everything except in-the-moment consciousness. Anything else takes too much energy.

“The Deepest Breath” introduces us to Zecchini and Keenan on alternating narrative tracks. From Italy and Ireland, respectively, Zecchini and Keenan had very different life trajectories: one was driven to be a free diver from a very young age, and the other spent his youth wandering the world, searching for something, but he didn’t know what exactly. Keenan then discovered free diving and was instantly hooked. Zecchini and Keenan are heard in voiceover in interview and podcast clips. The past tense used by other interview subjects shows where this is going (in case you aren’t up to speed on the real-life events).

Zecchini was inspired as a child by the example of Molchanova, whose feats remain legendary, who set records not broken for years and years. Zecchini was still in grade school when she decided she wanted to be a world champion. In 2015, Molchanova disappeared during a dive off the coast of Ibiza. She went down and never came back up. Shockwaves reverberated through the freediving community. Zecchini realized, for the first time, she could die doing this thing she loved. This tripped her up mentally. She said, hauntingly, in one interview, “It’s black. It’s dark. You feel locked inside.” 

Zecchini was so ambitious it made her tense and temperamental. She pushed herself too hard. Even other free divers thought so. But then, in 2017, during a competition in the Bahamas at the Vertical Blue, Zecchini met Keenan in his capacity as a safety diver. He offered to train her after Zecchini blacked out on successive dives. She flourished and broke a world record three days later (102 meters). The following day, her record was broken by Japanese phenom Hanako Hirose (103 meters), which pushed Alessia to break Hirose’s record the following day (104 meters). This triumphant experience solidified the bond between Zecchini and Keenan. “The Deepest Breath” is also a love story.

The pressure of the deep ocean is hell on the human body. Divers risk brain damage and permanent lung damage. There is something called a “lung squeeze,” and you really don’t want it to happen to you. Divers often black out underwater and must be rushed to the surface by the safety divers. CPR is administered while everyone is still in the water: there’s no time even to haul the diver up into the boat. There is traumatic footage of the moments when divers re-emerge to the surface, and they flail, their faces and bodies frozen in a full-body seize. Free divers wear wet suits and monofins, making them look like superhero mermaids as they undulate into the black. The pressure pulling divers down is called a “free fall.” Divers say it feels like flying.

McGann pulled together as much extant footage as possible from the various competitions, plus Zecchini and Keenan’s video recordings, video blogs, Instagram stories, etc. They documented their lives. Other free divers weigh in, and there are some conventional “talking head” interviews, particularly with the fathers of both Zecchini and Keenan, pained men who had to let their children go, who had to let them pursue this very dangerous thing, incomprehensible to most, but essential for the happiness of their children. Since free divers are followed by a hearty talented group of underwater cinematographers, there is existing footage of many of the dives. There are many famous spots free divers gravitate towards, the “vertical blue” in the Bahamas and the terrifying “blue hole” in Dahab, Egypt, with its deadly “arch.” The arch is the most dangerous place on earth for a free diver (“More dangerous than Mount Everest,” says one of the free divers). If you can make it through the arch and back up, you stand with the greats.

“The Deepest Breath” is haunting and eerie in tone, with hair-raising shots of divers swimming down down down, their bodies moving in one continuous rippling motion until they disappear into the blackness near the bottom. Zecchini and Keenan are almost otherworldly underwater, but topside, they are down-to-earth and fun-loving, free-spirited, and wild. Each found a kindred spirit in the other. Free diving is such a small community. When something happens to one, it happens to all.

Molchanova described what it was like at such a depth: “It’s like being in the last quiet place on earth.” Eloquent and moving, “The Deepest Breath” shows what it’s like “down there,” why people risk their lives to free fall into the blackness where it is so quiet, and why they also risk their lives to bring divers in trouble back up to the noisy surface. 

On Netflix now.

“Barbie,” director and co-writer Greta Gerwig’s summer splash, is a dazzling achievement, both technically and in tone. It’s a visual feast that succeeds as both a gleeful escape and a battle cry. So crammed with impeccable attention to detail is “Barbie” that you couldn’t possibly catch it all in a single sitting; you’d have to devote an entire viewing just to the accessories, for example. The costume design (led by two-time Oscar winner Jacqueline Durran) and production design (led by six-time Oscar nominee Sarah Greenwood) are constantly clever and colorful, befitting the ever-evolving icon, and cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto (a three-time Oscar nominee) gives everything a glossy gleam. It’s not just that Gerwig & Co. have recreated a bunch of Barbies from throughout her decades-long history, outfitted them with a variety of clothing and hairstyles, and placed them in pristine dream houses. It’s that they’ve brought these figures to life with infectious energy and a knowing wink.

“Barbie” can be hysterically funny, with giant laugh-out-loud moments generously scattered throughout. They come from the insularity of an idyllic, pink-hued realm and the physical comedy of fish-out-of-water moments and choice pop culture references as the outside world increasingly encroaches. But because the marketing campaign has been so clever and so ubiquitous, you may discover that you’ve already seen a fair amount of the movie’s inspired moments, such as the “2001: A Space Odyssey” homage and Ken’s self-pitying ‘80s power ballad. Such is the anticipation industrial complex.

And so you probably already know the basic plot: Barbie (Margot Robbie), the most popular of all the Barbies in Barbieland, begins experiencing an existential crisis. She must travel to the human world in order to understand herself and discover her true purpose. Her kinda-sorta boyfriend, Ken (Ryan Gosling), comes along for the ride because his own existence depends on Barbie acknowledging him. Both discover harsh truths—and make new friends –along the road to enlightenment. This bleeding of stark reality into an obsessively engineered fantasy calls to mind the revelations of “The Truman Show” and “The LEGO Movie,” but through a wry prism that’s specifically Gerwig’s.

This is a movie that acknowledges Barbie’s unrealistic physical proportions—and the kinds of very real body issues they can cause in young girls—while also celebrating her role as a feminist icon. After all, there was an astronaut Barbie doll (1965) before there was an actual woman in NASA’s astronaut corps (1978), an achievement “Barbie” commemorates by showing two suited-up women high-fiving each other among the stars, with Robbie’s Earth-bound Barbie saluting them with a sunny, “Yay, space!” This is also a movie in which Mattel (the doll’s manufacturer) and Warner Bros. (the film’s distributor) at least create the appearance that they’re in on the surprisingly pointed jokes at their expense. Mattel headquarters features a spacious, top-floor conference room populated solely by men with a heart-shaped, “Dr. Strangelove”-inspired lamp hovering over the table, yet Will Ferrell’s CEO insists his company’s “gender-neutral bathrooms up the wazoo” are evidence of diversity. It’s a neat trick.

As the film’s star, Margot Robbie finds just the right balance between satire and sincerity. She’s the perfect casting choice; it’s impossible to imagine anyone else in the role. The blonde-haired, blue-eyed stunner completely looks the part, of course, but she also radiates the kind of unflagging, exaggerated optimism required for this heightened, candy-coated world. Later, as Barbie’s understanding expands, Robbie masterfully handles the more complicated dialogue by Gerwig and her co-writer and frequent collaborator, filmmaker Noah Baumbach. From a blinding smile to a single tear and every emotion in between, Robbie finds the ideal energy and tone throughout. Her performance is a joy to behold.

And yet, Ryan Gosling is a consistent scene-stealer as he revels in Ken’s himbo frailty. He goes from Barbie’s needy beau to a swaggering, macho doofus as he throws himself headlong into how he thinks a real man should behave. (Viewers familiar with Los Angeles geography will particularly get a kick out of the places that provide his inspiration.) Gosling sells his square-jawed character’s earnestness and gets to tap into his “All New Mickey Mouse Club” musical theater roots simultaneously. He’s a total hoot.

Within the film’s enormous ensemble—where the women are all Barbies and the men are all Kens, with a couple of exceptions—there are several standouts. They include a gonzo Kate McKinnon as the so-called “Weird Barbie” who places Robbie’s character on her path; Issa Rae as the no-nonsense President Barbie; Alexandra Shipp as a kind and capable Doctor Barbie; Simu Liu as the trash-talking Ken who torments Gosling’s Ken; and America Ferrera in a crucial role as a Mattel employee. And we can’t forget Michael Cera as the one Allan, bumbling awkwardly in a sea of hunky Kens—although everyone else forgets Allan.

But while “Barbie” is wildly ambitious in an exciting way, it’s also frustratingly uneven at times. After coming on strong with wave after wave of zippy hilarity, the film drags in the middle as it presents its more serious themes. It’s impossible not to admire how Gerwig is taking a big swing with heady notions during the mindless blockbuster season, but she offers so many that the movie sometimes stops in its propulsive tracks to explain itself to us—and then explain those points again and again. The breezy, satirical edge she established off the top was actually a more effective method of conveying her ideas about the perils of toxic masculinity and entitlement and the power of female confidence and collaboration.

One character delivers a lengthy, third-act speech about the conundrum of being a woman and the contradictory standards to which society holds us. The middle-aged mom in me was nodding throughout in agreement, feeling seen and understood, as if this person knew me and was speaking directly to me. But the longtime film critic in me found this moment a preachy momentum killer—too heavy-handed, too on-the-nose, despite its many insights.  

Still, if such a crowd-pleasing extravaganza can also offer some fodder for thoughtful conversations afterward, it’s accomplished several goals simultaneously. It’s like sneaking spinach into your kid’s brownies—or, in this case, blondies.

Available in theaters on July 21st. 

“20 Days in Mariupol,” about the first 20 days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, spares no one’s sensibilities. It goes on a short list of great documentaries that the viewer will never want to watch again and likely won’t need to because some of the images are so gruesome and the context so upsetting that they’ll be burned into your memory.

Associated Press video journalist Mstyslav Chernov and two of his colleagues, photographer Evgeniy Maloletka and producer Vasilisa Stepanenko, were present for the first three weeks of the Russian onslaught, which began February 24 when Vladimir Putin announced a “Special Military Operation” in “self-defense.” Chernov’s narration confesses that he feels guilty for not staying longer, even though the odds of getting killed increased as the bodies of soldiers, civilians, and reporters piled up. 

Although “20 Days in Mariupol” begins at the end, it quickly transforms into a linear report of what the journalists saw. This movie is culled from approximately 25 hours of material that Chernov’s team recorded on-site; they could only get 30 minutes of it to the Associated Press due to the size of video data. It’s questionable whether much of it would have been okayed for inclusion in reporting anyway because of the Western media’s aversion to showing blood and death. 

A big part of what makes the movie so fascinating, valuable, and intense is how it lets certain events unfold in what feels like real-time, even though there are edits for the sake of compression and clarity. The only wholly unnecessary touch is a subdued minor-key synth score that plays during extended sequences of dread and terror. The movie doesn’t need it. The images and sounds speak for themselves.

What’s most striking about footage from the earliest days is the textbook surreality of it all. A scene will be set for us in a way that makes things seem typical or “normal.” The buildings and roads within camera range appear to be intact and functional. There are no planes in the sky, no tanks on the roads. Then comes an element that’s not normal, such as a plume of smoke on the horizon or a tearful older woman approaching the journalists to say she’s been driven out of her neighborhood with only the clothes on her back and doesn’t know what to do. (The filmmakers tell her to go home; she’s later found alive, but her house is destroyed.) 

Things get weirder and more frightening from there. The city is pounded into rubble by Russian bombs, missiles, artillery shells, firefights, and vehicular damage caused by the arrival of armored columns. Martial law is declared. There aren’t enough bomb shelters to house all the civilians, so they huddle in basements as explosives rain down. Electricity, water, and internet service either cease or are choked to near-uselessness. 

It becomes hard for anyone not in the military or the press to get reliable information. The journalists are reluctant to approach soldiers who seem to be Ukrainians because they might be Russians pretending to be Ukrainian. Even those with privileged access and protection have to sift through conflicting information, bad information, and disinformation. The movie shows rumormongering occurring on the streets of Mariupol and on Russian television news programs, which insist that reports of civilian casualties are “fake news” and that video of atrocities against Ukrainian civilians has been altered or manufactured. When a British journalist confronts Russia’s UN ambassador and asks him to comment on Chernov’s reporting, he says, unsettlingly, “Who wins the information war, wins the war.”  

This is a dispatch from hell on earth. The fragmented, chaotic, imprecise nature of it is a revelation. 

A four-year-old dies on an operating table after being shredded by Russian shells. A teenage boy playing soccer outside his school loses his legs in a bomb explosion; we see the bloody stumps as his body lies still on a gurney and see and hear his anguished father wailing. The last working surgeon in the hospital tells the filmmakers, “Show that Putin bastard the eyes of this child!” and yells, “Show what these motherf**kers are doing to civilians!” An eerily subdued sequence follows a team of volunteers dumping 70 bodies into mass graves. Half were Ukrainians killed in eight separate shellings in a 24-hour period. The rest were people who died at home of other causes but could not be collected and properly identified and disposed of because the invasion had destroyed the city’s infrastructure and bureaucracy.

An extended sequence dramatizes a news story that may already be familiar to viewers because it made international headlines: a pregnant woman who was about to give birth died along with her baby after being airlifted from the mostly-deserted obstetrics ward of the city’s bombed-out general hospital to another facility. Her pelvis was crushed by wreckage from the Russian bombing, making vaginal birth impossible. Medics tried to deliver the baby via cesarean section, but it was already dead. When the mother realized she was about to lose her child, she cried to the medics, “Just kill me now!” 

“This is painful to watch,” Chernov tells the audience, “But it must be painful to watch.”   

Now playing in theaters. 

Early in this entirely engrossing drama from German writer/director Christian Petzold, Leon, an extremely peevish young novelist played as a kind of encyclopedia of misery by Thomas Schubert, asks his friend Felix about a portfolio he’s working on as an application to art school. Leon is pale and lumpish and cheerless; Felix, played with an appealing bounce by the part-Jamaican actor Langston Uibel, is cheerful (albeit a little clueless; he can’t hear the ping in his car engine before it breaks down and leaves the two almost stranded at the movie’s outset) and open to experience. Aside from their aesthetic leanings, they don’t seem to have much in common. Responding to Leon’s question about the “theme” of his portfolio, Felix says, “Water.” Leon responds with a cheerless smirk and shoots his friend down: “Water’s not a theme.”

While Petzold isn’t known for anything like overt jokiness, he’s poking a little fun at himself here. As it happens, “Afire” (its original German title is “Roter Himmel” or “Red Sky”) is the second film of a quartet whose theme will be the elements; Petzold’s last film, “Undine,” had water as its defining element. The fire in this film spreads through forests on the German island where Leon and Felix have gone on a work retreat.

After their car breaks down and they’re forced to hoof it to a vacation house owned by Felix’s family, Leon and Felix, the precise nature of whose relationship we are never quite sure of, are surprised that there’s another lodger there. The beguiling Nadja is played by the beguiling Paula Beer in the third of her films with Petzold. (In “Undine,” she played a mermaid. Sort of.) Nadja is heard before she is seen, engaging in enthusiastic sex in the main bedroom of the thin-walled house. This makes Leon silently, seethingly crazy—almost everything makes Leon silently, seethingly crazy—but it turns Felix on a little bit. When finally visible, Nadja is cheerful and open. Soon we meet her sex partner, Devid—the spelling, Felix notes, in “an old GDR quirk”—who’s a rescue swimmer at the beach. As Felix, Devid, and Nadja enjoy the summer, Leon frets over his latest novel. His editor, a kindly older man, is coming to the island to discuss the manuscript of the novel, titled “Club Sandwich.” Shortly after he learns that Nadja spends her days as an ice cream vendor near the island’s deluxe hotel, Nadja asks him to look at the book. He scoffs. A cleaning lady once asked him to read a story of his, and she pronounced it “a little schmaltzy.” If the assessment of a cleaning lady could set off such a paroxysm of self-doubt … well, Leon doesn’t complete that thought, but we get it. When his editor shows up, Leon is in for a surprise about Nadja that ups the ante in what seems to be a sad-sack comedy of failure.

For much of “Afire,” Petzold really drops the hammer down on Leon, and everything that happens to him does nothing to compel him to react with any less petulance. When Felix and Devid start their own sexual affair—which Nadja has no problem with and which Leon observes with a vague exasperation—the dramatic stakes of the movie ascend not unlike the flames that the quartet can see from the roof of their house as it devours forest land.

Petzold has been quietly and industriously building one of this century’s most consistently impressive filmographies. The compulsive literacy (and literary-allusive) dialogue here, combined with the precise but unshowy mise-en-scene and editing, may, for some, call to mind the late, great Èric Rohmer. But Petzold, while not without humor, is a generally graver filmmaker than Rohmer, and the way this film steers into tragedy is wrenching. It leads to a conclusion that in some respects could be called pat, but it also justifies itself well enough—largely due to the exceptional work of the actors, particularly Schubert and Beer—to pass muster. Like all of Petzold’s recent pictures, “Afire” draws you in confidently and prepares its knockout emotional punch with scrupulousness and a vivid sense of surprise.

Now playing in theaters. 

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.

Directed by Andres Beltran and written by Matt Pitts, “Quicksand” is the story of a couple on the brink of divorce who travel to South America. Healthcare professionals who work and live in the United States, the wife (played by Colombian actress Carolina Gaitán) is a doctor returning to her home country after many years away to deliver a lecture at a conference. The husband (played by Canadian actor Allan Hawco) is in Bogotá for the first time. 

But before we see the couple, we are treated to a prologue of hunters in the rainforest that is meant to assure us this is a thriller and not a somber chamber piece, but it also spells out the problems with the film. The opening scene with the hunters relies on fast cutting to create a sense of terror that really just feels disorienting. The score also tells us how to feel and doesn’t relent for the film’s 85-minute runtime. The hunter’s wailing fear fails to make an impact because we don’t know what he’s afraid of. 

From there, we meet the couple who are the story’s focus. They have left their young children back in the States and we slowly realize their marriage has collapsed. The idea of a failing couple in peril far from home is an intriguing idea—it makes one imagine a hybrid of Ingmar Bergman and “Deliverance.” But the script fails to give the actors what they need to make this couple credible. Their first scenes are lacking in the kind of icy dread that is generated by a husband and wife in crisis and trying to pull away. The reasons for their marital trouble don’t need to be spelled out in a monologue, but they need to feel concrete. And they don’t.

The couple decides to take a hike in the rainforest near Bogotá, where they immediately encounter a thief who has trailed them to the remote location. After a brief confrontation, the wife and husband find themselves in the titular liquefied soil where they remain for the remaining two-thirds of the film. We are told by the husband that unlike ’70s television, actual quicksand doesn’t pull you under unless you flail, so they are merely stuck in the wilderness, waiting to fend off human and animal predators alike. 

The idea of a pair in crisis being forced into mutual Samuel Beckett-like stasis with one another feels like a form of therapy that should have been invented by now. And, of course, the quicksand does begin to force the couple to look past their grievances and see the value in one another. The film plays with the idea that their reconciliation may be for naught with their lives in peril and tries to keep us in suspense until the credits roll. In other hands and with greater faith in the audience, this film could have gone for a satisfying cinematic slow burn rather than resort to stylistic overkill. Coupled with a more layered and less cliched screenplay, “Quicksand” might have achieved something more gripping and emotionally moving. 

But despite the actors’ best efforts, the film gets bogged down by trite writing and over-direction. Real quicksand may not drag its victims down, but “Quicksand” sinks beneath the weight of its missed opportunities. 

On Shudder now.

No theme is more frequent in movies than very different people taking a journey together. They’re initially antagonistic, but they find a growing appreciation for one another throughout the story. Usually, one is careful and reserved, while the other is an impulsive and free spirit. The reason for the enduring appeal of these stories is the eternal human struggle between the ego and the superego. There’s something funny but also satisfying about seeing reconciliation, even the integration of the two. The set-up immediately connects to us; all we need is some worthy details, vivid supporting characters, and, if possible, some nice scenery.   

And that is what we get in the watchable French film “Two Tickets to Greece,” the story of two middle-aged women who have not seen each other since their early teens and find themselves traveling together to the Greek Isles. As a character points out to Blandine (Olivia Côte), even her name sounds boring. Blandine’s husband left her two years earlier and is about to have a baby with his new, young wife. Magalie (Laure Calamy) lives for fun, excitement, and the triumph of petty cons like keeping the tags on an expensive shirt so she can wear it once and then return it. In a brief flashback as the movie begins, we see them as middle schoolers getting into trouble and laughing about it. 

When Blandine and her college student son are going through boxes of things that have been packed away for decades, she tells him about her old friend, and he surprises her by tracking down Magalie and inviting her to meet Blandine for dinner. She does not tell him it did not go well, so he surprises her again by inviting Magalie to accompany Blandine on the trip to Greece. When she tells him they cannot get along, he loses patience. “You have two weeks to kill each other or patch things up. I don’t care which.”

Blandine has planned a stay in a luxurious hotel on the island of Amorgos, where she and Magalie once dreamed of visiting together, inspired by a film they had never watched, Luc Besson’s “The Big Blue.” But Magalie is a chaos agent. The careful, precise itinerary Blandine had in mind, with a notebook and glue stick to document every step, is jettisoned. Others might make Magalie’s choices because they cannot imagine the consequences. But Magalie is so determined to enjoy every possible outcome that she welcomes the consequences. So what if they get kicked off the ferry boat on a different island than the one with the fancy hotel? No problem! “We’ll sleep under the stars!” 

They end up at a small, rustic inn. Happy wherever she is, Magalie dances joyfully on the patio (and on a tabletop), where the other guests are having dinner. In a very sweet moment, as Blandine watches, she sees Magalie not as she is now but as she was when they were friends, imagining herself dancing with her as they did in middle school.

What elevates this film above the usual trip-gone-wrong storyline is its gentle exploration of what links the two women beyond their history. This is a movie about processing grief: Blandine over the loss of her husband and the life she thought she would have; Magalie over early trauma briefly touched on as the women finally talk about what drove them apart. There is an element of frantic denial in Magalie’s ebullience and prolonged self-pity in Blandine’s unwillingness to move forward. This comes together with the introduction of a third character, who goes by the chosen name Bijou (jewel), played by the British actress Kristin Scott-Thomas (“Four Weddings and a Funeral”). 

Bijou is Margalie’s friend. When the travelers find themselves stuck on yet another island that is not Amorgos, Bijou welcomes them into the beautiful home she shares with a Greek artist named Dimitris (Panos Koronis). She shares Margalie’s view that every minute of life should be fun, but in a quieter moment, Blandine learns that there is loss and worry underneath Bijou’s embrace of pleasure. And there is compassion as well. Scott-Thomas does wonders with this role, creating a full, complex character and adding depth to the storyline. It is as much due to what she sees in Bijou as in the accumulated frustrations of the trip that lead Blandine (significantly re-named by Bijou) to begin to be honest about her feelings toward Margalie. Three times in the film, we see how uncomfortable Blandine is with nudity, her own and anyone else’s. But she learns that refusing to look left her missing important information and an opportunity for intimacy, not romantic or sexual, just a shared understanding with another person. Margalie learns there is value in slowing down to pay attention to someone else. In these gorgeous settings, away from home, they show us that a journey filled with unexpected detours can end up in a destination better than the one we plan.

Now playing in theaters. 

The importance of Black athletes in the history and culture of American sports is relatively plain. However, the sports that come to mind are likely ones with either predominantly Black rosters like football and basketball, or ones with pinpointed moments of historical bookmarks like Jackie Robinson’s entrance into baseball. From director Hubert Davis, “Black Ice” is an icebreaking expose on the influence and oppression of Black athletes in Canada’s most treasured sport, hockey.

“Black Ice” is a historical document within the sphere of sports and outside of it, with anthropological context added. The migration of Black people to Canada from the southern United States constructed a flimsy pillar of national identity that believes Canada to be an escape from America’s racism, and this is partially to blame for how anti-Black racism within the nation was swept under the rug. 

Through multi-generational testimony from Black hockey players, we learn about the racism endured by athletes from teammates, coaches, leagues, and fans alike who believe they don’t belong in the sport. There’s no timidity in the doc’s testimonies. The film affords its subjects the same blunt expression that has been weaponized against them, and the result is unfiltered emotional depth that translates poignantly.

“Black Ice” understands at its core the fatigue of Black people used for their talents and skill, paraded as athletic representation of the cities they play for, who are constantly abused privately and publicly. From covert comments like “uncoachability” to equipment managers dressing in Blackface and coaches berating Black players for warming up to rap music, there’s no limit to the casual implementation of violence and absolutely zero room for interpretation. 

“Black Ice” is about Black hockey players, but also contains damning examinations of the ways that sports culture is a microcosm of general culture. Hockey is a Canadian pride and joy, and with that being said, the abuse allowed within it is itself a statement of priority. One of the most horrifically ironic moments in the movie details a white man who threw a banana at a Black player, only to come out and say he wants to move past it and continue forward with his career aspirations in policing. 

One of the film’s strongest tenets is its multi-generational and gender inclusive lens. On the younger end of the spectrum, we hear stories about the monetary costs playing hockey—from gear to lessons to team expenses—that create a level of financial inaccessibility in the predominantly white sport. Yet we also hear cherished memories from the sport’s older athletes and pioneers, who would pour out buckets of water on a cold day to create their own rink. “Black Ice” examines the evolution from outright exclusion to predatory inclusion that took place in the sport. 

Even with all of its jarring plight, what triumphs over the film’s tone is the love the athletes have for the sport. It is not necessary to be a hockey fan to absorb “Black Ice.” The players’ resilience, passion, and grit are the true subjects, and our admiration for the players motivates the film even as racism demands spotlight. It’s a symbiotic relationship, however unfortunate, that paints a true portrait of the culture of hockey, the importance of Black athletes within it, and the greater significance of what our cherished entertainments reveal about us.  

Now playing in theaters. 

There’s something a little old-fashioned about “The Miracle Club.” Set in 1967 Ireland, “The Miracle Club” stars three powerhouse Oscar-winning and/or nominated actresses (none of whom are Irish) and features period clothing and cars, sweeping cinematography, location-shooting, and a heartwarming message, where each character gets a satisfying arc. Cliches work for a reason. Emmy-nominated director Thaddeus O’Sullivan is alert to details and nuance, which is very important with a script (by Jimmy Smallhorne, Timothy Prager, and Joshua D. Maurer, based on a story by Smallhorne) where the revelations can be seen coming from three fields away. “The Miracle Club” has been kicking around as a potential project for years, and now, with Maggie Smith, Kathy Bates, and Laura Linney starring, it’s finally come to pass.

Lily (Smith) and Eileen (Bates) are lifelong friends living in a working-class suburb of Dublin, made up really of just a couple of blocks. It is a close community where everyone knows everyone else, gossip reigns, and grudges go on for generations. Lily, Eileen, and their much younger friend Dolly (Agnes O’Casey) sign up for a talent contest at the local parish. The prize? Tickets to Lourdes, the pilgrimage site in France, a place the women, all faithful and devout (grudges notwithstanding), have all been longing to visit. Each woman needs a miracle. Eileen found a lump in her breast and told nobody. She hasn’t gone to a doctor either. Her husband (Stephen Rea) and a gaggle of children keep her busy, and Eileen is resigned to leaving them. Lily can’t get over the death of her son Declan, who drowned many years before. Dolly’s young son (Eric Smith) cannot (or won’t?) speak, and Dolly hopes for a cure.

The rhythm of this small neighborhood is established immediately, and the tone is warm, inviting, and comfortable. John Conroy’s cinematography starts with stunning sweeps of Irish green and the blue sea, the gorgeous cliffs and rocks, Ireland incarnate. But he shows equal care with the small block of houses and their colored doors, the intimacy of the setting. John Hand’s production design is also a major contribution: the homes feel lived in, realistic, and not presented condescendingly. It’s homey and real.

Naturally, Lily and Eileen have secrets, all of which come roaring to the surface when Chrissie (Linney) returns to town, just in time to catch the talent show. She’s been gone from the town for decades, and clearly, there’s a lot of bad water under the bridge. Eileen can barely look at her; Lily turns her nose at her. Dolly has no idea what’s going on and warms to Chrissie immediately. Before you know it, through twists, turns, and coincidences, the quartet is off to Lourdes, praying for personal, physical, and spiritual miracles.

It’s easy to predict how this will go, but with actresses like Bates (whose accent is a bit spotty) and Smith (whose accent is very good), there’s always a lot to dig into and appreciate. Linney’s character is the opposite of expressive and remains so for much of the film, but there are cracks in the armor as the women’s time in Lourdes continues. Smith, in particular, gives a heart-breaking performance, guilt, and shame basically pouring out of her eyes, even as she struggles to cover it up with an imperious manner. She plays both simultaneously. It’s tempting to say Smith is “unsurprisingly” great, but this should be resisted. Maggie Smith is always surprising; we should not take her for granted!

There are moving moments (O’Casey is very touching), but once the “miracles” start coming, the film tilts into very shallow waters. It’s best at its most casual: the interplay of emotions and resentments, the silliness of holding grudges, the pain beneath the surface of these women. We are also treated to supposedly humorous scenes of the menfolk back home falling apart without their women: they have to shop for groceries now, they have to change diapers, oh, how clumsy they are! Considering that this is a period film, which takes place in a world untouched (so far) by the upheavals of the 1960s, these scenes are still pretty rote.

It’s worth it, though, to wait for Smith’s performance of the line: “God punished me for taking him away like that.” The line comes from her guts, her soul, and the shallow waters immediately yield to deep.

Now playing in theaters.