Movie reviews
It’s weirdly funny to see a year mentioned in the title of “Art College 1994,” an animated Chinese college dorm rom-com about young people and their greatest loves, themselves. You could easily imagine this feature-length cartoon taking place in another time or place without losing much of either its specificity or universality. Swap out a Nirvana poster or a multi-tiered tape-deck stereo, and you’ll still have an unsentimental and quietly unsparing portrait of idealistic undergrads at a pivotal moment when they start to realize how small they are in the world that awaits them after graduation.
Director/co-writer Liu Jian’s affection for his impulsive young characters adds a welcome variation to the usual pre-graduation coming-of-age story’s concerns for life after college. It’s funny because it’s true, and not only to its young subjects’ inconstant values. These art students, like most art students, take themselves too seriously and also live in a beautiful oasis that fosters tendencies that, to anyone else, must seem indulgent. “Art College 1994” is unassumingly sweet because it’s about young people and their eternal quest for freedom and self-expression, mostly inside their own navels.
“Art College 1994” is a time capsule about that shimmering moment in time when you think you know exactly what you’re talking about without knowing much at all. Liu (“Have a Nice Day”) shows an unusual patience and fascination with his characters, whose overlapping stories tend to meander more than they progress. There’s some intrigue about who will go where after school and who’s dating whom, making fair weather partners out of musical students Hao Lili (Zhuo Dongyu) and Gao Hong (Papi) and fine arts majors Zhifei (Shaoxing) and Xiaojun (Dong Zijian). There’s also a frequently rotated cast of supporting characters who receive and project their own ideas back at these four core main protagonists.
Liu focuses more on his characters’ academic setting since his blinkered twenty-somethings only think they know what they want and only on their own vaguely personal terms. Jokes about the art world and its young, impressionable supporters abound. Some are more amusing than laugh-aloud funny, though even that makes sense since most people in this movie don’t seem to have an outdoor voice.
A museum curator’s “manifesto” is greeted with shrugs—“I know every word here, but I don’t understand a thing.” A bemused student teases a well-traveled artist from Taiwan (renowned filmmaker Jia Zhangke) with a quasi-Daoist question—“Is the moon more beautiful abroad?”—and is instantly shut down by an embarrassed administrator: “Please don’t bring up things unrelated to today’s topic.” Art is burned for freedom and portfolios’ sake, and love matches are pursued and rescinded with startling regularity. Also, really, you’re engaged to him—you, so soon??
“Art College 1994” doesn’t build momentum so much as it floats along with its characters, fixating on contextualizing details on both the movie’s depopulated sound design and mostly music-light score. The ambient noises you hear on the soundtrack tend to stand out given the “social realist” design that’s become central to Liu’s now-signature visual style. Human characters move haltingly across ostentatiously designed background screens full of eye-catching ornamental details. It’s not naturalistic but rather stylized in a mannered way that feels true to this kind of story’s nature as a snapshot of students who drink too much, philosophize more than they understand, and prop up their choices with quotes from Fyodor Dostoevsky, James Joyce, and Pablo Picasso. They think about “traditional art” and how to make new art, either by combining old media or maybe burning it all to the ground (“I’ve already come up with a title [for an exhibition]. 'Flame of Ideas!'”).
The bitter edge to “Art School 1994”’s humor is also undercut significantly by its matter-of-fact poetry and arthouse-friendly toggling back-and-forth between impressionistic details. Look at this ceiling's rafters, then join Yingjun in bed as he stares up at nothing. The movie’s music cuts short mid-space out. Soon, we’ll join Yinjun again as he trudges around campus at night, hands in his pockets, headphones on, and a melody of crickets on the soundtrack. Then it’s off to the Casablanca Club and its marquee’s flickering purple and green flickering halogen bulbs, which crackle on the soundtrack like a bug zapper.
“Art School 1994” isn’t really nostalgic because it vividly depicts what it’s like to be young and only responsible for yourself, with no frame reference but your own narrow, constantly fussed-over headspace. It’s a rare coming-of-age story that acknowledges that, yes, life was beautiful when you were younger and more passionate about your future, if only because of a confluence of timing and circumstances that happen to involve you, and not often as a main subject.
There are windows throughout “Nowhere Special,” real and symbolic. Over the opening credits, we view windows, giving us glimpses of the outside and a couple of interiors in a rural Irish town. One of those windows is being carefully soaped and squeegeed by John (James Norton). He smiles at a black and white cat on the other side of the glass. James is a single dad to three-year-old Michael (an extraordinary performance by Daniel Lamont). We first see him looking through their apartment window, waiting for John to come home. As soon as Michael sees his father, he goes to the door so he can see John the instant he arrives.
John is a wonderful father, devoted, loving, engaged, and with seemingly endless patience. It cannot be endless, however. John is dying. He has only months to find a new home for Michael. As painful and difficult as that task is, there is another that is worse. John has to find a way to explain what is happening in a way that somehow makes Michael feel safe and loved and not devastated by it.
The symbolic windows give us views into other lives, as John and Michael see possible new families, arranged by the adoption agency and accompanied by a sympathetic young member of the agency staff. These scenes are reminiscent of the lovely “Away We Go,” where a couple visits several friends to help them plan what their life with a baby should be. For John, an affluent couple offers opportunities and comforts. A warm, suburban family offers a diverse array of biological and adopted children. It is not until an obviously unsuitable prospect added to the pressure of time running that John realizes, perhaps after we do, which is the right choice.
At first, John resists the gentle children’s book about death that the adoption agency offers, and refuses to make a “memory box” for Michael to keep. Like all parents, John wants to protect his child from learning about loss. And like all parents, he discovers that is impossible. Michael sees the other children being dropped off at school by their mothers and asks, not for the first time, where his mother is. At the park, Michael discovers a dead beetle, and John has to find a way to tell him why it is not moving and will not ever move again.
It takes nothing from Lamont’s performance to note it is as much a tribute to Norton and skillful editing as it is to the three-year-old actor. He is completely at home with Norton, and some of the film’s most potent images are of Michael just quietly thinking or listening, absorbing the world around him. Norton is also excellent, making the most ordinary domestic moments between John and his son achingly beautiful.
There are so many ways to go wrong with this story, which we are told was inspired by an unidentified real father and son. Writer/director Uberto Pasolini does not let that happen, relying on the most ordinary details to take on greater and greater weight. A casual comment that for a window washer rain is “another wasted day” is made to John, who needs to get the most out of every day he has left. John looks at another father helping a child. He watches an older boy walking to school. Norton’s quiet gaze tells us he is thinking of the Michael he will never get to see and all they will never share. Suddenly, the ladder John uses to reach the windows appears a longer climb. John counts out 34 candles for Michael to put on his birthday cake, knowing he will never get a 35th. Michael has a meltdown about not being able to wear his favorite pajamas. John’s response, beautifully subtle work by Norton, is endearing and utterly relatable to any parent who could not help but be touched by the ferocity of these life forces we bring into the world.
Minhal Baig’s “We Grown Now” is a film masterfully tied to the emotive potential of place. A period piece centered in Cabrini-Green in the early '90s, the film is as Chicago born and bred as the characters it loves throughout its runtime. Malik (Blake Cameron James) and Eric (Gian Knight Ramirez) are two young boys, best friends since birth as they say, living in Chicago’s infamous Cabrini-Green housing project. They live their lives in the quotidian but nostalgic ways many kids do: going to school, eating dinner with their families, and entertaining themselves in all the moments in between (telling popsicle stick-type jokes and gathering mattresses to jump on). It’s this overall simplistic and grounded approach to childhood that makes “We Grown Now” poignantly charming and the development of its story all the more affecting.
When tragedy strikes on the grounds of Cabrini-Green, a child’s life is lost in the crossfires of criminal activity, and the boys are forced to reckon with the psychic and physical consequences that are born in its wake. And so the title, “We Grown Now,” is less an observation of the process of aging and more a eulogy of lost innocence. It’s a document of Black life through the eyes of children who, on account of the sociopolitical factors of race and class, are forced to deal with adult problems and complexities far before their white counterparts. It’s a portrait of the beauty of youth and the heartening passion of childhood friendships but also a mournfully pointed finger at the fragility of these sacred pillars of upbringing.
However, “We Grown Now” is not overly saccharine or pitiful. It’s a film defined by streaks of sunshine and attentive detail to seemingly unremarkable moments of child life. Utilizing location at every feasible scale, from the wideness of the city of Chicago to the minuteness of frames hanging on cinder block hallways, Baig’s direction plays a symphony with your heartstrings at every turn. Romanticized images of Black girls hula hooping on tar-black pavement, close-ups of balls bounced against brick walls in bored, passage-of-time play, and hazy sunlight through school bathroom meetups (when you should be in class) recall the mundane with nostalgic reverence.
The film’s geographical core of Cabrini-Green is the most infamous of Chicago’s many historied housing projects, and its filmic legacy is most likely to awaken memories of the dangerous, dilapidated corridors and crumbling, graffiti stained infrastructure in “Candyman,” a film that takes place in the same year of “We Grown Now.” While these are vastly different films, each laudable in their own right, their depictions are clear dichotomous representations of reputation and reality. Yet, “We Grown Now” doesn’t sidestep the underbelly of its locale. While utilizing it as a biographical moment in the lives of Malik and Eric, it also permits a full, real spectrum of its history: both the plague of crime’s collateral damage and the play and plainness of an overall happily lived life. Though Jay Wadley’s string-heavy score sometimes tips into oversentimentality alongside a few heavy-handed moments of dialogue, “We Grown Now” is largely firmly planted in authenticity.
Baig’s direction stays consistent even in the film’s plaintive moments. The swapping between low-set cameras of youth perspective, high-angle shots that emphasize small scale, and honed attention to minute details maintains the whimsy and wonder of childhood. These repeated conventions are applied with romanticism in the film’s highs and brushed with melancholy in its lows, maintaining the perspectives of the young boys with powerful consistency.
James and Ramirez operate excellently as the film’s core duo, even as James’ Malik gets more of the main character treatment. The boys’ chemistry as best friends is believable between innocently playing the dozens and cutting class, musing on love and life with charming naivety, and even navigating the increasingly complex emotions that come with their disdainfully encroaching socio-political awareness. As Eric’s father, Lil Rel Howery displays an emotional range and palpability not typically attributed to his habitual comedic roles. Jurnee Smollett, as Malik’s mother, serves as the film’s contextual delivery of adulthood issues. Both depictions of these parental roles provide structure and color the film with a touching sense of protection, but “We Grown Now” belongs, unshakably and entrancingly, to the boys.
Will there ever be a version of “Rebel Moon—Part 2: The Scargiver” that makes the movie and its franchise seem essential? Director and co-writer Zack Snyder has already tried to whip up his fanbase by teasing “R-rated” versions of the first two entries in his ongoing “Star Wars” ripoff cycle, a lifeless homage to that other IPed-to-death sci-fi series. The well-covered struggle to release the Snyder cut of “Justice League” notably improved what was only ever a passable super-programmer. It’s also established an unfortunate precedent for how “Rebel Moon” is now being advertised, as a victim of its own release strategy.
Unfortunately, while I can’t review a version of “Rebel Moon—Part 2: The Scargiver” that I wasn’t allowed to see, I can say that I doubt more (or just more extreme) violence and sex will improve this joyless expansion of the previous movie’s Kurosawa-sploitation space opera. The shortcomings that kept the first “Rebel Moon” from ever taking off are still apparent in its sequel, particularly Snyder’s disinterest in his actors’ performances as well as this movie’s vast array of bland visuals and flavorless dialogue. Like the last one, the latest “Rebel Moon” looks like it was rushed through production to compete with whatever “Star Wars” series is now streaming on Disney+. The Snyder faithful may see something in “Rebel Moon—Part 2: The Scargiver” that the rest of us can’t, but that doesn’t make this tired sequel any less puny.
Previously on “Rebel Moon”: A group of misfit rebels banded together and seemingly defeated the Imperial Space Nazis, led by the goofily accented Regent Balisarius (Fra Fee) and the lanky rage-case fascist Atticus Noble (Ed Skrein). Noble was killed at the end of “Rebel Moon—Part 1: A Child of Fire,” but even the end of that movie hinted that he wouldn’t be dead for long. Sure enough, he’s back again and now angry enough to retaliate against the smalltown farmers of Veldt, an idyllic moon with Smallville-style fields of space-grain, Oshkosh B’gosh catalog-ready space-farm children, and “Asterix”-type longhouses, too.
Who will save the people of Veldt, represented here by the young and ripped hunter Den (Stuart Martin) and the older but also chiseled Hagen (“A White, White Day” star Ingvar Sigurdsson)? The same motley crew as last time, still led by the scowling ex-general Titus (Djimon Hounsou, the generically mysterious Kora (Sofia Boutella), and her unconvincing love interest Gunnar (Michiel Huisman), the last of whom is also from Veldt. In case you’re wondering what else has changed since the last “Rebel Moon”: there’s a scene where our heroes share what they’re really fighting for, which they emphasize through momentum-throttling, voiceover-smothered flashbacks.
Among other acknowledged influences on the “Rebel Moon” movies, Snyder claims kinship with the graphic-design-forward and stoner-friendly “Heavy Metal” brand of comics, an inspiration that Snyder teases in Martin’s character name (named after Richard Corben’s serialized space-barbarian “Den” comics). I don’t see it, and it’s not because Martin isn’t obviously trying to emphasize the sheer immensity of his emotions. I imagine that Den never lives up to his namesake because of of Snyder’s blunted vision and not Martin or his performance. For supporting evidence, see how often intensity and action figure poses stand in for character and detail in just about everyone else’s performances.
More is often less in “Rebel Moon—Part 2: The Scargiver,” not only when it comes to the movie’s sweaty, vein-activating performances, but also its over-exaggerated and under-choreographed action scenes. Kora and Gunnar’s overblown romance is also defined by bold, sweeping hints at romantic passion, like when he unbelievably confesses to her what motivates him: “It was you. It was losing you.” Never mind the gawky adolescent phrasing and the unbelievably flat line-reading—this gesture towards big-ness exemplifies the Snyder-y style of “Rebel Moon,” a series whose sound design is always more convincing, in both its nuance and sheer volume, than whatever’s on-screen.
Seeing “Rebel Moon—Part 2: The Scargiver” in a theater would probably be the best way to go, since that way you can hear the movie loud enough to imagine you’re watching something better. Then again, the fact that Netflix produced both movies—their most expensive production of 2023!—and is apparently now releasing at least two cuts per installment, suggests that not many people will be able to see this movie beyond their living rooms. In this light, it’s hard to imagine the necessity of a separate R-rated version of either movie.
The problem with the “Rebel Moon” movies isn’t that they need to be bigger or heavier to be better. If everything else feels as anemic and negligible as the non-sexual scenes in a floppy, overproduced porno, then I don’t think that adding more of everything will greatly enhance anything.
Set in 1992 in the northernmost United States, where criminals run drugs and guns over the border with Canada, "Blood for Dust" is a hard, nasty crime thriller about hard, nasty men. Directed by Rod Blackhurst from a script by David Ebeltoft, it tells you what kind of movie it is from its gruesome opening image and continues in that mode for another hour and forty-five minutes. It's anchored to a lead performance by Scoot McNairy that ranks with the best of classic neo-noir.
McNairy plays a traveling defibrillator salesman named Cliff. He and his wife Amy (Nora Zehetner) are Christians who attend church regularly and have a child with cancer, and there's nothing about Cliff that suggests he isn't sincere about loving his family and seeking solace in prayer and the word of God. But he's also the kind of guy who celebrates a big sale on the road by going to a strip joint. As the story unreels, we learn a lot of other things that complicate our image of Cliff. Somehow none of them make him seem like a hypocrite, just somebody who's contradictory, and whose in-the-moment decisions are powered by impulses we don't understand and that he's not going to explain to anyone, certainly not the viewer.
Cliff has a friend named Ricky (Kit Harington of "Game of Thrones"), a self-styled bad boy with a smirky face, a whooping laugh, an infectious self-confidence, and some of the least flattering facial hair you've ever seen. Ricky knows Cliff is struggling and offers him a chance to make a lot of money all at once by serving as sort of a mule, driving guns into Canada, trading them for drugs and driving back (or the reverse). Ricky tells his contact on the American side of the border, a gangster named John (Josh Lucas, nailing the character's reptilian swagger), that his buddy Cliff is perfect for that kind of work because he looks and acts like a milquetoast-normal guy who couldn't hurt a fly even if he wanted to. John agrees, assigning Cliff a mission and teaming him with a henchman and "minder" named Slim (Ethan Suplee—another of the excellent character actors gathered in this cast, which also features Stephen Dorff, who played a Ricky-like character in the 1996 crime flick "City of Industry").
Things get darker and more disturbing from there. It's best not to delve into the particulars, other than to say that there isn't anything new here in terms of crime-movie situations, violent or otherwise (Ricky is very much a chaos-stirring "live wire" type, familiar from "Mean Streets," "State of Grace," "Menace II Society" and countless other crime flicks), and that the movie is less interesting when people are shooting each other than when they're getting mad enough to consider drawing their guns in the first place; but also that, whatever its shortcomings, including too much solemnity and not enough jokes, there's no denying that the film creates a powerful mood and sustains it.
Cliff is a struggling salesman archetype, with all the burdens and secret corruption you'd expect from that kind of character. So, in a strange way, is Ricky, though he's more of a cowboy. If these actors were cast in a revival of "Glengarry Glen Ross," McNairy would be Shelly "The Machine" Levine," who justifies his shabby hard-selling of worthless real estate on grounds that he has a very sick daughter in the hospital, and Harrington would be Ricky Roma, the hotshot who brags about the big fish he's landed and holds forth on how bourgeois morality is for suckers.
In the end, though, Cliff is the darker character because he does still have self-awareness, guilt, and the ghostly afterimage of a code. His criminality is borne of despair, and that film noir hero's belief that the system is rigged against the little guy and it's better to lash out and risk destroying yourself (and others) than let the days go by (water flowing underground). Cliff and Ricky also have that film noir hero aspect of being deluded and self-justifying. They're both less sinned-against than sinning, but you wouldn't know if from hearing them rationalize their actions.
The entire cast operates at a peak level of craft, but McNairy's subtle, reactive performance helps elevate them all. The movie is good, but he's great. The former costar of "Halt and Catch Fire" brings a grubby, desperate "Everyman" quality to a character who is no better than the animals he gets involved with, just housebroken. It's not easy to give a blank-slate sort of performance without making the character seem undernourished or sketchy. This actor rises to the occasion. It's a living Rorschach blot of an acting job. Every five minutes you see something different.
Technically, the film is impeccable. Blackhurst and his collaborators (including cinematographer Justin Derry, whose wide-frame compositions have a 1970s Gordon Willis vibe; editor Justin Oakley; and a brilliant sound team) have captured the dread and isolation that people on the fringes feel when they believe there's no hope. I never really thought of the early '90s as having a distinctive period flavor, but they did, and "Blood for Dust" captures it, right down to the mullets, the squarish TVs and computer monitors, and the red-orange glow cast by incandescent lights. Somehow this movie smells like cigarettes. It also has a steely menace—the real-world kind that hovers around the edges of a run-down gas station or abandoned house or patch of snowy woods way out in the country, where horrible things could happen and no one would know until a steam shovel unearthed a skull.
“Dusk for a Hitman” is a husk of a great film. Director Raymond St-Jean has a sturdy central character—though the crime drama is based on the real life of Montreal fixer Donald Lavoie, much of it is fictional—made stronger through a deft ability to conjure a grim atmosphere around an actor capable of landing emotional grace notes in a threadbare story. Contract killings are carried out with cold efficiency and continual negotiations of loyalty, and these basic mechanics are enough to breezily pass the time. But the film’s incuriosity of the cutthroat world inhabited by Lavoie and his fractured inner life restricts this foreboding character study, rendering it merely serviceable.
Mostly taking place over the course of a year, “Dusk for a Hitman” begins in the Fall of 1979. Lavoie (Éric Bruneau), behind the wheel of his sleek caramel-colored Cadillac, is driving down a country road with a new, nervous partner. His young sidekick was assigned to Lavoie by their boss, Claude Dubois (Benoît Gouin), after the kid messed up a previous hit. Lavoie is accompanying him to finish the job. “Now that you have to help me, you’ll see it’s easy to kill a man,” Lavoie wryly says. The pair proficiently infiltrate the hideout of their target, shooting him in an outhouse. This is only half the task; in the quickness of a breath, Lavoie executes his partner.
Lavoie is Dubois’ best hired gun. The real-life hitman, in fact, would later admit that he murdered fifteen people for the crime boss, who, with his mob boss brother—the film omits the sibling—ruled Montreal’s underworld. Along with killings, Lavoie also collects debts and is an enforcer. Dubois so trusts him that the kingpin even shows the hitman where to find his buried loot in case someone is dumb enough to take him hostage. Outside of the close bond shared by employer and employee, St-Jean and Martin Girard provide little else about this organization's inner workings. So, if you’re looking for Henry Hill to give a “Goodfellas” explanation of Lavoie’s background and personal thoughts, you won’t find it in this film. That isn’t necessarily a negative. I’d even say it’s by design: Dubois dispatches rats and failures so quickly there’s no sense in learning their names. But I can’t help but feel more world-building could have happened: What’s Dubois’ territory, and how does his business hum?
There’s a similar thinness to Lavoie’s family life. His wife Francine (Rose-Marie Perreault) is so basic she might as well be nonexistent. His young daughter, to the best of my knowledge, doesn’t even have a name. Lavoie mostly calls her the kid. Once again, you get the sense this is by design. Not unlike what Martin Scorsese did with Anna Paquin’s character in “The Irishman.” Lavoie is so consumed by the lifestyle of murder, cocaine, and money—that he barely has the bandwidth or desire to see his family as people worth knowing. But by the second half of the film, when Lavoie’s motivations shift toward protecting his family, there are only two very brief scenes featuring his daughter. It’s a kind of hollowness that, after a while, feels less like a window into the character and more like a severed thread.
Even the fraught relationship Lavoie shares with his screw-up of a brother leaves much on the table. The specter of an unseen abusive father, one sick with cancer, looms over their lives—to the point Lavoie sneers at the very mention of his dad. And yet, it’s a heartache perpetually gestured toward without ever being felt.
The compositions in “Dusk for a Hitman” are fairly conventional (Bruneau is always centered framed), and the score has the kind of ragged, heavy guitars infiltrating just about every action film or crime thriller. Their simplicity, nevertheless, works in a film about an unsentimental killer whose soul is so blackened he can barely recognize himself. Even with the mostly staid lensing, some instances with a deep depth of field do ratchet up the atmosphere. When Lavoie is released from prison, you’re sure Dubois will whack him because of the sharp visual language. St-Jean and DP Jean-François Lord play with such expectations. Some simple blocking keeps a third gangster in view during an interrogation, and the staging of an ensuing hit holds the other hired guns just within reach, mulling behind Lavoie.
St-Jean is lucky to have Bruneau. The lanky actor palpably flexes his frame from still and rigid in a run-up to a murder, kinetic during the actual deed, and frazzled when coked up. Even when the script keeps his character at arm’s length, Bruneau quietly brings us in. The strained rivalry between Lavoie and Detective Burns (Sylvain Marcel)—which later takes an unlikely turn—only works because of Bruneau’s talent for granting us access to Lavoie’s innermost hurts. The same could be said of the underwritten love Lavoie displays for his family. It’s Bruneau who makes you realize how great “Dusk for a Hitman” could have been if only it had some extra shine, but who also allows you to be content that St-Jean’s crime movie is merely a sturdy installment in the genre.
Say what you will about “Stress Positions,” the new indie comedy that marks the feature debut of writer-director-costar Theda Hammel: it's not overly consumed with coming across as likable to potential viewers. Not only does it take us back to the early days of COVID-19 (an era that many audiences may not feel particularly inclined to revisit, especially in the context of a comedy) but populates its narrative with some of the most spectacularly solipsistic and generally irritating characters imaginable. As approaches go, this is undeniably chancy, I suppose. Still, while some viewers may find her willingness to go to such extremes impressive, I suspect that many more will find themselves driven to the exits.
Set over the spring and summer of 2020, the film centers on Terry (John Early), a guy who is hoping to ride things out in a Brooklyn brownstone belonging to ex-husband Leo (John Roberts) along with Bahlul (Qaher Harhash), his 19-year-old Moroccan nephew who works as a male model and has been laid up with a broken leg after being injured in a scooter accident. Terry takes his determination to protect himself and Bahlul from the potential horrors of the outside world to grand extremes: Spraying virtually every surface with an endless supply of Lysol, and removing every trace of the apartment’s long and lurid history as Leo’s chief party place. He also tries to keep potential visitors—save for the maskless MAGA neighbor who can fix the wi-fi and the GrubHub courier who is a regular fixture—away by insisting that the newcomer is too badly injured to have guests coming by.
Of course, the news that Terry has a handsome and mysterious male model sequestered in his apartment is just the thing to raise the curiosity of those in his orbit. Before long, his best (and possibly only) friend, trans lesbian Karla (Hammel), turns up to check out the newcomer and to take a break from her wife, Vanessa (Amy Zimmer), an author who essentially stole the details of Karla’s life for her first novel and who is now struggling to come up with a follow-up. While Terry becomes increasingly frustrated and paranoid—not to mention injured after slipping on a piece of raw chicken—Karla does everything she can to befriend Bahlul and to help him figure out who he is. Their respective jobs become excessively complicated when Leo unexpectedly arrives with his new fiancé and others, all of whom have become consumed with the notion of meeting Terry’s mysterious guest for themselves.
Some of the early going is quite funny, as Hammel starts things off in a cheerfully goofy tone. Terry’s determination to bang his pots and pans to support frontline workers without interrupting his latest rant is especially amusing. I also liked how the people in Terry's proximity try to curry favor from Bahlul in ways that only serve to underline their blinkered and occasionally racist perspectives. Karla tries to ingratiate herself by playing up her dubious Mediterranean heritage, Vanessa talks about the horrors of being forced to grow up around “blondes." While everyone is willing to talk about the evils and intolerant nature of all things American (in Terry’s case, presumably as a way of atoning for his bout of post-9/11 conservatism), none of them appear even to know if Morocco is part of the Middle East or not.
This is funny to a point, but the problem with “Stress Positions” is that said point arrives about halfway through. The runtime that remains gets overloaded with too many plot threads, characters, and repeated punchlines, Hammel essentially turning the proceedings into a failed exercise in Blake Edwards-style farce.
Another problem is the inescapable fact that nearly all the characters seem to outdo each other in self-absorption and general awfulness without making them interesting. The only one who escapes this is Bahlul; perhaps the funniest and subtlest running joke is the way he quietly suggests that these people fawning for his attention are not nearly as special or exciting as they think. If the film concentrated more on this and less on the increasingly chaotic proceedings on display, it might have become more than an endless litany of smug obnoxiousness.
The fact-based “Hard Miles” begins with a failure. Social worker Greg Townsend (Matthew Modine) urges a judge to allow the resident of a facility for teenage boys who have been in trouble to allow him to stay there, even though he pushed another boy. Townsend explains that he was protecting someone else, not instigating violence. But the judge rules that the boy must be transferred to a higher-security facility, one with “juvenile penitentiary” in its name.
It is not Townsend’s failure; it is a failure of a system that wants to treat these teenagers as criminals instead of opportunities for redirection. And that means showing them that they have other strengths and other choices. “If they see the bigger world, they can want to be a part of it,” Townsend says, and his idea of how to make that happen is to take them on a 762-mile bike ride from Colorado to the Grand Canyon. “Hard Miles” is inspired by the real Greg Townsend, who has taken thousands of young men on these bike trips. It is a compelling story, and the film is a combination of spectacular scenery, arduous exertion, inspiring pep talks, adolescent rebellion, emotional confrontations, and lessons learned by both the teenagers and their leader.
The small facility where Townsend works is at risk of being shut down. The director, Skip (Leslie David Baker of “The Office”), thinks some good publicity from a hike might help them, with a story about “urban delinquents rehabilitated by tall trees and sunlight.” It’s hard to run away from a hike. But Greg insists it must be a bike trip.
There are a few problems. First, they do not have bicycles. Second, with no experience and a group of known troublemakers, getting in trouble, getting hurt, or escaping seems inevitable. And third, no one wants to go, and the boys do not like or trust each other. But Townsend happens to be the teacher with the blowtorch who can teach them how to make their own bicycle frames and he has a friend who owns a bicycle shop to provide the gears and wheels. He persuades his colleague, Haddie (Cynthia Kaye McWilliams) to come along to drive the van that carries their gear. She is willing to provide support but understandably not willing to do the laundry. Synthetic bike shorts and tops worn over hundreds of miles through the desert should not be inflicted on anyone but the people who wear them.
Townsend wanted the young men to experience the grandeur of the Arizona and Colorado landscapes. He wanted them to learn what they could accomplish, and he wanted them to learn to be a part of something outside themselves. The best part of the movie is the insightful way it shows us that the young characters’ constant attacks on everyone around them are fueled by anger, fear, a loss of control, and a distorted idea of masculinity. They are so determined to insulate themselves from any hint of engagement with others that they jeer at everything, attacking before they can be attacked. We see that they hold on to anger, mistaking it, as young people do so often, for strength. But as individuals they are thinly characterized. We get a much better sense of the adults.
The film is even less effective in tying this to Townsend’s awkwardly inserted backstory. We see in flashbacks that his father attacked and beat him for having muscular and heart-related disabilities. Townsend gets repeated collect calls from prison. It is his brother begging him to see their father in hospice. It is possible that one reason he is so insistent on the trip is to have an excuse for refusing. When he finally gets on the phone, his father is so ill he cannot respond. Will Townsend leave the trip? Will the team be able to finish? Will they be willing to finish?
This is not the kind of movie that surprises you with the answers to those questions, even though it tries to ramp up the suspense toward the end. But like the young men on the trip, we cannot help but be moved by the scope and beauty of the landscape and the dedication of the adults who see possibilities for teenagers after the rest of the world has given up.
Just when you think they’ve run out of real-life World War II stories to turn into blockbuster movies, some documents get declassified, inspiring or at least suggesting new sagas of heroism. “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare,” about a small mission of Allied fighters killing Nazis on a grand scale wherever they go, directed by Guy Ritchie from a script by Ritchie, Paul Tamasy, Eric Johnson, and Arash Amel, claims as source material information that only became available after some secret history stuff was declassified in 2016. It also happens to be, according to its credits, based on a book by Damien Lewis called Churchill’s Secret Warriors: The Explosive True Story of the Special Forces Desperados of World War II, which was published in 2014. As it happens, a book by Giles Milton called The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare was published in 2017, but apparently not used for this movie.
Confused? Imagine how I felt when the film itself purports to open in 1942, and yet features its fictionalized Winston Churchill (Rory Kinnear) complaining about the United States’ reluctance to join the war. Like Pearl Harbor never happened! Granted, it only happened in December of 1941, and this picture opens in January of 1942, and after its crowd-pleasing Nazi-slaughtering opening scene in which Our Heroes, big-chested and bushy-faced and looking like they stepped out of a 1960s Jack Kirby comic (the pictures of the real-life figures rolled out before the closing credits are of weedier, paler Brits), dispatch not just a small squad but an entire gunship from their innocent looking “fishing boat,” there’s a title card reading “25 days before” and I’m sitting there doing math in my head and is it adding up ... ?
My advice to you if you’re going to watch this picture is to forget about these things. And, anyway, Churchill’s movie point has more to do with the Atlantic being stocked with German U-boats, which will likely blast any American ship bearing supplies or personnel right out of the water. British military intelligence, here represented by Cary Elwes and Freddie Fox (who plays Ian Fleming, and, yes, it’s the Ian Fleming; the movie makes a point at the end of telling us that the derring-do we’ve just witnessed and the folks who perpetrated it directly inspired his spy novels and James Bond and all that) concoct a scheme in which a special ops force will sail down to the Gulf of Guinea and take out a ship packed with supplies for the aforementioned U-boats. Without supplies, the subs can’t function and hence the shipping-across-the-Atlantic problem gets at least temporarily solved.
The movie goes for a “Dirty Dozen”/“Inglorious Basterds” vibe. Henry Cavill, extravagantly bearded and mustached, plays Gus March Phillips, first presented to the brass in shackles. After sampling their brandy and stealing their cigars, he puts together his crew, all of them apparent rebels and reprobates and rule-breakers, and which includes one really big-chested guy (Alan Richson) who’s a master archer. What good is a master archer in a firefight, you might ask. Well, you can take out Nazis in guard towers in relative silence with such weapons, which helps when you’re breaking out a team member who’s been imprisoned by the Germans. There’s also the requisite explosive expert, and so on. (Among the players of these mayhem-makers are Henry Golding and Alex Pettyfer.) On the ground a femme fatale played by Eiza Gonzalez and an undercover agent who operates a casino bar near the port (Babs Olusanmokun) conspire to distract the Nazis tending the targeted ship.
Unlike Alex Garland’s “Civil War,” “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” is commendably upfront about its politics. That is, it’s extremely anti-Nazi. No prevarication here. Germans exist in this film pretty much only to be shot (with bullets and arrows) or stabbed (multiple times and in the most sensitive-to-stabbing corporeal locations) to death. Sometimes before they die, they deliver smug Nazi speeches, which gives their subsequent horrible painful deaths an added thrill. And while “The Dirty Dozen” and scores of other WWII movies bowed to the sacrifices of life and limb made by Our Own Fighting Forces, “Ministry” makes a point of … well, not to give too much away, but every time one of its heroic fighters seems in a spot, the danger is only there to reveal an ingenious way of getting them out of it. If World War II itself had gone this smoothly, the Allies would have made it to Berlin before “Casablanca” got its wide release. (That would be January of 1943.)
While the action and suspense set pieces are executed with typical Ritchie bravura, the movie falls flat a lot of the time in between. Despite its four credited screenwriters, there’s not much verbal crackle at play—this is a largely British production in which its characters signal their Britishness by calling things “bloody this” and “bloody that” mostly. And the historical oddities do continue to grate even after you’ve resolved to turn off your mind, relax and float downstream. The sexually sadistic (of course) Nazi officer played here by Til Schwieger (speaking of “Inglourious Basterds”) entertains Gonzalez’s character by playing her a recording of “Die Moritat von Mackie Messer,” which we know as “Mack the Knife”; later in the picture, Gonzalez sings a (mostly) English version of the song. Given that the songs co-composers Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht were expelled from Germany in 1933 (Weill was Jewish, Brecht a commie) the notion of a Nazi favoring that tune seems farfetched (and “The Threepenny Opera,” the satirical musical from which it was derived, was banned by the Third Reich). Brecht and Weill themselves would likely blanche at the notion of a Nazi being entertained by their work. But that’s what passes for cheeky iconoclasm these days I suppose.
Murder mysteries usually present the offense at their center as a puzzle to be solved. There’s a reason the genre and its true crime sisters are often called “whodunits.” And that approach can work, building intricate illusions that are deeply satisfying when revealed a la “The Usual Suspects” or “Only Murders in the Building,” to name two popular titles with wildly different tones.
But this mystery-first approach obscures something essential about their ostensible subject of murder: Its human cost. Based on Rebecca Godfrey’s book by the same name and premiering on Hulu on April 17th, “Under the Bridge” captures the tragedy of homicide in a way very few of its peers have even attempted. It’s a devastating tale of development cut short as it follows 14-year-old Reena Virk and the classmates who last saw her alive in Victoria, British Columbia.
“Under the Bridge” accomplishes this feat by purposefully putting Reena at its center. She’s not a nameless body or a learning tool for anyone else. She’s an imperfect girl who’s trying to navigate her parents’ Jehovah's Witness expectations and her own desires to rebel and fit in. She does at least one terrible thing and makes a lot of bad choices. But she’s also relatable and sympathetic, a girl who never gets out of that teenage feeling of being lost.
Riley Keough plays a wounded and perceptive Godfrey, a journalist who returns to her hometown to write a book about the teens there. She quickly stumbles into the investigation surrounding Reena’s death. More than once, we hear Rebecca say she wants to honor Reena’s life by giving readers a sense of who she was before she died. And the show puts those proclamations to work, regularly having Reena take up the frame. There are plenty of flashbacks, detailing the events that lead up to her death, yes, but also her family history, her musical tastes, her friendships, and her misjudgments.
While we see Reena choose a brutal peer group, “Under the Bridge” is clear that what happened was not Reena’s fault but rather because of the choices of teens caught in a system that happily throws them away. And from there, the tragedy just ripples out, touching nearly everyone in “Under the Bridge” and their real-life doppelgangers.
The show delves into the psyche of teenage bullying, not as some sort of freak show or grotesquery, but rather as another facet of this tragedy. “Under the Bridge” amplifies its tone in early episodes through Chloe Guidry’s Josephine Bell, her queen bee overconfidence powering some laughs and a lot of plot points, but the show also depicts a handful of moments when Josephine’s bravado falls, revealing the scared girl underneath. Javon 'Wanna' Walton as Warren, the lone boy wrapped up in this tragedy, is heartbreakingly sympathetic. And Aiyana Goodfellow as Dusty brings the perspective of the other girl of color, showing how both girls were struggling with an extra set of challenges bravely but imperfectly.
The teens fill up the screen–their petty grievances, faltering alliances, and lack of control forming the building blocks of this death–but, like the sun, it hurts to look directly at them. So “Under the Bridge” gives us a set of grown-ups, acting as foils of sorts. There’s Reena’s mom, Suman, played with a devastating surety by Archie Panjabi; Rebecca guiding us through the story; and her high school friend Cam (Lily Gladstone), who’s now the local cop leading the murder investigation.
Following on the heels of her Oscar nomination for “Killers of the Flower Moon,” Gladstone is the marquee performer in this show, and she brings a tender earnestness to her role. “Under the Bridge” is purposeful about Cam’s identity too, touching upon aspects of Indigenous history that a lesser show would fumble or ignore. But she doesn’t outshine her co-stars like she arguably did in Scorcese’s history lesson. Here, her Indigeneity doesn’t mark her as the bearer of the worst tragedies but rather as part of a damaged and damaging society.
Both Rebecca and Cam see themselves in these teens, having lost Rebecca’s brother when they were growing up in Victoria. They recast that death onto the current one, creating a sad house of mirrors where the guilt spreads out like blood from a fatal stab wound. In fact, perhaps the most devastating line in a show full of them is when Rebecca tells Suman, “I would like to believe that when something tragic happens, it can make you more able to see the beauty that’s still left in the world. That didn’t happen for me but I hope that happens for you.”
With moments like this, “Under the Bridge” offers an unblinking look at the ways we fail each other and, perhaps more importantly, ourselves. This is a tale of how sins can haunt the living, long after the dead have gone cold. How gender, race, and privilege can increase or dissipate the consequences we face, and how that unjust system makes everything worse.
There is some healing in “Under the Bridge” but that path is narrow and incomplete. Instead, it is that pain that lingers. The pain and the call for us to better protect young people from themselves and the systems we’ve built that see them as disposable.
