New Moon (2022) | Directed by Jérémie Balais, Raul Domingo, and Jeffig Le Bars

 4.5/5

Jérémie Balais, Raul Domingo, and Jeffig Le Bars’s New Moon is a lovely short film – beautifully animated and full of magic, vibrance, and wonder. Animation is a wonderful medium to use when adapting a one-person show and bringing it to life – it allows the performer to inhabit all of the characters in a slightly different manner than they would onstage or in a live-action film. While this might just be a short snippet, a short story, it is such a loving tribute to the performer’s (Coleman Domingo) mother and a wonderful reflection on opening yourself up to possibility.

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Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore (2022) | Directed by David Yates

 1.5/5

David Yates’s Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore was marginally better than the previous entry in the Fantastic Beasts series – mostly likely because a competent screenwriter was brought in to give it a semblance of a story. However, it still suffers from many of the same issues that have plagued this prequel series since its beginning. Once again, characters are reset back to their previous state, and any pretense of growth has been magically erased – this may be the greatest magic spell of all in the franchise. Once again, the CGI is sloppy, and the action sequences are chaotic and poorly constructed. And once again, we have more of the series’ sexism on prominent display here. The entire film feels like an attempt to play on the nostalgia viewers have for the original Harry Potter franchise – from the overuse of the theme music to the reliance on “saintly” Dumbledore to the many CGI shots of Hogwarts. That said, Mads Mikkelson is wonderful as the villain (taking over the role in this installment) and brings more to the table than he’s given to work with. Likewise, Jessica Williams understands the assignment she’s been given as a performer and is delightful as a screwball comedy-era witch. The two central settings for this film are rather distasteful – Germany during the rise of Nazism especially feels inappropriate given how unwilling the film is to engage with the gravity of this situation, just using it as fascistic window dressing. And the use of Bhutan as the location for the final scenes also carries an air of white, European filmmakers exploiting and exoticizing the locale and making it into a “magical paradise.” This is a franchise that continues devolve into tedium and self-importance.

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Spiderhead (2022) | Directed by Joseph Kosinski

 1.5/5

Joseph Kosinski’s Spiderhead is a film with a fantastic concept but executed in the most boring and pedestrian way imaginable. The movie is full of clunky dialogue, stilted performances, generic fight scenes, and bland sets. Chris Hemsworth, taking a villainous turn, is very fun to watch, embracing the strangeness of the concept and finding a depth that isn’t present in the script or the filmmaking. The mystery lying at the heart of the film is utterly predictable and boring. There were so many interesting possibilities that could have been explored within this concept, especially in the idea that it is potentially alluring for the inmates and research subjects to help make the world a better place as part of their journey to assuage feelings of guilt over past mistakes. While there are vague nods toward the characters’ guilt and a desire for redemption, it’s never explored in any meaningful way. The film ends with such an anti-climactic thud and lack of a denouement that it feels more like a fizzle than an actual ending. It’s a film with so much possibility, so much that it appears to be striving toward – but it never quite manages to make any of the pieces come together.

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The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (2022) | Directed by Tom Gormican

 3/5

Is Tom Gormican’s The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent a great movie? Probably no. But it is fascinating to watch Nicolas Cage explore some of his potential fears and insecurities through this meta-fictional role – the fear of being a terrible father and not being there for his children, of working too much and being too desperate for each role that comes along, of working so much that he’s no longer a star, of being too self-absorbed to notice his family, of becoming irrelevant… The scenes in which Cage talks with himself are delightful throwbacks to his past work and provide moments of over-the-top reflection on the ways that artists – and especially actors – are in constant battle with their own egos. Pedro Pascal is wonderful and gives the film an emotional grounding that matches Cage’s (at times) manic energy. The meta-reflection on Hollywood, the kind of movies that are financed and seen right now, and the ways in which the story we watch unfolds to becomes fictionalized and wraps in on itself, is all a treat to watch. Perhaps less successful is the way the action-movie and spy plot take the weirdness and loveliness of the film’s concept and flattens it out, making it into something altogether more conventional and traditional than it could have been. Nevertheless, it’s still incredibly fun and has two actors who seem to enjoy the work of playing off of one another – but it had the potential to be so much more.

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Lot 36 (2022) | Directed by Guillermo Navarro

 3/5

Guillermo Navarro’s Lot 36 is a solid short horror film (part of Guillermo Del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities), telling the story of “a terrible person gets their comeuppance.” There’s something immensely satisfying in watching a racist and xenophobic opportunist face terror of his own making during the course of this short. There’s also something intriguing about setting the tale nearly 20 years ago – it’s easy for white liberals to believe that times have only gotten bad since Trump was elected, but stories like this remind us that the recent rise in white nationalism, racism, and grievance politics isn’t anything new. The way Tim Blake Nelson’s embittered racist ends up aligning himself with a very particular political group is especially pointed and has so many parallels to what is happening with white men today. While we’re never completely sure what kind of horror will be lurking within the titular storage unit, the short does telegraph all of the steps the characters will need to take to discover the horror, so there isn’t much in the way of genuine scares, suspense, or even surprise. Still, it has solid performances, decent atmosphere, and a recurring bit with the timed lights that’s incredibly effective.

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Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (2021) | Directed by Dean Fleischer Camp

 5/5

Dean Fleischer Camp’s Marcel the Shell with Shoes On is a lovely, unexpectedly insightful, and incredibly funny animated film. Camp and his co-writers (Jenny Slate, Elizabeth Holm, and Nick Paley) effortlessly capture the beats, rhythms, and spontaneity that you find in traditional documentaries – and yet the rigorous craft and skill it takes to combine the stop-motion animation with live action, all while still making room for improvisation, is stunning. Slate’s performance is outstanding, bringing so much heart and soul to a character that could all-too-easily be written off as cutesy or insubstantial. The camerawork has a warm, rich, and textured look that comes from this marriage of stop-motion and live action, and it captures the light in such a way that it mirrors the film’s own inner warmth and sense of peace and harmony. It’s delightful to see the way the film interrogates the role of “filmmaker” throughout (in its own very subtle and gentle manner), constantly challenging the notion that Dean, the human filming Marcel’s life, can remain a detached and uninvolved observer. The film also provides a sly skewering of the ways social media can push us into performing for one another, making shows of connection without every truly knowing or being known. And really, community is at the core and the essence of the film – can you ever find it again once it’s been lost? This theme is expertly threaded throughout the film – whether it’s Marcel’s quest for his family or Dean coping with the loss of his marriage. This is a lovely, joyous film.

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Moonfall (2022) | Directed by Roland Emmerich

 2/5

Nearly every beat of Roland Emmerich’s latest sci-fi/disaster film, Moonfall, borrows heavily from the tidy formula he’s established in his previous spectacle-laden blockbusters – from the disgraced hero brought back to save the day to the crackpot scientist who knows more about what’s really going on than the actual experts. Not to mention the world-ending destruction amped up to the largest scale imaginable. While Emmerich has dabbled in pseudo-science in his previous films, it seems unwise it is to indulge so heavily in conspiracy theories like the one that anchors Moonfall’s plot – especially at a time when distrust of science is at an all-time high. There are a handful of stunning images sprinkled throughout the ugly and incomprehensible CGI-action sequences – the “gravity waves” that arrive during a space shuttle launch is especially inventive. But the rest of the film succumbs to the “more is more” maxim of modern filmmaking and becomes so busy and cacophonous that it’s hard to care about what we see on the screen. It doesn’t help that green screen exteriors and shoddy interior production design give the film an artificial blandness throughout. Attempts to inject humor into the narrative fall flat, and both Patrick Wilson and Halle Berry do what they can with their roles, but the entire film is full of one-note, paper-thin characters that consistently drain the life out of every scene. The film’s final act gives us a last-minute info dump of exposition spelling everything out, resolving any lingering mystery, and pushing the narrative from the absurd into absolute silliness. There is the skeleton of a decent idea here – if it had been tightened up throughout and the script didn’t launch us into the disaster without taking the time to effectively pace out its opening scenes – there was the potential for this to be a lot of fun rather than the goofy slog it ended up becoming.

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Don’t Worry Darling (2022) | Directed by Olivia Wilde

 2/5

Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling is glossy and beautiful looking but inert, would-be thriller with no stakes or any sense of threat or danger. From the very beginning, the film lets us know that something sinister is happening under the surface of this “picture-perfect” community (the only real mystery in the narrative is the specifics) blunting any sense of dread it tries to create. Every plot point is telegraphed early in each scene or section, but the film belabors these points and drags them out (as if we’ll be surprised by what’s to come) which only further reduces any tension or sense of surprise or discovery. Because tension and dread are so poorly deployed throughout the film, the final revelation lands with a shrug rather than a knowing shock of recognition. It all feels so obvious – even if the mechanism is something we couldn’t puzzle out for ourselves. Florence Pugh and Chris Pine are fantastic (as to be expected), and they’re especially electrifying the few times they share the screen together. The punishing, sun-scorched cinematography, combined with the eerie sameness of the set design, gives us the visual sense of dread and unease that the plot is unable to sustain. It’s nice to see a major Hollywood motion picture explore coercion, male fragility, and control in abusive relationships, but it would have been nice to see those themes explored in a more substantive and better constructed film.

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Avatar: The Way of Water (2022) | Directed by James Cameron

 2/5

James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water is punishingly long, with so many narrative digressions and self-indulgent, disconnected sequences that the film pushes itself into a tedium that never earns its runtime. While the film’s computer-generated effects and motion captured performances are frequently stunning throughout much of the film, the moments in which the effects aren’t seamless truly stand out. Cameron stages a few truly spectacular action scenes that are well-choreographed and nicely paced, but far too many of them go on for too long and begin to lose the clarity of action that makes them so compelling early on and differentiates them from other modern action scenes. The Way of Water also falls into the problem that far too many “serious” action films succumb to – making depictions of an atrocity appear to be exciting and thrilling through the use of traditional action editing, bombastic music cues, and favoring the viewpoints of the perpetrators of violence.

The narrative itself is too thin to support the grandiose scale that Cameron is trying to achieve here – characters are constantly making unmotivated decisions for plot convenience and to advance the story to the next moment of visual spectacle. The patriarchal “father protects his family” worldview gets tiresome quickly, and the potpourri of Indigenous cultures that Cameron borrows from with no sensitivity and little understanding is backwards and regressive. Cameron continues to show that he is unable to write convincing dialogue – conversations are wooden and plodding, with the same lines and even series of lines repeated over and over again. Zoe Saldaña‘s performance through motion capture is very strong, and while there are a few inspired sequences and ideas throughout the film, but those ideas are never developed and those sequences are diluted by being drawn out far too long. This is a film (and franchise) with so much squandered potential due to Cameron’s problems with story, pacing, and dialogue, as well as his own inability to see outside of his own limited experiences.

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All Quiet on the Western Front (2022) | Directed by Edward Berger

 5/5

Edward Berger’s All Quiet on the Western Front is a brutal depiction of war, unrelenting and bleak, that never allow viewers to settle into the comfortable or familiar spectacle of violence. This is a film that constantly finds ways to complicate and humanize enemy soldiers so that the killing is never easy, it always comes at an emotional and spiritual cost to the characters we follow through the narrative – as well as ourselves. Because the film is so brutal throughout and places us so often in close point of view of soldiers at the front, it can come across as emotionally cold and distant, giving itself over to dread and terror more than the sadness and grief over all these wasted lives. Still, that’s preferable to the often mawkish and overly sentimental depictions of war and combat that we’re often presented in cinema. The true villains of the film aren’t enemy soldiers, but the generals and powers-that-be sending these young men off to die – depicted as grotesque, out-of-touch, blinded by the safety and security of their opulence and privilege. The sound design here is exquisite and essential to enveloping us in the terror of battle, contrasting it with the quiet times in between. This is a magnificent film – hard and challenging, but a powerful statement on the cruelty of war.