# Review: In concert film 'Renaissance,' Beyoncé offers glimpse into personal life during world tour
By **JONATHAN LANDRUM JR.**
December 1, 2023. 10:07 AM EST

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**LOS ANGELES (AP)** - In Beyoncé's concert film, she describes her recent Renaissance World Tour as being run like a machine: From lighting to set design, the superstar had a hand in everything production-related to ensure her stadium tour exceeded expectations after four years of preparation.

As a perfectionist, Beyoncé was tirelessly determined - working almost 50 days straight - to create an epic concert experience. This becomes clear in her movie "Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé," which chronicles the massive tour in support of her seventh studio album.

Written, directed and produced by Beyoncé, "Renaissance" perfectly captures her dazzling performances for the big screen and includes some intimate behind-the-scenes footage from the normally private singer, who has rarely done interviews in the past decade.

Beyoncé released her nearly three-hour "Renaissance" movie through AMC Theaters in similar fashion as the "Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour" film, which opened with a record-breaking $97 million domestically for a concert film last month. But unlike Swift, whose project primarily focused on her onstage performances, Beyoncé offers more insight into her personal life.

"I'm really excited for everyone to see the process," she says in the film.

With "Renaissance," Beyoncé displays more of her human side like in her 2019 Netflix film "Homecoming," which delved into the singer headlining the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. This time, she goes a step further into her story as arguably music's hardest-working performer, who attempts to juggle being a mother of three while she maintains her mental and physical fortitude during her tour.

Beyoncé expressed frustration with challenges to her lofty aspirations for her tour and felt she wasn't being heard because she's a Black woman. The tour ultimately grossed around $500 million, according to Billboard. She opens up about having surgery on her knee, which forced her into rehabilitation a month before her first opening show in Stockholm.

Unlike her tour, Beyoncé confesses, she's "not a machine."

But through her aches and pains, Beyoncé - who is the most decorated Grammy artist in history - showed up and performed at a very high level. It's what she demanded of herself and others who mirrored her mentality to make each show come into fruition.

The film showcases a few big-name performers who accompanied Beyoncé onstage, including Megan Thee Stallion in Houston. During her Los Angeles stint, Kendrick Lamar was a special guest along with Diana Ross, who sang to Beyoncé for her 42nd birthday.

But out of all the celebrity appearances, the one who stole the show was Beyoncé's 11-year-old daughter, Blue Ivy, who made her presence felt as a background dancer. Initially, the singer was opposed to pushing Blue into the limelight of performing in front of tens of thousands.

"She told me she was ready to perform, and I told her no," Beyoncé says in the film.

She eventually agreed to give her daughter one chance to show her stuff. Her first performance, however, was subjected to heavy criticism on social media. But Blue Ivy used that to train harder. She gained confidence as the tour progressed and gained more standing ovations each time she hit the stage.

Blue Ivy's growth brought joy to Beyoncé and to Mathew Knowles, the proud grandfather who is shown saying, "Now, that's a Knowles!"

During a stop in Houston, Beyoncé along with her mother, Tina Knowles, drove around her old Third Ward neighborhood before they stopped by her childhood home. The return to her hometown marked another reunion between Beyoncé and all the members of the girl group Destiny's Child - which included Kelly Rowland, Michelle Williams, LeToya Luckett and LaTavia Roberson, who was once ousted from the group.

Now, it appears there's peace among them. There were no words exchanged on camera except for a collective hug, which Beyoncé called during her narration a "new birth for us. A lot of healing."

Beyoncé along with her mother shared heartfelt moments of the singer's late uncle Johnny - a Black gay man who introduced her to house music as a child and made her a prom dress. She dedicated the "Renaissance" album to him.

The film squeezes in Beyoncé's appreciation for her devoted Beyhive fanbase who are often shown in the audience in various cities. During her shows, she expresses her gratitude for them, calling them "beautiful faces."

Despite the presence of jams like "Alien Superstar," "Church Girl" and "Cuff It," not every song performed on tour made the cut for the film.

And that's just fine. "Renaissance" is more about getting a glimpse into Beyoncé's life - even for just a little bit.

"Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé," an AMC release, is not rated. Running time: 168 minutes. Four stars out of four.


# Movie Review: 'Eileen,' a wonderful novel about an 'invisible' young lady becomes an oddball film
By **MARK KENNEDY**
November 28, 2023. 1:53 PM EST

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Something strange has happened to Eileen Dunlop, and we don't just mean the plot of "Eileen." The adaptation of novelist Ottessa Moshfegh's delicious coming-of-age heroine has had a weird birth onto film.

The plot and setting haven't changed: It's late 1964 in a frigid coastal town in Massachusetts. "Everybody's kind of angry here - it's Massachusetts," Eileen explains in one her best lines. She works as a clerk at a juvenile corrections facility, goes home to an alcoholic dad and repeats. Her whole world is a prison.

In print, she is dark and self-obsessed and deliciously willing to poke into every squeamish horror, even her own "folds and caverns." On celluloid, she is just a plain, anti-social Jane. In print in one scene, she scratches her nether regions and pointedly uses the unwashed fingers to shake hands with a boss. In the film, she just walks away. Eileen has been neutered.

It's not clear what has happened since Moshfegh - along with Luke Goebel - is a screenwriter as well as a producer. Moshfegh's original creation is a "fabulous shoplifter" who keeps a dead field mouse in the glove box of her smoky Dodge Coronet and loves National Geographic issues that feature unusual, painful tribal rituals. None of that made it to the film. That leaves her too inert, too passive - wide-eyed without the naughty.

"Eileen" was always going to be a hard book to adapt, especially since it's so internal. It's really a character study for most of the way, then events get jolted by an unexpected outsider - a real deus ex machina - and then it evolves into a low-stakes noir thriller, right down to the film's too heavy Hitchcockian end credits.

Thomasin McKenzie playing the titular character has a lot to do and she does it admirably, appearing mouse-ish from the outside, pulling pubic hair out of a bar of soap with delightful glee and taking the occasional flight of fancy by dreaming of executing her dad or having a hot and heavy tryst with a guard. "Get a life, Eileen. Get a clue," says her unamusing dad.

The deus ex machina here is Anne Hathaway as the glamorous Harvard-trained psychiatrist Rebecca Saint John, who drinks cocktails, smokes furiously - "It's a nasty habit. That's why I like it" - dances alone in bars and doesn't buy any '50s conventions. "I don't get what's popular," she says. Hathaway could have pulled back the throttle a little, often overawing McKenzie's mouse.

Hathaway's sophisticated character is the key to unlocking Eileen, and the young woman begins mimicking the older, often wearing her dead mother's clothes as she smokes or drinks martinis. They have a sort of flirtation - game recognizing game. "You really think you're a normal person?" the psychiatrist asks Eileen.

While director William Oldroyd often gets lost in the heavy darkness of noir, the screenwriters have some fabulous lines, like when Saint John tells Eileen: "You remind me of a girl in a Dutch painting. You have a strange face. It's plain but fascinating - with a beautiful turbulence."

Or when gin-soaked dad - a great Shea Whigham - calmly destroys his daughter: "Some people, they're the real people. Like in a movie. They're the ones you watch, they're the ones making moves. And other people, they're just there, filling the space," he says. "That's you, Eileen. You're one of them."

And that's the fate of "Eileen," too, unfortunately. By sanding off all the dark human quirks from their deeply human heroine, the filmmakers have left us a film that's just filling the space.

"Eileen," a Neon release in theaters Dec. 1, is rated R for "violent content, sexual content and language." Running time: 97 minutes. Two stars out of four.


# Review: Bradley Cooper's 'Maestro' leaves many notes of Bernstein unplayed
By **JAKE COYLE**
November 21, 2023. 6:37 PM EST

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Bradley Cooper's "Maestro," a high-wire act of a biopic, leaps constantly between on stage and off, flying through Leonard Bernstein's very public life as a conductor while diving into his more private marriage to Felicia Montealegre. How each side of Bernstein's existence interacts with the other is the tension and harmony of "Maestro." Which is authentic? Which a performance?

Resolving those dichotomies is, thankfully, not the aim of Cooper's admirably ambitious if performative drama about the musical conscience of 20th century America. Bernstein's polymorphous life was spread between his family life and a string of male lovers, just as it was between conducting and the solitary toil of composing. "Maestro" resists neat conclusions about any facet of an expansively contradictory life.

"If you carry around both personalities, I suppose that means you become a schizophrenic and that's the end of it," Bernstein (Cooper) says with a laugh in a TV interview alongside Montealegre (Carey Mulligan).

"Maestro," which debuts Wednesday in theaters before streaming next month on Netflix, isn't a cradle-to-the-grave biopic, though it doesn't avoid some of the genre's standard pitfalls, either. It's largely set around the beginning and end of his relationship with Montealegre, an actor he first meets at a party. "Hello, I'm Lenny," he says, grinning from the piano bench.

It's a framework with some benefits -- no matter what the title says, this is Mulligan's movie - that also omits much of Bernstein's most lasting accomplishments. There is little here of music making, generally, and virtually none of "West Side Story," "Candide," "On the Waterfront" or all those influential TV broadcasts. Fans such as Lydia Tár may not approve.

But "Maestro" begins, thrillingly, in a black-and-white blur. Characters exit scenes like they're falling through trap doors, a surreal swirl propelled by the verve of Bernstein's music. In the first scene, a 25-year-old Bernstein is woken with a call notifying him to substitute for Bruno Walter in conducting the New York Philharmonic that night. Enthralled, he pulls open the blinds, slaps, in rhythm, the bare bottom of the man sharing his bed and runs down stairs that magically lead right into Carnegie Hall.

It won't be the last time that "Maestro" draws a straight line between lovemaking and music. "If nothing sings in you, then you can't make music," Montealegre will later tell him. Music, no doubt, swells most in the Bernstein of "Maestro" when he's liberated to be himself.

On the night of their first date, Bernstein and Montealegre end up, fittingly, on a stage running lines, with one floor lamp casting them in shadow. "Even though you're the king, you're quite taken with me," she says, explaining his characterization.

The fiction is quickly borne out, albeit with a foreboding sense of marital trouble. Another headlong sprint between scenes ends with the two rushing onto the stage of "Fancy Free," the Jerome Robbins ballet that will lead to "On the Town." Bernstein, himself, joins the hip-swinging sailors.

"Maestro" is, for this roughly first black-and-white hour, wonderfully brisk and free of normal biopic constraints. It's like a dream of 1950s New York modernism. Dialogue moves at an urbane clip. The photography, by Matthew Libatique, dips confidently between intimate exchanges and wide-shot vistas of the Berkshires of Tanglewood or of Central Park. (This is, most definitely, a great Central Park movie, full of romance and encounters along its pathways.)

When "Maestro" shifts forward and into color, it loses its brio. The film, which Cooper wrote with Josh Singer, skips over the central decades of Bernstein's accomplishments, taking up residence instead in the early 1970s.

By then, Bernstein and Montealegre are married with three children (the oldest, Jamie, is played by Maya Hawke) and a house in Connecticut. But even though Montealegre entered into the marriage without wool over her eyes ("I know exactly who you are," she tells him, early on), all is now discord. Bernstein's dalliances, she tells him, have gotten sloppy. In a Thanksgiving Day argument in their Manhattan apartment overlooking the park, she seethes: "If you're not careful, you're going to die a lonely queen." Right about then, an inflated Snoopy floats past the window, like an eclipse.

In scene after scene like this, "Maestro" is staged exquisitely. But even as the film moves from its nervy first hour to its melodramatic set pieces, artifice steadily grips "Maestro." Cooper's Bernstein has come under criticism for the prosthetic nose, but it's other affectations in his performance that smother. It's a sincere performance, thoughtful and dedicated, but it's also mannered and showy, drowning in turtlenecks, cigarettes and accents.

But Cooper, a sensitive director, was also wise enough to follow Mulligan's increasingly moving performance. (She gets top billing, too.) The film's slide into family dynamics comes at the expense of Bernstein's larger story, but it yields a beautiful platform for Mulligan to capture a woman too infatuated by her husband to abandon him, but too clear-eyed not to be devasted.

"It's my own arrogance to think I could survive on what he could give," she says.

It's a powerfully piercing moment, followed by an extended, passionate recreation of Bernstein in 1976 conducting Mahler's Second Symphony. There, gyrating at the podium before an orchestra, the film tells us, may be where Bernstein truly gives all of himself.

Some of America's top filmmakers have long been tempted to tackle a film on Bernstein, among them Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg (both credited producers here). But Cooper's film never finds its balance. If Bernstein's sexuality must be the prism through which we view him, why do his male lovers (Matt Bomer makes a brief impression) pass by so fleetingly? "Maestro" is a fine portrait of a complicated marriage. But for a man who contained symphonies, that leaves a lot of notes unplayed.

"Maestro," a Netflix release is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for some language and drug use. Running time: 129 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.


# Movie Review: Emerald Fennell chronicles a promising young man in audacious, shock-filled 'Saltburn'
By **JOCELYN NOVECK**
November 21, 2023. 9:55 AM EST

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Two years ago Emerald Fennell stood on the Oscars stage hoisting her writing trophy for "Promising Young Woman," a scathing look at rape culture and a balancing act of wit, style, shock value, audacity, great acting and pitch-black humor - plus a timely #MeToo message.

That's a lot for a debut film, and we didn't even mention the best director nomination. Not surprisingly, anticipation has been hot for the writer-director's next effort (as an actor, she's already graced a little film this year called "Barbie," in the suitably dark role of pregnant, discontinued Midge).

Now "Saltburn" is here, and the results are enticing but decidedly mixed - perhaps because Fennell seems to be trying to one-up herself by leaning on the shock value, at the eventual expense of other storytelling elements.

Make no mistake, the clever writing is here, as is the style, the sleek technique, and some terrific performances (Rosamund Pike is especially delicious in a supporting role). What's missing, or muddled, is the message - and perhaps even more, the heart. After two hours of cringing and gasping in both awe and discomfort, we're left admiring the "how" of what she's doing but still figuring out the "why."

One thing that's not lacking: beauty. Unsurprisingly, Fennell excels at lush production values, especially in presenting the imposing, seductive and somewhat debauched Saltburn - no, not a person, but a country manor! This is England, and a story of class dynamics, so it's surely fitting that the star be a piece of real estate. (And let's just say, the phrase "real estate porn" takes on an added dimension here.)

We start, though, at Oxford. Here we meet our main character, Oliver Quick (and if that doesn't take you straight back to Dickens, nothing will). It's 2006, and Oliver (Barry Keoghan, ever-watchable and unpredictable) is a freshman on scholarship, feeling out of his league. At his first tutorial, he announces he read all 50 books on the summer reading list. His bemused teacher tells him nobody does that.

Oliver soon learns that life at Oxford isn't about what you've read, but who you know. In the Hogwarts-style dining hall, he can barely find someone to sit with - only a needy mathematics major. He has no earthly connection to the rest of the privileged, entitled (and in some cases, titled) student body, but aches to fit in.

And then aristocratic golden boy Felix appears, like a Greek god. Played by Jacob Elordi, currently appearing as Elvis in "Priscilla," Felix is gorgeous and effortlessly rakish; he seems to have never encountered hardship. Unless you count a flat tire on his bike, which is how Oliver meets him, lending his own bike so Felix can get to class.

The two become friends. It's obvious what's in it for Oliver, but what's in it for Felix? That's less clear, but Oliver's home life has been hard. So, when Oliver tells Felix a tragedy has occurred involving his drug-addicted parents, Felix invites him to spend the summer at his family palace, er, home.

The family includes Felix's beautiful but unstable sister, Venetia (Alison Oliver), his comically out-of-touch father, Sir James (Richard E. Grant, very funny), and the terrifically droll Pike as Elspeth, Felix's glamorous, clueless mother. Also spending the summer is cousin Farleigh (Archie Madekwe, excellent) a Saltburn outsider himself - American-born, a person of color - but compared to Oliver an insider, which is crucial. The great Carey Mulligan, Oscar-nominated for "Promising Young Woman," has a welcome cameo as an unwelcome guest.

The early Saltburn days are intoxicating. Felix points out the various Rubens portraits, the original Shakespeare folios, that sort of thing. Days are spent lounging languidly on the lawn by the mossy pond. Dinner is black tie, so Oliver needs a loaner jacket and cufflinks. These people even play tennis in tuxes.

Then the really crazy stuff starts happening.

And we mean Fennell-level crazy. In "Promising Young Woman" there was a slow burn to the shocking, graphic ending. Here, the shocks come early. A few involve bodily fluids. Fennell knows how to startle the most jaded of film audiences - guests at the screening I attended either gasped or giggled in embarrassment.

Fennell is also comfortable with the world she seeks to paint. Even if you didn't know beforehand, it's pretty clear from the vividly rendered Oxford scenes that the director attended Oxford herself, and her scenes of student life at that storied institution, seen through outsider Oliver, form the most authentic-feeling part of the film.

But how long will Oliver remain an outsider? Will this uncertain and complicated young man, who arrives at the Saltburn gates too early and too naive to have waited for the footmen to collect him at the station, ever fit in, something he covets above all else? That's the question the rest of the movie answers, taking increasingly sinister twists and turns.

As if in a garden maze, perhaps? Like any self-respecting, spectacular period mansion, Saltburn has one of those, too, where some key action takes place. More broadly, though, the maze seems to symbolize the effect of this film: pretty, seductive, challenging, forbidding and ultimately confounding.

"Saltburn," an Amazon/MGM Studios release, has been rated R by the Motion Picture Association "for strong sexual content, graphic nudity, language throughout, some disturbing violent content, and drug use." Running time: 127 minutes. Two stars out of four.


# Movie Review: Disney's musical fairy tale 'Wish' is beautiful, but lacking magic
By **LINDSEY BAHR**
November 20, 2023. 9:58 AM EST

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Walt Disney Animation's "Wish" is stunning to look at with textured and rich watercolor-inspired animation and easter egg treasures for audiences nostalgic for the classics. But it is also more concept than story: A strained and forgettable attempt to pay homage to the studio's 100 years. The origin of the wishing star is as fine a motivation as any for a jumping off point, but "Wish," directed by Chris Buck and Fawn Veerasunthorn, seems to have been drawn not from someone's earnest imagination and dreams, but a corporate board trying to reverse-engineer magic and charm.

Case in point: In one of the awfully generic songs, "I Am a Star," a cute, talking rabbit chirpily sings to our heroine Asha that "when it comes to the universe, we're all shareholders." Ugh.

I'm probably not alone in having learned several vocabulary words from Disney songs as a child, but there is something so dispiriting about hearing the word "shareholders" in what is supposed to be a rallying, inspirational anthem in a fairy tale world where talking goats and magic exist. There is no sign of corporations or public offerings in the Kingdom of Rosas, though that could have been an interesting path to take. Instead, this is a place founded by a guy, Magnifico (Chris Pine), who has the ability to grant wishes (and other magic things, too).

Now, you may think you know what a wish is, but this movie needs it to be a little more complicated than that and thus has to explain it over and over again to justify itself. Wishes aren't just small wants, they're everything - your soul, your reason for living - and Magnifico has convinced all his subjects to give him theirs upon their 18th birthday for protection. He stores these wishes in floating orbs in an observatory in his castle, that he'll then grant back to some at a later date.

Asha, the lead voiced by Ariana DeBose ("West Side Story" Oscar-winner and the reason "Angela Bassett did the thing" lives rent-free in my head) is a spirted subject of Rosas who is about to turn 18 and give her wish to Magnifico. She is fan No.1 of Rosas and Magnifico, but when she discovers (about 15 minutes into the film) that he doesn't have any intention of granting her 100-year-old grandfather's wish, she turns on him and Rosas and begins an accidental revolution. This is after Asha and Magnifico sing a duet "At All Costs" that is fully a love song about two people but has been shoehorned in here to be about Rosas and the wishes. It's strangely awkward.

The original songs, by Julia Michaels and Benjamin Rice, are slick and poppy and ultimately inoffensive. Their appeal might depend on how you felt about Benj Pasek and Justin Paul's songs for "The Greatest Showman." If you loved those, the "Wish" soundtrack is probably for you. If not, sorry, though "Knowing What I Know Now" is pretty catchy.

"Wish" also doesn't seem to have a solid handle on how the lack of these wishes affect the population of Rosas. A few walk around like sleepy shells, but most everyone else seems happy and content even after having volunteered this essential part of their being. Maybe that's the point? But this is a movie that has some surprising parallels (in themes and unresolved storylines) with "Don't Worry Darling" that don't stop at Chris Pine relishing his handsome villain era.

The animation really is quite lovely overall and striking after so many years of computer generated smoothness and perfection. But this is also a strange mixture of both styles and the storybook like textures makes some of the characters faces and the star look almost too fake for the world they're in.

The star, a speechless innocent, is also lacking a certain spark that might make it as iconic as the filmmakers want it to be. Or perhaps it just has the misfortune of looking too similar to the nihilist star from "The Super Mario Bros. Movie" from earlier this year.

"Wish" is harmless holiday programming for the family, but it's strange to watch a movie about celebrating the individual "star" in everyone that feels like it was made by mandate, not a dream. And I would bet that every person who worked on this film probably grew up loving Disney and that each has dozens of ideas more inspired than this to commemorate 100 years and take this company into the future. Maybe next time.

"Wish," a Walt Disney Co. release in theaters Tuesday, is rated PG by the Motion Picture Association for "thematic elements and mild action." Running time: 92 minutes. Two stars out of four.


# Movie Review: 'Fallen Leaves' is deadpan nirvana
By **JAKE COYLE**
November 16, 2023. 5:06 PM EST

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In a movie year rife with grand, three-hour opuses from auteur filmmakers comes a slender 81-minute gem that outclasses them all. Aki Kaurismäki's "Fallen Leaves," short, sweet and utterly delightful, is the kind of movie that's so charming, you want to run it back the moment it's over.

Kaurismäki, the writer-director Finnish master of the deadpan, has for nearly four decades been making minimalist, clear-eyed fables about mostly working-class characters in harsh economic realities. Bleak as his films are, they're also funny, compassionate and profound. They put up a tough, droll front that never quite hides the heart underneath.

The same could be said for one of the main characters in the plaintive and tender "Fallen Leaves." When Holappa (Jussi Vatanen), a construction worker, is invited by his friend Houtari (Kaurismäki veteran Janne Hyytiäinen) to karaoke, he replies: "Tough guys don't sing."

"You're not a tough guy," Houtari responds.

"Fallen Leaves," Kaurismäki's first since 2017's "The Other Side of Hope," is about Holappa and a woman named Ansa (Alma Pöysti), both solitary people scraping by in Helsinki. They first encounter each other at that karaoke bar where Houtari proudly sings (for the rest of the movie, whenever he appears he'll be seeking compliments for his performance), but Ansa and Holappa watch quietly apart.

Kaurismäki draws them together, but slowly. "Fallen Leaves" is the best big-screen romance of the year even though its prospective lovers exchange only a handful of words and, for most of the film, don't know each other's names.

It's more about the circumstances they're both in. In the beginning of the film, Ansa is working at a supermarket while a security guard glares at her. She's fired for keeping an expired item instead of throwing it away. At home, she looks at her bills and then shuts the power off. Her next job, at a restaurant, fizzles on pay day when the owner is arrested for selling drugs.

Holappa loses his job, too. After an accident at a construction site due to shoddy equipment, he's fired for having alcohol in his blood. He's a scapegoat, but the drinking problem is real. He keeps vodka in his locker and hidden on the job site.

"I'm depressed because I drink and I drink because I'm depressed," he tells Houtari.

The cinematography of longtime Kaurismäki collaborator Timo Salminen is so spare, with occasional pops of color and irony, that "Fallen Leaves" has a timeless feeling. It casts the cruelty of the world as an eternal state, a sense only enhanced and expanded upon in the most precise contemporary reference of the film. Whenever Ansa turns the radio on, news from the war in Ukraine is being read.

In Kaurismäki's film, the world is full of bullying authorities. (His radiant 2011 film "Le Havre," about an old French shoe shiner helping a migrant boy, hinged on a police officer who in the climactic moment choses to look the other way.) In "Fallen Leaves," the only thing to do is curse the jerks who make life miserable, have a drink and head to the movies.

That's where Ansa and Holappa go, once they finally meet, for a date. They see Jim Jarmusch's "The Dead Don't Die," a funny choice not just because it's a zombie comedy but because Jarmusch, a friend of Kaurismäki's, is so similar in deadpan style to him. Outside, the couple stands in front of telling posters: "Le Cercle Rouge," "Fat City," "Pierrot le Fou" - each a touchstone to the director.

It's little odes to cinema like these that make "Fallen Leaves" - winner of the jury prize at the Cannes Film Festival and Finland's Oscar submission - one of the most personal and self-reflective films for Kaurismäki. He probably wouldn't stand for all the analysis or the praise. But as Ansa and Holappa come together without a word of flowery romance, they carve out a small, private refugee from the world around them - just like the movies do. There isn't a bit of fat on "Fallen Leaves," just some lean truths about life and a dog named Chaplin.

"Fallen Leaves," a Mubi release, is unrated by the Motion Picture Association. Running time: 81 minutes. In Finnish with English subtitles. Four stars out of four.


# Review: In Ridley Scott's 'Napoleon,' the emperor has no clothes but plenty of ego
By **JAKE COYLE**
November 22, 2023. 12:44 AM EST

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For such a famed historical figure, Napoleon has made only fleeting appearances in movies since Abel Gance's 1927 silent film.

Stanley Kubrick had grand designs for a Napoleon epic that went unmade. (Steven Spielberg is attempting to revive those plans as a series ). Napoleon and his bicorne hat - more icon of history than a real character - mostly only pops up in time-traveling odysseys like "Time Bandits" or "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure."

The party, though, is finally on in Ridley Scott's "Napoleon," starring Joaquin Phoenix. Scott doesn't do anything small, not even famously diminutive French emperors. And his two-hour-38-minute big-screen biopic serves up a heaping historical spectacle complete with bloody European battles and massive military maneuvers.

But don't mistake "Napoleon" for your average historical epic. Our first sense that this may not be a grand glorification of a Great Man of history comes early in the film, when a 24-year-old Bonaparte leads the siege on the British troops controlling the port city of Toulon. When Napoleon, then a major, charges forward in the fight, he's visibly terrified, even panting. He looks more like Phoenix's anxious protagonist in "Beau Is Afraid" than the man who would become France's Caesar. Napoleon doesn't storm the gates so much as lurch desperately at them.

And for the rest of Scott's film and Phoenix's riveting performance, Napoleon's actions are never much more complicated than that. He assumes power cavalierly. His coup d'état against the French Directory in 1799 is a ramshackle farce. He flings his armies around the continent without the slightest concern. He's prone to petulant rages, screaming at the British: "You think you're so great because you have boats!"

"Napoleon" subscribes more to the Not-So-Great Man theory of history. This Napoleon isn't extraordinary nor is he much of a man. He's a boyishly impulsive, thin-skinned brute, careening his way through Europe and leaving battlefields of dead soldiers in his wake. When he, while on a campaign in Egypt, is informed over lunch that his wife, Joséphine (Vanessa Kirby), is having an affair back in Paris, he responds curtly to the messenger: "No dessert for you."

For more than 200 years, characterizations of Napoleon have ranged from genius reformer born out of the French Revolution to marauding tyrant whose wars left three million dead. Napoleon, himself, helped shape his legacy while exiled on St. Helena with a self-serving memoir. Some of the titans of 19th century literature reckoned with him. Victor Hugo wrote Napoleon lost at Waterloo because he had grown "troublesome to God." Tolstoy, in "War and Peace," was less impressed, calling him, "that most insignificant instrument of history."

In "Napoleon," which begins with Marie Antoinette at the guillotine and ends with Napoleon on St. Helena where he died at age 51 in 1821, it's startling how much disregard the movie has for its protagonist. Hollywood historical epics have traditionally leaned toward aggrandizement, not the undressing of fragile, deluded male egos who exclaim over dinner: "Destiny has brought me here! Destiny has brought me this lamb chop!"

Here is a sweeping historical tapestry - no one does it better today than Scott - with a damning, almost satirical portrait at its center. That mix - Scott's spectacle and Phoenix's the-emperor-has-no-clothes performance - makes "Napoleon" a rivetingly off-kilter experience.

It's not always a smooth mix. Phoenix's characterization may at times have more in common with some of his past depictions of melancholy loners ("The Master," "The Joker") than any factual record of Napoleon. A quality like ambition, you'd think, would be prominent in depicting Napoleon. He was a notorious workaholic, meticulously organized and an energetic intellectual - little of which is present here, making Napoleon's rise to power sometimes hard to fathom.

But that's also part of the point of "Napoleon," which surely has some contemporary echoes. There are plenty of enablers along the way (a highlight of the supporting cast is Paul Rhys as the scheming diplomat Talleyrand) as the film marches through major events like the fall of Robespierre, the 1799 coup, Napoleon making himself Emperor in 1804 and the triumphant Battle of Austerlitz. The last is Scott's finest set piece in the film, ending in a rout of the Russian forces as they flee over a frozen pond while the bombardment of cannons plunges them into an icy grave.

But in David Scarpa's screenplay, the real through line in "Napoleon" isn't the string of battles leading up to the downfall we all know is coming at Waterloo. (There, Rupert Everett's sneering Duke of Wellington enlivens the military tactics.) It's Napoleon's relationship with Joséphine that makes the main thread.

When he first sees her across a crowded party, he stands transfixed. Anyone would be. The slinky Kirby, sporting a pixie cut, rivals Phoenix for most potent presence in "Napoleon." She has a complete hold on Napoleon, who turns out to be no more suave in the bedroom than he is among society. When he returns from Egypt furious from the well-publicized rumors of her infidelity, they have a prolonged fight that ends with her turning the tables. "You are nothing without me," she tells him, as he cowers, happily. "Say it."

There's a version of the film that could be wholly focused on their dynamic. Joséphine is omnipresent for a long stretch - he writes her constantly from the battlefront in letters narrated to us - but "Napoleon" never quite finds its balance in cutting between their life together and the military exploits. Scott is expected to release a four-hour director's cut on Apple TV+ after the film's theatrical run, which may offer a more calibrated version.

But the 85-year-old Scott - himself a symbol of ceaseless ambition - has made a film that, like his previous "The Last Duel," is a provocative takedown of male power. Scott has made plenty of brawny, swaggering epics in his time - including "Gladiator," with an Oscar-nominated Phoenix as the Roman emperor Commodus. But even though not everything in "Napoleon" coheres, it's appealing destabilizing. In one of the film's final images, Napoleon and his hat are in silhouette as he slumps to his death like a keeling ship, going down.

"Napoleon," an Apple Studios release, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for strong violence, some grisly images, sexual content and brief language. Running time: 158 minutes. Three stars out of four.


# Movie Review: Emotional complexity, melodramatic wit and masterful acting in 'May December'
By **LINDSEY BAHR**
November 15, 2023. 4:06 PM EST

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There is hardly a false note in "May December," an audaciously self-aware, mischievously funny and emotionally complex drama that defies simple categorization.

Filmmaker Todd Haynes, working from a script by newcomer Samy Burch, deftly mixes cheesy movie of the week tropes with the psychological depths of Bergman to make this wholly singular piece that never quite lets the viewer relax on solid ground.

The set up involves an actor, Elizabeth Barry, played by Natalie Portman, who is spending some time with the real person she's decided to play in a film. That subject is Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore), who, when she was 36, was arrested and imprisoned for starting a physical relationship with a 12-year-old boy. Two decades later Gracie and that boy, Joe (Charles Melton), are married with three kids, one in college and twins about to go.

There have been cheap, seemingly exploitative movies made about them before, which we get brief glimpses of. Gracie tells Elizabeth, on their first meeting, that she just wants her to tell the story right. Elizabeth responds that she wants her to "feel seen and known." Both Moore and Portman are smiling sweetly, on perfectly polite stranger behavior, but it is also deeply uncomfortable. Is one lying? Are both? Who can we trust? Who do we like? Does it matter?

We already knew that Haynes was a master of melodrama, with films like "Carol" and "Far From Heaven," but in "May December" he gestures to the aesthetics of ripped-from-the-tabloids Lifetime fare. He layers that with a boldly dramatic score, borrowed from the past (the late French composer Michel Legrand's theme from "The Go-Between") and brilliantly deployed in both comedic and serious ways. Early in the film, Gracie is preparing for Elizabeth's arrival and opens her refrigerator when the score dips. We brace for something serious and dramatic as the camera zooms in on Moore: "I don't think we have enough hot dogs," she says.

Elizabeth isn't just there to watch them eat dinner and ask some questions. She is wildly driven to get to some sort of truth about Gracie, running around town like an investigative journalist interviewing everyone she can. Portman plays Elizabeth as impishly manipulative, utilizing the full power of her character's celebrity and its effect on people to get intimate confessions. It is a deliriously fun and unnerving send-up of both stardom and an actor's process. Late in the film, she calls it a story. Joe reminds her that it's their actual life. You can almost imagine Elizabeth Barry's deeply untruthful press tour for the film.

Gracie is harder to grasp, but she will keep the audience, and Elizabeth, on their toes for the duration. Just when you think you have a handle on something, she subverts it. We are, however, treated to some of her private moments that only Joe sees - her fragility, her delusions, her naivete. And Moore and Portman are electric in their scenes together, masterful performers whose characters are similarly performing for one another.

It's wonderfully fun to watch what they do, how they can make even the most basic of interactions slyly subversive and catty and how both try to maintain control over every conversation. But that they are great is not the big surprise of the film: Melton is. He will break your heart and not because of any huge Oscar-reel moment, but all the small ones leading up to the very earned tears. He's the sobering remind that behind all the intrigue and scandal and fun of the quest for truth, if we accept the reality of "May December" as some sort of reality, then we have to accept the tragedy of Joe.

Melton plays this 36-year-old father of three college age kids quietly. His first scenes with Gracie show a relationship that reads more mother-son than wife-husband, and not even just because of the age difference. At times he seems like a shadow of a person, playing the role of beer-drinking, hot dog grilling contented dad with an almost empty nest. He is, in this movie, still becoming, and maybe just now starting to grapple with the truth, as he raises his monarch butterflies and attempts to flirt over text with another person.

In fact, Joe, and Melton, might be the biggest masterstroke of "May December." Scandalous fun and camp are, you imagine, relatively easy with performers like this. But to give it a soul, too? It makes it monumental.

"May December," a Netflix release in theaters Nov. 17 and streaming Dec. 1, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for "some sexual content, graphic nudity, drug use and language." Running time: 117 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four.


# Movie Review: Taika Waititi's 'Next Goal Wins' is a sweet, frothy diversion but no knee slide
By **MARK KENNEDY**
November 15, 2023. 10:47 AM EST

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In "Next Goal Wins," a soccer coach comes from far away to lead a hapless group of athletes. He's a fish-out-of-water type, ill-suited for the job, but rises to the occasion and everyone feels good at the end. Wait, you're thinking, that's the plot of "Ted Lasso." Well, only kind of.

Writer-director Taika Waititi - the manic, slightly unhinged mind behind "Thor: Love and Thunder" and "Jojo Rabbit" - offers a sports movie that's not, of course, a sports movie and the opposite of whatever Jason Sudeikis was doing on his TV series.

"Next Goal Wins" - "inspired by true events" - stars Michael Fassbender as a bitter Dutch-American soccer coach assigned to help the struggling American Samoa national team qualify for the 2014 FIFA World Cup. The team is an international laughing stock and still stinging from having been on the wrong side of the worst loss in international soccer history - a 31-0 thrashing by Australia in 2001.

Waititi and co-writer Iain Morris based their movie on a 2014 British documentary of the same name and you can instantly tell why Waititi gravitated toward the story. It has a clash of civilizations, explores overcoming loss and it has a beautiful lesson about embracing those who are different.

In Waititi's hands, it becomes a sloppy, quirky, pop culture-studded frothy comedy that gently apes other underdog sports movies but doesn't offer much but a mildly funny respite from reality. It makes "Bend it like Beckham" seem really deep.

Waititi himself - he couldn't resist stepping into his own film - frames the movie in the first minutes by playing a priest on American Samoa who promises this will not be a tale of woe but "a tale of woah!" (Shakespeare isn't laughing).

Fassbender here is the opposite of Lasso - he's broken inside, angry outside, egotistical and unyielding, a coach fired from his last three teams and given a career lifeline no one else wants. He has no home-spun wisdom to offer, just routine high school bullying. "Something's not right about that guy," says one islander. "Well," comes the response. "He is white."

The coach will eventually be redeemed by American Samoa itself, by the nobility of its people and the goodness of their souls, with the movie getting dangerously close to worn out movie cliche territory.

The script had an opportunity to really examine the demand of winning at all costs versus the rewards of merely having fun and having a passion for sports but abandons any lessons in a flurry of team-building montages.

This being a Waititi movie, there's a scattershot of pop culture references - "Karate Kid," "Taken," "The Matrix," "Any Given Sunday" and even Frank Sinatra ("You're riding high in April, shot down in May"). At times, these seem more like the director's idiosyncrasies than plot advancers.

The script also takes a weird sort of glee mocking the islanders, who are portrayed sometimes as playing dress-up. One sits at a desk with a keyboard and a monitor but no computer and another makes siren noises with his mouth in a police car because of faulty equipment.

"Next Goal Wins" is most winning in the way it handles the team's star player, Jaiyah Saelua, who became the first nonbinary player to compete in a men's FIFA qualifier. Played with real tenderness and joy by nonbinary actor Kaimana, the way the team and coach relate to Saelua is genuine and touching.

There are other really nice turns by Oscar Kightley, Will Arnett and Elisabeth Moss, but it's Fassbender who must do the bulk of the lifting here. His accent is spotty and he may initially not have been on the top of everyone's list for the part but he sticks the landing, to mix sports metaphors. "Next Goal Wins" isn't a tale of "woe" or "woah!" but "meh."

"Next Goal Wins," a Searchlight Pictures release that's in theaters Friday, is rated PG-13 for "some strong language and crude material." Running time: 103 minutes. Two stars out of four.


# Review: The Hunger Games return in 'The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes,' with the odds in its favor
By **JAKE COYLE**
November 13, 2023. 12:17 AM EST

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Two hours and 37 minutes is pretty long for a "ballad," but you can't call it "The Hunger Games: The Three-Cycle Opera of Songbirds and Snakes" now, can you?

Concision was never much in favor in the four "Hunger Games" films, which reached a seeming finale with 2015's "The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2." The intervening years have done nothing to shrink the ambitions of this unapologetically gaudy dystopic series where the brutal deaths of kids are watched over by outrageously styled Capitol denizens with names like Effie Trinket.

That clash of YA allegory and color palette is just as pronounced, if not more so, in "The Hunger Games: Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes," a prequel set 64 years before the original books, adapted from Suzanne Collins' 2020 book of the same name.

"The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes," which opens in theaters Nov. 16, is an origin story of the Hunger Games, themselves, as well as numerous characters - primarily the devious President Coriolanus Snow, played by Donald Sutherland in the first four films. Here, Snow is an impoverished but opportunistic 18-year-old student played by Tom Blyth.

Just as in the "Hunger Games" films led by Jennifer Lawrence's Katniss Everdeen, the new one proves how much you can sacrifice in story when you've got a thrilling young performer commanding the screen.

Francis Lawrence's prequel often wobbles, especially in the early going. And yet, in the end, "The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes," propelled by Blyth's performance, manages to be the deepest expression yet of the series' melodrama of adolescence. In Panem, the only thing more tragic than the suffering inflicted by adults on the young may be a bright kid warping wickedly into one of those elders, too.

That generational divide was always at the heart of the appeal of "The Hungers Games," a fantasy where no adult or institution can be trusted, and the normal pressures of teendom are amplified in a modern, televised Roman Coliseum - an "American Idol" with murder - concocted by elders. It's madness shrugged off as, "That's just the way it is."

In "The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes," we see how it got to be that way. The 10th annual Hunger Games are approaching but it feels more like pre-Super Bowl times when the NFL and the AFL played in separate leagues. The broadcast is low rent, the ratings are poor and the games themselves are staged in a dilapidated stadium.

With little food in the fridge, Coriolanus is living with his cousin Tigris (Hunter Schafer) and grandmother (Fionnula Flanagan). Their family has fallen on hard times, in part because of a family rivalry with Casca Highbottom (Peter Dinklage), the dean of the academy who harbors hatred for the Snows. (Dinklage, whose wry presence adds a kick to the film, has managed to appear once again in an outlandish fantasy with a man named Snow.)

As the students gather amid Third Reich architectures (the production design by Uli Hanisch is stellar) and the games' founder Volumnia Gaul (Viola Davis, majestic in blue, with a turquoise eye) gazes on, Coriolanus is assigned his tribute, Lucy Gray Baird, a bold young woman from District 12 (also the home of Katniss) who wears a rainbow skirt and sports a dubious Southern accent. During the reaping ceremony, she makes an immediate impression, putting a snake down the back of a rival and bursting into song for the cameras. See, now there's concision, I thought. You get your songbird and snake, straight off.

Lawrence's Katniss was a thrilling female warrior whose seizing of center stage had reverberations off screen, paving the way for blockbuster female protagonists. Rachel Zegler's Lucy Gray is inevitably a disappointment by comparison. Lawrence's film, scripted by Michael Arndt and Michael Lesslie, for a while has the stale feeling of an unneeded retread. The tonal fluctuations, always a tricky balance in Panem, can be ridiculous. The stadium is abruptly bombed by unseen rebels. Once the games begin, one tribute concocts rabies.

The main thing holding our attention at this point is Jason Schwartzman's Lucretius Flickerman, a TV host with a Salvador Dali mustache who wants the games wrapped up just so he can make his dinner reservations. (It's been a very good year for Schwartzman, who transformed himself in Wes Anderson's "Asteroid City" and transmogrified in "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse." )

But "Songbirds and Snakes" sneakily begins making a case for itself. The relationship between Coriolanus and Lucy Gray is compellingly complex. He works desperately to help her survive the games because he believes in her, and maybe loves her, but also because her success benefits him, too. Whether Lucy Gray is as purehearted as her songs, too, is up for debate. Both, we sense, are cunningly playing the hands they've been delt, seeking an advantage where they can. When Coriolanus begins making suggestions for the games to Volumnia, he proves himself a natural-born marketer.

That there's tension in Coriolanus' character, considering we know how he ultimately ends up, is a tribute to just how good Blyth is. We've by now seen plenty of prequels that show us how some famous villain broke bad, but there's nothing in Blyth's performance that telegraphs his future. He's a sincere striver - we root for him because of his poverty and his puck - who's operating in the society he's found himself. He's a villain born entirely of circumstance.

"The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes" extends the saga for a third act that takes places in District 12, an addition that another franchise might have saved for the next installment. But it's also where that tragedy of "The Hunger Games," and Coriolanus' fate, earns some of the Shakespearean touches that have liberally been sprinkled throughout. (Shakespeare's "Coriolanus," is likewise about an ambiguous warrior set amid times of famine and class struggle.)

"The Hunger Games" kicked off a YA craze in film that had its ups and downs but petered out several years ago. Whether "The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes" is enough to relight those embers remains to be seen, but it is a reminder how good a platform they offered young actors. It's a ritual worth returning to.

"The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes," a Lionsgate release is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association for strong violent content and disturbing material. Running time: 157 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.


# Movie Review: Nicolas Cage finds fame to be highly overrated in chillingly funny 'Dream Scenario'
By **JOCELYN NOVECK**
November 8, 2023. 5:51 PM EST

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Quick: What's a good adjective for Nicolas Cage's screen presence? Mercurial, perhaps? Volcanic? Volatile?

How about mundane, schlubby, average? Not the page we'd think to turn to in our Roget's Thesaurus.

Yet here Cage is, channeling his inner drabness to chillingly comic effect in Kristoffer Borgli's "Dream Scenario." As Paul Matthews (heck, even the name is drab), a college professor at nowhere famous, he performs his job with perfect mediocrity, and seems a fairly mediocre husband and dad, too. With his graying beard, wire-rimmed specs and shiny bald spot, Cage's Paul is the guy in the room you ignore.

Until, suddenly, you can't. Because something weird starts happening. Paul starts appearing in people's dreams. Everyone's dreams.

The premise is delicious - and precarious. It recalled for me the setup in a very different movie, "Yesterday," where only one guy on Earth remembers the Beatles. It makes for a fantastic beginning, but you immediately worry how they'll manage to keep it going.

But Borgli, the Norwegian writer-director making his English-language debut here (Ari Aster co-produces), is aiming for a broader statement about the nature of fame. And while the topic, which he's broached before, may not be original, it's ripe for exploration in the right hands - especially with an actor as inventive and unpredictable as Cage. Fame can be intoxicating, this film is saying, but it can and probably will turn on you in an instant, unless you're Taylor Swift (OK, we added that last part).

We begin on an autumn day by a suburban swimming pool, where Paul is raking leaves near his teen daughter. Scary things start dropping from the heavens, and suddenly the girl is grabbed by an unknown force and lifted, screaming, into the sky. Dad? He does nothing to help.

It's only the girl's dream. But then there are more. Paul and his patient wife, Janet (Julianne Nicholson, reliably excellent) run into someone at the theater, and she too has dreamed about Paul. At a dinner party, several guests discover to their shock that they've been dreaming about the same person. Yep, Paul.

What's happening? On campus, Paul's students, who mostly chat among themselves during his unremarkable lectures on evolutionary biology, start listening - they're dreaming about him, too.

In many of these dreams, Paul stands by, inexplicably, as others experience peril - slithering alligators, for example. But in real life, for once, Paul has the floor - a man who until now seethed with frustration over his unrealized ambitions as others succeeded. Now, everyone is interested in him.

Borgli never stops to analyze the science of this bizarre development, and frankly, Paul doesn't either. He takes a meeting with a snarky group of branding experts (led by Michael Cera, perfectly cast) who want to market him up the wazoo. They can get him a Sprite commercial! Well, Paul doesn't want that - he just wants a book deal for his biology research. But his ears perk up at the idea of an endorsement from Barack Obama. ("I know Malia," one of these young professionals says.)

One young woman even lets on to Paul that in her dreams, the two have great sex. This is too stunning for the schlubby Paul to ignore, especially when she invites him home to recreate the dream. Needless to say, it doesn't go as well in real life. In fact, the dénoument is utterly, agonizingly humiliating.

And then, everyone's dreams change. Suddenly Paul is the one causing harm. His students, terrified, don't want to see him anymore. He gets sent home from a dinner with friends. He can't even sit in a coffee shop and read a book without a fellow diner spitting on his food.

As for the branding consultants, well, they inform Paul that Obama is off the table - but hey, they could get him time with Joe Rogan or maybe Tucker Carlson.

We won't spoil the ending, but let's just make the obvious point that Borgli is not making a rom-com - is there a word for "horror-com"? We walk away from this funny, sad, scary film acutely reminded that if fame has two sides, one of them is pretty darned horrible.

And perhaps, as you walk home from the multiplex this time, you might even revel in the fact that nobody's paying attention. Obscurity can be underrated.

"Dream Scenario," an A24 release, has been rated R by the Motion Picture Association "for language, violence and some sexual content." Running time: 102 minutes. Three stars out of four.


# Movie Review: Iman Vellani is a scene-stealer in low-stakes 'The Marvels'
By **LINDSEY BAHR**
November 9, 2023. 12:28 PM EST

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The stakes feel immensely low in "The Marvels," and it's not because this is a movie that spends a fair amount of time following cats or has an out-of-nowhere musical number. It's possibly because somewhere along the way, Marvel movies just stopped feeling like events. And this galactic trifle from director Nia DaCosta does not seem to be the one to make them again feel like a must for anyone who has not kept up with all their Disney+ series and who has forgotten what phase the MCU is in and why it matters.

Yes, Iman Vellani (as Ms. Marvel/Kamala Khan) gets her big moment on the big screen and nails it, as does Teyonah Parris (Monica Rambeau). Yes, there is a new villain, and it's a woman (Zawe Ashton as Dar-Benn) with a powerful new toy. Yes, Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) will have to face her past to move forward. And, yes, there is plenty of action, butt-kicking, wormhole jumping, glowing eyes and smashing of concrete walls.

But this is also a movie that teases danger, like a bad guy who appears to be knocked down reaching for another weapon, only to cut away. Granted, this happens in the middle of a hectic sequence involving the three leads fighting three fights in three different locations and switching with one another. Not that it really mattered what that guy was reaching for anyway - it never felt like anyone was in peril. It's also not quite funny either, but does introduce the crutch that Monica, Carol and Kamala can switch places in a flash. They'll try to explain why this is happening to you several times, each getting more confusing.

This is sort of a movie about a new team forming, sort of about fandom, sort of about accepting responsibility. But there is little doubt that these three will figure out a way to work together. There's some unresolved hurt between Monica and Carol but they're also both professionals, for goodness' sake. And Kamala just has to stop fangirling over Captain Marvel. These three are not given enough downtime to really enjoy whatever chemistry is there, perhaps because the movie seems more interested in the Khan family FaceTiming with their daughter and the goings-on in Nick Fury's (Samuel L. Jackson) oddly chaotic ship.

DaCosta, working with Marvel for the first time, keeps the energy up and the story moving at a quick clip, though. Those fretting about all the three-hour films in cinemas at the moment should be happy to hear that this is kept to a tight 105 minutes. And it is a colorful, vibrant affair, too, a very welcome change from "Ant-Man 3," helped no doubt by Oscar-nominated cinematographer Sean Bobbitt, mostly known for working with Steve McQueen.

And Vellani is the real standout star, a refreshingly human presence in stark contrast to Larson's cool and unflappable Captain Marvel. As Kamala/Ms. Marvel, you see in her someone who is excited and overwhelmed, in over her head and learning on the go. I wish they'd gone further with a conflict between her and her idol that is too quickly resolved. There is a warm sitcom tidiness to most of the conflicts here, right down to the Khan family shaking their heads at their daughter after a near-death incident as though she'd just borrowed the car without permission.

It's supposed to be a big deal that this movie has all women fighting a villain who's a woman, but as is often the case with Marvel's girl power attempts, it feels a little pandering in all the wrong places and doesn't really engage with any specific or unique female point of view. When our three heroes suit up, they do so off screen and come out with fresh hairdos and makeup. They look like their best selves and will continue looking like their best selves throughout a harrowing battle, which leaves some of their uniforms torn but not an eyelash out of place. I thought we'd reached a pro-hair tie place with our female superheroes, but these women, including Dar-Benn, are defiantly against the convenience; instead, they're constantly flipping their locks out of their eyes during fights, despite seeming more practical than that.

Also poor Ashton, who is such a splendid actor, has been saddled with one of the more forgettable and generic villain arcs. She gets to snarl a few one-liners and stomp around with tyrannical purpose in fantastically detailed costumes, but it seems to be a missed opportunity to not develop her more.

Bringing "Endgame"-like event hysteria back to Marvel was never going to be in the cards for "The Marvels," or "Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania." At least this movie seems to be enjoying itself (sometimes a little too much) with moments of whimsy and weirdness and at least one deranged and amusing gift for cat lovers everywhere.

Maybe it's just those pesky stakes again. This seems designed to be a minor Marvel - a fun enough, inoffensive, largely forgettable steppingstone - a get-to-know-them brick on a path only Kevin Feige has the blueprints for. And maybe it'll be something great, eventually.

"The Marvels," a Walt Disney Co. release in theaters Friday, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association for "action/violence and brief language." Running time: 105 minutes. Two stars out of four.


# Movie Review: In David Fincher's 'The Killer,' an assassin hides in plain sight
By **JAKE COYLE**
November 7, 2023. 9:55 AM EST

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It's a noir staple to open with a bit of narration, but once the nameless hit-man protagonist of David Fincher's "The Killer" starts gabbing, he doesn't stop.

As Fincher's assassin (Michael Fassbender) awaits his target from a high, unfinished floor in a Paris building that looks out on the home of his mark, his inner monologue runs with a smooth, affectless monotone. His musings are a mix of professional tips ("Anticipate, don't improvise"), nihilistic existential observations ("Most people refuse to believe that the great beyond is anything more than a cold, infinite void") and sincere self-reflections ("I'm not exceptional, I'm just apart").

That last line is the most telling one. "The Killer" is a terse, minimalist thriller in the cool, cold-hearted tradition of Jean Pierre Melville's "Le Samouraï." But while its methodical and solitary assassin acts and moves like cunning killers we've seen before, he blends into a modern background. He doesn't wear a trench coat or fedora; he dresses like a German tourist, with a dopey bucket hat. He shops for tools on Amazon. He picks up supplies at Home Depot. His position in Paris is an unused WeWork space.

In "The Killer," an agent of death is hiding in plain sight. He's an assassin for our homogeneous, corporate world operating in the same spaces we all do. He eats McDonalds. He drives a white Avis rental van that's the exact same as a dozen others in the rental car parking lot. Sameness is his superpower.

That also means that his nihilism is ours, too. "The Killer," which begins streaming Friday on Netflix, is a thriller where pointlessness isn't just lurking in the shadows. It's everywhere, even in a movie plot that grows increasingly resistant to offering the usual genre satisfactions. Fassbender's hitman, a background actor supreme, is a lethal manifestation of our soulless environment.

In that opening scene, he boasts of having a batting average (1.000, he brags) 'better than Ted Williams.' Yet the job goes badly. In the ensuing turmoil, he races to erase his footsteps but not before a dissatisfied client has his girlfriend (Sophie Charlotte) nearly beaten to death at their clandestine Dominican Republic home.

He embarks on a location-hopping mission to eliminate those responsible, an odd twist for an assassin who, at length, preaches disaffection. Much doesn't quite fit in "The Killer." That he even has a live-in girlfriend - we barely see her and his thoughts never again turn back to her - seems unlikely. A revenge plot also doesn't quite suit such a dispassionate protagonist. "Forbid empathy," he says. And the movie, too, can be withholding of anything like emotion. The most distinct thing about Fassbender's killer is that, like Patrick Bateman bopped to Huey Lewis and the News, he listens exclusively to the Smiths.

There's much pleasure to be found in the unnamed hit man's proficiency, just as there is in Fincher's cool finesse. Here, the director - long known for his own meticulous rigor - is working with some regular collaborators, among them screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker ("Se7en"), composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross ( "The Social Network" ) and cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt ("Mank" ). And there's a kinetic thrill to seeing Fincher back in B-movie territory. (The script is based on a French graphic novel by Alexis "Matz" Nolent.)

Especially good is a nighttime sequence set in Florida that begins and ends with a bloodthirsty dog and in between features violent hand-to-hand combat that careens through glass and walls. The scene, like several others in "The Killer," is a filmmaking feat of control. Fassbender, a natural at playing a loner (see "Shame"), is captivating throughout because he so possesses the movie's chief traits of guile and a deadpan sense of humor.

Everything here is tantalizingly close to calculated perfection that it comes almost as a surprise how "The Killer" ends up missing its mark. You could call it a feature of the film's existentialism, but "The Killer" increasingly is working, albeit proficiently, in a vacuum. Our hitman travels from place to place - always with fake passports with the names of TV characters like Felix Unger, Lou Grant or Sam Malone - but we don't get anywhere deeper with him or anything else. Meaningless may be the point in "The Killer," but at a certain point in this stylishly composed but empty vessel, you feel like pleading as another Fincher protagonist once did: What's in the box?

"The Killer," a Netflix release is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for strong violence, language and brief sexuality. Running time: 118 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.


# Movie Review: In 'Radical,' an unorthodox teacher in a violent Mexican border town
By **JAKE COYLE**
November 1, 2023. 4:00 PM EST

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On their first day sixth grade, the students of Jose Urbina Lopez Elementary School in the Mexican border city of Matamoros find their new teacher rolling on the floor surrounded by overturned desks.

They're not desks, he exclaims. They're lifeboats.

So begins Christopher Zalla's "Radical," an inspirational based-on-a-true-story drama about an unconventional teacher named Sergio Juarez Correa (Eugenio Derbez). His day-one lesson is ultimately about buoyancy. But the metaphor isn't hard to grasp. In Lopez's classroom, education is a life raft.

"Radical," which opens in theaters Friday, is a conventional but stirring entry in the crowded canon of uplifting educator tales like "Stand and Deliver," "Lean on Me" and "The Class."

"Radical," though, isn't set at an inner-city school in Los Angeles, New Jersey or Paris, like those films are. Matamoros, along the Rio Grande and across from Brownsville, Texas, is considered a lawless place, known for extreme violence and migrant encampments. "Radical" is also set in 2011, among the bloodiest years of Mexico's drug war.

That makes for an especially unlikely backdrop for classroom revival. The school, itself, is known as "The School of Punishment." For safety, its gates are locked during the school hours.

Sergio's self-empowering method is to allow kids to follow their curiosity and find answers for themselves. They're skeptical at first but soon are engaged and excited by their freedom to lead their own learning. More than once, Sergio says the students don't even really need him.

There are plenty of familiar beats as the school year moves along. Sergio's ways draw the ire of other teachers. Parents are distrustful, wondering if he's giving kids facing a harsh future false hope. But while "Radical," an audience winner at the Sundance Film Festival, is formulaic in its approach, it gets enough out of it likable cast to earn at least a passing grade.

Derbez, the Mexican actor and comedian, already made an impression in the classroom as the encouraging music teacher of the best picture-winning "CODA." Here, he takes center stage, playing Sergio with a winning sincerity and full-bodied resistance to the rules.

Three of the students are brought into focus: Paloma (Jennifer Trejo), a math whiz with astronaut dreams who lives beside the landfill her father works at; Lupe (Mia Fernanda Solis), a budding philosopher whose pregnant mother expects her to help with childcare; and Nico (Danilo Guardiola), a plucky kid who's being trained by a local dealer as a drug courier.

Their stories are never quite at the center of "Radical," which sticks closest to its star teacher. But each young actor is natural, particularly Trejo. Her real-life character, Paloma Noyola Bueno, was the central figure in a Wired article that "Radical" is partially derived from.

But the best relationship captured in "Radical" is the one between Sergio and the school's cautious, less energetic principal Chucho (a wonderful Daniel Haddad). He at first seems like an impediment to Sergio, warning him not to "kick the hornet's nest." But before long, he's a co-conspirator, willing to - in a further experiment on buoyancy - cannonball into a cold tub. Together, Derbez and Haddad help make "Radical" float, too.

"Radical," a TelevisaUnivision release, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association of America for some strong violent content, thematic material and strong language. In Spanish with subtitles. Running time: 127 minutes. Three stars out of four.


# Movie Review: A serene debut from Raven Jackson in 'All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt'
By **LINDSEY BAHR**
November 1, 2023. 2:35 PM EST

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Nature provides much of the soundtrack to "All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt," a poised and occasionally transcendent debut from writer-director Raven Jackson.

The sounds of crickets and birds, flowing water and the wind in the long summer grass are only sporadically punctured by a song at a party, or a brief moment of a swelling score. These are the kind of details that make you feel immediately rooted in a place. It's not just the nature setting on a sleep app either, or, if it is, sound supervisor Miguel Calvo ensure that it doesn't feel like that. It's thoughtful and precise and also lets you more fully enjoy the moments where those human-made sounds take over.

This might be a lot of talk about sound design to start, but it's also a bit of a primer on what to expect from "All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt," which counts "Moonlight" filmmaker Barry Jenkins among its producers. Like sitting in a field for hours without a phone or a book or a companion to chat with, just the world around you, Jackson's film requires a level of conscious, almost meditative submission. The dialogue is sparse, the narrative is also. It is probably not an accident that some of the first words uttered, minutes in, are "not too quick ... slow, take your time." It applies to the fishing lesson between father and daughter that we're witnessing, yes, but it works on another level too.

"All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt" is a collection of moments in the life of Mack (Charleen McClure as an adult, Kaylee Nicole Johnson as a child), sometimes skipping back and forth in time. There are long stretches where the camera lingers on a hug, or the red painted toes of a mother at a party, the back of our heroine's head, a fish on a table, a crying infant getting their first bath in a kitchen sink, or two sisters sitting on a porch, in silence, until one breaks into laughter. And there are many, many hands. It's possible the camera spends more or at least equal time on hands - preparing a fish, digging in the dirt, holding - or not holding - another, swirling muddy water in a pond. Within this tapestry there are glimpses of great loss, of solitude, of new life and of transitions that feel familiar even if they're not your own.

For as stubbornly minimalist as it is, the imagery is always vibrant, aided by the rich, primary colors of the costumes, and thoughtfully composed shots, whether of a worm wriggling or a classic silhouette looking outside a darkened door. The emotion, too, is surprisingly palpable considering how little we really know about the people we're watching.

Still, at a certain point, you may find yourself yearning for more - more story, more arc, more information, something to hold onto, to sustain interest or engagement. Sometimes it feels like you're wandering through a gallery of moving moments that you understand on an intellectual level are connected but maybe don't add up to a completely satisfying whole - especially at a trim, but standard, feature length.

That it works as well as it does is quite a feat, though. And with "All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt," Jackson has firmly established herself as a filmmaker to watch.

"All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt," an A24 release in theaters Friday, is rated PG by the Motion Picture Association for "thematic content and brief sensuality." Running time: 97 minutes. Three stars out of four.


# Movie Review: 'Rustin' with an outstanding Colman Domingo is a terrific look at March on Washington
By **MARK KENNEDY**
October 31, 2023. 3:50 PM EST

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The 1963 March on Washington drew an estimated 250,000 people from across the country - the largest march at that point in American history - and was the place where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his iconic "I Have a Dream" speech.

It likely wouldn't have happened without the work of a master strategist: Bayard Rustin, a gay Black socialist and pacifist-activist from Pennsylvania, whose close friendship with King was the engine in the early days of the Civil Rights Movement.

The winning, triumphant Netflix movie "Rustin" explores the stressful weeks leading up to the march from the grassroots level, with Colman Domingo starring as the organizer who many people know nothing about.

It was he who wrangled 80,000 boxed lunches, 22 first aid stations, six water tanks, 2,200 chartered buses, six chartered flights, 292 latrines, over 1,000 Black police officers and a change to the city's subway schedule, not to mention snagging celebrities like Marlon Brando, Charlton Heston, Lena Horne and James Baldwin.

Domingo is debonair, frisky, droll, passionate and utterly captivating as Rustin - the film representing the electric meeting of winning material with the perfect performer.

"You're irrelevant," Rustin is told at an after-work get-together by a more militant activist. "It's Friday night. I've been called worse," Rustin responds, taking a sip of his cocktail.

But as wonderful as Domingo is, it's the astonishing amount of talent in front of and behind the camera that will take your breath away. No matter how small, each performance brings fire and makes the most of a few minutes on camera.

Is that Jeffrey Wright as a dour Rep. Adam Clayton Powell? Yes, indeed. Wait, isn't that Adrienne Warren? Yup. Kevin Mambo and Audra McDonald, too? Yes and yes. Chris Rock ages up to play a stuffy NAACP Executive Secretary Roy Wilkins and Glynn Turman is awesome, as always, as labor leader A. Philip Randolph.

Da'Vine Joy Randolph plays Mahalia Jackson, Michael Potts is "Cleve" Robinson, CCH Pounder as Dr. Anna Hegeman, appropriately, gets her own warm round of applause during the movie. And Aml Ameen plays an understated King, his moments with Rustin playing like two old friends.

There's excellence in the music - Branford Marsalis provides the jazzy score, including lonely sax solos and mournful double bass plucks - and Lenny Kravitz contributed an original song, "Road to Freedom."

The biopic has a presidential seal or at least a former presidential seal - Barack Obama and Michelle Obama's Higher Ground produced. (Obama awarded Rustin a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom.)

"Rustin" is more than just the public-facing story of how the March on Washington came about. It's also a portrait of a man who has to hide his sexuality. If it was widely known, his career, the march and maybe even the Civil Rights Movement itself could be at risk.

Domingo shows the immense pressures faced by being a religiously-raised, Black gay man in the racist and homophobic 1960s, enough psychic forces to tear a man apart.

"On the day that I was born Black, I was also born a homosexual," Rustin tells King before a crucial meeting with Black leadership. "They either believe in freedom and justice for all or they do not."

Director George C. Wolfe, a theater legend, keeps this biopic intriguing, making it almost feel like a caper. Will they pull off their audacious effort? Of course, but the twists and turns endured make organizing the march a bit like the rush to get a big musical on its feet. Wolfe adds that energy.

The screenplay by Julian Breece and Dustin Lance Black isn't shy about exposing the divides within the movement and the ugly homophobic feelings of the era. There is a smart flashback to 1942 when the camera goes to black and white.

The movie take viewers to places perhaps unfamiliar, like to training sessions where Black police officers were taught about nonviolence and to Manhattan apartments where protesters would talk about their own stories of segregation to convince rich white folks to contribute money for buses.

The final section - the actual march itself - mixes new footage with some from that day. There was some fear by the organizers that not enough people would come, but the hero of "Rustin" doesn't waver - and is seen bluffing with reporters right up until the end. "Rustin" is as vibrant as the movement it covers.

"Rustin," a Netflix release in select theaters Friday and that hits Netflix on Nov. 17, is rated PG-13 for "Some violence, sexual material, brief drug use, racial slurs, thematic material, language and smoking." Running time: 108 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four.


# Movie Review: 'Pain Hustlers' tells a sadly familiar story with a kitchen-sink style
By **JOCELYN NOVECK**
October 26, 2023. 4:29 PM EST

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The wife of a man who nearly died of an opioid overdose comes bursting into the office of the sleazy doctor who prescribed it, wrongly, in exchange for personal gain. She slugs the doctor, in her agony.

The scene comes deep into the new Netflix film "Pain Hustlers," and it feels bracingly real and tragic.

If only the rest of the movie, the latest in a string of opioid-themed films, felt the same. Instead, despite a high-powered cast featuring a reliably solid Emily Blunt, an expertly low-life Chris Evans and the gifted Catherine O'Hara, the film tries too hard to be something it isn't, or shouldn't be: slick and breezy and too clever for its own good, filled with mockumentary interviews, wild montages, and other tricks used to more disciplined effect in more accomplished films.

Not that Blunt isn't an effective presence here as Liza Drake, a struggling, single Florida mom who works at a strip club but wants to move up in life - to be treated with respect, and to support her ailing teen daughter and her flighty mother. Indeed, Blunt carries the film with her intelligent and likable presence.

But that speaks precisely to the other big problem with the film, which is directed by "Harry Potter" vet David Yates and inspired by the article and book by Evan Hughes, telling the real-life tale of an opioid startup that intentionally mis-marketed a fentanyl spray meant for severe cancer pain. Here, the bare bones are the same, but Yates and screenwriter Wells Tower invent their own corrupt company and their own characters.

And the filmmakers seem determined to make their protagonist likable. In giving Liza a fairly ironclad excuse for her actions - her sweet, plucky daughter needs costly brain surgery - they take an easy way out. Not to mention that through most of the film, Liza believes (unbelievably, really, given her smarts) that she's merely helping patients get the right drug. Wouldn't it have been more interesting to see Blunt play a character who knew exactly what she was doing?

Instead, Liza claims at the start, looking back: "I did it for the right reasons." And here's sales rep Pete, her unscrupulous colleague: "This was 2011. Strictly speaking, we were not part of the opioid crisis." Evans, leaning into the sleaze, is fun to watch throughout, though the filmmakers care oddly little about his backstory.

Then there's Jackie, Liza's mom, wacky but also steely, and, in the hands of a wonderful comic actor like O'Hara, vivid in everything she does. Lest you think Mom doesn't approve of Liza's slippery new career, heck, she joins her at the company, and even makes moves on the boss - but we're getting ahead of ourselves.

When we first meet Liza, she's living in her sister's garage. At the strip club, she meets Pete, who, mid-flirtation, suggests she come work for him, promising $100k in commissions in one year.

Liza's daughter, Phoebe (Chloe Coleman, in a lovely performance) gets in trouble at high school, engaging in what one might call, um, arson. We also learn she suffers from epilepsy. She requires a stable environment, the doctor says. And then Liza and daughter get kicked out of the garage and move into a cheap motel, eating instant noodles. Liza reconsiders that job offer.

Outfitted with a fake resume - Pete, with a quick edit, gives her a biochem degree - Liza gets hired by Zanna, the company run by eccentric billionaire doctor Jack Neel (Andy Garcia, efficiently creepy) and proves a quick study. Against all odds, she finds a doctor (Brian D'Arcy James, playing against type as a sleazeball pain doc in need of a hair transplant) to write a prescription for Lonafen, a sublingual fentanyl spray. Soon she's corralled him into a "speakers program" designed to bribe more doctors.

Moving quickly from sundresses to color-blocked power ensembles, Liza starts raking in commissions, and she and Pete hire a team of hungry salespeople. Pete likens what they're doing to driving a few miles over the speed limit - technically illegal, but everybody does it. Meanwhile, Liza's suddenly able to afford a condo fit for a king, buy Mom a car, and enroll Phoebe in private school.

Zanna, named for Neel's own late wife, goes public, and is the industry's new kid on the block. The company's celebratory slogan, shouted at decadent parties: "We Own Cancer!"

But things start getting uncomfortable. Neel, increasingly paranoid, rejects Liza's proposed compliance plan. Then, he decides the best way to improve flat sales is to market Lonafen off-label - for any kind of pain, even headaches.

Liza is aghast - Pete, not so much - but her daughter's condition worsens, and Medicaid won't cover the operation. She needs cash. Then, patients start overdosing. The look one man's widow gives a weeping Liza, wordless, is chilling.

The pace picks up as the law starts bearing down. But ultimately, "Pain Hustlers" feels like a retreading of the same ground covered in other recent works, bringing nothing especially new to the table and, in splitting the stylistic difference between slick/breezy and poignant/authentic, succeeding fully at neither.

"Pain Hustlers," a Netflix release that begins streaming Friday, has been rated R by the Motion Picture Association "for language throughout, some sexual content, nudity and drug use." Running time: 122 minutes. Two stars out of four.


# Movie Review: Video game-to-horror flick 'Five Nights at Freddy's' misfires badly
By **MARK KENNEDY**
October 26, 2023. 10:05 AM EST

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Just in time for Halloween comes "Five Nights at Freddy's," a video game adaptation with the potential treat of demented Chuck E. Cheese-like animatronic creatures running amok. But the trick turns out to be on us.

The movie - built from developer Scott Cawthon's video game about anthropomorphic robots killing people - poorly fits into this vehicle and the problems start with the creatures themselves.

Yes, they have unsettling bright eyes and teeth. But, c'mon, one wears a bow tie, like a guest on PBS. They're more threadbare than eerie. Yes, they stomp around like The Terminator but one is a chubby chicken with the slogan "Let's Eat." They look about as scary as overgrown Care Bears with a drinking problem. One is, we're not kidding, a cupcake.

Caught between PG and R, as well as lost at the crossroads of inadvertent comedy and horror, the PG-13 "Five Nights at Freddy's" has to go down as one of the poorest films in any genre this year.

Like the video game, our hero here is a night watchman who is mysteriously hired to look after the ruins of an abandoned children's pizza-and-games restaurant. We learn that it was shuttered in the '80s due to a raft of missing kids.

Josh Hutcherson plays the guard with a mix of hotheadedness and compassion. "Just do your job and you'll be fine," he is advised. "Don't let the place get to you."

Why has he taken this silly job? To keep custody of his young sister, Abby (a very good Piper Rubio), proving he's a good guy. Other actors include the great Mary Stuart Masterson, slumming it as his aunt, and Matthew Lillard chewing scenery as if it were a slice of pepperoni.

Director Emma Tammi - using a script credited to her, Cawthon and Seth Cuddeback - do their darndest to fill the film up with a backstory and a reason for there to be murderous animatronic characters in the first place. So we have family betrayal, the lifetime pain of an abducted sibling, a possible romantic interest and a plot so tortured it should have a cameo in "Saw."

"I made a mistake. I don't want this," our hero screams toward the end and you can feel the movie theater's paying audience agreeing wholeheartedly.

There are so many questions that will keep you awake. Why was "Talking in Your Sleep" by the Romantics used so heavily? Why do the scriptwriters not understand human decay? Why does the dialogue often veer from flirty to angry so abruptly in the same scene? Why is it revealed only in the last 10 minutes that the maniacal Care Bears can talk?

It's ironic that much of the coolest action happens in a dreamstate. You may need to nudge your seatmates awake to rejoin the show when that happens. Maybe that's why "Talking in Your Sleep" was needed?

The filmmakers waste the rare attempt in a horror flick to make a kids' ball pit scary, but the absolute lowest point is when the supposedly murderous animatronics - Freddy Fazbear, Bonnie, Chica and Foxy - host a kiddie dance party. It's as if even they can't overcome their inner nature, having originated from Jim Henson's Creature Shop. This whole thing should have remained a game.

"Five Nights at Freddy's," a Universal Pictures release in theaters and streaming on Peacock starting Friday, is rated PG-13 for "strong violent content, bloody images and language." Running time: 110 minutes. Zero stars out of four.


# Movie Review: Teen dreams and adult nightmares in Sofia Coppola's 'Priscilla'
By **JAKE COYLE**
October 25, 2023. 2:35 PM EST

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Dreamily gazing at the album covers of Elvis Presley was not, statistically speaking, a rare habit among American teen girls in the late 1950s and early '60s.

But for Priscilla Beaulieu, teenage fantasy became a strange and surreal reality. Sofia Coppola's "Priscilla," starring Cailee Spaeny, captures all the dreaminess, the absurdity and, finally, the nightmare of falling in love with Elvis.

Priscilla was just 14 years-old - a 9th grader - when she first met him. It was 1959. She was living in West Germany, where her Air Force officer stepfather was stationed. The swoony early scenes of Coppola's film find a solitary Priscilla sipping soda in a Navy base diner while a cover of Frankie Avalon's "Venus" ("Venus, make her fair / A lovely girl with sunlight in her hair") plays around her.

A man approaches and asks if she likes Elvis. Of course she does. Would she like to meet him? Um, what? After some negotiations with her parents, Priscilla is sitting there on the sofa at a small party when the King of Rock 'n' Roll, himself (Jacob Elordi), strolls down the stairs. Big, big sigh.

Coppola, the writer-director of "The Virgin Suicides," "Lost in Translation" and "Somewhere," has always been innately attuned to the forming identities, swelling desires and intimate revelations of young women. In the story of Priscilla Presley (the film is based on her 1985 memoir, "Elvis and Me" ), Coppola has found a tale tailor-made for her delicately perceptive style of filmmaking.

As a movie, "Priscilla" is the diametric opposite of Baz Luhrmann's "Elvis." Where Luhrmann's film was lurid and careening, Coppola's is muted and textured. Her film is a kind of fairy tale that turns claustrophobic and cautionary.

"Priscilla" is, at least at first, quite funny. After Priscilla initially catches Elvis' eye at that party, she's back at school learning about the food groups. How could anyone possibly stomach that? Or when, after Elvis hasn't called following his stint in the military, Priscilla's mother asks her if there aren't any boys in school she might be interested in, instead. Priscilla doesn't need to say anything; just the image of lining up your average 9th grade boy against Elvis Presley is enough.

Yet their courtship continues in somewhat traditional fashion. Elvis, played with relaxed magnetism by Elordi ("The Kissing Booth," "Saltburn"), is drawn to Priscilla because she reminds him of home; it's clear her purity is part of her appeal to him. It's a long time before they have sex, though her youth remains tacitly problematic. "Wow, she's young," says one woman watching Elvis lead Priscilla upstairs. "Like a little girl."

Their life together is initially sweet if deranged. Priscilla drifts through a dream world even if Elvis' extremes are glaring to us. His bedroom in Graceland is comically gaudy. "I got this for you," we hear Elvis say kindly, before a handgun is handed over.

No Presley songs play in "Priscilla." (While Priscilla Presley is an executive producer, the Elvis estate didn't participate in the film.) But it does share a telling track ( Carl Orff's "Gassenhauer" ) with Terence Malick's "Badlands," another movie about an underage teen girl (Sissy Spacek) who throws her life in with a charismatic drifter with matinee-idol looks (Martin Sheen).

And like they do for Holly in "Badlands," things turn increasingly dark for Priscilla. Elvis treats her like a doll he keeps at home while he goes in and out. "It's either me or a career, baby," he tells her. Coppola, who dedicates the movie to her mother, Eleanor Coppola, has long specialized in gilded cages ("Marie Antoinette," "The Bling Ring"). Graceland turns out to be a prison to Priscilla.

There aren't many false notes in Coppola's richly layered film, handsomely shot by Philippe Le Sourd, with sumptuous production design from Tamara Deverell and fine, toned-down costumes by Stacey Battat.

But "Priscilla" fades where "Elvis" found its footing. When Presley's downturn accelerates in Las Vegas, Luhrmann's movie swelled with tragedy. In the same time period here, Priscilla awakens. Yet it feels underdeveloped, coming too quickly, in a sudden rush - albeit a terrific rush, with Dolly Parton playing.

A constant throughout, though, is Spaeny. This is a deft breakthrough performance perfectly poised between youthful fantasy and adult reality.

"Priscilla," an A24 release, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for drug use and some language. Running time: 113 minutes. Three stars out of four.


# Movie Review: 'Persian Version' finds laughter, tears in Iranian American tale of resilient women
By **JOCELYN NOVECK**
October 23, 2023. 5:35 PM EST

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Let nobody say writer-director Maryam Keshavarz doesn't know how to start a movie.

The first time we see Leila, her alter ego in the autobiographical, warm-hearted, personal, funny but also somewhat chaotic "The Persian Version," she's walking across the Brooklyn Bridge. Headed to a Halloween party, she's carrying a surfboard and wearing what she calls a "burkini" - a sexy bikini, but paired with a niqab, the face-covering garment worn by some Muslim women.

It's surely not an accident that Leila is crossing a bridge, because her film (and Halloween costume) is about bridging two identities - her Iranian heritage, and her American life. Leila (an engaging Layla Mohammadi) is a New York born-and-raised aspiring screenwriter (she wants to be an Iranian Martin Scorsese) who, we learn, has never been fully comfortable in either world. American kids would call her names at school; Iranians saw her as too Americanized.

There are other bridges to be crossed here, too. The most important is that between Leila and her formidable immigrant mother, Shireen (the wonderful Niousha Noor), who created a successful life in America out of sheer grit, educating herself and becoming an adept businesswoman while running a household full of boys and one girl. It's the girl, Leila, with whom Shireen has the fraught relationship, because - well, if you're a mother or a daughter you probably get it.

But there's a deeper backstory behind this troubled dynamic, and to learn all that, we must take a journey - a long journey, in terms of the film's run time - back to a remote village in 1960s rural Iran. But let's not get ahead of ourselves, because first adult Leila, gay and newly divorced from her wife, gets pregnant with the guy in drag who plays Hedwig on Broadway.

We told you this was chaotic.

About that Halloween party: Leila wins the costume prize - justifiably! - and also hooks up in a back room with Maximillian (Tom Byrne, charming in a less roguish Hugh Grant way), who's starring in "Hedwig and the Angry Inch" at the Belasco Theatre (where the show did actually run). And when she gets pregnant - professing she didn't know you could get pregnant from a one-night stand - Max says he's all in.

Keshavarz, whose film won the audience prize at Sundance, likes a flashback, and one of them takes us back to Leila's childhood summer trips to Iran, fooling guards at the airport looking for banned American music and videos, and bringing Cyndi Lauper to her Iranian relatives. Who, in turn, dance with abandon to "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" - a joyous scene.

Back in the States (the film toggles perhaps too frequently between eras, mostly 2000s New Jersey, 1980s Brooklyn and 1960s rural Iran) adult Leila's father needs a heart transplant. And Leila is hurting from her failed marriage. In flashback, we see her bringing her wife to Thanksgiving dinner and her mother, unable to approve of the gay relationship, ultimately kicking the couple out in disgust.

What has made her mother's heart so cold, particularly with her daughter? Leila's grandmother hints that a mysterious scandal long ago brought Shireen to America. To understand, we're taken back to that village in Iran, where Shireen was a bride at 14, coping with early motherhood and heartbreak. Luckily, this section of the film stars an extraordinary young actor, Kamand Shafieisabet in her first film, packing an emotional wallop into every scene.

As vividly as Keshavarz portrays the country of her heritage, she is unable to return there - her first feature, "Circumstance," about sexual desire between two girls in Iran, won her her first audience award at Sundance but also got her banned from the country.

In any case we end "The Persian Version" not in Iran but back in the States, in a place not usually very comical but where most comedies involving a birth, even a dramatic comedy like this, eventually wind up: the maternity ward.

The scene here is intentionally crowded and yes, chaotic, just like the entire film. But it ends on a note that brings easy tears.

The rebelliousness of each of the strong women here - mother and daughter - somehow coalesces into understanding. Such moments can be sappy, but here, as with her lovely opening shot, Keshavarz does it well. She sticks the landing.

"The Persian Version," a Sony Pictures Classics release, in limited release Friday and nationwide on Nov. 3, has been rated R by the Motion Picture Association "for language and some sexual references." Running time: 107 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.