Green Border (2023)

[2025 review here]

Zielona granica, Poland / France / Czech Republic / Belgium, 152 minutes

Director: Agnieszka Holland

Writers: Maciej Pisuk, Gabriela Lazarkiewicz, Agnieszka Holland

Photography: Tomasz Naumiuk

Music: Frédéric Vercheval

Editor: Pavel Hrdlicka

Cast: Jalal Altawil, Behi Djanati Atai, Maja Ostaszewska, Tomasz Włosok, Mohamad Al Rashi, Dalia Naous, Monika Frajczyk, Piotr Stramowski, Jaśmina Polak, Marta Stalmierska, Maciej Stuhr, Magdalena Popławska, Joely Mbundu, Taim Ajjan, Talia Ajjan

The green border in director and cowriter Agnieszka Holland’s blockbuster, sickening war movie, shot in black and white, is the swampy forested region on either side of the border between Belarus and Poland. A family of Syrian refugees is making their way to Sweden, seeking asylum in the EU. They travel by air to Minsk in Belarus, on the flight picking up Afghani refugee Leila (Behi Djanati Atai), an older woman who is seeking a new home in Poland (rather than wait, as she says, for the Taliban regime to resume power). Belarus is where the problems start for them. They encounter corrupt, sadistic, and/or indifferent officials in the border patrols, thieves, bad weather, and more. Poland unofficially does not allow passage for refugees. Both Poland and Belarus have “pushback” policies, which means Leila and the family are repeatedly herded across the border, back and forth, over and over, between the two countries. Making progress is all but impossible, dependent on luck more than anything.

The family is notably vulnerable. A grandfather in poor health (Mohamad Al Rashi) is the family patriarch, a traditional Muslim who trusts in Allah and rolls out the prayer mat even in the depths of the forest. His grandson Bashir (Jalal Altawil) is more savvy to the world, more embittered, carrying a cell phone that is their lifeline along with powerpacks to keep it charged. His wife Amina (Dalia Naous) and three young children are total innocents who must trust Bashir (and Allah) to get where they are going. The youngest is an infant still being breastfed. Leila has a cell phone too and seems to be the most skilled at using it. She and the oldest boy Nur (Taim Ajjan) make a connection that will turn out to be fatal.

Knock at the Cabin (2023)

I know, as a general rule, that novels tend to be better than the movies based on them. Paul Tremblay has a good reputation as a horror novelist and this movie is based on his Cabin at the End of the World, which I haven’t read. But I thought the premise was notably weak here. A gay couple, Eric (Jonathan Groff) and Andrew (Ben Aldridge), is vacationing at a remote cabin with their adopted Chinese daughter Wen (Kristen Cui). It’s a little confusing—the place is full of books and furniture and a fully equipped kitchen. I thought they might be living there but that didn’t make much sense either. Anyway, they are approached by four mysterious strangers who bang on the door of the cabin, force entry, and explain the family must make a sacrifice and kill a member of their family—their choice. The home invaders carry very terrible-looking weapons. The leader is a soft-spoken man named Leonard, who says he’s a second-grade teacher in Iowa. He’s played by Dave Bautista of Guardians of the Galaxy with infinite calm and patience and his menacing size. If the victims don’t commit this sacrifice, he explains, the world will end in various ways with a biblical tinge—flood, plague, etc. There is only limited time. If the terrorized family refuses to cooperate, one of the home invaders will be killed by the others in gruesome fashion, one at a time, the family forced to witness. No, it doesn’t make much sense and the strangers, not surprisingly, are not persuasive, even when they turn on the TV to news reports of various disasters. Some of these are great—a tidal wave coming ashore at Cannon Beach in Oregon, planes failing in flight and falling out of the sky. Those falling planes correspond to a recurring nightmare I used to have, so they worked very well on me. But more often I was frustrated with the proceedings here, which of course is not atypical for a movie by director and cowriter M. Night Shyamalan. The invaders can’t convince the family to commit the sacrifice because their arguments are so weak. They are based on visions they’ve had, which means it’s reasonable to think they are more likely mentally ill than that they have personal knowledge of God’s retribution, or whatever this is. Still, Knock at the Cabin got me in its grip and didn’t let go. Not making sense only made it more terrifying. Among other things by now we’re trained to try to out-think Shyamalan on the plot twists. It’s distracting, but I think he might be making that work for him now. Knock at the Cabin is perhaps less a horror picture than an unnerving suspense thriller, but any time you’ve got a home invasion you’re in the vicinity of horror. While none of it particularly adds up, I admit I spent most of my time watching from the edge of my seat.

Red Rooms (2023)

Here’s a French-Canadian movie with ambitions of addressing unhealthy public infatuations and obsessions with true-crime stuff, up to and including podcasters and so-called web sleuths and the many tricks of their trade. The statuesque, coldly numb Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariepy) has a day job as a model, with a terrific apartment in downtown Montreal. At home she is surrounded by high-end voice-activated computer equipment that enables her to pursue her various interests, which include checking her email, playing online poker for money, and looking for things on the “dark web” at large. She is presently attending the trial of Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos), who is charged with the murders, torture, and dismemberment of three teenage girls in separate incidents. He shot video of his depredations, two of which have been recovered and will be played at trial, although they don’t necessarily positively identify Chevalier, who wears a mask in the videos. Red Rooms intends to shock us with its revelations—“red rooms” are alleged sites on the dark web where people are tortured and killed, a kind of cross-pollination of OnlyFans and snuff films, suitable for Videodrome programming. But, while we hear the screaming and power tool noises in the brief clips we’re exposed to from the videos at the trial, we are never shown them. I’m not saying I’m disappointed (really, I’d rather not see these things) but it felt to me like a determinedly flinty movie going uncharacteristically soft. It might be an effort to get a more audience-friendly rating, but it has not been submitted anywhere for rating. Certainly, anyway, we can imagine what’s going on from the descriptions we’re given and what we hear, but it does seem notably coy. Kelly-Anne picks up a Chevalier groupie along the way, Clementine (Laurie Babin), and gives her a place to stay while the trial is going on. Clementine obviously represents a well-known type of troubled true-crime aficionado, but this all feels unlikely. Groupies like Clementine do exist, but I had trouble making out the motivations here. The icy Kelly-Anne seems to be a bit of a psychopath herself, is maybe the point, as she has illicitly acquired copies of the two known videos and we see how she acquires the third when she learns it is available. Another day, at the trial, Kelly-Anne shows up dressed explicitly as one of the victims, including metallic orthodontics on her teeth. She is forcibly ejected from the trial. I was not clear at all on why she did that. I liked a lot of things about Red Rooms but I’m not sure director and writer Pascal Plante ever brings it all the way home. Something at its center feels a little hollow, phony and pretentious.

Green Border (2023)

This epic and gripping picture by veteran Polish director and cowriter Agnieszka Holland (Europa Europa, The Secret Garden, Mr. Jones) takes on the humanitarian crisis of Muslim refugees making their way from Syria, Afghanistan, and elsewhere to sanctuary in Sweden (or Poland, or anywhere). The problem is getting there. As Muslims entering the EU they face hostility and prejudice at every point, particularly at this brutal “green border” region that Green Border focuses on between Belarus and Poland. It is heavily forested and the terrain can be rugged and swampy. Both Belarus and Poland have semi-official “pushback” policies, which means the refugees are continually moved back and forth across the barbed wire by violent border patrols. Laws obviously don’t matter here. Green Border offers a sprawling set of characters and stories, focusing on the border patrols and activists working on the scene as well as the refugees. Of course it’s worst for the refugees, but the activists are laboring under dire conditions too and we see that even the border patrols, or those not particularly psychopathic, are under tremendous contradictory pressures themselves. The stories and situations are complex as they unravel in this swirling stew. One thing keeps leading to another. It’s often nighttime. The screenplay is rich with the difficulties of individual circumstances, a constant high-wire act. It bears elements of The Grapes of Wrath in the story of one family. The black and white film stock only makes it more stark, the shadows are deeper, darker, and the glimmers of light more fleeting and elusive. It’s hard to watch in places because Holland’s characterizations are drawn so fine these people just come alive even as they are grievously wounded or worse. The middle-aged Leila (Behi Djanati Atai) haunts me, fleeing Afghanistan from the specter of the Taliban. Her big glasses, her deft use of her cell phone, her compassion and generosity, and her fate are deeply felt, searing. The final scenes compare all we have seen in a long movie with the more recent treatment of 2 million Ukrainian refugees after the Russia-Ukraine War started. They are welcomed to Poland even as the inhumane treatment and atrocities continue on the green border. Heartbreaking portrait of a horrible situation but the movie is never less than enthralling. Double feature with Come and See, if you can stand it.

Infinity Pool (2023)

It’s customary to say that director and writer Brandon Cronenberg, son of David, is a chip off the old block. His first feature film, Antiviral (2012), involved obsessed fans seeking viruses that had previously infected celebrities. Skip ahead eight years to Possessor (2020), which is about assassination via a technique of body possession. And now Infinity Pool, which takes place at a resort for the ultra-wealthy in the fictional island country of Li Tolqa, a bit Central America junta and a bit Eastern Europe satellite state. The political climate is menacing and unstable, let’s put it that way. Novelist James Foster (Alexander Skarsgard) and his rich wife Em (Cleopatra Coleman) are vacationing there, coping with his years-long writer’s block. They meet a woman named Gabi (Mia Goth, the secret sauce in this stew) and her husband Alban (Jalil Lespert), who are familiar with the resort and island country. Gabi says she liked Foster’s novel and wants to get to know him. The next day, even though the resort warns its guests that they should not leave the resort grounds, the foursome takes a day for touring and debauching. Gabi and Alban have been there before and seem to know their way around Li Tolqa. On the way home Foster, who is the least drunk, takes the wheel. But he hits a local farmer with the car and kills him. Gabi and Alban advise fleeing, which they do post-haste. But within hours police are at Foster’s room pounding on the door. All four are taken in for questioning and, to cut to the chase, Foster is quickly found guilty. The punishment is extremely unusual and represents the science fiction element here. It’s there to be discovered. As it happens, Foster and a handful of others find something to like about it, even though it’s pretty horrible. It’s what brings Gabi and Alban back, for example, committing crimes to experience it again. Mia Goth, previously a revelation in Pearl, though maybe not X (and I haven’t seen MaXXXine yet), might be even better here as a young rootless rich woman with an unsettling kink for power. Cronenberg had to endure rounds of edits to get the picture’s rating down from NC-17 to R, which might give some idea of what you’re in for here. Hallucinogenic drug use is a staple and some of the picture’s best scenes and visions take place inside heads with the music playing. Brandon may not yet be up to some of the heights of David, but it looks like he might get there yet. He’s a real chip off the old block.

Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. (2023)

It’s possible that you need to know Judith Blume’s 1970 YA novel of the same name to fully appreciate this movie. I never read it but at least I remember it was a popular sensation in high school. And I have seen another picture by director and screenwriter Kelly Fremon Craig, The Edge of Seventeen from 2016, which is approximately as good. It’s 1970 here and sixth-grader Margaret Simon (Abby Ryder Fortson) is experiencing personal challenges. Her family has just moved from New York City to the suburbs of New Jersey where she has to make all new friends. She also happens to be enduring some ongoing religious issues. Her father Herb (a strangely miscast Benny Safdie) is Jewish, her mother Barbara (an excellent Rachel McAdams) was raised by blood-of-Jesus evangelicals from Ohio who disowned her when she married a Jew. In fact, Margaret has never met her grandparents on that side. As a result, Margaret’s parents have decided to leave all personal religious choices to Margaret herself. Also, her teacher has assigned her to do a study of religion for a year-long project. Margaret is definitely curious about religion, which leads to lots of conversations / prayers she has with God (as per the title). Her Christian grandparents do make an appearance, and also, maybe, something of an effort, but that piece of the story is left open-ended by movie’s end. Mostly Margaret hangs around in a clique of three other girls her age, all of them worried about starting their periods and growing their breasts (behind closed doors in their bedrooms they fly off into exercises of “We must, we must, we must increase our bust”). They worry a lot about attracting boys, starting by liking some of the worst, not knowing any better. Are You There God? is indeed a tender coming-of-age story, and heck, maybe I should go back and read the novel. I loved this movie. It’s funny and warm and often touching. It’s rated PG-13, with lots of Disneyesque family feels. I had to wince a few times, and some of the plot threads are not resolved entirely convincingly. But Are You There God? is a nice place to stop and smell the roses. Fortson is terrific as Margaret and McAdams is also great. And the picture is full of tart little life lessons for Margaret that won’t hurt any of the rest of us to relearn. The mission of this feel-good movie is to make you and your loved ones feel good. Mission accomplished.

Anatomy of a Fall (2023)

Speaking as someone who watches too much true-crime TV, I was curious to see how this celebrated fictional movie from last year about a crime and trial might go. It won the big prize at Cannes and got a handful of Oscar nominations too, with a win for Best Original Screenplay. I’m happy to note first that, as far as I can tell, it is not a story based on real-life incidents, which somehow usually turn out terrible and strangely unbelievable in the movies. This French picture, much of it in English, is basically a domestic drama tucked away inside a courtroom drama, involving one of those cases where the evidence is too ambiguous to make an undisputed call. A man falls to his death—in the classic formulation of Richard and Linda Thompson, “Did [he] jump or was [he] pushed?” The widow, Sandra Voyter (Sandra Huller), is accused of murder and taken to some kind of jury trial in a very interesting and confusing French legal system. Police procedure is part of the story too, as cops and prosecutors attempt to divine what happened from odd blood spatter patterns and witness testimony, the latter of which is mostly only their 11-year-old son Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner). The marriage has been going rotten for some time. Voyter is not particularly sympathetic, arguably cold and ambitious to the detriment of her husband, Samuel (Samuel Theis). Both are writers but only she is successful, which adds to their growing tensions. Anatomy of a Fall thus becomes a kind of rorschach test, which in many ways puts their son Daniel uncomfortably in the middle. He was partially blinded in an accident when he was 4. Samuel blamed himself for it and Sandra is inclined to agree. One of the pleasures of this picture could well be pie and coffee discussions afterward about the crime and the verdict and what happened. Anatomy of a Fall is on the long side, running to two and a half hours, but I found it entirely riveting, especially in the trial scenes that take up so much of it. Huller’s performance is pitch-perfect, reserved, self-contained, with unsettling portents and few definitive clues about the truth of the situation. Also, speaking again as someone who watches too much true-crime, Anatomy of a Fall is not a bit cheesy, which is too often a major temptation in that realm. This movie deserves all the accolades it got.

Evil Dead Rise (2023)

I finally caught up with the late installments in the Evil Dead franchise. Sam Raimi’s original trilogy worked itself into an inspired Three Stooges mode that remains utterly original and worth seeking out. But a lot of people forget how actually terrifying as a horror movie the first one was, even with the low-budget trappings, or that’s how it hit for me anyway in the early ‘80s one weekend with rented VCR and movies. The 2013 remake and this, what? sequel?—are true to the essentials of the 1981 original. The roving demon spirit is represented by impossibly fast tracking through landscape, there’s an evil book made of blood and human body parts, and the possessions begin when the field recording made by some anonymous paranormal researcher scientist is played. On the recording he says the words that summon the demon spirit to take possession and from then on it’s chaos. Also there’s usually a scene of an animated tree raping one of the young woman victims, in usually a mixed group of five. There to honor the original apparently. You never know where a tradition is going to come from. The 2013 remake, directed by Fede Alvarez (Alien: Romulus; Don’t Breathe), is perfectly competent but has few surprises and became a little monotonous for me in the last third. Evil Dead Rise switches things up while remaining true to the essentials. Perhaps its boldest move is to change the setting from the famous “cabin in the woods” to an urban landscape in Los Angeles. An earthquake unearths the Naturom Demonto (updated from the trilogy’s Necronomicon Ex-Mortis for reasons unclear, perhaps an effort to leave behind any suggestion of the H.P. Lovecraft universe). The cracked vault also yields up field recordings by the researcher. The kid making the discovery is a wannabe DJ. He knows what to do with recordings, which look like 78s but play differently. The possession target is a single mother with three kids. Her sister is visiting. They have a tense relationship. As usual in this franchise, it gets bloody and gruesome. Check all content warnings. The tree thing is replicated inside an elevator. True to the trope! Yes, there were scenes of grotesque violence that were hard to watch, usually short. But director and writer Lee Cronin also has a lot of nifty tricks up his sleeve and there are a surprising number of surprises. Definitely worth running down if you’re into the franchise.

May December (2023)

I thought the Mary Kay Letourneau story provided a better frame for May December than Persona or any other cinematic references director Todd Haynes and writers Samy Burch and Alex Mechanik may have planted along the way. Julianne Moore has the Letourneau role, playing Gracie Atherton-Yoo, who was caught having sex with 13-year-old Korean-American Joe Yoo when she was 36 (by comparison, Letourneau’s 12-year-old paramour Vili Fualaau was Samoan). It’s 20 years later, prison sentence completed, back at home in Savannah, Georgia, together, Gracie and Joe now married with children. A TV movie is being made about the case. Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman) has been cast to play Gracie. She is visiting the family and their home to research her role. The dynamics between Gracie and Elizabeth (and one or two or three carefully composed shots) are where the Persona parallels originate. Portman and Moore are great, as they usually are, but I thought Charles Melton as Joe virtually stole the show, underscoring the kind of silent damage that goes on with sexual abuse. Joe is 36 in this picture, the same age as Gracie when she seduced him (in May December she is not a teacher but a coworker with Joe at a pet store). Their children are nearly grown—a pair of twins are graduating high school as part of the story here. Facing an empty nest at an age when many are starting a family, Joe is sad to see, a lost soul. His son thinks he is a joke. He is on the prowl for an affair but has no idea how to go about it. Deep resentments toward Gracie seem to be surfacing more and more undeniably. She still controls and manipulates him, treating him like a child. Moore plays Gracie as at once an innocent, a loving mama bear defending her family, and a monster, which is the picture’s subtle drift even as she goes on like the head of a happy brood. Portman is unsurprisingly very good as an awkward, intrusive, and in many ways unwelcome presence, asking inappropriate questions. When she’s called on it—she’s not often called on it—she grows defensive about the work and craft of the actor. She glides through many encounters on her star power. In a scene where she visits a high school theater class, one boy who is obviously a class clown asks her about shooting sex scenes. She takes the question seriously, answers in detail, and keeps calling him by name. It feels notably icky—like she might have some ideas about seducing him, inspired (she would no doubt say) by her studies of Gracie. I thought the picture at large was a bit muddled, though anchored by the stellar performances of the principals. There are times, likely because I’m male of a certain age, where Vili Fualaau strikes me not as victim, but as lucky, why if my 7th-grade biology teacher (who once told us to go home and tell our parents we had learned about “mastication” in science class) had ever approached me... Et cetera. You know how we can think. But May December in that regard is more realistic, showing the sad wreck that comes with all sexual abuse.

The Holdovers (2023)

The latest from director Alexander Payne is aimed squarely at boomers like me, with its coming of age tale and Payne’s familiar warm sitcom light touch. Most notably it is set in December of 1970, deliberately but artfully raising the nostalgia level to 11 for viewers of a certain age. It feels like we’ve seen this story a million ways in a million movies, but for whatever reason the one I kept thinking of was The Last Detail, director Hal Ashby’s deft 1973 dramedy of a young Navy man headed for the brig for a long stretch, escorted by an irascible Jack Nicholson who shows him one last good time. The Holdovers is much more genteel, and otherwise different in many ways, taking place in a boarding school over a Christmas break. Some students have nowhere to go and must stay at the school for the holiday, with faculty sharing the oversight duties year to year. Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) is the unfortunate candidate this year. Among other things, Hunham is an insufferable blowhard on the subject of Greeks, Romans, and other stuffy figures of classical humanities. He’s there with a gang of five boys, which briefly made me smell some version of The Breakfast Club coming. But soon, four of the kids are granted reprieve and taken away by the parents of one of them. The parents of the fifth, Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), cannot be reached, which dooms Hunham and Tully to make do with one another. Hunham had briefly been hoping to binge on mystery novels. The school’s African-American cook, Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), is also staying over. Her son graduated from the school the year before and was then drafted and died in Vietnam. The Holdovers has a great sense for how the last two weeks of December can go, especially among the holiday-orphaned—making do until Christmas, finding odd moments of poignant beauty randomly in the get-togethers (there’s a Frank Sinatra Christmas song here that hits me), and finally the release of Christmas week until the new year. These three holdovers make it to awkward Christmas affairs, doing their best. Tully and Hunham bicker a lot. The generational tension between them is thick, and Tully is on the verge of going wild. He’s on his third boarding school and he’s failing again—next stop, military school. David Hemingson’s script is well-fit to the unlikely trio, notably Giamatti, who preens and bellows as only he can, obviously at war with internal insecurities. The Holdovers is a thing of beauty and a wonderful holiday movie—bound to be a classic!

Oppenheimer (2023)

Somewhere along the line I developed a bad attitude about director and writer hail the auteur Christopher Nolan. I didn’t like Inception, I didn’t like Dunkirk, and I really didn’t like The Dark Knight Rises (is there consensus it’s his worst?). On the other hand, to be fair, there are as many that I do like, at least by parts (the first two Batmans, The Prestige, Interstellar, and especially Memento). But when last summer’s “Barbenheimer” phenom went down, famously restoring movies to commercial oomph, I was dubious, especially when I ventured out to see Barbie first. But I finally got around to Nolan’s A-bomb and frankly have to file it with things that make me shrug. It’s long, to start with, it’s packed full of strutting stars (Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Kenneth Branagh), the sound design is pretentious, and so is the gaudy overall visual strategy, alternating color with black and white because what? Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer is a stout enough moral being, heart in the right place, all that, much like oh, say, Kevin Costner in Hidden Figures. Murphy mumbles too much but I understand that’s part of the sound design. Points for being reminiscent of David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth. Still, by my lights the only certifiably great turn in this one, perhaps not surprisingly, is from Robert Downey Jr., who continues to bank the fires on being the best movie actor alive. The picture is arguably worth seeing for his performance alone. But I’ve heard enough disputes now about the historical veracity of Oppenheimer that I felt obliged to not believe any of it. I suspect the things I liked most and didn’t know already were the things that were made up. For a three-hour movie about A-bombs there was only one mushroom cloud. That’s probably for the best, at this point. Even nuclear anxiety isn’t what it used to be. Much too much was clonkingly obvious, like the quote attributed to “Oppie” out of the Bhagavad Gita, “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” It came to remind me of Samuel L. Jackson’s faux Bible quote in Pulp Fiction. I won’t go so far as to call the fatally self-serious Oppenheimer out and out bad. But I’m willing to say it’s 85% mediocre.

Silent Night (2023)

Director John Woo’s first picture in six years—and he’s back in Hollywood!—is all cinematic stunt: no dialogue, just fast cars, fistfights, high-powered guns, dangerous knives, a single dove, and the Christmas season. Christmas Eve, to be specific, December 24, as written on the calendar of our grieving father guy, Brian Godlock (Joel Kinnaman): “kill them all.” Silent Night, speaking figuratively to Die Hard, says, “Hold my beer.” You see, there was a gang war that erupted, with some crazy wild shooting and driving—not kidding, this hanging out weaving moving vehicles firing automatic weapons, all Benny Hill and Keystone Kops but deadly serious, is impressive footage. Then a stray bullet kills a 7-year-old boy. This is also around Christmas, you see, and the father subsequently spends the next year toning up like Travis Bickle for a big finale like Taxi Driver. This is why we can’t have nice things. To be sure, I missed dialogue and noticed its absence in Silent Night, all the pleasant clarifying padding of exposition. In all the places where it would naturally occur, Woo the filmmaker draws away from it or cuts away from it. We know the routines of high-action revenge, but usually they include some exposition. I wouldn’t say Silent Night is an experiment that entirely works, but I wouldn’t say it fails either. These firefights and the hand-to-hand combat are intensely ludicrous as only classic Hong Kong action sensibilities can deliver. It’s very rock-‘em sock-‘em from one of the masters of rock-‘em sock’-em and it’s a very pure form of rock-‘em sock-’em too, for that matter. Revenge stories always deliver queasy satisfactions, so that’s here as well. Not really my cup of coffee, but I’m easily enough drawn into them and then easily enough manipulated and satisfied. Making the whole thing about a 7-year-old son is an upright way to do it, on one level, granted that involving children this way is always shamelessly pumping up the volume on stakes. It’s also something of a crass way to do it—nooo, not the children!! At least Woo wisely refrains from sexualizing the terrible crime and keeps the focus always on the action, which veers toward the outrageously improbable, but hey, stunt players deserve their time in the sun too. Silent Night is not as suspenseful as Die Hard, and it’s also not as subtly Christmassy. But the action is 1,000% better. If you like a Christmas movie that looks like Die Hard, make it John Woo’s Silent Night.

Priscilla (2023)

My moviegoing habits have changed since the pandemic and are still out of focus. I finally went back into theaters earlier this year. My first preference is this newfangled 10 a.m. Tuesday matinee at the multiplexes, although the choices are not as good as at the local art house. I’ve seen a bunch of morning movies with only one or two others in attendance or even by myself. So I was a little set back to find my 11 a.m. matinee of Sofia Coppola’s latest just simply packed. Yes, it was the opening week, but come on. They all looked like retired biker outlaws. I guess that figures, given it’s an Elvis Presley movie, based on Priscilla Presley’s outrageously entertaining 1985 memoir, Elvis and Me. These days the seating in my multiplexes is all assigned and I was thoroughly nonplussed to find one such outlaw and his chick taking seats right next to me and carrying on for the duration as if they were sitting in their living room. They would remember things like that RCA was Elvis’s major label after Sun. Save it for later! I was further nonplussed to recall that I still hadn’t seen Baz Luhrmann’s much-celebrated Elvis from a year or two ago. It seemed to me in this bad moment that I really should have looked at it before seeing Priscilla. But you can’t do everything and I made what I could of the picture at hand: Cailee Spaeny is effective playing the title role low-key, Jacob Elordi did not impress much as an Elvis impersonator, and in general it is faithful to the book but the book is better, for example in bringing out the bizarre sexual tensions of their early relationship. I chalk up the feeling of restrained veracity to Priscilla Presley’s role on the picture as an executive producer. Priscilla is worth seeing for Elvis and/or Sofia Coppola completists. It’s all a bit wooden, but, as always, Coppola’s soundtrack choices are intriguing and often startlingly appropriate, including the Ramones’ cover of “Baby, I Love You” under the titles, “Crimson and Clover” during the late ‘50s period, Brenda Lee’s “Sweet Nothin’s,” and a bunch of hip-hop that worked when you might think it wouldn’t. No word on that from the couple sitting next to me.

I couldn’t shake my self-accusatory mood of being a lazy underachiever, so I hurried home after the credits started to roll and took a look at Elvis online. Yes, my heart sank when I saw it was almost three hours long, but it turned out to be entertaining and a lot more lively than Priscilla. Of course, Priscilla has the advantage of being far closer to the truth. I have already filed director Baz Luhrmann under unrepentant fantasist, for better or worse—The Great Gatsby no, Moulin Rouge maybe, and in general he’s one of those “from the mind of” guys. Austin Butler as Elvis has been oversold, I think, but he is good and has a few moments where he is almost transcendent. Tom Hanks in prosthetics, I believe (or is it CGI?), plays Colonel Tom Parker as a simpering manipulative huckster—he’s not bad, but the script is. Elvis is more telling the story of Parker, not Elvis. And it’s basically just riffing on the legend and known facts: Elvis, under Parker’s management, blazed onto the scene in 1956 and got in trouble for his lewd stage moves. He was drafted and served his time. He spent much of the ‘60s making bad movies. He had a big comeback TV special in 1968 and then became a star in amber in Las Vegas. He took a lot of pharmaceuticals and eventually died from them. It's all dutifully here, but the motivations offered are insane, or at least depart from what I thought I knew. He’s explicitly forced into the Army to get him off the stage, for example. He is defiant toward Colonel Parker, notably in the TV special, whereas I’ve always heard he was absolutely deferential to Parker (he certainly is in Priscilla). I take it that these things “made narrative sense” to Luhrmann and his cowriters Sam Bromell and Craig Pearce because they aren’t the way I understand Elvis’s career or even his legend exactly. On the other hand, looking up the song “Trouble,” I see that it was indeed written in 1958 by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. But I’m pretty sure Elvis never used it to stir up a riot at a show in the South circa 1957 where he was closely watched by authorities. “Trouble” is more famous for being Elvis’s opening number on the TV special. But OK, fine, never mind. Elvis can be vastly entertaining even as it mangles my sense of history (which might be wrong?). Priscilla looks and feels closer to the truth, but it’s not as exciting. Still, it’s a great double feature, and I swear too that I saw them in the right order.

The Creator (2023)

With artificial intelligence (AI) all the rage in popular culture at the moment, here’s a war movie, robots versus human beings, that has surprisingly little of interest to say about it. AI is basically the Nazis and commies of yore in this movie, “the enemy” enough to warrant the big guns. But is AI really evil? is basically as far as it goes in the big idea department. More to the point, there’s a lot of ordnance going off here. And for the feels, there’s a story about a fiercely loving military family torn apart by the requirements of duty and humanity. But the basic deal is the robots have created a super-weapon which the humans must destroy, unless the robots can destroy the humans’ super-weapon first. For once I’m leery of spoilers—I mean, it’s still a relatively new movie—so I’m not going to get much into plot details. Instead, I have to marvel at the way director and cowriter Gareth Edwards (Rogue One, the 2014 Godzilla) basically dodges any complexities of AI, reducing his tale mostly to standard warfare battles, explosions, and high tech. Kapow! Take that! Pew-pew-pew! It has a bit of a tricksy plot, but more in the spy story vein, as it’s not always easy to discern everyone’s motivations and loyalties (let alone what is going on from scene to scene). The plot does throw up some twists and turns but not in ways that seemed very interesting to me. I wanted to know more about this AI beyond simple domination and/or survival, the basic binaries we get in movies like The Creator. It’s skillfully enough done—looks good, blows up good, has some interesting ideas about what future warfare will look like. I’ve just never been very interested in war movies—well, I did like some of the nuance in the Vietnam War movies before they hardened into cliches. But once 9/11 and the “war on terror” was part of the national experience, I really haven’t been into them, acknowledging that the cinematic innovations of, say, The Hurt Locker, offer up some exception to the general rule that war movies are a lot of tedium. The Creator, for all its pretensions to vague religiosity and heavy science fiction “evolutionary” sophistication, is too basically a war movie. If you’re into it for that, it’s not bad?

People Try to Pet Tigers Sometimes... (2023)

True-crime youtuber Matt Orchard kicks off his 20-minute meditation on animal / human relations with a warning: “The following video contains visuals and especially audio of people in extreme pain, as well as other content that some may find disturbing.” It’s certainly true but he doesn’t warn—probably can’t—that many could find themselves literally laughing at the agonizing cries of pain, which are repeated for effect. Sure enough, the screams are the next thing we hear from a 911 call coming from a zoo in Florida. It’s amazing, in a way, that this victim even had the wherewithal to make the call. Orchard has previously made his feelings known about “Florida Man” incidents, and here we are again. The tale is about not one but two cases at Florida zoos in recent years where employees who are not responsible for animal care in any way decided it would be fun, or something, to go pet a tiger. These big cats are so adorable, after all—like Hobbes in the cartoon, or something. Orchard reminds us, however, that tigers are apex predators and generally more likely to show aggression than affection to random humans who hop safety fences and stick their arms through the wires of their fences for a little skritch-skritch. The worst visual details here are pixelated away but details about how the teeth inside a tiger’s mouth work are made quite clear. Your imagination gets some workout from this. Sadly, one of the tigers must be put down as the only solution to save a fool’s forearm. Orchard’s disgust with these two is palpable but, as he says, in the end most of us are going to have to side with the human in the immediate situation. It doesn’t help the endangered tigers any, whose dwindling numbers on the planet only make the situation worse. Zoo employees are seen crying over the incident and you may not be far from it either. We never hear from either of the fools—but what could they possibly say that wouldn’t make us think twice about who to shoot in the clinch? All you can do, Orchard implies, is run that agonizing audio a few times repetitively and let it become the cruel and savage joke that it and most “Florida Man” incidents are.

The History of the Minnesota Vikings (2023)

I was happy as could be to see Dorktown taking on the woeful tale of the Minnesota Vikings. Woeful, that is, as perceived by most, including me, and as debunked by Dorktown with their usual veracity and mind-numbing statistical detail. The Vikings are the football team tarred for going on 50 years with the label of “can’t win the big one.” (Later joined by the Buffalo Bills. Both teams have made four trips to the Super Bowl only to be turned away in defeat. The Bills did it in four consecutive years. The Vikings did it in four of the first 11 Super Bowls. It’s the reason I have been hoping last year and this for a Bills-Vikings matchup—someone would have to win.) But wait, Dorktown principals Jon Bois and Alex Rubenstein are here to set the record straight as only they can. They say early it would take them seven hours to tell all the Vikings stories—in the end, it’s closer to 10 spread across seven episodes going decade by decade (the team’s glorious ‘70s get two). And they probably didn’t tell all the stories. Perhaps Dorktown’s most salient point about the Vikings is that their winning percentage across the Super Bowl era is stellar, one of the best, bettered only by the Dallas Cowboys and Pittsburgh Steelers, with the New England Patriots starting to nip at their heels. It’s a record of remarkable consistency and high level of play, not able to win the big one notwithstanding. Full disclosure, though I grew up with them—the first episode covering the ‘60s brought back some memories of home so intensely it made me cry—I was never much of a fan. In my hippie years, and still, to some extent (if indeed my hippie years are over), I was opposed to organized sports generally and football specifically. I can’t claim to be a Vikings fan but at least I can tell you, in case you didn’t know, that Prince’s obsession with the color purple is because of this football team.

Bois declares, in a summary statement, “Only one team can call themselves the Minnesota Vikings, the carvers of the runes, the great American storytellers.” I’m not sure exactly what he means by that but there are hours and hours of great stories here, some of which fans may have gratefully forgotten. I guarantee you’ll be surprised by how many there are, and while many are quite painful, even vicariously, they are often inspirational in some way too. Defensive tackle Alan Page, for example, played for the Vikings 11 years, finished law school, became an attorney, became a judge, and, in 1993, became a justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court. Quarterback Fran Tarkenton saw into the future and created a style of quarterback play that ultimately caught on, even if decades later. He’s also, by happenstance and grit determination, now one of the richest men who ever played the game. Two postseason victories—one in 1980, the other in 2018—are certifiable miracles, the moments we are looking for when we look at sports. I love how much Jon Bois loves Bud Grant, who made an argument shortly before his death earlier this year about what makes football unique. The ball is not round and not always easy to handle—drop it, and no one knows what it’s going to do. It’s all luck. I’d say, with The History of the Minnesota Vikings, Dorktown has knocked another one out of the park, but that’s the wrong sports metaphor. Say they put it through the uprights (unlike, in the most unexpected ways imaginable, two Vikings kickers covered here). (Note to Dorktown: now do the Mets, please.)

Barbie (2023)

I was already tired of people’s opinions about Barbie even before the movie opened—they don’t like the color scheme, they don’t understand what it has to do with feminism, they think it’s too woke, etc. (in the latter case, I’m always tired of that opinion now). Director and cowriter Greta Gerwig seems to be on a mission to reclaim the popular and reviled Mattel toy doll world and make it all fun again and also, maybe, righteously feminist. Mattel is on a mission to break open a movie franchise. The 2001 homage / parody / rip-off in the overture basically explains it all, before whipping up Also Sprach Zarathustra. In Barbie, there’s a Barbie world and there’s the real world. The Barbie world is a matriarchy whereas the real world is still a patriarchy. When a portal opens between the two worlds—because reasons reasons—things start to go awry. Barbie (Margot Robbie) loses the high flex of her arches from wearing heels and then starts to show signs of cellulite. These are terrible things and must be set right. Ken (Ryan Gosling) stows away on the expedition to the real world, where he is utterly entranced by patriarchy—thinks it’s a great idea, wonders why no one ever thought of it before, and takes it back to Barbie world, where things go further awry. Barbie is an affable enough mess, trying hard. Gerwig’s humor comes through, most noticeably in the performance of Kate McKinnon as Weird Barbie, and Gerwig’s hipster instincts for music as primary signifier remain as detectable as ever: Lizzo, Dua Lipa, Khalid, Cyndi Lauper of course, Aqua’s “Barbie World,” the Spice Girls, Indigo Girls, Tame Impala, etc., etc. They’re all here. Mattel itself is on board and featured heavily. Will Ferrell, for example, is the Mattel CEO. Nice to see a corporation that can laugh at itself (cough-cough), but it’s more plain they’re more interested in raking up dough. There’s a dark side to all this too, though dark in the style of the TV series Wednesday, that is, not really dark. Maybe Barbie addresses depression in a good-humored way when one character works up variations of the doll like Irrepressible-Thoughts-of-Death Barbie and Crippling-Shame Barbie. But you already know what you think of Barbie. Don’t let my opinions annoy you further. Broey Deschanel over at youtube says it a thousand times better than I ever could.

Past Lives (2023)

Past Lives offers a bittersweet love story that’s hard to categorize. Call it a romance. It starts with a pair of 12-year-olds growing up in Korea. Hae Sung (Leem Seung-min, then Teo Yoo as the grownup) and Na Young (Moon Seung-ah, then Greta Lee as the grownup, called Nora) are 12-year-old childhood sweethearts. Na Young’s mother arranges and chaperones their one date. She says it’s so Na Young will have happy memories, knowing the family has plans to emigrate to Canada. Nora is ambitious. As a 12-year-old she wants to win a Nobel Prize in literature. As a 24-year-old—with the picture transitioning toward the present—she is a playwright and wants to win a Pulitzer. The second part of Past Lives, when Hae Sung and Nora are 24, presents a classic aching long-distant internet relationship. They communicate by phone and computer and have long talks at all hours of the day and night. They are plainly in love. But Hae Sung can’t travel to New York City, where Nora has settled, for another year, and Nora can’t make it to Seoul for a year and a half. At that point Nora looks at the futility and calls a timeout. Hae Sung is heartbroken and left feeling abandoned again. Almost immediately, Nora meets the man she will marry and we get word Hae Sung has a girlfriend. For the third part of the movie, another 12 years has elapsed and Hae Sung is traveling to New York to see Nora for the first time in more than 20 years. Past Lives has many of the beats of a romantic comedy but it’s much more poignant than funny. Nora has a real marriage, with fights and passion and connections (they are both writers), and she has a career, living in a small apartment in the East Village. Hae Sung has become an engineer with an office job, but he still lives at home with his parents. In many ways he feels uncomfortably like an incel. They have grown far apart because they have been raised in different families. But they still feel a connection. The picture starts out pretty well and gets better as it goes. The last section is full of tender and awkward moments as Nora and her husband and Hae Sung go out for a last night on the town. The final parting is agonizingly slow, making us feel all the complex welter of emotions set in motion. Past Lives is often beautiful—one to see for sure.

You Hurt My Feelings (2023)

It may be less than helpful to the general cause to say that the best movies by director and writer Nicole Holofcener compare favorably to the best Woody Allen movies, before he got to be so hard to take (ca. 1992)—Friends With Money, Enough Said, Please Give, and the others are narrowly focused, good-humored meditations on your vexing life and getting along with the people in it. You Hurt My Feelings has some small flaws but it’s well representative of what Holofcener does. Julia Louis-Dreyfus is the center of it as Beth, a professional writer in New York City who teaches adult education classes on writing and has published a memoir about verbal abuse. She’s a little defensive with people, anticipating they won’t take her experience seriously as abuse. She has also recently finished her first novel. Her husband Don (Tobias Menzie) is a psychotherapist possibly edging into burnout. He thinks botox might help. We’re privy to some of his sessions with a few comically neurotic clients. Beth’s son Eliot (Owen Teague) works in a cannabis store and may or may not be an aspiring writer. Beth smokes weed herself but refuses to buy from his store. She also has some unpleasant streaks of racism around this, appearing to believe street crime can break out right there, a jarring note (when it does, it’s even more jarring, the picture’s weakest moment). Beth hangs out a lot with her sister Sarah (Michaela Watkins) and sometimes Sarah’s husband Mark (Arian Moayed). Beth and Sarah frequently visit their mother Georgia (Jeannie Berlin). Around and around these characters go. The cast is big and the cast is good. The movie is essentially built out of conversation, as they shuffle along their appointed daily rounds, getting coffee and trying to figure it all out. The plot turns specifically on Beth and Sarah bumping into Don and Mark out shopping and overhearing their conversation before the two men know they are there. Don is telling Mark that he doesn’t like Beth’s novel and has been lying about it and doesn’t know how to come clean. Yes, it’s the ol’ eavesdropping gambit, that’s right. And then the knotty issue in relationships about how to support a partner’s creativity, tending to shade any criticism sought toward the positive. Because what else are you going to do? You Hurt My Feelings, notwithstanding the occasional pains, is a good time, warm and enjoyable, with some sharp edges of poignance and humor worked into it well.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023)

I looked at Into the Spider-Verse a few years late and with low expectations and I liked it a lot—don’t miss it, really. Then I went to this sequel shortly after it opened and with high expectations, and came away feeling a little meh, not least because it is obviously a bridge episode in a longer series, at least a trilogy. Ho-hum, getting tired of the big narrative arcs that feel big more for commercial reasons. Everything I liked in Into is basically still there in Across, but it wasn’t nearly as surprising this time. The effects are spectacular like fireworks, capable of burning into your retinas, figuratively speaking, I mean—high-contrast, colorful, very fast, and impressive. Already I’m seeing the colorful blurry ray used here (something multidimensional, I’m sure) showing up in memes. I also like the story of Miles Morales (voiced by Shemeik Moore), the Spider-Man who’s a Black kid from Brooklyn in a parallel universe. But they don’t lean into it as much here. Instead, it’s a lot of thunder and lightning about multiple dimensions and a multidimensional superhero / Spider-Man security team putting it all back in balance because otherwise we’d have to go through the Big Bang again, or something. Also rampant wisecracking, of course—it’s the Spider-Man brand to a certain degree so that’s always going to be there. It’s even the Marvel brand, come to think of it. And don’t think these characters don’t notice it and comment on it, because they do. The fights are too fast to follow but the action is rousing. One fun point here is all the Spider-Man variations mixed in with all the Spider-Man lore we know. So there’s a Lego Spider-Man, a horse Spider-Man (my favorite so far), Spider-Men previously seen in video games, a few Spider-Women, etc. And yes, there’s a brief scene where a cast of hundreds of Spider-Men are all standing in circles pointing at one another like the meme. That got a big reaction at the screening I saw. I can’t remember if it was in the first one too. The voice talent on hand is also impressive, though not necessarily particularly recognizable as such in the swift pace and clanging battles: Hailee Steinfeld as Gwen Stacy, Mehershala Ali, Kathryn Hahn, Oscar Isaac, Daniel Kaluuya, Ziggy Marley, Elizabeth Perkins, Jason Schwartzman, J.K. Simmons, ET freakin’ CETERA. So a big show and a reasonably good time and my first visit to a multiplex since the pandemic, but somehow, for me, just slightly underwhelming.