The group of friends in "Semper Fi," a new feature film from Henry Alex Rubin, the Oscar-nominated director of “Murderball," live in a small town in New York State, up near the Canadian border. Most have what would be called blue-collar jobs, operating machinery on the docks, short order cooks. One weekend a month they travel to Fort Drum for training. They're all in the Marine Corps Reserves, and the reserves are being called up for combat duty. "Semper Fi" is best when it sticks with the journeys of the individual characters, each with their own backstory and struggles. These men have always known each other. But something goes wrong along the way, and "Semper Fi" suddenly decides it wants to be another kind of movie. The transition doesn't work.

Cal (Jai Courtney) is a cop, and the legal guardian of his younger brother, a reckless hothead nicknamed Oyster (Nat Wolff). Oyster has racked up a couple of felonies, and Cal had to pull strings at the Reserves to get him a felony waver. Their relationship is that of a Stern Dad and his Rebel Son. There's a lot of tension in the relationship. The rest of the guys, all known by nicknames, are sketched in: Jaeger (Finn Wittrock) is a ladies' man, stinking up the car with his cologne ("It's called Transcendence," he informs his buddies, who razz him mercilessly). Jaeger can't let go of his ex-girlfriend, Clara (an underused Leighton Meister). She's moved on. He hasn't. Milk (Beau Knapp) is the most "adult" in the group. He's married, with a child. They spend their time getting drunk, racing each other home, calling each other "bro." Their bond is the bond of "Semper Fidelis," the motto of the United States Marine Corps. "Always loyal." (Last year, Rubin directed a rousing national commercial for the Marine Corps.) War looms, and the guys have a lot of steam to let off. After Oyster accidentally kills someone in a bar fight, he's given a 25-year sentence. The rest of them are shipped off to Iraq.

The action moves back and forth between Iraq and Oyster's experience in incarceration. The guards pick him out for sadistic treatment. Cal is convinced Oyster is going to be killed in prison, so when he returns from Iraq, he decides to bust Oyster out, using his training as a police officer and a Marine. This is the shift in the movie. The prison break is elaborate, requiring all hands on deck. The war veterans will work the prison break like one of their training drills at Fort Drum, like one of their operations in Iraq. But improbabilities loom. What will happen to Oyster afterwards? Where will he go? Won't there be a manhunt for him? If this is what "loyalty" looks like, I still have some questions. Combat veterans using their skills in an inappropriate civil environment is an interesting topic, but it's mainly ignored in "Semper Fi." We're expected to be on their side throughout.

Rubin (and his cinematographer David Devlin) have a good eye for landscape, light, and mood, and they handle complex sequences—like the battles in Iraq—very well. This is a very male-driven film, which is not necessarily a problem, but it is a problem when a character like Clara is so thinly drawn you can't even keep her in your head when she's off-screen. She's anti-war, she's gotten out of her blue-collar environment, she's getting an education. Jaeger is threatened. There are all kinds of unexplored possibilities here!

I know I complain about "too much plot" a lot in my reviews. I'm not against plot, but I appreciate small observant movies and character-driven stories not ambitious to put across a message. If the film does its job well, the message will be implicit. The movie is a way to get to know a bunch of interesting characters, people you can invest in, if not "relate to." There's a lot of plot in "Ash is the Purest White," one of the year's best films, but at its heart, it's really a story about this one woman, and the film is galvanized by Zhao Tao's tremendous performance. Her transformation is extraordinary. "Semper Fi," on the other hand, gets bogged down in its plot. The interesting characters and all of their conflicts are all right there onscreen—the cast is excellent—but the "prison break" is such a far-fetched idea it's difficult to invest in it. The best parts of "Semper Fi" call to mind "The Outsiders" or "Diner" or "Breaking Away," wonderful male coming-of-age stories, all of which had storylines but didn't feel beholden to the machinations of plot. Hanging out with the characters was enough.

If films were judged purely on the basis of their good intentions, then French writer/director Michel Ocelot’s animated adventure, “Dilili in Paris,” would easily earn four stars. When it comes to role models for children, this picture’s titular, pint-size heroine is as good as it gets, embodying the very essence of pluck and resilience. Born into the indigenous Melanesian culture known as “Kanak” in New Caledonia, Dilili sneaks onto a boat bound for France, where she is taken under the wing of a countess. Having already been taught the dominant Parisian language by noted educator and anarchist Louise Michel, Dilili’s eloquence outclasses that of all commoners once she arrives in Europe. Equipped with an insatiable curiosity and no detectable trace of homesickness, the girl is eager to join Orel, a new friend twice her height, on a picturesque journey through Paris, as they go about solving the mystery of a misogynistic cult known as the Male Masters. All Dilili has to do is curtsy while uttering her maddening catchphrase, “I am pleeeeased … to make your acquaintance,” in order to win over and enlist the aid of every feminist icon who crosses her path. 

Winner of the Cesar Award for Best Animated Feature, Ocelot’s film would seem poised to emerge as a surefire Oscar contender, especially considering the mediocrity of this year’s recycled offerings from Disney. Alas, on the eve of its U.S. release, “Dilili in Paris” was screened for critics in an English dub, and it is a complete disaster. Though Roger Ebert worried that little ones wouldn’t know what to make of the subtitles in Ocelot’s 2012 anthology film, “Tales of the Night,” I’m willing to bet that the ability of kids’ eyes to multitask when glancing at text and images sharing the same screen has increased exponentially in the era of iPhones. I saw my first subtitled film at age 12, and quickly forgot that I was reading each line, as I became fully immersed in the emotions conjured by both the visuals and the actors’ voices. 12 would also be the recommended age for this movie, which is bound to frighten or confound younger viewers with its mature themes and top-heavy exposition. 

The film’s opening moments are promising enough, in part because it’s the only nonmusical sequence preserved in its native tongue, as we see Dilili in what appears to be New Caledonia. Suddenly, she finds herself being scrutinized by the eyes of a white stranger. Then the shot pulls back to reveal that we are, in fact, already in Paris, where Dilili has been put on display in a recreation of her former Kanak village. Dilili is acutely aware of how her dark skin causes numerous local folk to look down on her in judgement, yet her relentlessly perky voice-over shields itself from any semblance of vulnerability or nuance. So focused are the English actors in mimicking the rhythm of the original French dialogue and movements of the animation that it frequently causes the characters to pause in random places, as if they were all possessed by the awkward cadences of Christopher Walken. Some of the translations are so wordy that they verge on self-parody, such as when the Prince of Wales inadvertently magnifies the absurdity of a key set-piece by saying, “Young man, let me congratulate you on your swiftness and your ability to unharness a horse without unnecessary movements and in complete silence!” Even the simple act of whispering is botched, with Dilili delivering the most pronounced background murmur since Mel Brooks hollered, “Harrumph Harrumph!” in “Blazing Saddles.” 

Perhaps this wouldn’t have been as glaring a demerit if the plot were more engaging. There’s no shortage of fascinating historical figures on display here, yet the film is only as interested in its Belle Époque period setting as “The Pagemaster” was in books. All the trailblazing artists, scientists, engineers and revolutionaries rounded up here are used merely as set dressing for a dull caper that turns ludicrous in the final act, with easily identifiable foes occupying the sort of lair typically reserved for Bond villains. We’re granted fleeting informational soundbites such as “Monet is about color, while Renoir is about happiness,” before Dilili quickly changes the subject to the fictional Male Masters, whose dehumanizing treatment of women held captive in their subterranean underworld registers as a heavy-handed metaphor for female oppression. It trivializes the #MeToo movement just as “The Day After Tomorrow” turned the urgent threat of climate change into a monster no more credible than Godzilla. Most egregious of all is the character of Lebeuf, who refers to Dilili as an ape before undergoing an abrupt change of heart, leading him to admit that he was an “idiot,” though “racist” would’ve been a more appropriate word choice. The fact Orel nevertheless trusts that Dilili will be safe in Lebeuf’s custody is one of many instances where the film stretches our suspension of disbelief past its breaking point. I was especially amused by the moment when a crowd of parents wait patiently to embrace their rescued offspring just so an opera singer can finish her solo. 

Many of the film's backdrops are admittedly breathtaking, yet the foregrounded people never seem to be actually populating them. The character animation is so flat and uninspired that it causes Dilili and her fellow humans to resemble stickers grafted onto postcards, with the subtle use of shadows and reflections doing little to add dimension. What made 1998’s “The Prince of Egypt” the gold standard for this sort of visual approach is the painterly texture that was given to its computerized landscapes, allowing them to blend more seamlessly with its hand-drawn characters. Nothing about “Dilili in Paris” feels natural or organic, a fact only intensified by such clunky exchanges as this one between Dilili and Colette, a performer of Egyptian pantomime and future author of Gigi…

Colette: “I show my body a little bit during the dance…because it’s beautiful!”

Dilili: “It is very nice of you.”

Colette: “It is an interesting activity.”

If only Colette were around today to pen a rewrite. 

The second season of Hulu’s series of original films from Blumhouse and centered on the holiday of the month they’re released starts off on a sour note with the inert and annoying “Uncanny Annie,” a movie that only proves concept only gets you so far. Directed by Paul Davis, the same filmmaker who made last October’s offering, “Into the Dark: The Body,” this year’s Halloween horror looks particularly pale when compared to other possibilities for your holiday viewing marathon. Heck, even “The Body” would be a better choice. And when you look and see that Netflix is releasing a new horror film every Friday this month, including offerings by Vincenzo Natali (“Cube”), Ciaran Foy (“Sinister 2”), and Zak Hilditch (“1922”), you have to wonder what Hulu and Blumhouse are doing with “Into the Dark.” It’s beginning to seem that they are too often content to do the bare minimum of creative work to deliver something to the small screen.

What’s truly annoying about “Uncanny Annie” is how rock-solid the concept should be: it could be basically be pitched as “Horror Jumanji.” Imagine the possibilities with a bunch of teenagers finding a “Jumanji”-esque game that transports them into a night of horrors. It even recalls the hook of Clive Barker’s “Hellraiser” in the discovery of something that opens a portal to another world, and it should be heavily influenced by the work of H.P. Lovecraft, but names like Barker and Lovecraft quickly fade away as you’re watching “Uncanny Annie,” a movie that takes its concept nowhere. Other than a few unearned character twists, there’s nothing that feels unexpected narratively, and there’s so little life in the filmmaking that it can’t make up for the dull characters or hackneyed dialogue.

A group of teenagers get together on Halloween both to celebrate and mourn a friend who died a year earlier. They all have a bit of baggage—two of them just broke up, for example—and wear some pretty mediocre Halloween costumes. As they’re loosening up for the evening, it’s suggested they play a board game, and one of the them stumbles upon one in the basement called Uncanny Annie, sort of a riff on Jumanji and the legend of Bloody Mary. Even the design of the game within the film is lackluster, mostly just a series of cards for the characters to read regarding a challenge like revealing a secret and what will happen if they refuse. It’s not long before they hear strange sounds in the house and realize the game’s stakes are real.

I have a high tolerance for bad dialogue—it comes with being a life-long horror fan—but “Uncanny Annie” really grates even on that level. The characters here are either yelling about what the game wants them to do or revealing the secrets unearthed by it, and none of it sounds remotely genuine. I’m not expecting too much depth in a movie like this, but these people are so one-note that you start to root for Annie. At least she’s got some personality.

Perhaps worst of all, "Uncanny Annie" is as visually flat as anything to date in the “Into the Dark” series. This is a collection of features that has been remarkably disappointing in terms of visual language—it’s hard to think of too many images over the course of now-13 films—but this one is a new low, often looking like a high school production in terms of design. The Blumhouse people changed the industry by making very profitable films with incredibly low budgets, and they often did so through a hook or concept. “Horror Jumanji” seems perfect for them—easy to keep the budget down and a concept that’s simple to convey. But even for Blumhouse, the films that have stood out have imagery and characters that linger. It’s impossible for a horror movie to haunt you if its creators can’t devise a single image or character worth remembering. 

The new Bollywood action-adventure “War” is probably only for fans of marquee-topping actors Hrithik Roshan and Tiger Shroff, the former of whom stars in the goony but likable superhero series “Krrish” and the latter of whom will star in an upcoming, officially licensed Indian Rambo remake. Stylistically, “War” is Maximum Masala, and maybe features more tonal shifts and berserk plot twists and convolutions than even established Indian film buffs can handle.

“War” features: a couple of good-enough musical numbers; “Top Gun”-levels of homoeroticism, intended or otherwise; way too much who-is-the-mole intrigue; a superfluous romantic sub-plot that dove-tails with a random Christmas scene involving a cute widdle kid; an entertaining motorcycle chase where the two dueling stars link arms and spin around like computer-graphics-enhanced dervishes; an endearingly sappy plot tangent involving the mother of Shroff’s character; and a show-stopping church-set hammer fight that follows a sports-car chase across a frozen river. Many muscle shirts, computer-graphics artists, and wind machines were put to great and terrible use on this movie. Thankfully, established Desi/Bollywood fans may find that “War” rewards more than it tests their patience (barely, but still). 

Roshan and Shroff play Kabir and Khalid, respectively, two smoldering Indian anti-terrorist spies who are out to nab evil international arms dealer/terrorist Rizwan Ilyasi (Sanjeev Vasta), who looks weirdly like Geoffrey Rush cosplaying as Fran Leibowitz, dressed as he in red circular-framed glasses, cream-colored khakis, and white pinstriped jacket. But before Kabir and Khalid set off to catch Vasta’s flamboyant-looking, but barely-developed baddie, the two leads take a while to size each other up. Which makes sense since “War” is basically structured like a bonkers “Marvel Team-Up” jam session, only starring two of Bollywood’s biggest contemporary stars instead of Spider-Man and Ben Grimm. 

Kabir doesn’t want to work with Khalid, not even after a (genuinely fun) establishing action scene where Khalid disarms a room full of drug-dealers in what looks like one long take. A pair of sudsy reasons are given for Kabir’s on sight enmity—Khalid’s dad betrayed his country! Also: Khalid has bad peripheral vision!—but these are obviously just excuses to get Roshan and Shroff to give each other sexy looks, declare their love for India, and dance together (it’s an okay dance number, mind you, but both stars have done better).

The same is basically true about, oh, all of the immaterial plot. Two handsome leading men, both of whom amass bloody scars across their chiseled cheek bones and jawlines, must work together despite their mutual fear of betrayal. Never mind Kabir’s hetero-romantic sub-plot with single mom Naina (Vaani Kapoor), a civilian asset who becomes reluctantly involved with Kabir’s plan to catch Ilyasi; Kabir and Naina’s romance is tellingly only emphasized at the start of the film’s post-intermission second half. “War” frequently promises and sometimes delivers a series of over-the-top confrontations between Roshan and Shroff, the latter of whom goes to weird lengths to make Roshan seem like the sturdier of the two stars (Shroff pouts a lot, is all I’ll say). 

Fans of Roshan and Shroff will probably flock to “War” for a handful of fun, gonzo set pieces that are immodestly dispersed throughout a litany of densely over-written, meagerly thought-through dialogue scenes. Both types of scenes can be fun. I’m rather partial to a later scene where Kabir retro-actively explains, through a series of flashbacks, the underlying method to his investigation’s maddening trajectory. So while the “four invisible chess pieces” metaphor that Kabir uses to both explain and applaud himself is gibberish, the montage that’s used to illustrate Kabir’s insane plan is as dynamic and goofy as the explanatory kicker at the end of a satisfyingly pulpy whodunit. If you’re going to “War,” you should probably go expecting some high-toned nonsense. 

“War” works best when it’s a Michael Bay-goes-Bollywood take on the “Mission: Impossible” films. What makes this a dicey proposition (for some): there’s a lot more “Mission: Impossible II”—and the “Heroic Bloodshed” spirit of John Woo, that sequel’s director—in this movie than I suspect many readers will care for. An out-of-left field bungee-jumping scene ends with one hero nervously walking away from oncoming cops after the other guy swings around a bridge and swan-dives into the water below. This scene is nutty, and not altogether well-made, but its creators’ dedication to flamboyant excess will be appreciated by fans.

My only warning for those who are interested in “War”: don’t go in expecting a smooth ride. There’s too much narrative padding and only some of it is the good kind of silly. There have been crazier Indian action movies this year (“Saaho” being the most recent) and more effective spy-thrillers, too (“India’s Most Wanted,” of all things). But “War” is satisfying for what it is: a star vehicle that’s too weird to be dismissed, and too plodding to completely work.

“Harpoon”: The title is both a noun and a verb, the promise of excitement and the threat of betrayal. It also represents a bit of a running gag in writer/director Rob Grant’s pitch-black comedy, as the weapon in question during the film’s fateful yacht trip is actually a spear gun, and not a harpoon at all.

That kind of playful bait-and-switch is emblematic of Grant’s approach throughout his zippy film. You think you know who the players are, how their relationships work and what they want from each other. But Grant keeps us on our toes the longer he leaves his characters stranded on the high seas, and he’s constantly using his confined space in inspired ways.

“Harpoon” begins life on dry land, though, as it introduces its three key figures. Jonah (Munro Chambers) and Richard (Christopher Gray) are best friends, although they couldn’t be more different. Jonah is an average-looking, middle-class sad sack who’s in the process of packing up his parents’ house after their deaths. Richard is a rich, pretty-boy hothead who’s frantically speeding over to that house to confront Jonah with some jealous accusations. In between them is Sasha (Emily Tyra), Richard’s beautiful and elegant girlfriend who also functions as a mother figure to Jonah. She’s both the disruptor and the peacemaker. They’ve all settled into their assigned roles in this dysfunctional triangle, but that bond is about to be tested.

The three go out on Richard’s yacht for a day trip off the Atlantic coast, with plans to scatter the ashes of Jonah’s parents and try out the gift Jonah and Sasha have gotten Richard as a birthday surprise: Think of it as Chekhov’s Spear Gun. It’s a seemingly idyllic day with the sun shimmering on the water, a light breeze in the air, a cooler full of beer and not another boat around as far as the eye can see. But then one bad thing happens, then another, then another. Eventually, several days have passed with the hope of rescue drifting further away. Tensions flare, secrets emerge and long-held resentments bubble up and boil over.

Grant subtly and seamlessly shifts tone from darkly funny to just plain dark, as the situation at sea grows increasingly dire. He strikes a tone of general bemusement off the top with the use of narration from Brett Gelman, who snarkily postulates about the nature of friendship and makes meta references to the movie’s chapter title cards. But the sly sense of fun that marks the movie’s start gives way to paranoia and gore until “Harpoon” ultimately morphs into a straight-up horror flick. Some sequences are so exquisitely gnarly, you’ll have to watch them through splayed fingers—but then they’re bookended by gallows humor to break the tension.

Within this tight space, the three actors get plenty of room to explore their characters’ ever-evolving natures. We think we know these people—hell, they think they know themselves and each other—until they eventually reveal their true intentions. Chambers, Gray and Tyra do a lot with a little; this is essentially a play, on film, on a boat. But all the actors get to enjoy giant arcs within a finite setting. Gray can be chilling, his handsome features giving way to ugly impulses. Chambers is wily and increasingly unnerving as he reveals Jonah’s desperation. And Tyra ably balances the challenge of being the voice of reason and sanity even as Sasha’s own transgressions come shockingly to light.

You may realize there’s not much to “Harpoon” as it sails off into the sunset, but that’s OK. This is one of those movies where the journey truly is the destination.

"Memory: The Origins of Alien" is one of the best documentaries about a single film that I've seen. It is reductive to call it a "making-of" documentary, because the phrase conjures images of the weakest of those supplements that used to appear on DVDs—the ones where filmmakers and actors sat in chairs in front of a poster for the movie, calling each other geniuses. In contrast, while this movie by Alexandre O. Philippe does go in-depth about how Ridley Scott made the original 1979 sci-fi/horror classic, this is not a collection of fawning, repetitious war stories. It has a complex and rigorously argued set of theses that all come together at the end. And it weaves every detail—whether provided by an on-camera witness, a document, a drawing, a painting or a photograph—around that set of intertwined arguments, which are too complex to explain in this review, but come across powerfully by the time the credits roll. 

It's not a making-of documentary, it's a thinking-of documentary. Like a mesmerizing presentation by a teacher who knows their stuff, watching "Memory" is nearly as intellectually stimulating as re-watching the work that inspired it, because you get to see arguments being introduced, fortified with evidence, then set up to segue into other, separate-but-related arguments, so seamlessly that the transition seems invisible and inevitable. 

It's all heading toward an extended consideration of that still-shocking dinner table scene, when the baby xenomorph bursts out of John Hurt's infected crewmember Kane. Both the story of "Alien" and the documentary about "Alien" observe a monstrous seed that was implanted inside of someone and gestated until it was ready to come out. The monstrous seed of “Memory” is the movie itself, or aspects of the movie. It has many mothers and fathers, all of whom help nurture it. 

Phillippe is one of the great practitioners of what might be called the feature-length video essay, a format that uses new and old interview footage (including bits that appeared on home video editions of "Alien") as scaffolding to support a series of arguments about what a film is doing and how it's doing it. This is not a "how did they make it" film. It's about why they made it the way they did. It's surely no coincidence that his last film, "78/52: Hitchcock's Shower Scene," focuses on the last groundbreaking movie shock prior to the "Alien" chest-burster. Both films are about medium-altering moments of horrendous violence that have implications beyond "isn't this scary/gross." Both place their scenes in context, not just within a particular film and its genre, but within decades of national and international history, and millennia of thought.

To that end, the film gathers marvelous, you-are-there details, such as costar Veronica Cartwright recalling the awful smell that greeted the actors when they arrived on the set on that day, due to the fact that Hurt's prosthetic chest cavity had been stuffed with offal that had putrefied beneath the lights. And there are countless, character-revealing throw-aways—such as the tidbits that co-writer Dan O'Bannon, was inspired to invent the story of "Alien" because he was obsessed with insects on the farm where he grew up as a poor boy in Missouri while suffering from Crohn's disease, a chronic gastrointestinal disorder that finally killed him. (O'Bannon's wife Anne is movie's single best source, practically our sherpa through the decades.)

Material such as this is rich enough to form the center of a satisfying documentary on its own. But Phillippe goes further, encouraging participants in the production as well as present-day buffs, scholars, and mythology aficionados (including actor Tom Skerritt, genre film master Roger Corman, film journalist Axelle Caroline, genre movie expert Clarke Wolfe, and TCM host Ben Mankiewicz) to go beyond "Alien" and the works it inspired, and think about where all the influences and allusions came from—not just in terms of film history, or even art history or literature, but humanity itself: our needs and fears, dreams and nightmares. 

At various points, the story, direction, and production design of "Alien" are convincingly tied to mythology, religion, dream analysis, then-current developments in politics, the long history of colonialism (which links "Alien" to another 1979 blockbuster, "Apocalypse Now," both of which acknowledge the fiction of Joseph Conrad) and Egyptian art and architecture. H.R. Giger, who designed the creatures and planet where the Nostromo crew discovers them, was hugely inspired by the latter; so were Alexandre Jodorowsky, whose aborted 1970s adaptation of "Dune" brought together O'Bannon and Giger. Right up until production started, the astronauts were supposed to find the egg chamber in an ancient city oriented around a set of pyramids—a notion that would find its way into Scott's "Alien: Covenant" decades later. (The city was replaced with a spaceship in the 1979 film for budgetary reasons. But decades later, the so-called "space jockey" would become the Engineers in "Prometheus"—a film which, like "Covenant," doubles as Ridley Scott's consideration of his role as a kind of Dr. Frankenstein in two genres, horror and science fiction.)

Philippe's direction, far more imaginative than the norm in a movie about moviemaking, is very much in the spirit of Scott's original vision for "Alien." Every detail of cinematography and design dovetails with the images and stories being presented, from the chiaroscuro lighting and black backgrounds that make the witnesses' recollections seem to be occurring in dream space, to the way Philippe plays previously-seen snippets of interview footage on squarish monitors embedded in control panels that look like items on the bridge of the Nostromo. 

Every detail, whether journalistic or aesthetic, is building towards an extended consideration of the "birth" scene at the dinner table. When it arrives, Philippe finds a way to draw everything together into a unified statement that is dazzling its clarity as well as its cleverness. This is a movie about impregnation, gestation, birth, and transformation. That's why it doesn't go through the plot of "Alien" chronologically, but instead weaves its strands around the idea of ancient, terrifying forces gathering power over many centuries, concentrating themselves in the minds of all of the people who worked on this movie, then exploding into the world. 

You won't see a better example of pure cinematic storytelling this year than "The Parts You Lose," an engrossing thriller about a young boy named Wesley (Danny Murphy) who befriends an injured criminal in hiding. Most of the movie is conveyed through his point of view, which is especially fitting because the central character is hearing-impaired. Wesley is a careful, thoughtful observer of the world around him, and this movie challenges us to look as closely as he does. Every frame is filled with significant, illuminating details.  

Many movies use striking images or close-ups of actors to help us see powerful performances. "The Parts You Lose" has all of that, but always in service of the story, much of it subtly filmed from Wesley's height and perspective. It also makes the most of the setting, a remote, hardscrabble small town in frigid, mid-winter North Dakota (filmed in Canada). There is snow everywhere, and Wesley's red knit cap stands out in the muted palette of neutral-toned overcoats and bare-limbed trees.

The first time Wesley sees the wanted man (Aaron Paul), he is lying motionless in the snow, an ominous dark blob in vast whiteness that would be powerful as an abstract image on the wall of a museum. Before we can wonder if he is still alive, he moves, and it happens to be exactly the form of communication best suited for Wesley to comprehend. He puts a finger to his lips to convey silence, a form of communication Wesley is very good at.  

As with Pip in "Great Expectations" and the children in "Whistle Down the Wind" and "Mud," the relationship between those who are vulnerable due to their youth and lack of experience and adults with a history of volatility and violence brings out our most protective instincts, and sometimes those of the criminals as well. Wesley helps the man who is hiding out, and the man helps Wesley as well, giving him advice about how to handle the bully who has been preying on him at school, and respecting him enough to beat him in checkers until he learns to do better. 

It is significant that Ronnie's nickname for his son is "Tiger," a name that says more about what Ronnie wants his son to be than about who he is. While Wesley's mother (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) uses sign language to talk to Wesley, Ronnie refuses. In one telling scene, Ronnie glances at a colleague at the auto shop teaching his son about Wesley's age about the different kinds of wrenches. For Ronnie, Wesley's disability seems to him to be just one more unfairness in his own life. 

Over the course of the film, three men tell Wesley scary stories to teach him something. The man in hiding describes what he did when a tiger bit off his finger. The cop who is looking for the man in hiding tells Wesley about a woman who befriended a mountain lion only to learn too late that it could not be tamed. And Wesley's father, Ronnie (Scoot McNairy), tells his son a story about his own father. Wesley is at the age when boys consider what it means to be a man, and we see him evaluating the depictions of masculinity in the stories and in the men who tell them. 

We also see the man in hiding consider what it means to be a father when he warms to Wesley. Wesley briefly represents the daughter he never sees, the boy he once was, and, maybe, a possible future where he could matter to someone.

Newcomer Murphy, who is Deaf, gives a performance filled with wonder, while trying to hide the feelings showing on his face. Winstead continues to be one of the most gifted actors on screen. Here, as Wesley's warmly sympathetic mother, she acts in what are essentially three different languages: ordinary spoken English, fluid and expressive sign, and the coded terms she uses for trying to translate Ronnie's rough and volatile moods into less scary terms for the children. The difference between what she knows and what she wants the children to see is painfully clear. 

Screenwriter Darren Lemke has shown a gift for stories about young characters with "Shazam!" and the underrated "Jack the Giant Killer." And director Christopher Cantwell ("Halt and Catch Fire") makes an impressive feature film debut with this quiet gem of a film. It left me looking forward to what he will do next.

Based on a novella by Stephen King and Joe Hill, Netflix’s “In the Tall Grass” is a fascinating push and pull between a visually striking director and a sometimes-leaden screenwriter, who just happen to be the same person. Vincenzo Natali (“Splice”) wrote and directed this adaptation, and he brings a striking sense of space and visual poetry that feels influenced by his excellent work on shows like “Hannibal” and “American Gods,” but the characters and dialogue often betray the overall mood of the piece. This should be a haunting, claustrophobic nightmare, but Natali over-complicates the source material—just like his characters, our reasons for investing in what happens next get lost in the fields.

The concept for “In the Tall Grass” is one of those wonderfully vicious little things that must have popped Stephen King up in the middle of the night, eager to write it down. A brother and sister named Cal (Avery Whitted) and Becky (Laysla De Oliveira) are driving across country when they stop near a remote church across from a massive field of tall grass. Through the open window, they hear something startling—the sound of a boy crying for help. He’s lost in the grass and can’t find his way out. After some back and forth, Cal and Becky walk into the field to find him, and are quickly lost themselves, but in a way, that doesn’t seem possible. Even though neither is moving, their voices seem to get closer than farther away. In the film’s best moment, they both jump to see where they are in relation to one another, seeing that they’re only about ten feet apart. They jump again and they’re now hundreds of feet apart. They are somehow stuck in a moving maze. Then things get even weirder.

Cal and Becky come across the boy, whose name is Tobin (Will Buie Jr.), and he is unsettling to say the least. When he meets Cal, he’s carrying a dead bird, noting that the grass doesn’t move the dead things. That's a nasty bit of foreshadowing, kid. Tobin may be a little disturbing but he’s nothing compared to his dad, Ross (Patrick Wilson), who seems like the kind of person one shouldn’t trust or follow in any situation. Has the grass driven him insane? Or was he that way before? We will also eventually meet Tobin’s mom (Rachel Wilson) and even another young man named Travis (Harrison Gilbertson) in a film with a very limited cast and almost only one setting that wouldn’t seem like a great one for a horror flick: a field of grass.

The early scenes of “In the Tall Grass” are its most effective, such as the aforementioned jumping scene and the panic that sets in when Cal and Becky realize there’s no way out of their predicament. Imagine being caught in a maze that’s always moving and changing. I wish Natali had spent more time in this phase of his story, allowing the true horror of the dynamic to seep into our bones. Would you just curl up and cry? And how would you respond if you found someone in the grass like Ross, someone who sets off all alarm bells in terms of trust but could be your only salvation? Natali moves too quickly from the atmospheric dread of Cal and Becky’s situation to, without spoiling anything, the more "unusual" aspects of what’s going on in the field, including a rock that may have special powers. He even introduces a bit of temporal displacement to the source material that feels unnecessary. It’s as if everyone involved thought the story needed more than it really does to be effective.

Having said that, there is more visually going on with Natali’s film than the vast majority of streaming originals we’ve seen lately, most of which seem designed to be watched on a phone or out of the corner of your eye while you’re playing with a phone. “Hannibal” was a show that often played with haunting images of threatening cycles of nature, and there’s some of that DNA in the black mud and undulating waves of green in Natali’s film (he directed six episodes of that NBC show). If “In the Tall Grass” didn’t have someone with Natali’s striking visual sense, it could have been a complete disaster.

Horror has a long history of using the natural world as its enemy. “In the Tall Grass” is at its best when it follows this tradition. We all know what it’s like to be lost, far from home and safety, but what if even the traditional rules of direction were completely haphazard? As it gets less relatable, it gets less interesting, but there’s still Wilson’s all-in performance and Natali’s craftsmanship to keep us engaged, stuck in the grass, praying for a way out. 

The tight little coming-of-age thriller “Low Tide” often feels like a slow-motion car crash. From very early on, we know this can only end in tragedy, and it becomes a matter of trying to figure out exactly from which direction it will come. Will it be greed, anger, or plain old stupidity that breaks up the quartet at the center of Kevin McMullin’s film? This is an old-fashioned hybrid of a thriller and a coming-of-age narrative that explodes when a fortune gets dropped into it. Think of it as an adolescent “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” with echoes of '80s adventure classics like "The Goonies" and "Stand by Me." 

Alan (Keean Johnson), Red (Alex Neustaedter), and Zmitty (Daniel Zolghadri) live day to day down the Jersey shore. Their backgrounds are left somewhat vague, but one gets the impression that blue-collar, possibly-single parents are a part of the picture. Both to alleviate boredom and so they can get some of the creature comforts life has denied them, the trio performs routine burglaries, nabbing a few things from the McMansions down the shore. In the one that opens the film, Smitty is caught on a second floor when the owners come home, and he’s forced to jump to the patio below, injuring himself pretty badly. This means that the guys will need a new lookout, which brings Alan’s brother Peter (Jaeden Martell of “Midnight Special”) into the gang. Is this the decision that will be their undoing?

Early on, McMullin sketches character details as a form of foreshadowing. There’s a great scene in which a group of preppie-looking kids pull up to near where the gang is sitting. The rich kids are showing off, playing their music loudly. Red's eyes look red with jealousy and anger. He flashes a knife, just enough so the driver can see it. Not only is Red territorial, but he’s probably a little dangerous. In the same group is a young lady named Mary (Kristine Froseth), who catches Alan’s eye. In one scene, without too much overly expository dialogue, we have easily delineated between Alan and Red – the lover and the fighter. When the boys find some literal treasure as a result of their next job, we can see where the cracks will form before they do.

“Low Tide” is filled with small decisions that work. It could have been melodramatic nonsense in the wrong hands, but McMullin has a subtle, clever touch—I particularly loved a late scene in which one of the boys is trying to shake down the others and caps his demands with a long sip on a juice box, reminding us these wannabe men are still children. He also works very well with actors, giving all four of his young men a chance to shine while also using Shea Whigham as a local cop. Neustaedter is menacing in just the right measure, Zolghadri looks right on the verge of making a bad decision at all moments, and Johnson has a warm charisma that fits the role. And then there’s Martell, who anchors the film without stealing focus from his supporting actors. 

There are some minor pacing issues that hold back “Low Tide”—for a film that seems comfortable taking its time for an hour, it feels like it then rushes to the ending—but this is a confident debut that seems like a film we’ll be looking back at it in just a few years as an early work of at least one major acting talent. It gives a critic that feeling they had the first time they saw “Stand by Me,” certain that this was a young cast that we’d still know when they got old. Like that film, this is a story of friendship and youth, although one tinged with the sense that we know adulthood often comes early through tragedy.

Although buried near the end of this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, the premiere of Noah Hawley’s dreadful “Lucy in the Sky” could not be hidden from curious moviegoers and reluctant critics on assignment. Based on the story of Lisa Nowak, Hawley’s movie was sold as a loose retelling of the sensational mid-aughts crime story about an astronaut who tried to kidnap another NASA colleague at the Orlando airport (not far from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida) after an affair with a different astronaut soured. What Hawley has delivered is a garden variety bad movie, proving the TV wunderkind of “Fargo” and “Legion” was not quite ready for the big screen. 

The movie opens with Lucy Cola (Natalie Portman), yes, quite literally in the sky in mid-mission. Already, she seems a little spacey, someone prone to staring off into some great distance only she can see. However, the rest of the crew has work to do, and the audience has a movie to see. She’s reeled back in but can’t shake the starstruck feeling of being in space. Inexplicably, Hawley uses these revolving environments to change aspect ratios not once but several times throughout the film, from the box-like Instagram friendly choice of 4:4 to even more extended variations of widescreen’s 16:9 ratio. To what end, you might ask? There’s really no purpose for it, other than keep the edges of the screen moving every 10-15 minutes (or less!). Whatever magic cinematographer Polly Morgan (also a “Legion” collaborator of Hawley’s) was trying to capture within the frame goes out the window quickly. We can’t help but stare at the collision of misguided aesthetics and rotten screenwriting. 

The screenplay department is in no better shape than the aspect ratios. Although there’s five credits attached to the script including two story by credits for Brian C. Brown and Elliott DiGuiseppi and three for revisions: Brown, DiGuiseppi and Hawley, the final work clearly needed more hands on deck to save the sinking ship. If the awkwardly handled characterization and dialogue doesn’t get on your nerves, perhaps the clichéd on-the-nose metaphor about butterflies emerging out of cocoons and the sight of rocket taking off as Lucy enjoys an orgasm in the office will. If you need more reasons to cringe, imagine watching John Hamm, here playing Lucy’s love interest Mark, as he watches and re-watches the news broadcast of the Challenger explosion on his TiVo. There’s no narrative reason for this, other than to make the audience feel worse for a guy who had an affair and is now getting stalked by one of his co-workers. Because “Lucy in the Sky” was so astronomically botched by a group of three men, I wonder if a woman might have taken a more empathetic, less campy approach to her story. Although, it’s possible that no one could have saved “Lucy” from itself. 

Despite assembling a reasonably solid cast, there’s no one strong enough to save the film. Portman’s astronaut is little more than a space cadet when she returns home from her mission and there are many moments where she just stares off or gets lost in her thoughts. When she is interacting with others, it’s like watching a toddler protest not getting their way or lying to dodge blame. Thankfully, not all of the women in NASA behave like Lucy, and others like Erin (Zazie Beetz) feel like taking a break from babysitting. Dan Stevens seems to have a little fun as Lucy’s cuckold husband, charmingly oblivious to her affair with Mark. A new character to the story, Blue Iris (Pearl Amanda Dickson), joins Lucy on her unhinged scheme to kidnap Erin, but she’s not so much a character as she is the audience’s moral compass, on hand to look outraged and puzzled by her aunt’s incoherent plans. Armed with a few choice bawdy one-liners, Lucy’s mom (Ellen Burstyn) is quite the scene-stealer and earns some of the movie’s few intentional laughs. 

There’s a sense of tragedy in Howak’s story that Hawley cannot capture with his metaphor-laden script and slow-tuned rendition of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” Although the film tries to be sympathetic to its heroine, it might actually turn the audience against her. Even though it skips the tale's most lurid detail—that Howak wore diapers to catch her target so not to waste time on pit stops (which the former astronaut denies)—the movie makes her on-screen counterpart a laughingstock, less complicated and more cartoonishly predictable. There’s a point at which this joke stops being funny and turns sad, and it’s very early in its over two hours runtime.

This review was filed from the Toronto International Film Festival on September 18th.

“The Cotton Club Encore” is a reworked version of 1984’s “The Cotton Club” supervised by its director, Francis Ford Coppola. Like his '70s era contemporaries Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, Coppola has taken a shine to fiddling with his earlier films. But unlike Lucas, who added special effects and dissed the Ewoks, or Spielberg, who turned guns into walkie-talkies, Coppola’s modus operandi is adding full sequences back into his re-edited features in the hopes of achieving even more dramatic richness. While I don’t believe he did “Apocalypse Now” any favors with his “Apocalypse Now Redux” versions, “The Cotton Club Encore” is less haphazard and disjointed than the original. It has more character depth as well. Forced to reshape his narrative in 1984 at the behest of Orion Pictures, Coppola has now been given the opportunity to offer audiences in 2019 the film he intended to make.

The troubled production history of “The Cotton Club” is worth seeking out if you are unfamiliar. There were budget overruns, worries on the set, frustrations in the editing room and even murder. The most relevant aspect in terms of this do-over is the studio’s insistence that Coppola remove most of the material that fleshed out his African-American characters. They also insisted that this hybrid of gangster movie and musicals had too many elements of the latter which, considering that most of the musical numbers take place in the Cotton Club of the title, also meant “too much Black people stuff.” The shooting script by Coppola and "Ironweed" writer William Kennedy supposedly balanced the stories of its two lead characters, cornet player Dixie Dwyer (Richard Gere) and hoofer Sandman Williams (Gregory Hines). The final product spent the majority of its runtime stuck in Dixie’s derivative and dreary gangster storyline. Even in its butchered state, “The Cotton Club” played like an intriguing, gorgeously shot and designed musical that kept getting rudely interrupted by a crappy mobster movie.

Though it does a good job of recalibrating Sandman’s story, “The Cotton Club Encore” exacerbates the musical vs. mobster schism with its additions. Coppola restores three musical numbers in their entirety and extends a few more (the visual quality changes in one so drastically that you can see where the new material was inserted). “Encore” gives us more of the tap duet between Sandman and his brother Clay (Hines’ real-life brother and dance partner, Maurice Hines) and, in a heart-cracking act of sweet charity, allows Gwen Verdon (who plays Dixie’s mother) a few more precious seconds of hoofing in the film’s fantasy-tinged final scene. "227"'s Jackée Harry gets a slinky comic number that steals the movie. Sandman’s wooing of beautiful singer Lila Rose (a stunning Lonette McKee) is now complemented by him singing Fats Waller’s “Tall, Tan and Terrific.” And Lila Rose croons a haunting version of Lena Horne’s and Ethel Waters’ signature song, “Stormy Weather.” Every single sonic moment Coppola returns to us is a show-stopping cause for celebration.

The opening scene (and the opening credits music by John Barry) is different here as well. The film now begins with the Cotton Club’s doorman (Woody Strode) turning away a woman he believes to be “colored.” She protests, and is still turned away. It’s a short scene, but it immediately puts focus on the Cotton Club and the ironic racism contained within it: the only way a Black person could get in the place is if they were performing there. The audience was entirely and unapologetically White. The club’s owner Owney Madden (Bob Hoskins) aims to keep it that way, but like Coppola, he has an eye for musical talent and basks in watching his musicians ply their trade.

Alas, that blasted mob story keeps getting in the way. Madden’s a part of it, to be sure, but at least he’s a memorable character. Early on, dishwater-dull Dixie saves the life of Dutch Schultz (James Remar), which puts him in the Dutchman’s good graces and on his payroll. Dixie’s hothead brother Vincent (Nicolas Cage, bonkers as usual) uses nepotism to also get hired by Dutch, but he has a far more violent job than his big brother. Dixie’s job is to keep Dutch’s moll Vera (Diane Lane) entertained. You can easily predict that Dixie and Vera will be dancing the Horizontal Hokey Pokey before too long. Between this, “Billy Bathgate” and a few other films I can name, I began to wonder if Dutch Schultz is the most cuckolded gangster in the history of cinema.

But I digress. Madden tries futilely to keep the peace between the warring criminal factions divvying up Harlem. In addition to Schultz, there’s Schultz’s nemesis Flynn (John P. Ryan) and Black crime lord Bumpy Johnson (Laurence Fishburne, 13 years before he’d revisit the character in “Hoodlum”). Bumpy gets more screen time in “Encore” but that’s the only new thing in a story you’ve seen countless times. To Coppola’s credit, he brings his trademark unflinching gaze to the occasional outbursts of violence. An early knife murder is so nasty that the chandelier becomes splattered with dripping blood. The superb cross-cutting of a gangland execution with Sandman furiously tapping a solo number (shades of the baptism in “The Godfather”) is the one moment when both halves of this story mesh together flawlessly, with machine gun fire waging a fierce battle with Hines’ furious feet.

Despite fleshing out Sandman and Lila’s romance to carry equal weight with Dixie and Vera’s, the most romantic couple in both iterations of “The Cotton Club” is Madden and his right-hand henchman and lover Frenchy, played by the absolutely magnificent Fred Gwynne. Gwynne towers over Hoskins to the point where they look like Mutt and Jeff, and his effortless deadpan bounces off his more boisterous co-star. Their argument about a ransom payment after Frenchy gets kidnapped is the most tender moment in the film. When Madden yells that he would have paid ten times as much as he did for Frenchy’s safe return, Hoskins makes you feel his worry deep down in your soul.

“The Cotton Club Encore” has 27 added minutes and 13 minutes excised from the original cut. One of the removed moments I missed was a scene with Diane Venora as Gloria Swanson (scenes where Fanny Brice and James Cagney appear are also gone). Swanson tells Dixie he oughta be in pictures, though to be honest, Gere is so flat here that you don’t want to believe her. Though he gets an onscreen credit for playing his impressive cornet solos, the normally reliable Gere can’t make Dixie work as a leading man or as a tough guy. Lane received a nomination from the reviled Razzie association, but she’s not at all bad here. The same can’t be said for Remar, whose attempts to evoke Edward G. Robinson are hard to watch. The way he holds his mouth is reminiscent of Robinson, but he has little of Eddie G’s talented charm and even less of his menace.

It’s unfortunate that the late Hines didn’t live long enough to see his role restored to its original glory, but “The Cotton Club Encore” reminds us how much of a triple threat he was. He could sing, he could act and he damn sure could dance. The film also serves as a reminder of Lonette McKee’s vocal prowess and onscreen presence. I wish the screenplay had dug deeper into her character’s feelings on passing for White, but I loved the answer she gave when asked why she would do such a thing. “Because I can,” she says. Though it’s still not entirely successful, I’m glad this version exists. Coppola’s restoration has turned a hot mess into a noble failure. 

This review was filed from the New York Film Festival.

Renee Zellweger takes on the iconic role of singer/actress Judy Garland in "Judy," directed by Rupert Goold. Set 30 years after starring in "The Wizard of Oz," when the spotlight of her stardom has dimmed, Judy arrives in London in a last ditch attempt to revive her career and finances to perform sold-out shows at the Talk of the Town nightclub. Her troubled past (shown in flashbacks to her childhood spent in the MGM studio system) takes its toll emotionally, and the fragile singer struggles to be back in front of an audience. Film journalist Katherine Tulich spoke to Renee Zellweger for this video interview.

The first thing you notice is the pain. Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) looks and sounds like he’s in a deep level of discomfort at all times. His frame is emaciated and gnarled, and that’s not taking into account the uncontrollable nervous cackle tic brought on by a neurological condition, one that excruciatingly wheezes out as he attempts to suppress it. Moreover, he looks like he hasn’t had a good day in his life: he walks home in a slow, downward-gazing shuffle, and he forces his face into an unnerving smile that only highlights his obvious malaise. As a party clown and aspiring comedian, he attempts to find ways to bring joy to the world, but mostly he makes others uncomfortable and makes things worse for himself, and that’s before the funding for his much-needed medication and therapy is cut. The question is not whether Arthur is destined for destruction, but whether it will be implosive or explosive. 

Few performers are as committed to portraying broken people and lost souls; fewer still are more willing to use their talents for difficult, potentially alienating projects (“Inherent Vice,” “You Were Never Really Here”) or as able to pull off physical and emotional high-wire acts as routinely as he does. Phoenix has more than earned the raves he’s receiving for “Joker,” a film that actively invites comparisons to “The King of Comedy” and “Taxi Driver” but falls closer to being his “Cape Fear.” It’s a broader, almost cartoonish variation on his type of broken man that’s nonetheless both convincing and utterly riveting to behold (he unfortunately does not have a talent on the level of Martin Scorsese, or even a passable imitator, to back him up). One hopes that the actor’s next performance will cut as close to the bone without requiring him to become skin and bones again. Regardless, it’ll join a rich collection of characters, like the following five performances, who’ve experienced some profound level of hurt and are trying to connect to someone or something.

1995: “To Die For”

Joaquin Phoenix was born in Puerto Rico to the Bottom family, which renamed itself Phoenix after leaving the Children of God religious cult and moving back to the U.S. mainland. After initially earning income by performing on the streets, Joaquin and his four siblings were discovered by a top Hollywood agent and began their acting careers. Joaquin, who briefly changed his name to “Leaf” to fit in with his nature-named siblings, had a few notable roles as a child actor, most notably as Dianne Wiest’s sensitive son in Ron Howard’s “Parenthood” (seen here having his heart broken by his father). He took some time away from acting as his older brother, the gifted young actor River Phoenix, gained greater acclaim for performances in films such as “My Own Private Idaho” and “Dogfight” before tragically dying of a drug overdose at the age of 23 (Joaquin, who was only 19, was the one who called the ambulance).

When Joaquin Phoenix did return to the screen in 1995’s “To Die For” (with River’s “My Own Private Idaho” director Gus Van Sant), he made an immediate impression as Jimmy Emmett, one of three directionless teenagers convinced by sociopathic aspiring broadcast journalist Suzanne Stone Maretto (Nicole Kidman, brilliant) to murder her husband (Matt Dillon). As the one who feels an immediate, intense emotional and sexual attraction to Suzanne, Phoenix plays Jimmy as someone who’s emotionally expressive and earnest while being verbally inarticulate, unintelligent. A poor kid, he struggles to find the right words to describe what separates Suzanne from everyone around him, and from most other rich people: “She just looks ... clean.” When Suzanne calls him “James” rather than “Jimmy,” he freezes; we don’t have to wait for him to say that nobody ever called him that before, as he does in his prison interview later. It’s written on his face, in a look in his eyes that says, “maybe I’m not just a dumb kid to her.” 

He is, and an easily manipulated one. The most heartbreaking thing about Phoenix’s performance in “To Die For” is that he plays someone who’s never quite able to figure out exactly what’s happening to him. When we see his face register that something’s not quite right about her immediate shift to joy after telling him (falsely) about her husband’s abusiveness, his smile fading, it’s immediately followed by him forcing himself back into that smile. When she asks him (mid-blowjob) if he understands why he has to get a gun, there’s a total lack of comprehension on his face as he says, “I guess so.” When committing the crime, he looks tortured, with a dim recognition on his face that what he’s been told about Dillon’s mean-temperedness doesn’t square with the mild-mannered guy he’s about to kill. When he’s been caught and it’s explained to him what happened, he breaks down, insisting that “it wasn’t like that ... we were in love.” For a brief moment, he found someone who made him feel like he wasn’t alone and that he wasn’t just white trash. Even at the end, he can’t bring himself to realize that he was just being used; all he can say is that he misses his friends.

2008: “Two Lovers”

If “To Die For” began Phoenix’s career properly, a trio of films in 2000 made him a star. He gained the most acclaim (including an Oscar nomination) for Ridley Scott’s “Gladiator,” in which he gives a spectacularly hammy performance as the perverted, petulant Emperor Commodus; while he’s noticeably more theatrical here than in his later work, Phoenix manages to make the character both hilariously off-putting and pitiable, always radiating a need to be adored by his father, his sister and his subjects. Phoenix also co-starred in Philip Kaufman’s “Quills,” though the purple prose of the script and overacting of lead Geoffrey Rush ultimately get the best of him there. 

But it was the least-heralded (initially) of the films that year that proved to be the most important. James Gray’s “The Yards” was shot in 1998 but not released until 2000, and then only barely, thanks to the meddling of mogul/serial predator Harvey Weinstein. The film is nevertheless remarkable, and Phoenix impresses as Willie, making his journey from small-time criminal who cares deeply for his friends and family to the one responsible for their pain wholly tragic. Gray would become the key collaborator of Phoenix’s early career, teaming up again in 2007 for the even-better “We Own the Night.” That film serves as the true introduction to the actor Phoenix is today, playing a bigger-than-life character while making his every gesture (his dismissive defense mechanism shrugs and scoffs) feel naturalistic, introducing him as the life of the party before he gradually forces himself into a box, regaining a family but losing his independence and spirit. Phoenix worked with Gray again a year later in the masterpiece “Two Lovers,” giving one of his best performances as a man who’s been so badly hurt that he yearns for a complete break from the world he knows, no matter the consequences. 

Phoenix’s Leonard Kraditor is introduced from behind, slumping in a way that suggests total defeat even before his abortive suicide attempt; it wasn’t his first. He’s clearly wounded and a little odd, muttering and stuttering and trying not to look directly at anyone, but there’s something endearing about his vulnerability and honesty when he tells Sandra (Vinessa Shaw) that his fiancée left him after learning they both possess a gene that would have led to their children dying young; he’s even charming, gently ribbing Sandra when she says her favorite movie is “The Sound of Music” (“underrated”). But as much as their parents (potential business partners in the Jewish community in Brooklyn) try to push them together, and as much as Sandra is clearly attracted to him, Leonard gravitates toward Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow, never better), a troubled neighbor having an affair with a married man. It’s equally funny and a bit heartbreaking watching Leonard try so hard to both impress her and seem like he’s not trying too hard, whether he’s breaking into a dorky white guy’s rap to entertain her friends or, when she’s not paying attention to him during a dinner, swaying to the side and looking away to “casually” exclaim that he’s got a girlfriend.

What’s devastating about “Two Lovers” is that we see both a small story of a man processing grief and pain and a much larger one of someone torn between two worlds (Gray’s specialty), yearning for something more while being pulled back to the familiar. There’s nothing wrong, per se, about Sandra, and his affection for her feels real, to some extent: if nothing else, you can tell that he’s sensitive to her feelings, that he wants to be wanted, and he likes that she likes him so much. But Michelle represents something new for him—a potential escape—and he yearns for someone who might be able to understand his pain. In each scene where he plays the good listener to her, you can see both genuine sensitivity to her problems and eagerness to be noticed. When he confesses his love, we see much of it from behind him, everything that’s been bottled up in him for years manifesting in his back and arms as he bobs back and forth and his head cranes down, years’ worth of shame and pain spilling out. That he briefly seems like he’s found the right person but has to break the hearts of his girlfriend and family is gut-wrenching, his goodbye to his mother both overwhelming and freeing. It’s no easier to watch him have his heart broken again, even as it means stability and a whole family that loves him. “Two Lovers” is one of Phoenix’s finest films because it shows a broken man being built back up again, only to find himself still feeling lost no matter how many people who truly care for him are there.

2012: “The Master”

Of course, it’s taken a few years for “Two Lovers” to get the attention it deserved, given that its release was overshadowed by another, lesser film that initially seemed like it might tank his career. Phoenix spent much of the 2000s balancing adventurous projects (Thomas Vinterberg’s misbegotten “It’s All About Love”) with more middling pictures (the Johnny Cash biopic “Walk the Line,” which nevertheless gained him another Oscar nod), blockbusters both original (M. Night Shyamalan’s “Signs” and the grossly underrated “The Village”) and ho-hum (“Ladder 49,” a film that feels like it should star Mark Wahlberg, but somehow doesn’t). He went way out on a limb when he announced during the press tour for “Two Lovers” that he was quitting acting for hip-hop and appeared confused and disheveled on “Late Show with David Letterman.” It ultimately proved to be a stunt for “I’m Still Here,” a mockumentary about fame and an artist losing his way that’s at once an impressive performance, a tedious experiment and an uncomfortable artifact, given the allegations that director (and Phoenix’s then brother-in-law) Casey Affleck sexually harassed two of his collaborators on set. 

Just as the film’s financial failure and overall bad press seemed like it might limit the roles Phoenix would be offered, he was cast as the lead in Paul Thomas Anderson’s “The Master.” It’s difficult to convey just how unexpected and electrifying the role was upon its release, even as it’s become the go-to pick for Phoenix’s best performance and one of the essential films of the 21st century, one that takes the strange post-"I’m Still Here" aura around Phoenix and pushes it to its logical conclusion. As Freddie Quell, a traumatized world War II veteran who seems like he was probably already erratic before the war, Phoenix gives a performance that’s counterintuitively mannered and spontaneous, bestowing Freddie several tics that nevertheless feel like a natural extension of his being—the hunched posture that makes him look like a buzzard, a permanent sneer that closes one side of his mouth and accentuates Phoenix’s own scar, and a feral jerkiness that seems to be the gesticulation of a man who acts without thinking about what he’s doing. He’s both prone to melancholy and constantly horny, and these things are directly connected to each other; he’s introduced humping a sand sculpture of a woman far past the point where the joke is funny, only to lie down and embrace it in a perfect portrait of loneliness. 

When he meets Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman, also in a career-best performance), he meets a defining figure in his life, one that lays bare his unhappiness and, briefly, seems to find a solution. In the film’s instant-classic processing scene, his emotions are laid bare in close-up: at first, Freddie is loose-limbed and relaxed, answering with laughs and mildly confused lip purses at unimportant questions. On more important ones (“do your past failures bother you?”), his “no's” are very slightly more exaggerated, conveying the thoughts of a man who subconsciously knows that he’s lying to Dodd and himself, but wants it to seem like he doesn't care about the question, someone who is, in fact, concerned with the impression he makes. When he’s given the physical challenge of not blinking (and immediately told he failed), his defenses are broken down, and he becomes less able to filter his remarks. By the third go-around, we see a man forced to be honest with himself about how damaged he is, how inconsequential he feels, how frightened he is that he’ll end up like his psychotic mother, how lost he is without the girl he loved, and how he’s sabotaged his own life. His elation upon unburdening himself sees the actor in a full-body high. He no longer judges Dodd’s strangest, most paranoid questions. It’s potential for a new peace for him.

Or so it would seem. If that brief moment of enlightenment was a high, it’s one he chases for the rest of the film, with doubt gradually creeping into his expression as he listens to Dodd’s sermons and as Dodd’s son states the obvious that he’s making it all up. From that point forward, it’s a battle between dueling impulses, a true believer’s violent need to lash out at any heretics and a doubting man’s deep frustration at what he knows isn’t reaching him anymore. The montage of Freddie being forced to walk back and forth in a room, cut together a more confrontational form of processing, is instructive as we see him trying in earnest to regain that high but lashing out as it doesn’t connect; you see total defeat on his face after yet another failed attempt (“I just don’t understand it”) and him embracing his innate grotesquerie as he grows more frustrated, pressing himself up against a window and punching a wall. By the time his body and mind surrender and he empties himself of emotion as Dodd desires, he doesn’t even believe that Dodd isn’t toying with him at first. Even an embrace is insufficient. He’ll leave Dodd and pursue that girl, only to find that he was far less important to her life than she was to his; he’ll return to Dodd, gaunt and ghostlike, “free to go where you please” but without any sense of victory or purpose. “The Master” moves because it shows a damaged man return back to where he was, totally lost, but without the comfort of ignorance or the hope of finding someone. If Anderson’s earlier film “Magnolia” shows lost souls finding some measure of closure or solace, “The Master” shows Phoenix’s ultimate lost soul, who’ll be searching for the rest of his life.

2014: “Inherent Vice”

Phoenix was back in-demand after “The Master” earned him a third Oscar nomination and rapturous reviews. The next few years saw him continuing his string of miraculous performances comparable to De Niro’s run in the '70s and early '80s. He first reteamed with James Gray for his exquisite 2013 film “The Immigrant” (another barely released film sabotaged by Harvey Weinstein), playing the pimp Bruno Weiss as a man whose sincere love for Marion Cotillard’s Ewa doesn’t stop him from exploiting her and causing her pain. It’s one of the finest films about the American Dream’s ability to give hope for happiness even as it breaks people down, and Phoenix’s unburdening in the final scene best encapsulates its conflicted, empathetic heart, showing a man expressing his justified self-loathing before he’s told that he is “not nothing,” with no guarantee that it’ll be enough. He’s just as exceptional that same year in “Her,” a Spike Jonze love story that empathizes with its central character’s loneliness and genuine passion while being far more critical of his dependency and deep need for validation than it gets credit, even from its fans. Phoenix plays Theodore Twombly with real tenderness while allowing his confrontations with the women in his life to show his childishness and difficulty meeting others’ needs. 

Both of these films feel like precursors to 2014’s “Inherent Vice,” his second film with Paul Thomas Anderson and one that is greater with each viewing. Phoenix brings a new level of shaggy charisma to Larry “Doc” Sportello, a private detective who’s sharp as hell but slightly dulled by all the dope, reacting to new information in the film’s labyrinthine plot with a kind of slightly irritated befuddlement that suggests he knows he’ll figure out what’s going on soon enough but he’s not ... quite ... there ... yet. The actor is equally adept at the film’s whiplashes between overt cartoonishness (his zero-to-100 shift from a horrified scream at a disturbing photo to an immediate look of calm, as if we’re seeing both his internal reaction and his external one simultaneously and it’s not quite clear which is which) and more understated humor (his “oh, come on, man” underreaction to Josh Brolin’s hippie-hating cop “Bigfoot” Bjornsen kicking in his door). 

The performance gets the humor of the hippie while taking seriously the sadness that a dream of a kinder, more egalitarian and less greedy and fearful world was slipping away. His every encounter with the darker forces chipping away at that dream shows someone who’s wholly unable to push back against their all-encompassing power, but who might be able to help one person (Owen Wilson’s deeply sad Coy Harlingen) regain some measure of freedom. Phoenix’s brief moment alone after his final scene with Wilson is among the best scenes he’s ever played, allowing the silence to convey both the grand-scale sadness and the small-scale happiness of the moment. 

Like “Two Lovers,” “The Master” and “Her” before it, “Inherent Vice” sees Phoenix’s lost character processing an old relationship that still looms large over his life, however much he may deny it here. The performance is a masterpiece of someone pretending they’ve moved on from the past. When Shasta Fay Hepworth (Katherine Waterston) first appears asking for his help, he tries to probe into her relationship under the guise of professionalism, but his curt, downbeat delivery can’t quite mask his bitterness. Whenever he’s challenged by Bigfoot or his current girlfriend, Reese Witherspoon’s square Assistant D.A. Penny, Doc tries too hard to appear nonchalant, only to overplay it badly and come off as cagey. It’s when Shasta reappears that his pain and unhealthy anger breaks through, with her seeing through his mocking tone and prodding at his weakness, his jealousy and his melancholy; Phoenix plays the scene quietly, letting his sexual attraction, his fear, his pain and his fury bubble up together until she he encourages him to let it explode. It's a violent, uncomfortable sex scene that nevertheless shows the tenderness in their relationship, Doc’s warring impulses of love and possessiveness. By their final scene together, it’s unclear, exactly, what’s coming next for either of them, but his enigmatic smile suggests that the fact that that tenderness remains, that it was there at all, is meaningful, regardless of how painful the end might be.

2017: “You Were Never Really Here”

“Inherent Vice” is one of Phoenix’s funniest and sweetest films, its still-considerable sadness and poignancy notwithstanding. His next truly great performance is a total gearshift. After giving a fascinating but not particularly successful performance in Woody Allen’s “Irrational Man” that suggests what would happen if “Last Tango in Paris”-era Marlon Brando played Martin Landau’s character from “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” Phoenix starred in four films from 2017 to 2018. One of them, “The Sisters Brothers,” is slight but funny and warm-hearted; another, “Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot” (his first film with Gus Van Sant since “To Die For”), is familiar but aided by grace notes and the sensitive performances of Phoenix, Jonah Hill and Jack Black. A third, the long-delayed “Mary Magdalene,” has his first unmemorable performance since 2007’s woeful melodrama “Reservation Road,” with his take on Jesus Christ mostly coming off as passive-aggressive and dully brooding. He’s equally ursine but far more compelling in Lynne Ramsay’s devastating “You Were Never Really Here,” giving a performance that’s by far his most frightening and among his saddest.

We know what ails Joe, a hired gun who’s living with the trauma of his and his mother’s abuse by his father, post-traumatic stress disorder from his experiences fighting overseas, and suicidal ideation. He uses violent methods to hurt men who abuse young girls, employing his hulking frame and quiet menace at one point to overpower a young man working for them and softly conveying that he could kill him without any effort. When he isn’t beating sex offenders to a bloody pulp with a ball-peen hammer, he’s either gently caring for his almost ghostly mother or acting out suicidal scenarios with bags and knives. “You Were Never Really Here” uses fragmented, impressionistic flashbacks and fixations to approximate Joe’s dissociation, but Phoenix’s body language is what sells it. Joe tries hard to hide his pain when he’s not alone, but we see him freeze when his mom brings up his girlfriend from 20 years ago. His every downward glance, terse reply and withdrawn, non-communicative gesture when he’s out and about shows a man in deep discomfort that he’s tamping down at all times. He’s someone who’s constantly trying to disappear, and it’s only when he can engage in his most destructive and self-destructive instincts, getting some measure of personal psychic revenge on others’ victimizers or pushing himself to almost but not quite harm himself, that he allows himself to engage his trauma.

On paper, the film’s central storyline, in which Joe attempts to save a young girl (Ekaterina Samsonov) from particularly powerful traffickers led by the governor of New York, plays like an extended version of the “Taxi Driver” finale that risks validating Travis Bickle’s murderous desires, not to mention Joe’s own suicidal impulses. In actuality, the film understands his feelings while showing how unsatisfying his actions ultimately are; when he’s robbed of catharsis, Phoenix’s breakdown is overwhelming, a primal panic attack that leads to Joe’s conclusion that no matter how much he’s built himself up as an avenging angel, he’s “weak.” He isn’t, but Phoenix and Ramsay show with few words just how broken he feels and how uncertain he is about what comes next. “It’s a beautiful day,” but whether or not there’s going to be any relief is unclear.

“Joker” is less delicate and less intelligent about depression, trauma and violence, throwing everything but the kitchen sink at Arthur. The film’s clumsiness ultimately muddies whatever director Todd Phillips had on his mind regarding social isolation and pain being used to self-justify abhorrent behavior, if he indeed had anything in mind beyond thin justification for portraying violent acts from DC Comics’ most famous supervillain. Yet even in a film that feels largely fraudulent, Phoenix, the most exciting American actor working today, manages to find a measure of truth. One thinks of how all life drains from his body as his hero, talk show host Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro), mocks him on television, or how Phoenix conveys Arthur’s warring impulses of malice and genuine desire for connection when he reaches out to Gotham’s most famous family. It’s another performance that manages to make affected behavior feel lived-in, as if Arthur’s desperately trying to mimic normal human interactions but can’t quite manage it; by the time he embraces his identity as Joker, a violent sociopath, he’s given that up. He no longer feels lost or broken, but what he’s found is a black hole.

“Little Monsters,” in which a class of Australian kindergarteners on a farm field trip find themselves surrounded by the undead, handles the zombie comedy with kid gloves. The key to their survival is their teacher Miss Caroline (Lupita Nyong’o), who is able to convince the young ones that it’s all part of a game, and initially receives little help from immature chaperone Dave (Alexander England), and a tormented kid’s TV host played by Josh Gad. It’s all overly precious and just not funny enough, even if it is a blood-soaked tribute to those who would look at the story as just another day of underpaid work. 

Nyong'o turns out to be the film’s highlight, and at least it has her in a role that proves she’s game for ridiculousness, and (later on in the film) can master a dryly funny monologue. Along with Jordan Peele’s "Us" proving the Oscar-winning actor's multiple talents, you should hear her sing "Shake It Off" by Taylor Swift here, while (actually) playing ukulele. Even when she’s not displaying an alarmingly tender mezzo-soprano voice, Nyong’o is a life force for “Little Monsters,” cutting through the shrill buffoonery of her male co-leads. 

But instead of focusing on Miss Caroline, “Little Monsters” is instead, bafflingly, about a boy with a whole lot of growing up to do: grungy, 30-something Dave. He’s introduced in the film fighting with his girlfriend in the opening credits—watching them spar in various locations not being able to hear what's made them both so angry, the camera floats around them like vignettes. One would expect a zombie to pop up, but no dice. Instead, the story takes roughly 20 minutes establishing him as a now-recently broken up, heavy metal has-been (channeling some major 2000s Jack Black energy) who is just as loud and oblivious as the classmates of his nephew, Felix (Diesel La Torraca). The tedious puppy dog that he is, Dave’s fixation shifts to wooing Miss Caroline when he meets her one day while dropping Felix off at school. 

In an attempt to impress her, Dave offers to help chaperone a class trip to a farm, which just happens to be near a US Army base. But before a zombie outbreak next door, things already go disastrously for Dave when he realizes that these kids aren’t as easy to corral as he assumed, and that he has no shot with Miss Caroline. He's especially hopeless against Teddy McGiggle (Gad), a kid's entertainer from America on a world tour, who knows how to enthrall a young crowd, and sweet talk women like Miss Caroline. His chances shot, Dave sulks around, until monsters eventually force the class and the three adults to hole up in a souvenir shop. 

Writer/director Abe Forsythe whips up a relatively plain zombie takeover, which is a big tell on the movie’s limited creativity. Yes, there's snarling, flesh-decaying post-humans who saunter around, and sometimes make for gnarly disembowelments straight out of “The Walking Dead.” But there's little inspiration behind the zombies themselves, who don’t create any nervous stakes (even with kids in the mix), or get decapitated in snazzy ways. Nyong’o even has a sequence where she dives into zombie battle, but the film cuts away from it, only showing her after, her dress and hair drastically restyled with blood and guts. It’s another example of “Little Monsters” skipping past even the smallest of gratuitous genre delights—how could you ramp up Oscar-winner Lupita Nyong’o going ballistic on the undead, and then not show us? 

The zombie apocalypse of “Little Monsters” largely takes place during the day, a key detail in how the film yearns to balance a light heart with dark comedy. But Forsythe’s script doesn’t have the cleverness to make such a tone pop, instead filling the time with easy, cringeworthy jokes, like often making Gad fall to the ground hard, or watching Dave bumble his way to accidental heroism. “Little Monsters” even has a stereotypical joke about Asian tourists taking pictures, and it would be more offensive if it didn’t seem like it was par for the film’s shallow course. I did laugh hard when a maniacal Gad aggressively cusses out the youngsters—one moment in which adult cruelty barrels through youthful innocence—but perhaps knowing how funny that beat is, and not being able to think of anything else, “Little Monsters” then repeats it over and over, the shock losing its luster.

“Little Monsters” is not for kids, and yet it wants to be as cute as their singalongs, even just by its premise alone. More than with any usual comedy, your mileage will undoubtedly vary with “Little Monsters,” especially if you find kids (with their matching frog backpacks and little observations) unflappably endearing, or man-children instantly worth rooting for. But as someone who constantly struggled to have mindless fun with “Little Monsters”—its self-amusement is far more obvious than it is infectious. 

The short film you're about to watch was more than ten years in the making. I directed, edited and cowrote it. It's the story of two friends who lean on each other during a difficult period of their lives. It's also the story of what happens when life gets in the way of art, and also how criticism, however constructive, can become paralyzing, even for a critic. For now, let's just say there are reasons why this film has never been seen by anyone except my closest friends until this very moment, and that I'm going to tell you about them here. Maybe it's best to watch "The Bed Thing" first and then read this piece, so that you don't go in it with any preconceived notions about what it's about, or what it's trying to do. 

The Bed Thing by Matt Zoller Seitz from Press Play Video Blog on Vimeo.

E. Jason Liebrecht plays Jason, who is sleeping on a couch in the living room of his apartment following a devastating event. His best friend Stephen, played by cowriter Stephen T. Neave, comes over to the house to try to get him up and moving again. And that's pretty much all there is to it, although hopefully you learn a bit about their personalities and stories as the movie goes along. 

Jason is basically me, just as the character that Jason played in my first feature, 2005's "Home," was basically me. Jason's best friend Stephen is basically Stephen, another cast member in "Home" who had become one of my closest friends after Jen's death, and who wrote the script with me. 

 "The Bed Thing" was shot in four days in fall, 2008, two-and-a-half years after the death of my first wife, Jennifer Dawson, who had died of a previously undiagnosed heart ailment in April of 2006, leaving me to raise our two children, Hannah and James. It turned out that this was the opening tragedy in an "if it rains, it pours" period of my life. One of my closest friends, Andrew Johnston, the longtime film and television critic of Time Out New York, was dying of cancer, and my stepmother, Genie Grant, had also been diagnosed with cancer around the same time. By the time I finished shooting the movie, Andrew was dead. 

Stephen was going through his own rough period, having recently endured the death of his mother, Dorothy, and one of his closest friends had died as well. The replacement of one bed with another is drawn from my own life: following Jen's death, I started sleeping on the couch in the common area. I just couldn't bear to be in the room where she died, and where she and I had slept side-by-side. My brother Jeremy and my high school friend David came over one day and insisted on taking apart the old bed and replacing it with a new one, hoping that would jump-start me into moving further along in the grieving process. I'll leave it to you to determine whether gestures like that help. 

At the time that I finished a rough cut of "The Bed Thing," I thought it was the best thing I'd done as a filmmaker. I didn't see much that could have been improved in the writing, direction, and cinematography (by Grant Greenberg, and then-young NYU grad from South African who went on to a terrific career). Dave Bunting, a filmmaker, musician and actor who has done a lot of editing and narrating for me on other film projects, played one of the bed salesman. Israel Rivera, Jr. played the other bed salesman. He actually worked at the bed store where we shot the scene where the guys go bed shopping, and the salesman's patter in the movie was rewritten based on my conversations with him. 

I was also proud of the fact that we'd shot "The Bed Thing" on Super 16mm film. Grant originally tried to talk me out of it, arguing that there was no reason to shoot a project like this on film anymore now that high-resolution video had become affordable and versatile. I understood his point, but still wanted to shoot on film because I still think it has a look that's impossible to match in clarity and beauty, particularly when you're shooting outdoors in the daytime during a visually interesting period like the fall. 

I'd planned to have "The Bed Thing" color timed and conformed after editing and then blown up to 35mm with a sync soundtrack right there on the reel, just like the short films I'd watched as a film student coming up in the 1980s. I had set aside some money for that final leg of the process—it was estimated to cost about $14,000 by a local post house back in 2009, although that number is surely higher now. I edited "The Bed Thing" on Final Cut Pro in the same bedroom that you see in the film, working from a low-resolution copy that was provided to me by the postproduction house on a Mini-DV cassette, a format that is now obsolete. I had been saving money to pay for all of this.

Then life got in the way. My son James developed asthma and we didn't have health insurance, which meant I would have to pay for his treatment out-of-pocket. There went the postproduction money!

I did have a contingency plan, though. I showed the film to one of the backers of my feature. He offered to loan me the money to finish "The Bed Thing" properly if it got into a major festival and pay it back over time. 

Unfortunately, "The Bed Thing" didn't get into any festivals. I submitted it to 2010 festivals, including Sundance, Slamdance, Raindance, Tribeca, South by Southwest, and Cinequest (which had premiered "Home"), plus probably four others. They all rejected it, except for Cinequest, bless them. But I didn't think it was worth going through the trouble and expense of finishing a movie shot on film to show it at just one festival. And I couldn't picture screening it from a low-resolution video with timecode at the bottom after going to all that trouble to shoot on film; it just would have been depressing. So I abandoned the idea of taking "The Bed Thing" on the festival circuit.

I was devastated. Also, resentful and mystified. Having been a juror on a lot of festivals over the preceding 15 years, I knew "The Bed Thing" was better than a lot of what was out there, certainly in terms of the photography and performances, although I won't be so bold as to hazard a guess about how the direction or writing compared to whatever festival jurors were seeing in 2009. I recut the film a few times after that, thinking I'd resubmit it, but the notes I got were demoralizing—one friend told me the comedy wasn't working, another didn't like the performances, another said he thought the direction was pretentious. I know you're supposed to have a thick skin about this kind of stuff, but I was not in a good place at that point in my life, and I took it all as certification that I didn't know what I was doing, that the film was garbage, and that I was unable to see this clearly because I was just too close to it.

So I gave up. 

People tell you not to get discouraged by rejection—hell, I tell people that!—but when it happens to you, it's a different story. I figured that I must have poor judgment when it came to my own work, that "The Bed Thing" was not good after all, and that I should probably just file it away under "lost causes" and get on with my life. 

The uncut 16mm negative of "The Bed Thing" is still sitting on my shelf in my workspace, wrapped in plastic.

I have a feeling that if I submitted it today, under my own name, it would get in more places, because I'm better known today than I was back then. But that doesn't testify to the actual quality of the piece one way or the other. And in my opinion that makes the whole situation sadder. Film festivals are filled with work that just isn't that good, because the people who the work are famous or connected—or in my case, semi-famous—or know somebody who runs the festival, or gave money to the festival, etc. I know this because I've suffered through many such movies and had discussions with festival programmers in which I was made privy to the truth of why they were accepted. I don't want to be an example of what I call a festival indulgence. I feel like I had the chance to get in on the merits back when I originally made the movie and it didn't work out, so it's better to accept that and move on.

But since this year is the tenth anniversary of my giving up on "The Bed Thing," I thought I might as well put it out there anyway, if only to justify writing this piece. It's still not really finished -- there are placeholders in the end credits, the sound mix is rough, and the music hasn't been cleared. But it's as finished as it's going to get.

I am still proud of it, and I hope it speaks to people. 

“Mister America” is one of those cult TV adaptations that could be reviewed in practically another language, and not because its origins go nearly a decade back to a “Siskel & Ebert” parody show called “On Cinema at the Cinema.” That web series was just the beginning for a meta-comic, inside-joke-filled universe that saw co-hosts Tim Heidecker and Gregg Turkington playing themselves in other spin-off shows (“Decker,” and the unjustly canceled-by-Tim “Decker vs. Dracula”), Oscar night webcasts, and later, a four-hour murder trial special. “On Cinema” is committed to its bits, the latest example being a full-length fake doc about Tim’s latest scheme. Depicting Tim's Trumpian grassroots campaign for district attorney, “Mister America” ambles through two overlapped realities (“On Cinema”’s and our own) and reveals a pathos that makes its dry political comedy accessible beyond an ingrained fanbase, if not poignant. 

Director Eric Notarnicola (sharing co-writing credits with Heidecker and Turkington) captures Tim after having just beat a case involving 20 vaping-related deaths at an EDM festival. Power-hungry and spiteful as always, Tim decides to run for district attorney of San Bernardino against the D.A. (Don Pecchia’s Vincent Rosetti) who tried to put him in prison. It quickly becomes apparent that Tim doesn’t know what he’s doing—he doesn’t even live in San Bernardino—and that his saving grace is his campaign manager Toni Newman (Terri Parks), who does most of the work. With a sense of narcissism meant to be equally recognizable and pathetic, Tim sets himself up for failure, yet again. 

Tim’s more immediate nemesis is Gregg Turkington, his “On Cinema” co-host, where the two hilariously embody the worst breeds of film critics: Tim praises every movie with hopes of Hollywood loving him back; Gregg praises every movie because he loves film and nothing else. As “Mister America” shows in brief but helpful flashbacks to earlier “On Cinema” seasons, they now have a contentious, elastic relationship that always brings them back into the same mess. Some of the funniest scenes in “Mister America” involve Gregg and Tim trying to embarrass the other in front of the documentary crew, like whenever Gregg posits that Tim’s campaign is just like a real-life adaptation of “The Shaggy D.A.” 

Notarnicola maintains strong pacing with his nuanced portrayal of failure, especially as election day approaches with no strategy in sight. In subtle but compelling scenes where Terri Parks’ Tony Newman depicts perhaps the most earnest person to be run over by Tim’s destructive schemes, the campaign falls into pathetic corruption, and Tim pacifies himself with cheap beer. These passages say little about the political process, which feels like a missed opportunity—the film also teases a “hidden camera in local campaigns” approach that's not fully realized, despite a few big laughs when Tim interacts with real citizens of San Bernardino. 

But this is largely a showcase for Heidecker, and his serious talent of being able to create a character right in front of the camera. His Heidecker character is inspired by a titanic source—Trump, unmistakably—though the impression is not built from a squinting face or Dorito tan. Instead, it’s the way he constantly stumbles through simple sentences, very awkwardly singles out people of color when chatting up constituents, or clings to the childish name-calling of his “rat” opponent. All the while, Heidecker is very good at making himself look awful, with a baggy brown suit that desperately needs a tailor, or when beaching himself on his hotel room bed couch, surrounded by fast food. It’s one of the most nuanced and cathartic riffs on our commander in chief, showing such grotesque behavior for what it is without a chorus to validate him.  

Recognizing the film's many inside jokes will make “Mister America” even more rewarding, but those familiar with “On Cinema” will have the greatest advantage when it comes to the movie’s comedic rhythm. Anyone who has seen Tim’s four-hour trial, or watched eleven seasons where Tim and Gregg barely review movies despite rating most of them five out of five popcorn bags, knows that the humor of “On Cinema” is a slow burn through bizarre character quirks, which then lead to abrasive, hilarious story developments. True to previous form, “Mister America” is more of a relaxed, giggly character study than one that treats gags like clockwork. In a natural tonal shift, this restraint makes way for a melancholy rumination on Tim's self-destructive narcissism, which gives the film its ultimate staying power. For someone who has co-engineered a meta-comic creative style while always maintaining control of his name, self-awareness is essential. In this universe—and on the campaign trail—it’s a tragedy when you’re the biggest clown of them all. 

It’s hard not to root for Nancy Drew, in all her iterations. She finds clues! She solves mysteries! She keeps a level head! That remains true—unlike a certain old clock, she is timeless—but beyond that, it’s hard not to root for “Nancy Drew,” a new addition to The CW’s lineup of shows in which hot youngsters with tragic or shadowy backstories get into and out of trouble. Some of that comes down to an appealing blend of influences that run through showrunner Melinda Hsu Taylor’s series: like “Riverdale,” it owes a lot to “Twin Peaks,” and like any number of other shows currently airing, it also owes a lot to “Riverdale”; “Veronica Mars” also figures prominently in its DNA, as does “Gilmore Girls”; the list goes on. But it’s not enough to check a bunch of boxes of things people have liked elsewhere and call it a day. That way brings disaster. There’s got to be something else there. This series has some considerable flaws, and as you might guess, can be fairly derivative, but it’s got a great lead in Kennedy McCann.

McCann brings us a version of the girl detective who, unlike many of her predecessors, doesn’t even kind of have her stuff together. As brought to life by McCann, Taylor, creator and executive producer Noga Landau, and executive producers Stephanie Savage and Josh Schwartz (of “The O.C.” and “Gossip Girl” fame), this is a Nancy who claims to have left her sleuthing days behind. It’s not that she’s seen the error of her ways, or decided to put away childish things in favor of some more adult, less entertaining hobby. This is a young woman whose life has been saturated with grief. After losing her mother in her final year of high school, Nancy’s grades and relationships cratered. Abandoning her plans for college and dreams for the future, she picked up an apron and an order pad and started working at a local diner, The Claw, managed by a tough-talking, grudge-holding former classmate named George (Leah Lewis, a standout in a mostly underwhelming cast). She keeps everyone, even her secret hookup Ned “Nick” Nickerson (Tunji Kasim) and her father (Scott Wolf, doing the “Riverdale” onetime-teen-heartthrob-plays-parent thing) at arm’s length, minimum. 

When the wife of a nefarious local rich guy is murdered in the diner’s parking lot, Nancy, George, Nick, and co-workers Bess (Maddison Jaizani) and Ace (Alex Saxon) become prime suspects, and Nancy feels the old urge to sleuth begin to rise. But then she gets a little distracted by a ghost in a prom dress—one who won’t leave her the hell alone. 

That’s the element of “Nancy Drew” that’s simultaneously the most entertaining and the most likely to send the show off the rails. In the two episodes provided for critics, Nancy gets drawn into two mysteries: that early murder, and the death of Dead Lucy, a former “Sea Queen” who wore her crown for only a few hours before she was found dead. Now she’s the stuff of local legend, and as Nancy breaks, enters, and makes lists with headers like MOTIVE and OPPORTUNITY, she keeps seeing a dead face behind her, refusing to be ignored, demanding her attention, and dare I say, haunting her every step. Some of it works. Some of it doesn’t. But in the chilly seaside town Nancy calls home, it just feels right, a spooky-but-not-too-spooky story that’s just ridiculous enough to make even the lackluster scares enjoyable. 

Yet it also never stops feeling like a distraction from that first mystery, the one with real-life stakes for our heroine—and more importantly, it’s definitely a distraction from the mystery that McCann makes important, which is The Case of How She’s Going To Get Her Life Together. McCann doesn’t oversell anything here, particularly the tough stuff, which makes it easy to invest in Nancy as a person who is very good at hiding how much she’s struggling. She’s great at lying. She pretends at invulnerability. Most interestingly, McCann somehow makes Nancy’s desire to sleuth seem like a positive and a negative at once: it’s something fundamental to who she is as a person, something honest and good, but is also a compulsion, and an unhealthy one at that. That’s all in the writing which, while not always particularly sharp or fun, does right by its protagonist, but it’s McCann who brings that contradiction to life in thrilling fashion. 

It’s fortunate that both McCann and the character are so engaging, because the one element of the show that should be an easy win somehow misses the mark. There’s “Who killed Laura Palmer?” on one hand, there’s “Who killed a resident of whatever town Jessica Fletcher happens to be visiting in this week’s episode” on the other, and plenty of questions in between. For a season-long mystery to work, you have to care about the people and the detective right away, ready to fear for their safety and dread that those who seem trustworthy will prove themselves otherwise. For a case-of-the-week to work, it’s got to be satisfying and clever—it’s the resolution, not the uncertainty, that satisfies. It seems likely that the creators of this “Nancy Drew” have chosen to go the former route, rather than the latter, and that’s fine, but the victim is a non-entity. No one grieves her, no one hates her, no one seems to know anything about her, and the same is true, at this stage anyway, of the ghost. It makes for a story that feels familiar but empty, writing out the formula without actually putting in any of the relevant data. 

“Nancy Drew” doesn’t work, really—not as a mystery, not as a ghost story, not as a character drama or coming-of-age story. It’s not there yet, it’s really struggling, but you sense that it’s got the goods somewhere. If it can just put the pieces together, find the clues, find the focus, then maybe it can be all that we want it to be: an entertaining story about a timeless character, doing what she does best.

Two episodes screened for review.

2019 is becoming the year of the CGI-faced actor. After computer based de-aging technology took decades off the cast of “The Irishman,” “Gemini Man” has employed this same technique to turn “Collateral Beauty” Will Smith into “Six Degrees of Separation” Will Smith. Granted, the F/X folks had to pull fewer decades off the Fresh Prince, so the effect looks a bit better. Plus they gave his younger stand-in much sharper cheekbones than he had in 1993, an enhancement that wasn’t necessary but was probably welcome. Director Ang Lee’s sci-fi actioner uses even more CGI to pit Young Will against Old Will in a convoluted plot about assassins, corrupt intelligence agencies and the old stand-by that’s currently getting beaten to death by “Ad Astra,” daddy issues.

Quite honestly, I didn’t know what to think of “Gemini Man” once the credits started rolling. I neither hated it nor liked it. Well, I hated one aspect of it, which I should get out of the way now because it will probably not affect most ticket-buyers. Paramount presented the critics’ screening in the format Ang Lee made it, 120 frames per second and in 3-D. Lee’s prior film, “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk,” also used this frame rate. As a point of reference using a more familiar movie, “The Hobbit” series ran at 48 frames per second. At five times the original rate of film running through the projector, “Gemini Man” looks radically different than most movies. It also looks astonishingly bad. Tom Cruise, Paramount’s current bread and butter, made a video scolding mere mortals like a Southern grandmother for using the motion smoothing setting on their televisions. Yet 120 frames per second looks exactly like motion smoothing. In fact, it looks worse, like a hellish cross between a video game and a telenovela. It’s so obnoxious that I know of two critics who walked out after 30 minutes.

Story-wise, Smith plays Henry Brogan, a highly skilled assassin working for an intelligence agency run by Janet Lassiter (Linda Emond). Brogan is so good he can hit a target on a moving train from hundreds of feet away. A target on a train whose tracks curve wildly toward the screen as it flies by at unimaginable speed. Brogan’s mark takes it in the neck rather than the intended head shot, and though it’s still a lethal wound, Brogan sees this as the final nail in the coffin of his career. He retires, returning to a boat dock where his normal boat renting guy has been replaced by Danny Zakarweski (Mary Elizabeth Winstead). As spies are wont to do, Brogan expresses suspicion about this change. Is she a plant sent to keep tabs on him, perhaps an employee of Lassiter’s frenemy colleague Clay Verris (Clive Owen)?

Of course, nothing is as it seems in movies like this. After colleagues start being murdered and Brogan learns that his last target was merely a scientist and not a terrorist, he goes on the run with Danny who, as expected, is also an agent. When Lassiter’s attempts to neutralize Brogan fail miserably, Clay overrides her and executes something called “Gemini.” You don’t have to be an astrologer to know that Gemini involves the aforementioned younger version of Smith, dubbed Junior. Lee does an excellent job with Junior’s reveal and the ensuing motorcycle battle, the most exciting sequence in the film. The first-person perspective really works here, as does the clever way the Smiths use their vehicles as weapons. Lee even throws in an homage to John Woo (who would have been a better choice for this material), though he uses pigeons instead of doves.

“Gemini Man” knows you’re there to see a battle of Wills, so it gives us multiple sequences where 51-year old Brogan goes toe-to-toe with his younger self. The elder Brogan has the advantage; the wisdom of age and experience prevents him from making the same youthful mistakes he once made, mistakes Junior is making for the first time. Unfortunately, the second battle takes place in a dark catacomb where the effects are so quickly edited that you can’t figure out which version is beating the hell out of the other. It also takes forever for Brogan to realize that Junior looks exactly like him. Maybe it’s the new cheekbones.

The screenplay by Billy Ray, Darren Lemke and “Game of Thrones”’ David Benioff is more in service to the numerous technological aspects Lee is juggling than any human element. It uses Brogan’s intentionally closed-off, emotionless personality as a crutch to avoid any meaningful fleshing out of characters and relationships. The always-welcome Benedict Wong shows up to supply his usual humorous line-readings and jovial nature—he’s a fine purveyor of the perfect best friend trope—and Winstead gets to kick some major ass instead of being a stereotypical girl Friday, but neither truly registers as a fully realized human being. The relationship between Junior and Clay (which I won’t reveal) serves as an attempt at emotional connection, but their entire plotline plays like a Hitler-less version of Ira Levin’s “The Boys From Brazil.” The reasoning behind Junior and the Gemini project is far more trouble than it is worth.

“Gemini Man” never pretends to be anything but a time-wasting contraption hoping to entertain its viewer. I can’t reasonably be mad at its honesty, and despite the horrendous dialogue its actors are often forced to speak, I found myself enjoying a fair amount of it. But Ang Lee is the rare director who can invest an action movie with the same strong emotional heft he brought to his dramas like “Brokeback Mountain.” “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” is a great example of this. His recent desire to be at the forefront of frame-based technology, however, is resulting in hollow, empty experiences that are literally hard to watch. Perhaps the Gemini project could be used to send the Ang Lee who made “The Wedding Banquet” to visit the Ang Lee who made this. Break his high-frame rate camera, Junior.

I love documentary films and am in favor of seeing them being distributed and seen more widely, and being written about more widely and in more diverse voices. So I am pleased to announce that the International Documentary Association (IDA) has just launched a Documentary Magazine Editorial Fellowship initiative that is currently on the lookout for applicants. It's all in keeping with the organization's ongoing mission "to serve, empower and engage a diverse range of voices, perspectives and experiences from the documentary community." The program, which runs from January through December 2020 will provide four emerging writers from underserved and underrepresented communities stipends of $2,000 each as well as the opportunity to attend an industry event.

The fellowship is funded in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), and will enable participating writers to contribute content to Documentary magazine, the only US publication dedicated solely to documentaries, available via print and online. This program will, according to IDA editor Tom White, help the organization enrich its editorial content, furthering and deepening an ongoing community-wide conversation about the nonfiction form and the issues and themes that are driving the documentary profession. 

Here are the fellowship bullet points and application guidelines, as posted on the IDA's official site...

The writers will:

• Participate in quarterly editorial meetings
• Pitch, write and deliver a minimum of 3 print or online articles each between January 2020 and December 2020
• Participate in 3-4 video mentorship sessions throughout the year with documentary industry representatives who will offer insights on the field. 
• At IDA’s expense, travel to and provide coverage of Getting Real 2020 or another local or regional film festival or industry event.

Eligibility Criteria

Candidates for the IDA Documentary Magazine Fellowship must be US-based and eligible to work in the US, and should hail from communities that have been historically underrepresented in the entertainment, journalism, film criticism or nonfiction media fields, including but not limited to:

• People of color including ethnic minorities and members of indigenous communities
• LGBTQ+ community
• People with disabilities
• Residents of under-reported US geographic regions

Applicants should submit the following:

1. A letter of interest that articulates your background, your experience in writing and your desire for and qualifications for the IDA Documentary Magazine Fellowship. (Suggested length: 1 page, Format: PDF)
2. Up to three samples of your previously published work (Any length or style, Format: PDF. Alternatively you may provide links to your work online)
3. One original story idea for a reported article or essay that you think will resonate with Documentary Magazine readers. (Suggested length: 1-2 paragraphs, Format: In Application Question) *Be advised that your story idea might be similar to content already in progress or in the planning stages at Documentary magazine
4. A current resume (Format: PDF)

Timeline:

• Application Deadline: Friday, October 25, 2019
• Notification date: Late November 2019
• A mandatory Orientation Meeting (approximately 1-hour), via Video Conference, will be held in late December or early January.
• Fellowship start date: Thursday, January 2, 2020
• Fellowship End Date: Friday, December 18, 2020

Header photo of Documentary Magazine courtesy of IDA.

It’s so clichéd at this point in the critical conversation during the hot take season of festivals to say, “You’ve never seen a movie quite like X.” Such a statement has become overused to such a degree that it’s impossible to be taken seriously, like how too many major new movies are gifted the m-word: masterpiece. So how do critics convey when a film truly is unexpectedly, brilliantly unpredictable in ways that feel revelatory? And what do we do when we see an actual “masterpiece” in this era of critics crying wolf? Especially one with so many twists and turns that the best writing about it will be long after spoiler warnings aren’t needed? I’ll do my best because Bong Joon-ho’s “Parasite” is unquestionably one of the best films of the year. Just trust me on this one.

Bong has made several films about class (including "Snowpiercer" and "Okja"), but “Parasite” may be his most daring examination of the structural inequity that has come to define the world. It is a tonal juggling act that first feels like a satire—a comedy of manners that bounces a group of lovable con artists off a very wealthy family of awkward eccentrics. And then Bong takes a hard right turn that asks us what we’re watching and sends us hurtling to bloodshed. Can the poor really just step into the world of the rich? The second half of “Parasite” is one of the most daring things I’ve seen in years narratively. The film constantly threatens to come apart—to take one convoluted turn too many in ways that sink the project—but Bong holds it all together, and the result is breathtaking.

Kim Ki-woo (Choi Woo-sik) and his family live on the edge of poverty. They fold pizza boxes for a delivery company to make some cash, steal wi-fi from the coffee shop nearby, and leave the windows open when the neighborhood is being fumigated to deal with their own infestation. Kim Ki-woo’s life changes when a friend offers to recommend him as an English tutor for a girl he’s been working with as the friend has to go out of the country for a while. The friend is in love with the young girl and doesn’t want another tutor “slavering” over her. Why he trusts Kim Ki-woo given what we know and learn about him is a valid question.

The young man changes his name to Kevin and begins tutoring Park Da-hye (Jung Ziso), who immediately falls for him, of course. Kevin has a much deeper plan. He’s going to get his whole family into this house. He quickly convinces the mother Yeon-kyo, the excellent Jo Yeo-jeong, that the son of the house needs an art tutor, which allows Kevin’s sister “Jessica” (Park So-dam) to enter the picture. Before long, mom and dad are in the Park house too, and it seems like everything is going perfectly for the Kim family. The Parks seem to be happy too. And then everything changes.

The script for “Parasite” will get a ton of attention as it’s one of those clever twisting and turning tales for which the screenwriter gets the most credit (Bong and Han Jin-won, in this case), but this is very much an exercise in visual language that reaffirms Bong as a master. Working with the incredible cinematographer Kyung-pyo Hong (“Burning,” “Snowpiercer”) and an A-list design team, Bong's film is captivating with every single composition. The clean, empty spaces of the Park home contrasted against the tight quarters of the Kim living arrangement isn’t just symbolic, it’s visually stimulating without ever calling attention to itself. And there’s a reason the Kim apartment is halfway underground—they’re caught between worlds, stuck in the growing chasm between the haves and the have nots.

"Parasite" is a marvelously entertaining film in terms of narrative, but there’s also so much going on underneath about how the rich use the poor to survive in ways that I can’t completely spoil here (the best writing about this movie will likely come after it’s released). Suffice to say, the wealthy in any country survive on the labor of the poor, whether it’s the housekeepers, tutors, and drivers they employ, or something much darker. Kim's family will be reminded of that chasm and the cruelty of inequity in ways you couldn’t possibly predict. 

The social commentary of "Parasite" leads to chaos, but it never feels like a didactic message movie. It is somehow, and I’m still not even really sure how, both joyous and depressing at the same time. Stick with me here. "Parasite" is so perfectly calibrated that there’s joy to be had in just experiencing every confident frame of it, but then that’s tempered by thinking about what Bong is unpacking here and saying about society, especially with the perfect, absolutely haunting final scenes. It’s a conversation starter in ways we only get a few times a year, and further reminder that Bong Joon-ho is one of the best filmmakers working today. You’ve never seen a movie quite like “Parasite.” Dammit. I tried to avoid it. This time it's true.

This review was filed from the Toronto International Film Festival on September 7th.