The film is winning praise on both sides of the Atlantic for its gorgeous and charming nostalgia. There’s no denying it’s a crowd-pleaser, but it does raise the question: When does nostalgia tip over into sentimentality?

After a brief wordless opening composed of a colorful aerial shot of a bustling contemporary Belfast, Ireland, the film shifts gears, giving way to a black-and-white shot of a single working-class street in 1969 Belfast. It’s a street full of kids playing typical kids’ games, including pretend-fighting with makeshift wooden swords and trashcan-lid shields.

The camera zeroes in on an adorable and expressive 9-year-old Buddy whose “sword and shield” are quickly rendered useless when his street suddenly becomes overrun by real marauders. The rampage of adults overwhelms him as windows are smashed and doors bashed. His panic-stricken mother barely rescues him from the melee. Buddy has just experienced firsthand the beginning of “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland between Protestants and Catholics.

Buddy’s family happens to live on a Belfast street where Protestants and Catholics peacefully co-exist. The mob in the street selectively attacked the homes of Catholics in an effort to run them out of town. Although Buddy’s family is Protestant, it has nothing against its Catholic neighbors. Tensions naturally arise, not only for the Catholics, but also between the Protestants who want to get along with their Catholic neighbors and the Protestants who want to terrorize them enough to force them out.

As these outside tensions grow, so too do the tensions inside Buddy’s family, but not over any internal disagreements about how Catholics should be treated. Rather, the overriding question becomes whether or not they should uproot themselves from the only home they’ve ever known and move to England in order to avoid the continuing sectarian violence.

In the midst of all this, Buddy is just trying to have a childhood. That opening scene of him with his pretend-weapons being overrun by an angry mob with deadly weapons is an apt metaphor for Buddy’s childhood, of how his world of imagination is no match for his lived reality.

While his older brother doesn’t have much to do with him, his father is off working as a joiner in England most of the time, and his mother is always distracted by the family’s financial straits, Buddy does have an escape valve. He gets to spend a lot of his time with his grandparents.

Winningly played by veteran Irish actors Ciaran Hinds and Judy Dench, they are the embodiment of perfect grandparents. Buddy confides in them about most everything, from school to life and love. He especially seeks advice from “Pop” about a particular girl he has a crush on at school. This ever-evolving “courting” becomes something of a sweet through-line for the entire movie.

In a lot of ways, Buddy’s warm relationship with his grandparents is the heart of the movie, encompassing both its strengths and weaknesses. Most of the charm that the movie exudes comes from these scenes, as do most of the big and little laughs. But perhaps because Branagh is so insistent on their endearing ways, it begins to feel forced and even false. As good as the acting is, the characters feel like staged idealizations rather than flesh-and-blood grandparents.

A nagging sense develops that Branagh is trying too hard to immerse us in a warm bath of nostalgia. When it’s declared that all an Irishman needs is a home, a Guinness, and a sheet of “Danny Boy,” a tipsy woman is soon seen belting out a rough approximation of “Danny Boy.” That’s not a bad line, and not a bad scene, but it’s a little too self-congratulatory for its own good. It’s as if to say, “Aren’t we something, we Irish men and women?”

A quick short scene between Buddy and a slightly older girl cousin about the mystery of differences between Catholic and Protestant first names is a sharp and witty bit of writing but again feels a little too clever by half. For this one scene, Buddy becomes a sort of Theodore Cleaver from the classic sitcom “Leave It To Beaver.” It’s as if to say, “Hey Wally, aren’t we Irish kids something!”

And when the family takes Grandma to see the British children’s film “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” in a theater, they all gasp a bit too much at a not-in-the-least-bit scary moment. This only seems to confirm suspicions that the filmmaker is more enthralled by the scene than the audience. And that’s when nostalgia tips over into sentimentality.

“Belfast” has plenty to recommend itself but it’s not nearly the moving testament to fraught times that Branagh thinks it is or wants it to be.

Check out more of Tom Tangney’s movie reviews here.

So now, imagine the daunting task Marvel sets for itself in “Eternals.” It has to introduce 10 new superheroes in one fell swoop, not to mention an entirely new cosmology involving Celestials, Deviants, and Eternals. That’s a lot of heavy lifting for a single film, even a 157-minute film.

And its ambitions don’t end there. It also wants to invest these Eternals with emotional complexities that are as varied as their strengths and personalities. And, oh, by the way, the film also covers 7,000 years of human history in the process. The fact that “Eternals” isn’t quite up to all this should come as no surprise. To its credit, it covers lots and lots of ground but it has to skim along on the surface much of the time just to get it all in.

At the most basic cosmological level, the Celestials created the Eternals to do battle with the evil Deviants. The Eternals are an immortal alien race who have lived among lowly humans on Planet Earth for thousands of years in order to protect mankind from the Deviants.

The roster of Eternals includes Sersi (Gemma Chan), whose power involves manipulating inanimate matter, Ikaris (Richard Madden), who can fly and shoot energy beams out of his eyes, and Kingo (Kumali Nanjiani), who can do with his hands what Ikaris does with his eyes. Thena (Angelina Jolie) is a warrior who can create stylish weapons out of thin air, Gilgamesh (Don Lee) is the physically strongest of them all, and Ajak (Salma Hayek) is a kind of healer who also acts as the Eternals’ spiritual leader. The powers of the remaining Eternals include super-fast speed, mind-control, illusion-making, and technological ingenuity.

In addition to showing off their fighting prowess again and again, the Eternals also have time for centuries-long romances and deep abiding friendships among themselves, as well as long-standing hurts and resentments. Sersi and Ikaris were once lovers and Sersi has never gotten over it, Thena and Gilgamesh seem like an old married couple, and the youngish speedster seems very into the mind-control guy and vice versa.

If you’re keeping score, that’s six of the 10 Eternals in some kind of messy romantic relationship and a seventh is flat-out jealous she’s NOT in a relationship with one of them. It’s rare for the emotional lives of this many superheroes to be so on display but I imagine it’s designed to deepen and enrich the characterizations. It’s one of the reasons Oscar-winning indie auteur Chloe Zhao (“Nomadland”) was brought on board to direct. Her specialty is the personal, and these immortals get personal.

“Eternals” intentionally sports the most diverse cast, with different races, nationalities, ages, genders, and sexual orientation. Zhao wanted the cast to reflect our world but not have audiences focusing too much on “what they represent.” Mission accomplished.

And the film does not shy away from big themes. The Eternals have varying takes on the humans they observe, interact with, and protect. Some of them have empathy for the struggles humans must endure, while others are less than enchanted with the human race and wonder if their mission on earth is a waste of their energies. Is humanity worth saving, given how quickly we resort to war and violence, for instance? As is evident by questions like that, certain Eternals strain under the yoke of the Celestials who brook no disagreement with them. Shades of Lucifer breaking away from his fellow angels, perhaps.

As should be clear by now, “Eternals” is a hugely ambitious film that doesn’t come close enough to attaining many of those ambitions. Instead it’s a relatively entertaining movie that provides a roster of superheroes who, I hope, go on to star in better future films.

Check out more of Tom Tangney’s movie reviews here.

His new film, “The French Dispatch,” is unmistakably Andersonian. Quirky subject matter? Check. Deadpan humor? Check. Meticulous production design? Check. Light-hearted absurdity? Check. Visual and linguistic wit? Check. Excessively referential? Check. Superficially slight with hints of profundity? Check.

Anderson, above all else, is droll and “The French Dispatch” is one of his drollest.

And, OK, he can be pretty esoteric too. His latest is a deep-dive homage to The New Yorker magazine and to France. How’s that for an odd and oddly specific focus? You don’t have to be a connoisseur of the high-brow publication or a devotee of all things French to appreciate this film, but it wouldn’t hurt. Anderson unabashedly admits that many of his characters are composites of actual New Yorker writers.

In Anderson’s imagination, The French Dispatch is a weekly magazine based in France but written for subscribers to the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun newspaper. Run by a gruff but soft-hearted founder/editor (played by Anderson regular Bill Murray), the magazine has a tight-knit staff of writers, illustrators, editors, and proofreaders who produce original, high-quality writing week in and week out.

The conceit of the film is that it’s structured like a magazine. It starts with an opening scene-setter, a live-action “article” by their Cycling reporter (Owen Wilson) about the goings-on in town (think “Talk of the Town” for all you New Yorker mag fans). This is followed by three rather in-depth “articles” — one about a convicted murderer/abstract painter (Benicio Del Toro) who’s marketed to great renown, another about a student revolutionary (Timothée Chalamet) who gets intimately involved with a French Dispatch reporter (Frances McDormand), and finally, a story by their food writer (Jeffrey Wright), who inadvertently gets mixed up in a boy’s kidnapping and attempted rescue. The film/magazine ends with an obituary on the longtime founder who passed away during the piecing together of this final French Dispatch issue. Interspersed among these “articles” are scenes with the founding editor doling out advice and occasional criticism to his reporters.

My favorite line in the movie is also the wisest piece of advice any editor could give a writer: “Try to make it sound like you wrote it that way on purpose.” Pure drollery.

Also droll? The town’s name. We first hear it’s “Ennui.” Everyone lives in Ennui. That’s funny. A little later, we find out the town’s full name — “Ennui sur Blasé.”  Not only is that redundancy funny, but if you’ve ever visited France you recognize how many towns are named something sur something. (In this case, Blasé is the name of the river running through town.) Très amusante, if you ask me.

Since the film is honoring a high-quality magazine, it’s fitting that the written word plays a prominent role in “The French Dispatch.” Not only is each new “article” introduced first with a written version of it on screen, but each story is also heavily narrated with voiceovers, so as to further emphasize its WRITTEN aspect. It’s rare for a visual medium like film to so acknowledge the value of the literary. But Anderson is careful not to shirk the film’s visual dimension. In fact, he’s very playful with the medium, juxtaposing color palettes with black-and-white, incorporating long animated sequences, changing aspect-ratios at will, presenting split-screens at times, occasionally freeze-framing group shots, and even scrolling subtitles upwards in the frame.

Curiously missing from this cinematic paean to The New Yorker is the magazine’s most iconic feature: the New Yorker cartoon. But I suspect for Anderson the entire film is his New Yorker cartoon. After all, it’s smart, precise, observant, and wry. Almost like he made it that way on purpose.

Check out more of Tom Tangney’s movie reviews here.

Unbeknownst to many moviegoers, Denis Villeneuve’s ambitious, big budget remake of Frank Herbert’s classic 1965 sci-fi novel “Dune” covers only half the book. The first, and less compelling, half. And it ends so abruptly, with our hero just beginning to venture out with a tribe of “Dune” natives, that it’s hard not to feel cheated. The story is over just as it seems to be ramping up.

In the long run, this may not matter much to audiences. Banking on the presumed commercial success of this “Dune” film, Villeneuve is reportedly already working on a script for a sequel, and possibly on a third film to make a trilogy that encompasses the first two of the six “Dune” books. If those films do indeed come to pass, this first film may be judged in the context of its sequels and be given a pass. But as of this moment, those future films have yet to be given the green light.

Admittedly, given the success of the “Lord of the Rings” and “Star Wars” films, Hollywood’s clearly become comfortable doling out epic stories over any number of films. But at least in those trilogies, the first film was a good stand-alone experience. This “Dune: Part One” is just getting on its feet when the proverbial rug is pulled out from under the audience. Villeneuve recently seems to acknowledge exactly that when he admits “Dune” is just an appetizer and “Dune Part Two” the main meal. (I guess Villeneuve likes the dining metaphor.)

To its credit, “Dune” does spend its two-and-a-half-hour running time building a plausible cinematic world out of whole cloth, Herbert’s whole cloth. It may not be glamorous work but the film carefully lays the necessary groundwork for our understanding of the various planets’ ecological properties, its varied races and cultures, and the political and economic conditions at play in this newly imagined universe. By film’s end, audiences will know about the water-rich resources of planet Caladan and the scorched sands of planet Arrakis (a.k.a. Dune), about the warring Houses of Atreides and Harkonnens and the nomadic tribe of Fremen who are native to Arrakis, about the secret religious cult of women known as Bene Gesserit and its centuries-long preaching about a Chosen One, and about the infinitely valuable “spice” being mined on Arrakis and the gigantic sandworms that protect said spice.

The film also, obviously, has to introduce us to an elaborate cast of characters as well, especially the troubled Paul Atreides who may be the Chosen One (played by Timothee Chalamet), Paul’s mother Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) and father Duke Leto (Oscar Isaac), the vile Baron Vladimir Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgard), Stilgar, the leader of the Fremen (Javier Bardem), and the mysterious young Fremen woman named Chani (Zendaya) who haunts Paul’s dreams.

Not only does Villeneuve make all of the planetary intricacies abundantly clear, he presents his vision with such precision and flair that for much of the film it may not matter whether anything of consequence is happening. The wind-swept sands of Arrakis deserve the IMAX screen I saw them on as do the glorious killer sandworms. But the question is: “Is that enough?”

The book “Dune” is a dense, complex, and multi-layered work of art and it’s clear Villeneuve realized how much heavy lifting he’d have to do to do it justice. It’s a daring move to spend this much time and energy on a film that’s all set-up and no payoff. It’s the world’s longest and most expensive trailer ever. I just hope Villeneuve’s calculations prove correct and the pay-off is in the works.

Listen to the Tom and Curley Show weekday afternoons from 3 – 7 p.m. on ³ÉÈËXÕ¾ Radio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.

Review: Daniel Craig’s final James Bond movie comes full-circle

The actual film proves to be a little less than I was hoping for, but I’m still glad Scott used his clout to get “The Last Duel” made.

After all, how often do we get to see a film open with a deadly serious medieval joust? It’s December 29, 1386. Two knights in full armor are cradling their heavy lances and bearing down on each other at a full gallop.

Just as first contact is made between the two warriors, the movie screeches to a halt, the title appears on the screen, and the story backpedals 16 years.

In classic movie tradition, the film proceeds to give us the lengthy backstory of how this famous duel came to be, before eventually returning us to the duel for a climactic finale. In actuality, it’s less straight-forward than that. What “The Last Duel” really delivers is three backstories, one by each knight and one by the woman whose accusation brought the duel about.

It’s a tricky structure designed to be like “Rashomon” in medieval France, made even more intriguing by the decision to have each version written by a different person. Damon writes his character’s version, Ben Affleck writes from his rival’s point of view, and writer/director Nicole Holofcener was drafted to write the woman’s version. It’s a clever but risky gambit that’s only partially successful.

The agreed-upon facts gleaned from all three accounts are these. Sir Jean de Carrouges and Sir Jacques Le Gris were longtime friends, having first met fighting the English on the battlefields of Limoges in 1370. Over the years, de Carrouges returned to run his family properties, married Marguerite, the daughter of a traitor who had sided with the English, in exchange for a large dowry of property. Meanwhile, Le Gris became a confidant of Count Pierre d’Alencon who demanded harsher and hasher taxes from property owners like de Carrouges. A simmering feud between the former friends (over some property that had been promised de Carrouges as part of a dowry but ended up in Le Gris’ hands by dint of Count Pierre’s interference) burst into the public realm when Marguerite accused Le Gris of rape. After a series of court proceedings resolved nothing, it was agreed that a jousting duel to the death between the two men was the only way to determine the truth. This sets up the dramatic finale, with a very dark twist. If de Carrouges loses, his wife is assumed to have lied and will be burned at the stake.

The three-perspectives approach has one glaring weakness – that we have to go over the same ground three times. The best way to overcome this weakness is to make sure the three versions are very different. Ideally, each story forces us to reconsider everything we’d heard from the other two. Unfortunately, the two men’s versions (de Carrouges first, then Le Gris) are so similar for so much of the time, that it feels more repetitive than revelatory. By the time we get to Marguerite’s version, which truly does upend her husband’s version and to a lesser extent Le Gris,’ we’re worn down by so much repetition in this two-and-a-half hour movie. Nonetheless, it’s Marguerite’s take that brings true focus to the film’s otherwise wandering thematics.

Oddly, once all three sides are heard, it’s pretty clear neither man is worth rooting for. If it wasn’t for the consequences on poor Marguerite, justice might have been best served if both men perished in this last duel.

Ultimately, the film is a proto-feminist take on the Middle Ages. It’s no surprise that women were treated horribly in medieval France, but it’s always worth highlighting actual women who choose to fight the outrages of the paternalistic world they inhabited, IF that is indeed what Marguerite did. This take on her feels a little too conveniently anachronistic to be entirely convincing, but this is where I’ll let the historians take over.

Check out more of Tom Tangney’s movie reviews here.

It doesn’t make for a better movie, but it is a fitting tribute to Craig’s singular interpretation of Agent 007. His Bond films are by far the most emotionally ambitious of all of them. Now that may not be what the fans care about but the actor Daniel Craig certainly seems to.

But Bond fans need not worry. The familiar trappings of the James Bond universe are all on fine display: spectacular stunts, elaborate chases, exotic locales, sleek cars, flashy gunplay, and beautiful women in fancy clothes. And the regulars all show up as well: M, and Q, and Moneypenny.

A few contemporary touches are also thrown in. For instance, the new temporary replacement 007 is a young Black woman, and we get to hear a few sex-positive cracks from a woman’s point of view.

The villain is yet another version of the madman-out-for-revenge cliché, as Rami Malik is playing a guy with an appropriately ludicrous name: Lyutsifer Safin. The only fresh face that makes much of an impression is actress Ana de Armas, who plays a CIA agent in Havana, Cuba. She’s a newbie agent whose playful sexiness leads everyone to underestimate her. She leaves the movie so abruptly after only 10 minutes of screen time, that she leaves Bond and the audience wanting more.

Unusual for a Bond film, the movie begins and ends not with Agent 007, but rather with Madeleine Swann (Lea Seydoux), Bond’s love interest at the end of “Spectre.” The fact that she bookends the film signals that, for his final go-round, Craig wants to put Bond’s love-life front and center for a change. Of course, he spends plenty of time fighting off all the bad guys — Spectre, Blofeld, Safin — but when it comes to the dramatic climax, the culmination of his five-film odyssey as Bond, it’s all about Swann for him.

Bond’s inner life has never been explored as deeply as it has with Craig’s portrayal. Ever since his first Bond film, “Casino Royale,” 007 has been haunted by the suicide of a former love, Vesper Lynd. Although Bond and Swann exchange “je taime”s early in the film, Swann realizes that until he comes to grips with his grief over Lynd, the two of them don’t have a chance as a couple. (She’s not a psychotherapist for nothing.) When things literally blow up at Lynd’s gravesite, Bond decides he’ll never be able to trust Swann either and puts her on a train, determined never to see her again.

When she reappears much later in the movie, Bond’s feelings for her deepen, some might say “mature.” Quite out of character, he ends up professing the most profound regret for abandoning her and then utters the most heartfelt and straight-forward expression of love any James Bond has ever uttered. By film’s end, he’s willing to die for love. He’s even talky about it.

As odd as this may sound for the always-in-control James Bond, it is an appropriate culmination of Craig’s character arc for Bond. It’s remarkable, looking back, how much attention was paid to Bond’s emotional vulnerabilities. Vesper Lynd’s sacrificial suicide in the first film still haunts him in his fifth and that doesn’t get resolved until he can offer a similar sacrifice to Madeleine Swann. Craig’s Bond goes out with an emotional bang.

It may not be the ending fans want but, in Craig’s eyes, Bond has finally come full-circle.

Find more movie reviews from Tom here.

The screening is part of SIFF’s first ever documentary film festival. Dubbed , the weeklong festival features 13 separate titles, all of which will play at the SIFF Cinema Egyptian with in-person introductions as well. Eleven of the films will also stream on the SIFF Channel, SIFF’s online streaming portal.

“A-ha: The Movie” is an ideal opening night choice. Given its synth pop subject matter, the film has an undeniably peppy veneer. After all, the band’s first and still biggest hit “Take Me On” is an earworm for all time. (Just try NOT humming that as you leave the theater.) But far from being a one-hit wonder, A-ha and its three members have fashioned a surprising 40-year career. (Who knew? Not me.) And the movie makes good use of that four-decade span to examine the personal and creative tensions that inevitably arise among the three. That tension gives the movie enough depth to prevent it from becoming just a nostalgic wallow.

If the A-ha documentary is perhaps the most enjoyable of the DocFest offerings, the most infuriating is “The Conservation Game.” You’ll never again watch one of those animal segments on late-night or early morning talk shows the same way. The film spotlights a retired cop who’s made it his mission to track down what happens to all those cute tiger, and lion, and leopard cubs who are forced to interact with clueless talk show hosts on a regular basis. Celebrity animal handler Jack Hanna and many others should be ashamed of themselves for their decades-long deception about the fate of these so-called “ambassador animals.” The Columbus Zoo in Ohio deserves special scorn. (Fans of “The Tiger King” might appreciate that the film includes an interview with Carole Baskin and briefly discusses Joe Exotic’s murder case.) A powerful indictment of the exotic animal industry.

Other films in this DocFest I’ve had a chance to preview include a behind-the-scenes sports documentary, an unexpected look at how trees communicate, and a very personal account of the fight over Confederate statues.

“The Squad #notheretodance” profiles one of the most successful women’s professional soccer teams in the world: Olympique Lyonnais. One often hears athletes say it’s the camaraderie that attracts them to sports, even more than the game itself. This movie demonstrates that point, since very little of the footage is on the pitch. A local bonus — a couple of the players featured also play for the OL Reign!

“The Hidden Life of Trees” is basically a come-to-life version of a book of the same name by world-renowned forester Peter Wohlleben. (The movie even zeroes in on the book’s chapter headings before each segment.) Chockful of surprising information about the complexity of trees and forests, it’s also gorgeously shot. “The Hidden Life of Trees” would be a good companion piece to last year’s “Fantastic Fungi.”

“The Neutral Ground” explores the culture war flashpoint of removing Confederate statues in the American South from a deeply personal point of view. The filmmaker is a mixed-race middle school teacher and comedian who does his best to hear out both his aggrieved father and Confederate apologists. As part of his exploration, he takes part in not only a Civil War battlefield reenactment but a slave rebellion reenactment as well.

Other films that were unavailable for previewing but look very promising include “The Rescue,” about the 2018 rescue of a boys’ soccer team trapped in an underground cave in Thailand, and “Flee,” an animated movie about a young Afghan boy who flees to Denmark.

Listen to the Tom and Curley Show weekday afternoons from 3 – 7 p.m. on ³ÉÈËXÕ¾ Radio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.

I’m sorry I didn’t like you as much as you wanted me to. I tried, I really, really tried. As you know, I’m a sucker for a good Broadway musical and, heck, you won a ton of Tony’s — the biggest smash hit since “Hamilton.” I know you suffer from crippling anxiety, from the sense that you’re just not good enough. But you know what? You’re right. You’re no “Hamilton.” You’re not even “In The Heights,” the movie.

It’s not that you’re all bad. You have a very nice cast, bolstered by legit actors like Amy Adams and Julianne Moore, along with a few fresher faces, too. And every one of them can really sing quite well. It’s true your lead Ben Platt is a little old to play a teenager but he did originate the role on Broadway to great acclaim, so I’m fine with a stage actor not being replaced by a flashier movie star for a change. You even dared to make some changes to the , dropping some songs and adding others, diminishing some roles even as you expand others.

But at your core, you suffer from the same faults as your predecessor. You’re just too needy. And even worse, you use your neediness as a shield to deflect criticism. “Don’t you think teen suicide is important?” you taunt. “Isn’t mental illness and depression worth our attention?” you challenge your critics. “And isn’t social media the worst?” you throw at your naysayers.

“IT SURE IS HARD TO BE A TEEN!” you want to scream at us. But because you’re so sensitive and unsure of yourself, instead of a scream, you can only blurt it out in near-whispers, in oh-so-quiet songs of lament, one after another, after another.

Like Evan Hansen himself, you, “Dear Evan Hansen” the movie, you use a tragedy as a justification for manipulating people into liking you, even worse, loving you! Your very earnestness is, perhaps unintentionally, exploitative.

I understand you’re unsure of yourself, but your fake persona allows for the worst kind of self-aggrandizement. “I am an important film because I am dealing with Serious Social Issues,” you seem to insist. Unfortunately, the subject matter is far too heavy for such a shallow, lightweight vehicle as yourself.

I know it’s hard, but be honest. Only then, as your song says, will you be found.

Sincerely,

Tom Tangney, Not Yet A Movie

Listen to the Tom and Curley Show weekday afternoons from 3 – 7 p.m. on ³ÉÈËXÕ¾ Radio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.

But that premise is not what you think. It’s not about having nine days to live. It’s about having nine days to find out if you get a chance to live at all, a chance to be born. How’s that for an intriguing premise?

‘Stillwater’ does not run deep enough

The set-up is mysterious. A man is in a house in the middle of what seems like a desert or a deserted beach. He sits in a room watching a couple dozen TV screens. The screens are all showing different first-person points-of-view of seemingly random events in daily life. The man watching all these screens occasionally pops in a new old-fashioned VHS tape to record these non-stop goings-on.

One of these screens shows the ongoing life of someone named Amanda. Amanda is a young woman who plays the violin. Shortly after a big performance, Amanda crashes her car into a bridge pillar and unexpectedly dies. The man in the house is distraught, but soon after, he begins a series of interviews with a handful of prospective replacements for Amanda.

He explains to them that he will choose one of them for “the amazing opportunity for life.” Over the course of nine days, the man in the house, whose name we find out is Will, will ask each of these unborn souls a series of tough ethical questions to which there are no right or wrong answers, he says. He then instructs them to watch the TV screens for a prescribed amount of time each day and write down anything they see that they particularly like.

Each of the candidates desperately wants the chance to become alive, but Will assures them there’s nothing they can do to influence his decision. Just follow his instructions, he says.

The movie mostly consists of how the prospective clients respond to what they see on screen and how they respond if and when they’re not chosen for life. The film also shifts its focus ever so gradually to Will himself.

Nine Days is a rich, somber, moody work of art. At one point, an applicant laughs nervously at one of Will’s questions: “This is heavy s—. Why can’t we relax? Everything’s so serious,” he notes, uncomfortably. Moviegoers might feel similarly about this film. It definitely weighs on you. There’s a sense of impending doom throughout.

But at the same time, this is about as life-affirming a movie as there can be. Every so often, the candidates break through their nagging fears and desperation, and experience, ever so briefly, moments of joy, or resolve, or pleasure, or indignation, or simple acceptance. Those moments have great resonance. Their time at the house can be worthwhile no matter how it ends.

It turns out you can live a lifetime in nine days.

Listen to the Tom and Curley Show weekday afternoons from 3 – 7 p.m. on ³ÉÈËXÕ¾ Radio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.

Written and directed by Oscar-winning Tom McCarthy (Spotlight), the film takes a whiff of inspiration from what happened to American student Amanda Knox in Italy over a decade ago and spins it into a contemporary story about a father’s determined attempt to free his daughter from a French prison.

Matt Damon plays the aggrieved dad, an out-of-work oil rigger from Stillwater, Oklahoma, named Bill Baker. Financially down-on-his-luck and unable to find a job, he ends up taking on construction work overseas, in Marseille, of all places. But Marseille is no accident. That’s where his 20-something daughter Allison has been locked up for the last five years for the murder of her roommate.

With four long years still left on her sentence, Baker decides he’s going to find a way to overturn the injustice done to his daughter. When Allison tells him another young woman told her that she knew a guy who was bragging that he had killed her roommate, Baker is convinced he’ll get the case re-opened. But when that hearsay is dismissed in a French court as mere hearsay, Baker is stymied and decides to take matters into his own hands.

The movie’s trailer might lead you to think we’re now about to enter Liam Neeson’s Taken territory, but Baker lacks Neeson’s “very particular set of skills.” Instead, without knowing a lick of French, and utterly dismissive of cultural differences, Baker bulls his way into the case — insulting his daughter’s lawyer, badgering potential witnesses, stupidly venturing into the French “projects” alone and at night to find a possible suspect. He ends up making matters even worse for his daughter. At one point, Allison screams her disappointment in him: “You’re always such a screw-up,” or something to that effect.

Stillwater eventually becomes less of a thriller and more of a character study of Baker. He’s kind of an ugly American who’s forgiven a lot because he has such a big, big heart. And Allison is right — he’s screwed up his life big-time. He’s a drunk and a felon, his wife killed herself (perhaps on his account), and he wasn’t around to parent his daughter after her mom died and now she’s serving a prison sentence for murder in a foreign country. His life is pretty much in shambles.

As he stumbles along in his months-long effort to track down the real killer, Baker’s rough-around-the-edges personality slowly gives way to his inner “nice guy.” He ends up babysitting his translator’s grade-school age daughter so much that he begins to discover the joys of fatherhood. It’s as if he’s making amends for neglecting his own offspring, and even Allison ends up approving of this new father-figure manifestation.

Unfortunately, McCarthy can’t let well enough alone. This “fish-out-of-water”/father-daughter redemption angle gives way, in the last act, to the film’s thriller roots, and promptly disavows all the painstaking character development we’ve witnessed in Baker over the last two hours. What a waste.

In the end, Baker is convinced he now sees the world differently after all he’s gone through in Marseille. I remain less convinced.

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It’s a grab-bag of a movie — a little schlocky horror, a little existential dread, a little philosophical reflection, a little mystery thriller, a little social satire. Any one of these might have provided the framework for a decent film, a film with some staying power. But instead, it’s like a tasting menu: You might find individual items tasty, but they don’t add up to a full meal.

And that’s a shame, because Shyamalan starts with a killer premise.

Imagine a beach on which everyone ages more rapidly than normal. Much more rapidly. The dozen beach visitors eventually figure out that a single hour on the beach is the equivalent of two years of normal life. And they can’t escape.

This is ripe for horror exploitation, as the oldest become decrepit and die, the middle-aged get sick and whatever illnesses they have progress much faster, and the kids go through puberty at alarming rates. The sometimes grotesque nature of the human body and, of course, the decaying flesh of the living and the dead are featured in Old, but not in any overpowering way. It’s horror gone mild.

The metaphoric nature of the premise has the most potential. The sensation of life whizzing by is a common observation of just about everyone but the young. What parents haven’t felt like their kids grew up overnight, and what senior citizens haven’t looked back at their lives and wondered how it all could have happened in a blink of an eye.

The beach-goers’ predicament is ultimately not that much different than ours. Shyamalan doesn’t develop this observation too deeply, but the characters’ realization of what’s happening does force at least some of them to reflect on their lives in rather profound ways.

And in a kind of time-lapse way, the kids grow up not only physically but emotionally, passing through the stages of maturity from worshipping their parents to despising them to appreciating them over the course of the day. This metaphoric plane is by far the strength of the film, and if Shyamalan had set anchor in this thematic bay, he might have had his strongest film since The Sixth Sense.

Instead, Shyamalan rushes on to other issues. Hey, what about group dynamics? Do the people work together or pull apart? With a multi-ethnic group, do rising suspicions fall along racial lines? Are individuals willing to risk their lives for the sake of others? Is this Sartre’s idea that hell is other people or the opposite? Again, all rich issues to explore, but Shyamalan gives them only the briefest of glances.

Other character and plot questions abound. Why is this happening and why are they there? Why do they blackout whenever they try to leave the beach? Why does one character’s nose keep bleeding? Why does another periodically slash with a knife? Why does another go into hiding? What’s that shiny object on the hill? What’s that kid’s coded message say?

Unfortunately, Shyamalan is determined to answer all these questions and then some, likely so that the audience doesn’t feel robbed, I suppose. But in so doing, he’s robbing us of the power of the premise. In the now-expected Shyamalan final act twist, the mystery does indeed get solved, but the power of the truly mysterious washes away with the tide.

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It’s a loss for us all that a man who had such a flair for relaying his discoveries about the world to the world couldn’t tell us about the pain and emptiness he experienced in his own, private world. And, of course, our loss is nothing compared to the grief his family and friends continue to feel, a full three years after his death.

Morgan Neville’s documentary tries its best to make sense of it all. But suicides are infinitely complex affairs; the motivations can be so multi-leveled and intertwined that they’re impossible to pin down. The fact this film is not up to the task, that it comes up short, is no disgrace, but it is a disappointment.

Anthony Bourdain burst onto the scene in 2000 with an astonishingly revealing look at his gritty life as a chef in a famous Manhattan restaurant. was not only a huge bestseller, it changed the trajectory of this former heroin addict’s life.

He became so heralded as a writer that he soon left his restaurant job and spent most of the final 18 years of his life galivanting around the world with camera crews in tow. His various TV series (“A Cook’s Tour,” “No Reservations,” “The Layover,” and “Parts Unknown”) were all marked by his distinctive writerly scripts, a sardonic, world-weary tone, and a sly sense of humor.

Anthony Bourdain cut an iconic figure, a chain-smoking smart ass whose too-cool-for-the-room vibe often gave way to surprise bouts of enthusiasm for this culture and that. As is noted in the film, his food-and-travel shows became less and less about food and more and more about the cultures he was experiencing in his travels.

To his legions of fans, much of the first 80 or 90 minutes of this two-hour movie will feel familiar. Chockful of clips from his TV shows, the doc sometimes feels like a highlight reel of Bourdain at his charming best. Interspersed with these clips are talking head sequences, with many of his closest colleagues, friends, and most poignantly his second wife.

Relatively short shrift is given to the first 40 years of his life — loving parents, 20-year-marriage to his high-school sweetheart, heroin addiction, kicking that addiction. Neville does dig up some pertinent footage of Bourdain through the years musing on death and suicide. At one point, he mentions he doesn’t want to have a big splashy funeral, unless it’s for entertainment value. He even jokingly entertains the possibility of his corpse being fed to a woodchipper. Gruesome, yes, but more in a black humor way than a personally revelatory way.

In the film’s last half-hour or so Neville offers up relatively fresh information about Bourdain’s last year of his life, and as valuable as it is biographically, it’s also the most problematic part of the documentary. Perhaps without intending to, the film seems to blame his latest flame, actress , for his downfall. When a photo of her with another man showed up in a tabloid, Bourdain apparently went into a tailspin from which he never recovered.

Plenty of his longtime work colleagues saw her presence as a destabilizing force in his life, but since Morgan couldn’t convince Argento to do an interview, the film seems a bit unbalanced and unfair to the actress. Another lifelong friend, wary of “always blaming the lover,” tries to right the balance a bit by adamantly insisting “Tony killed himself,” and no one else. Other friends also weigh in, doing their best to understand the incomprehensible. Valiant efforts all, but somehow not enough.

Neville includes a telling TV clip of Bourdain returning to the seaside restaurant where he first honed his kitchen skills. Bourdain says he was an angry young man back then and goes on to muse: “What the hell was I so angry about? This was paradise.”

What’s missing in Roadrunner is inevitable. What it needs is the impossible, Bourdain himself explaining his actions as only he could. To the outside world, he was living in paradise. But only Tony could make us understand how for him, at least, it was hell.

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This is all very irritating for hard-core MCU fans but most moviegoers, I suspect, probably don’t exactly remember or even care which Avengers died and which survived anyway. What they’re really after are Marvel’s patented thrills and chills, the spectacular CGI action set-pieces, the hyper-speed hand-to-hand combat, the constant quips amidst the heroics, and Scarlett Johannson in a dramatic black (or white) leather outfit. Black Widow delivers on all that.

And I have a hunch even the indefensible delay in getting Natasha’s story to the big screen just might have worked out for the best. After all, 2021 appears much more amenable to feminist sensibilities than, say, 2011. And Johannson’s worked hard over her eight Marvel films to make her character more than a sexpot, and that work culminates in Black Widow.

The film begins in 1995 when Natasha is a young teenager living in an idyllic small town in Ohio. She’s part of a fake American family — mom, dad, two daughters — who’re really Russian plants, and entirely unrelated to each other. Once the Americans figure out what’s really going on, the family has to make a harrowing escape to Russia. Upon their arrival, the four are immediately separated and the girls, the faux siblings, are sent off to a brutal camp called the Red Room where they are turned into merciless super-assassins, aka Black Widows.

The movie then jumps ahead 21 years. Natasha, who in the meantime has switched sides and joined the Avengers, is in hiding. For MCU fans, this timeframe is immediately following Captain America: Civil War when the Avengers are at their lowest point. They’re fighting among themselves and half of them are locked up by their own American government.

Natasha is lured out of hiding by an unexpected attack engineered by the evil Soviet General Dreykov (Ray Winstone) who had set up the assassin school she’d been trained at, and who she thought she had killed in a previous MCU movie. She eventually re-discovers her long-lost “sister” and fellow Black Widow Yelena (Florence Pugh), and the two of them team up to go after Dreykov. That takes up the rest of this 2-hour-and-13-minute movie. It’s sisterhood empowerment come to life.

In the process, what’s uncovered is a massive worldwide network of Black Widows who’ve been groomed to do the bidding of their master Dreykov. Taken from their families at a young age, these girls are brutalized (forced hysterectomies, brains chemically altered, etc.) until they become perfectly skilled killing machines. I can’t have been the only one that saw these as comic book parallels of real-life tragedies like sex-trafficking. And as for Dreykov, at least as played by Ray Winstone, he’s not only a megalomaniac, he is also the sleaziest of manipulators. It had to be intentional that he comes off as a kind of supervillain version of Harvey Weinstein or Matt Lauer.

All this “messaging” does not get in the way of the rollicking good time fans expect from the Marvel Universe, but it’s no accident this film was made in the wake of the #MeToo movement. Despite the frustrating delay, this late release might be exactly what Black Widow and Scarlett Johannson needed.  As they say, “Times Up.”

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‘F9’ shows ‘Fast and Furious’ filmmakers can’t even take themselves seriously

In Pratt’s latest movie, The Tomorrow War, which he also executive produced, he is again very heroic but, sadly, personality-free. His character makes a few half-hearted attempts at humor but they fall mostly flat. His character, Iraq-War vet Dan Forester is, most of all, earnest and pained and brave and bland. It’s hard to imagine why Pratt would want to take on this role, which has little use for his natural charm and easy-going personality.

Pratt has said he wanted to find material that was original. And the film deserves some credit, I suppose, for NOT being based on a book, a comic strip, a video game, or another movie. But what it does draw on seems to be every generic sci-fi/creature feature movie convention ever concocted. That’s not what “original” should mean. Good source material would be preferable to this mish-mash of the trite and the overly familiar.

I fault the screenplay more than the actors or director, and that might not even be the screenwriter’s fault. Apparently, the first script was deemed too Children of Men dark and the decision was made to go more Independence Day light. In the end, the film does justice to neither movie.

The plot begins with a promising time travel premise. Humans from the 2050s interrupt our lives as we know them to inform us that the human race is losing a war with aliens. Humanity has been nearly wiped out in the future and what our eventual descendants need are more bodies to fight. Hence, a mandatory worldwide universal draft is instituted immediately. The draftees time-travel to the future to fight the aliens for seven days. If they survive the week, they’re returned to present-day Earth. The downside? Only 30% survive.

Dan Forester (Chris Pratt) has to leave behind his wife and young daughter when he’s drafted, and the rest of the film consists of him battling hellacious aliens called White Spikes. His (and humanity’s) odds look grim when he lands in the future, and they seem to get grimmer and grimmer as the movie goes on. But these giant, fast, creepy-crawler creatures with voracious appetites and long spiky-ended tentacles at least provide the movie with an engaging enemy.

What the film does best is keep the tension up. The audience is on high-alert for the duration of this overly long (2 hours and 20 minutes!) extravaganza. Granted, at times it may feel more like a video game, but mostly the elaborate action set-pieces are pleasingly effective adrenaline rushes.

So, what’s not to like?

The script suffers from a bad case of Screenplay 101-itis. Embarrassingly heavy-handed foreshadowing, too obvious character arcs, abrupt interjections of lengthy conversations about personal feelings in the midst of perpetual life-and-death battles, and an embarrassing “lessons learned” platitude at the end of the movie that’s a real groaner.

The real lesson learned? Stick to the creature feature next time and leave humanity out of it. The future will thank you.

The Tomorrow War was originally slated as a Christmas 2020 release for Paramount. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Paramount sold the movie to Amazon Studios, which is releasing it on Amazon Prime on July 2, 2021.

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Before we get to that punchline though, let’s back up. “F9: The Fast Saga” once again brings the Fast and Furious gang together to fight off yet another attempt by assorted bad guys to take over the world. Like the Infinity Stones in the Marvel Universe, a high-tech device that could control all the computers in the world, and hence the world’s weapons systems, has been split in two and hidden so no one entity could take over the world. Well, guess what? The bad guys are close to getting both halves and the key to unlocking its powers. Yawn.

But wait, there are a lot of chases – with lots of muscle cars, souped-up motorcycles, massive tanks, even armored vehicles the length of trains – in lots of far-flung locations (Montecito, Edinburgh, the Caspian Sea, Tokyo, London, Tbilisi.) The action set-pieces are unabashedly spectacular, if a bit repetitive over the course of this nearly two-and-a-half-hour movie. The film has a lot of fun with racing and chasing vehicles equipped with high-powered electromagnets, for instance, that both attract and repel everything from bystanders’ phones and watches to bad guys’ guns and cars. It’s hard to run somebody off the road when your car is magnetized to the car you’re trying to run down. Ha!

It’s understood and accepted that none of these stunts would ever work in real life, where physics still reigns.

But “F9” then goes where no Fast Saga entry has ever gone before. Space, the Final Frontier.

The Fast and Furious crew realize that in order to stop the bad guys it has to destroy a particular satellite orbiting the earth. So, of course, the crew does what any serious bad-guy-stopping operation would do – they strap rockets to an old Pontiac Fiero and shoot two of the crew into outer space. I kid you not. Thankfully, this is played mostly for laughs. When the two lucky astronauts Roman (Tyrese Gibson) and Tej (Ludacris), wearing deep-sea diving outfits rather than space suits, finally reach orbit in their beat-up Pontiac, they’re in utter disbelief.

“This is crazy, bro!”
“Two dudes from the ghetto … in outer space!”

It’s a remarkably light and funny moment. We’ve suddenly left the gritty, stressful Fast and Furious world and have entered into Abbott and Costello territory. (“Abbott and Costello Go to Mars.”)

This comic relief works in the moment, but it eventually underscores a problem with the script. There are absolutely no stakes for anyone in the film. No one who shouldn’t die dies. In fact, some people who died in past movies are even explained back to life in “F9.”

In a very meta move, Roman even comments on how amazing it is that he’s never been hurt in any of his Fast and Furious escapades. Despite impossible odds, Tej and Ramsey and Letty and Dom have also escaped relatively unscathed time after time after time. The crew laughs it off and gets back to work. But the film clearly is acknowledging just how far-fetched this franchise is getting.

This kind of self-awareness is refreshing for a blockbuster franchise but could foretell its doom. When even the Fast and Furious filmmakers can’t take themselves seriously, will it be enough for fans to be in on the joke?

Perhaps what is needed is a kind of reboot. Much like the James Bond franchise did with Daniel Craig, this juggernaut of a series might benefit from a return to its rough-and-tumble roots. The original, “The Fast and The Furious,” was a pretty straight-forward movie about street racing in the mean streets of L.A. At this point, bringing Dom Toretto and “family” back down to reality would feel downright exotic.

No matter, though. Let’s not let perfection, as they say, be the enemy of the good. And “Luca” is a good film.

Luca is a typical adolescent sea monster. You know, chafing under the watchful eyes of his parents and yearning to be free to explore the outside world above water. Shades of “The Little Mermaid” and “Finding Nemo.” His parents are constantly warning him about the dangers of going to the surface, that land monsters will “murder” him. “Curious fish get caught,” they intone.

But as with most kids, curiosity gets the better of Luca and he soon runs into another young sea monster, Alberto, who’s already mastered the tricks of life on land. Alberto insists “Everything good is above the surface – air, gravity, the sky, the sun, and human stuff.” Little known fact: whenever a sea monster goes on land he takes on human form. Only when he gets wet does his sea monster form return.

Once on land, Luca has to learn the simplest of human tasks, like how to walk, for instance, not easy for a life-long underwater creature. He eventually even learns how to ride a bicycle.

But what he mostly learns is how to hide his true identity among humankind. Much of the movie consists of Luca and Alberto dodging dangerous situations in which their true selves are threatened with exposure. Along the way, they join forces with a spunky human girl, Giulia, to defeat the insufferable bully of the town. As luck would have it, Giulia’s dad is a fisherman who hunts sea monsters. So, peril is constant.

Much of the story moves along predictable paths and develops predictable themes – the value of friendship, hard work, and a little risk-taking. On that last point, Alberto teaches Luca to face up to his inner critic and say, “Silencio, Bruno!” whenever doubt creeps in. Why “Bruno”? Who knows but who cares, it seems to work. And most of all, the movie preaches the value of being yourself, whether that’s being a sea monster, a human, or both. Not exactly groundbreaking stuff, but relatable to adolescents everywhere.

The movie is also chockful of clever and classic Pixar touches – like Giulia’s cat who can sniff out a fish no matter its human form, or Luca’s grandma who secretly roots for him to seek landfall, and maybe best of all, weird Uncle Ugo (Sacha Baron Cohen) who lives in the deepest and slowest moving waters of the sea. He puts in a surprise appearance that’s worth sticking around for after the credits.

I’m always disappointed when I run into adults who avoid Pixar films because they think they’re movies for kids. They don’t know what they’re missing. Pixar projects often operate on so many different levels that they usually have as much to say to adults as children. “Luca,” however, is not one of those Pixar films. By all means, take your kids. But if you don’t have kids, this is one you can afford to miss.

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To give credit where credit is due, Miranda’s stage musical was the first Tony-Award winning show to incorporate significant chunks of hip-hop and rap into its kaleidoscope of musical styles. And its cultural significance for the Latinx community is undeniable. A Broadway musical set entirely within the confines of a Latino neighborhood in New York City, and cast almost entirely with members of the Latin American diaspora was truly daring.

But at its core, In the Heights is very conventional. The plot revolves around two young couples in love, each of them grappling with the joys and heartbreaks of growing up amidst the ever-changing world around them. Pretty standard musical fodder, right? Throw in a number of major dance sequences and you have the basis for a good old-fashioned musical, albeit in a refreshing new setting: Upper Manhattan’s Washington Heights.

The stage show’s inevitable happy ending seems more preordained than earned, but hey, what do you want from a musical? Theatergoers went home smiling, maybe even snapping their fingers.

I get the impression that wasn’t good enough for film director Jon M. Chu (Crazy Rich Asians). My hunch is he wants us to leave the movie theatre not just smiling but grinning ear to ear, not just snapping our fingers but dancing in the streets. Chu chooses to go big with Miranda’s material and he wants a big reaction. He doesn’t so much improve on the show’s weaknesses (plot, characterization) as overwhelm them with the show’s strengths (singing, dancing). And he’s aided immensely by a gorgeously talented cast of performers, led by Anthony Ramos (Hamilton) playing the part Miranda originally wrote for himself.

Movie versions of Broadway musicals can be tricky. The artifice of most musicals often clashes with the more naturalistic (realistic?) tendencies of film. Somebody suddenly bursting into song seems more appropriate on a stage than a city street, for instance. Chu confronts this dilemma head on. First, he decides to film on the actual streets of the actual neighborhood of Washington Heights. And secondly, he then doubles down on the very artificiality of musicals with some of the giddiest set-pieces imaginable.

The movie starts with a snappy opening song called “In the Heights,” in which our lead character Usnavi, a young struggling bodega owner, raps about his neighborhood. It’s an 8-minute song that succinctly introduces most of the main characters as they enter his shop and sing their greetings. The song ends with a big choral crescendo and it’s at this point that the film seems to announce this is a MOVIE musical. The camera moves from inside the bodega to outside in the streets, and rather than the 15 people or so we’d see singing and dancing on the Broadway stage, we see at least a hundred people a couple of blocks deep all dancing exuberantly in unison. Chu has made his intentions clear: He’s going for broke. There’s no holding back.

‘A Quiet Place Part II’ is a more than worthy sequel

Perhaps the most outrageous and exhilarating musical number, and definitely the splashiest, is “96,000,” in which all the main characters dream about what they would do if they won the $96,000 lottery prize. For no good reason other than to be showy, Chu sets the song in an actual huge Washington Heights community pool (Highbridge Pool). This allows him to recreate an old-Hollywood homage to Busby Berkeley and Esther Williams with 150 swimming dancers performing perfectly choreographed geometric patterns in the pool. This is flamboyantly (and buoyantly) over the top, and the movie revels in it.

Not all of the other 15 songs are so excessively staged (imagine how exhausting that would be!) but the choreography of many of them is quite complex and intricate, including the beauty parlor gossip session “No Me Diga,” and the uplifting “Carnaval Del Barrio.” Others are powerful and moving, especially “Pacienca Y Fe,” which recounts an aging Abuela’s long difficult life as a Cuban immigrant.

And Chu saves the most visually arresting number for almost the last. “When the Sun Goes Down” is a sweet love song about departing, but it has added impact in this movie version because of an unexpected trick of cinematography. That’s all I’m going to say because what makes the scene work is its very unexpectedness. The stunt perfectly embodies how the characters are feeling, yes, but it also serves as a kind of final declaration that this is indeed a MOVIE musical.

In the Heights deserves to be seen on the big screen. It’s available on HBO Max, but I recommend you see it in a theater.

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Writer/actor/director John Krasinski pulled off a mini-miracle last time out, crafting a $340-million smash hit with a relatively miniscule $20-million budget. But the miracle wasn’t just in the financial realm. Even more impressive was its artistic success. The original Quiet Place used a sci-fi/horror context to take a serious and compelling look at a nuclear family under extreme duress. Plenty of thrills and chills, of course, but also a desperate family’s coping mechanisms on full display.

What mostly set the original apart was its ingenious conceit — an invading race of sinister aliens whose power of detection depends entirely on their hyper-sensitive hearing. Each and every sound made by its human prey could mean a swift death sentence. Krasinski has a blast heightening the stakes even further by incorporating a deaf daughter and a pregnant wife who, in the course of the movie, has to try to give birth, silently. It was a fresh and exhilarating movie-going experience; one that was always meant to be a one-off.

But the powers-that-be saw its franchise potential, so A Quiet Place now has a Part II, and a Part III is already in the works. Trilogies often dilute the power of the original but if Part II is any indication, this may be the exception that proves the rule.

After a quick and terrifying “prequel” look at how this alien invasion started, the sequel picks up exactly where the original ended, on Day 474. Having spent most of the first film sheltering in place on their upstate New York farm, the Abbott family, or what’s left of it, spends this movie trekking overland to find safer environs. Of course, the stakes remain as high as can be given that any noisy step could be their last. And the degree of difficulty keeps climbing.

Mom Evelyn Abbott, played by Emily Blunt, has to shepherd her flock — a deaf daughter, a hobbled younger son, and an infant — on a cross-country journey on foot, armed with nothing more than a shotgun, an oxygen tank, a loudspeaker, and her own wits. Life doesn’t get much easier when they run into a demoralized and untrustworthy neighbor played by Cillian Murphy.

The suspense never lets up. In fact, Krasinski even ratchets up the suspense from time to time with parallel action sequences. For example, at a crucial point in the movie, the deaf girl is on one dangerous mission, the mom is on another, and the boy is on a third. In a bravura display of editing, all three actions culminate in a perfectly timed crescendo of terror and fright. It’s showy, but effective.

Compared to the first film, this sequel is more of a straight thriller, with more extended and elaborate action set-pieces.

Understandably, less time is spent on figuring out how and why the aliens operate the way they do. The aliens, this time out, are less a mystery to solve than a threat to escape from. That makes for an overall less profound film, perhaps, but a no less exciting one. If I have a quibble with the movie, it’s its use of a particular pop song as some kind of signal. Bobby Darin’s “Beyond the Sea” seems an awfully oblique way to send a message. It’s either too cute or too clever by half. But that’s a rare screenwriting misstep in an otherwise solid story.

A Quiet Place Part II is a more than worthy sequel. One can only hope a third and final film will uphold the standards of its excellent predecessors.

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If you’re late to this Oscar season but wouldn’t mind a reason to check out this Sunday’s show, I’ve come up with the five most pressing questions that Oscar aficionados want answered.

1) What’s a virtual Academy Award Ceremony directed by Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh going to look like?

Even making allowances for the typical over-the-top hype any Oscar show aims for, I expect this year’s ceremony to be unavoidably groundbreaking. After all, it is the first ever (and hopefully only) Pandemic Academy Awards. Director Soderbergh hopes to take the COVID-19 limitations and turn them into artistic strengths by making the ceremony feel more like a movie than a TV event. How he’s going to do that remains top secret, although he has revealed it’ll involve over-the-shoulder shots from the audience, high-resolution wide-screen formats, and live hits from not only Hollywood but London and Paris as well.

Normally, I’d dismiss this “like a movie” metaphor as rhetorical gimmickry, but in Soderbergh I trust. He has one of the most varied film catalogs, from indie darlings like Sex, Lies, and Videotapes and the four-hour Che, to mainstream juggernauts like the Ocean’s trilogy and Magic Mike, not to mention his Best Picture Oscar-winner Traffic, and his prescient and germane Contagion. A successful Oscar ceremony would be just the latest notch in his artistic belt.

2) Can the small, quiet, almost ruminative independent film Nomadland really win Best Picture, as it’s favored to do?

With the possible exception of Moonlight, I can’t think of a more unlikely Best Picture winner than Nomadland, except that it’s the odds-on-favorite to snag exactly that! Even more remarkably, if it wins Sunday night, it will have led the Oscar race wire to wire. That’s not to suggest it would be an unworthy winner. It’s just that it’s so low-key, so lacking in bombast or in flair, so free of attention-grabbing flourishes. Nomadland is a movie stripped down to its emotional core — a woman who hits the road to quietly grieve the loss of her husband and to take stock of her life in the midst of a serious economic downturn.

I keep expecting it to eventually fall to more traditional fare — the splashy Aaron-Sorkin movie The Trial of the Chicago 7, or the heart-warming Minari, or the punch-in-the-eye of A Promising Young Woman, but at each turn — the Golden Globes, the Critics’ Choice, the BAFTA’s, and the Independent Spirit Awards — Nomadland nabs Best Picture. (The only award it didn’t snag was the Screen Actors Guild Best Ensemble, primarily because Frances McDormand and David Strathairn were working mostly with non-professional actors.) Oscar voters sometimes like to buck the trend and that could still happen this time out, but I’m close to conceding. It’s Nomadland‘s to lose.

3) With four of the five Best Actress nominees evenly dividing up all the major awards this season, which one will finally prevail to take home the Oscar?

This is the most competitive acting race in recent memory. Frances McDormand (Nomadland) was the early front-runner for her impossible-to-improve-upon performance as a middle-aged woman on the move in a van. She has a BAFTA Best Actress win to show for it.

Then along came Viola Davis as the flamboyant and world-weary blues diva in August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. She’s practically unrecognizable as the “Mother of the Blues” and gives an intentionally “theatrical” performance. In some ways, it’s the polar opposite of McDormand’s internalized acting in Nomadland. Davis has a Screen Actors Guild Best Actress Award to show for it.

Next up was Carey Mulligan in A Promising Young Woman. She gives a ferocious performance as a woman who “acts” one way and then acts another way in this audacious feminist revenge-thriller. If McDormand’s acting is thoughtful and Davis’ is showy, Mulligan’s screams “contemporary,” the perfect embodiment of the Me Too movement. She has a Critics Choice and Independent Spirit Award for Best Actress to show for it.

Relatively late in the release game came Andra Day in The United States vs Billie Holiday. Much like Diana Ross in Lady Sings the Blues, Day is primarily a singer who is asked to portray one of the greatest blues singers of all time. Her life is mostly a downward spiral relieved only by moments of artistic triumphs, and Day handles both aspects admirably, especially the singing. She adjusted her singing style to sound uncannily like Holiday, a feat in and of itself. The fact that Day does all of her singing gives her bragging rights at least over Davis whose singing was reportedly dubbed. She has a Best Actress Golden Globe to show for it.

The only nominee who hasn’t won a pre-Oscar Best Actress Award is Vanessa Kirby, primarily because her movie, Pieces of a Woman, is just not very good. But Kirby easily earns her nomination with the film’s single-take 30-minute opening during which her character endures a harrowingly realistic and relentless pregnancy crisis.

Except for Kirby, the Best Actress nominees all have the individual hardware to show off their success. A very good case could be made for each of them winning the crown jewel of acting awards. Personally, I’d vote for Viola Davis but I’m betting/guessing it’ll be Carey Mulligan.

4) Will there be a rare posthumous Oscar for Best Actor this year?

Only once has the Best Actor Oscar gone to someone who had passed away, to the great Peter Finch in Network. The equally great Chadwick Boseman is set to repeat Finch’s feat this year with his vivacious take on the ambitious young trumpeter in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. The entertainment world and beyond mourned the unexpected death of Boseman who worked practically right up to his death. Having already played Jackie Robinson, James Brown, Thurgood Marshall, and the Black Panther, Boseman capped off his short but packed career with two films this past year — Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods and Ma Rainey. When he succumbed to colon cancer last August at the age of 43, he was universally praised for both his talent and character. Despite fighting Stage 4 cancer, Boseman, a lifelong August Wilson fan, chose to squeeze in one last revelatory performance, a role unlike anything he’d done before.

Best Actor winner at the Golden Globes, the Critics Choice Awards, and the Screen Actors Guild, Boseman is the heavy favorite to nab the Oscar too. A faint sign of trouble, he most recently lost the BAFTA to Anthony Hopkins in The Father and the Independent Spirit Award to Riz Ahmed in Sound of Metal. Those last two awards could be explained away by the fact that BAFTA might easily prefer a British actor, and the Independent Spirit Awards might prefer the star of a film that feels more “indie.” So, sure, Boseman’s not invincible in this competition, but he’s darn close. Levee Forever!

5) Will there be an equally rare Best Director Oscar awarded to a woman this year?

One of the major embarrassments for the Academy Awards is its dismal record for diversity in the Best Director category. For instance, only one woman has ever won the award in its 93-year history — Kathryn Bigelow for The Hurt Locker. But come Sunday night, there’s a better-than-good chance that that number will double.

First off, two women are nominated in this category — Chloe Zhao for Nomadland, and Emerald Fennell for A Promising Young Woman. These two nominations are especially remarkable given that only seven women have ever even been nominated for Best Director, in its, again, 93-year history. Even more remarkably, Zhao is the odds-on favorite to nab that Oscar, given that she has won just about everything in sight — the Golden Globe, the Critics Choice Award, the BAFTA award, the Independent Spirit Award, and the prestigious Directors Guild Award as well. An Academy Award for Directing would be one more stunning achievement for this Chinese-American woman who is also nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Editing, and Best Picture! Perhaps even more stunning, her next project is a Marvel Cinematic Universe entry called Eternals.

The Oscars air at 5 p.m. PST on ABC.

In addition to reviewing movies, Tom co-hosts the Tom and Curley Show weekdays from 3 – 7 p.m. on ³ÉÈËXÕ¾ Radio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.

The global pandemic completely shut down last May’s 25-day film festival. But in the intervening 11 months, SIFF figured out how to throw a full-on festival entirely online. This virtual festival will still offer plenty of world premieres and movies from all over the world (69 different countries), and will include many of those traditional post-screening Q&As with the director and actors.

But instead of the usual couple hundred full-length films, this year’s festival will feature about half that many. And the 25-day extravaganza will be trimmed down to 11 days, closer to the standard length of most other film festivals. It’s also happening a month earlier (April 8-18.) Go to for the particulars on how to buy tickets and watch festival films in your own home, or whichever home you prefer to watch movies in.

As I do every year for the SIFF, I’ve carefully combed through this year’s wide-ranging lineup to come up with my 10 Best Hunches for this 47th edition. (One big caveat: I have not had a chance to see any of these films yet, so take my “recommendations” with many grains of salt.)

1. The Pink Cloud

Talk about prescient. This Brazilian film posits a mysterious pink cloud suddenly enveloping the world and forcing everyone to stay inside and in place. Intriguingly, the movie explores what it might be like to be quarantined with someone you barely know for a long, long time, perhaps a lifetime. (The movie seems prophetic enough that its trailer actually starts with a disclaimer — that it was written in 2017 and filmed before the global pandemic.)

2. Wyrm

School is hard enough. Now, imagine a school in which shy young teens have to wear electronic collars until they engage in their first kiss. More comic than dystopian, this film looks excruciatingly relatable. SIFF compares “Wyrm” to the works of Yorgos Lanthimos (“The Lobster”) and Todd Solondz (“Welcome to the Dollhouse,” “Palindromes”). If that’s even half-true, this may be the find of the festival.

3. There Is No Evil

Despite its oppressive regime, Iran has produced some of the best movies of the last decade. This Berlin Film Festival winner looks like another one. Made in secret and banned in Iran, this film focuses on four different stories involving Iran’s excessive use of capital punishment. For making this movie, director Mohammed Rasoulof was sentenced to a year in prison and banned from filmmaking for two years.

4. Truman and Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation

Two gay icons of 20th century American literature, Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote, were apparently lifelong friends and sometimes bitter rivals. In addition to incorporating archival interviews, this documentary also uses the voices of Jim Parsons as Capote and Zachary Quinto as Williams to bring to life the two writers’ personal letters and diary entries, as well as portions of their published works.

5. Summer of 85

I still vividly remember sitting in The Egyptian Theatre watching Francois Ozon’s brilliantly nerve-wracking debut film “See the Sea” during SIFF 1998. What a calling card that was. Twenty films later, Ozon has become a giant of French cinema. A SIFF programmer describes “Summer of 85” as quintessential Ozon: “sexy with sinister overtones.” Parfait.

6. Writing With Fire

Democracy is under severe strain in India right now, which makes this documentary about India’s only all-women news outlet all the more pertinent. Founded in 2002 in northern India by Dalit women who were once considered “untouchables,” Khabar Lahariya (“News Wave”) has survived against all odds, constantly butting up against the patriarchy as it struggles to cover touchy subjects like unprosecuted rapes and the rise of Hindu nationalism.

7. East Of The Mountains

Call me a homer, but how can I resist a movie based on a book by a local author (David Guterson), directed by a local filmmaker (SJ Chiro), and starring longtime local actor Tom Skerritt? It’s even set in Eastern Washington. You can’t get much more local than that. The movie appears to be something of a meditation on the meaning of life, with Skerritt’s terminally ill character planning on taking absolute control over the end of his life. SIFF also happens to be honoring Skerritt with its Outstanding Achievement in Cinema Award this year.

8. Little Girl

There may not be a more contentious issue than transgender rights at the moment, but this documentary about an 8-year-old transgender French girl looks to be entirely disarming by focusing on what it’s like to be little Sasha.

9. Love Type D

A British comedy based on an astounding genetic discovery involving personal relationships. It turns out each of us has a genetic marker designating whether we are dumpers or dumpees. When our heroine Frankie discovers she’s an eternal dumpee, she takes matters into her own hands. I love a good deconstruction of the rom-com.

10. Tove

The Moomins are ethereal creatures who live magically mundane lives in a land called Moominvalley. In a series of children’s books and comic strips, Finnish author and illustrator Tove Jannson single-handedly created this world of wonder that’s charmed audiences worldwide for over half a century. Jannson’s life was not as pleasant or benign as her endearing creations. This bio-pic provides the emotional dramatics behind her less-than-fairy-tale life. A must-see for all Moomin fans like me.

Which movies will dominate Oscar nominations after season marred by pandemic?

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