Late Night with the Devil

For the longest time I kept giving Late Night with the Devil the benefit of the doubt, overlooking things and tones that didn’t square with the film’s presented milieu — it’s supposed to be footage from a late-night TV talk show that aired live on Halloween 1977. It’s got subtly powerhouse work by David Dastmalchian, striding into a rare lead role with confidence and his usual emotional transparency. He’s playing Jack Delroy, the host of the fourth-network show Night Owls with Jack Delroy, and it’s clear he’s watched enough vintage chat and horror-host shows to have internalized how such hosts acted and spoke. Dastmalchian makes the movie fun to watch all by himself. It’s the movie around him that falters.

Obsessed with beating Johnny Carson’s ratings, Jack loads his Halloween show with guests he hopes will lure and hook viewers. There’s “Christou” (Fayssal Bazzi), a psychic who purports to be in touch with audience members’ deceased loved ones. There’s Carmichael Haig (Ian Bliss), a Randi-type debunker of flim-flam. Finally, there’s reputedly possessed girl Lilly (Ingrid Torelli), whose parapsychologist guardian Dr. June Ross-Mitchell (Laura Gordon) saved her from some sort of demonic cult. It’s not long before Jack finds out the real target of satanic energy isn’t any of his guests. 

Gee, could the (real-life) Bohemian Grove and its shadowy meetings of powerful men in the entertainment industry have something to do with it? Grasping at any means to take down Johnny, Jack has joined these weird ritualistic get-togethers in the woods. This isn’t a spoiler, as the too-explicit narration spills the beans right at the start. We then learn Jack’s wife had died of lung cancer despite never smoking (such a thing is rare but not so unheard-of as to suggest demonic cause). So we go into all the supernatural events with the knowledge that it’s all happening due to Jack; he is the nexus of this paranormal activity. 

This is why horror movies get less legitimately frightening the deeper they wander into the weeds of exposition. It becomes Jack’s problem, Jack’s fault, rather than something random and scary that could happen to you. As I said, Late Night with the Devil is a fun tribute; sometimes it looks like genuine 1977 video footage and sometimes not (I assume because if it looked too much like video from 1977 it’d just look terrible, like a smeary, staticky fifth-gen dupe). It’s a decent enough stylistic calling card for the director brothers Colin and Cameron Cairnes, who also wrote and edited the film; perhaps next time they could hire another writer, or resist whatever pressure they may have been under to force the weird events — including levitation, projectile vomiting and someone with worms emerging from his flesh — to make some sort of narrative sense instead of allowing them to be harrowingly unexplained.

What’s worse, rather than letting the whole film just be the show’s footage, the brothers Cairnes often give us black-and-white “behind the scenes” segments that are necessary, I guess, to deliver plot points (as when someone dies offscreen and Jack hears about it during a commercial pause), but that also violate the imaginative contract we’ve bought into that this is actual coverage taped off of late-night TV. Not that we literally believe it’s real, of course, but we want to like what the movie is doing, want to make ourselves vulnerable to whatever scares it packs, and such breaks in the style and narrative shatter what should be unquestioning absorption. Again, it’s a writing issue. 

Dastmalchian is one of the most effortlessly engaging actors we’ve got. In a recent two-parter on The Rookie he played a corrupt ex-soldier who faked his own death; his character showed such strong certainty that he was untouchable by the cops (including the one he once served with) we were left with little reason to doubt him. Late Night with the Devil lets Dastmalchian run the gamut from TV-host smarm to insecurity to grief to terror — it’s a full package. The movie would be considerably easier to dismiss and forget without him as Jack, the ringmaster of his own small circus whose animals get out of his control. For his pains, he’s just surrounded by a bunch of Australian actors who needed work. One of them, Rhys Auteri as Gus, Jack’s Ed McMahon figure, gives an on-target performance without ego. Most of the rest of the cast appear to be too “in character” as guests on a Halloween show — are they on the level or not? These directors seem to know how to leave good actors alone, but the (let’s say) other actors don’t get the guidance they need. By the time the climax fizzles out into a weak post-climax that fills the studio floor with casualties but leaves us unmoved, some of us may already have checked out mentally. Enjoy the movie for Dastmalchian, but don’t expect much more.

Civil War

Like a lot of flashpoints for cultural controversy, Alex Garland’s Civil War isn’t much to get angry or enthused about. It’s not a bad movie; it just isn’t what a lot of viewers will be wanting and expecting. Civil War is about a second such conflict in America, and some of its sounds and visuals have the spooky-surreal punch of the invasion sequences in John Milius’ Red Dawn. Garland, like Milius, wants the American audience to feel what it’s like to live under a hostile military presence. But he also wants to fashion a bouquet to war correspondents — our heroes are a quartet of combat photographers/writers, and they only get in the thick of things every reel or so. Meanwhile, the narrative takes no sides, which seems meant to placate the red and the blue by presenting a purple story that has already annoyed both sides.

Lee (Kirsten Dunst) and Joel (Wagner Moura) are seasoned war journos, joined by aging writer Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) and neophyte shutterbug Jessie (Cailie Spaeny), who looks about 12. The American president (Nick Offerman) has somehow gotten himself a third term and done other dictatorial things. This has resulted (I guess?) in the country splitting up into factions — loyalist states (Florida, Colorado), neutral spaces, and a secessionist movement called the Western Forces based in a comically unlikely détente between Texas and California (Gavin and Greg, together at last!) 

That last detail is your loudest indication that Civil War isn’t meant to be a statement about our current polarized situation (and a surprising amount of reviewers really, really wanted it to be). It extrapolates a reality that could happen here into a story about the truth-tellers, the press who (theoretically, anyway) seek to capture what’s happening and report on it. Garland’s defense of the media against charges of “fake news” and “enemy of the people” is about the closest he gets to condemning a certain former president who, to these eyes, has very little in common with the president Offerman plays (for one thing, Offerman doesn’t have the material — he’s in it so little one could comfortably hold one’s breath throughout his scenes).

Every so often there’s stuff for Lee and Jessie to photograph, and Garland sticks to the stuttery realism of modern war cinema, the clatter and muffled bass of combat, people abruptly felled as though connected to the sky by an invisible thread that’s been snipped. It was done with more panache and feral virtuosity in Children of Men, but Garland’s attempt to honor the chaos of real warfare is noble. The comparison is apt, because despite what many of its overexcited boosters claimed, Children of Men plopped us in medias res in a grim meathook future and then had nothing much to say about it other than how much it would suck. Civil War is the same. Garland pays a price for his noncommittal approach: his world-building suffers to the point of being nonexistent or at least irrelevant.

If Civil War were a better movie it might spawn a franchise, like the odious The Purge, telling a variety of stories set in the dystopia it creates. Garland’s America has me wanting to know more about it than what we’re given piecemeal. What started the war, what politics were involved, how do some towns apparently choose to opt out of the conflict altogether? Meanwhile, Garland’s narrative is old and full of familiar tropes; the protagonists meet their predicted fates at the predicted times, and Jesse Plemons turns up on the road — this is in essence a glorified road-trip movie, with our heroes beating feet to D.C. to secure an interview with the president — to be creepy and militaristically sadistic in the manner of heavies in a hundred B-movies. Which Civil War basically is, though a well-acted one, and precisely calibrated in the combat sequences. But people need to chill about it. It is what it is, not what we want it to be.

The First Omen

The last time one of these Omen things came around — nearly twenty years ago! — I said we seem to get a lot of demonic cinema when there’s trouble in the Middle East (more so than usual, that is). I don’t know why. But the world situation is what it is, and lately we’ve gotten a slew of brimstone beasties. Last year gave us new installments of Evil Dead and The Exorcist, along with a group of others; this still-young year has brought Late Night with the Devil, Immaculate, and now The First Omen, a prequel set before the infernal events of the 1976 original. (It’s not a prequel to the 2006 remake, since we see a photo of the 1976 film’s star Gregory Peck here.) In such times, people prefer being scared by things that don’t remind them of the world outside the multiplex, I guess.

Visually, this may be the best-directed Omen yet. Cowriter/director Arkasha Stevenson and her cinematographer Aaron Martin offer an early-‘70s Rome done up in dark amber and burgundy, the color of hellfire, as though the world capital of Catholicism were hell on earth. Our heroine is Margaret (Nell Tiger Free), an American novitiate who arrives at an orphanage in Rome to take her vows as a nun. Margaret has been plagued by disturbing visions all her life, and she develops concern for an orphan girl named Carlita, whose drawings indicate similar troubling spectres. As Margaret eventually finds out — with the help of Father Brennan (Ralph Ineson), the priest headed for freak impalement in the ’76 film — she hasn’t been brought to Rome just to become a nun.

The movie is dark and often quiet, and takes its time. Arkasha Stevenson knows her stuff and creates a suffocating mood. It’s the script, whose end is designed to click neatly into the 1976 movie’s beginning, that lost me. Nell Tiger Free plays Margaret honorably, but as written she’s made a bit too perfect, boringly perfect. There’s more going on with Margaret’s roomie Luz (Maria Caballero), who wants to take Margaret out on the town before they both take their vows, and Sister Silvia (Sonia Braga), the chain-smoking, trampoline-hopping Abbess of the orphanage. These two women both imply vivid past lives before their calling, and Sonia Braga cast as a nun will amuse fans of her ‘70s and ‘80s work. Margaret might have been allowed her own secret quirks and foibles. Or perhaps the writers didn’t want to link female individualism with vulnerability to demonic interest. 

In these movies it’s usually a virginal innocent (almost always female) who attracts the notice of Old Splitfoot, the better for her to lure him and risk being defiled by him. Such narratives tend not to be especially feminist. They’re not built to be. Stevenson and her collaborators try, however, to make this a glancingly empowering story by establishing rapport between women (this film, incidentally, would pass the Bechdel Test breezing). The problem is, the script doesn’t create any pockets of warmth between them, no funky humanity whose violation we can mourn. Even in the sober-sided original film there was David Warner as a skeevy tabloid photographer whose manner amusingly rubbed Gregory Peck the wrong way. There’s no David Warner figure in The First Omen, and it could have used one, desperately. 

It does occur to me that these lacks may have more to do with studio meddling than with the creators, who may have initially delivered a movie more in line with what I might’ve liked. As it is, the film — despite freaky bits like a demonic birth that almost got an NC-17 rating — feels, like many prequels, like a bland and unnecessary story. We know, after all, that Damien will be born and taken into the highest halls of power until he grows up to be Sam Neill. Nothing in this film will — or will be allowed to — change that. The only story here is how Margaret, a nun from Pittsfield, Massachusetts, ends up being part of the Damien saga. She has nothing much intriguing about her aside from that, and despite what I’m sure were the writers’ best intentions, she becomes reduced to what these movies always reduce women to: her body. 

Asphalt City

The stressful, despairing but compelling paramedic drama Asphalt City is bound to be compared to 1999’s Bringing Out the Dead, Martin Scorsese’s hyperactive take on New York City EMTs. But the more relevant likeness, I think, is to the cop drama Colors. In that film, Sean Penn played a hot-blooded young cop partnered with tired veteran Robert Duvall; here, Penn takes over as the tired veteran, while Tye Sheridan rides shotgun as Penn’s rookie partner. There’s a lot mentally wrong with Penn’s character, Gene “Rut” Rutkovsky, but considering it’s Penn, Rut is surprisingly even-tempered, almost gentle. That’s meant to throw us off the scent of Rut’s less admirable qualities, or perhaps the film is proposing him as an essentially decent man who succumbs to pessimism and, about two-thirds into the movie, makes an inhumane decision that he sees as merciful.

The perhaps too-symbolically-named Ollie Cross (Sheridan) is considered by some of his more hostile colleagues as a tourist in the paramedic life; he’s studying to get into med school. Ollie just wants to help people. But the craziness of the job and how much desensitization it requires, especially in a chaotic urban milieu, get inside him and start pushing him towards being a rough customer like Rut or like Lafontaine (Michael Pitt in a juicy performance), a callous EMT who drives with Ollie a few times. People’s lives are in the hands of guys whose idea of a prank is to leave a bloody dead dog in someone’s locker. But that’s kind of a nihilistic rewrite of the doctors in M*A*S*H, who cracked jokes while elbow-deep in someone’s bowels. 

In either case, you don’t want an easy weeper coming to slap the paddles on your chest; you want cold technicians who know the boilerplate reassurances (“Stay with us, buddy, you’re gonna make it”) but can flip their emotional switch and perform the tasks at hand. Surgeons don’t often have a warm bedside manner, but EMTs are expected to at least make a patient feel rescued and headed for safety; the paramedics I’ve personally seen in action have been gracious and positive. But city responders may be a different species; they see the worst at their worst, and even the best are often not their best at their worst. EMTs often arrive to screaming and blood everywhere. The director, Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire, working from a script by Ryan King and Ben Mac Brown, spatters the screen in grit and gore; the dominant color is red, often flashing in our faces. Sauvaire does a detailed job of creating the inferno these men live and work in. As in Taxi Driver, it’s not the job but the city that torments the characters.

Asphalt City was once called Black Flies, after the Shannon Burke novel it’s based on, and that’s a finer and more poetic title but also possibly misleading (it sounds like a horror movie about demons — which this sort of is). Black flies are treated as harbingers of death, humming thickly and maddeningly around clotting blood and cooling flesh. Penn and Sheridan deliver anguished turns as men who must co-exist with the flies, and who seem to hear them buzzing inside their skulls constantly. (How insane is their job? Their supervisor is played by Mike Tyson.) I believed in the men, not always in the women they’re involved with. Katherine Waterston has a terrific angry scene as Rut’s ex-wife; Raquel Nave doesn’t bring much to the role of Ollie’s booty call (he hesitates to call her a girlfriend). I didn’t spot any female paramedics — it’s hilarious that Madame Web of all films shows this movie up in that area. 

I wouldn’t call the film sexist, though. (As I’ve said in other contexts, the movie isn’t feminist, but it’s not remotely masculinist either.) The women sadly know they don’t fit well into these particular men’s lives. And some of the female patients come through with vivid impressions. Kali Reis, a boxer who starred in the most recent season of True Detective, pierces our hearts as a pregnant addict whose encounter with Rut leaves them both wounded. Authentic faces like Luisita Salgado and Glorimar Crespo, as loud street people, flood the screen with profanity, cracked humanity, lacerated pride. The meaning of city life as seen in this movie boils down to making other people suffer as much as you’ve suffered, and how do you deal with being surrounded by people like that if you’re sworn to help and heal? Asphalt City isn’t perfect — all the scenes between Ollie and his lover are only there to make a point about his devolution, and we’re not terribly invested in the couple. But it has something; it has its own ornery integrity, and wants to stare death and despair full in the face, as its protagonists do every night. 

Love Lies Bleeding

The writer-director Rose Glass, who introduced herself five years ago with the well-regarded horror film Saint Maud, has a knack for setting up a suggestive yet oppressive mood. She was built, really, for film noir, and her latest, Love Lies Bleeding, has steamy moments and genuinely horrifying violence. In both films, though, she can’t quite stick the landing and some of the more hallucinatory passages risk bad laughter. That’s the trouble with movies as serious as Glass’s are — she doesn’t release our laughter with any comic relief, so it has to be released somehow, and it happens when our protagonist’s fantasies are made absurdly literal. Any more detail would be spoiling part of the big finish. 

I enjoyed Love Lies Bleeding more than Saint Maud, but I’m not eager to watch either of them again. Our heroine, Louise or “Lou” (Kristen Stewart), staggers under the weight of the world. A gym manager, Lou likes women but seems to have attracted only bad news like Daisy (Anna Baryshnikov), who is hyperactive and needy in a way that screams drugs, or just desperate loneliness. Soon enough, Lou meets Jackie (Katy O’Brian), a hopeful bodybuilder, and falls in love with her. Jackie seems nice but a little flighty; her instability spikes when she gets hooked on steroids Lou gives her. Jackie happens to have landed work at a shooting range owned by Lou’s dad (Ed Harris), a bad motorscooter who uses the range as a front for gunrunning and has left many bodies at the bottom of a ravine. 

That’s not all. Lou’s beloved sister Beth (Jena Malone) is stuck in an abusive relationship with J.J. (Dave Franco), who puts Beth in the hospital one day. Venting her anger, Lou says she wants J.J. dead, and Jackie hears and goes to visit J.J. in a spiral of roid rage. During all this, the feds are sniffing around; they’d like to nail Lou’s dad for all the bodies in the ravine, plus a new one found down there. For a while, I was with the movie as a sort of artful mirage of passion, in which Lou’s desires are answered by Jackie the leonine figure of mystery. Where did she come from? What does she want? It’s all kind of abstract. As if that weren’t enough stress, Lou is trying to quit smoking during all this. Good luck with that.

It’s capably acted — this deserves to be Katy O’Brian’s breakout role, allowing her to explore pleasure and pain and fear and madness, and Stewart has some fine, truthful moments. Her Lou grounds the sometimes strange film in lucidity and gives us someone to relate to. When these two make each other smile, they create a pocket of warmth we don’t want to lose, even though this is a noir and we know a storm is on the horizon. There’s a troublesome, though most likely unintentional, subtext wherein the mixed-race Jackie enters the pale Lou’s life and behaves savagely. Again, noirs are not nice. But it’s tricky to create characters we’re meant to care about, and cast actors who can make us care, and then shove them into the meat grinder of noir, where by definition everything turns to pulp.

Pulp, of course, can be fun. But Rose Glass has now made a horror movie and a noir, both genres that can offer a terrific time, and dipped them in a thick, forbidding mood. Jackie’s two major trippy sequences seem to signify more than is there; they pop in for a surreal twinkle, then are gone and unremarked on. Yet this kind of emotionally fuzzy psychodrama, which feels palpably physical but relentlessly interiorized, can poke us in raw places that other movies can’t get at. Someday Glass will find a story that consorts well with her dread-ridden tone, and she will make a classic that even I, who feels emotionally adrift in her films to date, will have to acknowledge. I’m also willing to note that the problem could be more mine than hers; something in my store of emotions and responses gets put off by what she’s doing or what she’s trying. That doesn’t make it bad. It certainly doesn’t make it boring.

Oscar Night 2024

I long ago stopped expecting Oscar-history moments on Oscar night, even after we’ve seen a few recent negative moments. But Ryan Gosling forever enshrined his coolness with his performance of “I’m Just Ken,” the most purely enjoyable thing I’ve seen on Oscar night in years. Gosling also appeared, with The Fall Guy costar Emily Blunt, to pay tribute to stuntpeople. You know how actors got nervous about being replaced with AI? Stunt folks got to feel that pain first. I know there continues to be phenomenal stuntwork, but the problem is CGI has advanced to the point where we don’t believe what we’re seeing. It could be Tom Cruise risking his ass or it could be Cruise’s face deepfaked onto a CGI figure.

Oscar host Jimmy Kimmel addressed the AI topic as well, using it to lead into a shot at the latest Transformers movie, as though Transformers wouldn’t have been feted if it had made more money. Kimmel, who largely conducted himself as slickly as usual, got a bad review of his Oscar hosting on Truth Social by none other than Donald Trump, who apparently had nothing better to do. I mean, I didn’t either, but then I’m not facing 91 state and federal charges. Anyway, Kimmel is a practiced old hand at this stuff by now, and we didn’t have to sit through the usual big comedic stunt. The evening felt streamlined, other than the return of that obnoxious bit where they haul five past winners of an acting award onstage, where they each hype one of the current nominees in that category. I miss seeing those Big Acting Oscar-night clips.

Then they botched the In Memoriam segment by filming the big screen showing some of 2023’s dear departed from too far away, instead of just letting that graphic fill our screens at home. They always manage to devalue the dead non-star, below-the-line talent they occasionally deign to acknowledge, this time by making them share a screen chopped up into thirds. The annual TCM Remembers homages have put the Oscars’ frail displays to shame for a while now; maybe the Academy should just get TCM to handle In Memoriam.

The courier of nostalgia on this most nostalgic of nights was Michael Keaton, which is not something I’d have guessed thirty years ago. Keaton’s bit with Schwarzenegger and DeVito — let’s not pretend these comically “extemporaneous” gags aren’t rehearsed inside out — was terrific, and he got to have a Beetlejuice reunion onstage with Catherine O’Hara. (They’re both also appearing in the sequel, coming your way in September.) Keaton seems at ease with what people want from him, and frequently goes and does his own thing anyway. Give him an Oscar. With my luck, his next nomination will be opposite Paul Giamatti. I was darn sad to see Giamatti remain seated, but I can’t begrudge Cillian Murphy’s night in the lights. There were people and films I’d rather have seen win, but at least none of what did win is insultingly bad (or even regular bad).

I didn’t love Oppenheimer — it’s a hard film to “love” — but it was destined to clean up, and largely deserved to, picking up seven trophies including the big one. Poor Things has got to be the weirdest film to win four Oscars since The Shape of Water. Like The Irishman, Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon was up for multiple awards and captured zilch. Maestro didn’t get the love either, and The Holdovers had to settle for one win — and its loss in the original screenplay category was ironic since a plagiarism claim against it had just been made public. The Zone of Interest won the right Oscars, I think. Weirdly, the three movies that got shut out (Past Lives was the third) were the only Best Picture nominees I hadn’t seen before Oscar night. I don’t really want to see Maestro.

It occurs to me that the night’s two big winners, Oppenheimer and Poor Things, are both mature geek movies — sciency and odd and unafraid to be off-putting in the pursuit of their vision. Somehow, Nolan makes a three-hour movie unfolding mostly in cramped rooms feel big, major, echoing with import. And Poor Things, which crossed the $100 million mark worldwide not long ago — which is not at all weird, heavens no — does what it does so fearlessly and with such a volatile visual sense that it has come to seem, out of all the nominees, the best example of pure cinema. That a movie this stubbornly strange could win four of the field’s highest honors while also being a legitimate hit is reason for optimism. Let’s hope it’s not unfounded.

Drive-Away Dolls

It’s probably too simplistic, and probably wrong, but on the evidence of Ethan Coen’s solo debut feature Drive-Away Dolls, he’s the goofy one in the Coen partnership and his brother Joel (who directed The Tragedy of Macbeth a few years back) is the serious one. (Typically perversely, the truth is probably the other way around.) Drive-Away Dolls, which Ethan also co-wrote with his wife Tricia Cooke, is blessedly short (77 minutes less seven minutes of end credits) and full of sex, violence, and jokes. The jokes sometimes land and sometimes don’t, but overall it’s a pleasant enough trifle. Not everything the Coens are involved in, separately or together, has to be a cinematic game-changer.

The dolls (the original title was Drive-Away Dykes) are buddies Jamie (Margaret Qualley) and Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan). They get a car from a drive-away service and head to Tallahassee, not knowing there’s something in the trunk. Violent men hired by a powerful figure are after this something, for reasons I should let the movie tell you. Jamie, a lascivious sort, and Marian, who brings a Henry James novel with her, are generally the kind of diametrically opposed friends you only meet in B-movies. But Coen never pretends this is anything but a B-movie. Full of psychedelic scene transitions that recall the knockout daydreams in The Big Lebowski, it’s informed by any number of exploitation flicks of the ‘70s, though I feel sure none of those had references to The Europeans. 

The movie is all over the place — its tone is the ‘70s, but it’s set in 1999 for some reason, and sports some anachronisms like someone saying women can marry each other in Massachusetts (they couldn’t until 2004). A small dog is treated somewhat cavalierly (though not cruelly, thankfully), its only purpose being an excuse to get Jamie’s ex (Beanie Feldstein, funny as usual) on her trail. The terrific character actor Bill Camp scores every time as the drive-away manager Curlie, who’s sort of the comedic flip side of the elderly gas-station attendant who almost loses the coin toss in No Country for Old Men. As often happens in Coen movies, the desperate criminals are ruinously stupid, and their quarry is only innocent in comparison. Stars Pedro Pascal and Matt Damon drop in briefly, adding to the tapestry.

It may also be simplistic to imagine that Coen came up with the knockabout male crime stuff while Tricia Cooke (who identifies as queer; she and Coen have an open marriage) handled the lesbian stuff. Certainly the scenes inside various lesbian bars (an endangered species these days) were informed by someone who’s been there. Apparently “basement parties” are or were a thing; Jamie and Marian find themselves at one such shindig hosted by a women’s soccer team, and are invited to another. The South in 1999, presumably, was a lava pool of activity for like-minded young women to pursue glory or humiliation. In this universe, men mostly exist to be laughable or menacing (Colman Domingo holds up the “menacing” portion as imposingly as he did in @Zola). This is the kind of movie where Beanie Feldstein comes to the rescue, gun blazing.

Weirdly, of the two solo Coen efforts, I prefer Ethan’s sex-positive, consolateur-laden goof to Joel’s starkly artsy Shakespeare. (The two films couldn’t be less alike.) For one thing, it’s more fun, and fun is as rare nowadays as lesbian bars. The loosey-goosey Qualley and the stoically suffering Viswanathan are an engaging match; if their Jamie and Marian headlined a TV series I’d be there for it. If you don’t relish their company, you’re only with them for slightly north of an hour, and there are other strange divertissements throughout, such as Miley Cyrus’ bit as a character named Tiffany Plastercaster, or a heavy who emphasizes people skills as a path to persuasion (with dialogue you can imagine hearing, slightly tweaked, in Miller’s Crossing), or the funniest front-page headline since Arrested Development’s heyday. It’s silly and soft and bound for the cult-movie section, where it will find the following it lacks right now.

The Zone of Interest

The star of the experimental Holocaust drama The Zone of Interest is sound designer Johnnie Burn, without whose subtle and detailed work the movie would be nothing. The movie, written and directed by Jonathan Glazer (Under the Skin) and inspired by Martin Amis’ novel, unfolds mostly in and around a nice Polish house with a spacious high-walled garden. The house is occupied by Rudolph Höss (Christian Friedel), his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), their children, and various servants. On the other side of those garden walls, mere yards away, is the Auschwitz concentration camp, where Höss serves as commandant. 

As you may have heard, Glazer shows us nothing of the prisoners’ suffering. He lets us hear it, at a distance. The sound of the crematorium is a constant death-rumble that we get used to and eventually don’t notice, which conveys the movie’s horrifying point — how human beings, infected with the mind virus of hatred, can learn to live with genocide literally next door and tune out the noises of hell on earth. Thus does dictatorship numb the spirit of those who enforce it. And if you think Glazer’s film is only about a specific atrocity decades ago, you might not be listening. 

Much of the movie feels like slice-of-life, afternoon-teatime scenes, or domestic scenes between parents and children, or child to child. About the only dramatic incident happens when Rudolph has to tell Hedwig they’ve been transferred and have to move; Hedwig loves the house and refuses to go. Yet every scene has an eerie tone, an uneasy texture, an insistent backdrop of apocalypse. Not all the intrusions are sound-related. We see one of Höss’s sons trap his younger brother in the winter greenhouse and hiss tauntingly, mimicking the gas chambers. We also see humanity, when one of the Polish servants sneaks out at night with apples and pears she places around the work areas for the prisoners. One time, the servant finds a scrap of paper with music on it, and plays it at the piano (it is a real song composed in an Auschwitz subcamp by prisoner Joseph Wulf).

We’re focused on the sound, but Glazer and cinematographer Łukasz Żal (Cold War) don’t shirk their visual duties. The compositions are pristine yet removed — we always seem to be looking down desolate Kubrickian hallways, or watching people putter around alone inside rooms we wouldn’t want to be in for long. The surroundings aren’t beautiful, they’re nice, in a banal way that underscores the horror. Even Hedwig’s beloved garden is nourished by the ashes of the cremated. Pure beauty is not really possible in this nightmare world. That servant girl’s act of mercy is filmed at night with thermal cameras, making it look cold and ghostly.

The Zone of Interest is less a narrative than an immersive experience. Every scene is there to make the point that, for some people, indifference to others’ suffering comes naturally, and for others, thankfully, it doesn’t. Hedwig’s mother comes to stay at the house, and while she spouts some standard antisemitic views she really isn’t up to being so close to the Final Solution that she can hear and smell it. Without the irrefutable proof of her senses, she can pretend to herself that these are merely labor camps for the war effort and that her daughter and son-in-law haven’t paid for their comfortable life with gallons of other people’s blood. 

And yet the lead actors import some of their own humanity into characters who have renounced humanity. Sandra Hüller’s Hedwig comes from a poor background, and now finds herself in a place where she can dote on her garden (tended by servants she can always have Rudolph take to the other side of the wall if they displease her, and she makes sure they know that) and try on a fur coat stolen from a prisoner. She ignores the carnage like a good German so she can maintain her lifestyle. Hüller puts across the fear underneath all of this without any special pleading for Hedwig. Christian Friedel has a trickier job as Rudolph; he seems to decide to lean into his unintimidating physical presence to suggest an insecure man welcomed into a cult of the most toxic masculinity and determined to prove by his very apathy that he belongs there. We don’t read bloodthirst in him, but the sort of moral vacuity and deadness that live under the famous Nazi quote, “I was only following orders.”

Madame Web

Fun-loving people on the internet would like you to believe that Madame Web is so bad it’s good. It’s not. It is so bad it’s depressing. It shows every symptom of a thing that was made but not cared about, dropped onto our desks the way a failing student passes in an exam they didn’t study for, wincing. It contains the most atrocious ADR (post-production dialogue dubbing) I’ve ever seen in a released studio film. To be so bad it’s good, it would need to be fun in some way — campy, weird, wild, a guilty pleasure. Madame Web is a guilty displeasure. The hour and fifty-six minutes we kill watching this can be better spent watching a better movie of the same length (say, Full Metal Jacket), reading, doing one’s taxes…

Madame Web is about a paramedic, Cassie Webb (Dakota Johnson), who receives semi-psychic powers, which are sometimey and not under her control. The scenes having to do with Cassie’s visions are confusing to say the very least, since they barge into the narrative with no preparation or context; they’re also edited as incoherently as every other action scene is here. The gist of the story is that Cassie, whose dead mom was trying to find a special spider in Peru, must protect three teenage girls (Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced and Celeste O’Connor) who are in danger from the movie’s big bad (Tahar Rahim), who has his own future visions in which he sees the girls, in superhero costumes, killing him. Thus does the movie spoil its own ending about twenty minutes in. 

Enjoy that glimpse of the girls in their Spider-Woman costumes — for that is their destiny, to be Spider-Women, as this film is Spider-Man-adjacent — in that early vision and right at the end, because that’s all you get in this supposed superhero movie. Most of it is a matter of Cassie and the girls running from the big bad, except for when Cassie pointlessly goes to Peru to find out her mom, who died while giving birth to her, was looking for that special spider so she could cure the disease she knew Cassie would be born with. The sequence seems about as useless as the scenes having to do with Ben Parker (Adam Scott), a fellow paramedic, and his pregnant sister Mary (Emma Roberts), who will give birth, the movie hints, to Peter Parker, aka the Spider-Man most of us know.

This movie isn’t really for a viewer who has never seen a Spider-Man film before, but neither is it for those who have seen every Spider-Man film (or even one). The screen is loaded with actors visibly wishing they were anywhere else, most certainly including the dull-affect Dakota Johnson, who narrowly loses the “Calgon, take me away” contest to Zosia Mamet as the big bad’s hacker. (Bored-looking Mamet sits at her monitor watching for the girls and delivering pearls like “I think I got them.”) The saddest/funniest aspect of the whole ordeal, though, is that it seems convinced it’s the first of many adventures with this quartet — the three superpowered girls commanded/protected by Cassie. There will be no such sequels. We will never see these characters again. There will be no great future stories with Madame Web, or Cassie Webb, or Jack Webb for that matter.

So the ending is one of those “The end? Nay — the beginning!” conclusions meant to make us thirst for more, when what we’re craving at that point is simple fresh air, or something stronger. Madame Web was directed by S.J. Clarkson, who also gets official screenwriting blame along with three others, and I suppose we’ve reached the point where women can make superhero movies as empty and unsatisfying as men can. Clarkson has been a prolific TV director, and I hope this film, whose problems are probably most accurately pinned on an insecure studio’s meddling, doesn’t squash her career. Tahar Rahim, too, is a better actor than this movie, which destroys his performance with that poor dubbing, would indicate. Nobody comes out of Madame Web looking good except maybe Kerry Bishé, who, as Cassie’s ill-starred mother, at least gets in and out fast. Everyone else has to pull on hip-waders and slosh through this sewage until the finish. 

Anatomy of a Fall

Did she do it? For most of Justine Triet’s absorbing Anatomy of a Fall, which won the Palme d’Or and has garnered five Oscar nominations, we hope she didn’t, but we’re never sure. “She” is Sandra Voyter (Sandra Hüller), a novelist born in Germany but, until recently, living in France with her French husband Samuel (Samuel Theis). Samuel, it appears, has fallen from an attic window to his death on the snowy ground below. But did he fall or was he, uh, guided? Accident, suicide, or homicide? And does any of this truly matter? Is our fascination with courtroom dramas leading us to look in the wrong direction?

The script, by Triet and her partner Arthur Harari, is an anatomy of something, all right. A mere murder mystery is not on the agenda; the mystery here is the deeper mystery of relationships, how they start, how they endure or fail. Nevertheless, I came to develop a sharp empathy with Sandra’s lawyer and former lover, the graying and mordant Vincent (Swann Arlaud), who knows that it doesn’t matter if his client did it or not, but if he can convince a judge of her innocence. She does not make it easy for him. Nobody in this family is easy, not even Sandra’s young son Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner), who is almost blind from an accident incurred when Samuel was supposed to be watching him. His near-blindness, though, is not what makes him difficult.

In someone else’s hands, when a bit of family drama falls into the legal thriller you’d been expecting, or when courtroom struggles interrupt the family drama you’ve been enjoying, the result might be frustrating. But Triet weaves the two threads together delicately, so that they feel like an organic whole, yet with the two sides occasionally commenting on each other. The argument we hear between Sandra and Samuel, which he secretly recorded and saved onto a USB stick, sounds authentically awful and hurtful, and neither party comes off at all well, which is usually how these things go. But does it mean anything? What, if anything, does it say about motive? And why do both the prosecutor and Vincent sound as though they’re arguing beside the point? The prosecutor’s arguments are grounded in logic, but when are people ever logical?

In this case, so many resentments have built up on both sides, born of insecurity, that when husband and wife look at each other what they see is their own frailty. Anatomy of a Fall uses the legal mystery as a launchpad to scrutinize the people onscreen, who often don’t act according to their best interests — even Daniel has his unrelatable moments, conducting a dangerous experiment on the family dog. (The dog comes through fine; the incident is set up to prove something else, so knowing the dog lives isn’t really a spoiler.) The movie runs well north of two hours but feels tight. Triet has the gift of making even seemingly non-essential scenes or shots feel they’re there for a good reason, even if only as part of the fabric of the story. Like any good family drama, and any good legal thriller, the plot keeps popping off revelations that put a spin on everything we’ve seen.

Sandra Hüller is having quite a season, Oscar-nominated for her work here and also starring in another multiple nominee, The Zone of Interest. Here she walks a thin line between helping us believe in Sandra and keeping it ambiguous whether we should believe her. I never doubted why Sandra may have done anything she did; what I still don’t quite know is whether she did anything, and the movie is no help. A verdict is reached, but the movie doesn’t necessarily agree — or disagree — with it and isn’t interested in selling it to us, either. Hüller is backed up in every corner by compelling co-stars, including Samuel Theis, who makes his only real scene count and resonate with fear and rage. I’m not sure, though, if Anatomy of a Fall is for the kind of moviegoer who needs a clearcut ending where nothing is left for the imagination to dwell on. It’s definitely more for the dwellers, the art-house fans who like their movies to talk to them plain, adult to adult.