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. 

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.”

Eileen

When a movie makes you sort of sigh and say “At least it’s short,” that movie might be in trouble. Eileen is not my idea of a great time, but I can understand why others might dig it. It’s bleak and grungy, full of wet New England snow turned gray by car exhaust; the movie feels irritable, with anger governing many scenes. It left me in a ghastly mood — I felt poked and prodded by the plot turns that play with deep, dark emotions for no very good reason. Whatever happens in the film seems devoid of meaning and grace. It has a kind of integrity, though, and I can imagine mopey young viewers falling under its spell. 

The main problem with Eileen (based on the debut novel by Ottessa Moshfegh, who wrote the script with husband Luke Goebel) is that it has the tone of film noir without the mitigating pleasures — the cold, cruel brilliance, the cynical patter, the style. The dialogue in this movie tends towards the incoherently emotional. Everyone is weak and doesn’t think things through. The titular Eileen (Thomasin McKenzie), 23, still lives with her drunken father (Shea Wigham), a retired cop sinking into the wastes of his own self-loathing. For work, she clerks in a boys’ prison, a grim and punitive place housing rude and terrible inmates, except for one kid whose reason for being there is more than meets the eye.

Eileen soon meets Rebecca Saint John (Anne Hathaway), a Harvard grad settling into her new job at Eileen’s prison as a psychologist. Rebecca seems an oasis of sophistication in this unnamed town in Massachusetts (the film was mostly shot in New Jersey). Everyone else is ignorant and brays in overdone accents. Set in the mid-‘60s, Eileen maroons two smart women in a time when Rebecca’s new boss says “She may be easy on the eyes, but I assure you, she’s very smart.” Eileen is something of a deranged fantasist, daydreaming about blowing her own head off or her dad’s. So it’s never quite clear whether Eileen is imagining the sapphic sparks between her and Rebecca, or whether it’s legit, or manipulated by one or the other.

Thomasin McKenzie is saddled with the worst Massachusetts accent since Julianne Moore on 30 Rock, but when she’s allowed to be quiet she scores. She and Anne Hathaway get a hushed, intimate rapport going, whispering fondly to each other. They had my permission to leave the dreary film behind and go find fulfillment in warmer climes, perhaps in a film by Greta Gerwig. God knows there’s nowhere for them to go in this film. A little over an hour in, the plot takes a pivot that struck me as flatly unbelievable, to say nothing of stupid. The movie throws away whatever McKenzie and Hathaway had built together, and we realize we’re watching a collection of self-sabotaging dimwits. Sigh. At least it’s short.

Who knows, Eileen might appeal to glum teenage nihilists. There isn’t much poetry in it, though, visual or verbal. Even when I myself was a glum teenage nihilist we had risk-taking stuff like River’s Edge, which at least was about something other than that life sucks and we’re all trying to escape it. (It also debunked that point of view, while Eileen dines out on it.) Eileen is directed (by Lady Macbeth’s William Oldroyd) as a string of blandly composed scenes heightened by abrupt gory shocks. The movie is unpleasant bordering on unsavory. It draws us closer with vague lesbian vibes and then squanders our attention on plot-centered drama that feels (despite a difficult monologue honorably delivered by Marin Ireland) pulpy and something you’d expect to find in a Lifetime movie. Eventually the film and Eileen have nowhere to go, and that’s exactly where they go.

Poor Things

It won’t do to take Poor Things literally. This, after all, is a movie in which a pregnant woman jumps off a bridge and is brought back to life, with the brain of her still-living child implanted in her own skull. The result is Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), who seems built to violate the Victorian mores of her society. We witness Bella, with her infant brain in a full-grown woman’s body, evolve from an innocent who spits out hated food and speaks in broken syntax to a wiser woman who reads up on socialism but still refers to the sex act as “furious jumping.” 

The movie, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos (The Favourite) and based on a 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray, is partly a riff on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and partly a charcuterie board full of bits from other works of dark science fantasy, with frequent visits from weird cinema down through the ages. I loved it, though possibly would have loved less of it; at two hours and twenty-one minutes, Poor Things starts to circle and belabor its point. Some won’t mind; others won’t get past the first half hour. Not a horror movie itself, it’s best appreciated by horror fans with long memories and patience. Its visual imagination is richly capacious, it has an uncompromising vibe of pure cinema, and when you see it a second time — and you may want to — you’ll at least know at which points to hit the bathroom.

Stone gives a hungry, open-souled performance illustrated by I lost count of how many sex scenes; she will be and has been praised for her bravery in the second aspect, but the meat of her work resides in the first, as Bella’s brain grows and her responses to stimuli and to life — at some points in her journey, there’s little difference — gain more subtlety and less babyish affect. Stone helps put across the story as a fable about growth in a barren garden of a society. We’re not meant, from our privileged perch as 21st-century people, to take Bella’s arc as a Victorian woman as commentary on feminism or anything else. Victorian London is just the most diabolically fun setting for this tale and its central figure, a prickly and proudly ungovernable agent of chaos.

A lot of the film, with its mad-lab gore and copious sex and nudity (if this got through with an R rating, what gets an NC-17 these days?), is like a Hammer horror from the ‘60s seen through a fever-dream lens (literally a fisheye lens at times, as well as a bokeh blurring effect). Cinematographer Robbie Ryan and production designers Shona Heath and James Price can take deep bows. And Lanthimos doesn’t forget about the supporting cast, including a waffle-scarred Willem Dafoe as Bella’s creator (who burps bubbles when eating) and a whiny Mark Ruffalo as one of the (male) fools who try to trap Bella’s spirit. Poor Things has a paltry-for-the-2020s $35 million budget but manages to look like a big Hollywood saga, only seen through a funhouse mirror.

Poor Things is essentially a comedy. We never fear for Bella even when things look bleak and Jerskin Fendrix’s ominous score becomes, according to the editorializing subtitles, “perplexing.” With its concerns with dark scientific inquiry and female consciousness coming into its own, it’s the true Barbenheimer this year. It arrives just in time to give me happy optimism about the future of cinema as a delivery system for idiosyncratic visions. It may not make studio accountants giddy, and might even be too stubbornly strange for the Academy, but it’ll take its place among the iconic works in dark-fantasy history. But this sort of unstable experiment comes with a mild warning: I loved it, but some of it I didn’t like. If that makes sense.

American Fiction

Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction is a bit like how Spike Lee’s Bamboozled might have turned out if Lee had eased up on the satirical buckshot a little and focused on the people involved. A television veteran here making his feature writing-directing debut, Jefferson has adapted Percival Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure, which was published back when debates over political correctness and Black urban “authenticity” ruled the culture wars. Today it’s all about “wokeness” and “virtue signaling,” and American Fiction rolls in to say … not a whole lot we didn’t know. White readers and literary tastemakers are hungry for reasons to feel guilty, and novels written in African-American Vernacular English about bleak lives full of despair are their cup of poverty-porn tea.

Fed up with writing literary books nobody reads, and contemptuous of try-hard bestsellers like We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, our hero, Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright), sits down and taps out a reductio ad absurdum saga called My Pafology, pseudonymously credited to “Stagg R. Leigh.”(Later it gets a less subtle, unprintable title.) To Monk’s dismay, the book takes off, charming every white reader whose desk it crosses. Ironically, the book is also nominated for a Literary Award, and one of the judges — Sintara Golden (Issa Rae), author of We’s Lives in Da Ghetto — shares Monk’s low opinion of (his own) novel. 

American Fiction isn’t altogether about that, though. Jefferson spends a lot of time fleshing out Monk’s family issues, establishing why Monk can’t really afford not to benefit from the book’s runaway success. (His elderly mother Agnes, played by Leslie Uggams, has dementia and requires memory-care housing that costs a fortune.) We meet Monk’s libertine gay brother Cliff (Sterling K. Brown); his tart OB-GYN sister Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross); housekeeper Lorraine (Myra Lucretia Taylor), who’s been looking after Agnes. Monk’s time as a son, brother, and prickly boyfriend — he’s attempting something with new acquaintance Coraline (Erika Alexander) — gets more play than his identity as a writer.

Jeffrey Wright has always been a pleasure to watch and listen to, and as the grouchy Monk he gets a lot of mileage out of eyebrow reactions and facepalms. (Monk spends much of the movie slumped in disbelief over what he’s hearing.) Wright takes full advantage of a rare lead role, and Jefferson gives him plentiful dramatic meat to chew on. It’s just that if you’re expecting the movie to lampoon the current moment (characterized by some as too sensitive, too concerned with diversity), American Fiction isn’t that movie. Jefferson keeps the hubbub over the book within plausible parameters. Not really a satire itself, the film is partly about satire and how it can seem indistinguishable from the stuff it’s roasting. 

Percival Everett’s novel was more of a metafictional musing on how a writer can sell himself cheaply. The racial aspects in the movie feel similarly muted. Monk objects to his books’ being filed in the African-American Studies section of the bookstore, and I imagine Everett and Jefferson would harbor the same watchful resentment against their work’s being pigeonholed because it emerged from Black creators. “The blackest thing about this one is the ink,” says Monk of one of his books. He also says he doesn’t believe in race — right as a cab driver passes him over in favor of a white passenger. Jefferson and Wright underplay the moment nicely.

The insights and ironies in American Fiction feel matter-of-fact. Nothing is punched up very hard. It’s a relaxed portrait of a man caught between needing to be true to himself and needing to make some money. It’s comparable to Bamboozled only because in both, the Black creators indulge in stereotypes in a spirit of sardonic revolt and watch as the public embraces them sincerely. Here, Cord Jefferson doesn’t seem to feel the same fire in the belly that Spike Lee did about the subject. That’s partly a good thing — Jefferson doesn’t head down the alleys of farce that Lee did — and partly sort of bland. The pertinent fact about Jefferson’s creativity, on the evidence of this film, is not that he’s Black but that he comes from TV, and American Fiction, smoothly rendered and never daring the excesses that Lee did, is essentially television. Still, it leaves the viewer with curiosity about what Jefferson will try next, and no movie that allows Jeffrey Wright this much screen time should be ignored.

The Killer (2023)

If the director David Fincher had his druthers, the two-hour entirety of his new film The Killer — based on a French series of graphic novels by writer Alexis Nolent and artist Luc Jacamon — might be devoted to coverage of the assassin anti-hero (Michael Fassbender) assembling or disassembling his weapons, or using a gizmo he bought on Amazon to hack into someone’s house, or otherwise cementing the likeness between this killing machine and all his smaller machines. Ultimately, though, the Killer (as he is known in the credits) is a smaller machine supporting a bigger machine, however much he wants to see himself as an individual who only works for himself — no causes, no flags, no emotion.

That detachment eventually wore away at our engagement in the graphic novels, and the same thing happens in the movie. Screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker (who wrote Fincher’s Se7en) apes comics writer Nolent’s affectless narration, which is long on hit-man do’s and don’ts. Almost everyone the Killer interacts with meets an early end, so after a while we don’t have any anxiety about those people; the only suspense is how he’ll dispose of the body or make it look like an accident. The only weakness the Killer has is his affection for his girlfriend Magdala (Sophie Charlotte), who was attacked to show the Killer he and his loved one can be gotten to. Why? Because the Killer, like so many fictional hit-men from Martin Blank to Ghost Dog, botches a job near the beginning of the film.

This trope is cobwebbed enough that we can guess Fincher intended The Killer as a riff on assassin literature. And in truth, this is probably Fincher’s sharpest job of direction since Zodiac. There’s a brutal hand-to-hand fight in which the Killer is pretty evenly matched with his foe, and the hits are varied and conducted with a merciless precision. The movie’s other similarities to the graphic novels are that it looks great and the violence has an abrupt anti-human vibe. Luc Jacamon’s rendering and especially coloring work on The Killer graphic novels are unassailable; Euro comics tend never to be half-assed and usually take pride in their craft (or maybe the half-assed ones don’t make it over to the States). Cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt, who won an Oscar for shooting Fincher’s Mank, works with a palette of muted blues and grays — it always seems to be raining even when it isn’t — that compels our eye rather than irritating it.

So okay: The Killer is washed-out and callowly nihilistic as a narrative (so much so that we can’t really believe in Magdala’s role as the redeemer of the Killer’s — and his world’s — sins) but tasty cinema. The presence of Tilda Swinton as a fellow assassin (called The Expert) to whom the Killer pays a visit put me in mind of Jim Jarmusch’s two runs at the hit-man theme, Ghost Dog (of course) and also The Limits of Control, where Swinton appears as a mysterious contact called The Blonde. Jarmusch’s films are dead-cool exercises that interrogate the very notion of assassin thrillers. Fincher is playing a different game — he works in the genre because it facilitates the bleak, mopey mood he’s after. 

Yet The Killer doesn’t leave me feeling like shit, the way his previous couple of films (Mank and the grotesque Gone Girl) did. I think it’s because The Killer’s mechanics of attack and retreat keep Fincher happily busy, and keep him from cruelly toying with our emotions too much. It doesn’t leave us feeling much of anything except respect for its aesthetic rigor. The graphic novels got far deeper into the geopolitics of the Killer’s livelihood, whereas the movie is much more simple, or simplistic. Certain bits of business stir or manipulate us as successfully as they always have. When we’ve got a Killer’s-eye view through a rifle scope and someone passes between us and the target, we don’t care if the target deserves to die or not — we just want to see the job carried off, and for that person to get out of the damn way. Thus does cinema implicate us in murder, as it has practically since its inception. The Killer is a drably familiar story that taps into the deeper ways we respond to movies. It doesn’t have a lot to say, by design, about what it shows us, but we can fill in the blanks if we care enough to.

The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial (2023)

The late William Friedkin was revered for his hard-punching, action-centered approach to moviemaking. He was never averse to manipulation or what some might consider cheap tactics to get an audience worked up (or worked over). His two most famous films are exemplars of their genres — The French Connection a game-changing cop thriller, The Exorcist the same for horror movies — and in those genres, a certain high-pressure style can only help. But a corner of Friedkin also loved courtroom dramas. He remade 12 Angry Men; he made Rampage one-third serial-killer horror and two-thirds legal procedural asking whether the captured killer could duck the death penalty by being declared insane; and he logged a similar ratio in his war drama Rules of Engagement.

What turned out to be Friedkin’s swan song is one of the most noted courtroom meditations, Herman Wouk’s play The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, based on Wouk’s novel. (The material also spawned the famous Humphrey Bogart vehicle in 1954, and Robert Altman directed a film of the play in 1988.) I’ll avoid spoilers for those new to the story, but Friedkin, as writer as well as director, has made some changes, updating the action from post-WWII to 2022, and one effect of the alterations is that Greenwald (Jason Clarke), the Jewish lawyer who defends Lt. Maryk (Jake Lacy) against the charge of mutiny against Commander Queeg (Kiefer Sutherland), no longer has a wrenchingly personal reason to make the climactic speech he still makes. So Greenwald’s anger seems undercooked.

Still, Friedkin captains this old ship smoothly, never resorting to flash (or flashbacks) and holding to an old-school talking-heads style that comes to seem, in this era of computer-generated whiz-bang, deeply satisfying in its meat-and-potatoes clarity. The emphasis is squarely on the talking heads, what they’re saying and, more importantly, what they’re not. Queeg was a taskmaster with a possible nervous condition, decreasingly liked by his crew, but does that mean Maryk was justified in flouting Queeg’s orders during a ship-threatening typhoon, steering the Caine in the opposite direction from the one Queeg specified? 

The more contemporary framing does enable Friedkin to cast away from the usual white-male default in this production; Monica Raymund files a fearsome, no-nonsense prosecutor Challee, while the late Lance Reddick (in his swan song; the movie is dedicated to him) brings every drop of quiet but iron authority he can muster as head judge Blakely. Kiefer Sutherland’s Queeg is in the long-standing tradition of glowering, tight-voiced Queegs, fondling his marbles and speaking in defense of rigid adherence to protocol. Would Queeg’s marbles be a fidget-spinner in 2022? Is Queeg on the spectrum? Friedkin updates the milieu without particularly refreshing the play’s attitudes towards mental disability. 

Friedkin had wanted to direct The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial for years. Whether he would’ve wanted it to be his coda is impossible to know, and I would guess he landed on this as his first feature in 12 years because the money was there to make it. Is it a weak film to go out on? Not at all. The editing, as always with Friedkin, is as sharp as a fresh razor and takes us through the drama briskly and firmly. The medium close-ups of tormented faces dominate the proceedings, and Friedkin stays on those faces, knowing each one is its own mini-movie of fear and regret. I’m glad he was able to make it, and I’m sorry there won’t be more.

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar

The writer-director Wes Anderson loves storybooks, and he loves theater. He has combined the two forms into his own distinct, deadpan-symmetrical mode of cinema since the beginning. The latest example is The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar along with three other short films which, like Henry Sugar, are based on short stories by Roald Dahl: The Swan, The Rat Catcher and Poison, all now streaming on Netflix. (I imagine Criterion will put out a Blu-ray eventually.) 

Henry Sugar, at 39 minutes the longest of the quartet, stars Benedict Cumberbatch as the eponymous non-hero, who teaches himself the art of “seeing without eyes” so that he can make a killing at the casinos. Like a lot of Anderson films (including Asteroid City from earlier this year), Henry Sugar unfolds within and without multiple levels of presentation. Old Roald himself (Ralph Fiennes), who shows up in the other segments as well, tells the tale, as do a doctor (Dev Patel) and Henry himself. Sets are pulled aside or uncouple to reveal other sets, and the characters (including Ben Kingsley as the guru who imparts the seeing-without-eyes procedure) mainly face us straight on and narrate.

The Swan (17 minutes) takes on the favored Dahl theme of children behaving terribly to other children. A bullied boy is tied to tracks, threatened with a rifle, and finally made to climb a tree to take the place of a swan one of the bullies killed. Rupert Friend plays the bullied boy as an adult and narrates. Friend also appears in The Rat Catcher (17 minutes), about the time an expert “rat man” (Fiennes) was called to deal with an infestation in a hayrick. Lastly, Poison (17 minutes) considers a man (Cumberbatch) immobilized by a deadly snake slumbering on his stomach, and the doctor (Kingsley) who comes to solve the problem.

Henry Sugar seems to exist on its own pretty well (it was shown by itself at the Venice Film Festival), and the other three share certain motifs: animals, the tension of having to stay absolutely still. It appears that Henry Sugar kicks things off by leaving us with the notion that someone with the power to help others should use that power. The next one, The Swan (I’m going by the order that Netflix lined them up for me to watch), imagines a world where help is not coming, but the afflicted character, says Dahl, never gives up. Then the next two segments offer help when invading animals crowd into the manicured boxes of life in a Wes Anderson film. Ending on Poison (which has been adapted at least twice before, once on Alfred Hitchcock Presents by the Master himself) seems to indicate that it’s important to help even if help may be neither required nor appreciated.

Despite the occasional tension, the filmmaking is becalmed, almost sedate, and assured. Sometimes this sort of Anderson project feels like a challenge he’s issuing to himself: how flat-affect and intentionally artificial can we make this story and still please an audience? And, like so much else he’s made, this series of shorts isn’t going to move the needle for Anderson haters any more than Asteroid City or The French Dispatch did. But those who eagerly await the newest American Empirical Picture will be entranced, as usual, by the toybox sets and the people standing stock still like toy figures inside immaculate compositions (all but Poison, which is shot in widescreen format, are presented in the square Academy ratio). Henry Sugar offers a more nuanced portrait of a man capable of positive change, while the other three have one emotion in common: fear. Are shadows of doubt creeping into Wes Anderson’s well-trimmed matryoshkas of narrative? As he gets closer to his end than to his beginning, his puppet reveries may darken in interesting ways.

Landscape with Invisible Hand

One would think, as many others have said, that extraterrestrial visitors would probably want to give Earth a wide berth. Aliens don’t need to destroy the planet — we’re doing a fair job of that ourselves. The aliens in Landscape with Invisible Hand, a mopey sci-fi drama, take over Earth because they want to save us from ourselves — or so they say. Called “the Vuvv,” they rule from offworld colonies and resemble “gooey coffee tables.” Through translators, the Vuvv lay down the law: Anything that does not enrich or amuse them is not worth the space it inhabits. They try to be polite about it, but they find themselves conquering an easily cowed species, except for a few rebellious types.

We follow the Campbell family. Beth (Tiffany Haddish), the mother, was once an attorney; now she has resumes out to fast-food chains. (Which, I guess, are still permitted to exist. The worldbuilding here probably doesn’t bear much deep thought.) Her son Adam (Asante Blackk) is a budding artist; the movie has eyes for him but more or less forgets about his sister Natalie (Brooklynn MacKinzie). Adam gets friendly with Chloe (Kylie Rogers), a fellow student in his art class. They kiss but seem more like casual friends than boyfriend/girlfriend. Regardless, Chloe hears about a way for them to make money by wearing “nodes” that allow the Vuvv to watch their romance; the aliens find human love fascinating.

That might have been sufficient for an interesting premise, but writer-director Cory Finley, adapting a YA novel by M.T. Anderson, more or less drops that thread in favor of showing the Vuvv’s demands bringing indignity to the Campbells and to Chloe’s family, who live in the Campbells’ basement. What if one or both of the couple were gay yet had to keep up the ruse of playing straight? Instead, the Vuvv hold the threat of “debt for six generations” over the humans’ heads, leading to first Beth and then Chloe’s father playing wife to a Vuvv who only knows about family and marriage from what it’s seen on Earth television from the ‘50s. Watching Tiffany Haddish trying to play a good stereotypical wifey to a gooey coffee table should be funnier than it is. A lot of stuff here should be.

Haddish only really gets her blood up in one scene, but it has no consequences since Chloe’s father apparently seamlessly steps into the wife role (it seems we all look the same to the Vuvv). Landscape tries to be an allegory about corporations deforming human life, but there’s a distinct lack of intriguing details, and though the plot eventually brings in a Vuvv who appreciates Adam’s art and offers him an elite position to ply his trade, its appreciation is only on the level of commerce and propaganda. Well, what if there were Vuvv with artistic, or at least not totally mercenary, sensibilities? The Vuvv are all boringly the same; they all have matching quirks and dominating personae. They don’t seem to have been thought out in dramatic terms — or comedic; the movie comes perilously close to being neither/nor, or null. 

Sometimes it enters that territory anyway. Haddish brings some gravitas to the scenes where her Beth frets about providing for her family; she plays Beth’s reality with all the pained honesty, clinging to whatever dignity she can, of an actor who once lived in her car. But that’s about it for emotional realism. We don’t really care about Adam and Chloe’s relationship, even if its failure means debtors’ prison for the family. Cory Finley apparently has bigger fish to fry, but any satirical points are so obvious as to be a big blur — we wait for something to flip the script, for someone among the Vuvv to act opposed to Vuvv dictates. But they don’t. They oppress, and the humans do what they must to survive. The result is more depressing than insightful or entertaining.

The Boogeyman

Stephen King’s 1973 short story “The Boogeyman” gave me a few sleepless nights when I was a kid. For King, the tale arose from his fears of his children dying. For kids, it was even scarier: a monster could come for you in the night, and your parents couldn’t stop it. The story is told by Lester Billings, who has lost three of his young children to what they described as “the boogeyman,” a thing that hunkers down in dark closets, waiting to strike. Lester isn’t very relatable — he doesn’t seem to like his wife or kids, and he’s actually kind of a huge prick — so we suspect, like others in his life, that he himself killed the kids and made up the boogeyman as a sort of coping mechanism. But no, the boogeyman is very real … although we may wonder to what extent the monster has acted on a resentful father’s suppressed desire to be rid of the shackles of family.

The new movie version (there was a cheesy short version forty years ago, usually packaged with a much better Frank Darabont short also based on King) takes an entirely different psychological tack. For one thing, Lester — in the person of the likable, sometimes painfully vulnerable David Dastmalchian — is presented in his limited screen time as a genuinely bereaved father who needs to make sense of what happened. A better movie might have wanted to follow Lester on his journey, but he — and, sadly, Dastmalchian — exit the picture early, leaving us with the therapist Lester visits, Dr. Will Harper (Chris Messina), and his two daughters.

I won’t abandon him as quickly as the film does; I find David Dastmalchian a fascinating, hooded presence. He can be creepy or friendly (or both), and he just pulls us naturally into whatever his character is feeling. His haunted, agonized features promise a much more impactful horror movie than The Boogeyman turns out to be. When he goes, the movie I wanted goes with him, and I was stuck with Dr. Harper, sullen teen Sadie (Sophie Hatcher) and cute-as-a-button Sawyer (Vivien Lyra Blair) as they grappled with the death of Dr. Harper’s wife. Thematically, this family’s pain isn’t very satisfying because the boogeyman isn’t drawn to grief. It just wants to drink the life out of children, and the only reason it imprints on Dr. Harper and his daughters is that Lester (unknowingly) brought it there. It’s said their weakness in time of grief makes them easier targets for it, but I was still left wondering why this story wasn’t about Lester and his growing terror and madness when his children kept being killed.

It took three guys to work up the script pitting two brave girls against a monster who doesn’t like the light. A couple of clever moments come out of this, such as when the younger girl, playing a videogame, makes the TV screen flash just long enough to reveal the boogeyman creeping in the shadows of the room. Whoever designed, rendered and animated the monster has earned a salute, and director Rob Savage is shrewd about how much of the boogeyman he shows us, and when. The atmosphere is heavy, with just about the only levity coming from Sadie’s high-school friends, one of whom is annoying enough that we want the boogeyman to visit her.

Nine out of ten horror directors think a dynamic soundtrack will scare us, and Savage certainly isn’t the exception. The movie gets plotty and goal-oriented when it should be parking itself quietly in front of a closet door creaking open by itself and letting us fill the darkness with our own fearful demons. If you’ve seen enough horror movies, you know all the tropes and all the techniques. So sometimes a frightening sequence in an otherwise non-horror film — I always cite the room full of mummies in Raiders of the Lost Ark or the terrifying figure behind the dumpster in Mulholland Drive — hits us squarely in the fear center, because we don’t see it coming. We horror-movie buffs may still have fun at a horror movie — even The Boogeyman has its enjoyable bits — but as far as genuine scares, well, that ship sailed for most of us somewhere in our teens. The Boogeyman isn’t scary, but it could have been. The source material was right there. David Dastmalchian was right there.