Humane

Here’s a cheerful premise: Our future will be so grim that people deemed by the government to be a drain on resources will be obliged to step up for euthanasia. That concept powered the 2022 Japanese film Plan 75, and it provides some electricity — some — to the dystopian thriller Humane, directed by Caitlin Cronenberg from a script by Michael Sparaga. In a few years (presumably), the deteriorating climate will result in a serious shortage of water and other natural resources, so the government makes a deal: At least one adult from every family must agree to die. Their survivors will get a decent chunk of change. They will pass into the great unknown mystery knowing they sacrificed (or were sacrificed) for the greater good.

The world-building in Humane doesn’t concern itself very much with some questions we may have (will birth control be mandated?). We see a few snippets of news on TV, some featuring Jared York (Jay Baruchel), an anthropologist working with the government on this morbid endeavor. Jared’s rich, famous father, anchorman Charles York (Peter Gallagher), has called Jared and his three other grown children to his home for dinner. When everyone — including addict Noah (Sebastian Chacon), embattled CEO Rachel (Emily Hampshire) and her teen daughter Mia (Sirena Gulamgaus), and aspiring actress Ashley (Alanna Bale) — has gathered, Charles drops the news: he and his wife Dawn (Uni Park) have decided to volunteer themselves for the cause — to “enlist.”

Charles is out of the picture in half an hour or so. His wife gets cold feet and flees, complicating matters greatly: the people who arrive to administer the enlistment, led by the amiable Bob (Enrico Colantoni), have to take a second body to replace Dawn. So the grown kids fight (often physically) over which of them is going to provide that body. Humane becomes a one-location thriller (it could be adapted to the stage with little trouble) in which four characters with varying degrees of pain in their lives try to defend their continued existence. That could be boring, but Cronenberg keeps things short and briskly paced, with a mitigating sense of humor — bleak humor, to be sure, but enough to humanize the brittle, often objectionable characters. 

Humane doesn’t seem to aspire to more than that; the world is narrowed down to one well-appointed home and one set of siblings squabbling. So it becomes an actors’ showcase, though the drama often devolves into stabbing, strangling, and gunplay. None of these people seem especially capable of fratricide, though I guess part of the satirical point is that these pampered bourgeois kids, who have grown up and into their own self-abusive flaws, turn easily and coldly to violence. I almost would rather have followed Bob and his partner from house to house, seen what they see — kind of the inverse of Asphalt City, in which a couple of guys go door to door saving lives, not taking them. 

But this is the Humane we got, and for what it is it’s crisply rendered. Of the three filmmaking children of Canadian master David Cronenberg (who contributes an aural cameo here), Caitlin seems to have inherited the old man’s dark sense of comedy, while Cassandra (based on her 2013 short Candy) got his erotic aesthetic and Brandon (judging by the two of his films I’ve managed to sit through) got his fixation on body horror. Put them all together and you have David, I suppose, just as combining the Corleone sons gets you Vito. Caitlin Cronenberg has an easy way with actors; her style is smooth, not off-putting or confusing. I’d like to see her write her own script next time, though, follow her own muse.

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.

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.”

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. 

Finestkind

Brian Helgeland, the writer/director of the fishing-boat thriller Finestkind, clearly knows his way around the deck. Before lighting out for Hollywood, he worked a scallop boat out of New Bedford, Massachusetts, where the land scenes in Finestkind are set and were (mostly) filmed. As the film’s college-age protagonist Charlie (Toby Wallace) learns the ropes, so do we. Charlie drops in on his fisherman/captain brother Tom (Ben Foster) and goes to work for him. It would have been interesting to follow these two in the real world, not in a neo-noir where people intone things like “You set us up!” and “Why the gun?” at each other.

Helgeland delivers a more or less engaging thriller anyway. But the early scenes — maybe the first hour or so — feel so lived-in and tied to experience sweet as well as harsh that it’s kind of a bummer when Finestkind pivots towards genre. I guess what I’m asking for is not so much a different movie as a different world — a world where a studio would finance a slice-of-life comedy-drama about a smart kid who roughens his hands on a fishing vessel for a while. But this is this world, and the script for Finestkind hails from a time when Helgeland was starting out and needed to show studios he could write something that would make money. This is the game most filmmakers in the studio system have to play. 

So plot threads begin to rise and envelop the characters, and some of them work better than others.  Captain Tom loses his boat, so he moves to the boat owned by his dad (Tommy Lee Jones), but then that boat gets impounded, and $100,000 is needed to get it un-impounded, and luckily Charlie has fallen in with Mabel (Jenna Ortega), who has drug connections through her mother. Soon we stop seeing details of working life and other things we haven’t seen much before in movies, and start seeing things we’ve seen all too often. 

Money is flashed. Packets of drugs are hidden (in scallop-filled freezers). Guns are brandished. One hilarious twist that perhaps only those from Massachusetts can fully appreciate: the ominous meetings of criminal business take place mostly in a well-lit donut shop. (Clayne Crawford, as the scary kingpin, is groomed like and has possibly been encouraged to sound like Casey Affleck in his great Dunkin’ Donuts bit on Saturday Night Live.) People are beaten up. As soon as we see a pregnant woman, we wait for something traumatizing to befall her. The thing is, this plot seems to want to steer towards a bleak, despairing noir ending, and Helgeland seems to like his characters too much to let that happen. Everyone mostly ends up where we’d like them to be. It’s as though the movie sweated out its fever and started sipping ginger ale and getting around again. The characters become like people again, with wants and needs beyond the thriller narrative.

So there’s a tension between the more artful, less “plotty” version of this story — the soil of which produces the flowering of mood and milieu and character we encounter in Finestkind’s first half — and the more conventional path down which the movie takes us, temporarily, until Helgeland settles the plot stuff and sets his people free to plan their lives after the movie is over. But before it gets slightly less interesting — only slightly, Helgeland is still professional enough to wring some stress out of the thriller elements — there are lovely moments, such as when Mabel shows Charlie her room and says “This is me,” or when Charlie and Tom can’t quite escape the embrace of their mom (Lolita Davidovich), or when we see a junkie who nevertheless has enough wherewithal and taste to read Elmore Leonard. Helgeland has created people who deserve better than what the studio demands he give them. 

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.

Saltburn

In some ways the anti-Holdovers, the sharp thorn of a movie Saltburn, the second film by writer-director Emerald Fennell (Promising Young Woman), wants to show the moral vacuity of the upper class and the worse morality of those who aspire to it. On the evidence, Fennell doesn’t have much faith in humans, who she seems to think will do any swinish, hurtful thing they can get away with, and in the godless universe occupied by Fennell’s characters, they can get away with plenty. The movie is well-appointed and observantly acted, but boy is it a downer. You may need a shot of cinematic Pepto-Bismol in the form of a revisit to The Holdovers if you try to down this difficult, unappetizing dish.

Our sympathy goes early on to Oxford freshman Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan), who talks vaguely of tough times at home. Oliver notices rich boy Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi) and swiftly becomes enamored of him. Is it just envy of the upper-crust kid’s reality, or genuine attraction, or all of these and more? Fennell sets up a narrative in which we believe in Oliver (Keoghan, summoning some of the heartbreaking vulnerability that distinguished him in The Banshees of Inisherin, makes this easy) and keep looking for proof of malice in the wealthy family he finds himself among.

Oliver befriends Felix, who plays at being a spoiled rich kid but has moments of kindness and awareness of those “beneath his station.” Felix invites Oliver to stay the summer with him and his family at their estate, Saltburn. Oliver accepts, and rapidly gains acceptance from Felix’s mother Elspeth (Rosamund Pike), sister Venetia (Alison Oliver), and father James (Richard E. Grant). A couple of wild cards are shuffled into the deck — Elspeth’s hapless rich friend Pamela (Carey Mulligan in a memorable one-scene cameo) and Felix’s cousin Farleigh (Archie Madekwe), also staying at Saltburn. They may make things more complicated for Oliver.

After a while it becomes clear that Saltburn has more in common with The Talented Mr. Ripley than with anything else, and that it eventually falls into a subgenre of thriller alongside Teorema, Brimstone and Treacle, Visitor Q, and 2005’s The King. It’s nice — I guess? — that the rich folks shown here turn out quite differently from our expectations. And Fennell sidesteps charges of elitism by making the film’s antagonist less a class warrior than a manipulative fabulist. It turns Saltburn into something of a revenge tale, except the victims haven’t done much to deserve it except exist, which may be part of the point. It also becomes unsatisfying and incoherent, essentially painting the upper class as well-meaning sorts plagued by people looking for financial help and devious moral goblins.

Sitting here after Saltburn is over, I don’t have a clear feeling about any of the characters except Richard E. Grant’s Sir James, who seems none too bright, even childlike (he loves nothing more than a party and an excuse to wear a costume of knight’s armor to it), but basically generous until his instincts are steered wrong by duplicity. Much of the work, of course, is done by Grant, who makes a bright impression, as he always has. Emerald Fennell herself comes from money — her father is the jewelry-designer-to-the-stars Theo Fennell — and her treatment of the father here is fond and gentle. Her tender feelings radiate outward to take in the rest of the Catton family.

But then we’re thrown back with Oliver, whose behavior takes him to a place where we really can’t (don’t want to) follow. I was left wondering what the point of Saltburn was other than up-ending our biases about people along the class spectrum. I would guess that the current moment won’t find many viewers sympathetic to what Fennell seems to be trying. Unlike Promising Young Woman, it doesn’t tap into the rage of its day. It’s just purposelessly unpleasant. The rich, we’re left thinking, would be perfectly fine and happy if left alone on their estates and not bothered by people who want their money or their lives. That can’t be what Fennell meant us to take away, can it?

The Holdovers

The Holdovers foregrounds three people in varying degrees of pain. It’s nothing radical — indeed, it’s consciously retro, set in 1970-71 and styled as though it were made then. The “film print” carries the spots and soft pops of age; the soundtrack is mellow and morose. Some folks will snuggle inside this movie like a blanket, because it’s ultimately comforting. Others may respond to it in a more prickly fashion, though it’s probably not meant to be held up to practical or political objections. Still, this is an atypically compassionate film from the previously cool and cynical Alexander Payne (Sideways, Nebraska), it’s gorgeous to look at, and it works if you don’t think about it too much.

Payne reunites with Sideways star Paul Giamatti, who specializes in finding the relatable or entertaining qualities in dissatisfied, dyspeptic men. Here, the script by David Hemingson serves Giamatti the role of Paul Hunham on a platter. Hunham teaches classical history at Barton, a New England boarding school. Various physical quirks have given him an eye condition and an illness that makes him smell like fish. Hunham is written as a strict and derisive martinet who slowly thaws in the company of others. The role is entirely in Giamatti’s wheelhouse, and it never requires him to take any chances. An Oscar nomination, and perhaps a win, has been signed, sealed, and delivered to him. Not that he doesn’t deserve it.

Hunham is obligated to stay at Barton over the Christmas break and supervise five students who can’t go home for whatever reason. Soon the group of kids is reduced to one, Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), a smart kid more or less throwing himself away because of trauma involving his parents. Completing the trio here is Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph),  who runs the school cafeteria and whose son, a Barton grad, recently died in Vietnam. Mary is a Black woman surrounded by white guys who come from money and think they have problems. The white kids go off to college; the Black kids get shipped off to kill and die. The movie makes its points about this subtly, which is to say inoffensively, non-stridently. Payne wants to compare and contrast pain divided by race or generation.

The director gets quietly affecting performances out of everyone (Randolph’s Oscar buzz, also deserved, is even louder than Giamatti’s), even newcomer Sessa. I wish I trusted Payne’s good faith enough to view certain details more charitably, such as the school staffer (Carrie Preston) who brings Hunham Christmas cookies and has lipstick on her teeth — why? Why score a mean laugh off this kind woman who later invites everyone to her Christmas party? (This character also suffers from one of the script’s more pointless curveballs.) But the story’s inherent sentimentality must have touched Payne somehow, even on a nostalgic level, because this kind of joke eventually fades out of the movie and a sort of warm curiosity takes over. Ultimately it’s about Hunham redefining what he means by “Barton men.” Nostalgia, and wanting things always to stay the same, are a comforting but smothering blanket that must be cast off.

Misgivings about Payne aside, he has put together a tonally satisfying fable in which people watch each other carefully and wait for them to reveal hidden layers. All three main figures start out wanting to be left alone in their misery, like emotional Scrooges, but learn to reach out to others, to be part of something larger, a community. Or just to leave the womblike solace of the known — to be born. Here and there The Holdovers irritated me, but overall its high-toned gloom won me over. The movie feels as though it were fighting for the right to end the way it does. Payne leaves smart-ass caricature behind, and the characters earn dignity and respect.

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.