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. 

The Greatest Night in Pop

Right smack dab in the middle of the ‘80s, the one-time-only “supergroup” USA for Africa recorded the relief-for-Ethiopia charity single “We Are the World,” the subject of the new Netflix documentary The Greatest Night in Pop, and for a good long time you couldn’t escape that song. (I had the album on cassette.) A lot of people had a lot to say about it, but as written by Lionel Richie and Michael Jackson, it lodged like a fish hook in the part of the brain that likes to play earworms. (The chorus seems built to be belted by large, swaying crowds.) As songs like it go, it could have been a lot worse — like, say, the now-cringeworthy “Do They Know It’s Christmas?,” which indirectly inspired “We Are the World” when Harry Belafonte observed, “Okay, the white people are trying to save Black people; how about Black people saving Black people?”

The resultant gathering of singers was pretty evenly split between Black and white, though the firepower was more or less all Black. Richie and Jackson got it onto the floor, with input and guidance from others including Stevie Wonder and event ringleader Quincy Jones. At the time, and even more so in today’s era of Zoom, part of the selling point was that all these big artists were indeed in the same room, not doing their bits separately and FedExing them in, and there was the bestselling video to prove it. All these big names committed to be there, and because of the logistical horrors involved in getting and keeping them in one place, the song had to be recorded directly after 1985’s American Music Awards — which Richie was hosting — and it had to be done that night. The final note was sung by 8:00 am on the morning of January 28.

If Richie was the Superman of this Justice League (he appears in the documentary, sharp as ever, reminiscing cogently and humbly), Bob Dylan might have been the Batman, dark and scowling, not really feeling a part of the proceedings. It seems he wanted to want to be there, but he was too much the loner, and besides he had a tough time figuring out what he could do with his solo line given his limitations as a singer. Stevie Wonder to the rescue: Wonder sat at a piano and mimicked Dylan’s voice precisely, showing him exactly what a voice like Dylan’s could do. The Dylan you hear on the single wouldn’t have been possible without Wonder. Then again, Stevie almost derailed the whole thing when he suggested singing a bit in Swahili. After a bunch of objections, including that Swahili isn’t even spoken in Ethiopia, the Swahili idea was dropped. But you get the sense that even in this highly specialized atmosphere, a song will revise and resolve itself as long as artists are willing to get out of its way.

Stevie Wonder ultimately valued the song, not his idea, and all the other artists here seemed to follow suit. (The documentary shows Waylon Jennings walking out of the studio during the Swahili kerfuffle, but doesn’t tell us he later came back; director Bao Nguyen prankishly plays Jennings off with the “Dukes of Hazzard” theme.) Quincy Jones’ famous directive to the artists was “Check your egos at the door,” which Garry Trudeau later copped for the title of his Doonesbury collection wherein his strips about the recording appear (he was admitted to the event as a reporter). If you weren’t around in ’85 it can be hard to imagine how large this single and its concomitant concerns about addressing starvation loomed in the national conversation. Soon after, DC and Marvel each put out an all-star benefit comic featuring superheroes wondering what they can do about the Ethiopian famine. Not much. In real life, tons of food sent to relieve hunger rotted on docks.

So The Greatest Night in Pop celebrates a time when optimism, though weaving and bloodied, could still stand tall, especially with a roomful of massive talents (and Dan Aykroyd — who has admitted he got in that room more or less by accident) getting buzzed off of how charitable they’re being. (The project’s success was not guaranteed; Bob Geldof, kicking the event off with a speech, finished with “Let’s hope it works.”) Some of the participants who are still with us — Springsteen, Lauper (who for my money has the song’s finest moment), Sheila E — are seen here conveying a sort of fannish impostor syndrome as they recall walking among legends. Elsewhere, probably punchy as hell in the wee hours, the singers all start singing Belafonte’s “Day-O,” and its uptempo silliness acts as a jolt of caffeine for the legends who were, it turns out, only flesh and bone. It’s not a great movie — the performance energy is splintered and scattered — but it’s hard to dislike and it’s a decent salute to the impulse of creativity to aim itself at a good cause. 

Dario Argento Panico

The footage of a young Dario Argento in Dario Argento Panico provides an amusing contrast to the old maestro he is now (he is 83). The acclaimed but notorious Italian director of such gory fever dreams as Suspiria and The Stendhal Syndrome definitely had a lean and hungry look in his ‘70s-‘80s prime, a tense and intense face (slap a mustache on him back then and you had Poe) topped by history’s goofiest mullet. Now he has filled out, wrinkled and grayed, and looks like the grandfather he is, but his eyes remain haunted. (The same is true of present-day Werner Herzog.) Argento’s fans may be disappointed with his output in the last decade or so, but he’s still recognizably the same man who turned murder into beauty in Suspiria. He still has some wild magickal darkness in his aura.

Panico is more or less a standard talking-heads tribute to Argento, who is seen here checking into a fancy hotel to work on a new script, just like the old days. He sits for director Simone Scafidi (who also made a doc about Argento peer Lucio Fulci), as do some of Argento’s family, collaborators, friends, and fans. Not just any fans, of course — Scafidi lands international cult directors Guillermo del Toro, Nicholas Winding Refn, and Gaspar Noé, who directed Argento in 2021’s drama Vortex. It’s del Toro who tees up the best Argento quote of the evening: “Everything in Argento’s movies is trying to kill you.” Yes, indeed, especially if you’re a woman.

Yes, Argento routinely contrived epically horrific deaths for many female characters, and even “played” their murderer’s hands on more than one occasion. He himself claimed he wanted to get across how terrible the violence was. Well. The social part of him may have said and believed that, but the artist side of him didn’t care, it scratched some deep dark itch. Given that his daughter Asia points out how many times a girl or woman is front and center in his films, whose terror and vulnerability against a ghastly killer are always heightened and taken very seriously, I doubt Argento hates women. He talks about watching his photographer mother take pictures of the leading models and actresses of the day. Mom made female beauty pop; son makes it bleed. This, the movie shows us, is a man about whom his daughters and even his ex-wife speak fondly. Like many other artists, he obeys Flaubert’s advice to “be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”

The documentary mostly deals with Argento’s peak and greatest hits. It finds time to mention his atypical Five Days of Milan, but passes over late-period Argento like Giallo and Dracula (Argento and I are probably the only ones who liked that one) in respectful silence. There have been a number of other film profiles of Argento; the first major one was probably Dario Argento’s World of Horror from 1985. This one takes its title from the emotion Argento wants to throttle out of the viewer — not just fear or horror but panic, a feeling of powerlessness in a malign universe. Argento wanted to evoke apocalyptic anxiety, and in his best work he did. 

The artist documentary to beat, of course, is Terry Zwigoff’s Crumb, though perhaps Zwigoff had the advantage of having unforgettably squirmy material to work with. Simone Scafidi doesn’t unearth any unsavory bits about Argento’s past; this is essentially a puff piece. The anecdotes are informative (though some producer says something I didn’t really get about Argento and Se7en), the analysis often on-target when it comes from ascended fanboy del Toro. (I enjoy hearing him talk movies almost as much as I enjoy his movies.) We can’t escape, though, the inconvenient feeling that the filmmaker Panico celebrates stopped being that filmmaker long ago. Argento could make his late-inning masterpiece. Anything’s possible. I’m certainly rooting for him.

Blazing Saddles

This year, Netflix is curating selections of notable films having an anniversary — 20th, 50th, and so on. One of them is Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles, which turns 50 on February 7. The movie has in recent years been conscripted in the new culture war as an example of comedy that “could never be made today,” because the “wokesters” and oversensitive Zoomers would “cancel” it, or some such thing. Yet there it is, on Netflix, with all thirteen “N-words” intact, along with other slurs. Blazing Saddles couldn’t be made today because it’s very much of its time — a spoof of ‘70s blaxploitation as much as westerns. Other satirical material with bawdy humor and language continues to be made. It’s just that you’re more likely to see it on Max than in the theater.

The movie, written by two Black guys and three Jews, has its heart in the right place when it comes to race. Today, it might come under fire more readily for its gay-bashing humor. Mel Brooks stops the movie cold during its climax so that Dom DeLuise can direct a bunch of flaming nellies in a song-and-dance number while himself playing a gay stereotype. It’s one of several bumps in the narrative’s road, as a Superposse of bad eggs has a traveling brawl with the heroes and townsfolk and keeps bursting in on other productions or the studio commissary, a shambolic meta-ending not unlike the non-climax of Monty Python and the Holy Grail a year later. The thing is, there’s no mitigating satire here, no gay Cleavon Little figure. It’s just making fun of the faygelehs. It’s not great.

Neither is the rest of the movie, really. I adore Mel Brooks as a public figure, your hilarious uncle who’s always “on” and says things in interviews that people quote for decades. May he live to be an actual 2000-year-old man. It’s his movies that don’t do much for me (though I have a soft spot for Young Frankenstein for its obvious love for the old Universal horrors and its dedication to getting the look right). As a writer/director, Brooks tends to elbow us too hard in the ribs trying to sell the laugh. Some of the best moments were improvised, such as the “y’know…morons” line, which benefits from understatement (if Brooks delivered the line he’d have launched it into the cheap seats) and Cleavon Little’s genuine chuckle at it.

Little, of course, plays Bart, the railworker turned sheriff — sent to a town ostensibly to guard it but really to destabilize it. A lot of Blazing Saddles’ racial material, especially as regards white scheming against Black people, wouldn’t offend today so much as seeming somewhat mild. Fifty years ago it was radical; then again, so was the campfire flatulence scene, which now plays both tame and obvious. I can say that Blazing Saddles was absolutely necessary for its time. That doesn’t mean it needs to be driven into oblivion now. To say it hasn’t aged well may only mean society has progressed in fifty years, and I imagine Mel Brooks would be depressed if we hadn’t made any strides since 1974.

Well, in some ways we haven’t. Things go in cycles, and fifty years ago a Black man in drag was on TV (The Flip Wilson Show, still running when Blazing Saddles was in theaters), and today some states are trying to outlaw drag queens. One step forward, ten steps back. The true sin of Blazing Saddles is that its humor is broad (Alex Karras’ Mongo punching the horse — Mongo was reportedly Richard Pryor’s main addition to the script) while its style is bland. The almost serene rapport between Little and Gene Wilder as the broken-down Waco Kid, two hipsters finding each other in a backward-ass town, is a source of pleasure. Harvey Korman, onscreen altogether too much, is not. Madeline Kahn, as the legendary Lili Von Shtupp, is majestically concupiscent while not exactly doing much for the then-fresh second-wave feminism. Blazing Saddles may be instructive in terms of the tropes it chooses to challenge (a group of Black railworkers crooning Cole Porter instead of “Camptown Races”) and the ones it chooses to leave unharmed. 

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.

The Boy and the Heron

Much of Hayao Miyazaki’s masterful new film The Boy and the Heron deals with grief, desolation, and the need for a veteran creator to contend with his own legacy. Heavy stuff, but moment to moment, there is such enormous pleasure in the little things that Miyazaki takes care to animate. When the wind picks up, it stirs hair, beard hair, even eyebrows and eyelashes. When people climb into and out of a pedicab, or cycle rickshaw, the conveyance tilts or sinks or lifts according to the weight of the passengers. As wild as the events get, they hold to a rigorous sense of physical realism. Everything in the frame has been thought about — why animate it if it shouldn’t be there? why not animate it correctly if it should be there? — and every frame is dazzling, and sometimes more than that. Some of the images gleam with an almost cruel beauty.

Because of all this, and because of an incredibly dense narrative loaded with bizarre creatures doing irascible, not-always-understandable things, The Boy and the Heron is, like other Miyazaki, the sort of banquet that may strike some as a bit much. Miyazaki will give you more movie than anyone else or die trying. It’s frankly too much for the eye and brain to take in at one sitting. That’s not a demerit in a movie marketplace that frequently gives us not enough movie. But I do advise just going along for the ride, letting the enchanting milieu wash over you, and not getting caught up in “what’s going on.”

What’s going on is that Mahito, a boy growing up during World War II, misses his mother. She died in a hospital fire. Mahito’s dad soon takes up with Natsuko, his late wife’s sister. Mahito and his father move out of Tokyo and in with Natsuko. A gray heron appears to Mahito and claims it can help him find his mother. Mahito is also looking for the pregnant, missing Natsuko. Along the way there are pelicans, and strange little ambling servants and their doll counterparts, and little globes called warawara that ascend from some sea world to the surface world to become human souls, unless the pelicans eat them, unless the master of fire Lady Himi torches the pelicans first. 

Some of the fierce gush of Miyazaki’s imagination seems borderline punitive. He doesn’t want to give us our bearings in mundane reality (even while respecting the lumpy, creaky physics of the “real world”); past a certain point it’s just chaos. (Miyazaki is said to have appended a statement to a preview screening: “Perhaps you didn’t understand it. I myself don’t understand it.”) It’s a classic love-it-or-loathe-it experience; I can’t imagine someone just shrugging at it neutrally. Miyazaki must set out to show us something we’ve never seen before (or never seen it this way before) in every scene. And he’s got so much plot here, so many pet themes to attend to, that the film runs about two hours, and I hate to say it, but we begin to feel the time. The pacing feels anecdotal; it’s like looking into separate boxes filled with magical things — we don’t feel much continuity between the scenes. This happens, then this happens, then something else happens. (Perhaps not coincidentally, many of Terry Gilliam’s films play similarly.)

Yet The Boy and the Heron, for all its ornery refusal to cater to newcomers’ sensibilities, feels like a work of high devotion and high craft. (Miyazaki and his sixty animators hand-drew every frame; the finished film has some CGI augmentation, as every Miyazaki has since Princess Mononoke.) Some critics seem to want it to be Miyazaki’s swan song, though he has said he wants to make another film — the core of the thing has that farewell-tour vibe to it, an artist accounting for what he’s brought into the world. If you watch it (a second or third time) with that in mind, it might hang together more neatly. But what Miyazaki is doing here isn’t neat, and shouldn’t be. It’s his artistic legacy all bound up with sorrow and bereavement and the impossibility of sensitive souls to live in a cold sharp world but living in it anyway. Why? Because, Miyazaki says, damn it all, it’s worth it. And so The Boy and the Heron is worth it.

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.