Author: Justin Humphreys

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Arts Culture

Saving Private Baumer

The brutalities of trench warfare are on full display in Edward Berger’s adaptation of the classic novel All Quiet on the Western Front. Photo: Netflix.

Netflix has elaborately revived Erich Maria Remarque’s classic World War I novel All Quiet on the Western Front, directed by Edward Berger. Remarque’s novel’s descriptions of trench warfare and mechanized bloodshed have lost none of their punch (likewise, Lewis Milestone’s 1930 film version), but in Berger’s take, many elements don’t fully coalesce into the potent anti-war statement the film is intended to be.

German teenager Paul Baumer (Felix Kammerer) and his friends enlist in the Army in a fit of patriotic fervor. Their illusions about war as an exciting adventure vanish as they are thrust into a hellscape of agonizing death. Seasoned soldier “Kat” Katczinsky (Albrecht Shuch) befriends Paul and helps him learn to survive on the front. Meanwhile, in a subplot invented for the film, German diplomats led by Matthias Erzberger (Daniel Brühl) realize their cause is lost, and work toward an armistice with the French.

Most of the movie portrays graphic battlefield violence, offset by occasional interludes of the soldiers at rest. The audience endures nightmarish combat, and some of the battle scenes—especially one involving tanks—are very effective.

The production design, costumes, and makeup effects are all first-rate. The opening sequence is probably the most inventive: uniforms being stripped off freshly dead soldiers, cleaned, patched, and recycled, ready to be handed off to the next batch of doomed youngsters. 

All Quiet is pitched in the gory mode of Saving Private Ryan and Fury, but it’s more deeply indebted to Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory, the gut-wrenching Russian war film Come and See, and Sam Fuller’s masterworks (one of Fuller’s finest lines from The Steel Helmet is paraphrased here). 

Unfortunately, All Quiet plays like a war movie designed to wow people who haven’t seen many war movies, and it suffers most in its character development, pacing, and scoring. Unlike in Remarque’s novel or Milestone’s film, the audience doesn’t really get to know Paul’s friends well enough for their deaths to register. And the film’s soundtrack prominently features an intrusive and anachronistic three-note leitmotif that is jarringly out of place.

The actors are all fine, and deserve more screen time to offset the violence. Key points are also belabored, like the German High Command’s elegant lifestyle juxtaposed with the squalid lives of its soldiers. And an ancient war movie cliché still holds true here: If a soldier shows off pictures of his loved ones, or even discusses them, he’s a goner.   

It’s clear just how many antiwar movies are superior to All Quiet in every sense, including the 1930 version, which, despite being over 90 years old, remains better paced and edited.

With the quality of cast, crew, and materials at hand, this adaptation could have been shaped into a more impressive film. All the elements are there—the filmmakers just got carried away with bombarding the audience with horror, and lost sight of the movie’s structure and characters. Yes, war is still hell, but there are limits to which viewers can be bludgeoned with that point.

All Quiet on the Western Front

R, 183 minutes

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Arts Culture

Building bridges

Dustin Lance Black appears at From Page to Screen: Screenwriter’s Panel on November 5 at the Code Building’s Irving Theater, and for a Q&A at the screening of Mama’s Boy at the Culbreth Theatre on November 6. Images courtesy of the Virginia Film Festival.

Writer/director/producer Dustin Lance Black’s films and television work—including his Academy Award-winning Milk script—are frequently outspoken about LGBTQ+ issues. The Mormon Church also resurfaces throughout his work, as in the hit FX series “Under the Banner of Heaven.” The two topics merge in director Laurent Bouzereau’s new documentary Mama’s Boy, which focuses on Black and his late mother, Anne. And they’re more deeply personal than ever.

Black, 48, half-jokingly calls the film “This Is Your Life and Mostly the Painful Bits.” Working from Black’s memoir Mama’s Boy: A Story from Our Americas, Bouzereau follows him as they retrace his experiences growing up gay among strict Mormons in Texas. There, homosexuality was considered venal, and he was terrified to reveal his true self. Meanwhile, Black’s resilient mother bravely lived with polio. Mama’s Boy explores how his coming out to her revealed her extraordinary gift for compassion.

An Instagram DM from Bouzereau concerning Black’s book led to their collaboration. Black was already aware of Bouzereau from his film-related documentaries, and was “very interested” in working with him. As they became acquainted, Black discovered that “to know Laurent is to love Laurent. … It’s easy to trust him. And I do feel that that trust was well placed.”

Dustin Lance Black.

Black wrote his memoir “from the safety of my home now as a grown man,” he points out. But facing his tough childhood memories on camera—particularly where they occurred—was another matter. “I would imagine many a therapist would say it’s incredibly bad therapy,” he says.

Black stresses that he deliberately didn’t write, produce, or direct Mama’s Boy: “I hate it when I watch documentaries and then at the end it says ‘directed by’ or ‘produced by’ the person who was just featured because then you don’t necessarily trust it.”

“This is my mom’s story more than mine,” he says, “and I feel like the lessons that I learned from her are vital now—are even more necessary now than when she shared these lessons with me when she was still around.”

Despite her background, Black’s mother not only accepted her son’s sexual orientation, but his friends’, as well. He was moved, he says, “to see how a conservative military Mormon woman showed the courage back in the ’90s to share space with a bunch of my queer friends … who she had been taught her whole life were immoral and illegal and hellbound. … And [show] the curiosity to listen. And we found common ground.”

Eventually, he recalls, she “challenged me to do the same in the other direction. And it’s not easy. … But what you find is you can build a bridge because you still do, for the most part, have more in common than what the 24-hour news channels and the newspapers would claim.”

Black hopes the film will encourage greater civility and humaneness, especially in the current climate of intense political polarization. “Perhaps we can just learn to live and let live a little bit more,” he says. “That’s the way we’ve kept the country together for nearly a quarter of a millennium. Are we going to make it any further? Not if we keep on like this.”

Looking back, Black says, “Everything I do in my activism is for that next generation so they don’t have to grow up having their adolescence spoiled by homophobia. … Frankly, we’ve already lived our youth. We’ve already survived those years, thank God.

“It’s really not for us, is it? It’s all for that next generation. That’s why we do it.”

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Arts Culture

Not Chevy’s Fletch

John Hamm charms as the wisecracking investigator in the breezy comedy Confess, Fletch. Photo: Amazon.

If you say “Fletch” to people 40 and up, Chevy Chase immediately comes to mind. Chase’s portrayal of Irwin “Fletch” Fletcher, a former investigative-reporter-turned-detective in the ’80s comedies Fletch and Fletch Lives, linked him forever with the title character.

But Jon Hamm has wanted to revive the wisecracking investigator for years, and his long-gestating pet project has finally come to fruition with director Greg Mottola’s funny and unpretentious Confess, Fletch. Hamm’s take on the lead character is less goofy and more self-effacing than Chase’s, cleaving more closely to Gregory Mcdonald’s original Fletch novels. He successfully reinvents Fletch in a straightforward, breezy comedy that defies deep analysis and stays consistently amusing.

Set mostly in Boston, Confess, Fletch finds the private investigator looking into an Italian count’s kidnapping and missing paintings, including a $20 million Picasso. After discovering a seemingly unrelated corpse in his Airbnb rental, Fletch finds himself being questioned for murder by police detective Morris “Slo Mo” Monroe (Roy Wood, Jr.) and his assistant Griz (Ayden Mayeri). Fletch’s work is further complicated by romantic involvement with the count’s daughter, Angela (Lorenza Izzo), and the irksome presence of her stepmother, the contessa (Marcia Gay Harden). An inveterate liar, the relentlessly glib Fletch assumes various ridiculous aliases and personas to solve the mystery and clear his name.

Confess, Fletch is largely character driven, and the cast and the script really sell it. Mottola’s direction is not about visual flourishes or tricky camera angles: He points his camera at his very able cast and lets them do their work. This approach works better in comedy—especially a modestly budgeted one like this—than perhaps any other genre.

The supporting cast members make distinct impressions in their disparate comic roles, particularly Kyle MacLachlan as a shady art dealer, Annie Mumolo as Fletch’s stoned, oblivious neighbor, and Hamm’s fellow “Mad Men” alum John Slattery as a foul-mouthed, cantankerous former co-worker. Airhead interior decorator Tatiana’s (Lucy Punch) klutzy attempt to define bespoke is a standout scene. And hilarious bits by Kenneth Kimmins as a yacht club’s chatty commodore and Eugene Mirman as its security guard are vivid reminders of how skilled character actors can make even minimal roles funny and memorable.

Another highlight of Confess, Fletch is its soundtrack of vintage Blue Note Records jazz. Mottola is an avowed Blue Note fan, and building the film around the label’s classics was a labor of love. By making Detective Monroe a jazz aficionado, tracks get organically worked into various scenes throughout the film, and the audience is treated to outstanding pieces by Astrud Gilberto and Walter Wanderley, Chet Baker, Dexter Gordon, and Art Blakey. 

Confess, Fletch isn’t deep cinema; it’s a relatively low-key comedy that will amuse some people and probably not others, which is all it needs to be. Fans of the ’80s Fletch might be put off by the lack of goofy disguises and Chase-style farce, but younger viewers won’t remember them. The steady stream of laughs from solid performers—anchored by Hamm—make Confess, Fletch a worthy stand-alone film and not just another dull reimagining.

Confess, Fletch

R, 99 minutes
Amazon Prime

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Arts Culture

Bowie’s changes

Moonage Daydream is no masterpiece, and it’s definitely not the last word on Bowie, but it’s still one of the most enjoyable movies of 2022. Photo: Neon.

David Bowie was so ahead of his time that, even six years after his death, his music seems advanced. Brett Morgen’s concert film/documentary Moonage Daydream is a cause for celebration for the Thin White Duke’s millions of fans with its combination of musical footage, interviews with Bowie, other archival clips, and animation.

Morgen has said that Moonage Daydream was initially intended as an “immersive experience” akin to The Beatles’ collaboration with Cirque du Soleil, Love. Trailers are touting it as a “cinematic experience,” which is a fairly accurate description: it’s deliberately not a traditional biographical documentary in the sense that people’s names and films’ titles aren’t identified with captions, nor are new interviews inserted. None of this deeply detracts from its overall structure.

Bowie’s life and work need no introduction, yet his story remains fresh and vital. The audience follows David Jones of Brixton as he creates the chameleon-like character that we think of as “David Bowie.” One interviewer describes Bowie as an artist whose canvas is himself, which Bowie wholeheartedly agrees with. He constantly pushed boundaries, like with his flamboyant androgyny at a time when simply dyeing his hair bright red was considered shocking.

Moonage Daydream drifts through many of his career’s key points, like his early triumph as Ziggy Stardust and his collaborations with Brian Eno, into his ’80s superstardom with chart-topping hits like “Let’s Dance,” and beyond. Much of the material was drawn from Bowie’s own archive, which he accumulated during his lifetime, and we hear about his half-brother who had schizophrenia, his movie career, his happy marriage to Iman, and his final years. 

Moonage Daydream continually reminds us what a polymath Bowie was. The minute he excelled in some art form, he would challenge himself with something new. From experimental rock, to film work, to starring as The Elephant Man on Broadway, to painting, he wholly immersed himself in each medium he worked in. His intense enthusiasm, creativity, and curiosity are infectious.

If you’re into Bowie and his music, this movie is an easy sell and you won’t be disappointed. Its primary focus is his onstage performances and videos, and hearing Bowie’s classics like “Space Oddity,” “Sound and Vision,” and “Aladdin Sane” blasting out of a movie theater’s sound system is reason enough to see it in a theater (preferably in IMAX).

Brett Morgen is, by his own admission, not a trained editor, and Moonage Daydream is rough around the edges. But Morgen’s subject and his music are so entertaining and interesting, he couldn’t possibly miss with his overall product. Bowie’s music is evergreen, and his interviews never get dull. It’s striking how vastly more gregarious, articulate, funny, and engaging he is in these interviews than most rock stars, and his unrelenting love of life and creativity give the film enormous energy. “Don’t waste a minute,” Bowie tells an interviewer. Judging by Moonage Daydream, he never did.   

Moonage Daydream

PG-13, 134 minutes

Alamo Drafthouse Cinema
Violet Crown Cinema

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Arts Culture

Time in a bottle

Idris Elba and Tilda Swinton star in the modern, grown-up fairy tale Three Thousand Years of Longing. Photo: United Artists.

Having masterminded the Mad Max franchise, Australian director George Miller could have spent his entire career making billions filming high-octane chases around a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Instead, he consistently chooses unusual, disparate projects, ranging from The Witches of Eastwick to the animated Happy Feet. His latest, Three Thousand Years of Longing, again proves he’s anything but one note.

Adapted from A. S. Byatt’s The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye, Miller’s latest stars Tilda Swinton as Alithea Binnie, a repressed narratologist visiting Istanbul for a conference. She fatefully acquires a glass bottle containing a Djinn (Idris Elba), who she releases. Imprisoned in the bottle for around three millennia, the Djinn must now grant her the traditional three wishes, but Alithea, a specialist in stories, is acutely aware of how such wishes can backfire.

Desperate for his freedom, the Djinn attempts to convince her of his basic goodness by elaborately detailing various incarcerations and escapes, weaving major historical figures into his recollections.

In these tall tales, Three Thousand Years elegantly captures the feel of myths—not kids’ fairy tales, but mature myths loaded with murder and lust. When a director describes an adult-themed movie as a “fairy tale,” it’s likely to be half-baked magical realism, ridden with plot holes. Three Thousand Years, however, is a love letter to storytelling. 

The Djinn’s yarns are genuinely mythical in scope, where each marvelous detail grows more extravagant. Miller uses this outsized material to comment on how, as human technology advances, our true sense of magic erodes. He echoes cinematic Arabian Nights classics like Alexander Korda’s The Thief of Bagdad without becoming derivative, and undercuts traditional notions of Djinns’ trickery.

Miller creates an atmosphere of wistfulness, laced with wry humor. Three Thousand Years marks a major shift away from the relentless pace of Mad Max: Fury Road. It moves leisurely without being slow, more like the original Mad Max, where quieter stretches let the audience get to know and like the characters before things get frantic.

Swinton and Elba give vulnerable, appealing, low-key performances that ground the film in believability and compassion. Every creative department delivers beautifully: the cinematography, costumes, and production design are all first-rate. It’s a visually sumptuous production where every penny spent on its intricate, rococo sets and opulent costumes is vibrantly apparent on screen. CG effects are used effectively, most notably in a standout sequence where Alithea discusses a childhood imaginary friend.

When a movie accomplishes as much as Three Thousand Years does, it’s hard to criticize it. The film’s well-written dialogue and inventiveness make it easy to forget how simple—and, at times, thin—its plot really is. It could be improved by raising the emotional stakes and tightening the story up overall. At its best, Three Thousand Years is a reminder of the far-flung, impossible places that movies can transport viewers to. With so many militantly dreary films in current circulation, the exoticism, romance, and humanity of Three Thousand Years combines for a magic carpet ride worth taking.

Three Thousand Years of Longing

R, 108 minutes

Alamo Drafthouse Cinema
Regal Stonefield & IMAX
Violet Crown Cinema

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Arts Culture

In hot pursuit

For almost 30 years, Maurice and Katia Krafft lived life on the edge, traveling the world to film closeups of volcanic activity. Photo: National Geographic.

National Geographic’s documentary Fire of Love is easily one of this year’s most engaging films. Its larger-than-life subjects are the late Maurice and Katia Krafft, the world’s only well-known volcanologist couple. Devoted to studying volcanoes closely, the Kraffts shot astonishing footage under extremely dangerous conditions. The intensity of the film relies on the couple’s fascinating archives, but an unfortunate series of precious animated vignettes and pretentious narration partly undercut the story’s extraordinary power.

From the 1960s until their death in July 1991 on Japan’s Mount Unzen, the Kraffts led globetrotting lives, exploring volcanoes as intimately as humanly possible. Throughout the film, we see them venture into risky situations that most people would avoid at all costs. Maurice Krafft aptly refers to their lives as “a kamikaze existence lived in the beauty of volcanic things.” In contemporary interviews, the pair come off as personable and warm, making light of the life-threatening circumstances their métier took them to. The Kraffts were daredevils, but with a quiet courage and cheerfulness that makes them all the more appealing.

What the Kraffts recorded isn’t dry science, but a sweeping visual feast. Countless hours of film are distilled into mesmerizing montages of volcanic power, alternating between epic eruptions and smaller, specific details of their aftermath. The scenes of devastation volcanoes leave in their wake are chilling. The tight shots of glowing molten lava, pyroclastic flows, and other volcanic phenomena become almost abstract. The volcanoes are the true stars of Fire of Love, and in what is likely a cinematic first, they get screen credits. 

The Kraffts were fully aware of how puny human beings appear alongside their subjects’ primeval fury, and their footage continually bears this out. The film also explores the pair’s daily life and work between missions. Occasionally, they take even wilder risks, like when Maurice goes rafting on a lake that’s mostly sulfuric acid.

Where the flow ebbs in Fire of Love is in its narration, delivered in a pretentious deadpan by actress Miranda July. The text is largely well-written, but her delivery is tonally completely wrong for this epic tale. Aside from this misjudged artistic choice, a string of interstitial animated inserts is also jarring and unwelcome. Done in a simplistic style, they come off as twee and out of place. Like the narration, their calculated clumsiness (à la Wes Anderson) clashes with the Kraffts’ films’ majesty.

It’s rare to see a documentary that is so extraordinarily strong in certain respects and so weak in others, but Fire of Love has so much in its favor that it’s worthwhile viewing. The film clocks in at 93 minutes (a miracle in these days of ridiculously overlong movies), proving that economy is an artistic virtue. 

Fire of Love is a vivid reminder that all it takes to make exciting spectacles beyond mainstream Hollywood’s explosive CGI excess is two intrepid souls with vision, bravery, and a camera. 

Fire of Love

PG, 93 minutes
Violet Crown Cinema 

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Arts Culture

Trip itinerary

Author Michael Pollan (right) researches psychedelics though assisted drug trips in the Netflix docuseries “How to Change Your Mind.” Photo: Netflix.

Michael Pollan’s 2018 bestseller How to Change Your Mind expounded on psychedelic drugs’ medical benefits and, in Pollan’s view, their unfair stigmatization. Now, Netflix has adapted his book into a four-part docuseries, hosted by Pollan, that is at times gripping and wholly convincing, and, at others, plays like a lame infomercial.

Each episode focuses on a separate psychedelic, beginning with LSD. Aside from discussing the drug’s possible medicinal uses, the first episode delves into the lives of key figures in the popularization of psychedelics, including LSD’s inventor Albert Hoffman, Aldous Huxley, and Timothy Leary, among others. There’s a lot of common knowledge here, with some notable exceptions—for instance: Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, had his miraculous epiphany to start AA while experiencing a primitive deliriant treatment, the belladonna cure.

The series gets progressively better with each episode, but the first is arguably the weakest. Pollan and his interviewees have a slightly creepy fanaticism about LSD and the perceived benefits of microdosing it. It’s a potent, unregulated, and illegal drug that has different effects on those who take it, but Pollan elides over its potential drawbacks in the same way a sunny, upbeat TV commercial for psychoactive medication will end with a speed-read laundry list of intense, harmful side effects. There’s a certain naiveté at points throughout the series, like when proselytizing for psychedelics turns into envisioning them as the solution to all of the world’s problems.

The second episode, about the hallucinogen psilocybin, is much more successful, not least of all because psilocybin is a relatively benign drug compared to LSD. Pollan speaks with experts on the subject, and people who have experienced relief from various disorders by ingesting psilocybin under clinical supervision. Pollan cogently explores points about its judicious use, and it seems to be enormously beneficial in the right circumstances with the right people. This episode lags when an interviewee describes his drug-induced trip at length, dragging on exhaustively. Further undercutting it is a sloppy, indifferent animated version of this trip. (For truly imaginative psychedelic animation, look to something like Yellow Submarine.)

Of the first three episodes, the third, about the medical benefits of MDMA (ecstasy), is the strongest. Pollan and his interviewees make a case for using MDMA in controlled, clinical settings to help defuse extreme cases of PTSD. Once the favored drug of ’90s ravers, MDMA appears to have life-changing potential. Wholly unlike the previous episode’s rambling digression, listening to trauma victims describe their experiences here is riveting, and testimonials about how the closely observed use of MDMA helped relieve their pain is touching and fascinating.

“How to Change Your Mind” makes many thought-provoking and intriguing points; the series is only middling because Pollan and his cadre of zealous experts oversell their case. They avoid discussing how wildly different individuals’ body chemistries are and how negatively many people react to even mild substances, let alone something as strong as LSD. Psychedelics are not one-size-fits-all, chemically speaking, and if Pollan had taken a more even-handed approach, “How to Change Your Mind” might have changed far more minds on these issues.

“How to Change Your Mind”

TV-MA, four episodes
Netflix
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Arts Culture

Tiny sneakers, massive charm

The one-eyed YouTube sensation Marcel the Shell wins on the big screen with a heartfelt story voiced by Jenny Slate (Marcel) and Isabella Rossellini (Connie). Photo: A24.

Judging by its trailer, Dean Fleischer-Camp’s Marcel the Shell with Shoes On might come off as utterly silly—and in parts, it very enjoyably is. But, ironically, its hero, a charmingly ridiculous one-eyed shell with feet, ranks among the single most human movie characters of 2022. This substantial little tale of survival, loyalty, and courage is excellent family fare that won’t insult adults’ intelligence or bore them.

Marcel the Shell (voiced by actress and co-screenwriter Jenny Slate) originated as a solo character in Fleischer-Camp’s online stop-motion shorts, and this part-animated, part-live-action feature explores the roots of Marcel’s seeming uniqueness. Fleischer-Camp plays his own alter ego, filmmaker Dave, who inadvertently discovers Marcel and his grandmother, Connie (the voice of Isabella Rossellini), living covertly in an Airbnb he’s rented. The Shells’ family and others like them vanished when the house’s previous occupants broke up. 

Dave films a documentary around Marcel’s day-to-day life, which mainly centers on the Rube Goldberg-like inventions Marcel has built to harness his gigantic, potentially hostile surroundings. As Dave’s videos make Marcel a YouTube sensation, Marcel sets out to find his kin. The improbable story plays like a combination of The Incredible Shrinking Man, David Holzman’s Diary, and Charlotte’s Web. 

Marcel the Shell is made doubly appealing by its handmade stop-motion animation, which is a relief from the slick, homogenized CGI cartoons that have overtaken the artform. The film’s crew—particularly animation director Kirsten Lepore, supervising animation director Stephen Chiodo, and their team—deserves praise. The seeming simplicity of Marcel scuttling through his daily routine has a lovable DIY quality that enhances the story’s humanity, thanks to the animators’ meticulous, time-consuming labors. 

With their very fine voice acting, Slate and Rossellini are the film’s backbone, truly imbuing their characters with life. That Marcel the Shell sprang from a small creative team is vividly apparent. Slate, Fleischer-Camp, and co-writers Nick Paley and Elisabeth Holm bring far more imagination and personality to this modest project than any of the committee-made cartoon spectacles playing alongside it in theaters. The film’s easygoing pace and lack of explosions and mayhem are also a treat. These virtues serve as reminders of so many things that popular animation has lost.

For parents, Marcel the Shell also opens a rich line of discussion with kids about, among other diverse topics, the best and worst aspects of technology—in particular, social media. As Marcel’s online popularity grows, he disgustedly discovers the difference between “an audience” and “a community.” He is eventually confronted with other, more profound concerns, and the film confronts these life lessons with care, grace, and dignity. 

It’s hard to criticize such an inventive movie, but Marcel the Shell could have easily been shorter, and it slips into preciousness, at times. Those quibbles aside, within its fanciful framework, it’s frequently hilarious and, at times, genuinely poignant. It’s virtually devoid of dreary jaded­ness, and it has a winning protagonist who’s worth rooting for. To accomplish all that with a main character that’s basically a conglomeration of random bits and pieces culled from a craft store’s cutout bin is an exceptional achievement. Marcel the Shell with Shoes On is a lovely film, and well worth seeing. 

Marcel the Shell with Shoes On

PG, 89 minutes
Violet Crown Cinema
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Arts Culture

Best original organ

With Crimes of the Future, starring Léa Seydoux, Viggo Mortensen, and Kristen Stewart, director David Cronenberg makes a graphic return to form. Photo: Neon.

For fans of writer/director David Cronenberg’s films, his newest, Crimes of the Future, is cause for celebration. It’s 100 percent unadulterated Cronenberg, and marks a return to the sub-genre he essentially invented: body horror—unsettling excursions into human biology in revolt against itself. And for those unversed in Cronenberg, this will be a thought-provoking, observant, shocking, funny, and rewarding experience.  

Set in a run-down future, the film focuses on performance artists whose specialty is physically altering themselves in front of audiences. Among them, Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) develops entirely new organs that his performing partner Caprice (Léa Seydoux) surgically removes. As Tenser prepares for more groundbreaking shows, he works undercover with a detective in the NVU—New Vice Unit—seeking out a dangerous cult intent on developing a unique breed of human.        

If all this sounds surreal, it is, in the best possible sense. Although it’s not a masterpiece, this is Cronenberg’s finest, most peculiarly inventive film since his excellent Existenz. It feels like it was made decades beyond 2022, or was designed for another, humanlike species. Cronenberg aficionados will recognize echoes of his great works here, including Videodrome, The Brood, and The Fly. As in those films, he eschews preachiness and didacticism in Crimes of the Future, in favor of pointed observation. That’s not to say it’s cold or nihilistic—it’s neither—just that he doesn’t lecture his audience: He imaginatively extrapolates on current trends in his own unique, intense, and wryly witty voice. His latest is loaded with dark comedy and is distinctly Cronenbergian with expressions like “best original organ,” or “designer cancer.” And, in his inimitable way, if there’s a place the audience might consider too shocking, Cronenberg immediately goes there.   

Crimes of the Future is a refreshing reminder of how wonderful it is to see a gifted director allowed to express his personal vision without dull studio interference. The film is devoid of pandering, and never insults its audience’s intelligence, successfully commenting on everything from humankind’s adaptability to the most hideous environments, to the pretentious side of performance art—better still, it actually leaves you thinking.    

The cast has no weak links. Mortensen eloquently physicalizes Tenser’s torturous occupation and its physiological hazards. Kristin Stewart is hilarious as jittery bureaucrat Timlin, a kind of surgical groupie, and Don McKellar is very good as her boss, Yevgeny Nourish. (Odd names like these are another Cronenberg hallmark.) Also outstanding are Nadia Litz and Tanaya Beatty as the dryly funny repairwomen Router and Berst.        

The unsung hero of Crimes of the Future, though, is Cronenberg’s longtime production designer Carol Spier, whose contributions to his movies are incalculably important. For decades, Spier has ingeniously shown the unshowable, to borrow one of the director’s phrases. Her ability to give his highly abnormal worlds believable form is the stuff of genius.

Crimes of the Future will likely appall viewers with weak stomachs. But Cronenberg’s violence and sexuality possess a sensibility, and that makes all the difference. Unlike so many outstanding horror filmmakers who slid into making junk in their elder years, 79-year-old Cronenberg’s chops—no pun intended—are strong. He still really delivers.

Crimes of the Future

R, 107 minutes
Streaming (Google Play, Vudu)

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Arts Culture

Failed mission

“Night Sky” stars Sissy Spacek and J.K. Simmons as an aging couple who discover a portal to a strange planet on their property. Photo: Amazon.

Director Juan Jose Campanella’s “Night Sky” grounds its fantastic premise heavily in the everyday. This is a venerable dramatic tradition, and an intelligent approach, especially when science fiction has become synonymous with space operas and action. Unfortunately, when the miraculous and the mundane collide in “Night Sky,” the mundane wins.  

The series opens in rural Illinois, where elderly couple Franklin and Irene York (J.K. Simmons and Sissy Spacek) keep a secret chamber hidden on their property that spirits them light years away to an observation room on a barren planet. The two have been making the trip for so long that they are as blasé about it as taking a weekend hike. Meanwhile, in Argentina, single mom Stella (Julieta Zylberberg) guards a similar portal with almost religious devotion, keeping it hidden from her teenage daughter Toni (Rocio Hernandez). 

When a mysterious young man (Chai Hansen) appears via the alien world, and upsets the couple’s equilibrium, these central narratives begin to intertwine with various subplots involving the Yorks’ granddaughter Denise (Kiah McKirnan) and their nosy neighbor Byron (Adam Bartley).

Spacek and Simmons are the show’s backbone, and do well with the scripts they’re given. Much of the story is told through the shifting emotions on their faces, and Spacek is vulnerable and a joy to watch work. Simmons is good throughout, but occasionally lays the folksiness on too thick. He shines in Franklin’s sternest moments.

A dramatic slow burn can be pure magic when done right, but “Night Sky” doesn’t pull it off. It’s an overly protracted version of a story that should have been told in under two hours. The writers noodle around with the potentially fascinating concept to the point that it loses most of its dramatic tension, like stretching a good “Twilight Zone’’ episode until it breaks.   

“Night Sky” can’t be faulted for its depiction of small-town Americana, but it pushes the story’s everydayness in its first four episodes so hard that it subsumes anything engaging about the plot. The idea of using a science fiction series as a springboard for dealing with very real problems like senility, physical infirmity, and children predeceasing their parents is worthwhile. Unfortunately, the series overplayed its hand, banking on the elderly Yorks’ aging pains to play as deeply dramatic. This could have worked, if balanced properly, but too much of the series fixates on these details. The Argentina sequences are more successful because Stella’s character is so intensely duty bound to her mission.

The current fascination with multiverse stories and vicarious otherworldly escape routes is almost more interesting as a commentary on the present zeitgeist than it is as entertainment. It seems that after the last two years, a lot of people would love to uproot themselves from our time and space continuum and find a more benign one. Sadly, the one “Night Sky” presents isn’t worth the trip. Go outside and look at the real night sky: It’s much more magical than this series.

“Night Sky”

Eight episodes
(streaming) Amazon Prime