Tag: Screens

Based on Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography American Prometheus, writer/director Christopher Nolan’s biopic Oppenheimer follows physicist Robert Oppenheimer as he develops and detonates the first atomic bomb, then spends his life regretting it. The subject is fascinating, but, despite Nolan’s visual razzle-dazzle, the film only works sporadically.

The movie occurs mainly in flashbacks: Oppenheimer’s unorthodox theoretical physics studies lead the Army to choose him to design a supremely powerful bomb before the Nazis can. A post-World War II wraparound story woven throughout the film finds Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) being professionally undone by his former boss, Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey, Jr.). 

Supervised by General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon), Oppenheimer builds a small scientific community in Los Alamos, Mexico, and races to finish the “gadget,” as he calls it. Meanwhile, his intimate relationships with his wife Kitty (Emily Blunt), and his occasional mistress, Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh), remain turbulent.

Murphy almost supernaturally resembles Oppenheimer, and captures his haunted look and physicality as well as any actor probably can. Damon shines as the hard-nosed Strauss. But Downey’s performance is just a variation on the same uptight jerk he’s played countless times before.

Most of the cast’s recreations of historical figures are fine, particularly Tom Conti as Albert Einstein, Kenneth Branagh as Niels Bohr, and James Remar as Harry Stimson. Gary Oldman is outstanding in his single scene as Harry S. Truman, where the president shifts from being a backslapping good old boy into nearly demonic nastiness. 

Nolan’s visual storytelling is at its tightest, most focused, and least talky during the construction and testing of the bomb at the Trinity Site. But the film is definitely a mixed bag. Nolan’s script is dialogue heavy, but his tin ear for 1940s speech shows virtually no feel for the era’s phrasing or slang. The anachronistic soundtrack also diminishes the overall period flavor.

But Nolan’s biggest mistake is dancing around the aftermath of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. The audience sees Oppenheimer’s guilt and horror at his complicity in the destruction, but no images of the leveled cities and the bombs’ victims. The unspeakable should be spoken—and seen—here, not hinted at.

With nuclear saber-rattling still a very current concern, viewers should be reminded of how devastating these weapons are, even the smallest, earliest ones. Nolan attempts to convey the bomb’s hellish power in a lame vision Oppenheimer has of an atomic attack. Those criticisms aside, the film’s final sequence has an intense potency that makes up for what the preceding scenes lack.

Technically the production design and costumes are very good. The variable cinematography includes some visually stunning sequences, particularly several key aerial shots. But Nolan’s occasional use of a jiggling, handheld camera for the gigantic 70mm IMAX screen was a colossal creative error, and enough to induce seasickness. Subjective scenes of Oppenheimer’s imagination working through particle physics are interesting, but not spectacular.

Overall, Oppenheimer is worthwhile, but it’s unnecessarily flashy and could have benefited from a more intimate approach. The Oppenheimer documentary The Day After Trinity is much better, partly because of its straightforwardness. Oppenheimer is a respectable effort at telling this earth-shaking story, but, despite all its hype, it isn’t the multi-megaton cinematic explosion it’s marketed as.

Oppenheimer

R, 180 minutes

Alamo Cinema Drafthouse
Regal Stonefield

Director Lesley Chilcott’s three-part Netflix series Arnold has a subject so famous and ubiquitous that a first name is all the title requires. Arnold Schwarzenegger has lived an epic life, carving out his mythic existence with success in multiple arenas. In this series his biography is presented strictly by-the-numbers in a creatively unambitious documentary about this epically ambitious man.

Schwarzenegger, 75, recounts his life on camera, with each episode spotlighting a specific segment of his career: “Athlete,” “Actor,” and “American.” Interspersed with interviews with his co-workers and friends, including James Cameron and Danny DeVito, the Schwarzenegger-sanctioned doc is light on controversy, and annoyingly stagey unnecessary reenactments of incidents from his life occasionally appear.

Episode one, “Athlete,” establishes that every stage of Schwarzenegger’s life was marked by a superhuman drive to be number one. He grew up in the tiny Austrian village of Thal with a father who was an abusive World War II vet on the German side—a martinet who instilled in Arnold and his brother, Meinhard, a fiercely competitive urge. While other Austrians focused on soccer or skiing, the adolescent Arnold became fascinated by bodybuilding after seeing muscleman Reg Park in a Hercules movie. 

The rest is history. Schwarzenegger won the Mr. Universe competition by age 20, before he reached the United States. And when he did arrive in the States, he lived the supreme Horatio Alger success story: a muscle-bound kid with a heavy accent and an unpronounceable name taking America by storm.

Nicknamed The Austrian Oak, Schwarzenegger became a poster boy for muscle training with the help of weightlifting legend Joe Weider, winning title after title. After a decade of competing, it became “boring,” Schwarzenegger explains, and he chose to “leave it a winner.” But not before he filmed the 1977 hit docudrama Pumping Iron, which widely popularized massive delts and pecs throughout America.

In “Actor,” Schwarzenegger discusses his movie career, and from here on, the material becomes overly familiar. Star-making vehicles like Conan the Barbarian and The Terminator made him a box-office draw as one of the world’s biggest action stars. One of Arnold’s most amusing vignettes is an interview with Sylvester Stallone describing his relentless competition with Schwarzenegger in the ’80s, each of them vying for the biggest guns and most kills on screen. This echoes a telling phrase Schwarzenegger uses to describe what he loves about America’s hyper-ambitious culture: “Too big is not enough!”

Episode three covers Schwarzenegger’s marriage to Maria Shriver, a Kennedy, and his entrance into politics. After serving two terms as governor of California, Arnie’s marriage collapsed when it was revealed that he had fathered a child with the famous couple’s housekeeper. This, and some admissions of sexual harassment in his youth, are virtually the only aspersions allowed to be cast on his character throughout the series.

Therein lies the documentary’s major flaw: Arnold is essentially a promotional video for its subject, who is presented as godlike. Admittedly, Schwarzenegger’s extraordinary life makes most of it engaging, but it’s too worshipful. The bigger problem is that this is unexceptional, and low on insight or enlightening new information about the “Governator.” It’s basically fun, but for a documentary about Olympian bodies, its storytelling muscles lack tone.

Arnold

NR, three episodes
Streaming (Netflix) 

Throughout his career, writer-director Paul Schrader has excelled at creating challenging, dark movies with jagged moral edges and explosive antiheroes. His newest film, Master Gardener, continues in this vein, and offers the kind of demanding, character-driven, literate film that rarely gets made.

The titular gardener is Narvel Roth (Joel Edgerton), chief groundskeeper of the palatial Gracewood Gardens, and lover (on the side) of the gardens’ owner, aging society matron Norma Haverhill (Sigourney Weaver). Roth carries a kind of mark of Cain: His upper torso is heavily tattooed with racist iconography—horrible mementoes of his earlier life as a murderous white supremacist. After testifying against his own racist crew for the FBI, losing his family, and changing his name, he has reinvented himself through gardening. But when Haverhill asks him to take on her troubled grand-niece, Maya (Quintessa Swindell), as an apprentice, his closely guarded existence starts cracking.

Like Roth, Schrader’s antiheroes are usually richly drawn, troubled, and intense. Master Gardener is among what Schrader calls his “man in a room” films: stories of human time bombs imposing something like order on their lives via diaries, like his Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. There are countless echoes of Schrader’s earlier works here, including Rolling Thunder and Hardcore. 

Master Gardener harkens back to a richer era in American cinema, when movies’ moral demarcations weren’t drawn as broadly and bluntly as public service announcements. Redemption is heavily overused to describe movie plots, but here, it satisfactorily applies. Never one to make things easy for his audience, Schrader presents a loathsome human being gradually redeeming himself.

But Roth is penitent, and Schrader makes a fascinating, challenging case for even the worst people’s ability to achieve humanity. Some of the most compelling moments are terse flashbacks to Roth’s violent life among neo-Nazis—haunting shots intensified by their juxtaposition with his serenity tending the plants. The garden is eloquently used throughout as a metaphor for human regenerative qualities.

Schrader’s knack for dialogue remains strong, especially the gorgeously written horticultural discussions, which won’t confuse laypeople. The script’s high point is arguably Haverhill’s monologue about a pathetically shining moment in her life that reveals her profoundly dull, spoiled shallowness.

Schrader shoots tightly, cleanly, and unpretentiously in ways that younger studio hacks could learn from. His direction is usually more marked by his skill with actors and dialogue and less by his visual sense, but there are exceptions, including a dream sequence in Master Gardener that delivers some of his most dazzling work since Cat People. The film’s reported budget—around $5 million—makes its many virtues even more impressive.

Weaver shines as the shallow, spoiled socialite, the kind of multidimensional role that more actresses over 70 deserve. As Roth’s FBI connection, Esai Morales is impeccably natural. Jared Bankens as a vile drug dealer may be 2023’s scuzziest movie villain.

Master Gardener is not a masterpiece. Certain plot points seemed forced, even during beautifully written scenes, but, overall, it’s an impressive piece of work by a venerable American cinematic talent. Most importantly, it’s a film with a thought-provoking, individualistic vision by a filmmaker who has something to say that’s worth listening to.

Master Gardener

R, 110 minutes

The beauty of Judy Blume Forever, Davina Pardo and Leah Wolchok’s outstanding documentary, is, whether you’ve read Blume’s books repeatedly or not at all, you will be touched, amused, riveted, and even moved by her story.

For generations of kids, Blume is a beacon of empathy, a haven of straight talk among the most awkward and confusing parts of growing up. In bestselling young adult novels like Tales of a Fourth-Grade Nothing, Blubber, and Forever, she openly confronted subjects like menstruation, bullying, and sex with a candor that kids seldom heard from their parents or teachers. Blume’s popularity remains undimmed with the release of Judy Blume Forever, as well as a film adaptation of her perennial classic, Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret.

Judy Blume Forever is largely told by the funny, engaging author on camera, with interviews, photographs, and clips interspersed throughout. Her decades of professional storytelling shine through in her consistently interesting autobiographical commentary. Blume, now 85, was raised in a repressed atmosphere where sex was a forbidden subject. Married at 21, she settled into life as a New Jersey housewife, but burned inside to write. After multiple rejections, her first book, The One in the Middle is the Green Kangaroo, was published, then her third novel, Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret, became a breakout bestseller.

Vividly recalling her own childhood frustration with adults constantly “keeping secrets” from her and other kids, she approached her writing with complete commonsensical frankness. “I could be fearless in my writing in a way that maybe I wasn’t always in my life,” Blume explains. Young readers responded intensely to her candor, and Blume became a kid-lit icon.

The millions of youngsters gobbling up her books began turning to her as a confidant, and she received thousands of letters, frequently about things they felt uncomfortable discussing in their own families. Some of Judy Blume Forever’s best sequences feature these heartfelt messages juxtaposed with contemporary interviews with women, including author Lorrie Kim, who’d begun corresponding with Blume as children. They describe the positive impact she’s had on their lives—and Blume’s deep sense of respect, and responsibility to them, is genuinely noble. 

Judy Blume Forever also delves into the author’s status as one of America’s most-banned young adult writers. Blume’s staunch anti-censorship in the face of sexist, puritanical suppression only increases her likability. A priceless clip shows windbag Pat Buchanan launching into a tirade against Blume on a talk show, in which she responds with a hilarious rejoinder about his fixation on masturbation.

Despite flaws in its sound mix—the background score sometimes threatens to overpower the interviewees’ comments—Judy Blume Forever is a wonderful film that vibrantly reminds us how profoundly fiction can enrich human lives. It avoids being mealy-mouthed and is tempered with a no-nonsense frankness. And, as the title Judy Blume Forever suggests, it proves that Blume’s work remains evergreen and timeless.

Judy Blume Forever

NR, 97 minutes
Amazon Prime

Longtime pals Ben Affleck and Matt Damon have re-teamed to make Air, the true story of the development of Nike’s Air Jordan sneakers. If this doesn’t sound like promising material, it isn’t. Although Air, directed by Affleck, undeniably has its moments—and there is plenty of talent involved—overall, it’s a story that isn’t worth devoting an entire feature film to.

In 1984, Nike “basketball guru” Sonny Vaccaro (Damon) becomes intensely driven to sign up-and-coming basketball star Michael Jordan to be Nike’s NBA spokesman and have his own flagship shoe line. Nike CEO Phil Knight (Affleck) basically respects Vaccaro, but, like most of Nike’s staff, has serious doubts about Jordan. Facing competing offers from rivals Adidas and Converse, Vaccaro takes it upon himself to deal directly with Jordan’s parents, Deloris (Viola Davis) and James (Julius Tennon). Like the U.S. president in old movies, Jordan himself is represented, but never faces the camera.

For those who lived during the film’s period, Air’s focus on retro trappings has a certain charm. It is, after all, the origin story of an ’80s pop-culture touchstone, so it continually spills over with contemporary artifacts. The opening montage features clips ranging from a “Where’s the beef?” ad to Ridley Scott’s dystopian Apple Macintosh commercial—but nostalgia alone can’t carry this film.

Unconventional biopics can be very satisfying, but Air is thin and flat virtually from start to finish. It shoots for the uplifting, rousing spirit of a traditional sports movie, something its predictable climax can’t deliver on. And since the story is peppered with sports allusions and terminology, it loses resonance for anyone with scant interest in basketball.

The cast isn’t at fault here. Among them, Chris Tucker is a standout as Vaccaro’s co-worker, Howard White. As frantic as ever, Tucker lightens Air up whenever he’s onscreen. The other actors are decent, and Damon, Davis, and Tennon generally bring a naturalness to their roles. Sadly, Davis’ pivotal character is deeply underutilized. As sleazy agent David Falk, scene-stealing Chris Messina has some of the film’s funniest moments. 

Overall, Affleck’s direction is decent, as is Robert Richardson’s cinematography, and they are at their best when shooting in intimate closeup, letting the actors’ faces tell the story. There are some genuinely engrossing and entertaining scenes, including Vaccaro’s first sit-down meeting with Mrs. Jordan, and a foul-mouthed phone exchange between Vaccaro and Falk. But to call Air inconsistent is a gigantic understatement.

The biggest problem here is that anyone of a certain age or with a decent knowledge of American pop culture knows how this story ends well in advance. Unlike Affleck’s far better Argo, there is no suspense about who will emerge victorious. And the fact is, the characters here aren’t on some kind of valiant crusade: The most ’80s thing about Air is its fixation on money. The non-moral of this story seems to be that making gigantic sums of cash is intrinsically great. Darker aspects of Nike’s past, like the heavy criticism it received for its outsourcing practices, is scarcely referred to. Instead, what the audience gets is cheerleading for a sneaker company, and, any way you cut it, the creation and marketing of a basketball shoe is essentially uninteresting. What it all amounts to is plenty of dead air.

Air

R, 112 minutes
Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, Violet Crown, Regal Stonefield

Scott Beck and Bryan Woods’ 65 is a lean, tight science fiction adventure—an exceedingly simple survival story. Don’t expect anything new or revolutionary. But at its own pulp level, it’s an engrossing—and at times, touching—film.

Spaceship pilot Mills (Adam Driver) leaves on a two-year exploratory mission that comes with a massive raise to pay for his daughter Navine’s (Chloe Coleman) grave and unspecified illness. Mid-voyage, asteroids unexpectedly pelt his ship and he’s forced to crash-land on an unknown planet that is actually Earth during the Cretaceous period. This location isn’t saved for some hackneyed climactic revelation—the opening title card reveals in full: “65 Million Years Ago Prehistoric Earth Had a Visitor.” 

All of Mills’ passengers die in the landing, save one: Koa (Ariana Greenblatt), a young girl around his daughter’s age. Neither one speaks the other’s language, and together, they must weave their way to a functional escape pod through a primordial forest teeming with agile prehistoric predators.

Despite 65’s simplicity, it’s surprisingly enjoyable. It deserves an award for running only 93 minutes when most current movies self-indulgently ramble on interminably. Where the film really shines is in its humanistic respect for themes that really matter: courage, family, loyalty, ingenuity, and selflessness. With so much recent fare bludgeoning the audience with wearying nihilism, a straightforward tale of essentially sympathetic, intelligent characters seems almost novel. 65 may be pulp, but it’s far more engaging than what passes for art these days.

However, 65 only distinguishes itself intermittently. Its space opera setting diminishes some of the gripping quality that Beck and Woods brought to the scripts of A Quiet Place and its first sequel. Those films are echoed here on certain levels—an adult shepherding a child through a potentially deadly maze of monsters—and it exceeds viewer expectations. But the Quiet Place films were also consistently more potent, partly because, in their fantastic setting, they were still closer to the mundane world.

A major plot point that somewhat undercuts 65’s storyline is Mills’ initial negligence that kills nearly all his passengers. Not enough is made of that pivotal fact, and it tarnishes his character’s likability. 65 also has some notable plot contrivances that can be overlooked, but other major plot points (containing spoilers) become almost silly. 

On a technical level, 65 delivers throughout. The dinosaur effects, both practical and CG, are convincing and, occasionally, startlingly effective. As is often the case nowadays, the other visual effects, costumes, and production design are all praiseworthy, while the storyline is the thinnest ingredient. It was shot in Oregon, Louisiana, and Ireland in well-chosen, gorgeous, primeval-looking locations. Driver and Greenblatt’s performances are fine. 

65 may not be exceptional, but despite its flaws, it’s decent enough to recommend. It’s also fairly family-friendly. Sam Raimi produced it, but it cleaves closer to his superhero movies and doesn’t venture into Evil Dead territory. The bottom line: If you don’t approach 65 with high expectations, you might be pleasantly surprised that it’s a precarious journey worth taking.  

65

PG-13, 93 minutes
Alamo Drafthouse Cinema,
Regal Stonefield

For months, the publicity buildup for Elizabeth Banks’ horror-comedy Cocaine Bear has convincingly sold it as deliriously entertaining nonsense. The movie’s hilarious, unrepentantly trashy trailer boldly spelled the plot out: A hulking black bear high on cocaine rampages through the Georgia hills. Sadly, the film is a missed opportunity that doesn’t deliver on its very appealing hype.

The story opens in 1985 as drug smuggler Andrew C. Thornton (Matthew Rhys) flings duffel bags full of cocaine from his auto-piloted plane into a Georgia forest. With the plane in trouble from its heavy load, Thornton attempts to parachute out and plummets to his death. A bear stumbles onto the drugs, ingests huge quantities, and develops a Tony Montana-level coke habit. Alternating between bizarre and violent behavior, the bear attacks nearly everyone it encounters. A series of interwoven subplots involving the drugs and the bear ensue, including Detective Bob (Isiah Whitlock, Jr.) investigating Thornton’s fumbled drug run; Thornton’s accomplice, Syd (the late Ray Liotta), hunting for the cocaine; and schoolkids Dee Dee (Brooklynn Prince) and Henry (Christian Convery) cutting school unwittingly close to the bear.

Probably the film’s funniest element is how it intentionally mocks its own declaration of “inspired by true events” which, even in serious current movies, is frequently double-talk that conceals a disregard for historical facts. The real cocaine bear reportedly never assaulted anyone and was simply found dead after OD-ing on the air-dropped cocaine. From there, Banks and screenwriter Jimmy Warden largely invented their story.

Cocaine Bear is distantly related to nature-in-revolt films like Grizzly and Day of the Animals—both of those films are better made and more entertaining—and the Italian Wild Beasts, about murderous zoo animals juiced up on PCP. What made drive-in movies like those so appealing was the lack of irony that gave their many ludicrous moments a manic unpredictability and wonderful ridiculousness.

In a perfect world, Cocaine Bear would have been made in 1987 by a sleazy outfit like Cannon Films for about $1 million, played totally straight-faced, and starred a stuntman in a moth-eaten bear suit snorting lines off a Fat Boys LP cover. But Banks’ approach is annoyingly tongue-in-cheek, and her heavy-handed self-awareness spoils what could have been highly entertaining cinematic mayhem.

There aren’t many noteworthy performances, mainly because most of the characters are caricatures, especially the various grotesque Southerners. The audience has so little time to get acquainted with anyone on screen that the occasional bloody dismemberment hardly registers. Whitlock’s quietly funny detective is an exception, as are child actors Prince and Convery as the precocious youngsters.

The prodigiously talented Devo co-founder Mark Mothersbaugh has composed a surprisingly generic ’80s throwback score, and the bear and its attacks are generally pretty unconvincing—largely visual effects built around a motion-capture actor playing the beast. 

When a movie works overtime to be as dumb as Cocaine Bear, it becomes almost critic-proof: When you pick it apart, the filmmakers can always say they meant it to be lousy. Deliberate amateurism like this usually goes awry fast, and such is the case here. If you want to be wildly entertained by gory, unhinged junk, let this slick Hollywood imitation hibernate and seek out the genuine, untamed variety elsewhere in the film vaults of the wild.

Cocaine Bear

R, 95 minutes
Alamo Drafthouse Cinema,
Violet Crown Cinema

Infinity Pool is the third feature by writer and director Brandon Cronenberg, and comparisons to his extraordinary father, Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg, are inevitable. With Infinity Pool, Brandon explores dark, grotesque territory similar to what his dad’s work has charted, but only superficially. The younger Cronenberg has a long way to go as a director if this ugly, tedious film is any indication of his capabilities.

In the fictional country of La Tolqa, failed novelist James Foster (Alexander Skarsgård) vacations with his wife Em (Cleopatra Coleman) in a heavily guarded seaside resort. There they meet fellow guests Gaby (Mia Goth) and her husband, Alban (Jalil Lespert), and join them for a clandestine picnic in the dangerous countryside outside the resort’s gates. While driving home, Foster has a hit-and-run collision with a local farmer, and the next day finds himself facing the death penalty for it. But the corrupt officials offer an escape clause: For a sizable fee, a wealthy tourist like Foster can be cloned and an exact double will suffer his punishment. Foster agrees and witnesses his doppelgänger’s execution. He then discovers that Gaby, Alban, and others have not only been through the same process, but regularly commit heinous crimes knowing they can buy their way out. Instead of leaving the countryside, Foster stays and wallows in depravity with them.

The film’s first act sets the plot up intriguingly, but doesn’t deliver a genuinely imaginative storyline by exploring the concept of doubling the way a film like Invasion of the Body Snatchers does. A dark satire of a plutocracy where despicable Jeffrey Epstein-like degenerates indulge in vile decadence with impunity is barely fleshed-out, and Infinity Pool fails as both science fiction and horror. Instead, it’s predicated on the dullest kinds of shock value.

Repulsive subject matter and amoral characters can work, but it takes a gifted artist with rarified sensibilities such as Cronenberg’s father, or novelist J. G. Ballard, one of the elder Cronenberg’s favorite writers. Infinity Pool plays like a trashy retread of Ballard’s brilliant novels like High-Rise and Super-Cannes. Handling distasteful situations like this with wit and panache is hard to pull off, and the younger Cronenberg isn’t up to it. He has created a deadening, soulless film.

The cinematography in Infinity Pool has a few striking moments, but it’s mostly headache-inducing motion or downright pretentious with an overreliance on extreme closeups. There are hallucinatory sequences that are as hokey as the LSD freakouts in ’60s drug movies like The Trip and Psych-Out, only much less entertaining. It all plays like empty, flashy posturing by a film student.

The film’s cast is generally decent, but is saddled with an unengaging, unappealing script. Goth unfortunately gets plenty of screen time—a little of her vacant stare and shrill voice go a long way. The production design is inventive, especially in the eerily inhuman resort, and its wholly invented police state, and the dissonant soundtrack by Tim Hecker is also better than this movie deserves.   

But there is nothing in Infinity Pool that hasn’t been done better—and less sickeningly— elsewhere. It isn’t even fun trash—it’s just overpoweringly, witlessly mean-spirited. The film delivers nihilism of the worst and most pretentious kind. This particular pool isn’t just stagnant—it’s shallow, to boot.

Mia Goth and Alexander Skarsgård star in Brandon Cronenberg’s Infinity Pool.

Infinity Pool

R, 117 minutes
Amazon Prime

Gerard Johnstone’s M3GAN is built on a concept that was a chestnut 40 years ago: seemingly benign artificial intelligence turning on its human creators. With a creepy, malicious android little girl as the film’s lead, Johnstone serves up a mélange of Child’s Play, Frankenstein, and Westworld. By playfully reworking the old robots-in-revolt shtick, the horror specialists at Blumhouse Productions have made this slick, inexpensive, pulp entertainment enjoyable.

Robotics specialist Gemma (Allison Williams) takes in her recently orphaned niece, Cady (Violet McGraw), while, simultaneously, her job security as a toy designer hinges on her next computerized novelty being a hit. Gemma supersedes her boss David’s (Ronny Chieng) orders and dives headfirst into finishing her latest invention, M3GAN (Model 3 Generative Android), a robotic humanoid playmate for kids. Using Cady as a test subject, Gemma watches her neice bond with M3GAN, and the very protective robot quickly reveals it’s far more advanced than even Gemma realized. Faster than you can say “HAL 9000,” things begin to go horribly awry.

M3GAN’s script doesn’t bear close scrutiny, but no one expects it to. It’s firmly committed to delivering comic scares involving the half-saccharine, half-creepy M3GAN, and they’re much funnier than they are creepy. The film’s PG-13 rating works in its favor, since Johnstone and his screenwriters cleave more toward black comedy than gore. Their middlebrow jabs at overreliance on technology and corporate sleaziness are generally well-aimed, beginning with a hellishly accurate toy commercial parody announcing the annoying Furbee-like Purrfect Petz that Gemma’s company produces.

One excellent creative choice is Gemma’s characterization. Indifferent to her traumatized niece’s emotional needs, she cold-bloodedly uses the child as a pawn to further her career. But Williams doesn’t telegraph evil to the audience: Her manner is eerily normal and polite as she goes about her inhuman business. The two key kid actors, McGraw and Amie Donald as M3GAN (voiced by Jenna Davis), do an admirable job of selling their characters’ respective humanity and inhumanity. Chieng’s performance as David is middling, mainly because his role is written as a caricatured big-business jerk. Likewise, many of the supporting characters are well-worn stereotypes.  

The special effects and makeup are good overall, and appear to have been done with puppetry more often than CGI. The musical choices are above average throughout, and peak sharply with the inventive use of British composer Basil Kirchin’s “Silicon Chip.” But the film’s last act is mostly a dud. Plot points established early on go unresolved—possibly groundwork for a sequel—and Gemma has a contrived and out-of-character change of heart. Sequences that show promise seem to fade out as quickly as they began, their potential cut short.

If you approach M3GAN without high expectations, it might pleasantly surprise you. Johnstone and company knew exactly what they were making: dumb, fun horror that demands to be seen with a big, rowdy audience. Don’t stream it—viewers’ lively reactions are a key part of the movie’s appeal. Made for around $12 million, it delivers exponentially more entertainment than some of the $200 million spectacles from the last few years. M3GAN is like a Wendy’s cheeseburger: You either like it or you don’t, and nobody is going to mistake it for filet mignon.

M3GAN

PG-13, 102 minutes
Alamo Drafthouse Cinema,
Regal Stonefield & IMAX,
Violet Crown Cinema

Writer and director Scott Cooper’s film of Louis Bayard’s novel The Pale Blue Eye is a reasonably engaging American Gothic mystery. It offers visually appealing historical fiction and, at just over two hours, doesn’t overstay its welcome. But with a mediocre script and lead performances that don’t equal its pictorial loveliness, the film only sporadically delivers on its promising premise.

Set in 1830 in the Hudson River Valley, former detective Augustus Landor (Christian Bale) is enlisted by West Point to solve a cadet’s ritualistic murder. Landor becomes acquainted with cadet Edgar Allan Poe (Harry Melling), taking him on as his assistant and sleeper agent within the student body. As the murders continue and Landor weaves his way through a sea of red herrings, insidious secrets begin to reveal themselves.

The basic plot device is clever: Poe, the future inventor of the modern detective story doing actual sleuthing. It’s not Poe’s first appearance as a crime-solver on film—The Man with a Cloak explored the same conceit—but The Pale Blue Eye really owes a debt to Shakespeare in Love. Throughout the film, we see Poe encountering flashes of his eventual masterpieces. The Tell-Tale Heart is the most obvious, as is Augustus Landor’s name, which Poe openly says inspired his immortal Auguste Dupin. There are other similar allusions that are spoilers.

The script is fine and diverting, but it gets convoluted. It suffers from too many secondary and tertiary characters, which prevents all but a few of them from being fully fleshed-out, and from transcending clichés like the stiff-backed military school commandant. Likewise, some of the dialogue is excruciatingly blunt, like Landor’s rant at West Point’s chiefs about their soul-crushing regimen. But beyond these flaws, some of the characters work well, and the audience is, at times, cleverly misled.

Like many current movies, the below-the-line talent is superior to the script. The cinematography nicely evokes the requisite period feel with its brownish, appropriately dreary color palette. The moody lighting in the 19th-century homes and taverns is particularly noteworthy. The costumes, production design, and overall creation of the film’s milieu are very good.

As far as the cast goes, the two leads are the only drawbacks. Bale spreads his artificial edginess with a wide brush. His gruff, mumbled, syncopated delivery gets tiresome quickly. And although Melling almost supernaturally resembles Poe, his Virginia accent is affected, and he overplays the great writer as an excitable oddball. Neither performance is terrible—they just needed reining in. Meanwhile, the supporting players appear to be having a ball, and their enthusiasm registers well on screen. Gillian Anderson shines as the neurotic Julia Marquis, wife of West Point’s physician (well-played by the reliable Toby Jones). Charlotte Gainsbourg and Timothy Spall, among others, perform admirably. Robert Duvall has a small but critical role as Jean Pepe, an elderly antiquarian.

All in all, The Pale Blue Eye adds very little to historical fiction, or to the cinematic Poe canon. It’s worth watching for its visual attractiveness and has its moments, but don’t come expecting a story of Poe-like quality. This is no Murders in the Rue Morgue, and Cooper’s tale runs short on both mystery and imagination.

The Pale Blue Eye

R, 128 minutes
Netflix