Dead Reckoning is fine. It’s not great. The problem is that the action scenes aren’t as dazzling as the ones in the last two in the series, Rogue Nation and Fallout. Cruise and his collaborator on these movies, writer-director Christopher McQuarrie, seem to know they struck gold with Fallout, which deserves consideration as the best sheer action picture ever made, and they don’t really try to outdo it. The new movie’s biggest stunt—which features Cruise driving off a 10,000-foot high cliff in the Alps on a motorcycle—just doesn’t measure up to the sight of him in Fallout jumping out of a plane at 30,000 feet. What could?

I mean, I feel bad for Cruise, because he just wants to make our jaws drop. And they do—look, the guy actually drives a motorcycle off a cliff right in front of our eyes, for God’s sake—but it’s just a fact that they dropped more the last time.

The cleverest choice Cruise and McQuarrie made here was going smaller rather than larger. That’s the case with this movie’s car chase, which takes place around Rome rather than Fallout’s Paris. Cruise and his costar, the enchanting Hayley Atwell, are handcuffed together in an ancient, tiny, canary-yellow Fiat with a supercharged motor. Because the handcuffs are on his left wrist and her right, she’s the one who must drive in and around and past Italian cops, American spies, and a crazy woman in the employ of the A.I., who’s driving a giant military vehicle.

Atwell’s character is not a trained Impossible Missions Force operative; she’s just an ordinary pickpocket. And so Cruise must direct her through Rome traffic and down the Spanish Steps in a state of dire and impotent panic while she wears a priceless expression of sheer terror on her face. What results is a wildly unexpected and brilliantly funny scene that could have appeared in a silent comedy. In fact, there’s almost exactly such a sequence in Harold Lloyd’s Speedy, made in 1928, in which Lloyd is tasked with driving Babe Ruth (yes, the real Bambino) to Yankee Stadium from midtown Manhattan in time to play the game. (You can see the scene here.)

The Little Fiat That Could arrives an hour into the picture, which is not when you want the high-water moment of your action movie to happen. You want it near the end, like Fallout’s jaw-dropping final 15 minutes, in which two helicopters duke it out in the mountains of Afghanistan. In Dead Reckoning, the climactic set piece involves a runaway train with Cruise duking it out with the elegant Esai Morales. They punch each other and duck when the switching towers zoom by. Then they punch each other and flatten out when the train goes into a tunnel. It’s well-staged, but I just saw the same scene three weeks ago in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. (Here’s an uncomfortable fact for you: The greatest action-train scene ever made is in a movie nobody saw and that is now a permanent scandal. That’s The Lone Ranger, featuring alleged cannibal fantasist Armie Hammer and Johnny Depp playing Tonto.) And truth to tell, I saw a better action movie this year in John Wick 4.

There’s going to be a part 2 of Dead Reckoning. It will also be about the keys and the A.I. Only this time, if I read the tea leaves correctly, Cruise is going to go into space somehow and do something. If that does happen, he’ll be back on top. Unless Keanu does it first.

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The movie begins with a gorgeous con artist in Tegucigalpa scamming a naïve Honduran father into leaving his two little children with her for the day as she takes modeling pictures. When he returns, the photo studio has been stripped bare and the kids are gone. Cut to Jim Caviezel (Mel Gibson’s Christ) as a Homeland Security officer busting a pedophile in California as the creep is downloading images to the dark web. He too is a con artist of a kind; he gets the pedophile to cooperate by posing as a fellow evildoer and is handed a photo of the little Honduran boy we saw in the first scene with instructions on how to find him at a border crossing from Mexico.

Once Caviezel finds the kid, he’s scored what his supervisor calls a "career capper." But the boy has told Caviezel his sister was with him, and the anguish of their father at having one back but not the other torments him into dangerous action that takes him to Colombia, where the second half of the movie takes place.

Sound of Freedom has remarkable commonalities with another film released this year: The Covenant, directed by Guy Ritchie, in which a tormented Jake Gyllenhaal cannot rest until he has found and rescued the Afghan interpreter who saved his life in the waning years of the U.S. effort there. Ritchie is not a subtle director, and his lack of subtlety served him well in this instance by engaging the audience’s ire as well as its sympathy. The director and cowriter of Sound of Freedom is Alejandro Monteverde, and he’s not subtle either—but he has a gimlet eye and has made a beautifully shot and deeply considered picture that really only loses you in a final rescue scene that strains credulity to the breaking point.

Sound of Freedom is based on a true character. Caviezel is playing Tim Ballard, who quit the Department of Homeland Security to dedicate himself to combating sex trafficking. The central sequence in the movie is based on an elaborate sting he and his organization pulled off to get traffickers and kids into one controlled location, whereupon Colombian authorities busted the monsters and freed the kids. You see footage from the actual event in the movie’s final moments (including a shot of the gorgeous con artist, which seemed until that moment like a made-up detail) as well as clips of Ballard testifying on the subject before Congress.

The tales told by buccaneering global saviors should always be taken with a grain of salt, but that Ballard’s heart is in the right place and that he’s put his money where his mouth is cannot be gainsaid. Unless you’re a jerk from Jezebel or the Guardian determined to assassinate this movie because it (a) mentions God twice, (b) salutes a cause taken up by social conservatives at a time when liberals are far more concerned with helping authority figures castrate children rather than save them from international criminals, and (c) stars an actor sympathetic with QAnon conspiracies playing a person who has said QAnon ideas have brought people to his cause and given him an opportunity to educate them in the realities.

Now, I hate QAnon, and I’m sorry Jim Caviezel is a nut who goes on Steve Bannon’s podcast, and I really wish Ballard wouldn’t play footsie with any of this. But seriously, when I see liberals actively seeking to suppress a movie because its star and subject are not aligned with them politically, it makes me want to throw a pie in their faces. I’ve spent 50 years tolerating political views I find repellent from actors who make creditable movies and acknowledging the value of movies whose politics I might abhor. Give cultural and creative open-mindedness a shot, you idiot commissars. And screw you besides.

Released by a crowdfunded micromini studio called Angel Studios after it sat on a shelf at Fox and then Disney for five years (it was made in 2018) and with a profile so low in the pop-culture publicity mainstream it’s likely you’ve never heard of it until you started reading this piece, Sound of Freedom has made more than $40 million since its July 4 release. It has outearned the Jennifer Lawrence raunchcom No Hard Feelings (which I also liked), in part because it is experimenting with a fascinating direct marketing campaign. At the tail end of the movie, Jim Caviezel comes on screen with a "special message" in which he talks about how he and others want this movie to be for sex trafficking what Uncle Tom’s Cabin was to slavery. To that end, he says, Angel Studios has a "pay it forward" proposal for the audience. He asks those watching to open their phones and take a picture of a QR code. That takes you directly to a screen in which you are invited to buy tickets to Sound of Freedom that can be given to others.

I read a box-office report on an industry website (since edited, so I can’t quote it directly) tut-tutting about how Hollywood feels like this ticket-buying ploy is somehow unfair and a form of cheating but that movie-theater owners are absolutely delighted. Yeah. A ticket bought is a ticket bought. End of discussion, you whiny losers.

Here’s a test for Hollywood. This movie will likely be one of the few box-office surprises of 2023 when all is said and done. And it happens to feature what may be the best supporting performance in any American movie so far this year, from the extraordinary Bill Camp. If you know him at all, you know him as Mr. Shively, the orphanage janitor and chess guru on the stunning Netflix series The Queen’s Gambit. Here he plays Vampiro, a former Medellin cartel lowlife who helps Caviezel in Colombia.

It’s a sensational performance. And Camp is a beloved character actor with a sterling reputation on stage, on the small screen and on the big screen. If this were any other kind of picture, he would be a shoo-in for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination. If he doesn’t get one, I will be back when nominations are announced early next year to double-down on my "screw you, you whiny losers" take on the morally decrepit response to this painful, necessary, one-of-a-kind movie.

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If the finished product is something Mangold thinks is an "adrenaline blast," then he must be the most depressed person on earth. The experience of seeing Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is more like listening to someone speaking in a monotone describing a not-very-memorable trailer at very great length than it is watching one. Which is weird, because on paper, Mangold was a good choice to take over from Spielberg. He's often a very good director whose best pictures, Logan and Ford v Ferrari, are kinetic and emotionally resonant. And to be fair, Dial of Destiny is beautifully made for the most part. Most important, I guess, Harrison Ford delivers the goods not only as his own 80-year-old self but also as a "de-aged" Harrison made to look as though he's 40 and then again as though he's 60. It's the best use of that special-effects technology yet.

But the overall picture is just incredibly boring. There's a fight on top of a train, and a chase through a parade that ends with a horse riding down a subway tunnel, and a shipwreck with eels, and a tuk-tuk barreling through Tangier, and even with all that strenuous effort to make the action exhilarating, this is Indiana Jones Watches the Paint Dry.

Worse still is the plot. Here, the relic everyone is chasing is a clock-like thing made by the mathematician Archimedes in the third century B.C. with time-travel properties. The villain is a Nazi scientist who (like Wernher von Braun) helps the United States get to the moon. This guy who is otherwise a professor at the University of Alabama has several henchmen working for him. Who's paying them on a professor's salary? Also, there's an African-American CIA agent who is somehow supposed to be watching him or helping him as he chases Archimedes' dial but mostly just looks angry as the henchmen keep shooting people.

Eventually this all leads to a mind-bogglingly deranged third act—and I don't mean this in a "wow, this went sideways unexpectedly and you gotta see this thing to believe it" way. I mean it in a "they spent $295 million and this is the twist they came up with?" way. I know the words "Indiana Jones" must have seemed like IP catnip to the pooh-bahs at Disney when they decided to make a fifth movie back in the mid-teens, and that it took many iterations and false starts to get to the point where they could actually start making it. But some sane person should have stepped in at the 11th hour and said, "Oh, no, I'm sorry, we're not risking 300 million simoleons on this nonsense."

Robert Iger, who returned as Disney's chief at the age of 71 following a brief retirement after the most successful run as an entertainment CEO in history, is not having a Steve Jobs second go-round triumph in his restoration era. Everything is going wrong for Iger right now. His Pixar movie tanked earlier this month, and this one is going to tank too. He's more like Winston Churchill returning to 10 Downing Street in 1951 and bringing his world-changing career to a mediocre end.

Trump fans, take note.

The post REVIEW: 'Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny' appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

And then big-screen comedy just seemed to die. Everybody has a favorite theory about why, but all explanations come back to the fact that gender and identity politics have made it all but impossible for anything to get through the development grinder in Hollywood without being chewed up into agreeable and inoffensive pablum or rejected outright because the risk of reputational damage from political incorrectness is just too great. As a result, Sandler has been churning out massive Netflix hits like clockwork, Rogen is trying out character acting in films like The Fablemans and the upcoming Dumb Money, and Carell has taken his talents to multiple streaming series.

Which is why the release of No Hard Feelings is a surprisingly significant cultural moment. It’s the first comedy of its kind in a long time, a deliberately raunchy R-rated story about a young woman in desperate financial trouble who becomes part of a desperate scheme concocted by rich helicopter parents to make a man out of their incredibly awkward on-the-verge-of-freshman-year-at-Princeton son. Farcical hijinks ensue. With a stupendous central performance by Jennifer Lawrence as a reckless party girl/bartender/Uber driver who’s past 30 and fast running out of options, No Hard Feelings is an often hilarious and surprisingly soulful movie. Co-writer and director Gene Stupnitsky works hard to soften the malice and ugliness emanating from the movie’s plot and instead provide a sweet and winsome sheen to the proceedings. His deep good will toward his characters keeps No Hard Feelings from becoming gasp-inducingly outrageous in the manner of There’s Something About Mary. The question is whether that’s a good thing when it comes to the box office, because its mildness means No Hard Feelings doesn’t launch you out of the theater on a jangly high. Nor does it provide a satisfying love-story conclusion. Instead, No Hard Feelings is a coming-of-age story in which two immature people unexpectedly learn how to grow up from each other.

Make no mistake, a lot is riding on No Hard Feelings. If it triumphs, that will be a signal that there is an audience for sex and mistaken-identity farces again, the way there was for Wedding Crashers and The Hangover trilogy in living memory. And not only that there’s an audience, but that people have been craving the opportunity to have a good life Hollywood has denied them since it went into Trumpocalypse Mode in 2016 and decided that nothing in American life was funny any longer, that we were all going to die, and that the only thing in Hollywood anyone could agree on was that it would be very bad if the Infinity Stones ended up in Thanos’s gauntlet.

I don’t know when I’ve rooted for a movie more. I really liked it but even if I hadn’t, I would be as desperate as Jennifer Lawrence’s character is for it to make lots of money. Enough with the bad, weak, flavorless, cowardly, pointless comedies of the past few years—every one of which has only deepened the slough of despond into which comedy-loving audiences have fallen because they’ve been told they’re not supposed to find things funny that don’t comport with the commissariat’s directives. No Hard Feelings walks a tricky tightrope, and it gets across the correctness chasm with great creative success. May it be rewarded for its labors.

The post REVIEW: No Hard Feelings appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

This is the explanation for the wild success of the superhero movie in the two decades since the first Spider-Man was released in 2002. The superhero is the only pop-culture hero we have left, really. And while the superhero comes in many varieties, including the female variety, the one quality all superheroes share is that they put the interests of others—from the residents of the city they live in, to the people of their entire planet, then of the entire universe, and then of the entire multiverse of universes—above their own.

It is inexplicable, therefore, that the people who make these movies (and TV shows) have chosen to take a bizarre turn in their storytelling by taking the "hero" out of the superhero. The worst-ever Marvel movie, The Eternals, introduced seven new heroes, only to show us how dull, stupid, vain, and lousy they all were. The Disney Plus show called The Falcon and the Winter Soldier spent seven episodes trashing the legacy of Captain America, the noblest of all superheroes, because the serum that made him turned out to be… racist?

This explains the headshaking misfire that is The Flash, a $300 million epic featuring an unattractive, whiny, and off-putting central character who refuses to listen to reason and sets into motion the destruction of all existence everywhere by… running backward?

I wasn’t a comic-book reader so I can’t speak to the faithfulness of this movie’s depiction of Barry Allen in the person of Ezra Miller, an interesting and odd young actor. Miller is now far more famous for personal misbehavior—beating someone up in a bar in Hawaii, accused of grooming a 12-year-old girl, arrested for breaking into and entering a neighbor’s house in Vermont—than for performing. And it’s likely to stay that way.

For my sins, with my kids, I have watched quite a lot of the TV show based on the Barry Allen/Flash character. It just wrapped up a nine-year run, and by far the best thing about that program is the extremely charming and personable Grant Gustin, who also plays Barry Allen. So it can’t be that the Flash was designed by his comic-book creators all the way back in 1956 to be as unpleasant as Miller is here and has been in two previous DC Comics movies. Some of this is due to Christina Hodson’s peculiar screenplay, which starts off the picture with Barry Allen whining (on some kind of invisible communication device connecting him with Jeremy Irons, playing Batman’s butler Alfred) about being hungry and how he’s constantly being taken advantage of by other members of the Justice League.

He does not grow more personable, even after he saves an entire nursery full of babies in a wacky sequence in which the newborns aren’t only launched into the air when the hospital housing them collapses but are threatened as they fall through the air by knives and acid and other deadly things. Miller is anti-personable, and that quality persists throughout, marking this as perhaps the single-most egregious piece of miscasting since Laurence Olivier played Neil Diamond’s Orthodox Jewish cantor father in the 1980 remake of The Jazz Singer. And Miller is not only miscast once. Miller plays two versions of Barry Allen in this gigantic film and not only appears in almost every second of the picture but often appears twice in the same frame. One Miller is bad enough; two Millers is all but unendurable.

To be fair to Miller, he’s not the only bad thing here. The depiction of Barry’s use of his superpowers, which is pretty similar to the TV show’s, basically features him moving in slow motion while fake-looking lightning effects fill the screen. And then there’s the running. Barry is clad in a red leather jump suit with a masked-wrestler head covering, and you know he’s become The Fastest Man on Earth when he chicken-flaps his arms and assumes a gait that combines ice-dancing with a Rockette kick. I know our job as viewers is to suspend disbelief, but you can’t suspend your sense of the ridiculous, and Ezra Miller looks absolutely ridiculous.

Like Jack Woltz in The Godfather, a superhero can’t afford to be made to look ridiculous. It’s the central job of all superhero performers, in fact—to make it seem as though the suit and the cape and the mask are the perfect manifestations of the heroism they must display. But maybe Miller’s silly conduct fits the overall catastrophe of this picture, since it removes the heroism from Barry Allen (even after he saves all those babies) and turns him into a universe-destroyer.

It suddenly occurs to him that he can somehow save his mother and father from unjust fates by turning back time and making a small change on the day his mom was murdered and his dad was charged with her death. So he does it—and guess what? He rends the fabric of time and he changes Batman from Ben Affleck into Michael Keaton and he brings back Superman’s enemy General Zod and then he has to make things right after making them wrong.

We already saw a superhero make this mistake (though not a DC superhero) in Spider-Man: No Way Home three years ago. But Marvel and Sony made sure that when Spider-Man sought desperately to screw things up in the multiverse, he didn’t do it by himself; rather, the sorcerer Dr. Strange did it for him (for reasons the movie never explains). Also, when he does it, it summons the two previous screen Spider-Men (Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield) and their presence is delightful—as opposed to the second Barry Allen, who is even more dislikable than the first Barry Allen.

Still, the decision to have Peter Parker mess up the universe had a very short-sighted quality to it. He is the cinema’s favorite superhero for a reason—he always, always means well and often goes unrewarded for it except by us, who know his secrets. Now his creators have called his heroism into question by elevating his teenage foolishness—the very structure of existence is threatened because he asked Dr. Strange to be a magical Rick Singer and cast a varsity-blues spell to get his friends into MIT through a side door.

We can’t have real-world heroes any longer, and now, it seems, we can’t even have comic-book heroes any longer. These Hollywood morons are killing the one golden goose they had left, and it may be the last egg they got from it was Ezra Miller.

The post REVIEW: ‘The Flash’ appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Now the guiding hands behind Into the Spider-Verse—Phil Lord and Chris Miller, who had previously made the hilarious movie version of 21 Jump Street and moved into animation with the delightful Lego Movie—have upped their ante. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is a conscious effort to be to its predecessor what The Empire Strikes Back was to the original Star Wars. It’s darker, more serious, more mythic, and ends on a crazy cliffhanger. Many people prefer The Empire Strikes Back to Star Wars as a result. I don’t, though I think it’s very good. And critics are falling over their knees in tribute to Into the Spider-Verse, which is also very good—and is so packed with detail you can hardly take in given its breakneck pace that it practically demands repeat viewing. If its audience is enthusiastic, it will be a repeat audience over the next couple of weeks and launch this picture into the box-office stratosphere.

In the new picture, Miles Morales is now 15 years old and is lonely and isolated because no one knows he’s Spider-Man, and he’s increasingly feeling alienated from his loving but clueless parents. Miles entered the realm of the superhero in the first movie with company to help him, as those other Spider-Men ended up in his universe to mentor and teach him. But then they went home to their universes.

His universe is not ours, by the way. In his, the center of the show-business world is Inglewood, Calif.—not Hollywood. This is one of the hundred clever details you can only take in on a second viewing, and you only know it because a sign in Times Square advertises a restaurant called Planet Inglewood. Our world in the Spider-Verse is the one in which Queens resident Peter Parker is a budding photographer with a girlfriend named Mary Jane. In the first movie, our Peter Parker is middle-aged and out of shape and has been dumped by MJ because he was too scared to have children.

Our Peter Parker returns in Across the Spider-Verse, along with Miles’s erstwhile classmate Gwen Stacy, who’s Spider-Woman in her universe. Like Miles, she has issues with her father. And those issues trigger the plot of the new movie, in which she leaves her universe to become part of an interdimensional crew that attempts to repair fissures in the multiverse. Now, if that sentence means nothing to you, trust me, this movie will be nearly impossible to follow. Also impossible to follow at times: the fights and chase sequences, which are to ordinary fight and chase sequences as a speeded-up Benny Hill girl-chasing skit is to a conventional depiction of a man trying to ask a woman out on a date.

Everything is thrown out of the window here. Backgrounds go abstract, which erases any sense of perspective or place. The characters hurtle in and around objects and obstacles you can barely make out. It’s eye-popping but verges on the incoherent, at least. Once again, this seems deliberately intended to compel multiple viewings not only in theaters but at home, where you can slow the action down and then revel in the complexity of the design.

What’s impressive about Across the Spider-Verse is that it’s so radical in its visual conception. Rather than play it safe, Lord and Miller and their creative team (the movie credits three directors and another screenwriter besides Miller and Lord) double-down on what made the original a distinctive work of animation and take it almost into the realm of the abstract. This was an unconventional but ultimately wise choice, as anything less creative than the original movie would have seemed like a disappointment.

Where Across the Spider-Verse gets disappointingly and tiresomely conventional is in the depiction of the parents, all of whom get far too much screen time worrying about their skills and their inability to reach their kids and the difficulties of raising teenagers and blah blah blah shut up already. The movie is more than two hours long because of this argle-bargle, which is supposed to make the proceedings more "relatable," I suppose. Believe me, I’m a parent of teenagers, and I can relate. But I don’t want to.

Anyway, I still think Into the Spider-Verse ranks as a towering achievement in animation and isn’t surpassed by this new one, but people who want to take these movies more seriously than I do are going to favor Across the Spider-Verse. But just like the people who favor The Empire Strikes Back, they will be wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

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The dazzling musical numbers in The Little Mermaid proved to be the secret weapon that launched Disney animation into the stratosphere, with follow-on pictures Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast demonstrating the power of an indelible score. That is what led Disney to try its hand at live theatrical presentations, which revolutionized the Broadway theater and led to the creation, in the stage version of The Lion King, of the single most successful entertainment property in history. It has earned something on the order of $12 billion alone. There would have been no Lion King without The Little Mermaid.

The thing about The Little Mermaid is that it's actually kind of weird. It begins with a ship at sea in a storm, then proceeds immediately into a near shark attack on the title heroine—feeling more like some kind of action picture than a musical comedy romance. The decision to hire the Broadway songwriting team of Howard Ashman (lyricist) and Alan Menken (music) must have come at some point in the middle of the process of making the movie, because their work feels a bit shoehorned in. As a piece of storytelling, the movie doesn't hang together at all, and the odd shifts in tone continue throughout. What's more, there are just five short songs in the entire movie. Ariel, the central character, has one solo. Eric, her love interest, doesn't sing at all. The two showstoppers are given to a secondary character, Sebastian the Jamaican-accented crab.

The thing is, no one remembers the lulls, or the opening 10 minutes, or much of anything else about the movie's story.  What they remember is Ariel's longing to be human, her teenage struggles with her loving but tyrannical father, and how Ursula the sea-witch plays on those struggles. Mostly, though, what made people see the original over and over are those songs and how they were visualized—like Ariel lovingly cradling lost items from shipwrecks as she expresses her hunger to be "part of that world." Like Sebastian setting a romantic mood in the languorous and beautifully seductive "Kiss the Girl." And best of all, the sea creatures of the deep forming themselves into an orchestra as Sebastian tries to convince Ariel to stay in the water where she belongs:

What do they got, a lot of sand? We got a hot crustacean band!

Each little clam here know how to jam here. … That's why it's hotter under the water …

You see The Little Mermaid, basically, to watch "Under the Sea," which deserves consideration if you were trying to pick the most joyous three minutes ever captured on film. The movie is only 82 minutes long anyway, so it's over before you know it.

The new version runs 2 hours and 15 minutes. Mistake.

Now, I have to say it's easily the best of the studio's efforts to turn its musical cartoons into live-action pictures. But that's an amazingly low bar it clears. The Will Smith Aladdin was just awful. The Emma Watson Beauty and the Beast was maybe worse. The Lion King and The Jungle Book—which weren't even live-action, they were just filled with CGI versions of animals rather than drawn versions of animals—were bizarre. Here, director Rob Marshall (who made Chicago) and screenwriter David Magee (who wrote the brilliant screenplay for Life of Pi) really try to take the source material and turn it into a fleshed-out story that offers real stakes and real drama. The sequences of ships in trouble at sea are beautifully conceived. The painstaking special effects work is far better than I expected it would be, although they have the unfortunate problem of following Avatar: The Way of Water in their depiction of a life lived under the surface. Rob Marshall is many things, some of them good, but he's no James Cameron. (Who is?)

They work hard to give the almost nonexistent character of Eric the human understandable motivation and personality—and give him a loving mother who fears the sea as a parallel to Ariel's father Triton, who fears the land. And Marshall really tries to make us fall in love with Ariel by lavishing time and attention and close-ups on his discovery, the gorgeous young singer/actress Halle Bailey.

But come on, fellas. This is a fairy tale for children about a mermaid with daddy issues who goes to a sea-witch to become human. Nobody cares about Eric and what he's like; there's no drama when it comes to Ariel and Eric, just as there never is any drama about a princess and her true love. Nobody needs the stakes raised. Everything added here, every minute beyond 82 minutes, is ultimately superfluous. They're well done. But they add nothing; indeed, they drown what's good in a sea of what's kind of emotionally and dramatically meh.

Still, you have the wondrous Daveed Diggs (Thomas Jefferson in Hamilton, and if you haven't heard him doing "Rap Battle #1" with Lin-Manuel Miranda on the cast album, shame on you) as the voice of Sebastian. He knocks "Under the Sea" out of the park, even though the number as a whole—which is staged as a Busby Berkeley dance number with fish—can't compare to the hilarity of the 1989 version, in which we see a fluke be "the duke of soul." And then we hear and see the fluke say "yeah" in a bass voice.

It's my favorite moment in the original movie. There's no "yeah" in the new movie. There, right there, is everything that's wrong with The Little Mermaid in a seashell. I mean a nutshell. It has reduced one of the key movies in history to a creditable but kind of boring piece of work.

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BlackBerry is set in Waterloo, Ontario, which is where the hardscrabble little company called Research in Motion invented the device in 1996. And Canada is a central character in BlackBerry even though there’s no didactic material about the wonders of the Great White North. The extraordinary cowriter/director/costar of this remarkable film, Matt Johnson, offers us an indelible rendering of his country’s bifurcated nature—how its potential greatness is often subsumed in a modesty that seems to rise from an existential sense of inferiority in relation to the behemoth south of its border.

The question that preoccupies the people responsible for the BlackBerry—maybe the one outdated device in history that people look back on with a sense of passion and regret—is whether they can compete in the larger marketplace against ruthless American companies whose staffs possess greater social and technical skills than they have.

Jay Baruchel, a slight comic actor from Montreal you’ve seen a million times over the past 20 years, plays Mike Lazaridis, a brilliant and wildly awkward fix-it guy who seems terrified of other people and almost incapable of having an ordinary conversation—and yet has a will of iron about how to maintain his own and his product’s integrity.

Non-Canadian Glenn Howerton, one of the stars of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, is mesmerizing as Jim Balsillie, a raging volcano of ambition and fury with a Harvard Business School degree who latches onto Mike and provides him with real-world savvy. But it’s the unscrupulousness that grips Jim whenever he's feeling desperate that helps create the crisis that brings the BlackBerry down. Well, that and the iPhone.

Then there’s Matt Johnson. I’ve never ever seen him before as an actor, and I haven’t even heard of the web series or the two movies he cowrote and directed before this one. I’m going to search them out now, because this guy is awesome. He’s charming and vivid as Doug Feiglin, Mike’s early partner and closest friend, who serves as the movie’s conscience and its emotional center. And man, can this guy write and direct. The movie is visually off-kilter and always interesting to look at, and surprisingly tension-filled even though we kind of know the ending.

More important, the screenplay he coauthored with Matthew Miller almost never does anything obvious, and it compresses and simplifies a very complicated business story in a way that doesn’t seem to distort the actual facts of the case. To prove the point, the real Jim Balsillie—who hardly comes off well here—said, "They're taking an element of truth, who I am, and they're playing with it. I'm aggressive. I'm competitive. I'm ambitious. I own that."

BlackBerry is so good, in fact, that it might represent the high-water mark of Canadian cinema. Now what, you may ask, is Canadian cinema? To be sure, a lot of stuff has been made in Canada over the past 50 years, owing to a favorable tax structure for TV and movies so long as Canadians are employed making it. But a movie in which Toronto doubles for New York is not really a Canadian movie per se. By Canadian cinema, I mean movies made by Canadians, about Canadians, and set in Canada.

To my mind, there are four Canadian auteurs. The most garlanded right now is Sarah Polley, a onetime child actress who has made documentaries and fictional films of uncommon delicacy and whose latest, Women Talking, won her an Oscar for best screenplay this year. Another is Denys Arcand, a Québécois who makes talky, intellectually minded films in French. His masterpiece, which you should find and savor, is called The Decline and Fall of the American Empire.

The director with the longest and most interesting career is David Cronenberg, who has been writing and directing suspense and horror movies about the dangers of technology since the late 1970s. His best picture is probably The Fly with Jeff Goldblum, but he also made a brilliant virtual-reality picture called eXistenZ in 1999 that got swamped and forgotten in the wake of its flashier competitor, The Matrix, and is among the overlooked gems of its decade. (Michael Ironside, who was the villain in Cronenberg’s breakthrough film Scanners more than 40 years ago, is fantastic here as a tough old guy Jim brings into the company to force some semblance of professionalism on the unruly techies.)

All three of them are very, very interesting, but their films are often recondite and odd. BlackBerry is hardly blockbuster Hollywood fare, but it’s both compelling and satisfying in a manner that signifies it’s some kind of a classic. And though it feels as do-it-yourself as the BlackBerry prototype we see emerge from a kid’s speak-and-spell machine near the beginning, BlackBerry never loses sight of the fact that it is telling the story of how a device changed the world and then, almost instantly, found itself piled onto the scrapheap of history.

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You can’t blame COVID for movies as bad as Black Widow and The Eternals, as insubstantial as Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and Thor: Love and Thunder, or as dispiriting as Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and Wakanda Forever. Only Spider-Man: No Way Home offered the kind of exhilarating highs and affecting moments that typified the MCU during its startling decade of success. Diminishing box-office returns (with the exception of No Way Home) indicated the public was progressively experiencing the Marvel movies not as their most beloved refuge from the problems of the real world but basically just another bummer.

Well, you can call a pause in the decline of the MCU because this weekend, a genuinely terrific Marvel movie is making its debut. It’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, and it is a wildly imaginative, inventive, and surprisingly involving space opera. I say "space opera" because like its two predecessors, the movie is set far from Earth—and like the first Guardians, it has a visual wit and richness and brightness that evokes superhero comic-book imagery at its most eye-popping. Even if the action flags, there’s almost always something in writer-director James Gunn’s creative arsenal to hold or distract your attention.

Gunn is a real director with a real vision, which sets him and his work apart from most of the Marvel product over the past several years. This movie is the goods. The delightful crew of misfits that make up the "guardians of the galaxy" undertake a risky journey to save the life of Rocket, the raccoon we vaguely knew from the first movie who had been turned into a superintelligent sociopath after being experimented on in a lab.

As we follow the guardians, we learn what happened to Rocket in a series of startlingly affecting flashbacks that feature a crazed utopian social engineer called The High Evolutionary who has spent centuries attempting to perfect life-forms and civilizations and then destroying the new worlds he creates when he is not satisfied by them. The Nigerian actor Chukwudi Iwuji, who made his name at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford, gives a positively titanic performance as the High Evolutionary—probably the best and most formidable villain in all 32 MCU movies.

Gunn is a rarity in this world as both writer and director. Marvel often plays weird games when it comes to the directors it chooses. Its honcho, Kevin Feige, has made it a habit to hand directing jobs to indie auteurs used to making small-scale slice-of-life pictures—notably Chloé Zhao, whose movie Nomadland won her an undeserved Oscar during the worst year in movie history and who then helmed The Eternals, the worst movie in Marvel history.

You can’t entirely blame Zhao for that. Feige put her in nominal charge because entire sequences of these movies have already been conceived and designed before the directors even begin working, in a process called "pre-visualization." What this suggests is that Feige has taken to hiring these directors not to empower them but to control them. As they have no experience in running a production with hundreds if not thousands of people working behind the scenes, they must turn over much of the work to the overseeing corporation—especially when it comes to the most elaborate parts of their movies. But the lack of an overall creative vision has meant that Marvel action and special-effects sequences are usually rote and uninteresting. (Marvel effectively admitted as much when it fired the executive who coordinated the "pre-viz" stuff earlier this year.)

Gunn has independent standing and credentials, despite his bizarre history with Marvel and its parent company Disney. They fired him off this very project six years ago after he led the first two Guardian movies to unexpected box-office and creative heights for what was supposed to be almost a side project. That was during the witch-hunt phase of the #MeToo movement. Gunn’s crime? Tweeting obnoxious and gross stuff years earlier. He then went off and made a movie and a TV show for Marvel rival DC—The Suicide Squad and The Peacemaker—before Marvel decided the heat was no longer on and could bring him back. But they’ve now lost him permanently, because once he finished this movie he was hired to run what might be called the DC Cinematic Universe.

The revival in Marvel’s creative (and, I expect, box-office) fortunes represented by this undeniable achievement in high-end popcorn filmmaking show what a colossal blunder it was for Disney and Marvel to sacrifice Gunn in the first place to the 2017 mob. They still need him—the stuff that is in the pipeline after Guardians 3 does not look especially promising—but they don’t have him. Too bad.

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Aside from one irritatingly overcooked depiction of a post-traumatic-stress-disorder dream, Ritchie’s work here is all but unrecognizable. He suborned his own regrettable insistence on jumping up and down and saying, "Hey, look at me, I’m directing here" and used his technical facility to enrich and deepen the story he is telling. In so doing, he elevates a work of heightened melodramatic realism into the realm of fable.

The story is this: A team of American soldiers circa 2018 in Afghanistan is on its fourth tour of duty searching out Taliban IED factories. They’re led by Jake Gyllenhaal’s John Kinley, who has grown weary of their task because he and his men mostly go around pursuing bum leads and getting nothing done. The team secures a new Afghan interpreter, Ahmed (Dar Salim), a calm and focused man in his 30s who has angered previous American squads because he thinks he knows better than they do. As it turns out, he does, and when he’s not listened to, disaster strikes. Ahmed must take heroic measures to save Kinley, after which Kinley must take heroic measures to save Ahmed.

There are scenes of almost unutterable power here that simply involve driving down a barren road or a desultory moment that suddenly takes an unexpectedly menacing turn. Dar Salim, an Iraqi whose family fled to Denmark and has starred in several celebrated Nordic streaming dramas, is the sensational find here. Gyllenhaal’s Kinley is our stand-in, but it is Salim’s Ahmed who makes clear in every shot just what the stakes are in the battle for his country and in the battle to maintain his dignity and his soul. This is a towering performance, and if MGM knows what it’s doing, it will be planning a campaign that will lead to a best supporting actor Oscar for Salim.

Ritchie says he conceived the movie watching a documentary about the relationships between Afghan interpreters and the American and British military men they worked with. That was long before the Biden administration decided to pull all American forces out of Afghanistan, stranding thousands of Ahmeds—who had been promised visas to America if necessary in exchange for their service—in a Taliban-led nation where they are being hunted and killed.

The Covenant ends up a fable, or an allegory, because by the end, the audience realizes that Kinley is not just an everyman but the best of us—haunted by his obligation and determined to fulfill his responsibilities. Contrast that to how America has behaved since July 2021 toward the Afghans with whom we made a covenant.

Ritchie and his collaborators have made a terrific action movie that puts us to shame.

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The very fine British actor Nicholas Hoult has succeeded Frye and is starring in a new picture named for the character. There is no mad, desperate, gleeful, psychotic, haunting joy in Hoult's Renfield. Rather, he's depressed and guilt-ridden and kind of a drag, which makes him an unusual character to be sitting at the center of an ultraviolent horror comedy, which is what Renfield is. The clear models for this film are the hilarious Ryan Reynolds vehicles Deadpool and Deadpool 2, which took the superhero genre and fed it through a crazy blender that made you alternately root for its remorseless hero and gasp at the sheer carnage that follows in his wake. No such feelings grip you at Renfield. You enjoy Deadpool's company because he's funny. You are fascinated by Frye/Renfield's company because he achieves an almost unparalleled level of intensity. But Hoult/Renfield leaves you entirely meh.

That's not to say the movie is lacking in intensity. The comedian Ben Schwartz has an indelible villainous moment snorting up a caterpillar as though it were cocaine. The wonderful Awkwafina proves yet again she can spin gold from dross by taking a completely incomprehensible part—a New Orleans cop who serves both as comic relief and as the driver of the plot when she tries to nail a drug-dealing family that killed her dad—and getting some laughs out of it.

And then there's Nicolas Cage, playing Dracula. He has spent the last four decades being intense on screen to a fault, and wearing out his welcome as such over the past two decades. He's for the most part kind of unbearable here, with 32 pointy teeth (rather than just 2) that make him hard to look at. But there are a few scenes where he dials it all back and pulls off some miraculous comic beats, as his Dracula shows off some expert skills at emotional manipulation. I think Cage needs to calm down, lay off, play some pickleball, and become a sitcom dad or something.

Oh, wait, the plot. So, having achieved immortality along with his "master," Hoult's Renfield is living in present-day New Orleans and slowly nursing Dracula back to health after a disastrous encounter with some exorcists. To do so properly, Renfield should be providing the count with innocents—nuns, virginal cheerleaders, and such. But he has a guilty conscience. He doesn't want to hurt people. He attends a church support group for codependents with the idea he will serve up the tormentors of these poor victims to his boss. He serves them up by using insects to provide him with superhuman powers and strength. Frye's Renfield ingested bugs because he had become so corrupted by Dracula's evil he was attempting to copy the vampire as he indulged in ending "little lives." Here bugs are like Barry Bonds's steroids. You shouldn't take them, but man, do they work.

This is not a good movie. Don't let anyone tell you different.

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Now, with a modified definition that takes its literal meaning and turns it symbolic, "branding" is the central preoccupation of the mass entertainment business, and maybe of business altogether. Most entertainment products are made not just to produce a profit but to serve a corporation’s "branding"—the image and idea of itself it wants to impose on the world. If it could do so with a physical mark, it would, but since it can’t, it seeks to do it through sheer force of will and propaganda.

We are now drenched in branding. We’re drowning in it. Case in point: Wednesday, April 5. Two movies opened that day. One is Air, a fact-based tale about the making of a sneaker with two of the last old-time movie stars, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck (who also directed). It is the best-reviewed film of the year so far. The other is Super Mario Bros, an animated version of a classic series of video games. It is the blockbuster of the year so far and will earn close to $150 million when the final tally of its first weekend results come in. You’d think they have nothing in common. But in fact, they are both studies in branding—so much so that their entire emotional impact is based on how you respond to the evocations of the products they are showing and celebrating.

Air is set in 1984, and throughout the movie director Affleck is constantly hearkening back to the consumer products at that moment. We see the Wendy’s "where’s the beef" commercial. We see people playing on Coleco hand-held gaming devices. Pepsi is the choice of a new generation. Affleck and the movie are trying to have it both ways here. Good student of the vile work of Howard Zinn that he is, he wants Air to be a critique of commodity capitalism and its effort to hypnotize us into wanting things (even as Affleck is literally buying and selling $50 million mansions in and around Los Angeles). But the entire film depends on its target audience (basically American adults who have some memory of the 1980s) swooning every time they see a blue Slurpee come out of a 7-Eleven dispenser.

Air is about a billion-dollar business that wants a player named Michael Jordan to endorse its sneakers. Affleck and screenwriter Alex Convery have made this a scrappy underdog story, because we’re told that in 1984, basketball players and black people didn’t like Nikes and Jordan was going to sign with Adidas.

Damon plays Sonny Vaccaro, who has been engaged by Nike to spot coming professional hoop stars. He’s a shleppy and out-of-shape gambling addict, but he’s smart and funny and fearless—and Damon is, as usual, just an utter pleasure to spend time with. Sonny becomes fixated on Jordan, who wasn’t even the top draft choice the year he made the pros. He bets it all on a longshot bid to convince Jordan’s mother to convince Jordan to go with Nike. So this movie asks us to root for one sneaker corporation against two others.

I’m sorry—what? We’re supposed to think Nike is better than Adidas and Converse because Sonny Vaccaro sees that Michael Jordan might be so good and so charismatic he will transmute himself into the greatest brand in the history of sports. That’s nice and all, but there’s one too many speeches from Viola Davis about how "my son is going to change the world." Mrs. Jordan was a smooth and clever negotiator, and it turns out she understood stakeholder capitalism so well she forced Nike into giving her son a piece of the action—a piece that is, the movie tells us, worth $400 million a year in passive income to Jordan even now, almost 40 years later.

But, um, how exactly did Michael Jordan change the world? By making athletes richer through the act of separating generations of kids from oceans of money by convincing them into thinking they will somehow have Jordan’s spirit enter their bodies by putting on an expensive sneaker? "A shoe is just a shoe, until my son steps in it," says Mrs. Jordan in a line Viola Davis improvised. No, a shoe is still just a shoe. Air is very entertaining, but it’s one of the most sheerly hypocritical movies ever made.

Super Mario Bros is, by contrast, a peculiarly honest example of brand exploitation. It doesn’t do what cleverer branded fare, like The Lego Movie, tries to pull off, which is to play subversive riffs off the very product they’re using to sell tickets. It’s the story of a Brooklyn plumber named Mario who is considered a loser by everyone from his old boss to his own father and has only his loving younger brother Luigi on his side. When the two of them get sucked into a pipe and into a magical land, Luigi ends up in a hellscape prison while Mario finds himself in the cutesy Mushroom Kingdom. Mario needs to rescue Luigi and the Mushroom Kingdom needs to save itself from the hellscape.

Along the way, I’m told—I’ve never spent a second playing these things—the movie features musical cues and character design and imagery from four decades of Mario video games. This is done without apology or any effort to wink at the audience to make it clear the movie’s makers are superior to the product they’re exploiting. Kids of all ages love these Mario things and the movie does not condescend to them, which is why it is and will continue to be so successful.

How much has branding taken over the world and colonized our brains? Well, the other day, I was asked a question about the daily podcast I host and what its purpose is. And I said we did it to "extend the Commentary Magazine brand." And then I—the steward of a 75-year-old publication that seeks to explore and advance the best that has been thought and said in Western culture—suddenly wanted the earth to open and swallow me whole.

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Remember fun? It’s a thing that existed once, before ideology came along and ruined everything. A fun song like "Baby It’s Cold Outside"—one of the most fun songs ever, in fact—can no longer be tolerated because ideologists decided it’s no longer a depiction of a welcome seduction but rather the horrifying tale of a date rape. A fun movie like Blazing Saddles—one of the most fun movies ever, in fact—is by common assent a work that could never be made today because it’s… well, who the hell knows what it is, but its own creators wouldn’t even be able to conceive of the racially charged situations that are the heart of its wild comedy.

You get the sense that people who make works of popular art are censoring their own thoughts as they go to create properties that are anodyne and inoffensive to the cultural gatekeepers who sit with giant stamps reading "Acceptable" and "Unacceptable." The problem is that you can’t achieve fun that way. Fun is loose-limbed and free-flowing, and it emerges from a condition of improvisatory freedom, not from an endless road featuring an endless series of red flags and yellow lights.

Could you make something ideologically au courant out of Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves? Sure you could. Disney managed to tank its own $150 million kid cartoon Strange World by trying to establish a new landmark in the history of wokeness by making its central character a teenage boy’s same-sex crush. Anything can be politicized. Anything can be filtered through an activist sensibility that sees storytelling as a way to instruct our youth in proper progressive attitudes. Resisting that impulse even as you honor some of cultural progressivism’s central foundations—in this case, a properly multicultural team of protagonists—seems almost heroic these days.

That’s not the only pitfall the writer-directors of Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves—Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley—have avoided. They have also managed to translate a tabletop game into a successful film. I know of only one other such success, and on first release it was an abject failure: the 1985 movie Clue, with multiple endings corresponding to possible conclusions to the mystery game, which found new life and new status as a beloved touchstone in the decades that followed its box-office egg-laying.

Goldstein and Daley, who made the terrific adult comedy Game Night in 2018, not only came up with a plot (together with cowriter Michael Gilio) that allows those of us who have never played D&D to follow along, they made it spirited and funny and blessedly free of political cant.

Chris Pine plays a once-heroic spy in a mythical medieval and somewhat magical world who has fallen from his noble calling and become part of a con-man troupe. His fellow thieves are a barbarian (Michelle Rodriguez), a bad sorcerer (Justice Smith), and a carny (Hugh Grant, whose work in his second career as a character actor is among the great pleasures of cinemagoing and TV-watching these days).

The band breaks up when Pine and Rodriguez land in prison. When they bust out, they discover that Grant has somehow risen to become the semi-dictator of a populous city and the caretaker of Pine’s daughter. He’s up to no good, and defeating him and the witch who’s working with him sets them on a series of somewhat wacky adventures.

While the motley crew here practically screams Guardians of the Galaxy, the movie this one most resembles is Ladyhawke, the light-hearted and romantic medieval adventure from (again) 1985, in which a young Matthew Broderick helped a cursed couple (Michelle Pfeiffer and Rutger Hauer) find their way back to true love. Broderick there played a variant on Mickey Rooney. Chris Pine here is channeling some combination of Errol Flynn and Humphrey Bogart, dashing and cynical and amusing all at once.

He is just so good here he reminds you of the supernatural qualities of the first name "Chris" in contemporary filmmaking: The only people who have his indelible blend of romantic physical authority and crackerjack comic timing are the three other Chrises—Pratt (of Guardians), Hemsworth (of Thor), and Evans (of Captain America).

They’re fun. This movie is fun. And I really missed fun.

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Like Lean's great films, this one is long, running just a bit shy of three hours. Unlike Lean's films, it's a lunatic potboiler with a body count that might even make Quentin Tarantino say, "You know, this might be a bit much." Still, the only proper response to this thing is: Wow. I'm not a hyper-violence guy, and this is a hyper-violent movie, but I know masterful filmmaking when I see it, and this is some by-damn masterful filmmaking, and I didn't look at my watch once.

And it really does turn the original John Wick inside out. The great surprise of that came-out-of-nowhere picture wasn't just Stahelski's brilliant staging of the hand-to-hand fight sequences, which ditched the quick-cut chaos of Michael Bay's confrontation scenes in favor of a Gene Kelly/Fred Astaire elegance showing you every move and twist and turn the way you can see the entire dancing body in a classic MGM musical. It was also the turn it took about an hour in, when it turns out that the assassin John Wick is a veteran operative inside a secret world of thieves, murderers, and criminals that exists quietly alongside our own and is run out of a posh hotel near Wall Street called the Continental. That mythological world was just great fun, and unexpected, but the first John Wick was still a movie about a guy and a dog and the idiot son of a Russian gangster who was going to pay for what he did to the pooch.

John Wick 4 is all mythology, and I don't know if you'd be able to make sense of the Continental world if you haven't seen any of the others. But who cares. When people aren't fighting, John Wick 4 is just gorgeous to look at no matter where you are—Osaka or Paris or Berlin or the Gobi Desert. And when they are, you just sit there with your jaw dropped in amazement. There's a staggering sequence set on a series of outdoor staircases, which Wick has to get to the top of, and he keeps getting waylaid again and again.

And I don't even want to tell you about the movie's central showstopper, except to say it takes place at night in a famous spot in Paris. It involves cars, motorcycles, buses, and pedestrians, and you have never seen anything like it.

As usual, Reeves brings a kind of hypnotic woodenness to his acting—if you can call it acting—here. He barely speaks, he barely changes expression, and he utters maybe 50 words in the entire picture. But that's Reeves in these fights, or he's in enough of the fights anyway to display a committed physicality that does make him a unique screen presence. And there are all kinds of good flashy performances around him, notably Bill Skarsgård as the movie's aristocratic villain, the John Wick series veteran Ian McShane (best known as Al Swearengen in the glorious HBO show Deadwood) as the underworld hotel manager in New York, and Hiroyuki Sanada as his counterpart in Japan. And we're introduced to a budding new star in Shamier Anderson, who plays a new-generation John Wick and will likely anchor the fifth entry in the franchise if one is made.

Of course one will be made. What am I saying? This thing is going to make a zillion bucks, and it should.

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For a solid hour of The Way of Water—it’s the movie’s second in a complete running time of 3 hours and 10 minutes—we are treated to tall blue and green cartoon characters swimming and diving and riding on the backs of alien seahorses and having sign-language conversations with whale-like creatures. It’s like a nature documentary, only there’s no actual nature, just the world’s most unimaginably expensive computer-generated imagery blended with live-action performances the computer then draws over. (Kate Winslet is in this movie. You’d never know. It could have been me.)

I’m not sure I can convey to you how boring this all is except to say that it’s, you know, like staring at a fish tank on your computer monitor. "The way of water has no end and no beginning," someone says—and writer-director James Cameron thinks the line is so important he has another character repeat it later in the film. The problem with dialogue like this is when you’re at minute 100 and you’re watching a CGI person smiling as she gazes at a coral reef for what feels like forever, you fear there really will be no end.

The first hour is better, but not much better. In this sequel to his mammoth box-office hit of 2009, the most financially successful movie ever made, Cameron proves uncharacteristically choppy and uninspired in his plotting as he brings us up to date on what’s been happening to his hero Jake Sully, the human turned alien.

I was not a fan of the first Avatar, but I recognized Cameron’s expository brilliance, which is a hallmark of his work. People these days tend to scoff at Titanic, but what Cameron does there is extraordinary: He begins the movie with a present-day sequence in which we are told how the ship went down in 1912. As a result, when we travel into the past and the Titanic hits the iceberg 90 minutes later, we know everything we need to know technically about the sinking and can just experience it in real time. Cameron may write horrible dialogue, but in almost every movie he’s ever made, he has proven himself a master at storytelling.

Case in point: In the original Avatar’s opening act, Cameron unwinds and unfolds an incredibly complicated plot with off-handed mastery. We learn that the paraplegic Marine Jake Sully had an identical twin brother scientist who had been training for years to man a manufactured alien body—the avatar of the title—so that he could go to work with the natives on the alien moon called Pandora. His brother dies, and Jake can take his place because of their identical genomes—but he doesn’t have any idea what he’s getting into because he hasn’t had the training. Along with him, we learn about the company that was doing the work, the military people protecting them, and the culture of the Na’vi, the people of Pandora. Any single element of these strands could have been its own movie. Cameron weaves them together with remarkable economy.

Not so here. As the new movie begins, 13 years have passed since we last visited Pandora, just after Jake became a full-time Na’vi and the bad humans were expelled from the place after their unscrupulous efforts to mine the incredibly valuable mineral Cameron called "unobtainium." Jake and his wife Neytiri have four kids. They’re happy. They run around and hunt and jump and stuff. Then the bad humans come back and Jake turns into a guerrilla leader whose band of giant Ewoks attack bad human military convoys. The bad humans make new avatars, only this time they’re bad military guys who are supposed to stop the guerrillas. So Jake and his family go on the run, leaving the forest to hide among the water people elsewhere on Pandora.

All of this could have been told in 10 minutes. It takes Cameron five times that long. And it’s not until much later that we find out the reason the bad humans are back on Pandora is to obtain a new natural resource—which comes from the brain of Pandora whales who compose music and are very emotional and are smarter than we are. The substance that comes from their brains is yellow and goopy and it stops human aging. It doesn’t have a stupid name like unobtainium, and so, as a result, I cannot tell you what it’s called.

I also can’t remember the names of any of Jake’s and Neytiri’s children, who are the central characters of The Way of Water. And that’s even with the fact that the version I saw in the theater on Thursday night actually had captions, just like on Netflix or Prime Video (including non-dialogue captions like "ENTHRALLING MUSIC" or "SCOFFS"). You’d think seeing the names in type in front of me would have made those names more memorable, but it turns out it’s important for characters to, you know, be even remotely interesting for you to remember them.

So I’m watching the screensavers, and not caring about the characters, and wondering what the hell I’m doing in this theater. And then the movie’s third act begins, and Avatar: The Way of Water catches fire. The last hour is a nonstop action bonanza, one of the most exciting feats of filmmaking you will ever see. The way in which Cameron’s technical wizardry combines CGI and ultra-realistic real-world ships and planes as bad humans do battle with saintly Na’vi is just staggering to behold and even more staggering to think about.

"How on earth did he do that?" barely describes the feeling you have throughout much of this sequence. This is now Cameron’s third movie centering on watercraft—Titanic was preceded by The Abyss—and you’d think he’d be tired of it by now. But then he does something almost comically delightful not by evoking his own ship-goes-down epic but rather doing a quick remake-redo-outdoing of The Poseidon Adventure.

Cameron is a true showman, as evidenced by the fact that he maybe doesn’t even care about the boredom evoked by the movie’s first two hours because maybe he knows they will make the final hour seem all the more amazing by contrast. Avatar: The Way of Water does have an ending, thankfully, and it almost justifies the beginning.

Almost.

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Arnold also surely saw every picture his son made, which meant he had to watch as Spielberg presented the cinema with a rogue’s gallery of lousy fathers—fathers who literally leave their kids on earth to travel to the stars (Close Encounters of the Third Kind), or go off to Mexico with their girlfriends (E.T.), or are unpleasantly impatient (Hook), or deeply ungenerous emotionally (Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade).

When E.T. became the most successful movie ever made in 1982, Spielberg spoke frequently about how it was a metaphorical autobiography. In so doing, he gave the impression that Elliott’s father—who dumped his wife before the movie begins—was a stand-in for his own. Meanwhile, he publicly showered his saucy and sassy mother Leah with love. He set her up in a kosher dairy restaurant in Los Angeles (it was excellent, by the way) and called her his "lucky charm" in his Oscar speech when he won for Schindler’s List. That night, he did not mention his father at all.

Now, at the age of 74, he has decided to correct the record. He has just co-written and directed The Fabelmans, an autobiographical picture that is nothing less than an act of contrition. You might call it his Mourner’s Kaddish. Jews recite a prayer called the Mourner’s Kaddish three times daily for a year after a member of their immediate family passes. The Fabelmans began filming within a year of Arnold’s death at the age of 103. It is Spielberg’s Kaddish.

The distant father Spielberg spoke about in interviews is not the father we see in The Fabelmans. Bert, played by Paul Dano, is patient and kind and forgiving and a source of family stability. He is supportive of his son’s interest in filmmaking but would prefer he pursue a career making and doing tangible things, which is portrayed here not as a dismissal of his son’s abilities but as a reasonable paternal point of view. We are also told that he is a genius (Arnold Spielberg was a pioneer in the commercial application of computers and held 12 patents) and that some of the difficulties in his marriage are due to the fact that his wife Mitzi feels unequal to him. He does what he can to mitigate that problem by being a loving and devoted husband, which isn’t easy, because his wife Mitzi Fabelman is not exactly loving and devoted back.

If The Fabelmans is a sentimental love letter to Spielberg’s father, the tone is quite different when it comes to his mother. Mitzi is the unstable center of The Fabelmans, suffering from undiagnosed bipolar illness (the movie is set between the years 1952 and 1966) and trying to hold herself together while her own existential desperation keeps her teetering on the verge of breakdown. That his mother suffered from mental illness is new information Spielberg provides us with here to understand him. And why shouldn’t it be new? His mother only died in 2017 and surely he wanted to spare her any public embarrassment. But since he has made her condition our business by making this movie, it’s worth noting that The Fabelmans lays the blame for the central trauma of his life—the dissolution of his nuclear family—entirely at the feet of his mother.

Spielberg’s revision of his own personal myth is the only reason I can discern for the existence of The Fabelmans. It’s a strange picture, because there’s very little urgency to it, and for good reason. The story of the early struggles of a person who became the most successful director in history almost from a standing start in his mid-20s with Jaws—and began his career by signing a contract with Universal Studios as a director at the age of 21—just isn’t going to have much meaningful drama to it.

Sure, his parents fought—although in this movie, there isn’t actually much fighting, while biographies of Spielberg suggest Arnold and Leah were unpleasant to each other for six years before they split. And sure, when he moved to a new high school in Northern California six months before his graduation, he found himself crosswise of some horrible anti-Semite jocks. The only real surprise in the movie, which I don’t want to spoil, involves his father’s best friend (Seth Rogen, in the movie’s standout performance). The only real interest the movie generates comes from watching Spielberg’s stand-in, Sammy, begin to make movies at the age of 6 and achieve preternatural mastery by the time he reaches 15. A sequence in which he films a World War II story with classmates from his Phoenix high school is simply stunning. Spielberg is too old and too grand at this point to be falsely modest; The Fabelmans is unabashedly the story of the coming of age of a great popular artist.

The way the movie shows us Sammy’s discovery of his gifts is spellbinding. And it’s mostly done silently, which is a good thing, because the dialogue by Spielberg and Tony Kushner is often nothing short of ghastly. Funny thing. Spielberg also collaborated with Kushner on West Side Story last year, which was a fluid and inventive masterpiece. Here he tells his own story to far more indifferent results. I wish I could say The Fabelmans deserves its current standing as the frontrunner for this year’s Oscars, because it’s a serious and honorable piece of work and it is, of course, beautifully made. It’s just not very good.

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Pitt has always had Robert Redford’s looks and Dustin Hoffman’s character commitment. His first Oscar nomination was for 12 Monkeys, in which he played a twitchy psychopath so beautifully—and so unattractively—you couldn’t actually believe it was the same golden beach boy who’d dazzled Geena Davis out of her cash in Thelma and Louise. So it might well be that he allowed himself to look peaked in Bullet Train when he didn’t really have to because he’s playing a man who’s lived a hard life and believes himself to be the unluckiest person on earth. He’s also hilarious, so much so that it would be thrilling to see him attempt an out-and-out comedy at some point. He tosses his one-liners like an ace knuckleballer, with off-speed mastery.

He's the reason to see Bullet Train—well, he and Joey King, the star of a zillion kids’ shows and Netflix teen romcoms you’ve never even heard of. She plays a character called the Prince, who is one of a half-dozen people on a bullet train from Tokyo to Kyoto and is a criminal mastermind who looks like a ninth-grader. Pitt is Ladybug, who does work for hire for some criminal syndicate and whose job is to locate a briefcase with ransom money in it, steal it, and get off the train at the next stop.

He doesn’t, of course, because the Prince is after it too. So are two cockney thugs who brought the briefcase on the train, and a Mexican cartel hitman who’s on the train looking for revenge against someone who poisoned his wife at their wedding, and I’m probably missing two or three others. This movie is John Wick mixed with Bugs Bunny. Its ambition is to be a live-action cartoon in which the fights and deaths and blood and gore are entirely comic. It takes place entirely within a universe of bad guys with their own rules and protocols, though the underworld-building here is just not as entrancing as it was in the first John Wick—with whom it shares a director, David Leitch.

I enjoyed it very much, but fair warning—you have to be able to stomach the gore, which is vivid even if it is purposefully over the top. Mostly, though, Bullet Train reminds you that not only are Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise among the last movie stars, but that there’s no one 30 years younger who could convincingly take on their glamor-boy action parts. Back when they were 30 years younger, such performers were practically a dime a dozen.

Where did they all go?

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We begin with a successful New York journalist named Ben Manalowitz, played by the movie’s writer-director, B.J. Novak. He and his friend (played by the singer John Mayer, well-known for being a cad) open the movie discussing their method of taking the names of hook-up-ready women and putting them in their phones in depersonalized code so they can remember who the women are. They do nothing but agree with each other. "One hundred percent," each of them says to the other. They are, and are intended to be, gross and contemptible.

Ben dubs one such girl "Texas," and as the movie begins in earnest, he’s in bed with a one-night stand when he gets a call from Texas’s brother Ty (Boyd Holbrook). She is dead, the brother says. She was in love with him. The funeral is on Thursday and Ty will be at the airport to pick Ben up. Ben doesn’t even know her name. Turns out it’s Abilene, Abby for short. Ben gets an idea—he can expand on his career by doing some sort of podcast about her, her family, and her end. She’s a "dead white girl," the holy grail of podcasts, and she’s from a red state, so how exotic is that?

Things get even juicier when Ty informs Ben that Abby didn’t die of an opioid overdose. She was murdered. And he wants Ben to help him exact vengeance. Now, why Ty would want Ben’s help is far from clear, as his manliness, such as it is, just extends as far as objectifying women. But Ben tells Ty he wants to center a podcast on the murder, and Ty thinks that’s just great because the people on Reddit will get obsessed with it and will take vengeance on the murderer without their having to do it.

As the movie progresses, Ben begins to fall in love with Abby’s family. Her mother (J. Smith-Cameron) is a no-nonsense person who can give the phrase "bless your heart" infinite shadings. Her nine-year-old brother seems so off Ty calls him "El Stupido," but it turns out he’s a sad and soulful little boy riven with anxieties.

Abby’s two sisters show unexpected depth. Ben makes mention of Chekhov and his famous line about how if there’s a gun on stage in act one it has to go off in act three. When Abby’s sister Paris says she's confused because there aren’t any guns in Uncle Vanya or The Cherry Orchard, Ben has to admit he’s never read Chekhov, he’s only heard about the gun thing.

And he is captivated by a philosophical local named Quentin Sellers (Ashton Kutcher) who has set up a music studio in the artsy town of Marfa not far away. Abby recorded there, and Ben learns she had a beautiful and soulful voice. What’s more, her supposedly sordid relationship with a local drug dealer actually dates back to childhood, when his mother wouldn’t let him read Harry Potter because it was Satanic so Abby would call him at night and read the books over the phone to him.

So this is a movie about an NPR type discovering that red staters are people too. Sounds horribly condescending. But that condescension is actually the subject of Vengeance. Ben keeps learning that every time he thinks he knows what’s going on, he actually has no idea—and his absolute certainty that he can get to the bottom of things marks him not as some kind of skeptical sage but rather as a fool.

Novak is a comic writer and performer best known for his work on The Office. He is following in the footsteps of Jordan Peele and Peele’s movie Get Out by writing and directing an entirely different kind of fare from the work that made him famous. Peele could have starred in Get Out—but for whatever reason he decided to find himself an actor who could do the job better than he could have, and he found one in Daniel Kaluuya, whose brilliance gave the movie surprising emotional depth. Novak should have done the same. It’s too bad he didn’t. Maybe on his next project, he’ll stay behind the camera and let someone else make his material look and work better.

And one hopes Novak will repair his rookie moviemaking mistakes. His villain does more monologuing than a Bond antagonist. And because he wants to show us the pleasures of ordinary daily life in Texas, Novak has us experience them through the eyes of Abby’s family. But would people stricken with grief at the untimely death of a twenty-something loved one really go have fun at the rodeo and go line dancing at a party?

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Peele immediately became someone like that for our time. Get Out, which combines take-no-prisoners racial satire with genuine scares and laughs, made a zillion dollars off a $4 million budget and justifiably won Peele an original screenplay Oscar. He followed it up with Us two years later, a beautifully rendered and stunningly acted scary movie about people and their doppelgängers that earned an eyepopping $70 million in its opening weekend.

But unlike Get Out, which had one of the most satisfying concluding scenes in recent film history, Us didn't stick the landing. In its final 20 minutes, Us turns into a conspiracy thriller, in which no one bothers to explain the conspiracy before delivering a confusing twist that doesn't make sense when you first watch it, starts to make sense as you begin thinking about it, and then finally returns to making no sense after you've turned it over in your head a few times. Still, Us is imaginative and eye-catching and its first 90 minutes are pretty spectacular. The Peele bandwagon continued to roll.

Which is why Nope, his third film as writer/producer/director, is such a colossal disappointment. If Get Out is a racial Rosemary's Baby and Us is an upper-middle-class Last House on the Left, Nope is Close Encounters meets Alien. An extraterrestrial entity manifests itself in a remote hilly area—and is not friendly at all.

Plotwise, it reminded me of Snoopy's novel, the one in which Part 1 goes like this: "It was a dark and stormy night. Suddenly, a shot rang out! A door slammed. The maid screamed. Suddenly, a pirate ship appeared on the horizon! While millions of people were starving, the king lived in luxury. Meanwhile, on a small farm in Kansas, a boy was growing up." Then Snoopy types the words "Part 2" and tells us, "In Part 2 I'll tie all of this together." Snoopy never writes Part 2, and Peele never ties all of Nope together.

There's a farm outside Los Angeles whose horses are used in the making of motion pictures. It's run by a sullen and withdrawn Daniel Kaluuya (the star of Get Out and an Oscar winner for Judas and the Black Messiah), who doesn't get much help from his excessively voluble and hyperactive sister played by Keke Palmer. Down the road is a crummy amusement park whose owner—Steven Yeun of Minari and The Walking Dead—keeps buying horses from Kaluuya. When he was a kid in the 1990s, the owner was a sitcom star on a show about a chimp; the movie begins with the chimp going wild on set and killing and maiming his fellow cast members.

Kaluuya and Palmer get a glimpse of an alien ship in the clouds, and she realizes they could make their fortune getting a picture of it. Turns out, Yeun has seen it as well, and he summons a paltry audience for a live show to give them a glimpse of extraterrestrial life. None of this goes well.

On the one hand, there's a lot to unpack here. Nope is about Hollywood, and mythmaking, and imagemaking, and capitalism's foolish efforts to harness and control the wildness of nature. On the other hand, the characters aren't interesting, the movie feels endless, and the only genuinely interesting aspect of it is the sitcom chimp attack. I could have watched a whole movie about that and its aftermath, and that movie would have been more interesting than Nope. Kaluuya, ordinarily one of the most dynamic actors on earth, plays his part so recessively he's like a crater at the center of the movie. Having the story revolve around such a dull figure is a striking conceptual failure for Peele, especially after he wrote such a glorious role for Kaluuya in Get Out—and especially after guiding Lupita Nyong'o through her absolutely staggering lead performance in Us.

I'm still rooting for Peele, but he needs some help. Just as Steven Spielberg lost his way after Jaws and Close Encounters with 1941 and then found renewed focus by collaborating with George Lucas on Raiders of the Lost Ark, Peele could really use a strong producing hand and sounding board who could challenge his more vague ideas and insist he connect them all in a satisfying way. Otherwise he won't be another Spielberg; he'll just be another M. Night Shyamalan, who took off like a rocket but then refused to listen to people who told him his bad ideas were bad and as a result could not deliver on his original promise.

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The inspired Hemsworth has now completed the about-face that began with Ragnarok and continued in the final Avengers movies, turning Thor from an earnest man-mountain into Buzz Lightyear with a hammer—noble and fearless and vain and comically clueless all at the same time. (I mean the funny Buzz Lightyear from the Toy Story movies, not the bad, not-funny one in Lightyear.) Hemsworth even pulls off a series of bits about Thor’s complicated emotional relationship with the weapon he made for himself in Avengers: Endgame, the Stormbreaker, and each hits the bullseye. Some of Waititi’s fanciful japes don’t work, but it doesn’t matter, because there’s always another one about to come in from the wings.

As this is a Marvel thing, there has to be a plot about a villain who is on a quest to destroy things and take over everything. This time it’s Christian Bale, whose makeup is, bizarrely, an almost exact likeness of Jared Leto’s getup when he played the Joker in the dreadful 2016 DC movie Suicide Squad. (I’m not talking about The Suicide Squad. I’m talking about Suicide Squad. These are two different movies. Made five years apart. I’m not kidding.)

What Christian Bale’s character wants to do is kill gods. In the world of Thor: Love and Thunder, all the gods from every ethnic and religious pagan tradition are alive and well and hanging out with each other in a place called Omnipotent City. And you know what? Bale is right. The gods kind of deserve to die. They’re selfish and thoughtless and mean, and in the case of Zeus, act like the grouchy proprietor of a successful Greek diner in New Jersey when you object that your coffee is cold.

Zeus is here played by an unrecognizable Russell Crowe, who not only does a flawless Greek-diner accent but is so hilarious it breaks your heart to think of all the romantic comedies he might have made back when he was young and handsome and before everyone discovered he was actually a complete violent lunatic who threw phones at people’s heads and thereby trashed his own career. His five minutes on screen are alone worth the price of admission.

Thor comes to hate Zeus and kind of goes all Bale on him. The movie’s confusing take on godshood is its great weakness; if the gods stink then why should Thor risk everything to save them? Waititi contrives to turn Bale’s character into the Child Catcher from the horrible 1968 extrava-bore Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. (I’m sure this is intentional.) He steals a bunch of kids who are so multicultural they come from different planets, even, and puts them in a cage in an alternate dimension. He then visits them and scares them for no good reason. We saw in the movie’s opening sequence that Bale has become a god slayer because a god didn’t save his own young daughter, who died of thirst in a desert. So what’s he tormenting these kids for? He’s only kidnapped them to lure Thor to his realm because he needs Thor’s weapon, Stormbreaker.

Why does he need Stormbreaker? Does it matter?

The movie centers on Thor’s busted relationship with his ex-girlfriend Jane, who somehow also becomes Thor even though Thor is still Thor. When last Natalie Portman played Jane, in Thor: The Dark World (the third-worst of all Marvel movies, the worst being Iron Man 2 and the second-worst being Eternals), she walked through it in a fury because the Marvel people fired the director she had wanted. Portman was probably right—the director in question was Patty Jenkins, who went on to make the smash hit Wonder Woman—but she evidently vowed she wouldn’t deign to do any more Marvel stuff.  She had also won an Oscar between the original Thor and Thor: The Dark World and got a little big for her britches, if you ask me, given that she has done negligible work in the decade since.

And she does negligible work here too. Portman is supposed to bring a level of emotional honesty and delicacy to the wild proceedings, but she seems completely out of place and cannot find a center or a tone for her role. She and Hemsworth actually had a good rhythm going in the original Thor but his transformation into a wacky comic character doesn’t give her much to play against. And her character’s transformation into a superhero is (I can hardly believe I’m typing these words) not credible.

The thing about crazy comedies is that their plots are often disastrous and there are stretches of boring pointlessness. But over time, you forget those and you only remember the highs. My guess is that while Love and Thunder will always be overshadowed by Ragnarok, it is a movie people will recall with fondness and will come to seem a classic a decade hence.

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