A Real Pain (2024)
A funny, poignant, and surprisingly gentle movie about two cousins going on a journey to retrace their family history and honor that legacy while trying to reconcile their privileged connection to that past. Written and directed by Jesse Eisenberg, who also stars as David, a generally normal family man traveling with his much more jubilant and troubled cousin, Benji (Kieran Culkin). They’re on a tour through Poland and visiting infamous Holocaust historical sites, ultimately finding their grandmother’s home she fled so many decades ago. The cousins are dramatically different; David is timid and anxiety-ridden, and Benji is the life of any party, an impulsive yet charming people-person. The tour is meant to draw them closer together, to each other, to their shared historical roots, but it might also make them realize what cannot be reconciled. This is an unassuming little movie about a couple characters chafing and growing through their interactions, getting a better understanding of one another and what makes them tick. It’s really the Benji show, and Culkin is terrific, effortlessly charming and funny but with a real tinge of sadness underlying his garrulous energy. There’s real pain behind the surface of this character that he’s trying so hard to mask, though it appears in fleeting moments of vulnerability. Benji causes the various characters along the tour to think differently about their own situations, their own connections to the past, including his cousin, and ultimately makes the journey feel worthwhile. At a tight 90 minutes, A Real Pain is a small movie about big things, and Eisenberg has a nimble touch as writer/director to make he time spent with strangers feel insightful and rewarding.
Nate’s Grade: B+
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Queer (2024)
Based upon Beat writer William S. Burroughs, and by the creative team behind this year’s Challengers, Queer is a gay romantic drama equal parts desire and desperation. It also happens to be a confounding artistic misfire and one of the more head-scratching Oscar-bait entries of late.
Set in the 1950s, William Lee (Daniel Craig) is a middle-aged writer living in Mexico City and looking for companionship. One day he meets Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey, Outer Banks), a young Army expat who he can’t stop thinking about. Lee circles the man, flattering him and throwing affection his way, and eventually the two of them get involved in a relationship, though Allerton is quick to proclaim he is “not queer.” Can they find something lasting or meaningful and work through their own doubts and personal hang-ups?
What really hinders this doomed romance is that it never feels special for either of the participants, at least something to remember through the ages. Unrequited romances in an era where people could never act out their passions because they were considered inappropriate or obscene are their own sub-genre of movies, the Romance That Could Not Be. I initially thought that Queer was going to be a gender flip of 2015’s Carol, Todd Haynes’ film about two gay women trying to carry on a covert relationship through glances and finger touches. Queer is not Carol, and I wasn’t even a big fan of Carol. For starters, even though the setting is in 1950s Mexico City, it doesn’t at all feel like any of the characters are being forced to repress their authentic selves. I’m unfamiliar with whether or not Mexico was so accommodating to gay foreigners, but from a narrative standpoint, it saps the story of conflict on a social scale. If society accepts these men carousing around the neighborhood for homosexual hookups, then what’s halting our gay couple for achieving happiness cannot be external, it must be internal. That means we need to know much more about these characters because we can’t just blame the pressures of society keeping these men apart and/or repressed. The problem with this approach is that the story keeps both of these characters too far at a distance to fully understand them, including any faults that might ultimately lead to their falling out or parting ways.
The burden of romances that are meant to be so powerful they leave a mark, good or bad, is that you need to feel that ache and power so that it feels tragic they could not work out, that they will be haunted by the memory of what they had and what could have been. With Queer, I can’t understand what drew either of these men together beyond lust and inertia. Eugene is an enigmatic blank of a character, a young G.I. who doesn’t consider himself queer. That’s as much as you’re going to get about this man as he’s mostly held as a desirous placeholder, something for our older character to yearn over, but he already feels like a half-remembered, overly-gauzy nostalgic memory of a person even in the present. He’s just kind of there. He doesn’t say much, he doesn’t do much, but he’s reciprocal, and I guess that’s something. The character of William Lee is a writer living abroad, ostensibly writing and publishing with financial freedom. His life abroad is essentially an ongoing vacation where he gets to casually drink, stroll about, and find younger men to warm his bed. Now if Lee had all these things but, because of his middle age, he was seen as less desirable, that these young men only used him for their own gratification and then abandoned him, then we have a scenario where he might find someone who can fulfill what he is missing, who can be different from the others. I don’t know what either of these men see in one another because they’re both so terribly underwritten. It makes it hard to care or become emotionally invested in these men and their connection.
Then the movie just collapses entirely in its meandering, abstract, and generally mystifying second half. I figured the movie would be these two men leaning into their feelings and daring to act them out, becoming infatuated with one another, and that’s really only the first half. Then Lee gets the idea to travel to South America to look for a rare plant believed to offer telepathic powers. Now clearly there’s some metaphors here about the desire for connection and understanding, and you would think the motivation would be spurred by being denied these aspects. Instead, Lee and Eugene seem to lack any real challenge to being together, nor is there any pertinent threat that Eugene will leave him or that there is any competition for his affections. There’s not really a conflict present that can keep them apart; even Lee’s drug addiction plays such a minimal part. I suppose it’s meant to convey the character’s dependency issues, but then present a parallel where Eugene is his new drug, his new obsession, and chasing it leads to his self-destruction. That’s not what we get. We get a boring couple going on a weird vacation. This journey south becomes one very tedious expedition into extended trippy visuals and sketchy symbolism like vomiting out one’s heart. It was at this point that my wife had lost all patience with the movie and just wanted it to end. I couldn’t blame her. Even if the story and characters were lacking for the first half, they’re just abandoned completely in that second half. The movie is actively challenging you to disengage with it when it already gave me little to hold onto.
The main headline for Queer was that this is Craig’s big awards gamble, and he is good, but absent the material to really explore the complexity of his character, the performance is limited because Lee is so archetypal. He’s the middle-aged lush, the sad gay man looking for love and connection in an era that was not kind to said pursuit, and yet in Queer he’s not really persecuted, he’s not really challenged, and he’s not really explored in any meaningful manner. Craig has a few moments where he showcases the vulnerable heartache at the edges of this man, giving you a glimpse of a tortured soul that would have been worthy of being explored with more development. Alas, as the movie descends into its second half abstract, Lynchian morass, I gave up my attempts to find meaning and depth and just became morbidly curious where this all could possibly lead. The conclusion is meant to evoke some sense of tragedy and regret, but Queer failed to make me interested in these two men being together and it failed in making me interested in them at all. At two hours, the biggest struggle of Queer is the patience of the audience to keep watching.
Nate’s Grade: C-
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Kraven the Hunter (2024)
Kraven the Hunter feels like a movie that was never meant to be seen. That seems paradoxical considering the efforts of many talented people over years took place to bring the Spider-Man villain solo movie to some form of creaking, wheezing life. Since 2017, Sony has decided to create their own Spider-Man universes minus, of course, Spider-Man. They’ve been making solo movies about Spider-Man villains and while the Venom movies have been inexplicably popular, the rest have been regarded as unmitigated disasters. In 2022, Morbius was bad enough that Sony thought they could re-release it to capitalize on the memes and derisive entertainment factor. To no avail and a total lack of morbin’ time. In 2024, Sony released three Spider-Man villain movies, though Madame Web was never really a villain per se, but then again nobody really wanted a Madame Web movie anyhow, though it once again gave us some memorable memes. Now Kraven is reportedly closing out this shared cinematic universe experiment, and the president of Sony is blaming those mean ole film critics for the failures of these would-be superhero classics (always a smart movie, assuming audiences are incapable of making up their own minds). Delayed almost two years from its original January 2023 release date, Kraven the Hunter is the death knell of this enterprise and it comes to a thoroughly mediocre conclusion, feeling even more disposable, poorly developed, and mechanical, and ultimately a footnote to a footnote of superhero cinema.
Kraven, nee Sergei Kravinoff (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, portraying his third superhero) is the son of a notorious Russian crime boss, Nikolai (Russell Crowe). One day on a hunting trip in Ghana, Sergei rescues his brother Dimitri (Fred Hechinger) from a lion. The lion injures Sergei and takes him for food, but thanks to a magic elixir from a tourist, Calypso (Ariana DeBose), who saves him. Now he has animal-like senses and speed and strength. As an adult, Kraven seeks out villains to bring to justice, but he’s also trying to square the legacy of his father and whether he is like dad. 
The problem with these Spider-Man-Minus-Spider-Man movies is making people get interested in the famous web-slinger’s rogues gallery. This usually means treating the character’s best known for trading punches with another hero as their own individual anti-hero, complete with a more villainous villain for our future villains to have to topple. Usually these villains (the actual individual movie antagonists, not the protagonists) are an imitation of our heroes (still referencing the future villains), the mirror version of them. So if your protagonist is going to be a vampire, then your antagonist is going to be a slightly more evil vampire. If your protagonist is an alien goo monster who likes to eat heads, then your antagonist is going to be a slightly more evil alien goo monster that likes to eat heads. You get the idea. However, you digest enough of these, and it all seems a bit too perfunctory, the main character having to defeat a version of themself. The main challenge is finding a way to make an audience care about these characters, and having them rescue a love interest or defeat a new-but-same villain with the implicit promise that maybe, if you’re patient enough, you might see them eventually try to murder Spider-Man, is not it. I’m not against the idea of giving these villains their origin tales, but it feels like in order to make them more palatable to a mass audience means they’re neutering the nature of these characters. The hypothetical future Sinister Six movie can’t all be six misunderstandings against Spider-Man.
Alas, Kraven is a real bore of an action movie even with its R-rating, the first for these Spider-Man villain movies. The added bloodshed and curse words don’t exactly make the movie feel more adult when we’re still dealing with plotlines like a super lion biting our hero and giving him super lion powers, much like the origin story of Spider-Man, or another villain suffering from a very silly and similar Amazing Spider-Man 2 Goblin-itus medical malady. This is not a serious movie in the slightest but that doesn’t mean it can’t be passably fun, but everyone is just so dour and passionless that it drains all entertainment. At least Madame Web was perplexingly interesting with its bad decisions. There’s such little energy to be had through the middling two hours. Kraven is gifted superhuman powers and he uses them to hunt down bad men and big game poachers, becoming let’s say Captain Planet if he watched nothing but Charles Bronson movies. There’s got to be an exciting movie there, or at least a more interesting one than what we eventually got here. It’s hijacked by some pretty rote family drama of a bad dad who was too hard on his kids and rescuing a kidnapped little brother who he feels guilty about leaving with the bad dad after Kraven got his new powers. The family drama is pretty rote and uninspired, with both of the other characters kept to the sidelines for most of the movie, which makes it hard to care that much about either of their impacts. The haphazard integration of a romantic subplot with Calypso is even more perfunctory when I would much rather see Kraven fall in love with a lion instead.
I like J.C. Chandor as a director, and he’s someone who leaps at new challenges. His debut movie, 2011’s Margin Call, was an engrossing character piece about Wall Street traders and execs on the verge of the 2008 financial meltdown. It was so bare-bones that it was practically a play. His next film, 2013’s All is Lost, was the exact opposite: a movie completely told through visual storytelling and with a minimum of spoken words as Robert Redford tries to patch up his sinking boat. 2014’s A Most Violent Year was a slow-burn crime drama about the lengths people will go to escape their past and their nature. From there, Chandor has been circling larger studio projects, leaving 2016’s Deepwater Horizon and then replacing Kathryn Bigelow for Netflix’s action thriller, 2019 Triple Frontier. He’s a chameleon of a director and the only real point of interest I had with Kraven. What would he do in the superhero space? Well, the answer is not much. The visual flourishes we’ve seen before in other movies but without a sense of humor. Watching Kraven periodically run on all fours may make him more animal-like but it doesn’t look good. The movie gets lost in the convoluted mythology and rules of its characters and what they’re capable of, and so the action sequences feel cobbled together and short on imagination. The climax is during a stampede of buffalo but there’s no real danger here like dodging around the animals. They very conveniently allow space for our hero to fight his battle, thus becoming a thundering backdrop. Even if you’re overly generous, there’s not much here to excite the senses or even your morbid curiosity.
There is one line of dialogue that needs to be singled out for its absurdity. While Madame Web was ridiculed for its “researching spiders in the Amazon with my mother before she died” line, the filmmakers had the good sense to eliminate it from the final film, though not the good sense not to include it in their initial marketing. With Kraven the Hunter, there’s a character who talks about her mother and literally says, “She died and I never saw her again.” That’s usually how that works.
As the final piece of Sony’s Spider-Man villain spinoff universe, Kraven the Hunter brings this diversionary superhero franchise to a merciful end. The frustrating thing is that Kraven as a character can work, as recently demonstrated in the popular Spider-Man PlayStation video game sequel. He’s supposed to be the ultimate hunter, a force of nature, but that doesn’t mean he needs to carry his own movie, just like Morbius or Madame Web or any other Spidey villain. Launching these characters could have worked but needed much more imagination and care. Instead, it was Spider-Man movies without Spider-Man and, with the exception of the Venom movies with their goofy buddy movie appeal, audiences have responded with the indifference you would assume. It’s not enough for these movies to merely be adjacent to Spider-Man to be appealing. They need to be good, to be able to stand on their own, and to support an extended time with this character. It’s hard not to see the larger machinations for eager franchise-extension as the primary motivation. But if these are the impressions of the characters we’re getting, who would want any more? Turns out nobody was actively cravin’ another underdeveloped and mediocre superhero movie.
Nate’s Grade: C-
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Snack Shack (2024)
The coming-of-age sub-genre is a familiar and well-worn formula, but with the right filmmaker and voice, it can become refreshingly alive once again, like hearing your favorite song covered by an exciting different artist. Snack Shack is an exuberantly charming movie about one summer with 14-year-old best friends who are constantly running money making schemes and hustles. They overbid to run the concession stand at their community pool, but the best buds are entrepreneurial whizzes and turn the snack shack into a smashing success. There’s plenty of familiar genre elements, from bullies, parents they’ll have more appreciation and understanding from at summer’s end, parties and self-discovery, crushes and jealousies that will test their limits of loyalty; there might not be anything new during these 110 minutes, but it’s the nostalgic authenticity and verve from writer/director Adam Carter Rehmeier (Dinner in America) that makes the movie shine. The movie is practically bristling with details that feel so well-realized and genuine. You’ll enjoy spending time in this world and with these characters, reliving the summer of 1991 in Nebraska. Gabriel LaBelle (The Fabelmans) is fantastic as Moose, more the live-wire, always-smiling, charismatic smooth-talker of the two friends. Every second he’s onscreen makes you inch closer to the screen. I don’t think some of the downer plot turns late in the movie feel like a fit and are there to form the Hard Truths experiences meant to shake the innocence of youth. For a movie this jubilant and sunny, it feels like an abrupt tonal swerve that’s more deferential to genre expectations than the previous vibe of the movie. Despite some minor missteps, the good times cannot be thwarted and Snack Shack is a funny and refreshingly retro peon to being young.
Nate’s Grade: B+
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Hundreds of Beavers (2024)
It’s become a cliche for film critics to say, “you’ve never seen a movie like this,” and that’s only partially true with the DIY indie comedy sensation, Hundreds of Beavers. You may have seen this before though decades ago in classic Looney Tunes cartoons, a clear inspiration for the inventive visual slapstick and antic comedy imagination on full display. The commitment of the cast and crew to make a modern-day Looney Tunes is so rare and the results so amazingly executed that when I questioned whether we needed a full movie of this rather than a short film, I cast aside the question and chose to simply enjoy the fullness of the movie. Why scrimp on imagination and ingenuity and divine wackiness for only fifteen minutes when we can have one hundred? If you’re a fan of inspired slapstick comedy, and especially the Golden Era of classic cartoons (1944-1964), then Hundreds of Beavers will be a celebratory experience that could boast hundreds of laughs.
Set amid the early 1800s in the Wisconsin winter, Jean Kayak (Ryland Brickson Cole Tews) is a frontiersman trying to make a name for himself. He wants to be the best fur trapper in the land, and if he nets enough furs, he’ll be granted the chance to marry the pretty daughter (Olivia Graves) of the local Merchant (Doug Mancheski). And with that, the rest of the movie is watching Jean try to outsmart the wildlife (portrayed as people in giant mascot costumes) and collect enough pelts.
By the nature of its premise and intention, this is not going to be a movie for everyone, or even many, but if it’s for you, it will feel like comedy manna from heaven. The grand appeal of Hundreds of Beavers is the sheer surprise of it all, with the jokes coming fast. The pacing of this movie is at spoof-movie levels, with jokes hitting in weaves and often, complete setups and punchlines taken care of in under ten seconds. The joke-per-second ratio of this movie is off the charts, especially when the movie also begins building its own internal logic and foundation for running gags. That creates an even deeper and richer tableau for comedy, with jokes piling on top of one another and building escalations and extensions. I’m genuinely amazed at the creativity on display in every minute of this movie. The fantastical imagination of this movie could power an entire Hollywood studio slate of movies. I was in sheer awe of how many different joke scenarios it could devise with this scant premise, and I was happily surprised, no, elated, when the filmmakers kept this level of silliness and invention going until the very end of the movie. I was chuckling and guffawing throughout, and I strongly feel like this is the kind of movie that, if you watch it with a group of like-minded friends, can produce peals of infectious laughter.
I really want to celebrate just how whimsically silly this movie can be, with humor that ranges from clever to stupid to stupidly clever. Much of the humor resides around the death and mutilation of animals, which isn’t surprising considering our hero’s goal is to gain hundreds of pelts. It never stops being funny seeing people dressed in giant animal mascot costumes to represent the wildlife, and when they’re killed through the assortment of different means and accidents, the movie adopts classic cartoon visual communication and logic by giving them large X’s covering their eyes. Even when the creatures are losing heads and limbs and getting impaled or giant holes blown through them, the lightness of approach keeps the violence from feeling upsetting or realistic. It’s all just so silly, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not sneaky-smart from a comedy standpoint. There’s one scene where Jean is riding a log down a flume inside a giant wood-harvesting plant the beavers have constructed. A rival log with angry beavers chases him in parallel, and it looks like they’re just about to jump onto his log and grab him. However, they jump but seemingly stay in place, and that’s where the movie cuts to a different shot from a wide angle, to reveal that there are four or five of these flumes running parallel and not merely two. The joke itself is only a few careful seconds, like most of the jokes in Hundreds of Beavers, but it demonstrates the level of thought and ingenuity in the comedy construction, and that’s even before spaceships and beaver kaiju.
The acting is fully committed to the exaggerated and cartoonish tone of the proceedings. These actors are selling the jokes tremendously well, and since the movie is practically wordless, most of it comes from physicality and expression. It hearkens back to the early silent era of moviemaking by the likes of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplain making millions laugh. Even the smallest roles are filled with committed actors helping to make the jokes even funnier. The people in those mascot costumes can be riotous simply in how they slump their body, cock their head, choose their pauses and gesticulations. Watching the movie is a reminder at how universal comedy can be when you have the right people who understand the fundamentals of finding the funny. Tews, also serving as co-writer with director Mike Cheslike (L.I.P.S., The Get Down), is our human face for much of the mayhem, and he can play bedeviled and befuddled with flair. His facial expressions and exaggerations are a consistent key to framing and anchoring the tone of every moment.
While the budget is a relatively modest $150,000, it doesn’t mean the movie looks pedestrian. Choosing to film in black and white helps mask some possible limitations, and the creative choice to go with people in giant mascot costumes helps too, but much of the movie is elevated by its clever green screen effects work. Whether it’s augmenting the snowy outdoor wilderness with exaggerated elements, like traps and contraptions and holes in ice, or segments filmed entirely on green screen and utilizing heavy composites to magnify the number of animals on screen, it all better fulfills the vision and tone. The finale inside the beaver complex is a wild sequence reminiscent of Marvin the Martian landscapes and interior design. The look of the movie, while rough around the edges at points, leans into its lo-fi aesthetics to make it part of its charm, much like the goofy mascot costumes. The continued goofiness doesn’t cancel out the visual audaciousness, even when that audacity is in the guise of creating something so stupid for words.
I would advise anyone to give Hundreds of Beavers a try, even if for only ten minutes. If you don’t connect with the film’s comedic wavelength or appreciate the ingenuity of the players, then so be it. But I think more than enough will be charmed and impressed by its energy and creativity. I said before that there was once or twice, during the first half, that I questioned whether we needed a feature-length version of this kind of movie. Then it occurred to me how rare such a movie like this is, how singular its vision can be, and how instead of questioning its duration, I then chose to celebrate its cheerful existence, and every new joke was a new opportunity to produce smiles and laughter, and I anxiously waited for the next and the next, my smile only broadening. Hundreds of Beavers is one of the craziest movies you will see but it’s also, at its core, a celebration of comedy and collaboration and the special appeal of moviemaking and those with a passion for being silly. In these trying times of uncertainty, I’ll take a feature-length dose of that, please and thank you.
Nate’s Grade: A
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The Bikeriders (2024)
For a four-year period, writer/director Jeff Nichols is a filmmaker who appeared on my Best of the Year list three years, including making my top movie of 2011, Take Shelter. He’s a filmmaker I highly prize, so an eight-year gap from Nichols is an extended leave that makes me personally sad, though his latest movie, The Bikeriders, was delayed by a year after Disney decided to sell it rather than release it for the 2023 awards season. It’s a pretty straightforward drama about a Chicago motorcycle club in the 1960s. It’s all about a group of men that really don’t know how to express their feelings, so it comes out as drinking and fighting and general rebellion against outside authority. These social outsiders find kinship under the leadership of Johnny (Tom Hardy), an unstable man with his own code of honor and retribution. Our narrator is Kathy (Jodie Comer), a plucky woman who falls for a reckless biker, Benny (Austin Butler). There are plenty of interesting moments and sequences, like the rejection of wannabe new members too eager for approval for institutional violence. The changes the club undergoes through the mid 1970s are interesting, especially as the rules of the club begin to fray with the influx of new members and drug addictions, and the challenges to leadership we know will eventually end in tragedy and a betrayal of what the club was intended to be. Regardless, it feels like the movie has all the authentic texture and period details right but is missing a stronger sense of story. It’s more a collage of moments that doesn’t add up to a much better understanding of the three main characters. It’s more like a mood mosaic than engrossing drama, so if you have a general interest in retro motorcycle culture or the time periods, then maybe it will cover the absences in character. I found The Bikeriders to be a good-looking coffee-table book of a movie, more recreation than investment.
Nate’s Grade: B-
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Nightbitch (2024)
Motherhood can be a real bitch, right? That’s the lessons for Nightbitch, a bizarre movie that juggles high-concepts and tones like a struggling new mother juggling time. Based on the novel by Rachel Yoder, Amy Adams plays Mother (yes, that’s how she’s credited), an artist who chose to become a stay-at-home mother to her two-year-old son, and her life has become an endless stream of days appeasing a small tyrant who she also unconditionally loves. Early on, Adams uncorks an imaginary monologue about demystifying the glamour of motherhood and the guilt she feels about not finding every tantrum and bowel movement a thing of bronze-worthy beauty. She’s grappling with significant changes, and that’s even before she thinks she’s turning into a dog. I can find thematic connection with motherhood and body horror, as our protagonist feels that she no longer recognizes her body, that she feels a lack of direction and agency in a life that no longer feels hers. The added body horror of transformation makes sense, but this element seems so extraneous that I wished the movie had exorcised it and simply stuck with its unsparing examination of parenthood. You would think a woman believing she is becoming a dog would dominate her life. The ultimate life lessons of the movie are rather trite: assert yourself, establish a balance to have it all, and fellas, did you know that being a stay-at-home parent is actually hard work? There are too many half-formed elements and plot turns that don’t feel better integrated, like flashbacks interwoven with Mother’s mother, not credited as “Grandmother,” as a repressed Mennonite in a closed community who disappeared for stretches. There’s also a few curious reveals relating to Mother’s perception of others that are unnecessary and obtusely mysterious for no real added value (“Why that library book died forty years ago….”). Adams is blameless and impressively throws herself into the demanding roll, going full canine with gusto as she trots on all fours and eats out of bowls. The problem is that all the dog material feels a little too silly when realized in a visual medium rather than a symbol of freedom and rebellion. Nightbitch is more bark than bite, and I’d advise viewers looking for an unflinching portrayal of motherhood to watch Tully instead and, if desired, pet your household dog at home to replicate Nightbbitch but better.
Nate’s Grade: C
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Nickel Boys (2024)
This might be the most immersive and biggest directorial swing of the year. Director/co-writer RaMell Ross adapts the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Colson Whitehead about a reform school for juveniles more like a prison during the Civil Rights era. Ostensibly, the Nickel Academy is an institution that is meant to teach moral lessons and responsibility through outdoor labor. In reality, it’s a school that benefits from labor exploitation and has no intention of fulfilling its promise that students can possibly leave before they turn eighteen. This is even worse for African-Americans, as the school is also segregated and the students have to endure the racism of the administrators and other white juvenile delinquents who still want to feel superior to somebody. It’s a cruel setting destined to spark risable outrage, especially knowing that our main character, Elwood Curtis, is a victim of profiling and being in the wrong place at the wrong time, a star student selected to take college classes at an HBCU. The big artistic swing of Nickel Boys is the choice to tell the entire movie through first-person perspective, with the camera functioning as our protagonist’s eyes and ears. As the camera moves, it is us moving. It makes the movie intensively immersive, but I had some misgivings about this storytelling gimmick. It limits the resonance of the central performance as we can’t see the actor and his expressions and emotions, which I found frustrating. Ross also decides to do this same trick twice with a second character who befriends Elwood. Now we can see more of our main character, through this other person’s eyes occasionally, but it’s also like having to re-learn the visual vocabulary, and switching from viewpoints was distracting for the immersion and to recall whose eyes were whose at any moment. There’s also flash-forwards to adult Elwood that only served to muddle the tension. There’s enough genuine drama in this setting that I wish Nickel Boys might have been a more traditionally-made drama. Still, it’s a fine movie, but the aspect that will make it stand out the most is also what I feel that holds it back for me from being more profoundly affecting.
Nate’s Grade: B
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The Brutalist (2024)
The indie sensation of the season is an ambitious throwback to meaty movie-going of the auteur 1970s, telling an immigrant’s expansive tale, and at an epic length of 3 hours and 30 minutes, and an attempt to tell The Immigrant Story, and by that we mean The American Story. It’s a lot for any movie to do, and while The Brutalist didn’t quite rise to the capital-M “masterpiece” experience so many of my critical brethren have been singing, it’s still a very handsomely made, thoughtfully reflective, and extremely well-acted movie following one man trying to start his life over. Adrien Brody plays Laszlo Toth, A Jewish-Hungarian survivor of the Holocaust who relocates to Pennsylvania in 1947. He starts work delivering furniture before getting a big break redesigning a rich man’s library as a surprise birthday gift that doesn’t go over well. Years later, that same rich man, Harrison Lee (Guy Pearce), wants to seek out Laszlo because his library has become a celebrated example of modern architecture. He proposes Laszlo design a grandiose assembly that will serve as a community center, chapel, library, gymnasium, and everything to everyone, standing atop a hill like a beacon of twentieth-century civilization. Everything I’ve just written is merely the first half of this massive movie, complete with an old-fashioned fifteen-minute intermission.
The second half is about crises professional and personal for Laszlo; the meddling and compromises and shortfalls of his big architectural project under the thumb of Harrison, and finding and bringing his estranged wife (Felicity Jones) to America and dealing with the aftermath of their mutual trauma. I was never bored with writer/director Brady Crobett’s (Vox Lux) movie, which is saying something considering its significant length. The scenes just breathe at a relaxed pace that feels more like real life captured on film. The confidence and vision of the movie becomes very clear, as Corbett painstakingly takes his time to tell his sprawling story on his terms. I can appreciate that go-for-broke spirit, and The Brutalist has an equal number of moments that are despairing as they are enlightening. I was more interested in Laszlo’s relationship with his wife, now confined to a wheelchair. There are clear emotional chasms between them to work through, having been separated at a concentration camp, but there is a real desire to reconnect, to heal, and to confront one another’s challenges. It’s touching and the real heart of the movie, and it easily could have been the whole movie. The rest, with Laszlo butting heads against moneymen to secure the integrity of his vision, is an obvious allegory for filmmaking or really any artist attempt to realize a dream amidst the naysayers. The acting is terrific across the board, with Brody returning to a form he hasn’t met in decades. Maybe his career struggles since winning the Best Actor Oscar in 2003 have only helped imbue this performance with a lived-in quality of a soul-searching artist. Pearce is commanding and infuriating as the symbol of America’s ego and sense of superiority. The musical score is unorthodox but picks up a real sense of momentum like a locomotive, thrumming along at a building pace of progress. The only real misstep is an unnecessary epilogue that spells out exactly how you should feel about the movie rather than continuing the same respect and trust for its patient audience. The Brutalist is an intimidating movie and one best to chew over or debate its portrayal of the American Dream, and while not all of its artistic swings connect, the sheer ambition, fortitude, and confident execution of the personal and the grandiose is worth celebrating and elevating.
Nate’s Grade: B
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Babygirl (2024)
It’s so rare to see erotic dramas with the kind of pedigree, and set up for potential awards buzz, of Babygirl, and I think that’s because they’re a little hard to take seriously (see the ridiculous and tone-deaf Deep Water for further proof). What distinguishes the artistic erotic drama from the tawdry erotic drama will be a perhaps invisible line. Still, it’s rare for an actress of Nicole Kidman’s caliber, and let’s also be frank -her age- to headline an erotic drama, so that naturally draws some intrigue and eyeballs. Babygirl follows a familiar premise of taboo desires at the expense of domestic upheaval, but where it goes makes it ultimately feel like an unsatisfying morality tale.
Kidman plays Romy, a powerful tech CEO suffering from a lack of spark in her love life. She loves her husband (Antonio Banderas), her three teenage girls, and the life she’s built for herself, but she also needs to masturbate if she ever wants to be physically satisfied. Along comes a lanky hunk by the name of Samuel (Harris Dickinson) as an intern at her company and immediately makes her feel hot and bothered. He’s direct and wants to tell her what to do, and the excitement Romy feels makes her question how far she’s willing to go and what she’s willing to risk to chase her passions. 
Babygirl is another rich person’s fantasy romance where a character risks losing their family on a fling, and usually these stories only go so many ways, primarily with the protagonist regretting their affair and learning some kind of lesson from the ordeal. For a formula meant to inspire titillation and transgression, these movies can be, at their core, very moralistic and conservative. There are so many movies that prominently feature cheating only for the person to realize how much they were taking for granted what they had all along. So many of these wayward participants don’t feel like they have lost something by the end even after risking their relationships, so the conclusion of these movies seems to be a facile “don’t do that again” lesson of sowing one’s oats. It strikes me as ironic that these stories are about untamed passions but they end so dispassionately. For the first half of Babygirl, I was questioning where this movie could lead: would the husband kill his wife’s lover and through the shared disposal of his body bring them closer together? Would it be revealed that Samuel was a stalker who manipulated his way into Romy’s life? Was her husband secretly behind this strapping young lad coming into her path and trying to provide her that spark of danger but in an unknowingly controlled environment? The eventual path of Babygirl is probably the most realistic path and yet it’s rather dramatically lacking and insert. Ultimately, the movie’s message seems to coalesce around accepting your desires and being open about sharing them; however, the proceeding movie doesn’t feel like a meaningful road to that cozy conclusion.
There’s a dramatically rich idea that could have been explored more maturely, namely that this woman has sacrificed her own physical pleasure for her career achievement. During one awkward night, Romy admits to her husband that over the decades of their relationship that he has never made her climax. His manly ego is bruised severely and Romy tries to wave away the statement, but the movie only seems to use this detail as further establishment for the motivation to have an affair. Director/writer Halina Reijn (Bodies Bodies Bodies) sets this up within the very first shot of the movie, with Romy finishing having sweaty sex with her husband only to finish by herself with the help of Internet pornography. Right away we know her husband isn’t doing it for her. There’s one moment where Romy explains that she feels like her desires are degrading and self-destructive, but she won’t share them with her husband. She tries to guide him there, planting a pillow over her head to cover her sight to facilitate her imagination, but it makes him feel uncomfortable to continue (“I feel like a villain”). There’s an interesting exploration of keeping passion stoked in a long-standing relationship where inertia can settle in, but the ultimate revelation is rather pat and all-too familiar: communicate more. Thanks, movie. So much of the movie is built around what Romy learns from how far she goes, but what do we learn about Samuel too? He’s kept a frustrating blank of a figure, more catalyst than fully developed character. If he’s ultimately just the excuse to push her out of her comfort zone, did he have to be this boring even with his kinks? 
Will you find Babygirl sexy? I don’t know. It primarily trades in dominance/submissive dynamics, and the director keeps her camera’s gaze on the pursuit of feminine pleasure rather than closeups of pert anatomical parts. The sequences where Samuel orders Romy around played more unintentionally comical to me rather than decisively arousing, especially moments like him forcing her to eat out of his hand like a dog. I can understand being in such a high-powered job of constant decision-making might make a fantasy of giving up control and agency seem appealing, but this isn’t really explored in the movie. I can also understand the shame of feeling like your hidden desires might be too embarrassing to share with your partner, but this isn’t fully explored either. For all its heavy breathing and sultry glances, the movie feels far more clinical than passionate. The sensation I felt the most was a lulling curiosity that ultimately went unmet. Your mileage may vary.
Babygirl is the kind of movie that critics declare the lead actress being so “brave” to push boundaries at her age, to bare her body in an age bracket that Hollywood finds less-than-desirable. However, Kidman has long been an actress unafraid of the demands of nudity as well as challenging roles, which mitigates the perceived daring of this latest performance. Babygirl is ultimately a disappointing erotic drama that, for me, lacked heat, better character development, and a surprising or insightful plot. In short, Babygirl comes up short where it counts.
Nate’s Grade: C+
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