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The Amateur (2025)
I was genuinely surprised how much I enjoyed The Amateur, which on the surface seemed like a disposable revenge thriller. I never even realized it was a remake of a 1981 movie, co-starring Christopher Plummer. If you look closer, the screenplay has so many nifty little conflicts and points of interest to further draw you in. Rami Malek plays a CIA analyst whose wife dies in a terrorist attack who takes it upon himself to seek vengeance the old fashioned way: with his bare hands. He wants to become a field agent and get retribution, and he’s willing to blackmail his superiors in order to get the approval. From there we have the bosses trying to uncover the leverage against them, there’s a handler trying to train our protagonist but also keep him contained or supervised, and then there’s our would-be amateur who struggles with more physical hand-to-hand fighting and gunplay but can think on his feet and is a whiz with technology, especially improvised explosives. He’s taking out his hit list and going up the chain while his co-workers are trying to sabotage him. There’s so many fun cross-purposes of conflict that keeps the movie entertaining even when it follows a more formulaic “oh what price this vengeance” path. I appreciated that the main character has flaws and vulnerabilities. He’s not great at certain vital aspects to being a field agent, but his determination and adaptability overcome those shortcomings. It makes for a fairly entertaining underdog story with many possible antagonists targeting around our lead. A lot of the supporting characters are pretty rote and the general plot is fairly predictable but it’s the ongoing conflicts and challenges, plus the brain vs. brawn underdog perspective that allow The Amateur to be enjoyable popcorn thrills.
Nate’s Grade: B
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Dream Scenario (2023)
Imagine being the most famous person in the world for doing absolutely nothing, where every person can see you every night, each of them feeling like they own a little piece of you. Now imagine that person being a balding, middle-aged father and professor of evolutionary biology, a man so dull that nobody would likely remember him except that he keeps popping up in everyone’s dreams on a nightly basis. The man in question is Paul Matthews (Nicolas Cage), a man so boring that his literal dream is to publish a book on the evolutionary biology of ants. Dream Scenario begins as a sci-fi curiosity and then becomes an intriguing expose on sudden fame as well as the most cogent argument yet on the hazards of a “cancel culture” that too many comedians cling to as an excuse for not being funny. I kept thinking back more and more on the movie, rolling over sequences and choices, as it refused to leave my waking thoughts.
There’s an obvious and easy parallel between what Paul is experiencing and general celebrity, where members of the public have an individual relationship to a person but divorced from the reality of who that person may or may not be, as well as one-sided. These are strangers to Paul but so many feel like they know him, like a neighbor, or a lover, or a threat to someone’s mental stability. It’s an ongoing struggle of rationalizing different perceptions of a person, where so many project what they want onto this smiling bald man who has become a national figure of fascination. Given the premise, I completely understand. I can only fleetingly remember my own dreams maybe once every two weeks, but if a real person, who I’ve never met, continued to make strange cameo appearances, I would definitely investigate further. That’s a genuine mystery that could break through even our jaded media culture. The big question would be why is this happening but the more interesting question is why this guy? What makes him special? I was always engaged with the movie and impressed by the turns the screenplay made, providing insightful glimpses into human nature that felt relatable as well as realistic in response to this phenomenon. Of course there are certain people that view him as some angel, whereas others a devil needing to be stopped, and some an unknown being they’ve projected sexual feelings onto. There’s a very funny and also deeply uncomfortable sequence where a young woman tries to recreate her erotic dream with the real Paul, and of course the real Paul fails to measure up to the fantasy mystique. I was also intrigued by the question of why Paul does not appear in his wife’s dreams. The screenplay by director Kristoffer Borgli is consistently well-developed and full of changes and challenges that had me glued, though I should warn you, dear reader, that you will never be given a concrete reason why the dreams began.
The first half of the movie is Paul’s ascension, enjoying his notoriety and the new access he has to getting published and achieving his dreams that felt stalled for too long. It’s the positivity of the fame and untapped desire of the general public, with the assorted weirdo from time to time. Then there is a significant turn, and the movie gives a clear theory as to why, and the dreams all of a sudden now become nightmares. Instead of Paul just being in the background of everyone’s dreams, acting as an observer rarely doing much of anything, now he’s become a malevolent force, a stalker, a killer, or worse. Now the general public fears this man and fears going to sleep with the certainty that Paul will be waiting for them to perform any manner of terrors. Paul is placed on sabbatical after his very presence on campus drives students away into hyperventilating. Paul is genuinely pained by this but also painfully annoyed, as he argues he cannot be responsible for the dreams of others and what happens inside every individual subconscious. He hasn’t really done anything in physical reality, and yet he’s kicked out of restaurants, shunned by his colleagues, and his endorsement deals are drying up with the exception of the alt-right.
The premise also allows for plenty of beguiling and funny and creative imagery. Since we’re dealing with a wealth of dreams, this allows the filmmakers a near limitless opportunity to hit whatever themes or oddities they desire under the pretense of retelling a dream. We get the mundane, we get the horrifying, which plays out with some effective jump scares, and we get plenty of surreal moments. This artistic choice allows for an ending that feels ambiguously bittersweet but also tragically fitting and satisfying. It felt exactly how it should have been. It reminded me of Being John Malkovich, and truthfully this movie feels like a lost Charlie Kaufman story. The consumerism satire is also right on target, from Paul’s initial agency meeting trying to get him to endorse Sprite in the dreams of millions, to the application of harnessing people’s dreams to sell products or further one’s social media branding. It feels topical while also a sadly logical extension.
For me, this is the most interesting satirical broadside yet exploring the concept of “cancel culture,” a term often so overblown to the point of being a nonsensical catch-all for consequences. Paul’s sense of grievance is real, but the movie doesn’t present him as a martyr and instead chooses to use this transition, from curiosity to pariah and national nightmare, to better satirize people’s attempts to manipulate their own flailing narratives (see: ukulele apology videos, self-imposed exile for “listening,” late-night Ambien usage, etc.). After Paul has a nightmare of his own, starring himself, he records a manic tear-filled self-pittying apology to appeal to his detractors saying he now too has those “lived experiences” with transparent insincerity, and of course it doesn’t appeal to anyone and he’s even more ridiculed and despised. I enjoy that the movie doesn’t want to dwell in the tragedy or general unfairness of this turn of events with Paul becoming the world’s most hated man. Paul also refuses to accommodate or acknowledge other people’s discomfort, overriding security concerns and repeatedly placing his family and children in uncomfortable if not humiliating positions because dear old dad just refuses to accept mollifying his behavior for their social benefit. Paul was riding high on the ego trips of the unexpected attention and adoration, and occasional starry-eyed groupie, and he’s fighting to regain that same level of credibility and status before he retreats back to being a punchline, an asterisk in history, a trivia answer on a game card.
Dream Scenario tackles the rise-and-fall of overnight celebrity and sudden fame and adds an intriguing sci-fi spin as well as some arty yet accessible meditation and fun satirical social commentary. It asks us to contemplate the nature of our dreams and how we might behave under this extraordinary scenario, whether as one of the people befuddled by the dreams or the even larger befuddlement of the person appearing in all those millions of dreams. It asks us to reconsider perception, as well as how well others may know us, as well as what we look for with our own dreams. When Paul’s wife (Julianne Nicholson) admits her own fantasy and it involves him wearing an old 80s costume that she found to be surprisingly sexy, he’s a little let down that this is all she has for her dreams, and that to me seems like a fine central theme to ground this movie. It’s easy to go crazy with limitless possibilities, but we often return to what matters most, and that’s often idiosyncratic, personal, and perhaps underwhelming to an outsider who lacks the context and, sorry, lived experiences. Our dreams can help define us but not necessarily as extravagant escapism. It can also be the ordinary, the unusual, the moments and people we just want to revisit a little longer. Now imagine this hijacked, weaponized, and then hacked into ad space, and you have Dream Scenario, a peculiar yet arresting little movie that has lots of intriguing ideas to share.
Nate’s Grade: A-
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I, Tonya (2017)
Back in 1994, popular culture was rabidly obsessed with figure skating thanks to Tonya Harding (Margot Robbie), the “bad girl” who was accused of coordinating an attack on her skating rival, Nancy Kerrigan. Tonya’s skuzzy husband, Jeff Gillooly (Sebastian Stan), had hired a friend to “intimidate” Kerrigan, and the end result was a broken knee and the world-famous outcry of, “Why?!” I, Tonya takes a look at the players of this media circus and lets them tell their own stories in their own words.
I,Tonya feels brazenly like a Scorsese movie populated with kooky Coen brothers characters. Director Craig Gillespie (Lars and the Real Girl) cribs from the best and uses all those propulsive camera moves, voice over leading to fourth-wall-breaking, and music needle drops to draw an audience into this crackling crime story. The biggest decision made by screenwriter Steven Rogers (P.S. I Love You) is the dueling perspectives of Tonya and Jeff being given equal treatment. They both sit for a series of on-camera interviews and will even interrupt the flashbacks to object. Jeff will recount a time Tonya chased him around with a loaded shotgun, and then Tonya will turn to the camera and argue that this moment never happened. I, Tonya doesn’t tell you who to believe and who to doubt. The account will purposely contradict one another, often demonizing the other party and painting themselves as a larger victim of fate. The movie is steadily entertaining as it mixes moments of light and dark. Tonya breaking the fourth wall to talk about her domestic abuse is another way of showing just his disassociated she’s become to a life of abuse. It turns fourth wall break into coping mechanism. I was laughing at the buffoonery of Jeff’s goons and moved by the relentless torment of Tonya. It’s a story that’s worth revisiting and is given an invigorating sheen of inept crime thriller. Gillespie goes a little too hard with the Scorsese speed ramp zooms and quantity of literal song selections, but it doesn’t detract from the film’s overall entertainment impact.
This is a film about reassessing preconceived notions about who the characters are, what the story exactly is, and where the truth lies amidst all the madness. Tonya scoffs, “There is no such thing as truth,” as if she were channeling the forty-fifth president of the United States of America. This becomes a foundational thesis of the movie as we’re presented with conflicting personal accounts where characters will break the fourth wall to criticize the validity of what they are doing or saying. All of these conflicting accounts force the audience to constantly reconsider what we are seeing and being told. We have to consistently think about the source and how there might be bias at play. As expected, Tonya and Jeff’s differing versions of events paint the other as more knowingly duplicitous. Tonya flat-out accuses Jeff of years of physical abuse, the kind of relationship Tonya’s vicious mother had primed her for. LaVona Golden (Allison Janney) would say all of her cruel hostility was valuable in an ends-justify-the-means crucible. Through fighting to earn the approval of an abusive authority figure, Tonya became one of the greatest figure skaters in the world, the first to achieve the vaulted triple axle. LaVona shouts that “nice” doesn’t get you anything in this world (her own mother was nice and LaVona became a waitress). People throughout I, Tonya are reshaping worldviews, angling for sympathy, and spinning history for personal advantage. Everyone wants to be a victim, a martyr, or at least the person who was right in the end. By the end, you don’t know what exactly to believe and whose truth is closest.
This was a media scandal that the public gladly gobbled up every new morsel, bringing out the knives to carve up a villain served up on the Olympic stage, but I, Tonya is a very empathetic portrayal that still doesn’t take the edge off of its title heroine. She grew up poor and scrappy and had to make her own costumes for her skating performances. From a technical standpoint, Tonya Harding could out skate anyone, but she didn’t fit into the cookie cutter beauty pageant image of what a wholesome girl should represent. The same bias against her, the trailer trash girl who couldn’t catch a break, was still dragging her down even when her skating was superior to her competitors. It definitely helps to paint a sympathetic portrayal for the woman, and that’s even before the years of abusive relationships, and a husband she may have returned to in order to appear more “wholesome family.” It’s easy to castigate Tonya Harding as a villain, but it’s even harder to see the person inside the caricature that was sold for mass media consumption.
The use of humor has to be very delicate because of all the controversial material. We have naturally offbeat characters doing incredibly stupid things, and then we have a husband repeatedly hitting his wife. This seesaw of tone means that the comedy needs to be precise or else it will undercut the drama or, worse, cross into gross mitigation of abuse. LaVona is a popular source for verbal abuse, and it’s meant to be shocking, but at no point do I think the film trivializes the conditions of Tonya’s childhood for ironic comic fodder. It’s presenting an abnormal treatment of an abnormal upbringing, and the later detours with “The Incident” are highlighting the naturally cracked criminals. These people were not good at what they were doing and were easily caught. The nimwits-try-their-hands-at-crime subgenre is ripe for laughter, in particular Shawn Eckhardt (Paul Walter Hauser) and his self-professed masterful skills at counter terrorism planning. The Tonya Harding scandal is so inherently sensational and with so many bizarre, colorful characters that to treat it without its penchant of natural humor would be a disservice. Crazy people doing dumb things are going to tend to have some humor value. Where the film falls short is in the realm of media satire. There are a few tasty morsels sprinkled throughout, like LaVona forcing reporters to stand behind a rope line if they wanted to snap her picture, but overall the media satire feels flat. Bobby Cannavale (Spy) feels completely wasted as a Hard Copy reporter/exposition device. He offers few insights and fewer colorful anecdotes. The most pointed the film gets with media commentary is when Tonya looks directly into the camera and accuses each person of being her abuser. It’s a stark turn that stops the action cold, and the audience has to think about their own tacit approval through media consumption. By rewarding this coverage and the easily packaged version of events, have we all played a part in Tonya’s suffering and shame?
Robbie (Suicide Squad) is sensational in the role, eliciting so much emotion that it can instill whiplash. One moment you’re impressed by the depth of her vulnerability and the next you’re whistling at her hard-as-nails persona and sheer tenacity. It’s an unapologetic performance that goes dark places and serious places, but Robbie doesn’t stoop to pander. Tonya wants your empathy but she doesn’t want your pity, and she sure as hell isn’t going to pretend to be somebody she’s not. The tricky part is the question over who is Tonya Harding. With Robbie, she’s a profane firebrand who is impatient with a world that refuses to accept her and her talents. The scene where Tonya is stripped of ever competing again in professional figure skating is a dazzling piece of acting on Robbie’s part. Tonya has sacrificed much of her own life for this sport, and by her own admission she doesn’t know how to do anything else. To see it all go away with the pound of a gavel, she pleads for jail instead as a more humane punishment. This feels like Robbie marking her grand entrance into the next acting echelon in Hollywood.
The supporting roles nicely serve their purpose, with Janney (The Girl on the Train) being the obvious standout. Her hellish mother is overpowering in every sense. Janney is abrasive and fierce and a crutch for the screenplay when it needs something shocking. I do not doubt the voracity of what the Tonya and other participants have said about LaVona, but the filmmakers don’t know when to leave enough alone. There are insights to be had through LaVona’s relationship with her daughter but it’s too often one-note. She’s the angry older woman berating people for shock, comedy, or a transition.
I, Tonya might change your mind about Tonya Harding. She’s definitely unrepentant in the movie while at the same time asking you to view her with an empathy that was lacking during the parade of 1990s tabloids. She’s an abuse survivor who had to claw for every advantage she could earn. You might not like her, or maybe you’ll grow to appreciate her, but you will understand her better. Robbie is outstanding, Janney is highly memorable and perfectly cast, and the direction provides plenty of jolts, from electric camerawork to the energetic propulsion through its diverging viewpoints. The dark comedy works, the serious drama works, and the domestic violence is not trivialized with so many ironic winks. I, Tonya is an unflinching expose that forces you to question the validity of everything. It’s a movie that dares you to question your perceptions while you’re keenly watching. Perhaps twenty years later, Tonya Harding will get whatever she is due.
Nate’s Grade: B+
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August: Osage County (2013)
This holiday season, the movie with the most acting, by far, is likely to be August: Osage County, the adaptation of Tracy Letts’ Tony award-winning play. It’s a large dysfunctional family getting back together and opening old wounds, so, you know, the most relatable Christmas movie for some. It’s easy to see what attracted such A-list talent to this project because these characters are actor catnip; each is overflowing with drama, secrets, revelations, anger, and it’s all channeled through Letts’ barbed sense of humor and wickedly skillful dialogue. With Meryl Streep as the pill-popping matriarch, Julia Roberts as her resentful daughter, and a host of other inter-generational conflicts and secrets, you may feel exhausted by the end of its 130-minute running time (the stage play was 3.5 hours, respectively). The emotional confrontations feel like grueling pugilist matches, the melodrama kept at a fever pitch, but the film is never boring. Streep is her usual astonishing self and the deep ensemble gives each actor something to chew over. This is the best Roberts has been in years, and she’s not afraid to get nasty (“Eat your fish!”). Just when you think the story might soften, Letts unleashes another body blow, allowing no uncertainty that this is a family doomed. The story also provides insights into tracking the path of cruelty through the family tree, limb by limb. August: Osage County is stridently funny but also punishing in its no-holds-barred approach to family drama. If you’re looking for a movie that makes your family seem normal and even-tempered, this may be it.
Nate’s Grade: B
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Kinsey (2004)
Bill Condon’s probing, fascinating biopic of Indiana University sex pioneer Kinsey (Liam Neeson) could not come out at a more important time. Kinsey lived in the Dark Ages of sexuality and fought against what he saw as “morality disguised as fact.” Kinsey broke barriers studying the science of sexuality and gathered nationwide statements to amass the first thorough book on what’s under the sun and what’s going on under the sheets. Today, we live in a splintered world where people listen to information that affirms their beliefs, and tune out contradictory evidence even if it’s fact (look at the latest report on abstinence-only programs dishing out highly erroneous information). Kinsey railed against this dangerous line of thinking. The man was no saint and had issue comprehending some of the more complicated human emotions. Kinsey is exceptionally well acted and Neeson gives a career best performance. Kinsey is fearlessly graphic in its frank discussion but also enormously intelligent. The fact that conservative groups are actually protesting it shows that Kinsey’s work is far from over.
Nate’s Grade: A-
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