Does AI spell promise or peril?

 Directors Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell's documentary, The AI Doc: or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, benefits from a personal twist. Already in progress, the movie’s urgency amps up when Roher, who does the movie's interviewing, learns that he and his wife are about to become parents. 

  Given the many dire forecasts about AI Roher has already heard, he's understandably apprehensive about the life that awaits the child he'll be raising.

  At first, Roher's questions seem motivated by a fear that AI, in relatively short order, will make humans superfluous, creating a society dominated by polarities: wealthy elites and impoverished masses. More extreme naysayers wonder whether AI will come to regard humanity as superfluous to its needs. In which case, goodbye to us.

  Roher poses his questions to a variety of computer scientists and corporate leaders who work in the field as he weaves a tightly edited film that includes news footage and amusing sketches drawn by Roher. The movie’s interviews have been mixed in ways that illuminate the documentary’s three parts: Doom, optimism, and reflection.

    Those interviewed include Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, Daniela Amodei, president of Anthropic, Tristan Harris, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, and Deborah Raji, a computer scientist.

   Snippets of interviews fly by so quickly, I sometimes wondered whether it might have been worthwhile for Roher and Tyrell to slow down, but if they wanted viewers to begin thinking seriously about artificial intelligence, their documentary makes for an engaging beginning.

    Roher, who directed Navalny, a documentary about the Russian dissident, and Tyrell raise big questions about the race for all-powerful general artificial intelligence, the system that will surpass human intelligence. They frame the discussion in terms of a broad question: Will AI that's smarter than humans offer promise or peril?

   As the title suggests, Roher winds up somewhere near a cautious middle.

   Great at generating concern, AI: The Doc functions more as a one -hour and 44-minute skim of the topic rather than the deepest of dives. Never dull, the film outlines the pluses and minuses of a technology that, like it or not, seems to be developing faster than any of us can digest.

    

  

        

Sofia Coppola's 'Marc by Sofia'

                  

 Among the many things I generally ignore, high fashion ranks near the top of the list. Occasionally, I peruse the photos in one of the New York Times' glossy Sunday supplements, an activity that seldom fails to amuse. How could it not, with designs so exaggerated they might be taken as examples of human absurdity?

  Keep my attitude in mind as you read this review of Sofia Coppola's documentary, Marc by Sofia, a look at the way fashion icon Marc Jacobs goes about the business of designing clothes and creating a show. 

    Set in the months before Jacobs's 2024 spring show, the movie mixes show preparations with clips from the movies that inspired Jacobs (Sweet Charity, All That Jazz, and Hello Dolly). He's also partial to the work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder and an admirer of Elizabeth Taylor's jewelry. Diana Ross's sequins? The best.

    A long-time friend of Jacobs, Coppola takes a casual stroll through Jacobs' world, stitching together a tale that puts the designer's sensibilities on display while offering sketchy biographical material: At the age of 15, Jacobs left home to live with his grandmother, a meticulously organized shopper. His widowed mother had remarried, and Jacobs didn't like the stepdad. 

    Perhaps biographical detail doesn't matter. Jacobs seems to live in a world ruled less by the accumulated sediments of his past than the cultural ether he inhales, absorbs, and, then, transforms. 

   Some have seen Coppola's film as a look at Jacobs's creative process, which includes attention to every detail of his looming show: from set design to the quality of the false eyelashes for models to the music he’ll play. I approached the movie as I would a visit to another planet, a journey into exotic and unfamiliar terrain.

    In the 2024 show, women wearing wigs bigger than beach balls, display their chalky, mannequin-like expressions and wear outsized clothing that falls slightly short of qualifying as housing. 

   The clothing seems part of a satirical joke. 

   Is it?

   Beats me.

    It probably helps to be familiar with the arc of Jacobs' career, which Coppola presents mostly with references -- from his stint at Perry Ellis to his mold-breaking work at Louis Vuitton, where he added humor and flash that stretched the Vuitton brand. 

   And, of course, there's Jacobs' fabled Grunge period, that moment in the 1990s when sighs over elegance were replaced by the enraged banshee screams of rockers and those who followed them. We even see a clip from Jacobs' days as a student at the Parsons School of Design.

   But Jacobs works in the real world, too -- sort of. He once designed clothes for Winona Ryder's shoplifting trial. 

    The movie can be amusing, although it seems directed at those who already know that Jacobs is a major designer whose work has proven influential. 

   Coppola doesn't tell us, by the way, where Jacobs, now 62, stands in relation to other contemporary designers. And she doesn't include much by way of outside observation about his work. A little more context would have been welcome.

    I've admired Coppola's work in movies such as The Virgin Suicides (1999), Lost in Translation (2003), Marie Antoinette (2006), and The Bling Ring (2013). Nothing about Marc by Sofia made me think less of Coppola as a filmmaker, although it does seem like a bit of a digression.

 

    

     

An animated look at a filmmaker's life

      To appreciate the animated biopic, A Magnificent Life, a bit of background helps.

    The name Marcel Pagnol (1895-1974) may not have the same kind of resonance with American audiences as French directors such as Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard. Even when it comes to movies of the 1930s, cineastes are probably more familiar with the work of Jean Renoir and Rene Clair, both of whom were Pagnol's contemporaries. 

   I'm being sketchy, of course, but I begin this way because Pagnol may be better known to French audiences than to American viewers. I'm not even sure Pagnol receives main-course treatment in American film schools.

    If anything, American audiences are familiar with Jean de Florette and Manon of the Springs, two 1986 movies directed by Claude Berrie and adapted from a pair of Pagnol's novels.

     Director Sylvain Chomet (The Triplets of Bellville) has taken on the challenge of bringing Pagnol's life to light with A Magnificent Life, a  Pagnol biography that's animated with detail, style, and affection. Chomet creates an encompassing world for a story about a multi-talented artist who wrote novels, plays, and directed films for which he also wrote the screenplays.

   Chomet tells the story with flashbacks, beginning in 1974. Presumably finished with creating, Pagnol is asked to write articles for Elle magazine. Writing proves difficult, partly because Pagnol’s memory has begun to fade. Enter a young Marcel, a character who serves to trigger memories of the author’s life and give the movie a whimsical touch. Pagnol chats with his younger self.

   An early episode recounts the death of Pagnol's mother. Fifteen at the time of his mother's death, Pagnol already had begun writing poetry. Mom had been his primary audience; her loss proved devastating. 

   The story then finds Pagnol, as a young married man, teaching Latin in Marseille. When he was transferred to Paris, a move he celebrated, his wife objected, but Pagnol's life as a writer began in earnest.

    Chomet goes through the major events in Pagnol's  life: his Paris successes, his return to Marseille, and his work with French actor Raimu, depicted here in amusingly boisterous fashion.

    We also learn about Pagnol's loves and his commitment to putting the Marseille accent into a trilogy of films (Marius, Fanny, and Cesar) released during the 1930s. Perhaps foreshadowing what we think of as "series" storytelling, the films followed the same characters for years. 

    Like all lives, Pagnol's had rough spots. In 1954, he lost his two-and-half-year-old daughter, Estelle. He took more than 10 years before making another film. 

     I saw a dubbed English-language version of A Magnificent Life, which eventually lost steam, as it drew from Confidences, a collection of Pagnol's essays. 

   Chomet's animation creates an absorbing world that brings its own rewards, but the movie does as much telling as showing, and in the end, makes a better showcase for Chomet's talent than for Pagnol's significance as an artist. 

Space travels of an unlikely duo

    On its surface, Project Hail Mary sounds like another large-scale space adventure, a movie in which a lone traveler must save the Earth when a virus threatens to dim the sun. A mysterious microbe known as Astrophage is responsible for this doomsday scenario.

   Fortunately, Earth has hope for survival, albeit a slim one. The future of humanity depends on a molecular biologist -- Ryan Gosling's Ryland Grace -- traveling 11.9 light-years to Tau Ceti, a star that’s immune to Astrophage. Perhaps an antidote can be discovered and brought back to Earth. 

    It's a last-ditch, long-shot effort with no guarantee  of success, but it's the only option.

   Project Hail Mary directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (The Lego Movie and Spider-Man: Into the Spider Verse) shift away from the usual space-genre tone, bypassing ominous cosmic references and occasionally indulging in sentiment.

    Distinguished by its use of sets and avoidance of green-screen work, the movie has a down-to-earth flavor, even as it vaults toward a distant galaxy. The approach is in keeping with Drew Goddard's screenplay, which immediately confronts Grace with the series of problems that propel the story. 

   When he awakens from his induced slumber, Grace can't remember who he is or how he happened to find himself on a spaceship. Job one: Read the clues that will help him recover his memory.

    Grace seems an unlikely hero. The story begins with him teaching seventh-grade science, after having been rejected by scholars for advancing a thesis the scientific establishment scorned; i.e., that life needn't be water-based. Grace's brilliance was mocked.

     Eva Stratt (Sandra Huller) heads an international organization that recruits Grace for the Hail May Project. Eva admires the fact that Grace is willing to think unconventionally, even if others don't accept his conclusions. 

     So, Grace enters deep space, quickly learning that his companions on his voyage had failed to awaken from their induced sleep. He becomes the solo savior of his planet.

     Well, not quite.

      En route to his destination, Grace encounters an alien ship on which a creature he names Rocky also has been traveling.

     James Ortiz does the voice work for Rocky, filling the character with innocent charm and making the most of the way Rocky struggles to understand a new language, sometimes to comic effect.

   Grace's alien buddy may look like a leggy rock, but by no means is he as dumb as one. An engineer by trade, he builds a bridge between the two ships. Rocky, we learn, misses the spouse he left on his home planet; he, too, has lost his crew, and, like Grace, he has tried to adjust to being alone.

   The screenplay adds poignancy because scientists on Earth have equipped Grace's ship with enough fuel to reach its destination, but not enough for a return trip. (The ship, by the way, runs on Astrophage, an odd bit of irony.) Additionally, Grace must mourn the death of his fellow travelers (Ken Leung and Milana Vayntrub), both of whom he hardly knew.

     Project Hail Mary is based on a popular 2021 novel by Andy Weir, who also wrote The Martian, which became another big-screen space adventure built around loneliness and ingenuity. 

     By the time Rocky enters the picture, screenwriter Drew Goddard has begun employing flashbacks to allow Huller's character to develop and to provide additional insight into Grace's pre-flight life. Gosling carries the movie with ease in a showcase role.

     A set piece in which Grace and Rocky try to recover fuel is built for excitement, but other space shots lack the feeling of dark emptiness that can make life feel puny, meek, and insecure.

    Entertaining and involving -- if overly long at 156 minutes -- Project Hail Mary occasionally struck me as silly. Rocky, after all, isn't the most intriguing looking of creatures. I also found the cuteness of the movie's epilogue off-putting, making me think I'd witnessed an adventure that couldn't resist painting a smiley face on its intergalactic surface. 

     Still, Project Hail Mary offers relief from the interplanetary bloviation of other space epics, serving as an antidote to the self-seriousness with which Hollywood usually plies the depths of space. 

     The message also merits consideration: Forget Aliens and its many successors; other forms of life just might turn out to be our BFFs.

      

A second helping of comic gore

  

     It has been seven years since the release of Ready or Not, a jokey, gory slice of horror that pitted a new bride (Samara Weaving) against wealthy in-laws intent on protecting their privilege. I hadn’t thought about the movie until I learned that a second helping was in the offing. I rewatched the original, and remembered why I enjoyed it while also recognizing that blood, gook, and fear aren’t everyone’s favorite popcorn seasonings.

    The same mini-review might apply to Ready or Not 2: Here I Come, a movie in which co-directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett make good use of Weavings’ fierce determination and find reasonably clever ways to revive the Ready or Not strategy.

   Once again, Weaving's Grace must survive a deadly hunt in which she’s the prey, this time at the cruel behest of a fiendish cabal composed of sects vying to head a coalition of Satanic cultists who claim to control the world.

    And once again, Grace takes a beating that leaves her wounded, bloodied, and in bad need of a shower.

   Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett repeat the formula, adding gory flourishes and making enough references to the original to connect the two movies -- if not in plot, then in spirit. 

   A major addition involves providing Grace with a fellow sufferer, her estranged sister Faith (Kathryn Newton). Faith resents her older sister for fleeing to New York at the age of 18. Fifteen at the time, Faith was left in foster care.

     Forget the Le Domas family of the previous movie and glide past the movie’s devilish mumbo-jumbo. Focus instead on the brutal game played at a sprawling Connecticut  estate.

    The hunters compete to head the council, the governing body of the movie’s greedy Satan worshippers. Hunters must use weapons that were common during the period in which their forbearers joined the group. We're talking axes, pistols, bazookas, rifles, knives, and more.

      The large cast includes Sarah Michelle Gellar and Shawn Hatosy as cunning siblings who want to rule the clans. They’re joined by an embittered woman (Maia Jae) who once was engaged to the man Grace married in the first installment. Other characters may be less well-drawn. Some don’t do much more than add to the body count.

      Elijah Wood signs on as The Lawyer, the character who defines the rules of the game, and horror master David Cronenberg makes an early appearance as the father of the twins.

      The simmering conflict between the sisters can feel  forced, and the blend of comedy and gore can’t help but feel familiar. An overstated grand finale of blood and exploding bodies serves as an icky exclamation point to the proceedings.

      One could slice and dice further, but as second helpings go, Here I Come proves a reliably amusing bloodbath, particularly for those who like their violent mayhem served with stinging comic twists.

Goodbye Oscar. Let's move on

    Somebody mentioned that the 98th edition of the Academy Awards happened Sunday night. 

    I heard the show went long (3 hours and 32 minutes),  that one group of recipients got played off the stage, and that host Conan O'Brien delivered a strong opening with a Weapons parody in which he appeared as Amy Madigan's character from that film, the unforgettable Gladys. 

     O'Brien also closed the evening with a clever riff on One Battle After Another, but by that time, all the awards had been handed out, and some viewers probably already had had enough.

     His monologue? I heard, "meh."

     OK, it’s not hearsay. I watched.

     But I decided to change-up this year and wait until the morning after to see what -- if anything -- stuck from the night before. 

     Oscar managed to turn Leonardo DiCaprio -- a nominee for best actor for One Battle After Another -- into a supporting character. When One Battle won best picture, I had to search for Leo in the back row of all the film's actors. Fortunately, his Clark Gable mustache made him easy to spot.

      Teyana Taylor, a losing nominee for supporting actor (One Battle After Another) seemed more pumped up than any of the winners. If there were an award for best adrenalin rush, she'd have won it.

       I was glad to see Autumn Durand Arkapaw become the first woman to win an Oscar for best cinematography for her work on Sinners. 

      It was equally rewarding to watch Michael B. Jordan take the best actor award for playing a dual role in Sinners. 

      By the end of the evening, though, I was starting to feel sorry for early best actor front-runner Timothee Chalamet, who looked a little silly to me in his all-white outfit. I wouldn't have voted for him, but Chalamet's off-key comment about opera and ballet was mocked during the ceremony, although it probably didn't figure in his loss.

     I say that even though I wasn't a Marty Supreme fan.

     Despite the hype about a too-close-to-call best-picture race between Sinners and One Battle After Another, One Battle emerged victorious, the outcome that had been most predicted from the start of an interminable awards season.

      Sinners wound up winning four Oscars after earning a record 16 nominations. One Battle After Another took six of its 13 nominations.

     It was moving and appropriate to see the Academy offer extended In Memoriam tributes to Robert Redford (Barbra Streisand presided), Rob Reiner and his wife Michelle Singer Reiner (Billy Crystal did the honors) and Diane Keaton and Catherine O'Hara (Rachel McAdams led the way). 

      In her acceptance speech for best actress, Hamnet's Jessie Buckley said she was ready to have 20,000 children with her partner. I can't knock celebrating motherhood, but, geez, wouldn't 10,000 suffice? 

      Aside from Javier Bardem, Jimmy Kimmel, a few barbs from Conan, and a pointed cautionary speech from David Borenstein, co-director of the best documentary, Mr. Nobody Against Putin, the night was less political than expected, considering the fraught moment we’re living through.

      Jackie Cazares, a mom who lost a daughter in the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting, spoke when All the Empty Rooms won Best Documentary Short Film.  One of our great sadnesses is that school shootings have become so much less shocking in the 26 years since Columbine.

      The best live action short category resulted in a rarity, a tie with Two People Exchanging Saliva and The Singers each getting an equal number of votes. 

      Amy Madigan, the best supporting actress for her work in Weapons, might be the first Oscar recipient to reference shaving her legs in the shower. Wow, an actual human being wins an Oscar.

      Someone noted that the awards didn’t have the indie spirit that seems to have dominated recent Oscar seasons. Warner Bros., a studio that may soon be acquired by Paramount Skydance, released both One Battle After Another and Sinners. Sinners did better than One Battle at the box office, but neither movie can be seen as typical Hollywood fare. 

       Still, after being nominated for nine Academy Awards, Marty Supreme, released by the adventurous film company, A24, didn't win any. 

       Bugonia, Hamnet, The Secret Agent, and Sentimental Value -- all of which can be regarded as independent features -- earned a total of 25 nominations, but won in only two categories: best actress (Buckley for Hamnet) and Best International Feature (Sentimental Value). 

        The first-ever award for casting went to Cassandra Kulukundis for her work on One Battle After Another. I'd love to have heard the directors of each of the nominees in that category explain the role the casting director played in making their films successful.

       Where will the awards stop? Lots of folks think stunts deserve an award. How about catering? Animal wrangling, anyone? Just sayin'. 

       Sean Penn, this year's best supporting actor, was a no- show. Maybe -- like many of us -- he'd had enough of awards season. 

        If you judged by the audience, you might have thought that Sinners was the only movie anyone truly loved. It seemed to earn more applause than anything else. 

        That's it from me about Oscar 98. I don't know about you, but I think it's time to leave 2025 behind. 

Oscar predictions for 2026

One Battle After Another and Sinners find themselves in a battle for best picture.

   Yeah, I know. It's almost mid-March, and we're still talking about 2025 -- at least when it comes to movie awards. Oscars will be handed out on Sunday evening. If you search for Oscar predictions online, you'll find no shortage of guess work, intuitive hunches, and analytical explanations for what’s likely to transpire. 

   I've always approached the prediction game with reservations, prompted this year in part by a lack of strong rooting interests on my part. Jessie Buckley seems a shoo-in for best actress, but I wouldn't be upset if Rose Byrne won for her performance in If I Had Legs I'd Kick You. 

   I prefer Sinners to One Battle After Another, but either movie would make a decent best picture winner.

   Sure, Sean Penn is the favorite in the best supporting actor category for playing a right-wing nut job in One Battle After Another, but if Stellan Skarsgard pulled off a major upset by winning in this category for his performance as a film director in Sentimental Value, my life -- and probably yours -- will remain unaffected.

   Moreover, the awards season has become so long, so televised, and so covered by the press that by the time Oscar rolls around, I'm well past ready to move on.

   Still, Oscar remains the big prize, so I'll offer predictions in some of the major categories.

Best Picture: One Battle After Another.  

     This one boils down to a two-picture race pitting One Battle After Another against Sinners, which received a major boost when Sinners’ star Michael B. Jordan won best actor at the Screen Actors Guild awards. Other professional groups have gone for One Battle. 

      Here's a stray thought. What if the two frontrunners wind up providing another movie with a window of possibility. In the old days, I'd have speculated that Hamnet --a more traditional choice for best picture -- might have emerged victorious.  This year: Not likely.

Best Director: Paul Thomas Anderson, One Battle After Another. I don't regard One Battle as Anderson's best movie; it’s not as good as Magnolia, There Will Be Blood, The Master, or Phantom Thread. But Anderson is a strong stylist, a sometime visionary, and a director with a clear, idiosyncratic sensibility that’s woven into all his work. He's had 14 nominations and has never won. He's a major director who’s past due.

Best Adapted Screenplay: Paul Thomas Anderson for One Battle After Another, an adaptation of Thomas Pynchon's 1990 novel, Vineland. Anderson updated the story but kept Pynchon's raucous spirit alive throughout his movie. There's no real competition in this category.

Best Original Screenplay: Ryan Coogler for Sinners. Coogler brought sharp relevance to a genre mashup of a movie that employed an expansive cinema vocabulary but spoke in a distinctive voice. 

Best Actor: Michael B. Jordan. Jordan played twins who moved back to their Mississippi hometown to start a juke joint. Magnetic in dual roles, Jordan likely will beat out Timothee Chalamet's uber-driven performance in Marty Supreme. Why? Because Marty Supreme isn't likely to receive big love in other categories.

Best Actress: Jessie Buckley, Hamnet. There's simply no competition in the only category on which everyone seems to agree. 

Best Supporting Actor: Sean Penn, One Battle After Another. If not Penn, Delroy Lindo of Sinners might provide one of the evening's surprises. 

Best Supporting Actress: Amy Madigan's supporting performance made the horror movie Weapons a hit. Even if you don't like horror, you'd have to acknowledge that an unrecognizable Madigan stole the movie. If not Madigan, keep an eye on Wunmi Mosaku, who played hoodoo healer Annie in a role that gave Sinners a soulful boost.

Some bonus picks: Best International Feature, Sentimental Value. Best Animated Feature, Kpop Demon Hunters. Best Documentary, The Perfect Neighbor. Best cinematography, One Battle After Another.

Another Colleen Hoover romance

  Reminders of Him, the latest adaptation of a best-selling Colleen Hoover novel, takes us to Laramie, Wyoming, but the film could have been shot anywhere, a clue that we might have wandered into formula territory.

  The characters in Reminders of Him don't seem rooted in any specific landscape or location; they spring from a blueprint built around romance and obstacles, ingredients that have been seasoned with tragedy.

  Maika Monroe (Longlegs) gives a credible performance as Kenna, a young woman who, at the film's start, is released from prison after serving five years for vehicular manslaughter while driving under the influence. Kenna's boyfriend, Scotty (Rudy Pankow), was killed in the accident. 

  Guilt-ridden and shaken, Kenna pleaded guilty -- even though the situation turned out to be more complicated than initially suspected. 

   The newly released Kenna has one goal. She wants to see her daughter (Zoe Kosovic), a girl who was born in prison and taken from her. She has never held the child, who’s being raised by Grace (Lauren Graham) and Patrick (Bradley Whitford), Scotty’s unforgiving parents. They've structured a legal arrangement to keep Kenna away from her daughter Diem. 

    That's plenty of dramatic fodder. But what’s a movie such as this without romance? Enter Ledger (Tyriq Withers), a childhood friend of Scotty’s who owns a local bar. Ledger didn’t know Kenna previously because when Scotty was courting her, he was trying to launch a career with the Denver Broncos. When he blew out a shoulder, his athletic career crashed. By the time he returned home, Scotty already was dead.

    All drama hinges on some sort of contrivance; in Reminders of Him, they're awfully transparent. For five years, Ledger has been developing a close relationship with Diem, serving as a kind of surrogate father — at least that’s how he sees it.

     Kenna and Ledger know their relationship will threaten Ledger’s bond with Scotty’s parents and with Diem, who’s as cute as the kitten Kenna's landlady gives her when she moves into the low-rent but  ironically named Paradise apartments.

      At various times, Kenna narrates the film, reading excerpts from the notebooks she began to fill in prison. These consist of letters written to her late boyfriend.

     The supporting characters include a charmingly blunt young woman with Down’s syndrome (Monika Meyers) who Kenna meets when she lands a job bagging groceries.

   The story unfolds in predictably delivered slices that don’t grate on the nerves but unfold smoothly in the hands of director Vanessa Caswill, working from a screenplay by Hoover and Lauren Levine.

     Neither offensive nor deep, Reminders of Him glides past complexities that might have made for a more involving story. The movie follows on the heels of two other Hoover adaptations, It Ends with Us and Regretting You. It improves on the latter but isn't as strong as the former. 

     Hoover’s fans evidently are devoted enough to propel these movies into the profit column, even when they feel, as this one does, more anemic than any melodrama should.

       

A horror movie relies on sound

 Canadian director Ian Tuason makes his directorial debut with Undertone, a narrowly focused horror movie that concentrates on a podcaster who, with a partner, devotes her time to debunking paranormal claims. 

 Evy (Nina Kiri) spends most of the movie alone, preparing or recording her podcast while her mother (Michele Duquet) is dying in an upstairs bedroom. Evy has temporarily moved into her mother’s home for what amounts to a prolonged death watch.

  Evy’s podcast partner, Justin — a heard but not seen Adam DiMarco — believes that a series of disturbing recordings he has received might be authentic. Evy agrees to listen but plays her customary role as the pair's resident skeptic.

   Tuason's camera often isolates Evy in a darkened corner of a house that's filled with her mother’s Catholic paraphernalia — small statues of Mary, a picture of the Last Supper, crosses, and other cliches that usually turn up in films about possession.

    As the two partners listen to the audio files — 10 in all — tension mounts, and Tuason suggests a few psychological possibilities. Evy learns that she’s pregnant; she backslides on her sobriety, and she’s increasingly spooked by noises in the house. Lights  turn on and off by themselves. Faucets mysteriously begin running. Old stuff indeed, but wrapped in a minimalist package.

   The major question involves whether Evy is slipping into a state of psychological distortion or whether a demon — in this case, one responsible for mothers who kill their children — could have been summoned when the tapes were played. Eerie nursery rhymes -- Baa Baa Black Sheep, for example -- are repetitively employed.

    Tuason's audio-orientation relies on suggestive sound design, which includes snippets from the audio files that Justin receives. He sometimes plays them backward as he searches for hidden meanings.

     Films such as Undertone depend heavily on their finales. Tuason cloaks his with mostly darkened images and heightened sound, a maneuver suggested by preceding developments, but which seems too gimmicky to be entirely satisfying.

     Credit Kiri with holding the screen. And at its creepiest, Undertone casts a creepy spell. When it's all said and done, though, the movie doesn't dig deeply enough into what increasingly seems like an accumulation of familiar genre tropes.

A coda to the 'Peaky Blinders' series

    Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man serves as a sufficiently honorable coda to a series created by Steven Knight and starring Cillian Murphy. The series spread over 36 episodes, beginning in 2012 and concluding in 2022. 

   During its run, the series found deep and surprising moments for a cast that created indelible characters, even when the stories began to feel a bit repetitive.

    Before watching the one-hour and 52-minute movie version now playing in select theaters and bowing on Netflix on March 20, I viewed the entire series. It definitely helps to have some of the Peaky Blinders details in mind when you see this movie version. 

   Another caution: You'll probably miss some of the characters who made the series so memorable. Too bad many of them had the misfortune of dying before The Immortal Man begins.

     I'm not sure how director Tom Harper, a series  veteran, and show creator Knight, who wrote The Immortal Man, could have topped the brilliant conclusion to the sixth season. What they offer echoes past achievements more than it surpasses them.

    So where does The Immortal Man begin? Tommy has withdrawn into rural isolation with his loyal associate, Johnny Dogs (Packy Lee), serving as a helpmate. Essentially, Tommy has given up on the world.

    The world, however, has moved on. The story has entered the 1940s. Britain is embroiled in World War II, and Tommy's recently discovered son, Duke (Barry Keoghan), who entered the series during its final year, runs the Peaky Blinders gang with little regard for any gangster ethos.

   Untamed and reckless, Duke must be saved from himself, which means Tommy needs to put aside the biography he's writing and return to Birmingham to reestablish the sense of family that has all but vanished from the gang.

   Tommy initially resists the call to return, even when his sister (Sophie Rundle) pleads for a comeback. He changes his mind when Kaulo (Rebecca Ferguson), the twin sister of Duke's late mother and a Romani Gypsy seer, visits. Tommy, as immersed in his belief in the power of curses as ever, must meet his destiny. 

   One of the problems with a movie version of Peaky Blinders is that the characters can't develop the novelistic complexity the longer format not only allowed but often used to maximum effect. We really got to know the characters, even those we came to fear or despise.

    The plot builds on a trend established in the final season. Fascists in Britain pose a threat to a country that's already under bombardment. Tim Roth portrays Beckett, a Nazi sympathizer involved in a German counterfeit currency scheme that's meant to undermine Britain's already shaky economy and lead to the country's collapse.

    The third act resolution of Tommy's efforts to thwart the plot deftly build tension and excitement. At times, though, the movie overdoes things. A fight between Tommy and Duke finds them wallowing in the mud of a pigsty, for example. 

   During the final season, Tommy's ambition had already begun to curdle into resignation. His inner torment intensified. Now, Tommy is a bit of a dead man walking, a depleted husk of a man who lives among ghosts but has been denied the peace of joining them. He eventually dons his trademark cap and long overcoat, but much of the old juice has drained away.

     Beyond that, the key idea of family connection, with all its tests, contortions and possible betrayals, was stronger in the series, partly because the theme here is more stated than deeply felt.  

     A familiar question arises. Can Tommy find redemption? Tommy's attempts to foil a Nazi plot offers him an opportunity to do something good in the world, the best a man such as Tommy, who has accumulated a large body count, can hope to achieve.

   Whatever you think about this addition to the Peaky Blinders catalog, I can't imagine that devotees -- even those who wind up being mildly disappointed -- won't want to see it. 

    When a graying Tommy rides into Small Heath on a black horse, the movie offers a mix of nostalgia and stirring imagery: A lone savior comes to the rescue of those who lack the will to get the job done. Sure we've seen it before, but this, after all, is Tommy Shelby.

     As a series fan, I'm glad to have seen The Immortal Man, primarily because Tommy Shelby has earned his place in gangster lore as a keenly intelligent but brutal man whose thoughts remain hidden but whose eyes reveal the echoes of the poetry that haunts his damaged soul. 

'The Bride!' celebrates its excesses

  It's unlikely anyone will accuse Maggie Gyllenhaal of stinting on ambition in The Bride!,  a wild farrago of a movie that resists classification. 

  Is The Bride! a horror movie or a Gothic romance? Is it a feminist reimagining of movies of the 1930s, particularly James Whale's The Bride of Frankenstein? Is it a comedy that pays homage to Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein with a rousing rendition of Puttin' on the Ritz?

  Or, is it a showcase for an uninhibited display of ferocity from Jessie Buckley in another fearless performance?

  As it turns out, The Bride! is all those things, a movie that makes no bones about celebrating its excesses, of which there are too many.

   Gyllenhaal's big-screen gamble doesn't entirely, but her  approach yields intermittent payoffs. Perhaps the genre it mostly resembles is one in which two crazy outcasts tear across the American landscape, eventually finding love.

    Buckley appears in two roles, occasionally interrupting the narrative for portentous speeches delivered by Frankenstein's 19th-century author, Mary Shelley, who inspires a manic outburst by Ida, also Buckley, a Chicago moll who winds up dead in the movie's prologue.

    Enter Christian Bale's Frankenstein, a.k.a. "Frank," who visits Dr. Euphronious (Annette Bening), a scientist who has been experimenting with reanimating the dead. Poor Frank. He's lonely and craves the companionship of a woman who, like him, was created, not born. He yearns for a soulmate.

     Though she expresses reservations, Euphronious helps Frank dig up the recently deceased  Ida. Employing whizzing, flashing equipment that's heavy on old-fashioned dials and gauges, Euphronious jolts Ida back to life. 

     Initially, Ida, who can't remember her past, hardly seems an ideal partner for Frankenstein, played by Bale with a mixture of sincerity and goofiness, punctuated by occasional bursts of violence, mostly to protect Ida.

    Nothing if not loyal, Frank sticks to his lovelorn mission. He and Ida wend their way across the country, making stops at a roaring Chicago party, a sophisticated New York City black-tie event, and a rural drive-in theater.

    The wandering duo frequently attends movies, all of which star romantic lead Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal). As we all once did, Frank learned about romance from the movies.

    Irate Chicago mobsters and a detective duo (Peter Sarsgaard and Penelope Cruz) pursue the fleeing renegades, as images of Bonnie and Clyde flash through our collective heads.

   Despite efforts to mask his appearance, Frankenstein can't always hide his stitched-together face, and Ida's tousled blonde hair and blood-red lips are accompanied by an ever-present stain on her right cheek, a souvenir from her reanimation. When it's popularized on tabloid front pages, her look turns into a fashion statement.

      I can't say that Gyllenhaal blends the movie's cornucopia of ingredients into a satisfying whole. She creates a mixed-bag of a movie that dashes across the screen, dazzling with its theatricality, amusing with its satiric fillips, and repelling with splashes of body horror. 

    Eclectic to the max, The Bride! practically drowns itself in movie love as it tries to match Buckley's expressions of unrestrained wildness. Say this, though: The Bride! earns the exclamation point in its title.

       

       

     

'Hoppers': fun with a message

  Mabel's journey isn't exactly standard issue -- at least not for a 19-year-old college student.

    During the course of Pixar's animated feature, Hoppers, Mabel (Piper Curda) projects herself into an artificially created creature that looks exactly like a beaver, so much so that she fools real beavers. 

   Mabel has a cause, but don't prep for a lecture; Mabel's story delivers an environmentally oriented message without short-changing fun.

 A resident of the small town of Beaverton, Mabel is a staunch environmentalist who balks when the town's mayor (Jon Hamm) destroys  the natural habitat where beavers and other creatures mingle. 

  A nearly completed thruway threatens her beloved glade. 

  Mabel's appreciation for nature began with her grandmother (Karen Huie). Grandma told Mabel that nature provides sanctuary and balance. Sitting quietly in the glade, Mabel could feel as if she belonged to something bigger than herself, and all would be well.

   As is often the case with animated features, the supporting characters add color and, in this case, a bit of human and creature chaos. Kathy Najimy voices Dr. Sam, the scientist who has invented the machine that transfers human brains into animal droids. The machine allows Mabel to  become a trusted advisor to King George (Bobby Moynihan), a beaver who has learned the art of accommodation with human ambitions. A major supporter of the Pond Rules that govern the animals, George needs to have his rebellious spark reignited.

   Meryl Streep provides the voice for Insect Queen, an imperious character that's more interested in fighting than persuasion. 

  A diverse array of creatures enters without too much concern for verisimilitude, particularly in the movie’s third act. Director Daniel Chong even finds a way to add a giant shark named Diane (Vanessa Bayer) to the mix.

   Toward the end, the movie probably overindulges its action inclinations, but not enough to spoil a mostly enjoyable hunk of animation. 

    What's missing? Some of the pop-cultural sizzle that the best Pixar features have captured. Still, Hoppers entertains while delivering a hopeful message that suggests we do better when we work together.

   I know that feels like a greeting card bromide, but, hey, we are talking an animated feature that may not be fully grown up, even if it avoids being infantile.

   For the record: The movie acknowledges that when nature functions properly, some of its characters might have to feed on their companions. A last-minute rescue saves Loaf, a beaver voiced by Eduardo Franco, from Ellen, a mostly friendly bear (Melissa Villasenor).

    Not to worry. Life in the glade may have its dangers, but they beat the disasters represented by thoughtless human intrusions.

A family story with gender twists

 Strong currents of gender fluidity run through Jimpa, a movie from Australian director Sophie Hyde. Relying on heavyweight casting centering on Olivia Colman and John Lithgow, Hyde tells a family story about characters struggling with multigenerational issues and fragmented family ties.

    Hannah (Colman) decides that her family should visit her gay father (Lithgow) who the family calls Jimpa. Jimpa and his former wife tried to make their marriage work in Australia, but Jimpa left Australia to become a gay activist in Amsterdam, where he has lived for years.

    Jimpa's grandchild, Frances (Aud Mason-Hyde), a nonbinary transgender 17-year-old, idolizes Grandpa, regarding him as a hero who fought for gay rights. Hannah decides it's time to expose her child to the kind of diverse "queer" community available in Amsterdam. It's almost as if she wants Frances to peruse a menu of gender options.

    Hyde takes the drama back and forth in time, including snippets that illuminate Hanna and Jimpa's backgrounds. 

    A charismatic gay man, Lithgow's Jimpa isn't entirely at ease with the younger queer generation: He struggles with pronouns and loathes bisexuality, deeming it a cover-up for the gayness he has fought so hard to bring into the open. Still, he has a generous attitude toward the grandchild he clearly loves. 

   Hyde creates an easy-going ambiance around Jimpa whose gay friends have known each other for years and who've lived through the AIDS plague. Jimpa is an AIDS-positive survivor, but a recent stroke has left his family worried about his future.

    Early on, Frances propose to live with Jimpa for a year, a choice Hannah greets with trepidation. Still, she does her best to negotiate emotionally volatile terrain while allowing Frances as much freedom as possible. 

    A filmmaker by trade, Hanna believes -- or wants to believe -- that it's possible to make a film without conflict. She's working on a film about her father.

    The third act turns into a bit of a "right-to-die" drama when Hannah's sister (Kate Box) shows up. She disagrees with Hannah about how to deal with Jimpa's physical decline.

      Gently assembled, Jimpa tackles difficult issues and avoids drawing harsh lines in the sand, but it never finds a solid core around which the confusion of its characters can swirl. That's another way of saying the movie can't quite decide whose story it's telling, or maybe it tries to tell too many, doing none of them full justice.

An Iraqi childhood under Saddam

  Engaging as it is disturbing, The President’s Cake follows the adventures of Lamia (Baneen Ahmed Nayyef), an Iraqi third-grader whose life is upended by a draconian school requirement. Lamia is assigned the task of bringing a cake to class as part of the national celebration of Saddam Hussein’s 50th birthday. 

 A major problem immediately arises. Lamia, who lives with her grandmother in the country’s Mesopotamian Marshes, can't find the ingredients for even a simple cake, partly because prices have soared due to a UN-imposed embargo.

   Early on, Lamia’s grandmother (Waheed Thabet Khreibat) takes the child to the city to live with someone who has agreed to take the child in. Too old and ill to cope with a nine-year-old, Grandma panics when Lamia flees, traveling through Baghdad's streets and markets in search of ingredients for her cake.

    Lamia doesn't lack for motivation. Her teacher (Ahmad Qasem Saywan) is a martinet who acts as a loyal surrogate for Hussein, treating his students as servants to his dictatorial demands.  

   During Lamia’s urban quest, she’s joined by Saeed (Sajad Mohamad Qasem), a schoolmate and the son of a disabled beggar. Lamia carries her pet rooster, Hindi, on her journey, her way of clinging to something familiar from home.

   Most of the people Lamia encounters aren’t eager to help. A mailman (Rahim Al Haj) proves an exception. He enters the picture when he gives a ride to Grandma and Lamia on their way to Baghdad.

   At the time, the mailman is accompanied by a soldier  traveling to his wedding. Gravely wounded by an American bomb attack, the prospective groom has lost his eyesight. “If she’s ugly, I won’t know it,’’ suggesting there's little left for him but residues of rueful humor.

   For his part, Saeed has been assigned the task of procuring fresh fruit for the birthday celebration, a task that’s as far beyond his reach as is Lamia’s pursuit of a cake.

  The two kids struggle to achieve their goals while Grandma hectors the uncooperative local police in hopes that they will locate Lamia.

  Lamia’s naïveté and resourcefulness make her an endearing character. Her mission-oriented focus contrasts with Saeed’s more improvisational efforts, augmented by Saeed's skill at theft. The two sometimes engage in staring contests to see who’ll blink first, a reminder that we’re watching kids who are ill-prepared for the tasks at hand.

   The President’s Cake reveals the harsh realities of a society in which scarcity and cruelty have been normalized. At one point, a seedy chicken merchant with perverse intentions tries to take Lamia to a porn theater in exchange for the baking soda she needs. Occasionally, bombers roar overhead, another sign of the hardships faced by the country’s beleaguered population. 

  Working mostly with non-professional actors and benefiting greatly from Iraqi locations, first-time director Hasan Hadi plays the indifferent bustle of everyday life against the personality of a plucky nine-year-old who, like many other Iraqi kids, deserved better.

    

    

A touching film from Colombia

 Oscar Restrepo (Ubeimar Rios) published two books of poetry as a young man and hasn't written anything since. Hapless and ill-kempt Oscar -- the main character in the Colombian movie A Poet -- lives with his mother, drinks excessively, and rants about Colombian poetry. When he's invited to read at a Medellin school devoted to poetry, he shows up too drunk to do anything but embarrass himself. As a last resort, Oscar, with a major assist from his sister, lands a job teaching at a high school. When one of his students -- Rebeca Andrade's Yurlady -- shows promise, Oscar presents her as a promising poet who deserves admission to the school where he, too, once was considered to have potential. As it turns out, the people who run the school view Yurlady as a representative of impoverished youth who'll help them raise funds and enable the school to tell a story about how it provides opportunities to young people who might otherwise fall through the cracks. Slowly, Oscar and Yurlady develop a trusting relationship, which  -- for Oscar -- may be a substitute for the estranged relationship he has with his own daughter (Alisson Correa), who's understandably wary about her alcoholic dad. Shot in 16 mm by director Simón Mesa Soto, A Poet leans heavily on Rios's shambling performance, which captures Oscar's mix of desperation and drunken bravado, but keeps the character a couple of degrees away from being pathetic. Not surprisingly, Yurlady is more interested in being an ordinary  teenager than in serving as a surrogate for Oscar's unrealized ambitions, and Oscar eventually outrages the girl's family. Soto's small-scale realism suits material about someone whose life can't, and probably never will, match the way he sees himself, but it lands gently enough to be touching. 

This dark comedy doesn't sting

  Becket Redfellow's unmarried mother was disowned by her wealthy father when she insisted on giving birth to her son. Dad evidently didn't like the situation, perhaps disapproving of Mom's choice of a mate and not knowing the poor guy would expire soon anyway.

   A Dickensian childhood ensues. Mom gives birth, and dotes on her son. She insists that he's entitled to "the right kind of life," i.e., one in which he becomes an heir to the family's vast fortune, something her father never would consider. When Mom dies, young Becket is left on his own.

   Once he reaches adulthood, Becket decides to secure what he believes to be his rightful portion, Becket (Glen Powell) thinks that it would be appropriate for him to murder all the family's heirs,  leaving him as the only remaining option.

  Ambitious and charming, Becket devises various ways to eliminate his competition, knocking off his relatives one by one, even after one of them (Bill Camp) accepts him as a member of the family's financial business. 

   Always good, Camp adds welcome humanity to the proceedings; he believes the family owes Becket some help. More considerate than the other character, Camp's Warren Redfellow even finds a way to eliminate himself as a possible inheritor.

    Others are more cunning. During his childhood, Becket met Julia, who has grown into an ambitious woman (Margaret Qualley) for whom all decisions begin and end with money. She married for money, but that didn't work out. She now believes she can cash in on Becket's journey toward riches.

  Woefully underdeveloped, Qualley's ruthlessly conniving Julia is never fleshed out. Julia becomes an  emblem of greed and not much more. 

    Becket's plan receives a bit of a setback when he falls in love with the girlfriend (Jessica Henwick) of a cousin (Zach Woods) whom he murders. 

   Woods, by the way, has a nice turn as a guy who thinks he's an artist because ... well ... because he thinks he is.

   Not especially troubled by conscience, Becket devises ways to murder his relatives that are meant to be darkly comic -- killing his aunt with a poisoned tooth whitening device or setting off a dark room explosion. But these murders aren't nearly as amusing as those found in No Other Choice, another dark comedy centering on murdering the competition.

  Where No Other Choice found thematic richness in its premise, How to Make a Killing presents a world in which the privileged rich are assumed to be indulgent, useless,  and worthy of elimination. 

   Of the major performances, Henwick stands out as a likable woman who left the highly competitive world of fashion to become a high school English teacher, hardly a job that leads to a life of luxury.

    A framing device is made clear from the outset: The story begins with Becket on death row, unfolding in flashbacks as he calmly tells a visiting priest about his criminal exploits. At various points, Becket could have quit and lived a well-heeled life, but he couldn't stifle his urge to have it all.

  Director Jay Patton Ford, who directed the much better and far more trenchant Emily the Criminal, seldom achieves the biting sharpness such a story requires, and the successive murders proceed almost by rote, as if the filmmakers were thinking out loud about what to do next.

  All of this builds toward a confrontation between Becket and the head of the family, Whitelaw Redfellow (Ed Harris). Becket improbably avoids detection by two FBI agents, but the movie's approach to its major confrontation proves even less credible. 

   Loosely inspired by the 1949 Ealing comedy classic Kind Hearts and Coronets, How to Make a Killing needed more bite, satirical sting, and genuine shock. Too often, it seems to be sticking to the surface as it advances through its plot without finding much by way of a cutting edge.

'Pillion' dominated by sex and power

 

 We live an age of initials -- from MAGA to DEI to BDSM. BDSM? BDSM, in case you didn't know, involves bondage, discipline, domination, submission, sadism, and masochism. Director Harry Lighton's Pillion may put those initials into slightly wider use, although a movie that makes sexual dominance and submission part of -- or perhaps the entirety of its concerns -- isn't likely to transcend niche viewing.

   Some have seen Pillion as a subcultural romcom, which seems a stretch to me. It has also been called a Domcom, which is too clever by half.

   To begin with, some background: The word "pillion" refers to the person who sits on the back of a motorcycle, playing second fiddle to the driver and clearly acknowledging his subordinate position.

   The movie centers on Colin (Harry Melling) and Ray (Alexander Skarsgard), the duo that lives through Colin’s drama of sexual self-discovery. Colin lives with his mom and dad, works as a parking lot attendant, and sings in a barber shop quartet. Minus his sexual explorations, he’d be one more nonentity living in a dreary London suburb, a person of little or no distinction.

   Ray spots Colin at a local pub and begins instructing him in the ways of submission. Ray obviously knows that Colin, practically a poster boy for loneliness, is an easy mark and will do his bidding. Ray, on the other hand, is cool, handsome, and composed; he’s everything Colin isn’t. 

    But here’s the twist: Colin doesn’t aspire to be Ray. He aspires to serve Ray.

   As it turns out, Ray is a cruel taskmaster. I won’t describe the demands he places on Colin, except to say that they begin when, after an early sexual encounter in an ally, Ray asks Colin to lick one of his boots. In his sleekly tailored leather outfit, Ray looks ready should anyone ever make a comic book movie that needs a superhero who’s into sexual dominance.

   As the movie progresses, the two become a couple, with Colin sleeping on the floor of Ray’s bedroom (Ray won’t allow him in his bed), shopping and cooking for Ray, and changing his appearance so that he can blend into the gay biker culture in which the nomadic Ray has taken temporary root. Ray gives Colin a chain with a lock attached, an obvious symbol of subordination.

   Colin’s parents — a befuddled dad (Douglas Hodge) and a mom who’s dying of cancer (Lesley Sharp) — accept Colin’s gayness. But Mom craves the relief of knowing that her son will settle down with a “nice” boy. Fat chance. Still, the movie gives Sharp a strong moment as a mom who fears for her son's future.

   Scenes of psycho-sexual dominance are more explicit than you might expect and aren’t easy to watch, although some see them as darkly funny. Lighton, who wrote the screenplay based on the novel Box Hill by Adam Mars-Jones, plays Skarsgard’s aloof indifference against Melling’s addled subservience. Their relationship contains the seeds of a deadpan comic burlesque.

   It’s possible to see Ray as a typical literary figure, the mysterious outsider who schools a less-sophisticated student in the ways of  life, in this case, the BDSM life, which Colin willingly enters. He’s not a prisoner. As current parlance would have it, he’s a consenting adult.

   Obvious questions evolve. How much can Colin take? Will he ever tire of watching Ray polish his motorcycle while he pines for attention? Is there a point at which Collin will want more from the lopsided power relationship to which he seems to have become addicted?

   Lighton takes us to that point and contrives for Colin to exercise a bit of self-assertion, a minor triumph but one that might be seen as the movie's redeeming raison d'etre.

   Pillion isn’t 50 Shades of Grey, another movie about dominance. Nor is it easily compared to Nicole Kidman’s Babygirl, which coated its kinky core with a glossy veneer. Let's just say that Lighton leans in the opposite direction, and leave it at that.  

   And unlike either of those movies, Pillion makes little attempt to go much beyond the world Colin and Ray inhabit, aside from Colin's impossibly awkward attempt to please his mother by bringing Ray home for dinner. 

   Melling makes a convincing schlub who begins to discover a sense of belonging, and Skarsgard conveys Ray’s intelligence, hauteur, and insistently expressed authority. 

  But with or without Colin's consent, Ray’s behavior tips close to sadistic abuse, and Lighton's unwillingness to flesh out Ray’s character presents us with a conundrum. It makes him a man of mystery, but also raises questions. We have no idea how Ray sustains himself or how became the man he is.

   Lighton and his cast surely knew that Pillion wouldn’t be everyone's tub of popcorn. Yes, there’s humor here, and yes, the performances are well-adapted to the material, but I don’t know how much can be gained from its collection of abuse and degradation, even if the movie's characters are eager to immerse themselves in it.