After finally getting to see American Fiction, it is clear to me why it was nominated for Best Picture. I don’t know if it will win, and I don’t even think it’s my favorite movie of the year. It isn’t the only movie with a powerful message, and American Beauty is more on the nose with its messaging than some of the other Oscar nominated films are this year. That said, American Fiction is a powerful film with powerhouse performances by the actors and a script that is sneaky-good.

The screenplay, which was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay at this year’s Oscars, is a great mix of thematic storytelling and powerful dialogue. There are a lot of very uncomfortable ideas being discussed in this film in ways that shouldn’t make us laugh but do. There were scenes when I was laughing uproariously at things that shouldn’t have been funny but were incredibly funny within the context of what this script was saying. Through the screenplay, American Fiction challenges the viewer, whether that viewer be African American, Caucasian, or any other race or ethnicity, to examine how they examine race. But that’s not all the film does. This is a deep and complex film that also tackles issues of family relationships, romantic relationships, and professional relationships and how each of those relationships requires us to wear a different mask for those occasions.

In my opinion, the most important component of this screenplay is the dialogue. The most prominent message this film delivers is that what we say is less important than how we say it. Writer/Director Cord Jefferson effectively showed us a writer in Thelonius “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright), who is an abrasive, if good-natured person of color who is trying to articulate complex subject matter in an educated way but is being undermined by Sintara Golden (Issa Rae), who is also highly educated but is writing her novels using much more urban language that is commonly associated with African-American culture. Frustrated with the hypocrisy of the soft racism of low expectation, Monk writes a book as a joke under a pen name that uses all of the urbane syntax, and suddenly people are interested. Needing the money to take care of his mother, who is suffering from early-onset Alzheimer’s, Monk reluctantly agrees to have the book published, and he sells the movie rights. Both the publisher and the producer are white, and neither of them has a clue about what’s going on. Then, the longer the charade persists, the more Monk loses control over who he believes he is, and that causes him to lose control over his own life.

American Fiction is a smart film that forces us to examine what it means to be tolerant and how well-intentioned people can still get it massively wrong. Another nice thing about it is that it doesn’t pretend to tell us how to get it right. We still need to figure that out for ourselves.

It pains me to say this. It really does. I have been a Disney fan since I was a kid, and I even worked there for a few years around the turn of the millennium. I raised my daughters watching Disney movies, and there was a time in my life when Disney could do no wrong in my mind. Those days are gone now, and this movie is easily a bottom-5 Disney Animated Feature. I can usually find at least a few redeeming things about almost any Disney film, but this one left me completely flummoxed. The film made no sense from a story perspective, from a character perspective, or even from a design perspective.

Disney is worried about the wrong things.

I worked at Disney during a pretty dark time. The wave that produced blockbusters like The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King, Mulan, and Tarzan had crested. The Florida studio would produce Lilo and Stitch during that period, but the Burbank studio was struggling, and the company went through a very clumsy transition from traditional hand-drawn animation to a CGI pipeline. What was worse, though, was that the studio had lost its way in terms of crafting wonderful stories that were populated by intriguing characters. The studio was trying to make movies that would appeal to everyone rather than just making good movies and letting the rest take care of itself. I fear that Disney is in a similar situation today.

The wave that produced Tangled, Frozen, Moana, and Encanto has crested, and the most recent efforts, Strange World and Wish, are films with stories that are thin and characters we don’t care about. What’s worse is that you could always at least count on Disney films to look good, but the visual styles of these films, and of Wish in particular, felt confused and disorganized.

The structure of the story doesn’t work.

From a storytelling standpoint, but script just didn’t work on any level. First of all, the concept just didn’t make sense, there was never a clear idea of what this story was about. Since there was no clarity in what the story was about, the characters weren’t developed enough to have clear goals. Without those goals, it was impossible for the story to have a tight dramatic structure. That is screenwriting 101, and this movie failed. Screenwriters Jennifer Lee and Allison Moore just did not do enough to build this script from the inside out, and without that foundation, the story fell flat.

The characters had no depth.

Asha (voiced by Ariana DeBose), the main character had a relatively ambiguous goal. According to the concept of the story, King Magnifico (Chris Pine) created this utopian society where people could come and live in peace. They would express their wildest wish to him, which he would magically keep, causing them to forget what it was, and once a year, he would grant someone their wish. Asha wanted her grandfather to get his wish since he was going to turn 100, and from there, the story completely fell apart.

But the main issue with Asha is that she has no depth. The best characters always have an inner weakness or flaw that they need to overcome, and Asha doesn’t have anything that I could see no flaw in her personality. She was totally likable and a little quirky, but she didn’t have any character trait that could accurately be described as a flaw. The problem with that is that the transition between Act II and Act III is often a moment when the hero seems to lose everything, often due to the fact that they haven’t overcome that flaw or weakness. It’s usually the most dramatic moment in the script and sets the Hero forward to finally claim the prize in Act III. That moment completely fell flat in Wish because there was no flaw to cause Asha to seem to fail or for her to overcome. That left us with an undramatic story and an anticlimactic finish to the story.

There was also no clear motivation from Magnifico. Why did he want other people’s wishes in the beginning? Why was it important that they forget what the wishes were once they gave them to him? What was he getting out of any of this?

The production design lacked focus.

This might have been the most upsetting thing about Wish. While the movie was beautiful, there was no direction to the production design. The studio seemed to be influenced by previous success from other studios that added unique elements to their looks, like Into the Spiderverse from Sony and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles from Paramount, but those studios clearly identified the motivation behind the interesting looks that they had. There was none of that in Wish, and it seemed like they were playing with the different looks in the movie with no real idea as to why.

Overall, this was a pretty lackluster effort from the studio that should be leading the charge in animated features. I will always be a fan of Disney films, and that’s why it’s so disappointing when they come up so short when we all know what they’re capable of at their best. At their best, there is no one better than Disney. Unfortunately, this film is far from their best, and I don’t think Wish could be included in the top-5 animated films released this year.

Do better, Disney.

I had been looking forward to Napoleon’s release for months. I don’t remember when I saw the first trailer for it, but as soon as I saw that Ridley Scott was directing Joaquin Phoenix, my initial response was, “Yes, please!” I had visions of Gladiator dancing in my head, and my expectations for this film were through the roof. And I will freely admit, that’s on me. I don’t know if my expectations for this film were unreasonably high, but they were high, and Ridley Scott and Napoleon did not meet them.

The Good

Napoleon is a superb visual film. The production design is gorgeous, the costumes were immaculate, the VFX enhanced everything without drawing attention away from the narrative, and the lighting reflected the mood of every scene perfectly. Ridley Scott and his team built a world that felt lived in. There were times when the costumes were ill-fitting, which brought a subtle realistic component to the look of the film. There were several scenes that took place at night, and candlelight provided the only illumination, which brought warmth to those scenes and often matched the warm mood those scenes were trying to convey. The battle scenes were often gray, wintery scenes, with the only color being the red blood that freely splashed through the air and on the ground. The production design was beautiful when it wanted to be and jarring when it had to be.

The cinematography was amazing. Director of Photography Dariusz Wolski presented a world that felt like eighteenth and nineteenth-century Europe. He wasn’t afraid to make us wait with long takes that slowly revealed what we needed to see. In equal parts, he showed us what was gruesome and what was glamorous about the day.

One of the projects that Stanley Kubrick wanted to make but was unable to before his death was a film about Napoleon and Josephine. I’m sure Ridley Scott was aware of that, and there are a lot of moments that seem to pay homage to Kubrick as a filmmaker, whether in the use of Kubrickian cinematography tropes, or the use of classical music as the score in ways that felt like Kubrick was in the editing room, there were stretches of this film that felt like they were being directed by Kubrick himself.

Vanessa Kirby as Josephine was a treasure. She played the role with panache and wit and snark and pain. All of the levels were perfect, and she brought Josephine back to life in a way that made it plausible that the most powerful man in the world at that time obviously would have been obsessed with her.  Kirby’s performance as Josephine was nothing short of sublime.

Overall, this is a very entertaining film. The action sequences are exciting and riveting, and the movie, as a whole, did what it needed to do to keep the audience engaged, at least on the surface level.

The Bad

From a storytelling standpoint, this film is full of missed opportunities. As engaging as Napoleon was on the surface, it lacked that much in-depth. It felt like Ridley Scott was trying so hard to cram as much as he could into two and a half hours, and in doing that, he didn’t adequately explore anything in terms of how these characters, especially Napoleon and Josephine, felt about each other. That led me to walk out of the theater realizing that I didn’t care about any of them. There were moments in the film that should have been emotionally powerful but fell flat because the groundwork hadn’t been laid to create depth in their relationships.

I remember seeing a quote from Kubrick when discussing why he wanted to make a film about Napoleon and Josephine, and he relayed that he was fascinated by the intensity and passion in their relationship. Ridley Scott teased us in this film with one scene of Napoleon telling Josephine that she was nothing without him, and then her turning the tables to get him to admit that he was nothing without her. It showed at once the potential for toxicity and codependency that could have driven the emotional content of the story, and then he never went back to it. Other than giving us some narration of letters they wrote back and forth, there was nothing that built their relationship.

In fact, just the opposite happened when there were sex scenes that showed Josephine completely disinterested and Napoleon only interested in providing an heir for himself. We saw no passion and even less emotion. Then, at the critical time when Napoleon discovers that Josephine has died, the audience should have been given an emotionally impactful scene, but it fell flat. Then, at the end of the film when we learn that Napoleon’s last word was “Josephine,” we don’t care. We weren’t adequately shown the love they had for each other, and other than one scene where Napoleon pulls Josephine under the breakfast table to make love to her, we weren’t shown the passion that they had for each other. All of that was crucial in giving the audience an emotional hook upon which to hang their hats, and we never got it.

Vanessa Kirby’s performance as Josephine may have been sublime, but she was miscast. Joaquin Phoenix’s performance as Napoleon was understated and brooding in its intensity, but he was miscast as well. In real life, Josephine was ten years older than Napoleon, and that was the reason that she was unable to become pregnant and produce him an heir. That age difference was at least reversed in this film, and it created a disconnect. Josephine already had two children from her deceased husband when she met Napoleon, and if you didn’t know about their real-life age difference, the fact that she was unable to get pregnant in this film wouldn’t make sense. It also snubs much of the realism that the filmmakers were striving for in other areas. The decision is understandable from a marketing perspective, but it created a disconnect in the film that, artistically, they weren’t able to overcome.

Overall

Overall, I give this film a C. Perhaps that’s due to my overinflated expectations for the film, but I feel like that’s being generous. I was entertained, but being entertained by a film like this isn’t enough. I wanted to feel something and I felt nothing. Walking out of a movie like this feeling empty is worse than feeling bad. I wanted a lump in my throat at the end of this film but was left feeling hollow. Still, I would recommend seeing it in the theater if you get a chance. The visuals and battle scenes are worth it.

The Holdovers was a little bit Dead Poets Society, a little bit Scent of a Woman, and a whole lot of charming and entertaining. This film was a lot of fun, and it was very much a character-driven film. That is to say that there wasn’t a ton of plot and there was even less action. This was a story about characters who were broken and either didn’t know how to heal or didn’t even know that they needed to heal. Circumstances brought them together and forced them to be together for the Holidays, and they all slowly came to grips with where the pain was coming from in their lives and how they could manage it.

Alexander Payne is very good at this kind of filmmaking, and his films often are populated by broken characters who need to be fixed and The Holdovers is the latest example in that line.

The main character in this story is Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti), a history teacher at a prestigious New England prep school for boys whose crankiness is matched only by his pretentiousness. He seems to relish in giving the boys grades that will prevent them from getting into the Ivy League school of their parents’ choice and he revels in putting these spoiled and entitled brats in what he thinks is their place. We learn later that this misplaced populism isn’t in him from principle so much as it has been ingrained in him by events from his past that have shaped who he has become, and he has never addressed those issues to this point in his life. The two and a half weeks he spends held over in the school over the Holidays will force him to confront that past and will force him to grow as a person and a human being. The character arc that Paul experiences is both satisfying and heartwarming as he goes from tyrant to prince, and it happens completely organically within the confines of the story.

Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa) is the unfortunate student who has to stay over the Holidays with Mr. Hunham. Left behind when his mother and stepfather went to St. Kitts and then were unavailable to give permission for him to go with other kids on a skiing trip, Angus must endure 3 weeks alone with Mr. Hunham, the least favorite teacher of everyone in the school. Angus’s scars are more visible than Hunham’s, but Angus tries to mask them with a tough attitude and a cocky disposition. Angus is another character with a terrific character arc, as he goes from a petulant malcontent to a sensitive kid who seems to have found is place in the world and is comfortable with it.

The chemistry between Giamatti and Sessa was also spectacular as they learned and grew together.

The third character in our triumvirate was Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) head of the cafeteria and the mother of a former student of the school who was recently killed in Vietnam. She puts on a brave face for most of the film, but she is being torn apart on the inside by the memory of her son and she misses having him in her life. He was able to attend the school because she worked there, but going to an Ivy League school was beyond her means so he joined the army thinking he could go to college on the GI Bill once he got out. Randolph’s performance in this film is beautifully tragic, as she loses just enough control of her emotions just enough times for us to be able to understand the pain she trying to squelch. Her arc is different from Angus’s and Mr. Hunham’s but they’re all connected to each other and she would not have been able to go on her journey without them.

The plot of the story is really secondary to the character’s journeys and it essentially serves as a vehicle to facilitate the journeys the characters experience. The argument could be made that the movie is a bit episodic, except that the various scenes do build off each other and there are a lot of things that are planted early in the screenplay that are paid off later. All of the scenes demonstrate the growth of the characters and they all fit seamlessly together. Most episodic films could have the various scenes interchanged and nothing would change in the overall story. That is not the case with The Holdovers and screenwriter David Hemingson did an outstanding job of meticulously crafting a narrative that didn’t overpower the character growth but demonstrated perfectly how these broken people fixed each other.

Overall, this is a feel-good film that is very entertaining and should deservedly see its fair share of recognition come Awards Season.

Killers of the Flower Moon might be a top-5 Martin Scorsese film. Yes, the running time pushes four hours. Yes, its placing is as deliberate as it can be. But the acting is nothing short of sublime. Scorsese’s direction matches nearly any film he’s ever made, the cinematography is stunning, and the screenplay is loaded with powerful thematic components and some equally powerful emotional moments to go along with masterful storytelling. Could some time been cut out of it? Probably, but I wouldn’t want to be the one to decide what needed to be cut. The story is woven together so meticulously that nothing is wasted. No scenes are superfluous. Nothing seems self-indulgent or gratuitous. This is as streamlined a three-hour and forty-five-minute film as you will ever see.

That is what impressed me most about the film. It goes without saying that Martin Scorsese is one of the greatest filmmakers in the history of cinema. Many of his best films are included in lists that note the very best films ever made. He is also a director that, despite his advanced age, hasn’t lost anything off of his fastball. His stories are still as compelling as they were ten, twenty, thirty, forty years ago. The Irishman was nominated for multiple Oscars a couple of years ago, including Best Picture, and it would be a shock if this film didn’t receive similar accolades.

Scorsese, along with co-writer Eric Roth penned an intricate screenplay that, despite its deliberate pacing, never stops moving. There were no safe zones to get up and go to the restroom in this film. Every scene was important, and every scene was built on what came before. If you missed anything, you would be lost later on. At some point in the future, I will do a full Hero’s Journey breakdown of this film’s screenplay, but suffice it to say, this was a dramatic film filled with tension because Scorsese and Roth built the conflict and the drama through the slow burn of the first act and the first half of the second act until the Supreme Ordeal, which kicked off a much more intense and dramatic second half of the film. Even when the film ended, some three-and-a-half hours after it started, I was still left wanting more.

That was also due in no small part to the exceptional performances of Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert DeNiro, Lily Gladstone, and a bevy of talented actors and actresses that brought this tragic story to life. I would be shocked if DiCaprio isn’t nominated for Best Actor. He became Ernest Burkhart in this film. I didn’t feel like I was watching DiCaprio play a role. I thought I was watching the story of Ernest Burkhard and the terrible choices he couldn’t stop making.

One point I will make about this script that aspiring screenwriters could learn from. Every chance Scorsese and Roth had to give Ernest a choice, they had him make the wrong choice. They were able to do that and somehow still allow the audience to root for him. Well, really the audience was rooting for Mollie, and she needed Ernest to make better choices, which he never did. Yes, Scorsese and Roth were following source material and real-life events, but they could have done things a lot differently to make Ernest more sympathetic, but that would have done a disservice to the overall story. I always tell writers they need to love their characters enough to put them in painful situations. That’s the way to get the most drama into your story. Scorsese and Roth cared enough about Ernest to do just that, and the story is that much better because of it.

There’s no question that this movie is going to be too long for some people. But I cannot encourage you enough to see it in a theater. The cinematography is gorgeous, and Director of Photography Rodrigo Prieto bent light and shadow in ways that accentuated the story and made us feel like we were a part of the scene. He also used light and shadow to express the sometimes soft, and too often violent, nature of the West in the 1920s as oil money corrupted men’s souls just as painfully as the oil they discovered violated the environment.

One more point to make is that, and this is speaking as a white male, it seems as though Scorsese and the rest of the people producing this film took their charge very seriously and made a great effort to tell this story with as much sensitivity and compassion as they could toward the Native American community, and specifically, the Osage people. Whether or not they accomplished that is ultimately up to the Osage and other Native Americans to decide, but Scorsese and his team should at least be acknowledged for attempting to tell this story in a way that would have been unimaginable even a decade ago.

Overall, this is one of the best movies of the year. If you are a fan of Martin Scorsese, I cannot recommend seeing this movie highly enough. If you are a fan of dramatic and tragic storytelling, this is a movie for you as well. Yes, it’s long, but it is so worth it. Do yourself a favor and see this film in the theater. You will not regret it.

The Creator was a little bit Children of Men, a little bit District 9, and a little bit Rambo: First Blood Part II. It was clearly a parable for the Israel-Palestinian conflict, which makes the timing of its release an unfortunate coincidence. This was a film with a lot to say, and it was able to say it, at least for the first hour-and-a-half, or so. But a muddled and disorganized third act left an unsatisfying and borderline bitter taste in the mouth.

This is a story about humans versus AI. After an alleged AI attack detonated a nuclear warhead in Los Angeles, the United States put a ban on AI technology and uses its standing as the world’s police force to destroy any remaining tech, all of which now only resides in Asia, since those pesky Asians are stubbornly standing by the tech and offering sanctuary to the sentient beings. War breaks out and an ex-soldier, Joshua (John David Washington) finds himself caught between the woman he loves and his duty when he’s sent to destroy a weapon that could turn the tide of the war against the United States only to discover this weapon is in the form of a child, and this child ends up being very significant to him.

The Creator was an entertaining film and there were moments that were emotionally gripping. Screenwriters Gareth Edwards (who also directed the film) and Chris Weitz did a nice job of connecting us to the characters and bringing them to us as real people. The AI characters were especially well-developed, and many of them displayed more emotion than their human counterparts, which was one of the driving thematic points of the film. Unfortunately, there were some holes in the plot. Why would an AI child-like ice cream? How could she eat it? How could she digest it? The movie set up that they can feel emotions, but how can they produce tears? I understand that they need to be plugged in, but there is a scene when Alphie falls asleep. Why would AI tech sleep? Those might be small points, but I found them to be distracting, especially without anything in the way of an explanation.

I also expected the VFX to be stronger. This film may get nominated for an Oscar for Best VFX, but it shouldn’t. There were times when the compositing was inconsistent, so it looked like the lighting on the characters was different from the lighting in the scene. Again, a small detail but a noticeable one. Also, some of the action sequences were just plain poorly executed. There were rivers of bullets flowing in many of them and characters just ran out into the middle of them and were never touched. From a technical standpoint, I expected this film to be much better.

I did feel that the story was quite strong, at least through the first two acts. There were great thematic components about humanity and man’s inhumanity to each other. The AI in this film displayed far more humanity than the soldiers and U.S. government officials. Americans were the clear bad guys in this movie.

Edwards and Weitz excelled at creating the relationship between Joshua and the AI weapon Alphie (Madeleine Yuna Voyles in her film debut), and the development of the relationship over the course of the film felt natural. It was not forced in the least, and it created several emotionally charged and tension-filled moments. There were times when it was reminiscent of the Obi-Wan series, but this relationship was much more believable than the one between young Obi-Wan and young Leia. They learned from each other and grew because of each other. Both had excellent character arcs so they felt like more complete characters by the end of the film.

Unfortunately, in my opinion, the film went off the rails in the third act. The story was more or less abandoned for the sake of ginormous action sequences that were completely out of context with the rest of the story. There wasn’t any warning that the film was going to turn in this direction, but it seems like Edwards and Weitz had painted themselves into a corner and the only way out was to blast their way out. Other than the very end of the film, the third act was very disappointing. It may be worth going through the screenplay to determine where it worked and didn’t work, but that will be a blog for another day.

This is a fine film if you’re looking for 2-plus hours of escapism and you don’t mind a hole or two in the story. And if you don’t mind action sequences that looked like they could have used a little more effort. But the character relationships are strong and it is a very thoughtful film from a thematic standpoint. It just came up a little short in some key areas, which made the overall reaction one of disappointment.