Three good movies this week.

Napoleon

Ridley Scott is no stranger to violent and rousing historical epics, but when he tries to take a more human approach, especially one involving comedy, all bets are off. That’s my main issue with Napoleon, a four hour miniseries trimmed down to a terribly paced 158-minute theatrical release, it’s trying to do a bunch of different things and not fully succeeding at any. Scott and Joaquin Phoenix paint the character as a total clown with next to no self-awareness, who just happens to be really good at battle strategy. By attempting to check all the boxes on Napoleon’s conquering timeline in just 2.5 hours, there isn’t enough time to adequately build the character or his bizarre relationship with his ex-wife, Josephine (Vanessa Shaw).

What Scott does right is the battle sequences. When Napoleon is an action movie, it completely held my attention. However, you can sort of tell that Phoenix wasn’t as interested in this part of the story, because of how bored the actor looks. Phoenix perks up in scenes involving his romance with Josephine, which shifts the movie’s tone to absurdist, screwball relationship comedy. His performance is good in these scenes while Vanessa Shaw is even better, but it becomes clear neither Scott nor the writer David Scarpa know how to write comedy and it just comes off as this awkward Phantom Thread wannabe. These scenes were a mixed bag for me. I appreciated the performances but the material was severely underwritten. The scenes I found to be the most boring were the stiff, dialogue-driven negotiation sequences between Napoleon and a rolodex of military leaders. God, they just droned on forever and I wanted to jump into a river and drown. They were shot so flat and matter of fact, Phoenix practically falling asleep during them.

I appreciate Ridley taking a big swing here to make this more than just a rote action biopic, especially after his success with The Last Duel, which marked the director’s first really good movie since Matchstick Men. However, what worked for that movie just doesn’t work here. Tonally, Napoleon is all over the place – a three part hybrid of beautifully realized sets and battle sequences, a sexy cat-and-mouse romance between two awkward weirdos, and a stuffy historical biopic where people sit and talk about “important” stuff indoors. I’ll be curious to see if the four-hour version on Apple+ makes any more sense. Grade: C (In Theaters)

Thanksgiving

The most surprised I’ve been all holiday season was when the end credits started to roll on Thanksgiving. The baron of egregiously depressing torture porn, Eli Roth, made a name for himself in the early 2000s with the release of Cabin Fever, Hostel and its slightly superior sequel, and The Green Inferno, his tribute to the god awful Cannibal Holocaust. They were not good but not quite as bad as most of the Saw films, each possessing a morbid wit that elicited at least a couple good laughs from me per film. In 2007, he created a fake movie trailer for a Thanksgiving-themed slasher simply titled, Thanksgiving, for the intermission of the Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez drive-in throwback, Grindhouse. It was a trashy and funny enough fake trailer, shot on grainy film and featuring a dumb, small town sheriff played by Michael Biehn. Never in a million years did I think he would make a feature out of it and never in a million years did I think I would like it, like really really like it, but here we are.

Basically, Eli Roth sanded off some of the sleazier elements of his trailer including the grainy film and paired it with an enjoyably campy story about a small town (Plymouth, Massachusetts) reeling over a Black Friday tragedy where a bunch of folks got trampled to death trying to purchase TVs and waffle irons. One year later, a mysterious killer with a big ass axe in a John Carver mask begins picking off survivors of the tragedy in spectacularly gory and sometimes wildly creative fashion. Don’t feel too bad though, the survivors of the RightMart trampling massacre are mostly just a group of shitty ass teens and RightMart assistant managers. For obvious legal reasons, we can’t say the name that the mega store is based on here at Margetis Movie Reviews, but take a guess in your head.

This is an obvious and very loving nod to the slasher movies of the 1980s, particularly the ones based on holidays like Happy Birthday to Me, My Bloody Valentine, and more than anything, Friday the 13th and its eleven sequels. Unlike a lot of those movies though, Thanksgiving is completely self-aware and not afraid to point out how dumb it’s being. This is a refreshing change from much of Roth‘s more cynical, mean-spirited, and frequently depressing earlier work. Thanksgiving is never even remotely scary (at least to this critic) and there’s next to no suspense, but it’s fun, funny and entertaining. Also, if you enjoy seeing assholes meet their end in creative ways, you can do a whole lot worse. It even stars Patrick Dempsey as the sheriff, and he’s great. Grade: B (In Theaters)

May December

Todd Haynes (Carol, Far From Heaven) is back at the top of his game with the funny, tragic, and beautifully disorienting May December. It is loosely based on that middle school teacher who had an affair with her 7th grader, got pregnant, went to jail for seven so-odd years, had the child, and then ended up marrying that 7th grader. Imagine reading that article and thinking, “God, I wonder what these people will be doing in 20 years.” That’s the entire setup for May December, which takes place twenty years after the tabloid scandal trial. Since then, Gracie Atherton (Julianne Moore) and former student Joe (Riverdale‘s Charles Melton) have had three children, the last of whom are going to college in the fall. They occasionally get the obligatory package full of dog shit on their front porch, but for the most part, the small town of Savannah, Georgia has come a long way in accepting them. They buy Gracie’s homemade cakes and come to their gorgeous house for barbecues. At one point, Gracie’s ex-husband says the town does this as a sort of kindness, to keep her busy, almost like they’re afraid she’ll get bored and seduce another one of their children.

While Gracie’s family enjoys decades of denial, TV actress Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman) comes into town to shadow Gracie since she will be playing her in a Lifetime-esque movie about her life. She’s polite and tells the family what they want to hear, all while trying to stealthily sneak questions about what happened twenty years ago without pissing off a very emotionally fragile Gracie. Really, she might be the biggest sociopath in the whole movie because it becomes clear she doesn’t care about any of these people, she’s just using them to get an Emmy or something. As she grows closer to Gracie and her now 36-year-old husband, their family dynamic begins to crumble like a house of cards.

While Haynes and writer Samy Burch certainly point out the absurdity of this setup, they never treat their characters like sideshow freaks. They treat this issue very seriously while allowing every bit of humor to come from the absurdity of the situation. It helps all three leading actors are nothing short of brilliant. Julianne Moore, one of the best actors working today and certainly no stranger to eccentric parts, tears into the role of Gracie, never downplaying how calculating and sick she can be while somehow eliciting empathy or at least pity from us even in her darkest moments. Natalie Portman gives one of her best performances as the seemingly sweet but ice-cold actor who manipulates an entire town into feeding her information for her dumb television movie. She delivers a monologue as Gracie late in the movie that might stand as the best work Portman has ever put to film. The real surprise of May December is Charles Melton as Joe, delivering my favorite performance of the movie as the grown-up seventh grader finally coming to terms with Gracie’s abuse at the age of 36. He’s easily the most sympathetic character in the film. He is both stoic and super awkward; a man of very few words, you see everything he’s going through in his face.

This is a fascinating original movie that’s all too rare nowadays. It’s unpredictable and thought-provoking and should prove just as entertaining to argue with friends about as it is to watch in a theater. If you can’t catch the movie during its limited theatrical run, don’t worry; it’s coming to Netflix on December 1st. Grade: A- (In Theaters)

Rustin

Rustin, a well-intentioned but extremely conventional civil rights biopic, all but squanders a fantastic, energetic performance by Colman Domingo. Produced by Barack and Michelle Obama, distributed by Netflix, and featuring a solid ensemble of actors like Chris Rock, Jeffrey Wright, Audra MacDonald, and CCH Pounder, Rustin is very competently made with fine production value; it just never digs deep enough into the central conflict of its main character. Bayard Rustin was a civil rights activist and close collaborator to MLK, who spearheaded the 1963 March on Washington. Flamboyant and charismatic, Rustin inspired almost everyone he met while posing a real threat to the establishment. He was also gay, which in those times was practically illegal, so he did everything he could to shield it from the public. Of course, it ended up coming out. First, with a rumor that he and MLK were having hot civil rights leader sex together, and then with an actual misdemeanor charge for doing the deed with two fellas in the backseat of a town car. I’m sure being outed like that was a more traumatic moment for the real Bayard Rustin than this movie treats it, which really brushes over it quickly as if trying not to offend the grandmas watching, who are still on the fence about these “homosexuals.” That’s the problem with a lot of American mainstream civil rights/racial injustice historical movies like this, Hidden Figures, and Till; they are trying so hard to be for everyone that they come off as these personality-free, melodramatic slogs to get through but hey at least they usually have a good original song by Common or Lenny Kravitz attached to them. Despite the dialogue being painfully on the nose and the stakes seeming way lower than they should, Domingo is so good he makes Rustin worth watching. This is hardly an adequate tribute for such a seemingly fascinating historical figure and hardly a project worthy of Domingo‘s blood, sweat, and tears. I’ll be happy if this gets more people interested in activism and history and how this story ties in with today’s injustices, but as a piece of cinema I think it fails pretty spectacularly. Grade: C (Netflix)

Saltburn

Saltburn, basically The Talented Mr. Ripley: Degrassi Edition now with 100% more horniness, tells the story of a clever teen interloper named Oliver (Barry Keoghan) who becomes obsessed with Felix (Jacob Elordi), a tall, handsome, rich and possibly royal classmate of his at Oxford. Oliver manages to peak Felix’s interest and sympathies, and gets taken in for a summer at his family’s castle named Saltburn. That’s right folks, the house is so big they named it. There, Oliver meets Felix’s eccentric parents, Lady Elsbth (Rosamund Pike) and Sir Jack (Richard E. Grant), his sister, Venetia (Alison Oliver), “Poor Dear” Pamela (Carey Mulligan), and their American cousin, Farleigh (Archie Madekwe). When we first meet the family, they are gathered around a TV watching Superbad and really loving it. They are overly nice to Oliver when he’s in the room, but talk mad shit about him when he’s gone. They’re fake ass people, but Oliver wants to be them. Over the course of a summer, Oliver drools over Felix while manipulating and sometimes seducing whoever he needs to in the family to stay in their favor.

The biggest problem with Saltburn is what plagued writer/director Emerald Fennell‘s last film, Promising Young Woman – a serious identity crisis. It seems to want to be a dark comedy through most of it, but it also tries to be a steamy romance, and then towards the end jumps on this high-octane thriller tone out of nowhere. It acts like it wants to make statements about how the super rich use and dispose of regular folk like objects, but it seems way too seduced by the appeal of their lifestyle to actually do this. Maybe that’s the point because the movie is seen through the eyes of the interloper, Oliver. Saltburn holds your attention throughout, but it becomes apparent early on that this movie really isn’t saying anything despite it wanting to. I mean my god, they shot it in pretentious-ass 4:3, they must be trying to say something important! Despite high aspirations, Saltburn really only knows how to exist as a hollow piece of freakshow entertainment. Two-dimensional characters shuffle through a series of bizarre and sometimes very entertaining set pieces, awkwardly edited together in a completely unfocused narrative. There’s also a “twist ending” that doesn’t feel like a twist at all, but just confirms something we or at least I just assumed from the beginning of the film.

Saltburn is a mess, but it’s never boring or anything less than watchable. It can be frustrating especially if you’re mulling over the wasted potential of this set-up, these bizarre characters and these very gifted actors. As it stands, Saltburn features some truly funny dialogue and the performances across the board are as good as they can given the depth of the material. Grade: C+ (In Theaters)

Slotherhouse

Slotherhouse is trying so desperately hard to be a trashy cult classic that it fails to land most of its comedic moments. Have you ever wondered, what if sloths were actually cold, calculating killers and only pretended to be lazy and chill AF as a way to trick their prey? Neither have I, but apparently writer Bradley Fowler and director Matthew Goodhue have and decided to make a whole movie about it while also sprinkling in positive but obvious social messages about poaching wild animals and social media dependency. It’s a terribly paced, sloppy mess of a movie that never elicits laughs or shocks when it aims to in part because of how little we care about the garbage characters. The plot follows a basic girl who wants to be president of her sorority so she purchases a sloth from a seedy exotic animal smuggler to basically just whore it out on Instagram. One by one, girls in her sorority get murdered by the sloth in wildly uncreative and gore-free ways – it’s PG-13, another nail in Slotherhouse‘s coffin. Even though a bunch of people are disappearing, no one is mentioning it or even finding their bodies which are left in the most obvious of places. A girl is murdered in a communal bathroom and doesn’t get discovered till nearly 24 hours later. I’m sorry but one of the twelve or so students who live in this house used that bathroom during that time period. Anyway, the main girl has a bunch of dumb friends including what I’m assuming is Gen Z’s answer to Kramer, a bumbling punk-rock stoner named Zenny who forgets stuff all the time and primarily mumble-speaks except when punctuating extreme moments with a “yeah, bitch!” or some other loud, half-assed catchphrase. It’s not the actress’ fault, this shitty, on-the-nose character is just a symptom of the overall tone-deafness of the production. The most successful so-bad-they’re-good movies are at least in some part a genuine attempt to make something serious. The botched sincerity is what it makes it so hilarious. The difference with the Slotherhouses and Sharknados of the world is that when you try to manufacture that so-bad-it’s-good vibe, something always gets lost in translation. I guess what I’m trying to say is Slotherhouse is too dumb to know why its concept is funny. Grade: D+ (Hulu)

When Evil Lurks

It’s been a while since a horror movie has gotten under my skin the way When Evil Lurks did, a little Argentinian wonder that manages to transform something as overdone and cliche-ridden as a possession movie into a wildly unique and risk-taking piece of work. I wasn’t a huge fan of filmmaker Demián Rugna‘s first film, Terrified. I can’t remember entirely why, but my two-star Letterboxd review from February 2, 2020 reads, “Some really terrifying visuals can’t carry a movie whose characters are the antithesis of engaging.” I can say that the characters in When Evil Lurks are far more compelling and relatable, and the visuals are even more terrifying. One thing I distinctly remember from Terrified, is the dug up corpse of a little boy sitting at a kitchen table over a bowl of cereal. How the kid got there made no sense, perhaps the corpse re-animated itself and walked home. It was one of the most jarring and upsetting visuals of that movie year for me, but there are three or four images in When Evil Lurks that eclipse that little boy corpse. There are things in When Evil Lurks that you can’t unsee, framed perfectly to scare the living daylights out of you, but it would come across as merely gross without a compelling and fast-paced narrative behind it. From the opening frame, Rugna‘s film is a chase movie featuring two brothers (Ezequíel Rodriguez, Demián Solomón) literally trying to outrun evil….but you can’t outrun evil. A strength of this movie is Rugna never really delves too far into what “the evil” is. Although the grandma character says there are seven rules about facing “the evil”, they wisely never go down a rabbit hole trying to make sense of everything. All we need to know as an audience is that there is something scary and dangerous around that corner, and Rugna knows this. Instead we focus more on the emotional state and past sins of the older brother (Rodriguez), who, throughout the entire runtime, is being forced to make hard decisions while seeing the devastating consequences in real time. When Evil Lurks is certainly not for everyone. It’s one of the most truly violent movies I’ve seen in years. However, for those who can handle extreme gore as long as there is a worthy context surrounding it, it’s a refreshingly weird take on the possession flick. It may be mean and gross but it’s also really great filmmaking. Grade: B+ (AMC+ / Shudder)

Sanctuary

Is there a doctor in the house? This movie is so close to disappearing up its own asshole it may need medical assistance. Zachary Wigon‘s Sanctuary is a single-location, two-person film (meaning it’s really a play) about a pervy millionaire hotelier (Christopher Abbott) getting blackmailed by his much-more-clever-than-she-seems dominatrix (Margaret Qualley). Over 90 odd minutes, the two room-bound characters conversate while the balance of power keeps shifting back and forth between them. Some well-written moments are scattered throughout, but overall, Sanctuary feels very overwritten, often hitting its points so hard it nosedives into parody. Christopher Abbott, one of the best and most under-appreciated actors working today, delivers predictably nuanced work while his co-star, Margaret Qualley, frequently overplays their scenes. It makes me wonder how much of this is just the actors trying and sometimes failing to contextualize really on-the-nose dialogue. I’ve seen Qualley in other things (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, HBO’s The Leftovers), and she’s usually very good, but here she seems lost. Eventually, the movie arrives on a satisfying and somewhat ironic note, but it only makes you wish the rest of the movie was that good. As it stands, this is mostly just an interesting misfire. Grade: C+ (Hulu)