One clear winner this week.

The Boy and the Heron (How Do You Live?)

Japanese anime master and Studio Ghibli founder Hayao Miyazaki returned from retirement for what I assume was a bid to save his company’s reputation from the clutches of his son, Goro. Sorry, Goro, but your 2020 computer-animated Earwig and the Witch was perhaps the worst cartoon I’ve seen since Planes. That movie was not only ghastly to look at, with characters so grating and obnoxious I wanted to stab myself in the eye with a pencil, but it was so awkwardly structured and delivered I thought ChatGPT wrote it. Anyway, all is now good in the Ghibli-verse, Hayao is back and his movie is not only a success, but one of the single best films the artist has made in his decades-long career. It’s also the headiest. The Boy and the Heron, originally titled How Do You Live?, a much better title, explores the interior life of a 12-year-old boy, Mahito, displaced by World War II. After his mother dies in a hospital fire and his house is firebombed, Mahito and his well-off father, Shoichi, flee Tokyo and seek to start up a new life in the countryside. Mahito gets a new stepmom prospect and a new school, but he’s not ready to move on. In the forest near his new home, he finds a gateway to a bizarre magical world, much darker than anything we saw in Spirited Away or Howl’s Moving Castle. Of course, whether or not this magical world exists or is simply a coping mechanism for Mahito is up for debate, but come on, it’s Miyazaki, so of course it is. I saw the dubbed version, which I’m happy about because Robert Pattinson delivers a v/o performance as the villainous Heron that’s absolutely bat-shit crazy. Christian Bale, Dave Bautista, Willem Dafoe, Mark Hammil, and Florence Pugh also provide character voices. This is easily the densest work of his I’ve seen, but at 82 years old, the director is asking us how we live in the most insane of trauma when nothing looks like it’s going to work out. For Hayao, it’s escaping into a world not governed by our seemingly cruel logic. Grade: A- (In Theaters)

Dream Scenario

Dream Scenario is a disappointment because it takes a fantastic premise and fumbles the ball in the third quarter – to make a football analogy for one of the few movies that doesn’t so much as have a single sports reference in it. Nicolas Cage is on his A-game as Paul Matthews, a thoroughly mediocre college professor about whom the entire world begins inexplicably dreaming. He’s never a big part of anyone’s dreams; he’s just an impartial passerby, a fact that Paul is most annoyed with and fears define him as a person – completely benign. As more people experience him making cameo appearances in their dreams, Paul gets carried away with the fame aspect. He is suddenly taking interviews on major news networks, meeting with entertainment agencies, and turning his classroom into a self-important Q&A with him as a master dream man. When the dreams turn to nightmares, though, Paul faces the prospect of being canceled, which is ultimately tragic because he has no control over what he does in people’s dreams. Much of the first half of Dream Scenario works very well. It’s a wonderfully funny comedy with a winning Cage performance. There’s a boardroom sequence with Michael Cera and a hilarious Kate Berlant where an ad agency tries to get Paul Matthews to sponsor Sprite through his dreams. It’s the best and funniest scene in the film. However, as the movie shifts into the nightmare portion, it goes off the rails. It just doesn’t work as well as a drama/psychological thriller as it does an absurdist comedy, and it finds itself unable to fulfill the promise of its loaded premise. Perhaps this would have made a better miniseries, but as it stands, the second half feels rushed and half-assed. Still, that first half is strong enough to warrant a recommendation. Grade: B- (In Theaters)

Passages

Passages, the new Ira Sachs film, wasn’t on my radar until its star, Franz Rogowski, won the New York Film Critics Circle award for Best Actor in a Leading Role. After seeing it, I agree he’s very effective in the role. Still, the part isn’t very interesting to me, and there were perhaps a dozen superior leading male performances I’ve encountered this year. Maybe Passages is just a movie I need to file firmly in my brain’s “Not for Me” compartment; it’s about Tomas, this asshole film director (Rogowski), who verbally abuses a bunch of actors on his set as the movie begins. He then goes out to party with the cast and crew, cheating on his tired husband, Martin (Ben “Paddington” Whishaw), by way of a HETEROSEXUAL encounter with a French elementary school teacher, Agathe (Blue is the Warmest Color‘s Adèle Exarchopoulos). He comes home all excited to tell his poor husband about it and then gets upset his husband isn’t happy for him for betraying their marriage vows to have straight, vaginal sex with a woman of all people. Sachs‘ movie very obviously paints Tomas as a narcissistic sociopath, but he’s just not that interesting or charismatic of a narcissistic sociopath to spend an entire movie with. He’s no Mikey in Red Rocket or Des in The Last Days of Disco; he’s certainly no Johnny in Naked. Throughout the film, we see his new heterosexual relationship with Agathe bloom in predictable and thoroughly uninteresting ways while periodically checking in on the much more interesting or at least more sympathetic character of Martin, who begins dipping his wick into the mutual friends pool as a way to get Tomas’ attention. Ben Whishaw is far and away the best part of Passages, hinting at a more insightful motion picture that would follow his more grounded and relatable character. As it stands, this is a very underwhelming character drama one outstanding supporting performance cannot save. Grade: C+ (Mubi/VOD)