Three hits and a surprising miss.

Ferrari

One of my most anticipated movies this Oscar season was Michael Mann‘s return to filmmaking after eight long years, Ferrari, a picture he’s been trying to make for decades. I had heard it was an amusing throwback to 90s and 80s historical dramas set outside the U.S. that cast American stars in non-American roles, having them just speak English in the accent of the character they were playing. Here we get Adam Driver shouting orders and coming apart in a thick-ass Italian accent, and it should just be more fun than it ends up being. Most of Ferrari is a chore to get through.

Ferrari‘s biggest sin is focusing more on the boring-ass cars than the combustible and fascinating relationship between Enzo (Driver) and his powerful and scary wife, Laura (Penelope Cruz). The movie comes alive when Mann focuses on their acidic relationship and allows Driver and Cruz to act in ALL CAPS. Not only is it more entertaining than a stupid sports car and how fast that stupid sports car goes, but it allows you to understand Enzo’s character more.

This is one of Mann‘s driest movies, with the scenes involving Enzo and his employees feeling very cookie-cutter while failing to let you know where any of the supporting characters are coming from. Patrick Dempsey is cast in an odd, one-dimensional racecar driver role for some bizarre reason. Shailene Woodley plays a crucial part as Enzo’s mistress, the mommy of Enzo’s illegitimate son and potential business heir, but she’s severely miscast. Her Italian accent, while not laughably terrible or awkward, is barely there. Every fourth word she says has an Italian twang; the first three sound as American as apple pie or an abundance of ice in soft drinks.

The movie isn’t as big of a bore as I’m making it out to be. The last thirty minutes or so really pick up the slack and give us a solid third act. A scene in this final stretch made me audibly gasp in the theater. However, that, paired with Driver and especially Cruz’s commanding performances, isn’t enough to save Ferrari. It’s no The Keep, but it’s undoubtedly one of master auteur Michael Mann‘s worst movies. Grade: C+ (In Theaters)

American Fiction

This is a bit of a weird one for me because I understand and agree with all the charges against American Fiction‘s uneven structure, limp ending, and relatively low-hanging fruit targets in terms of insufferable white liberals, but I just didn’t care. There are few films I purely liked and enjoyed the company of as much as I did with American Fiction this year. This is mainly because it deeply cares about its characters, to the point of fully fleshing out ones that would exist merely to excel the plot in more routine comedies. That attention to detail is all too rare at the movies these days.

Jeffrey Wright, in one of his best performances ever, plays Monk, a thoroughly depressed and defeated writer/college professor whose work seems super pretentious, albeit vastly under-appreciated. It’s simply not what people want to read, for better or worse. Much more commercially successful is a young, black female author, Sintara Golden (Issa Rae), whose recent novel, We’s Lives in the Ghetto, is flying off the shelves. She acts as sort of an existential tormentor for Monk but also a scapegoat, a way for him to be like, “Well, people are fucking stupid and racist and want to experience black culture through the lens of a sensationalist ghetto story, so that’s why my books aren’t selling.” Needing a hit, and I won’t reveal why, Monk decides to ghostwrite a parody of this genre titled My Pafology, as a fake convict named Stagg R. Leigh. His agent, Arthur (character actor John Ortiz), sends the novel out as a joke, and to both of their surprise, he is met with publishing offers eventually amounting to $4 Million. Can Monk keep up the facade of being Stagg R. Leigh, or will his dignity finally kick in?

The trailer for American Fiction makes it seem like a straight-up satire, when it’s more of a character study and family dramedy. The Stagg R. Leigh stuff takes a significant backseat to establish what’s going on in Monk’s personal life, at least for the film’s first half. I guess this is what annoyed people about the movie since the trailer is totally misleading. I, on the other hand, found this so surprising and refreshing. Typically, in satirical comedies, the brother/sister/mother characters are relegated to one to two-dimensional roles, often just existing to show that the central character indeed has family, but here they are interesting, fully realized people. Blackish‘s Tracie Ellis Ross is fantastic as Monk’s pragmatic sister, while the always amazing Sterling K. Brown steals every scene he’s in as Monk’s manic brother. Rounding out the genuinely exceptional ensemble is Adam Brody as a sleazy Hollywood producer dead set on turning Monk’s book into a Hollywood movie, Miriam Shor as a tone-deaf literary publisher, and Leslie Uggams as Monk’s mother.

While certainly not perfect and a bit disappointing in its final act, American Fiction is one of the more unique films to come out of 2023 and announces an immense talent in first-time filmmaker Cord Jefferson. While this is his first screenplay, he’s written for some of the best television shows – The Good Place, Watchmen, Succession, Station Eleven, Master of None – and is a mentee of Parks & Recreation creator Michael Shur. Can’t wait to see what he does next. Grade: B+ (In Theaters)

Birth/Rebirth

One of the better horror movies of 2023, Birth/Rebirth, is subtler than its gory contemporaries and wisely functions as a grounded drama before a queasy body-horror picture. It stars underrated character actress Marin Ireland in one of the year’s best performances as Rose, a doctor definitely on the autism spectrum. When the little girl of a nurse in her hospital, Celie (Scrubs‘ Judy Reyes), dies suddenly of bacterial meningitis, Rose sneaks the corpse of the child out of the hospital. Why? Because she’s working on an experimental and highly unethical project of re-animating the dead. When Celie follows Rose home one night, her extreme grief and a fervent desire to see her child alive again overcome her common sense, and she becomes Rose’s roommate and assistant in the project.

Written and directed by first-time filmmaker Laura Moss, the film effectively examines the ways our healthcare system seems to constantly fuck us and the cold and callous ways healthcare professionals often treat us, not least of all women, sometimes even by other women. Those expecting a high-octane zombie picture will be seriously disappointed. This nuanced horror film derives its thrills from something much scarier and more realistic than jump scares. Grade: B (Shudder/AMC+)

The Outwaters

Sure to alienate people and piss them right the hell off is Robbie Banfitch‘s The Outwaters, one of 2023’s many experimental horror films. However, while Skinamarink was only scary for three or so minutes out of its ass-numbing 100-minute runtime, and Enys Men was straight-up unwatchable, The Outwaters constantly engaged me even in its most frustrating and needlessly obscure moments. At 110 minutes, it’s about 30 minutes too long, but once it gets going, roughly an hour in, it produces some of the most frightening imagery I’ve seen this year in cinema.

Part of the film’s effectiveness is that we never know exactly what is happening. Effectively using one of my least favorite horror techniques, found footage, the film presents itself as four memory cards found in the desert where four missing thirty-somethings were supposed to be. From what we can tell, two amateur filmmakers took their aspiring singer/songwriter friend out to the desert, along with an annoying woman from work, to shoot footage for the friend’s music video. Somewhere along the line, the group of friends started being attacked by spirits or an ancient evil existing out there. What begins as super loud thunder soon turns into mystery tall men covered in blood, equipped with axes, long intensine-looking blood slugs that break your foot bones, and hearing your mom’s voice randomly.

While the characters are super basic, I bought them as real people who could exist, making it all the more spooky. Typically, these movies exaggerate how obnoxious the characters are so you don’t feel bad when they get their stomachs ripped open. This is usually a misstep unless you’re making something satirical or overly goofy. I’m glad The Outwaters resisted this urge. It is a very polarizing movie that many critics have expressed passionate hate towards, but overall, it worked for me. Grade: B- (Tubi/Screambox)