Only one stinker this week.

Civil War

My first thought after leaving the theater showing Civil War was, “I wonder how this movie will fare in 10 years?” I have a sneaking suspicion it will all but mostly be forgotten about. This isn’t to say Alex Garland (Men, Annihilation, Ex-Machina) has made a bad film because he hasn’t. He’s made a good film, but it’s nowhere near great. The best thing about the movie is the uniformly excellent cast, from the leads to the bit players. Even if the characters seem a bit two-dimensional and some of their dialogue exchanges seem a little too forced or manufactured – in a way where, as the viewer, you’re actively aware that you’re listening to Garland‘s ideas instead of the character’s. The second best thing about the movie is Garland‘s superb visual style, significantly displayed in a handful of genuinely suspenseful and beautifully choreographed action sequences. The film’s climax, especially, is the single most gripping ten-minute stretch I’ve seen in a movie this year.

Civil War opens with the unnamed President of the United States rehearsing a State of the Union address he’s about to give on live television. He’s flubbing his lines with some low-key George W. Bush energy. Nick Offerman plays him in a role that totals two minutes of screen time. His flubs and overall nervous energy kick things off with some levity. That is until we actually hear what his speech is – him boasting about what a great military victory he just had bombing the fuck out of other American cities. The picture he paints is of a country all but destroyed. Still, he does mention he’s anxiously awaiting the rebel fighters’ surrender so we all can return to normalcy. Whatever that normalcy looks like. We then cut to Kirsten Dunst‘s Lee, a veteran photojournalist sitting on a hotel bed, reviewing footage on her camera while watching this on TV. Right after, we see a giant explosion in the city from her room window. It doesn’t phase her much.

From there, we learn that Lee and her partner, Joel (Wagner Moura, who you may recognize from Narcos and memes as Pablo Escobar), are trying to go to Washington, D.C., to get an interview with the President before it’s predicted that rebel forces will defeat the white house and kill his ass. “It’s a suicide mission!” says Sammy, an old veteran New York Times reporter played by the always delightful Stephen McKinley Henderson (Dune Part One, Beau Is Afraid, Lady Bird). He, along with an aspiring teenage photojournalist named Jessie (Priscilla‘s Cailee Spaeney, in the best performance of the film), tag along with Lee and Joel. Civil War then becomes a road movie, where the four travel across the country to get to D.C., encountering one fucked up, generally action-packed situation after the next. This could have been a video game.

This movie has some surprises and fantastically staged action and suspense sequences. It never glorifies violence, however, and you always feel the danger in the pit of your stomach. This part is done so effectively that it makes you wish the characters were more deeply drawn. As they stand, they all represent specific character archetypes we’ve seen in countless movies before; the only saving grace is that they’re portrayed by fantastic actors. There are a few cameos here and there, but really, the one that stands out is Jesse Plemmons as a racist sociopath leading a small army of militants in what looks like just murdering any minority they can get their hands on. He’s so good at never overplaying psychopaths, and the one he creates here comes along at the perfect point in the movie. It’s maybe the most chilling scene in Civil War, a film full of them.

Overall, it seems that Garland was aiming for something much more resonant and profound than what this is – a well-made but not particularly notable thriller about the cold but necessary detachment of journalists. If Garland had taken bigger, more confident swings, this would have either been a total disaster, maybe even an offensively tasteless one, or a bonafide masterpiece that perfectly reflected the zeitgeist and had much to say about the world we live in. Civil War is frequently engaging and competently put together, but ultimately disappointing, as it’s really just a series of very safe choices. Grade: B (In Theaters)

Curb Your Enthusiasm

Oh, how the mighty have fallen. Look, I get it. Making one episode of excellent television is a near-impossible feat of magic. Larry David has given us eight seasons of it. Seven more if you count Seinfeld. The first eight seasons (12 years) of Curb Your Enthusiasm were fantastic. Then, something changed when he returned with the show six years later, in 2017. The plotting was more forced, Larry’s assholishness was over-the-top, and the show was shot in too high a definition. There were no more surprises. Leon (J.B. Smoove) was still great, but I digress. The magic was gone. Our Curb baby grew up to be a boring adult. Sure, we got some good stuff throughout the show’s final four seasons, but nothing ever rose to the level of Curb at its best. This final season was the worst. Even worse than “Fatwa.” Maybe that was the joke…a big one on our collectively stupid asses. To see if we’d still heap praise onto something so closely resembling the feces of an animal.

The final season of Curb Your Enthusiasm involves Larry getting arrested for unknowingly breaking a bullshit voting law in Georgia. He’s in Georgia for a meet-and-greet appearance he ends up not getting paid for because he’s such a prick. Anyway, he meets up with Auntie Ray from Season 6, Leon’s aunt, who is in line to vote. Larry hands her a water bottle, and since that’s illegal in Georgia, so he gets arrested and put on trial. After that, he becomes a public hero, and the remainder of the season sees him trying to prepare for his trial, where there’s a real possibility he’s going to jail. There are a bunch of other dumb subplots this season involving racist black lawn jockeys, COVID-19, golf swings, and colostomy bags; all of it reads really hack. There are some bright moments, though – guest star Tracey Ullman sings the J.G. Wentworth theme, guest star Lori Loughlin really has no qualms about shitting all over her public persona, and the Sienna Miller episode is actually pretty good. However, for every inspired moment, there are three boring ones. Even exceptional guest stars like Conan O’Brien, Steve Buscemi, and the boss, Bruce Springsteen, can’t bring Curb out of its slump.

The series finale is the worst, though. The whole season, they hint at a particular outcome, and you think there’s no way they’ll do exactly what they’re telling us they’ll do. Then they do, and it’s so anti-climactic. Usually, I would be less harsh on a show, but this is the equivalent of an honor roll student suddenly doing C- work. In the words of Auntie Ray, “Fuck you, Larry David!” Grade: C– (Max)

The Regime

Most critics were much harsher on The Regime than it deserved. It’s a broadly funny satire with underdeveloped characters that isn’t half as clever as it thinks, but it’s mostly saved by its two lead performances. Kate Winslet plays Elena Vernham, the chancellor of a fake Central European autocracy. She wasn’t voted into office but inherited the post when her father died. She’s a wildly incompetent and delusional narcissist, made all the worse when she decides to elect a disgraced soldier as her most trusted advisor. This soldier, Herbert Zubak, went apeshit during a riot and murdered a bunch of protestors trying to get food. He’s played by Belgian actor Matthias Schoenartes, in the series’ best and most interesting performance. Unfortunately, we don’t learn enough about Elena, and despite Winslet‘s best efforts, we never empathize or understand her the way I think we’re meant to. There are a lot of gags per episode; some work, others don’t, and the supporting roles are all underwritten. This is especially true of Andrea Riseborough‘s Agnes, the royal palace manager, who seems to exist merely as a plot device. We get some very entertaining cameo performances by Martha Plimpton as the chairwoman of the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and Hugh Grant as the former chancellor now ousted from power and secretly living in the palace’s dungeon. However, most of The Regime plays like Armando Ianucci-lite. Iannucci, of course, created Veep and The Thick of It, two political satires far ahead of this one in craft and depth. As it stands, this is a moderately entertaining and interesting misfire, but a misfire nonetheless. Grade: B- (Max)

Ripley

Remakes and literary adaptations are tricky business. Remakes of famous literary adaptations are even trickier and often feel entirely unwarranted. The only time they are really successful is if the creator has an altogether different take on the material, as was the case when Oscar-winning screenwriter Steve Zaillian (Schindler’s List, The Irishman, American Gangster, HBO’s The Night Of) wanted to remake The Talented Mr. Ripley, a wildly successful late 90s Matt Damon movie based on the celebrated novel of the same name by Patricia Highsmith. Gone are the lush colors and bright sun of Italy, replaced with gorgeous but brooding black and white cinematography, maybe the best I’ve ever seen in a television series, by Oscar-winning Director of Photography Robert Elswit (There Will Be Blood, Nightcrawler, Good Night and Good Luck). The characters of Tom Ripley, Dickie Greenleaf, and Margie are aged up to their late 30s/early 40s from their mid-20s. Speaking of the characters, Dickie is less manic and more boring than he is in the 90s version, and Margie is colder and less full of life. However, the key is the change to the title character of Tom Ripley, who is not a calculating mastermind in this version. He’s a sloppy, third-rate con man who is pathetically in lust with Dickie Greenleaf and who succeeds in his crimes based solely on how easy it was to get away with ANYTHING in 1961…especially in 1961 Italy. Most of this works, but some of it doesn’t.

This is my favorite interpretation of the Tom Ripley character I’ve seen, mainly due to the richly detailed and phenomenally understated performance by Andrew Scott (All of Us Strangers, Fleabag). He carries this series by its feet. Dakota Fanning‘s down-played version of Margie bests Paltrow‘s more traditional take, but I think Jude Law blows a solid but unmemorable Johnny Flynn out of the water with his more colorful take on Dickie Greenleaf. Philip Seymour Hoffman delivered the best performance of the film, but here, his role is played by Sting‘s non-binary offspring, Eliot Sumner, in a bafflingly miscalculated and almost incoherent performance. I don’t know what Sumner is attempting to do with the character, but they’re certainly not acting; they’re barely standing and speaking words of dialogue. The Italian cast is uniformly excellent, with Maurizio Lombardi standing out as the Rome detective hot on Ripley’s case. There’s also an outstanding performance by a cat who serves excellent face.

The show begins to fall apart in its pacing and length towards the end. It is significantly stronger in its first half, peaking in its third episode, than in reaching a climax; it feels like it could have been five or six episodes instead of the eight we got. I read that creator Steve Zaillian aged up the actors because he thought it was just more pathetic that trust fund baby Dickie Greenleaf is out in Italy living the life of a kid at age 40. While I agree with that assessment, it presents more of a problem for the Ripley character aged up to 40. In the original, it made sense Dickie’s wealthy father would hire a 20-something without life prospects to find his son. In this version, it makes less sense he’d trust a 40-something without life prospects to find his son. Wouldn’t he be able to quickly tell this dude is sort of a non-launcher (at least in his eyes) who won’t be able to get the job done?

Given the series’ sheer scope and beauty and Scott‘s performance’s sheer power, these quibbles are easy to forgive. I recognized pacing flaws throughout, but I was never bored or disengaged at any point. This is a slow burn, but one I really enjoyed. Grade: B+ (Netflix)

The First Omen

POTENTIAL SPOILERS

Many horror movies are released yearly, but 2024 is something else. It seems two horror movies are being released every week, and I can’t keep track. So many are being released that two horror movies with more or less the same exact plot were released within the same two-week period – Immaculate and The First Omen. Two movies about a young American novice in Italy waiting to take her final vows but, in the meantime, unwillingly carrying the antichrist in her body. While Immaculate was a far more ambitious religious horror movie with shades of drama, The First Omen knows precisely what it is – fun, disposable trash that takes you on a two-hour ride that allows you to forget about it as soon as you leave the movie theater. It’s a better movie because it aims much lower and is easy to execute.

Nell Tiger Free plays our young novice protagonist, and while her performance isn’t as good as Sydney Sweeney‘s in the other pregnant nun movie, it’s pretty solid. Audiences most likely know her from playing Myrcella Baratheon in Game of Thrones, or if they have AppleTV+, they know her from playing the nanny in the M. Night Shyamalan show Servant. Speaking of Game of Thrones, Tywin Lannister himself, Charles Dance, has a brief role as a priest. Bill Nighy, Ralph Ineson, and Sônia Braga fill out the supporting cast, all excellent actors in purposefully one-dimensional roles.

The First Omen is dumb fun, it’s never not entertaining and for a horror movie that lasts two full hours, that’s a bit of a miracle. Grade: B (In Theaters)