Nothing bad this week.

The Bikeriders

I’m a fan of writer/director Jeff Nichols. The Arkansas-born filmmaker has proven his versatility time and time again, seamlessly switching from end-of-the-world parables to science fiction to even a modern-day retelling of Mark Twain‘s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Whatever the genre he’s working in, he always finds very human stories to tell with a clear, prevailing message. That’s what makes The Bikeriders so frustrating, an interesting but wildly uneven tale about the inner workings of a fictional 1960s motorcycle gang. Nichols creates a wide array of fascinating characters but fails to explore them in depth or even bring them together in a cohesive story. The Bikeriders feels like high-quality scrapped parts, haphazardly welded together to create a vehicle that just don’t run.

Killing Eve‘s Jodie Comer plays Kathy Bauer, basically the movie’s narrator and then-girlfriend of Benny, a particularly brooding member of the biker gang played by Austin Butler. She’s being interviewed by photography student Danny Lyon, played by Challengers’ Mike Faist and based on the real-life photojournalist who wrote the book the movie is based on. She begins the tale by describing how she met Benny and fell for his odd bad boy charms, but as time went on and the gang became increasingly more dangerous/violent, she started to fear for Benny’s safety and her own. While most of the movie is pulled from Kathy’s interview, Danny interviews/hangs with different members of the gang, including Johnny, played in a very big and very entertaining performance by Tom Hardy. Johnny is your typical gang leader in many ways, but in others, most notably his sensitivity towards the brooding Benny, he’s not.

While Kathy is the narrator, the movie is mainly focused on the relationship between Benny and Johnny, leaving Kathy a bit underdeveloped. While writing this review, I tried for fifteen minutes to think of a better way to describe her than “Benny’s girlfriend,” but all of the female characters are very one-dimensional in The Bikeriders. In almost every scene, they’re regulated to the background, simply observing what’s happening with their men. This is a shame because I doubt they don’t have a perspective on all of this. Perhaps it was Nichols’ way of saying they took a backseat to the gang for all the members, but why didn’t he explore that concept more?

That’s my biggest question about the movie; why didn’t Nichols‘ explore all of these themes more? He touches on the idea of processing the end of an era, how all promising endeavors eventually spoil with time, and even how superficial societal expectations seemingly push people to be outlaws in the first place. Yet, he never follows through with any of them. If you’re going to leave your themes vague, why not explore your characters instead? Nichols not only has three great leads in Comer, Hardy, and Butler, but an impressive ensemble cast that relegates the brilliant Michael Shannon to one good monologue, and that’s it. The Bikeriders feels like a tremendous eight-part miniseries whittled down to a two-hour movie for the summer multiplex audiences. What a shame because this picture has so many excellent little parts. It was just assembled poorly. Grade: B- (In Theaters)

Kinds of Kindness

If you were among the many people who thought Poor Things was too weird, seriously, stay home for this one. Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lathinmos has made a career of making seriously fucked up movies, but this is perhaps his most callous. Re-teaming with his old writing partner, Efthymis Filippou, from his Dogtooth and Lobster days, and not Tony McNamara, who wrote his two most accessible films – The Favourite and Poor Things – Lathinmos has crafted a riveting and hilarious three-part dark comedy anthology, with each vignette being more hopeless than the last.

All of this would seem totally sadistic if Kinds of Kindness were merely cruel for cruelty’s sake, but it offers profound insights into twisted but not too uncommon human behavior, usually by putting its characters in the most absurd of situations and having them play it completely straight. This is aided immensely by the two remarkable lead performances at its center. Emma Stone and Jesse Plemmons each play three different characters, one per segment, and all are incredibly nuanced. Plemmons, in particular, stands out in his characterizations, delivering what I believe is the actor’s best screen work to date. It’s no mystery why he won the Best Actor prize at Cannes this year. The supporting cast is rounded out by Hong Chau, Margaret Qualley, Momoudou Athie, Joe Alwyn, and the one and only Willem Dafoe, each playing three different roles as well. Euphoria‘s Hunter Schaefer is also in the last segment, but it’s unclear why she doesn’t play roles in the first two.

In an effort to let you enter the movie as fresh as possible, I won’t reveal much about the segments other than that the first is about a well-dressed man (Plemmons) being manipulated by a sugar daddy (Dafoe), the second follows a cop (Plemmons) whose wife (Stone) is missing, and the third is about a cult member (Stone) trying to find a woman with the ability to bring the dead back to life. Every segment is well executed, with each getting progressively darker. In fact, the second segment was so disturbing to my audience that five members got up and left in a huff. I didn’t think the third segment could be any bleaker, but guess what?

For 140 minutes, the film chugs along at a beautiful pace, but during its final 24, it begins to run out of gas. This certainly isn’t due to a lack of ideas being presented on the screen but merely because experiencing this much back-to-back misery, no matter how funny or fascinating, is a grueling endurance test. Most audiences, especially mainstream audiences, will find it absolutely appalling and maybe even confusing. Kinds of Kindness is a movie that hurts, but for me, it hurt so good. Grade: B+ (In Theaters)

Fantasmas

Generally, I’ll wait for a series to end before I review it, but halfway through Julio Torres‘ Fantasmas, I knew this was the best sketch comedy since I Think You Should Leave. While it may not be as clutch-your-sides-as-you-involuntarily-slide-off-your-couch funny as that show, it makes up for it in sheer ingenuity. This is the cleverest television comedy I’ve seen in quite some time, with Torres‘ concepts ranging from excellent to undeniably brilliant. It’s also extraordinarily queer and makes no apologies for it.

The show isn’t all sketches, though—there’s a narrative through line where Julio plays himself—a creative in search of work in New York City. After successfully pitching a clear-colored crayon to the big wigs at Crayola, Julio treats himself to an oyster-shaped diamond earring, which he loses the same night at a rave. The rest of the series focuses on him trying to get his earring back while taking detours that lead to self-contained sketches. There’s a wickedly funny Alf parody featuring Paul Dano and a cookie and spaghetti-eating pink monster, a bizarre ad for a toilet bowl decorator featuring Aidy Bryant, a gay hamster nightclub, and even a near poignant sketch about kids drawing dicks.

Perhaps my favorite sketch so far is Torres‘ re-interpretation of letters of the alphabet as performance artists. Q, played by Steve Buscemi decked out in punk gear, and sporting a blue mohawk, is bombing on stage. He complains to the venue’s booking manager that his material is too off-beat for this early in the lineup and that he really needs the audience to be more “liquored up.” It’s also not helping that he’s sandwiched between two of the most mainstream and accessible letters in the alphabet – P and R. From there, he struggles to get work, playing weird songs about social security in the subway station for spare change when a cocky colleague, the letter O, approaches and offers him work as an understudy. “Just lose the little stick, and you’re me!” From there, it spirals and concludes on a genuinely touching note.

Besides one-off guest appearances, the show has two recurring characters in Julio’s life. The first is his agent, Vanesja, played exceptionally well by Martine Gutierrez, who is actually a performance artist pretending to be his agent, but so deep into the method process, she’s actually doing legitimate agent work for him. The second is Chester, played hilariously by Tomas Matos, a service driver who created their own ridesharing app, “Chester,” to compete with Uber. Technically, there are three, if you count Bibo, Julio’s robot assistant who continuously attempts to get him to face reality.

Fantasmas is undoubtedly not for everyone. Those wanting more traditional sketch comedy might be lost with how far this chases its own tail down a peculiar humor rabbit hole. Still, for those craving something new and actually fresh this uncommonly disappointing television season, Fantasmas is a rare gift. Something inarguably original that we’ve never seen before. Grade: A (Max)

Stopmotion

The most A24 horror film I’ve ever seen that’s actually not an A24 horror film, Robert Morgan‘s Stopmotion, is an effective but somewhat treaded-upon arthouse fright flick. It takes a very familiar plot of indie horror films: an off-beat protagonist being haunted by something but actually just being self-sabotaged by their own mental illness until they’ve become the villain of their own story. Don’t worry, I didn’t really spoil anything. Stopmotion isn’t about plot or character but an orchestrated pairing of disturbing images meant to elicit fear or unease from the viewer. What I’m trying to say, in true roundabout fashion, is that the set-up of Stopmotion may be old hat, but the film’s grotesque imagery is often unique and downright terrifying.

Irish actress Aisling Franciosi, so brilliant in Jennifer Kent‘s The Nightingale and also very good here, plays Ella Blake, a stop motion animator determined to finish her dying mother’s short film. She has a boyfriend with a corporate job (Tom York) who makes “music” on the side, but he’s certainly no artist and thus doesn’t understand Ella. No one in her life really does, apart from her overbearing mother who is now catatonic in a hospital bed. One day, a mysterious little girl (Caoilinn Springall) wanders into Ella’s apartment and starts hijacking her movie project, dictating what story Ella needs to tell. From the onset, it’s clear there’s something off with this little girl; most likely, she only exists in Ella’s imagination. Is she Ella as a child or merely a representation of the unquestioning and unrestrained child imagination most artists seek when diving into their work? We never know, and honestly, we don’t need to know.

Stopmotion is a movie that finds its rhythms in tones and haunting imagery over any sensical plot mechanizations. From that perspective, it’s a small triumph. Ella makes her stop-motion characters out of raw cow steaks, cigarette ash, and dead roadkill outside her apartment. It’s revolting but also fascinating, and the mere idea of that gets under your skin more than anything else. I liked this film because, above anything else, it’s about the creative process and the dark, miserable places artists are willing to bring themselves in order to create something meaningful. Grade: B (AMC+)