Archive

Drama

White Lightning – 2.5 stars

March 11, 2025
2 stars, 70s, Action/Disaster, Drama
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I was abandoned this past weekend, and I don’t do well alone. With an empty house and the care of a disinterested 15-year-old cat entrusted to me, I took the time to catch up on a few 70s flicks in my queue, including this strange creature.

Burt Reynolds – not at the height of his popularity, but post-Deliverance – is Arkansas inmate Gator McCluskey. He’s in the federal pen for illegal liquor running when he learns that a crooked sheriff (Ned Beatty) has murdered his younger brother. Why? Because the brother was a meddlesome hippie, and Beatty does not like hippies. So, Gator gets out, insinuates himself into the county, and exacts his revenge.

There’s a lot bad to meh here.  The “I hate hippies” thing is unexplained – we never really know what the kid did to deserve being dumped in the swamp, and a sit-down between Beatty and Reynolds never happens. And the women of the Arkansas county are so carnal in their attraction to Gator, it seems cartoonish. Worse, there are tons of car chases, but not of the ilk of The French Connection or The Seven-Ups or Bullitt. Just a lot of banal vrooming around dusty country roads. From this demon seed sprouted Smokey & the Bandit and Cannonball Run (Hal Needham was a mere stuntman for the picture, but a few years later, he was second unit director on a reprise, Gator, and then he moved on to directing the slop that was Smokey and the Bandit I & II and Cannonball Run I & II). The first glimpses of Reynolds’ giggling, slapsticky, “I don’t give a fuck” mien can be found in the flick as well.    

There are a few notes on the plus side of the ledger. Reynolds connects. He has movie star gravitas and just enough menace left over from Deliverance to project power and fear. Beatty is also strong, exuding a meanness and lethality in the guise of a portly bureaucrat. The film also takes a few runs at a healthy cynicism.

Fun facts – at the tail end of his career, the picture’s screenwriter, William Norton, did 19 months for ferrying guns to the IRA. After being released from prison, he moved to Nicaragua, where he shot and killed an intruder in his home. He then spent a year living in Cuba, was unimpressed, and was smuggled into the U.S. by his ex-wife.

Where is this film?

On Amazon, not recommended except as a curio.      

Killers of the Flower Moon – 1.5 stars

February 10, 2025
1 star, 2023, Drama, Historical
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I pledged to go to the theater Saturday to see the three-and-a-half hour The Brutalist. I begged off at the last minute, but then, the guilt of it made me do penance.

I watched Killers of the Flower Moon, another glaring omission, especially on the part of an unpaid film reviewer. Killers was adapted from David Grann’s best-selling book about a series of murders of Osage Indians in the 1920s, crimes borne of their oil wealth and societal vulnerability.

The good.

Martin Scorsese is no slouch behind the camera, and he ably presents the grandeur and sweep of Osage life and the peculiar opulence that sprouted about it. The film looks and feels like a $200 million picture. The detail is impeccable and the feel authentic (not the garish, silly design of Gangs of New York).

Lily Gladstone. Her job as the stoic sufferer of any number of depredations could have been capably performed with simple solemnity. But she infuses it with charm, passion, and subtle resignation. In a film during which I often found myself stifling a yawn, she was captivating.     

To the bad.

Scorsese seems to be having a late-in-life problem with repetitive scenes. Here, we are treated to at least a half dozen scenes of Robert De Niro (the bad guy) telling Leonardo DiCaprio (his nephew and henchman) what to do, DiCaprio getting more and more upset, and De Niro just yelling at him again and again. Much like The Irishman, the movie is 3.5 hours. In that film, it was “1.5 hours … trying to get Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino) either to his senses or a meeting.” Here, it is De Niro and DiCaprio bickering.

Worse, their interminable mugging is to the detriment of more interesting characters and subplots, from the resistance of one white man (played quite ably by Jason Isbell), to the genesis of the federal investigation, to the intervention of an Indian investigator, to the actual murders themselves.  Simply put, no one gives a flying fig about these two one-dimensional, barking characters, but there they are, hogging all the scenery at the trough.

The film is also painfully confused. Is this a testament to a historical wrong? A little. But that factor seems mailed in, with scenes of Osage registering objection, but no real agency. Which is fine.  Most people in history have little to no agency. They are subject to the cruelties of their surroundings. It leaves us the machinations of the criminals. But they are so simple (Osage sheep, whites sheep shearers), they don’t lend themselves to captivating drama. Also, Scorsese’s tie to the Tulsa race massacre seems cheap and manipulative.

Is it a procedural or whodunit? Nope.  We know the villain from moment one, he only lacks a mustache to twirl, and when the case is cracked in the last third, it is by far the best part of the picture. But the way it is solved is mundane. They try to break a guy, he gives a bit of guff but soon talks. The book was very much a whodunit and a procedural, grippingly so.

Is it a love story? Scorsese tries, but there is no real chemistry between DiCaprio and Gladstone, certainly, not enough to sustain his serial abuses, i.e., his central part in the murder of her family and friends. The lovable scamp!

Is it a psychological portrait? Perhaps. DiCaprio is the guilty henchman, no doubt, but he is so glaringly stupid (Scorsese even give him pointless unwieldy teeth, this side of Simple Jack), you wonder if the character’s psychology is worth the inquiry.

The writing is not so much weak as it is misdirected. If you’re going to pay $5 million for adaptation rights to a book, why jettison the most interesting parts? The book really digs into the strange origins and dichotomy of the Osage and their oil wealth, which was borne of their savvy as much as their geographic fortune. Here, they hit oil, and the rest is a surface coverage of their spendthrift ways and the fact that to access the wealth, they need white guardians. Scorsese presents this in a sort of mashed up montage. Similarly, the book covers the birth of the FBI and the investigation of the corrupt locals from a federal agent, a first. Here, the Feds just show up (led by a criminally underutilized Jesse Plemons) and start to brace some dudes.          

Like The Irishman, I felt this would never end, and like The Irishman, the universal plaudits feel like they are being artificially elevated on the vapor of Scorsese’s status and the ennobling of the cause.          

Blitz – 1 star

February 10, 2025
1 star, 2024, Drama, Historical
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In the Gary Oldman Churchill vehicle, I wrote of, “one of the most cringe-inducing scenes you’ll ever see, when Winston Churchill finds himself on the Underground getting his back stiffened by ‘the people’ [which was] patently ridiculous.  The only thing missing on that subway car is Tiny Tim exclaiming ‘God Bless Us, everyone,’ thereby spurring Churchill to reject appeasement and declare that England would ‘never surrender.’”

In Blitz, near every scene feels as authentic as THAT scene. Darkest Hour meets Sesame Street meets Yo’ Teach. Tired, anachronistic piffle.

If you can get past the Model U.N. in the Tube, you are made of very stern stuff.

Steve McQueen, not the actor but the director of 12 Years A Slave, needs some perspective. This film comes six years after his last, the uneven Widows, and the rust and ennui shows.

A friend put it perfectly: “It is as if he wanted to make a standard racial parable, but knowing how played out that could be, jammed it into a period piece.”  

McQueen did himself no favors in casting either. Saoirse Ronan opts for 90% beatific. Playing her son, Elliott Heffernan just doesn’t register, starting with sullen and eventually advancing to more sullen. When he stretches, it is more miss than hit. As he told Variety, when asked to cry, “I pretended my mom was taking away my PlayStation.” It is Heffernan’s first gig, and yes, it looked like his mom took away his PlayStation. 

I’ll give McQueen the accomplished look. The opening scene of men fighting a post-bombing fire and Heffernan’s journey across the English countryside to escape the terror are arrestingly resonant.

On Apple.

A Complete Unknown – 4.75 stars

January 21, 2025
2024, 4 stars, Drama, Historical, Musical
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For a music bio, you can max-mythologize a dolt and maybe no one will notice the subject is super boring.  See The Doors. Elvis. Bohemian Rhapsody.

Or you can play it straight and overarching, maybe puncture the myth in parts, but ultimately, tell a big, soup-to-nuts, rags to riches story rather than create more ornament for the church.  See Ray. Straight Outta’ Compton. La Bamba.

But when you add kick-ass performances from people who can really sing, and a thoughtful, tight script, then I’m in.  See The Buddy Holly Story.  Coal Miner’s Daughter. Walk the Line.

Luckily for Bob Dylan, the director of the latter, James Mangold, took this picture on.

We meet Dylan as he is deposited in NYC to meet his idol, Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) who, robbed of his voice, is tended to in a New Jersey hospital by Pete Seeger (Edward Norton). Seeger and Guthrie see greatness, Seeger takes Dylan under his wing and we are off to the races, from aspiring folkie in 1961 to superstar in 1965, as Dylan weighs the dilemma of a lifetime:

Willeth I go electric?

“Will he go electric?” is actually a big deal in Dylan’s world, one fleshed out by Mangold and screenwriter Jay Cocks (Silence, Gangs of New York), as the genesis and essence of the folk milieu is revealed to us.

Of course, we want electric, but Cocks makes us understand the instincts of the standard bearers. They are curmudgeons, maybe, but they are earnest. The folk movement is something they built, sure, a lot of it on Dylan’s back, but their protective nature is not ridiculed. Quite the opposite. Cocks gives Seeger a great speech wherein he urges Dylan to stay acoustic in the service of a larger musical aim.

Still, the film doesn’t make the tug larger than that, and Dylan’s switch does not stand in ostentatiously for “bigger” themes.

Similarly, the pressure of going from lauded unknown folkie to superstar is not treated as an excuse for bad behavior or a major unfairness. It’s an annoyance that informs Dylan’s desires, and while we get the pressure he is under, as played by Chalamet, Dylan is made kind of dick because of it, equal parts sympathetic and petulant.

Mangold also has fun with the times. The look is spot-on, particularly of early 60s Greenwich Village, and we get the fun interdiction of Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook), a Dylan supporter and pen pal. And Al Kooper just jumping in a studio to hit the organ for the start of “Like A Rolling Stone” because he could not play guitar on the track?

Goosebumps.

Ultimately, as with Walk the Line, the music is the star. Chalamet sinks smartly into the role, traversing the road from wise but sweet neophyte to badgered superstar, but he sings great and quite a lot. All the performances crackle but he really nails it.

Mangold also does a great job with Dylan and his first girlfriend (they have an exchange about the plate-spinners on variety shows that is touchingly smart and Elle Fanning really resonates as the gal who took Dylan in only to see him grow beyond her attentions).

The Joan Baez relationship is more ragged. She just seems like a bitch, angry that Dylan criticized her songwriting (“’Sunsets and seagulls.’ ‘The smell of buttercups…’ Your songs are like an oil painting at the dentist’s office”). Mind you, that would piss most anyone off, but they continue as a couple with no discernible attraction, and the why seems thin.

A minor nit.  Great fun, moving, and impressive. Top 5 of 2024.            

Anora – 5 stars

January 14, 2025
2024, 5 stars, Comedy, Drama
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Sean Baker (The Florida Project) delivers an uproarious, tender, unexpected love story, powered by a rollicking, unyielding performance from Mikey Madison as the lead (last seen by me as one the Manson gals of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, the one who Leonardo DiCaprio ultimately dispatches with a flamethrower).

Anora, or Ani, works as a stripper at Headquarters in Midtown, a sanctum where she peddles her wares (simple company, lap dances, and in the private rooms, maybe more). She supplements her income as an escort. Sex is transactional, which does not devalue her ability to enjoy it, but the financial nature permeates the act such that her brittle nature seems organic rather than a symptom.

Then, she meets her knight in shining armor, Vanya, the child-like, fun-loving son of a Russian oligarch (Mark Eydelshteyn), who blows through Daddy’s rubles like water, rents her for the week, and then, after a bender in Vegas, marries her. This obviously does not go down well, and the oligarch must rely on his Armenian reps in New York to rectify the situation. They are not quite the Eastern thugs of lore, and their intercession is more Three Stooges than John Wick.

As they say, hilarity ensues.

As does much more. The connection between the man-child Vanya and Anora is in part about money, yes, but you can feel a spark, and even though Anora remains focused on the payments, soon, she fancies herself Julia Roberts. This is love, and he is hers, even if he just started shaving. You know that it cannot be, but Baker has you as enthralled as Anora, on pins and needles, hoping against all hope and reason. When the forces of power intercede, they are partially represented by an Armenian thug Igor (Boris Yurasov) who reveals a gentle, protective disposition and an alternative approach, one that Anora fights with the same verve and fire she exhibits to hold on to Vanya.

Ultimately, there is a reckoning, a declaration of independence, and a new beginning, but before we get there, Anora and her unwelcome coterie of Armenian minders endure an evening that harkens to Scorsese’s After Hours.

As with The Florida Project, Baker has such command of place, you feel immersed. Here, due to the whirlwind nature of the story, Baker’s pace is not Florida languid, but Big Apple urgent and exhilarating. It’s a joy ride with heart.

Madison, Eydelshteyn, and Yurasov all deserve Oscar nominations, and my fingers are crossed, as Madison and Yurasov received nominations for the Golden Globes.    

I have many films to see, but this is currently the leader in the clubhouse for best of the year.

My Old Ass – 0 stars

January 7, 2025
0 stars, 2024, Comedy, Drama
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Elliott, a vacuous, self-satisfied, snarky Canadian teenager (Maisy Stella) is visited by her 39 year old self (Aubrey Plaza) during a mushroom trip. Plaza’s old ass has much to say to Elliott’s young ass, much of it a violation of the Prime Directive, the guiding principle of Starfleet that prohibits its members from interfering with the natural development of alien civilizations.

Yes. I watched Star Trek. What of it?

The set-up is well worn. Elliott wants to get off the family cranberry farm and find herself in the big city of Toronto. She is meant to be celebrated for her freedom and grab-life-by-the fistful approach. She’s gonna’ shake the red juice off her small town boots and let loose before global warming interferes with her cell service. She’s a rebel. But she’s also a loudly stupid and narcissistic rebel, and all the soft piano, oboe, and terrible acoustic dirges cannot make her interesting.

With a lead who could act and a less obvious, smarter script, My Old Ass could have been a clever twist on the coming of age flick, Freaky Friday meets A Christmas Carol.

Stella (member of the music duo Lennon & Maisy), however, cannot act. She is one-note, snotty, and charmless. She makes Disney Channel kids seem method. 

The film has a few genuine moments where Plaza, Elliott’s mother, and her would-be first boyfriend all present Elliott with a remembrance, a well-rendered insight, a moment of tenderness. In response, Elliott – not allowed to say “dude, what the fuck? for the umpteenth time- offers a “dude, what the fuck?” countenance. Any expressed emotion crashes into her stubbornly smug visage, where it thuds. Such that we are thinking, “Miley Cyrus could have really done something with this role!”

Worse, no one has bothered to make the trick explainable. After the drug trip ends, inexplicably, Plaza still texts and calls and visits Elliott. Tripping as portal to an Apple data plan? This is lazy mush and indicative of the ragged nature of this endeavor. 

The script is mostly middling sitcom. Plaza and Elliott say cool stuff like “when do we …?” Followed by “oh my God. This happens …” Plaza says to Elliott: “Moisturize!” Elliott replies with a form of “What the fuck? Dude!???” Elliott to Plaza: “Can I kiss you?” Plaza replies with “ewwwwwwwwwwww!” or some derivation of same. Stella says “fuck” and “dude” and “like” and “sick” a lot. She spouts hip cliche’-ridden observations that may tickle the fancy of an 18 year old peer, but test the patience of anyone who has read a magazine. Or a cereal box.

When we get to the meat, Plaza reveals a particular thing Elliott must prepare for, something so obvious, it seems a perfunctorily preordained. It is asked to serve as the emotional linchpin of the movie, yet the most Stella can muster is the disappointment of a girl who pours a bowl of Lucky Charms only to find a low marshmallow count. 

Sometimes, in these flicks, you get some funny, well-drawn secondary characters who maybe could drag Stella along. But everybody is pretty vanilla and meh. When they have something to say, it is leaden with announcement and unforgivably banal. 

The film might have been saved if Plaza told Elliott not to take a particular hike and she did it anyway and then she was almost murdered by the Green River killer.

Missed opportunity. 

Last point. Yes, teens say “like” and “fuck” nonstop, like men in war curse beyond any comprehension. But to actually let characters lapse into this doggerel in a script? Jesus. It may as well be serial farting. 

The picture was on a few top 25s and 50s and very highly rated on Rottentomatoes.com.

Undeservedly so. Like dude, what the fuck. 

On Amazon. Thankfully, for free. 

A Real Pain – 5 stars

January 2, 2025
2024, 5 stars, Comedy, Drama
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A beautiful, meditative story about family, and the disconnect between ancestry, past, and shared blood. Writer-director Jesse Eisenberg (The Social Network), and Kieran Culkin (Succession) are disconnected cousins who used to be very close when young, and are now held together by a strong attachment to their recently deceased grandmother. In remembrance and per her wishes, they join a tour group to Poland to visit her origins, including the concentration camp she survived. In that journey, they hash out some old differences, reveal their insecurities and grievances, and otherwise, commune with the past. Culkin is enagaging,  charming, yet emotionally dictatorial, and peripatetic. Eisenberg is OCD, eclipsed, a little bit pissed off about it, and, yet, desperate for his cousin’s ability to connect while at the same time weary of having to clean up his emotional messes.

The film is never overt, but it is very touching, particularly when the fissures between the cousins arise in the midst of a supportive group of fellow tourists (one of whom is Jennifer Grey, from Dirty Dancing, who is really quite good, even if she looks nothing like she used to given the radical plastic surgery she underwent many years ago). They are all on their own journey for different reasons, and they quickly become another family to the two protagonists.

Eisenberg’s script is sharp and his direction leisurely. At times, his take felt a little like Sofia Coppola, such is his comfort with the silences and the scenery (his shooting at the camp is haunting). The pain of the characters, as juxtaposed against the history, is made more acute, but again, there is no resolution, no great battle royale, no truly deeper understanding. But, quite tenderly, the bonds are strengthened. The experience may not change their trajectories, but that seems baked into Eisenberg‘s cake.

A lovely, bittersweet picture.

The Apprentice – 3 stars

December 13, 2024
2024, 3 stars, Drama, Historical
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There are figures who defy biography. Some are dolts who we lionize because of an electric public persona, but after we peel back the skin, dig in, and nothing but soft goo is revealed, we adorn them with meaning if only to combat the dullness and our disappointment. Some are opaque, having lived a purposefully secretive life that does not lend itself to exposition. Some are so mythic, hagiography follows, lest a god be sullied. And many are just boring through and through, even if their impact was monumental.

How best to approach Donald Trump? I was thinking about why Saturday Night Live has such a problem caricaturing Trump and concluded that it is difficult to lampoon a cartoon. Trump is thuggish, brash, bombastic, ridiculous, and his persona – both before and during his political career – is that of someone who is already playing a part, man as product. Someone once observed that Bill Clinton was the most authentic phony they’d ever encountered, which makes him Trumpian on one level. The persona so effectively swallows the person that the former becomes innate.

Now, I don’t know what Donald Trump (or Bill Clinton, for that matter) is like privately, and Hollywood has yet to take on Clinton in biopic (we’ve had snippets, most recently Ryan Murphy’s rendition of the Lewinsky scandal, but nothing penetrating or overarching). And neither does screenwriter Gabriel Sherman. But he takes a fair stab, and it’s a game effort, for a time.

We meet Trump (Sebastian Stan) in the 70s, an ambitious son of an old-fashioned real estate developer who strives for entrée’ into tony Manhattan clubs while working for Daddy, collecting his rents in cheap New Jersey apartment housing. Donald has a dream – to develop a hotel in the then-hellscape of 42nd Street – something his father (Martin Donovan) considers an ill-advised fantasy. But Trump persists and soon, he meets another father figure, Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), who becomes his tutor and mentor. Cohn, a sybaritic fixer, protégé’ of Joe McCarthy, and executioner of the Rosenbergs, blackmails those who attempt to thwart his new charge, facilitating Trump’s rise. We watch Trump ascend, while negotiating the death of his alcoholic brother, eclipsing his father, and falling in love with Ivana (Maria Bakalova), all the while with Cohn in his ear. This is the part of the film that works, as we see a progression, both maturation and degeneration.

When we hit the 80s, Trump is on top, Cohn is crippled by AIDS, and their relationship deteriorates. With what feels like the snap of a finger, Trump is callous and brutal, as he repeats the Cohn mantra (attack, deny, always claim victory). But we don’t really see him ever employ those rules. In fact, he just reappears as a brute, and we are treated to the litany of rumor, concoction or well-known unflattering fact without context or explanation. Trump abandoned his brother, raped and verbally abused Ivana, tried to take financial advantage of his doddering father, gave Cohn fake diamond cufflinks, swung and missed in Atlantic City, took a lot of speed, wrote The Art of the Deal, mused about a political future, got liposuction and a scalp reduction, and is a germaphobe. One box after the other perfunctorily ticked. Just overt capsules, with all character-development jettisoned for dizzying visuals of the corrosive jet set life.

I suppose Sherman was trying to portray the seduction of Trump in concert with the go-go 80s, but it was done much better by Oliver Stone with Bud Fox in Wall Street, and even that movie can be garish and obvious.  

What does work, however, works very well. The Trump-Cohn relationship is beautifully drawn. The elder sees talent and vitality in the son he never had and a young man he refrains from seducing sexually, while the understudy finds the father who truly believes in him. When the former imparts his wisdom, it would have been nice if Sherman could have employed it more directly as the basis for Trump’s rejection, but it is enough that the devil gets his comeuppance from his Frankenstein, and you know it works, because you kind of feel bad for the devil.

Stan and Strong are riveting and I expect both actors to be nominated. Even if they were undeserving, Trump is irresistible bait for the Oscars and given the unflattering vignettes of the film and the fertile environment for decrying the Bad Orange Man, we and the Academy shall not be denied.  

Luckily, the actors are deserving. Strong is quickly becoming one of the most innovative character actors of his generation (I cannot so on enough about his turn in last years’ Armageddon Time, which, ironically, also included a young Trump character), and Stan manages to humanize a cartoon while incorporating the now ubiquitous Trump cadence and physicality, but doing so in a way that shows the features in infancy, so we can envision what they will be when we turn on our TVs today. Per Sherman, “And I think what Sebastian did so brilliantly is that he doesn’t try to impersonate Trump. He finds his own version of the character. And it works in a way where you feel like you’re watching a real person. You’re not watching Sebastian trying to be Donald Trump.” Dead on.

A solid, game, entertaining, very flawed near-hit that peters out.

On demand.

Rebel Ridge – 4.5 stars

December 12, 2024
2024, 4 stars, Action/Disaster, Crime/Mystery, Drama
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Writer-director Jeremy Saulnier’s Blue Ruin, an earthy, dark meditation on the messy and corroding influence of family blood oath and violence in rural Virginia, was such an assured debut, I was blown away. He followed up with the canny, creepy Green Room – where a band gets the worst gig ever playing for skinheads in the Upper Northwest – a commercial failure, perhaps because it was such a grounded horror film. No unstoppable evil or chop-licking psychos, just nasty, human, unregulated criminals with Swastikas and 12 packs who dig punk rock and live in the deep, deep woods. 

Rebel Ridge again showcases the director’s dead-on familiarity with small town America. No Chevy Truck “backbone of the USA” schmaltz or easy tropes of the rural downtrodden being done in by “the man’s system.”  Saulnier understands that most people are in some form or fashion paid by “the man’s system” and that system is what keeps mortgages current, power boats afloat, and Carnival cruises filled. In the small Southern hamlet that is our setting, graft, skimming, and railroading drifters end up just being part of the fabric, the next logical step for a speed trap town. 

What follows is a gripping, subtle melange of liberal fear of cops and conservative “power of the deep state” fear of the government, good old fashioned small town Walking Tall corruption via asset forfeiture and  … Rambo: First Blood.

No preening, no speeches, a lot of surprises, and a boffo, visceral, satisfying revenge fantasy ending, powered by Aaron Pierce’s reserved, steely leading turn. 

In spots, a bit ragged for Saulnier, and there is an underdeveloped relationship between Pierce and a plucky court clerk (AnnaSophia Robb), but those are nits.

On Netflix. 

Conclave – 5 stars

December 9, 2024
2024, 5 stars, Crime/Mystery, Drama
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A movie that works beautifully on several levels.  First, if you ever wanted an “inside” look at how a pope is selected, someone did their homework. Just like William Peter Blatty’s research into the ritual seemed so authentic in The Exorcist, and the hierarchy of a late 60s parochial school was nailed by John Patrick Shanley in Doubt, the convening of the cardinals to pick the next pontiff exudes legitimacy. Based on a Robert Harris novel, screenwriter Peter Straughn has a solid feel that comes from some religious experience and curiosity (“It was a world I was interested in. I was brought up Catholic. I was an altar boy, and I went to a Catholic school, so, in some ways it felt like home territory, even though I’m no longer a believer. I had one foot in the world and one foot out, so that interested me”).

Second, and I can’t write much on this, there is a satisfying Sixth Sensian reveal that is confident enough to leave it at that, without delving into the machinations of the ultimate selection. I was concerned we’d recap with a Murder on the Orient Express flashback diagram, but the picture is less about how we got to the selection than what it meant to get there and what it means. Better, the end is the kind of reveal that could have been wielded like a sledgehammer, but Straughn and Director Edward Berger (All Quiet on the Western Front) celebrate subtlety over all else.  

Third, the film is a feast for the actors. Ralph Fiennes is masterful in his portrayal of the manager of the conclave, fighting his own ambition and anger at his designation as a mere facilitator rather than a spiritual leader. Fiennes is ably supported by John Lithgow, Stanley Tucci, Lucian Msamati, Sergio Castellitto, and Carlos Diehz, who represent different future paths for the papacy while vying for the top slot. Isabella Rossellini plays her own game as the sister who, for lack of better title, is the site manager for the election. Her hand may be well hidden and guiding, but given her near vow of silence in the world of men, even though her face tells so much more by necessity, nothing is confirmed. Nominations will be accorded generously and she is a shoo-in.  

Last, the Catholic Church comes out well in this. In and of itself, not necessarily a recommendation, but the movie offers a different view of an institution so maligned of late that another broadside would just feel hackneyed. Sure, there are shenanigans and skullduggery, but there is also great deference to the awesomeness of the task, the mysticism and seriousness of the process, and the weight placed on the jurors. The debate between the “new” and more traditional Church is also given a fair airing and ultimately, without taking a side, the picture elevates a philosophical point to a logical, if arguably heretical conclusion.        

One of the best of the year.