Reviews by JxSxPx

The aging director at the center of Pain and Glory may call himself Salvador Mallo, but one glance at the giant silhouette on the poster lets you know it’s really Pedro Almodóvar. Crafting one of his most personal and autobiographical works, Almodóvar reveals more of where his provocative worldview and vibrant artistry springs from and invites several of his famous friends along for the ride. Not quite the career capper it threatens to be, please don’t quietly into that goodnight, Pedro, Pain and Glory is still one of his typically mesmerizing Escher-like creations.

Almodóvar is less in the mood for subversion and more in confessional spirit with his two-track narrative that finds Salvador as both infirmed artist and young boy. An opening voiceover narration, as is his tradition, provides context for where Salvador is in his present life, which is not a great place. Depression, anxiety, severe migraines, back problems, tinnitus – these are just some of the ailments sapping him of his creative powers, and that’s before we really start delving into his emotional problems in a more profound way.

We go back in time to a young boy traveling with his mother (Penélope Cruz in youth, Julieta Serrano in old age) to their new cavernous house in Paterna. Quite literally, as their house is a whitewashed cave that’s been converted to a home. Preternaturally gifted and precociously talented, he teaches a laborer named Eduardo (César Vicente) to read and write. Salvador gets his portrait painted by the soulful man and experiences his first erotic awakening when he fetches a towel for Eduardo after he takes a sponge bath in their home.

The sensuality and eroticism of Almodóvar’s cinema, most explicitly in his use of color, is one of his greatest trademarks. Eduardo’s bath features whites that are nearly blinding as they transform and highlight Vicente’s body into an Adonis-like spectacle. Or the bloodred sweater that the adult version wears when reuniting with a long-lost love that symbolizes a moment of reawakening and reconnection with the outside world. Clearly taking the lessons he’s learned from Douglas Sirk, Almodóvar fashions yet another candy-coated melodrama that bushes the boundaries of narrative absurdity within an explosion of color and texture.

Yet you can’t keep a rascal down for too long as Almodóvar promptly reintroduces Salvador to the leading man of his first success, Alberto (Asier Etxeandia) and has the two men commiserating over their wounds before engaging in casual heroin use. The two of them falling down the junkie rabbit hole together provides some of the sharpest, wildest gags in some time. Alberto is also responsible for laying the groundwork for Salvador’s eventual creative flourish as he finds unused manuscripts and begs to fashion them into a one-man show.

It is through the prism of Alberto’s one-man show that we gather further autobiographical purges from Salvador/Almodóvar. And the long-lost love that will provide a one-night reunion that makes Moonlight’s climax seem demur by comparison for all its sustained emotional expressions. Throughout, I had been convinced that Antonio Banderas was giving the performance of his career, but this sequence absolutely sealed it.  

Banderas has a habit of appearing a bit hammy in his American films, not his fault but the fault of a system that doesn’t quite know what to do with him. His Spanish films, particularly his prior work with Almodóvar, is exemplary, and this could be the crown jewel of his career. Layered, minimalistic, achingly vulnerable and playfully stylish, Banderas crafts a portrait of a flame reigniting that’s as touching as he is improbably handsome.

Of course, Almodóvar always gets the best work out of his various muses, which Banderas absolutely should qualify as given the ways his camera has caressed and exemplified him over the years. The two of them have crafted a funny, beautiful, touching self-reflexive portrait that perhaps operates as a bit of wish fulfilment. (Whose mid-life crisis looks this glamorous?) The ending camera pull back to reveal Cruz being filmed in a scene by Banderas is another one of the director’s tricky climatic subversions that display that while he’s mellowed and matured with age, he’s still a provocateur at heart.  

Last year’s Can You Ever Forgive Me? was my introduction to Marielle Heller, and you can consider me a fan after the one-two punch of that movie and this one. She brings an eye that is both resolved and empathetic to stories that could easily transition into treacle in anyone else’s hands. After all, a story beginning for empathy, forgiveness, and compassion is not exactly the stuff of dramaturgical pyrotechnics under most director’s all-seeing eye.

Despite opening the movie with his near uncanny valley approximation of St. Fred Rogers, Tom Hanks is not the main attraction of this movie but merely a benevolent guru here to offer his wary disciple a path forward. Meet Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys), a recent father who finds his new reality brushing against his deep-seated traumas and frozen in place. Vogel is a writer for Esquire and has a nasty habit of taking his subjects to task for perceived imperfections. This is when Fred Rogers enters his life.

The Rogers assignment was something forced upon him by his editor (Christine Lahti), but ends up being the thing that jostles him out of complacency and towards healing. Sure, the narrative heads down the exact path you think it’s going, but it’s a beautiful, touching journey towards that place. And Heller crafts a film that never takes the easy approach or a forgiving eye on its various characters. She makes them earn their redemption and reconciliation.

Vogel’s father (Chris Cooper) was an absentee alcoholic for much of his life and left behind a wake of damage. Now, with a cancer diagnosis barreling down him, he’s back in his son’s life asking for forgiveness and trying to make things right. Their union will eventually be mended but there will be explosions between here and there.

Rogers not only functions as a replacement fatherly figure but a peaceable teacher. Heller was wise to cast Hanks as his wholesome nice guy vibe folds itself into Rogers so invisibly that the two blurs in an instant. I was enchanted by him from the first frame on and cried more than once as he offered healing balm and benedictions.

Just as good is Rhys who seems born to play characters with a dyspeptic nature. His world-weary expression’s slow melting is presented through extreme emotional control and subtle shifts in his facial muscles. We believe in the spiritual awakening he’s gone through partially because Rhys has managed to invest us in his convert’s rehabilitation. That is the power of A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, even as it occasionally tips towards the maudlin. Or maybe because of it, as Joanne Rogers (Maryann Plunkett) tells us there’s hard work at the center of Fred Rogers’ teachings and persona.   

The only known portraits of Harriet Tubman are that of her in steely resolve in her old age, and they provide only a small glimpse of a towering figure. But this movie is not quite the addendum or correction to that incomplete vision. Not by a long shot.

Harriet removes Tubman’s numerous achievements from the earthly to that of the magical realist. This does a great disservice to her story as it makes her merely a saintly pawn in a cosmic journey. It’s easy to stare in awe of her daring when it treats her alleged communions with god as literal fact and provides her journey with the safety bumpers endemic to biographical films.

From the first scene it is obvious that Harriet is going to be unconcerned with the historical record in a profound way. If you watch enough of these awards-bait movies you’ll notice when things are clearly engineered for clear three acts, saintly heroes, black hat villains, and Harriet falls into every single one of these traps. Its artifice is palpable and noticeable, like Joe Alwyn’s ever-chasing plantation owner’s son and a black slave catcher that exist to be hissed at and provide plainly designated things for Harriet to act against.

Her story didn’t need these patently false creations and it undercuts the triumph of her story by essentially crafting an AU for such an important historical figure getting her first big screen treatment. Harriet Tubman becomes a Joan of Arc type by adhering so strongly to these dreamscapes and treating them as literal prophecy instead of juxtaposing them against all the planning and support network that went into Tubman’s daring returns to the south. There’s no insight here beyond a surface-level acceptance of historical tidbits as literal truth and facts.

Yes, Tubman did experience what she believed to be visions from God as the result of a traumatic brain injury in her youth. But by continually zipping back to the blue-tinted spirit world and undercutting Cynthia Erivo’s stoic, gritty performance, director Kasi Lemmons turns her into an unknowable, revisionist superheroine that we never for a minute believe is in any danger. What this movie needed was less religiosity and more humanity.

Laika continues to create highly impressive visual worlds in Missing Link, but their elaborate dioramas feel incomplete this time around. There’s a great idea, likable characters, but a general sense of the various parts not quite coming together as they should. This is the weakest effort from the studio to date.

Still, their weakest effort is better than many major studios middling efforts. Ignoring that the humor in Missing Link never quite comes together, there’s a pleasingly twee and polite sense of lunacy here. Picture Wes Anderson making a Looney Tunes cartoon and you’re somewhere in the ballpark of what’s charming and why it doesn’t entirely work.

Sir Lionel Frost (Hugh Jackman) wants in on an exclusive explorer’s club and sets about trying to obtain proof, if not outright capture, various cryptids to get his bona fides. He gets wind of a Big Foot in the pacific northwest and sets out to bring it back to the club, except the Big Foot (Zach Galifianakis) contacted him to help him reunite with his kind. Off they set for Shangri-La in search for the yetis, the Big Foot’s distant cousins, all the while they’re being chased by Lord Pigget-Dunceb (Stephen Fry), his hitman (Timothy Olyphant), and joined by Adelina Fortnight (Zoe Saldana), a fellow would-be adventurer.

The best creation to come out of the movie is Susan Link, the titular missing link. Underneath that monstrous façade is a sad, lonely creature looking for love and acceptance and a child-like penchant for taking things literally. Stuffed into an ill-fitting suit for the much of the movie, Link is an adorable little creation that would demand an onslaught of toyetic merchandise if released by a competitive studio. Galifianakis’ voice work also finds the right balance between whimsical and genuine pathos.

The rest of the characters, save for Emma Thompson’s xenophobic and pretentious leader of the yetis, are sweet but largely unmemorable creations. They’re fun to spend time with but don’t last in the imagination as well as Coraline, Norman, Kubo, or the boxtrolls. This film, in particular, feels more concerned with having you embrace its highly detailed production design and quirky body shapes. There’s a lot of artisanal warmth swimming through your vision but it doesn’t add up to too much of a story.

Laika loves to highlight the impressive, aching work that goes into crafting their movies with time-lapses, but all that effort doesn’t always translate to imaginative, immersive tales. The terror of Coraline, the empathy of ParaNorman, the healing trauma of Kubo and the Two Strings – all of them have something strong and beautiful undergirding their elaborate milieus and tactile wonderlands. Missing Link is frustratingly almost there but not quite.

Crashing together bits of two shows recorded for the King Biscuit Flower Hour, Picture This Live was released to coincide with EMI’s 100^th anniversary and shortly before the band released their comeback album. Eventually, it was rereleased under the name Blondie Live: Philadelphia 1978/Dallas 1980, which is a mouthful forsaking the simplicity of the original.

Enough of the background, this is the best of Blondie’s various live albums. A raucous 75 minutes where the band struts their punk bona fides and make even their most pop-friendly songs sound deliciously spiky. Largely pulling from Parallel Lines, the band blazes through the usual hits – “One Way or Another,” “Sunday Girl,” “Heart of Glass” – with vigor. Even better are the lesser-known songs like a mashup of “A Shark in Jets Clothing” and “I Know but I Don’t Know,” that threatens to continually thrash itself into a stupor. It all comes to a garage-rock crescendo with a medley of T. Rex and Iggy Pop. Not even Debbie Harry’s proclamation of “this is the pop portion of the show” vibes with actual reality as the band is in fighting spirit throughout giving their catalog of stellar material a sloppy, aggressive workout that proves their pop was always of the arty variety.

DOWNLOAD: “Bang a Gong (Get It On)/Funtime,” “A Shark in Jets Clothing/I Know but I Don’t Know,” “Picture This”   

Not a greatest hits compilation, not quite a rarities collection, but a weird hybrid of the two with various lesser-known singles (“Picture This”) and album-only tracks (“English Boys”) thrown in for good measure. Blonde and Beyond exists in a strange nebulous zone that is not quite the testament to this iconic band that it could be. To be fair, there’s plenty of great music still to be found here, including a Parallel Lines reject (“Underground Girl”), an early version of “Heart of Glass” (“Once I Had a Love”), and a suite of live covers (a cartoony “Ring of Fire,” a garage-rock rip on “Bang a Gong,” an impressive “Heroes”). Some of the B-sides have since been added on to the remasters of their original albums, like the adult melodrama of “Susie and Jeffrey” that reveals the stark influence of the Shangri-Las on the band popping up on AutoAmerican. Strangest of all are the two foreign-language remakes of two of their best songs, a Spanish “Call Me” and a “Sunday Girl” completely in French. Still, Blonde and Beyond is clearly for completists and the curious only.

DOWNLOAD: “Underground Girl,” “Heroes,” “Once I Had a Love”

If you like cars or movies that are clearly aimed for the dads in the audience, then Ford v Ferrari will hit you right in that sweet spot. A nearly three-hour tale of male bonding, father/son dynamics, and a haloed vision of the American dream. There’s a far more entertaining two-hour movie squeezed somewhere into this smorgasbord, but the vroom-vroom scenes sure are nice.

Look, if there’s one thing I don’t care about and can’t pretend to, it’s cars. Corporatist egotism is at the center of this tale and endless scenes of Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) and Ken Miles (Christian Bale) designing and testing their entry in the Le Mans competition just doesn’t excite me. Competently made as the film may be, this hagiographic depiction of these men is a bit much as the film’s central conflict is not between Ford and Ferrari, but these two and Henry Ford II (Tracy Letts).

Not even pretending to care about anyone who isn’t those three, Caitriona Balfe is utterly wasted as Miles’ wife, Ford v Ferrari is “just guys being dudes.” In-between various scenes of sports/racing film shorthand there’s also the corporate board presented as interfering dunderheads to deal with. For all the dread that the film manages to invest into its racing scenes, especially the climatic race, it nearly undoes it by counterbalancing it with cartoon characters demanding the bottom line, good PR, and camera-ready theatrics.

Having said all of that, Ford v Ferrari is a technical marvel. The film largely manages to avoid the montage cliché of these types of films, and there’s always the threat of the cars spinning out of control. Miles’ fateful drive through the final legs of the competition displays several cars contorted into odd shapes or engulfed in flames. There are finally actual stakes at the center here, even if we know from the beginning that it’ll all work out in Ford’s favor.

This is probably nirvana for gearheads, and good for them, but I often found my mind wandering until the engine’s roar snapped me back to what was happening. It’s all a little bit canned but made well enough. Dads will love it though as this the most dad movie to ever dad movie.

Wouldn’t it be great if Agatha Christie had a sense of humor and individual characterization? Well, here’s Rian Johnson to take Christie’s infamous template – cramped location, a dozen suspects, an eccentric outsider to take the case – and distorts them through a parodic point-of-view that makes this more Clue than Murder on the Orient Express. It’s a brilliant little whodunnit that sublimates that genre by answering the question quickly and revealing a class consciousness that powers through the rest of the narrative.

The morning after a big birthday party for family patriarch (Christopher Plummer) finds him dead of an apparent suicide. The warped world of wealth and privilege has distorted the minds and morality of the various members of the family that a private investigator (Daniel Craig) finds himself moving through. On the periphery, yet entirely central to the narrative, is the nurse (Ana de Armas) who quakes with repressed secrets and struggles with ever complicating situation she has found herself thrust in.

Knives Out is an expertly scripted detective story that gives us a wide range of fully realized characters in short order. From Jamie Lee Curtis’ cutthroat heir to the throne, Michael Shannon’s nervous son that refers to his father’s legacy as “ours,” Don Johnson’s smarmy in-law, and Toni Collete’s Marianne Williamson devotee, who practically steals the movie by going for broke with her crackpot reading of the character. That’s a lot of personality without even mentioning Chris Evans’ wayward child or Jaeden Lieberher’s alt-right troll.

Craig’s Benoit Blanc is an obtuse creation – a Foghorn Leghorn accented private detective whose bonkers accent masks a keen intelligence. If this isn’t one of the greatest creations in both Rian Johnson’s and Craig’s respective careers, then I don’t know how it wouldn’t qualify. This Kentucky fried Sherlock Holmes is a hoot and I hope we get to experience another hilariously morbid story with him as our guide.

While Ana de Armas gets the toughest role in the entire film. If everyone else is essentially playing a cartoon, and they are, then de Armas must be the straight (wo)man to their insanity. She walks a fine line between anxieties over being an immigrant and keeping her head above water. It requires a fine-tuned actor to find the right calibration to keep it all working and she pulls it off. Props for also finding new ways to vomit every time she tells a lie.

It is important to note how central de Armas is to the narrative as Knives Out slowly pulls its focus away from who did it to commentary on the corrosive powers of inherited wealth and power. Craig getting the various family members accounts of the party reveal a group that centralize themselves above all else and cannot see far past their nose. The threat of losing what they assume is rightfully theirs, something that they somehow worked hard for instead of being pompous trust-fund babes in middle-age. The second half is a series of explosions over the family’s entitlement revealing itself and impotent rage at a system they thought would protect them. It’s a mini dissertation in class politics that manages to be a blast from start to finish.

Hmm, this is an odd to talk about. It bares a striking resemblance to the likes of Vice in which complicated, thorny material is presented with a degree of insouciance that is perhaps at odds with itself. Satire is all well and good but treating a glimpse behind the curtain with buffoonery may be a bridge too far when the story being told is that of sexual assault survivors reclaiming their power to take down the monster.

Yes, even if the subject matter revolves around (groan) Fox News. It seems easy to take pot shots at that institution and their ability to distort and reframe every argument as an aggrievement or political spin for conservatism, but Bombshell always does. Megyn Kelly (Charlize Theron, nearly unrecognizable) begins with a direct address to camera that explains how the sausage is made and who the main players are in short order.

If that didn’t clue you in, then Kate McKinnon’s liberal-in-hiding does a quick debrief that the facts don’t matter, and everything is pitched to stoke resentment and anger. Nearly every scene, no matter how serious, is deflated by a joke. The notable exceptions are the ones that stick with you for their encroaching dread and ability to empathize with the characters. Yes, the scene where Margot Robbie’s true believer gets demeaned by Roger Ailes (John Lithgow, scary good) is disturbing, but just as good as the one where Robbie’s low-level victim punches up at Kelly.

Bombshell needed more of these moments instead of so much insider gossip. There are fraught issues at play here that have plagued and divided the national psyche in the wake of 2016, in no small part to Fox News’ kowtowing and playing the eternal victim. This film is not interested in even looking that deeply at the material when it could more easily have scenes of its on-screen talent in-fighting and forcing pledges of allegiance to Ailes. There was enough room for both, but one of them would require deeper introspection.

Ailes is an easy figure to root against on paper, but Lithgow’s performance complicates that narrative by peeling back the layers to reveal the insecurity empowering his monstrous actions. We never sympathize with him, but Lithgow manages to puncture the more politely bemused concern with rage. A similar thing happens with Robbie’s hodgepodge creation, a composite character made-up of numerous disposable blondes, as we watch her go from wide-eye faithful to someone losing their religion.

As it is, the film is too jovial and remote too often for it to really treat its subject matter with the depth it deserves. For every scene like the one involving Kelly, Gretchen Carlson, and Robbie’s intern going on a tense elevator ride while the threat of sexual violence slowly increases there’s another where walk-ons of actors approximating Sean Hannity or Bill O’Reilly to drop sexist, clueless broadsides that render Fox News not a repressive, suffocating environment but like a very special episode of The Office.

If I told you there was an animated film about the origins of the Santa Claus mythology would you picture something treacly and gushy? Granted, nothing involving Christmas can escape heavy sentimentality and requisite story beats, but Klaus counterbalances the sweet with the sour. Of course, the sour here is represented by a delightfully anarchic humor that gives a blood feud a slapstick edge.

I suppose it helps Klaus has a skewed, skeptical look at traditions and history. The feuding families apparently are more than willing to set aside their lust for violence when presented with a welcome alternative. Not Will Sasso and Joan Cusack’s heads of their respective families who want to keep the traditions alive, but they’re presented as villainous and curmudgeonly stunted characters. Tethering yourself to the past and refusing to mature beyond it is an impediment to progress and happiness is the film’s main argument and moral.

The world of Klaus is beautiful and charming to behold. The lovingly detailed hand-drawn animation is a reminder of a style that is depressingly hard to come by in the modern age. There’s real buoyancy and life in the geometric designs between the rounded body types and angularity of their dwellings.

It's a reminder of the best of the Disney Renaissance in the ways that quick jokes like creepy tots turning a snowman into a stabbing victim with carrots are hidden away in warmly textured watercolor-like backgrounds. There are no big musical moments, but there’s plenty of gorgeous visual delights to entrance the eye while a pleasing magical realism slowly emerges within the narrative.

If the major beats sound like a Hatfields and McCoys long-standing feud, where exactly does Santa Claus play a role in all of this? On the outer edges of the town (and the narrative) lives Klaus, a man with the body of a brute but possessing a wounded soul and golden heart. The major constructions of the myth – reindeer, flying sleighs, chimneys and stockings – are built by misunderstandings and a game of telephone with the town’s children. Klaus also can commune with his dead wife by ‘listening’ to gusts of snow and goes from literal man to figurative icon by the film’s end.

This transference from literal (if cartoonish) reality to magical realism is quiet and built slowly. Much of Klaus is like that in the ways it entertains and charms before disarming you with a possibility that anything could happen. It is this spirit of the traditional and the modern in conflict and conversation that powers Klaus through to a touching ending. This was one of the delights of 2019 that I didn’t see coming.