Reviews by JxSxPx

The Lashes debut album, Get It, is an infectious romp, but unlike their contemporaries Hot Hot Heat, the Strokes or Rooney, the Lashes sound like they’re aping their own generation. It’s not terrible; it’s harmless and very safe, but a lot of fun while it lasts. You won’t remember much of it after it ends, much like a sugar high.

And while the Strokes and Hot Hot Heat play alternative music with a pop sensibility, the Lashes are pop hipsters who add a few guitars into the mix. They clearly never developed as lyricists beyond high school (“Sometimes the Sun” features an epic eye-roll of a chorus). It’s not terrible, except for maybe the cliché ridden ballad “Dear Hollywood,” but it is sonic cotton candy.

Think of this as the perfect sugary rush to groove along to on your way towards the beach. Or as the latest thing that your thirteen-year-old sister is in love with. Get It? Eh, not necessarily.

DOWNLOAD: “Yesterday Feels Like a Year”

White boy reggae never sounded as good as it did with the Police’s barrage of stellar singles throughout the early 80s. Every Breath You Take: The Classics lives up to that subtitle even if the track listing is missing a few gems (“So Lonely,” “Synchronicity II,” “The Bed’s Too Big Without You,” just to name a few) that could have easily taken the place of the two remixes at the end. Still, the twelve songs chosen here really are the best of the best from Sting and the boys.

We begin with the impassioned pleas of “Roxanne,” and we only get better from there. The Police were one of the best bands of their generation, let alone to come out of the New Wave scene, and one of their first great pop songs was a love poem to a prostitute that Sting delivers with a mixture of jealousy and heartache. Even better is the follow-up, “Can’t Stand Losing You,” which shimmies and grooves with its ska-adjacent beat.

Nothing beats “Message in a Bottle” for its scope, feeling, and spongy reggae swagger. The Police really hit their stride when it comes to massively catchy and enduring singles with their second album, Regatta de Blanc, and just kept the hits coming in successive years. The line-up of essential material makes enough of an argument for itself: “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic,” “Every Breath You Take,” “De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da.”

Every Breath You Take: The Classics really launches itself towards “must buy” territory through one simple fact: it’s the best single-disc assortment of the Police’s career on the market. The two-disc The Police is an all-around better collection, but it’s so massive and sprawling that many a casual fan may balk at the sheer scope. And Message in a Box: The Complete Recordings is out-of-print and a gargantuan retrospective including every single album and B-side in one place. Greatest Hits is a UK import, but its sixteen tracks does tip the scales in its favor. Good luck finding it in the states.

If all you want is the purest distillation of the Police, then you’ll find it here. Or, if you’re not sure where to start with their career, here is a damn fine primer for the rest of their albums. The inner band friction made their music great, and for all of the limelight that Sting’s sensational voice and bass playing got, it’s impossible to imagine the band sounding quite the same without Andy Summers’ guitar and Stewart Copeland’s drums.

You need a reminder of what a great band the Police were? Here’s twelve.

DOWNLOAD: “Message in a Bottle” 

The Best of Village People displays that they were a great party band, and a reminder of just how silly, camp, and dumb they were. Their songs remain anthems for stadiums and awkward drunken dancing at wedding receptions. Come on, everyone’s had to suffer through watching their older relatives embarrass themselves trying to do the dance to “YMCA.”

Twelve songs is already an amount of Village People that’s pushing it for the casual fan, and the two album-versions of evergreen tracks “In the Navy” and “YMCA” are superfluous. The Best of Village People still finds all of their major songs, including the chanting “Macho Man” and elegiac “Go West,” in one place next to lesser-known singles, “Ready for the 80s” and “Can’t Stop the Music.” This is all well and good, but do songs like “Hot Cop” and “Fire Island” really qualify as “the best” this group has to offer?

That’s the major rub with this best of collection: there’s just not enough material to justify even twelve songs, never mind repeating two of them to bloat it out to fourteen songs and 75 minutes. All you really need is about an EP’s worth of material to get your gayest disco inferno imaginable. That’s the problem with a group that’s basically a living cartoon, too much exposure to it and the novelty rubs off revealing the thinness of the idea/material in the first place.

Or maybe you just won’t pay close enough attention while the disco beats keep pumping and the party keeps bumping.

DOWNLOAD: “Macho Man”

Paul Thomas Anderson traffics in films that are purposefully oblique. They are sustained on mood, on character, on a ripeness of visual poetry that recalls the titans of cinema in a way that refracts them like a funhouse mirror. Phantom Thread, for all of its straight-ahead narrative propulsion, is as fascinatingly opaque as The Master or Magnolia.

Not only is there a sense of tightly-wound control from the first frame, but there’s a palpable sense of unease as to where this is going for a long period of time. Open with a harsh white background and the title in ornately circular script and a sound of organized noise or elegantly controlled feedback. If you’re getting the sense that you’re about to engage in an old-fashioned gothic romance, then you’re right.

The world of Reynolds Woodcock is one of both meticulous routine and an ominous sense that everything will explode in either violence or carnality, maybe both, at any moment. His co-dependent relationship with his sister, Cyril, is one that extends from the professional to the personal as she functions as both sister, matron, assistant, schoolmarm, and drill sergeant. She never rises her voice above a clipped, patient tone that exudes icy dominance and remove even when trying to display kindness or give a compliment.

Like a sacrificial lamb stumbles an innocent, Alma, the latest in a long line of dewy woman functioning as muses and goddess for Woodcock before he grows bored of them and sends them packing with cruel efficiency through Cyril’s machinations. Yet there’s something about Alma, a core of steely resolve, a rebellious streak, a refusal to merely placate egos and function as an object. It is through her that we hear this story, and we’re never quite sure about how truthful her words are at any given moment.

Yet it’s that sense of unease that makes Phantom Thread so absorbing. For all of the outward beauty of the clothes and settings, for all of the considerable sex appeal that Daniel Day-Lewis contains, there’s a burbling sense that something is never quite “right” about anything happening in this world. It all appears orderly and measured, immaculate and luxuriant, a world where a shadow contains much portent of things to come.

Anderson has frequently flirted with magical realism or outright dipped into near-biblical imagery, and Phantom Thread is possibly his most outward concession to unreality yet. Reynolds Woodcock sees his mother while sick in bed, and we have no reason to believe that his spectral presence is a mere hallucination. Death and ghosts of things past haunt the Woodcock’s palatial rooms and relationships.

Reynolds and Cyril are both committed to the legacy of the Woodcock fashion house. Both operate under the illusion that any piece of couture will last forever, and maybe they will but there’s no way to know or guarantee posterity despite their best efforts. It is in this obsession with death and legacy that Phantom Thread first shows its gothic romance cards, as it is also here that the ghost of Woodcock’s mother appears. Suddenly you’re connecting Phantom Thread to works like Wuthering Heights and Rebecca, and the threads (no pun intended, I promise) connecting them become a fairly straight line.

Then the relationship with Alma takes on stranger contours and actions. He reveals a certain superstitious center to his character early on when he admits to putting messages into the dresses he makes for his clients, there’s a particularly loaded one for a princess that I won’t reveal, as if he’s either blessing the garments or trying to exorcise them from his personal demons. Alma begins as a passive listener to this, filing it away for future use, and becoming a blank form for him to sculpt.

Sculpt he does, but Alma quickly reveals herself as someone malcontent with living her life in so passive a manner. She upends his orderly life and rebels against his complicated rules and regulations, throws his routines into disarray and asserts her power over him with some surprising choices. A late scene where she delivers a monologue about wanting him kept on his back flashes a kinkier, more disturbed side to this relationship and Alma’s character than we had previously been allowed to witness.

Naturally, much of Phantom Thread is about pageantry, how could it not be when the main character is a couturier, and power. That crosses over into the central triangle of the film. Reynolds and Alma duel and love with such ferocity that the twin points became an equilibrium between the characters. Reynolds starts off as the one with all the power in the relationship, but Alma subverts his expectations and throws his routine out the window to recreate another with her at the center. Where does this leave Cyril in the end? She was the original hidden, guiding hand of Woodcock up to this point, and we don’t get a clear answer. She does not give us her place in her brother’s life easily, that much is clear.

There’s no easy answers here, as there aren’t in many of Anderson’s films post-Punch Drunk Love since they’ve gotten increasingly austere and esoteric. Frankly, I enjoying trying to limn the mysteries of his films, especially if they contain performances as impeccable and magnetic as Day-Lewis, Lesley Manville, and Vicky Krieps are here. Day-Lewis is no surprise, but Manville manages to not only hold the scene with him but overpower him at certain points, which is no small feat and a point to underscore the fact that Day-Lewis’ Reynolds is a man who wants to domineered and disciplined by a motherly figure in a persistent state of organized chaos and soothing love. Krieps takes that baton and runs with it into a perverse place that places their love as both nurturing and a model of erotic power imbalances.

Phantom Thread was a shock to me, but in the best of ways. It presents a triangle of people as an every changing organism where power gets displaced as often as the wind blows. If this isn’t one of 2017’s best films, then I don’t know what else could possibly compare.   

Treating prickly subject matter with a carelessness and shock-and-awe grandstanding does not a great film make. No, no amount of verbal pyrotechnics about topics like racism, sexism, and culpability can mask the fact that Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is flippant about things like character development or narrative coherency. It speaks in broad strokes, more like a caps lock, but it doesn’t engage in any of its idea in any meaningful way.

Even worse is how Three Billboards treats epithets like they’re the Molotov cocktails that Mildred hurls at the police station – moments of rage thrown out to whip a reaction out of you with no follow-through or repercussions. From accusing a pirest of “altar-boy fucking” to hurling out loaded racial language to engender a guffaw or tongue-click from its white liberal audience, Three Billboards is more about titillation than it is about engagement with its ideas and themes.

Case in point, a scene where Mildred’s ex-husband comes barreling into her home, attacks their son, and his current, younger girlfriend walks in on the altercation. There’s no payoff here. We’re told throughout that he was an abusive man, but all we get is this one scene and there’s deeper significance to this scene, there’s no reaction from his younger girlfriend other than to turn tail and walk away, it’s as if this scene exists merely to underscore’s Mildred’s reasons for anger and vigilante justice. It’s just sloppy writing. How does this scene of violence affect her son? How does this affect his relationship with his younger girlfriend?

This sloppiness extends outward as character’s make improbable 180 turns or choices that come out of nowhere. A racist cop that plays out like a bumbling idiot suddenly demonstrates not only an interior complexity that materializes out of thin air, but a brand new outlook on life that is unearned. Not to mention a brain power that we haven’t even gotten a tease about before the script needs him to suddenly be smarter. And this is all after numerous scenes of him beating up innocent civilians, including throwing one out of a window.

For all the arguments that the various players in making this film have given about how these characters aren’t actually redeemed in the end, you wouldn’t know it from the musical cues and vague enough ending that can easily read as a redemption. Individual scenes in Three Billboards work beautifully to build something thorny and jagged about tough issues, but then they turn around and fly around making choices because the script demands it not because it endemic to their character growth.

This doesn’t even begin to broach the topic of race in this movie. Here is a movie happy to talk about police brutality against minority communities and keep them largely off-screen. It reads as hollow virtue signaling and a half-formed idea. We’re merely told that these things exist and never grapple with them, and it only feeds into Mildred’s character journey of fighting the power and shaking the rafters. It’s deployed with a callousness that’s galling, or served up as a punchline, take your pick which is worse.

Where Three Billboards excels, and it really excels here, is in its trio of leading performances. Not that they can overcome the speechifying of the script, but they manage to make a meal out of its ostentatious dialog. Woody Harrelson gives us a performance that reminds us of just how underpraised an actor he is, quite possibly containing one of the largest ranges of his generation. Sam Rockwell possibly has the hardest role here as he’s the racist cop that gets the redemption without the reckoning, and he must walk that fine line. His natural charisma and decades-long character actor bona fides keep his performance moving, as does his affinity for the grooves and textures of the Martin McDonagh’s writing. It’s a showy role and Rockwell manages to make a coherent person where the script does not.

Same goes for Frances McDormand who lends her naturally flinty and gruff persona to a role that can not only carry that weight, but demands it in order to work. Mildred never asks for our sympathy or understanding, even when the film does and protects her from too harsh of consequences with her whiteness. McDormand’s performance is a late-career masterpiece from an actress that’s at her best with characters that are nearly impossible to play on the page, ones who are hard to love and go to improbably dark parts of their psyche. Even when Three Billboards fails to rise to her masterful performance, McDormand is never less than astounding to watch.

Seeing Cartoon Saloon attached to a new animated film perks my interest up just as much as seeing one coming out from Laika. Cartoon Saloon produced what are two of my favorite modern animated films, The Secret of Kells and Song of the Sea, so seeing their geometric animation style in the promotional images for The Breadwinner got my eyebrow raised. Seeing Kells’ co-director, Nora Twomey, venturing out on her own was a plus, as was the move away from Ireland and into Afghanistan. The Breadwinner did not disappoint me, but I acknowledge that there’s a certain thinness of narrative and refusal to go deeper with its material.

These two points are valid criticisms of the film, but they weren’t enough to deter my enjoyment. Sure, I’d love to learn how Parvana’s cross-dressing impacted her on a deeper level, and found the story-within-a-story to be too obvious and route, but there’s still plenty to recommend and admire here. Perhaps a story of standing up to gender inequality meaning potential death is too much for an animated film to carry, but I respect the ambition to tell this story in this particular way.

The power of telling a story, of harnessing and controlling a narrative is the life blood of The Breadwinner, as Parvana’s father instills this lesson into her early on before the lesson eventually becomes a reoccurring theme. Parvana tells a story throughout, a fairy tale of a prince encountering numerous roadblocks and horrors, that functions as her making sense of a tragedy that happened off-screen long before we met the family. Although this is a bit of a great irony as the whole of The Breadwinner is creakiest in terms of narrative. A film about the power of storytelling is messiest in telling its own story, oh well.

But look at that animation! Bathed in warm golds and brown, with the occasional vibrantly bright colorful embellishment, the look of it is as enticing and gorgeous as Kells or Song of the Sea. The story-within-the-story segments are animated in an entirely different style that’s no less pleasing as they appear like felt cutouts of angular objects moving in a way that suggests heavily-caffeinated marionettes. Despite a uniform house style, this Cartoon Saloon release doesn’t look entirely like the other two and develops its own character and variation of the house style.

And even when the story falters, Parvana is a compelling heroine, a young girl of thwarted ambition and intelligence struggling against a suffocating ruling order. Her rebellion could have been better fleshed out, but she’s always a figure worth rooting for. It’s refreshing to watch an animated film about a young girl that doesn’t involve musical interludes, gimmicky sidekicks, or anything typically princess-y. She’s a real person with flaws, dreams, and struggles.

The power and beauty of The Breadwinner is in the broad strokes, like the bold lines and shapes that animate its characters. When a trip to the water well is fraught with more tension than the entirety of Dunkirk, then you know your film, flaws and all, is working remarkably well. I continued to look forward to what Cartoon Saloon releases next.    

Sometimes truth is infinitely stranger than fiction. Case in point, look at the romantic comedy interrupted that is The Big Sick. Loosely based on the real life courtship between co-writers Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon, The Big Sick is a thoughtful examination of the ties that bind us together, be they familial or chosen.

We begin in the normal romantic comedy formula: boy (Nanjiani playing a variation of himself) meets-cute with girl (Zoe Kazan), complications arise first in the form of different backgrounds then in the form of a medically induced coma, an action that causes those looking for a routine rom-com payout to get a serious case of blue balls. Into this emotional turbulence comes the girl’s parents, and The Big Sick takes us into more dramatic and pricklier territory than we initially anticipated.

But yes, it’s still funny. Maybe not gut-busting funny, but in a more low key way that charms you with its accurate observations of place or the minutia of its various characters. Although, given Kumail’s aspirations of standup comedy, we do get plenty of behind-the-scenes riffs between him and his standup buddies. These scenes act as breaks of levity in-between some of the more turbulent passages as Aidy Bryant and Bo Burnham lovingly eviscerate each other about craft and their work.

Yet those passages of emotional turbulence still shimmer with comedic possibility, even if the shifts sometimes get a little abrupt or harsh. There’s the central conflict of Emily’s eventual medically induced coma, but there’s also plenty of material about cultural conflicts and the difficulties of the vagaries of romance and maturity. Not only is Kumail stuck between his family’s Pakistani background and demands, his own comfortable adoption of Americana, but the intrusion and growing relationship that develops between himself and Emily’s parents.

Those parents are brilliantly played by Holly Hunter and Ray Romano. Hunter is the tough but loving southern military daughter while Romano is the more awkward embodiment of dad-humor and prevalent oversharing. The two of them together manage to find a rhythm that feels like a long-term relationship, and the tense intimacy they form with Kumail is an interesting wrinkle in a film that’s full of them. The three of them turn what should be a nearly improbable situation and twist it into something that feels organic and structurally sound. It isn’t just the semi-autobiographical elements at play here, but a deep knowledge that tragedy or chaos makes for strange bedfellows.

The Big Sick finds a sweet spot and works it over for all its worth, which as it turns out, is quite a lot. Not just a crowd-pleasing comedy, not just a charming story of guy-gets-girl, but something richer and deeper even when its tonal shifts are sometimes too jarring, The Big Sick is a wonderful little movie. Perhaps a bit too long, as is just about every other modern comedy, but still packed with truths, laughs, and a pleasing interest in glimpsing the pain underneath the escapism.  

On the periphery of Disney World there’s a little motel called Magic Castle, and it is here that we begin our story. It’s the summer, and we’re quickly introduced to Moonee (Brooklynn Prince, a stunner of a child actor’s performance), a six-year-old heavily interested in playtime, imagination, and performing various mischievous acts without the forethought of where these actions will lead. The Florida Project will place us directly into her point-of-view and journey, and it’s an emotional ride of great rewards.

Moonee lives with her young mother, Halley (Bria Vinaite, another great find), at the hotel, and she quickly meets up with the new girl at the motel, Jancey (Valeria Cotto), after spitting on Jancey’s mom’s car. Moonee gets in trouble, Halley encourages Jancey and Moonee to be friends, and we’re off from there. There’s not a solid story structure to The Florida Project, we merely sit back and observe various episodes in Moonee’s life.

We watch many things occur from Moonee’s perspective, several of which we can fill in the gaps as adults whereas the details appear mystifying to her, and observe the human need for denial in full activity. Various scenes portray the bittersweet reality of these characters with a clear-eyed empathy for their humanity and the unspoken, largely unknown reasons for how and why they ended up here. There’s a refreshing lack of judgment as these characters scramble to survive, protect their kids, and maintain some semblance of dignity and humanity.

Orbiting it all is the kindly manager, Bobby (Willem Dafoe) one of many adult figures trying desperately to keep the tragedy of life at bay from the children occupying the slum motel. He performs his normal duties with lived-in ache and tiredness, but also emerges as a fatherly figure to the various denizens of the Magic Castle. Dafoe develops this subtlety and with great compassion for this man. For an actor of his stature to appear in a film populated by unknowns and first-timers could easily dip into star vanity, but no so here. Dafoe develops a rapport with them, and grounds himself into a man that expresses a decency that feels forged out of hardship and personal pain and tragedy.

His protectiveness is never more apparent than running off a man that’s hinted at being a child predator, and his rage is palpable. Even better is a scene where he runs interference between Halley, having turned to prostitution to provide for herself and Moonee after losing her meager support system, and a john. Bobby acts as a human shield between the two of them while Halley, in a bit that’s nearing slapstick but still nonjudgmental about her, telegraphs her rage and contempt through her face and flashing the john the middle finger. He not only diffuses the situation but does so in a way that’s entirely protective of Halley and Moonee. Bobby is the supportive through line of The Florida Project, an emblem of the protections in place to try and let these kids just be kids.

If Moonee understands any of these developments, you wouldn’t know it from her persistent need to play and imagine. She’s aware enough of the cultural currency at play here to know she’s not going to Disney World itself any time soon, but she finds spaces where she can pretend that they’re various locations or attractions from the theme park. Director Sean Baker allows for Moonee’s vivid imagination to play out as a nearly holy communion with something larger than herself. It’s beautiful how he simply allows her to be in these spaces and observe where her spirit and mind will take her.

Baker also manages to capture a feeling of transience to these imaginings that extends to the surroundings. Earlier in the film, Moonee and the other children say goodbye to one of their own that’s moving away. While moving away, his father makes him give away his toys to the other kids because there’s no room in the car, and the kid stands by with a curious expression on his face as these totems of his childhood and time spent here are given away. He’s learned something about the ephemerality of life despite the promise of replacing them all with brand new ones. It won’t be the same, nothing in life ever is.

This feeling carries us into the final moments of the film which play out in a curious emotional space. With Halley and Moonee being separated from each other, briefly they’re routinely told, after someone ratted on Halley’s escorting, we witness Moonee’s rage and confusion as to what’s happening. Moonee knows that something dark is descending upon her, something that will shatter the delicate nature of childhood innocence and precociousness. In a flight of desperation we watch her run with Jancey to Disney World’s Magic Kingdom. Or did they? Is this scene real or the most fully-realized bit of daydreaming we’ve witnessed to this point?

The literal truth of the scene is nearly impossible to read. She very well could have run off, but I prefer to think of this as a last-ditch effort, a moment of clearly thought-out self-preservation of her innocence, rather than any kind of literal truth. It’s a complicated moment of heartbreak and joy, underscoring the transient nature of childhood innocence, and further underlining the socioeconomic structures at play here. It’s a perfect ending to one of 2017’s best films.

For better or for worse, Molly’s Game is Aaron Sorkin with the firehose going at full blast. If you’re a fan of Sorkin and his many –isms, then you’ll be in for a cinematic treat as there’s nearly two and a half hours of rapid-fire dialog to get through. If, like me, you’re something of an apostate about his writing, then prepare for a mixture of some good, some bad, and a pure distillation of Sorkin with nothing to muzzle him.

It’s an odd story for Sorkin to throw in for his directorial debut, but at least he’s got Jessica Chastain to deliver his lengthy verbal passages, narration, and try to keep your attention for the whole time. Chastain brings a fiery intensity, subtle bits of humor, and icy intelligence to the material, and turns Sorkin’s writing into a one-woman opera. It is one hell of a performance from an actress that has given us a bevy of impressive performances in a short amount of time, and it continues on with her penchant for mercurial and chameleonic tricks. Even when the script gives her some clunkers to deliver, or even questionable thoughts to spit out, she nearly makes it all work.

There’s still some shocks to be found in Molly’s Game, namely in Michael Cera. The harmless looking funnyman takes on a rare villainous role here that displays a swirling undercurrent of malice that hasn’t been tapped into before. So praise goes to Sorkin for looking at the dweeby kid from Arrested Development and seeing the potential for something more and deeper in him. Hidden within Molly’s Game are several small nuggets of shocking casting choices, pieces of dialog, or scenarios that make it zing when you think it’s going to zag, and they make this overly long film worth the journey.  

Pity the same can’t be said for Kevin Costner as Molly’s dad, a demanding and exacting bastard that disappears for a long stretch only to show up at the end of the narrative to explain to Molly the “why” of her. This is Sorkin at his worst impulses and instincts, and Costner can’t seem to overcome the hurdle and makes an already unpleasant scene into an exercise in tedium and contrivance. Molly’s character has been displayed enough up to this point that this scene feels mildly superfluous and smug. Even when he’s trying to avoid it, Sorkin can’t help himself from mansplaining to his female characters.

The major problem with Molly’s Game is one of indulgence. Sorkin’s verbal pyrotechnics are already enough, but allowing him to director is just too much. Nothing about the story feels or plays out in a naturalistic manner even when Sorkin’s camera plays out as such. Then there’s his history of treating life and his characters as a meritocracy, and this is evident from the opening moments when Molly gives us a recitation of her résumé and never lets up from there. At times, a certain feeling of self-parody creeps into the material, most likely unintentional but it’s there.

The biggest problem with All the Money in the World is that its anchoring presence, that of billionaire J. Paul Getty, is just not interesting enough as presented here. He’s clearly meant to a figure of mythological proportions, and Christopher Plummer is valiantly trying to play him as such, but the rest of the film is lacking a certain something about it to really sell this idea. Perhaps its leftover messiness from having to quickly reshoot so much of it, or maybe it’s just that this was always a heavily manufactured affair with clear examples of artistic liberty taken with the material.

Then there’s the main problem of Mark Wahlberg. All the Money in the World is a three-legged beast that depends on the performances of all three main actors to work properly, and two of them are doing a great job. Wahlberg is a perfectly fine comedic actor, but he’s shown time and time again that he’s limited in dramatic roles. This feels outside of his range of emotive capabilities as his biggest choice to display seriousness is whether or not he removes his glasses. Michelle Williams and Plummer outgun him, and the delicate balancing act necessary for some scenes are thrown off by his stilted line readings and frowning serious face.

There’s also the problem of the repetitive nature of a large chunk of the film. We get so many false leads, hysteric crying phone calls, negotiations, and near misses that you can guess the exact structure of the next several scenes before they’ve even finished, or started. Things play out almost as caricatures, of icy wealth, of band of brothers criminals, of a ferocious mother, that you lose any real emotion or complexity to the narrative. All the Money in the World just becomes another handsomely made but inert Ridley Scott film, and we’ve been getting an awful lot of those lately.