Reviews by JxSxPx

My knowledge of the film versions of Show Boat is limited to the 1951 version with Ava Gardner and the heavily truncated version wedged into the opening of Till the Clouds Roll By. I had heard of this version, and knew that James Whale, one of the great-underrated talents of the era, directed it, but it wasn’t easily available. Widely considered the greatest movie musicals, and the penultimate adaptation of the stage show, this 1936 version of Show Boat was an object of my obsession in tracking down to view. So, thank god for the internet is all I’ll say.

For a movie that placed into the National Film Registry thirty years ago, this version of Show Boat has been a ghostly presence in the home-video market. Along with a 1929 half-silent/half-talkie version also produced by Universal, Show Boat was bought up by MGM in the late 40s while they were prepping a big budget, Technicolor version, and suppressed from circulation until the late 70s when star Paul Robeson passed away. What a shame as this truly is the best film adaptation of the stage show, keeping a large bulk of the songs from the show, adding and removing only a small number, and smartly transitioning from the stage to the screen.

Yet it is not a perfect film, though it teeters close to that mark. The treatment of race and miscegenation is sensitively handled for 1936, but it plays as reductive to these modern eyes. Same goes for a blackface number, nowhere to be found in the stage show but added here, involving Irene Dunne. To tell the story of vaudeville and the showboat eras without minstrel numbers would be to tell a lie about our history, but it wasn’t there originally and serves no purpose in its addition. It is mercifully brief, so let us at least be grateful for that much.

Everything else, mostly, works beautifully here. Led by the incandescent Irene Dunne, the cast is truly stellar, except for Allan Jones who was a great warbler but a limping dramatist. Paul Robeson and Hattie McDaniel prove as fully fleshed out as the captain his wife, Magnolia, Julie, or Gaylord. They wander through much of the earlier parts of the film acting as a chorus, and their absence from the latter half takes an obvious toll. Robeson’s deep voice blaring out “Ol’ Man River” is the obvious highlight. A show-stopper made up of Whale’s creative direction, impressionistic imagery, and Robeson’s vocal performance, which finds the poetry and suffering in the lyrics.

Even better may be Helen Morgan as Julie, the tricky role of the doomed biracial actress. Her reemergence late in the plot to sing “Bill” sealed the deal for me. Done mostly in close-up, Morgan finds every melancholic note, every raw nerve, and keeps all of it swirling underneath the placid surface of her face. It’s the type of minimalist acting that Whale could easily conjure forth from his performers, think of Mae Clarke in Waterloo Bridge or Boris Karloff in the Frankenstein films.

What really solidified in my mind was how badly James Whale’s career is in desperate need of a critical reevaluation. While his three entries in the Universal Monsters franchise remain the best, his other works, including this film, deserve some admiration and respect. He creates a world that feels authentic to the period, not just in costumes, but in the various sets, and the elliptical way it treats issues of racism, spousal abuse, and alcoholism. His variation in staging the sequences is also quite nice, at times he just plants the camera and lets the actors go to work, and in others he goes for stranger, daring, more artistic numbers. If 42^nd Street laid the foundation of more fluid camera work, and the Astaire-Rogers films showed that integrated film musicals could be made, then Show Boat took those lessons and created a fluid, engaging, high-spirited melodramatic work of surprising grace and beauty. 

Cinema produces many iconic pairings, typically comedic duos who play off each other brilliantly, and find ways to make their disparate qualities part of the material, like Laurel & Hardy or the Marx Brothers. Or similar stars with personas that mesh well, like William Powell and Myrna Loy as the movie’s gold star duo for smart, witty, urbane, sophisticated couples whose characters clearly enjoyed a great sex life and their mental sparring. Then there’s the strange duo of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, a marked study in contrasts that on paper seems all wrong, but once the projection booth starts going becomes positively transcending.

Astaire is smooth as glass while dancing; no he glides, yes, he glides across the screen. His entire body continuing and elongating his fluid movements, typically dressed in a tuxedo and doing much of his best work solo. He also wasn’t the handsomest song-and-dance man around, looking a little bit bulgy eyed and projecting an air of sexlessness. Ginger Rogers, by contrast, was an earthy pistol, a gum-chewing chorus girl who made good. Her career trajectory during the 30s and 40s was not unlike any of her numerous parts in films like 42^nd Street or Stage Door. She was brassy, and a competent dancer, but nowhere near the expert technique of Rita Hayworth or Cyd Charisse. Yet together they’re one of the most romantic, magical pairings in the history of cinema.

They made nine films together, effectively launching his career with Flying Down to Rio in 1933 and pushing her towards the top of RKO’s star roster. But Astaire, having come up as part of a duo with his sister Adele, hesitated to engage in the partnership, only coming around once he noticed that his career prospects would only improve if he teamed up with Rogers. This backstage drama is nowhere to be found in any of their films together, of which Top Hat is the fourth, the most well known, most financially successful, and the quintessential. Many would argue that Swing Time is better, and in many respects, it is, but Top Hat is the ne plus ultra of their pairings.

Everything here works, including the plot's easygoing machinations. No one goes into an Astaire-Rogers film looking for narrative complexity and depth, and this one is smart enough to tackle the situation of mistaken identity with a screwball verve. Outside of her films with Astaire, Rogers was a gifted performer with a way with a wry one-liner, a withering look, and an unflappable demeanor. So many of the heavy-lifting moments are handed to her while Astaire gets the lion’s share of complicated dance routines. They even each other out, he covering for her weaknesses as a dancer, and she making their romance’s ups and downs believable.

Yet the two most memorable moments in the film are their shared dance routines. “Isn’t This a Lovely Day (to be Caught in the Rain)” communicates a softening of her resolve to him, at first antagonistic to him, as he sings to her back we can see her quicksilver thoughts and changing emotions. Once they begin to dance, forget it, this is the magical stuff that we go to the movies for. The dancing changes throughout, first with Rogers mocking Astaire, then they engage in a playful duel, before finally working together. Their ebullience is potent.

Greater still is “Cheek to Cheek,” the consummation of their romance. There’s no athletic, flirtatious choreography here as in “Isn’t it a Lovely Day,” just a quiet, delicate passionate entanglement between the two. Rogers wears the infamous feathered gown that makes her twirls, bends, and fluid movements seem ever continuing. Her dress provides a visual underline to the movements, culminating in a deep backbend that looks positively dreamy. Out of all the various dance sequences in the Astaire-Rogers films, “Cheek to Cheek” is probably the most famous having appeared in The Purple Rose of Cairo and The Green Mile, to name just two of the major ones.

Top Hat is perfection, the type of escapism that is utterly charming in its simplistic structure. Much like later day musical sensations like Esther Williams or Mickey Rooney, all of their films follow a basic series of events, types of dances, and supporting players. What makes Top Hat such a definitive example of the Astaire-Rogers films is how effortless it all appears, how much energy it projects, the strength of the Irving Berlin songs, and a dreamy, tender world unlike any other before or since. Sometimes it’s nice to escape into this Art Deco wonderland, where the idle rich engage in oblique games of love, and where heaven looks an awful lot like two people dancing cheek to cheek.

42^nd Street is the premiere backstage musical, the granddaddy of them all, setting the template for the narrative and crafting the character molds. If some of it feels flabby or overly familiar, that’s simply because it’s impossible to view 42^nd Street in any other way than through the prism of our current age.

What helps matters is quite simply that 42^nd Street is a Pre-Code burner, complete with a character dubbed “Anytime Annie.” Maybe it’s not as overheated and sexy as many of its contemporaries, but the Jazz Age hangover hasn’t quite lifted off of these characters. They’re frequently aware of the Depression, making numerous references to it, and maneuvering into backstage politics to ensure a job, or a sugar daddy, to help stay above it. These chorus girls aren’t the healthy, smiling, All-American types of MGM’s 1950s output, but the tougher, rougher ones that Ginger Rogers, who has a great supporting role here, and Joan Crawford exceled at in the era.

The plot is something of a rusty cliché now, but directors Lloyd Bacon and Busby Berkeley keep it humming at an accelerated pace. A veteran stage star (Bebe Daniels) has a sugar daddy putting up the money for a new show, but still pines away for her former vaudeville partner (George Brent). A young up-and-comer (Ruby Keeler, all wet in dramatics but a sensation when dancing) befriends two veteran chorus girls (Rogers and Una Merkel, stealing the movie with one-liners every chance they get), a horny chipmunk singer (Dick Powell), and finds herself slowly emerging as the rising star while Daniels descends into self-destruction, alcoholism, and abusive diva tantrums.

Where the movie is smart to put its focus isn’t on Keeler, who can’t act her way out of a wet tissue, but on the entire ensemble. Daniels does great work throughout, Merkel and Rogers are the types you want to spend more time with, Brent is quietly heartbreaking, and Werner Baxter dives into his crazed, eccentric director with everything he’s got. With so much musical talent on display, there’s surprising little here in the way of big numbers, save for the final half hour which throws out all of the big productions numbers in rapid-fire succession. This is truly more of a comedic drama about the grind of putting on a show, not a brighter, happier “let’s put a show” revue of the Mickey-and-Judy variety.

No better moment perfectly captures the grueling, physically taxing process of rehearsal quite like the kaleidoscopic view of the chorus girls practicing their choreography over and over. They become inseparable from each other, and reduced to moving parts, repeating the same actions again and again until they become smooth and familiar. Yet this is also the same thing which makes me slightly uncomfortable about Berkeley’s big choreographed numbers in the end. The shapely legs moving in geometric unison begins to feel like something of a meat parade, with the faces and bodies being only as important as they were in any specific frame. I suppose something had to boost the morale, along with a few other things.

Something of a tease, 42^nd Street is the warm, escapist fluff which could easily be described as buoyant. There’s no story beat or character development we can’t see coming from the first reel, but there’s a sprightly, sexy energy here that’s very appealing. No dusty relic here, just a solidly constructed Pre-Code semi-musical with a mostly game cast, fun story, and solid direction. If nothing else, give it a watch as the movie which really broke the ground on cinematic musical language. If it’s not as revolutionary today as it was in 1933, well, a lot of time has passed in those eighty-plus years, and a lot of films have followed, expanded, or reinvigorated its formula since.

Perhaps it’s a bit too long, and maybe a few of the musical sequences are a little stiff, but I still think Guys and Dolls is an enjoyable riot. Obvious musical players like Frank Sinatra and Vivian Blaine excel here, but Jean Simmons is the surprising coup, providing the movie with a heart and soul, while Marlon Brando reveals that there was a natural comedian lurking underneath all that smoldering Method intensity. Perfect it ain’t, but it’s got a lot of color and charm.

Let’s get the problems out of the way first, because what works outweighs it. Director Joseph L. Mankiewicz was a natural for quiet, small character-driven dramas, look at his superior “women’s picture” A Letter to Three Wives or the towering achievement that is All About Eve, but he wasn’t a natural photographer of song-and-dance. Sometimes the choice to simply plant the camera and shoot works, like in the high-spirited “Sit Down You’re Rockin’ the Boat,” but it undoes the winking sexuality in “Pet Me Poppa” and leaves “Luck Be a Lady” is little soggy. Mankiewicz was smart to simply shut up and follow the acrobatic dancing and pantomime of the opening, which slowly introduces us to the lovable grifters and criminals we’ll see more of, but he’s clearly no Vincente Minnelli or Stanley Donen in the musical department.

While I adore Brando, it is a bit funny to see him in the leading role, which has all of the big numbers, while Sinatra is sacked with the quirky character part that requires no range. Sinatra wanted Brando’s part, and they should have switched roles. Brando does fine in a few of the quieter numbers, but the bigger pieces are clearly limited by his small vocal range. He plays the dramatic scenes and comedic beat with relish, and his romancing Jean Simmons is feisty and lively.  

Now that that unpleasantness is out of the way, everything else in Guys and Dolls is a winner. Jean Simmons is the true surprise, and walks off with the film by the end. Shacking off the respectable British leading lady vibe that hovered around her, she dives into her character’s drunken antics, physical comedy, and big emotional scenes like a starved animal on a particularly juicy cut of meat. Her singing voice is surprisingly strong, and quite lovely. Watching this, I’m reminded of how strong a performer Simmons in, and I can’t help but wonder how she could deliver this performance, along with her great supporting work in Hamlet and Elmer Gantry, and not become a big star on par with Vivien Leigh or Deborah Kerr. It’s impossible to imagine producer Samuel Goldwyn’s original choice, Grace Kelly, ever coming close to this role.

If Mankiewicz is sometimes confused about staging of the numbers, he at least made the tremendously smart choice of giving this film a completely unique look. Unlike numerous other big musicals of the era, Guys and Dolls wasn’t filmed in real outdoor locations, and it wasn’t given the glossy MGM-style treatment either. This version of New York, an obvious set, is entirely enchanting for being so minimalistic and strange. It somehow befits the cartoon-ish Damon Runyon creations that they don’t populate a recognizable world, but one made up of bits-and-pieces and highly stylized impressions of New York’s various locations.

Even better are Runyon’s numerous colorful supporting players, gangsters who don’t speak in contractions, engage in funny wordplay to talk around subjects, and have generally outsized personalities. Particular standouts are Vivian Blaine’s Miss Adelaide, a loopy, nasal-voiced nightclub singer who finds herself chronically sick while waiting for Sinatra to propose, B.S. Pully’s Big Jule who sounds like a talking ashtray, and Stubby Kaye’s Nicely-Nicely Johnson who is generally personable throughout as a comic-sidekick, but gets a glory moment in the aforementioned “Sit Down You’re Rockin’ the Boat.” They’re exaggerated cartoons, but they’re endearing for being so broad and comically large transforming profane hustlers into endearing kooks.

Even better is the Michael Kidd choreography that covers a wide terrain of styles and moods. The Havana sequence has sexy movements, delivered by Brando with his some stiffness but his trademark smoldering, and by Simmons, who practically explodes with an unleashed carnality that wipes everything else off the screen. The introduction of “Luck Be a Lady” is theatrical and athletic, showing a dice game in exaggerated leaps and expressive movements. And Kidd gives Blaine, and a new chorus of Goldwyn Girls, some teasing, winking cheesecake in her two numbers, one of which is a striptease that rivals Rita Hayworth’s imaginary one in Pal Joey for being a gasser that’s also sexy.

Maybe it gets a little flabby in the mid-section, and it’s definitely a bit too long, but I think Guys and Dolls is a charmer. If nothing else, it’s great as an antidote to some of its era’s rivals for simply forsaking their grandiosity for earthy characters, sharp wit, and imaginative production design. Any film that manages to overcome problems that would sink any other deserves major kudos. It’s not a perfect musical, but I love spending time with these ne’er-do-wells brushing up against the Salvation Army. 

The Bishop’s Wife is a perfectly fine excuse to spend 105 minutes with Cary Grant and Loretta Young, but there’s a general sense of heavy sentiment that makes the whole thing so sweet that it threatens to drill holes in your teeth the longer it goes on. It’s kind of gentle, old-fashioned movie-making that makes modern viewers frequently roll their eyes, and I can’t blame them. It’s so wholesome as to be anemic.

A religious fantasy about an angel (Cary Grant, who else?) coming down to help a bishop (David Niven) and his wife (Loretta Young) in their marital and financial difficulties. For such a simple story, the production is the kind of nightmare that would lead one to believe The Bishop’s Wife would be a bloated mess, but it’s not. Despite the numerous setbacks, none of the stitches show, and none of the sutures bleed.

Going under the direction of William A. Seiter for two weeks, with Teresa Wright as the wife and Grant and Niven in the reverse roles, producer Samuel Goldwyn, one of the great independents of the era, was not happy with the results. He scrapped it all, replaced a now pregnant Wright with Loretta Young, whose yearning eyes and lady-like carriage are a perfect match for the part, brought in Henry Koster to direct, uncredited rewrites from Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett, and had his leading men swap roles. The Bishop’s Wife emerged from these troubled production woes as a light, fleet-footed, very charming, if slight, piece of romantic holiday entertainment.

It’s hard to picture Grant as the troubled bishop, seething with jealousy over the relationship between his wife and the angel. Niven would have been fine in the angelic part, but he’s much better suited to the bishop. The only problem is the lack of chemistry between Niven and Young, whereas she shimmers and glows in her scenes with Grant. The central romance is somehow unbelievable between the two, and it’s easy to believe in Niven’s jealousy of her spending time with Grant, as their chemistry is evident.

Where The Bishop’s Wife excels is in Grant’s central performance, which displays hidden sadness beneath his handsome, confident surface. It isn’t until the final act that we learn that this angel yearns for a mortal existence and the love of a good woman, and would happily throw it all away for Young’s character. This complication hints at a darker, better, more interesting movie lurking underneath the glossy structures. Grant, never an actor to slum it no matter the film or the part, does wonders in selling us on this faintly ridiculous premise and character. If The Bishop’s Wife is not top-shelf among his iconic screen roles, then it’s certainly among his wider range of second-tier likable creations.

The problem is that Grant’s character and performance are more interesting than much of the rest of the film. There’s no hint that he won’t bring back light and joy into the couple’s lives, that everything will work out in the end. There’s no dramatic stakes here, and it’s hard to invest in it. The script also makes Niven look frequently petty, verging on unlikable, for long stretches of time, so the romantic triangle, the closest this film gets to heavy dramatics, doesn’t entirely work.

Yet for much of the time, The Bishop’s Wife is delightful in its minor key. Young does incredibly fine work. She was one of the few actresses who could make a goody-two-shoes lady into a meal of a dramatic part. Her large eyes, ever changing like a flowing current, can bring depth to lines and material that are otherwise bereft of them. And the special effects work is lovely in its lo-fi way. Scenes of Grant magically decorating Christmas trees, or helping organize a cluttered room sing with the old school magic of Hollywood’s primitive days.

If it’s not a classic to me, and it’s not given how it plays as an overlong syrupy sitcom, a precursor to the holiday-themed episodes of TGIF sitcoms, then it’s at least a charming diversion around Christmas time. There are worse ways to spend the holidays then watching Young and Grant ice skate or shop for hats.

After Toy Story 3 in 2010, the consistency of Pixar’s output went all sorts of strange. Not that every single movie prior to 2010 was a gold star, hey Cars, but the quality was remarkably high, and the few sequels found ways to expand the themes and emotions of its original in profound ways. Then we got the uneven Brave, slight but fun Monster’s University, and the atrocious Cars 2 (not in that order), but the old Pixar magic came roaring back in Inside Out.

Pixar is best when it focuses its immense resources on highly imaginative, inventive stories that take simple concepts and explore them through characters instead of strict narratives. Think of the ways it took on the yearning to create (Ratatouille), aging (the Toy Story franchise), the power of laughter and fear (Monster’s, Inc.), and here it takes on memory, emotions, depression, and what’s going on inside of our minds. To have this film tell it, there’s five central big emotions which pilot your system, with one typically being the driver.

That main emotion here is Joy (Amy Poehler), who demands control of the board at any and all moments, practically bullying Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Fear (Bill Hader), Anger (Lewis Black), and Disgust (Mindy Kaling) into being second fiddle. The oppressiveness of forced joy will be a major theme in this film, viewing happiness as the end-all be-all at the expense of the full-range of emotions is inherently limiting. I loved Inside Out for simply stating that Sadness was a necessary emotion to achieve full maturity and live a full life. There’s a fairly courageous argument to make in a culture that demands positivity and forebodes darker feelings.

This makes Inside Out sound like a serious or heady trip, which I suppose it is at various points, but it is also an absolute blast to watch. The various glimpses into other people’s minds revealed that while the construction was vaguely similar, it wasn’t the same. Variation was clearly present, and the joke about the cat’s brain was a nice bit of relief after so emotional a trip.

The colors are vibrant, and the absence of them as the central character slowly falls into a depressive state is subtly done. This is one of the better filmic representations of encroaching depression I have ever seen, with the long-term parts of the personality draining and crumbling away. Or the ways in which it looks at nostalgic memories, which are tinged with happiness and ache in equal measure, or how various remembrances are complicated by disparate feelings tugging at them. Inside Out is a smart movie for adults, and a very engaging and funny one for kids, distilling complicated concepts to more easily manageable bits and pieces.

Then there’s just the series of smart jokes on display. There’s a literal Train of Thought that gets derailed, a movie studio which produces films and comes complete with a reality distortion filter, and a gated up subconscious that houses various fears at rest. Of course, this wouldn’t be a Pixar movie if it didn’t introduce a character that we grow emotionally attached to, only for something bad to happen to them. Here, that character is Bing Bong, a castoff of an imaginary friend, running around, long-forgotten.

When Joy and Sadness get stranded away from the central control room, Bing Bong will be their guide back to headquarters. He’s lovable, a cotton candied body with an elephant head, and Pepto-Bismol pink. His observance after Facts and Opinions boxes get knocked over that they mingle all the time produced a hearty chuckle from me. And when he and Joy eventually get stuck in the mental abyss where older memories go to die, his eventually sacrifice left me an absolute wreck. It wasn’t just Richard Kind’s perfect vocal performance that made him so endearing, but what his symbolic heft represented – the parts of childhood we let/must let die in order to grow up. His nobility and self-sacrifice in the moment is wrenching, and his final words delivered with kindness and thoughtfulness.

Everything works here, and after a series of films that felt like Pixar had lost their way, or acquiesced to the worst impulses of its parent company, Inside Out is a welcome triumph. It may not be neat and tidy a ride, but neither is growing up. Inside Out plays like a symphony of confusion and mixed up emotions, reminding us that every feeling is validated, and that this monopolization of positivity isn’t a sustainable goal. Life will happen, and twinges of sadness, fear, disgust, and anger are inevitable. We are multitudes, and that is one of the definitive, unifying experiences of life.

Yet again, Alejandro González Iñárritu creates a film that is artistically daring, but emotionally hollow, a simple-minded revenge film that ends in two men beating each other bloody in the snow. That is the entirety of the film, a simple revenge story that is lacquered with gorgeous cinematography and two great central performances, but like many of Iñárritu’s films, there’s very little that’s actually there.

As a punishing endurance test for the audience, The Revenant can’t be beat. Ever wanted to watch a handsome leading man cut open a horse and climb inside for warmth? Well, here is your chance. Ever wanted to watch another typically handsome leading man walk around with a bald spot from an unsuccessful scalping attempt? Well, this film has got you covered for that too. Eating raw bison liver, moments of beautifully executed violence, and the quiet contemplation of a Terrence Malick film without his poetic soul can all be found here.

There is no heart or emotionally gripping content here, and passages that try for it feel portentous and unearned. Iñárritu’s work is much better when he relaxes into just filming the disturbing decathlon that Hugh Glass goes through to get his revenge. There’s no poetry here, no soul, just ugly uber-masculine chest-pounding and enormous amounts of bloodshed. Outside of its impressive technique and sheer audacity, it’s cold, calculating, and yet another overly-long misery-fest from its director.

Yet even this can’t sustain The Revenant for its nearly three hour running time. Without deeper hooks to grab onto, this just begins to feel shallow, a series of pretty pictures and tortured faces without much thematic content to wrestle with. What is the bigger aim here? I said that Iñárritu was contemptuous of his audience with Birdman, thinking them too stupid to understand his points, so he instead loudly yelled them at their face replete with exclamation points and bolded text. The Revenant is not so different, with every beat played at eleven.

The Revenant still has some quality moments of film-making, and unlike Birdman, I didn’t outright hate it. I admired its bravado more than I enjoyed it. Across the board, the acting is high-quality work, with much of it resting upon Leonardo DiCaprio. He commits himself to the blood, spit, and insanity of the part to the point where I wondered if he left a piece of his soul out in the woods when filming was wrapped. He cranks himself into the self-possessed and beaten down frenzy of Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia, he’s just doing it in service of a much lesser work.

Tom Hardy, Domhnall Gleeson, Will Poulter, and Forrest Goodluck all turn in fine work in various supporting roles. Hardy, one of our more under-appreciated actors, has had quite a year in films exploring uber-masculinity’s destructive nature, but Mad Max: Fury Road, for all of its bluster and high-octane thrills, was a smarter, brainier movie with much more to say between explosions. His work here is another strange, body and voice morphing grotesque, and he excels at every turn.

Gleeson has had a year of nothing but strong supporting performances. He’s underutilized here, but he works as something of the film’s moral compass, so it’s no great shock when he’s sidelined and written out of the piece for large chunks of time. And Poulter, primarily known for his comedic work in We’re the Millers, shows how capable a dramatic performer he can be.

Yet it’s the heavy presence of so many Native actors that impressed me the most in The Revenant. Granted, the female characters are mere wisps, dead wives and kidnapped daughters who exists to torment and drive our characters to acts of violence. It’s still nice to see so many faces on-screen that are too often ignored in representation, and all of them do credible to magnificent work with the material. It’s a shame that they’re only ever brought out for historical periods, solidifying the vague impression that they’re relics of the past, frozen in amber, but maybe the presence of them in such a big-budget and box-office dominating piece will lead to more stories with them in major roles? Maybe I’m being something of a Pollyanna, but I want to believe that a lesson about diversity is being learned here.

By this point saying that Emmanuel Lubezki is one of the greatest cinematographers currently work should be meant with a resounding, “Well, duh!” but the sentiment still holds true. Lubezki uses natural light to craft some resoundingly beautiful shots of nature, or man’s struggle to survive in them. The stark, harsh shots of DiCaprio staring out in a panicked state are so immaculate that they could be framed and displayed as photographic art. He’s on something of a roll with awards these past three years, winning Oscars for Gravity and Birdman, and it appears that he’s on track to pick up his third straight win. He deserves it, just like he deserved the other two, and a few others before them.

Hopefully, coherence and editing will soon make their way into Iñárritu’s work. The Revenant becomes overburdened by indulgences, keeping up with the auteur theory in a sense. His voice is loud, aggressively so, but what exactly does he want to say and do with it? Oh well, at least there’s heavenly visuals to distract from the sinking feeling of “Is that all there is, my friend?”

Is Hans Christian Andersen a very good movie? Eh, it’s ok I suppose, but it’s a great spotlight for Danny Kaye’s abilities. The movie has little to do with Andersen’s real life, presenting pure confectionery sugar as substantive storytelling, with a few musical numbers, bright colors, and little of it is memorable.

It’s quite difficult to see why this story was the driving obsession for super-producer Samuel Goldwyn. Its roots lie in 1936, when Goldwyn begin harvesting the initial idea. Production was stop-and-start through the 40s, during which time Goldwyn considering collaborating with Walt Disney to animate the various fairy tales, and sought ballet star-turned-actress Moira Shearer for a role. Neither of these ideas proved fruitful, and the final product feels somehow bloated and like it’s chasing the tails of superior works.

An extended ballet sequence in the final act plays like a ho-hum variation of its obvious sources, the surreal central dance in The Red Shoes and An American in Paris’ climatic ballet. It tells the story of “The Little Mermaid” well enough, but it’s missing a certain something that made those films sing loudly. Director Charles Vidor is just not much of a musical director, with the best sequences in Cover Girl being the ones he handed over to upstart Gene Kelly.

Even worse is the supporting players orbiting Kaye, most of which are fine is underutilized except for one major exception. Joseph Walsh is fine as the more-adult apprentice, even if he saddled with a character that can be something of a nag. Farley Granger is very handsome, but outside of Alfred Hitchcock’s guiding hand something of an inconsistent performer. Here he gets to shout a lot, one scene in particular is pure camp given that it’s the openly gay Granger screaming at a bunch of male ballet dancers to be straighter, but little else to do. But it’s Zizi jeanmaire who sinks the film whenever she’s required to do anything besides dance. She’s a fabulous dancer, but she can’t land her jokes, sell any of the drama, and the unrequited romance is something of a waste of time.

Hans Christian Andersen is much better in the first hour or so when it simply lets Danny Kaye do his thing. He’s aces as the head-in-the-clouds cobbler-turned-writer, and he sells everything thrown at him. His series of songs all blur since none of them sound terribly different from each other, but Kaye manages to sell their emotional truths. A few of the songs are playful spins on his famous fairy tales, such as “The Ugly Duckling” and “Thumbelina.” Even if lovesick Kaye isn’t much fun, or even believable as Jeanmaire doesn’t make for a good match with him, he’s still clearly invested in trying to make it play as real.

Filmed entirely on sound stages, Hans Christian Andersen plays out like a filmed storybook come to life. This is consistently charming throughout, even if the script fails to match the vibrancy of all around it. Well, there are a few moments of unintentional camp, like Andersen explaining to a group of children that many kings are just queens with mustaches, or the ending which finds Andersen and his young male apprentice danced around by a protective circle of little girl. Read with the knowledge that most academics view Andersen as a frustrated homosexual during his era, these sly jokes appear faintly transgressive for the time. Without a villain, well-shaped narrative, or a central hook, Hans Christian Andersen is but a slow trifle with few inspired moment. At least Kaye’s whimsy and silliness is a central presence in creating some sustaining life force.

The problem with Ex Machina is that it presents the glossy surfaces of deep ideas and slow mounting dread, but never pays off on them or reaches an emotional crescendo in which answers and provocations are expelled. It just floats by on a trio of strong performances, top-notch effects work, beautiful scenery, and a persistently ominous musical score. All of the ingredients are there for a master work of smart science-fiction, but the soufflé never rises completely.

Given that it coasts upon the aphorisms of “less is more” and “God is in the details,” Ex Machina excels in establishing and sustaining tone and atmosphere, practically dripping with prolonged paranoia, sexual threats, and questions of consciousness. Like so much of modern science-fiction, it builds upon the foundation of Frankenstein, this time taking a creator-creation locked in struggle and adding an element of patriarchy to the mix. This becomes as nebulous and half-formed as the rest of the ideas trotted out, but the actors do great work in trying to sell it.

As I watched The Danish Girl I thought that Alicia Vikander was a strong performer, but that this was clearly not the role she should have been nominated for. Ex Machina is a much better demonstration of her gifts, as it allows her to play something other than long-suffering supportive wife, and it utilizes her past as a dancer to great effect. Her rigid body movements, quick gestures, and large staring eyes craft an unnerving first impression, and it pays off wonderfully in her final moments. As she removes the flesh from the failed experiments before her, Vikander’s Ava creates a new form, and stands in awe of her self-made reinvention.

Domhnall Gleeson had a great 2015 between his solid work here, charming turn in Brooklyn, and full-on maniacal posturing in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. He’s appropriately naïve walking into this sustained battle between victim-victimizer, but quickly becomes something a casualty between the increasingly blurred lines between the creator and his creation seeking liberation. But it’s Oscar Isaac who clearly dominates Ex Machina, sometimes a bit too much. He’s supposed to be the villain, but he’s so charming, so beguiling a presence that he threatens to undo our distrust of him. His peacocking, culminating in a synchronized disco-fueled dance routine with his mute servant (Sonoya Mizuno), and personal demons, if his character isn’t a full-blown alcoholic then he’s well on his way, aren’t given enough attention in the script, but Isaac works miracles in the role.

While I generally enjoyed Ex Machina, too much of the enigmatic nature left me feeling frustrated. Well, that and the tendency towards treating the female AI creations as half-sentient Fleshlights was a little icky. I’m not sure if that last fifteen minutes, in which Ava wreaks havoc upon her creator and coconspirator is enough to wash that away. What exactly drove Isaac to create and program his AI in this way? Ava’s refusal to be kept locked away lacks emotional heft as so much of her creator’s backstory and methodology remains a ghost in the machine. But if you can roll with these flaws in the script, Ex Machina provides many beautiful, sleek surface textures to enjoy, and a smarter variation of pulpy science-fiction.

Charlie Kaufman’s films are such distinct flavors, heavy on the quirk and human drama, that they’re immediately recognizable, even in animated form. If film is frequently thought of as a director’s medium, Kaufman proves that occasionally a screenwriter’s voice is so specific that it can puncture that thought ever so slightly.

Here in Anomalisa, Kaufman presents an authentic and great depiction of depression. Using stop-motion animation, Kaufman tells the story of a man’s (David Thewlis) midlife crisis in which he views everyone with the exact same nondescript face and the vocals of Tom Noonan, regardless of gender or age. Noonan’s vocals are frequently affectless and the same for every character, until he overhears Lisa (Jennifer Jason Leigh), the only person to feature their own face and vocals.

Make no mistake; this is no meet cute that’s a miracle cure-all. Unlike numerous movies with liter the landscape that sell the lie that romantic entanglements will cure crippling depression, Anomalisa proves that a connection can temporarily shake it off, but it’s still an uphill fight every moment of every day. Yet there’s a real tenderness and connection between these two lonely people, and their sex scene is the most emotional moment in a film full of them. Who knew a film about puppets would feature a sex scene that was that engaging and honest?

There’s not a lot of plot involved in Anomalisa, it mostly involves one night, is confined primarily to a hotel, and our emotions traverse from sympathetic feelings towards him to anger and wanting him to get his shit together. Then the final scene comes around, and we see how disconnected he is from his own life. An earlier scene hinted at it, the morning after with Leigh’s character, in which her voice merges with Noonan’s, and the sun behind her head slowly eclipses the character’s face. But the final scene hammers the point home, this guy is depressed, floundering, and needs a lot of help.

What makes the film work so well is its modesty of ambition. It is an entirely hermetically sealed world. Even the nightmare sequence takes place entirely within the hotel. This small scale allows for the focus to really narrow upon the character’s interactions, and how they evolve and change throughout the course of the night. Being a Kaufman film, things get weird and strange, but they never stop feeling real. Despite the puppet’s visible face plates and hair lines, despite it being yet another entry in a well-worn genre (middle-aged straight white man deals with sadness), it finds tremendous specificity, truth, and melancholy within. Never before has Cyndi Lauper’s “Girl Just Wanna Have Fun” been used to highlight the yearning to break free, to walk in the sun, to sing in our own voice.