Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

In his ninth feature film (he keeps count), Quentin Tarantino’s emphatic style is more comfortable in its own genre-soaked skin than it’s ever been. The camera doesn’t pan or tilt or dolly on its own so much as it seems to keep time with the late 1960s soundtrack. People kill each other to the bombastic harmonizing of Vanilla Fudge’s “You Keep Me Hanging On.” This is all to say that Tarantino, now 56, is never boring.

In the historical counter-factual fashion that is now characteristic of him, Tarantino imagines that Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) and her husband, Roman Polanski (Rafal Zawierucha), have a next-door neighbor named Rick Dalton (Leonardo Di Caprio). Now in his late 30s, Rick did well as a TV actor in a 50s western called “Bounty Law.” And he’s still trying to be That Guy in 1969. Tarantino relishes the many Family Guy-style flashbacks to Rick kicking ass as the no-nonsense bounty hunter. QT is a serious disciple of genre schlock who always highlights the levity inherent in it.

Rick is simultaneously looking to branch out and convinced he’s washed up. The culture is about done with guys like him. He’s even apprehensive about saying hello to his stylish next-door neighbors, the “hottest director in Hollywood” and his glamorous, free-spirited wife. But the camera glides like Superman up and over the fence, into the sky, and from one property to another. The bravura camera move early in the film asserts Tarantino’s conceit visually. Can you believe it, he seems to say, the guy lives right next door.

As much time as Once Upon a Time in Hollywood takes to establish Dalton as its flawed hero, it is Brad Pitt’s Cliff Booth who steals the film. In what is, for me, Mr. Pitt’s career-best performance, Booth is a kind of hero character for cinephiles, an archetype from a bygone time when we needed archetypes. His world-weary nonchalance seems to be his main superpower. The “real” Steve McQueen (a perfectly cast Damian Lewis) sits by a pool and gossips like a Hollywood dirt sheet writer about who’s dated whom. (Granted, that scene contains the film’s best one-liner joke.) Meanwhile, Booth, who is Rick’s stuntman and all-purpose fixer, does the things the movie stars pretend to do.

In Inglorious Basterds, Pitt’s heavily southern accented military man feels like a cartoon character. You witness Pitt jumping into the animation cell and exaggerating his movements. In Cliff Booth, though, Pitt is at ease. The way he sits, walks, smokes — there’s no detectable performance. Booth is a “cool guy,” but not one who’s going to argue with you about it. We’ve seen this fella before in Tarantino’s universe. Think Max Cherry and Jules Winnfield.

In recent years, I’ve noticed that Mr. Pitt, now 55 years-old and twice divorced from equally famous spouses, is remarkably at ease in interviews. It’s almost as if he’s spent twenty-five years or more having his name be synonymous with “handsome” and knows there’s not much to be done about it. This breezy, affable demeanor is so consistent that it might make a character like Cliff a lobbed pitch for Pitt. The film belongs to Booth. His employer goes through every stage of existential angst, while the stuntman seems to have made his peace with angst long ago, or maybe even made it his bitch. When it’s revealed, early on, that Cliff had a pivotal domestic incident in his past, we feel as if we already knew that. He’d been wearing it on his sleeve all along.

Once Upon a Time takes a good long while to find it’s story. Tarantino is content to film the classic cars and billboards of Hollywood in 1969 and shuffle us through his roster of favorite actors, fading each one in and out of the film like a well-prepared principal at an elementary school Christmas pageant. And why not? He has unfailing good taste in actors. Kurt Russell, Bruce Dern, Scoot McNairy, and the late Luke Perry all get a moment. There they are, and there they go.

There are flubs, though. Al Pacino feels somewhat like a stretch. Also, you could cut out half of Di Caprio’s scenes and not lose a whole lot of what the film is trying to do. Moreover, Margot Robbie’s much discussed portrayal of Sharon Tate ends up being more of a grace note in the film. There’s not much to the character. In Tarantino’s vision, Tate is not even a symbol for anything. She’s just a pretty girl who was lucky until she wasn’t. It was proper for Tarantino to have been asked at Cannes about the short shrift he gave both the character and Robbie.

Eventually, Cliff finds his way to the Manson Family’s dilapidated ranch, and we’re treated to some impressively tense scenes. The three sets of main characters — Cliff and Rick, Sharon and her friends, and the Manson clan — sort of circle each other for most of the running time. And even when the plot reaches its crescendo, they still don’t get much time together.

Despite all the hullabaloo, Once Upon a Time is not about “What If x, y, or z had never happened?” The Tate-LaBianca murders are of little interest to Tarantino, or to us, really. What it is is a film about the where and when, not the how and the who. And the filmmaker’s affection for the setting and time period leaps off of the screen more than any murder would, real or imagined.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood — FOUR STARS

Directed by Quentin Tarantino

Rated R

Sony Pictures Releasing

Heyday Films

Columbia Pictures

Bona Film Group

Visiona Romatica

161 mins.

High Life

High Life is almost an anti-science fiction movie, a work that has affection less for the visual character of the sci-fi genre than for what that imagery can yield toward such classic Denis themes as isolation and exploitation.

We begin, after all, on a slow-gliding shot of a garden. Which is itself the food source on an unremarkable looking spaceship that looks like a backup battery pack phone charger. Robert Pattinson, an actor I still find mostly a blank stare, carries the picture with that blankness. Denis’ best work has been with expressive actors who carry in them an element of essential strangeness, which makes High Life an outlier of sorts.

Pattinson is quite affecting as Monte, a prisoner on spaceship where prisoners are on a mission to a black hole. (The idea is to harness the black hole’s power for use as an Earthly energy source.) The prisoners think they’ll win their freedom, but the whole thing is a kind of perverse double-cross that ends badly.

Denis gives us the narrative out of order — itself a kind of double-crossing of story that allows her to brush past the sci-fi conventions and get to the oddities of humans in space.

The twist involves both Juliette Binoche and the sexualized science. Binoche’s character, coyly named “Dibs,” is running experiments on the death row prisoners.

Monte got convicted for, as a child, killing his best friend over a dog. And Monte certainly has the monotone and saltine pallor of someone who’s been on death row that long. By the time Denis’ stirring ending flashes before us, we’ve been sat alongside Monte long enough to have never actually seen his crime.Thus we feel a deep, unusual-for-Denis ambivalence toward what he and his companion may or may not be soaring into.

High Life — THREE STARS

Directed by Claire Denis

A24

110 min.

Us

Jordan Peele’s Us seems shaped by everything from Haneke to Hitchcock, from Almodovar to John Carpenter to, indeed, Polanski. But it’s Peele’s own wry aesthetic and penchant for dialogue that’s at once realistic and off-beat that sets his second film apart. So often in the film, which opens today, what’s most impressive is not the scares, many of which are well orchestrated, but the in-between moments of a family eating fast food for dinner, or a boring car ride to a summer home that features memorable diagetic music (there’s some of that Haneke).

Much praise has already been collected by Peele for his careful craft — and the film is impressively put together — but, as in Get Out, what sells the scares is that Peele is such a studious observer of the banality of daily life.

After a spooky flashback cold-open, Us begins as Haneke’s Funny Games does, with a somewhat idealized but recognizably human family driving to a vacation home. Again, Peele, who also wrote the screenplay, excels at this sort of exposition, which in typical horror films is excruciating. We find the Wilsons at ease with one another. There are jokes and banter. But the spooky aura of the cold open hangs in the air. Where Get Out had a more straightforward relationship to form, Us is more observant of its characters faces, the camera seeming to study, even probe, them. It moves its angles slightly in between shots. Scenes shot in broad daylight seem to be imbued with the coldness of midnight.

The central conceit of Us is hinted at with prefatory text across a black screen at the beginning of the film. As the trailer revealed, a family is haunted by bizarro versions of themselves. Where these versions come from and what they want is at once intellectually stimulating and cockamamie if you mull it over for too long. Peele’s penchant for allegory is a gift and a curse. One wonders whether he received studio notes to the effect of “Explain this in dialogue.”

Indeed there are tense, highly memorable scenes that are freighted with long, verbal explanations of What’s Going On. Not a crime in itself (Hitchcock does this all over the place in Vertigo). But too many details in terms of the Hows and Whys just serve to thicken the sauce needlessly.

Story aside, the picture belongs to Lupita Nyong’o. Her character, Adelaide, walks through life haunted by a childhood trauma — a shopworn horror trope Peele twists into something legitimately interesting. Nyong’o is a screen acting ninja of body language. When Adelaide tells her husband, Gabe (Winston Duke), about the childhood event, Peele writes her a dramatic monologue that borders on the maudlin. But it’s Nyong’o’s posture that sells it. She hugs her own elbows as if to protect a body she isn’t quite sure is hers.

The scares and the blood and the gore Us has on offer is better than most horror submissions these days, which tend to linger on the violence in a cheap, juvenile way that doesn’t interest Peele. In Us, the manner in which the characters commit their violent acts actually reveals something about them. (What a concept.) Of course, most discussions of the film will center around the meaning of it all.

Unlike Peele’s first film, Us is more ambiguous in its thematic destinations. The ideas of doubles, doppelgangers, shadows, and mirrors have a deep mythos all their own and can be read in any direction you like. The cognitive bias programmed in us by Get Out  is to see the film as, on some level, about Race in America. Put a gun to my head and I’d say I read Peele’s film — which is at bottom about a permanent and exploited underclass who are out of sight and out of mind — as an allegory for the prison system. The inmates are exactly like you, only in red jumpsuits. 

Us — THREE STARS

Directed by Jordan Peele

Rated R

Universal Pictures

Blumhouse

Monkey Paw

116 min.

Captain Marvel

Although it is a muddled and superficial film, Captain Marvel stars Brie Larson and Samuel L. Jackson, the latter of which is among the most watchable movie stars working today. Their tandem charms and relative comfort working within the Marvel aesthetic make the experience almost tolerable.

Directed by indie journeymen Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, Marvel’s latest chapter in its never-ending story is almost unwatchable in its first reel. The titular character has about three names, thus we can stick with “Captain.” We meet Captain on her home planet, where she’s haunted by memories she can’t quite snap into focus. It’s a warrior society, and in its first third the film borrows from everything from Green Lantern to Superman to The Matrix and grows more tedious with every purloined almost-idea.

There’s an early covert mission Captain goes on with her fellow alien freaks that’s a mess of too-dark cinematography and meandering, uninspired direction. The formal maneuver of representing Captain’s repressed/erased memories of a past life through extremely on-the-nose editing gets old instantaneously. It’s also annoying. There was an opportunity here to do something interesting with the are-we-our-memories philosophical underpinnings of the story, the feminist subject matter, and the 1990s setting. But these elements are never explored, just simply presented.

It would have been great, for example, to see the 90s setting used to some thematic effect rather than simply mined for its obnoxiously obvious playlist. A Marvel movie that actually mimicked a 90s movie aesthetic would have been… well, it would have been as good as any idea in Captain Marvel. The film’s one actually worthwhile major theme — that Captain Marvel had been fighting on the wrong side of a war because she didn’t know who she truly was (literally) — is rendered in such an incurious fashion that the notion is wasted.

Larson navigates the character’s intensity and, remarkably for an alien, penchant for wry comedy more or less skillfully. Of course, the problem with a hero who literally doesn’t know her true identity is that whatever personality traits she might exhibit seem random. Which they are. Oh, is she also a swordsman of sarcasm? Sure, why not?

Larson gets by on her instincts, never really seeming to know, well, who this character is. (Compare with Robert Downey Jr.’s handling of Tony Stark in the Iron Man films; this is less a testament to Downey’s talents than it is to the fact that Tony Stark has character traits that make him recognizable in a literal crowd of superheroes.) Predictably, her best scenes are ones that resemble her own indie background — e.g., sitting at a kitchen table and reminiscing with an old friend, or engaging is semi-barbed banter with Nick Fury (Jackson).

To the extent that Marvel films exist as long-form trailers for the next Marvel film, Captain Marvel is about as effective as it gets. It has the perfunctory boisterousness and pointless swagger that only the finest (worst) trailers can effect. Sitting in the theater, one realizes that the reason the fans come out is the post-credits sequences, in which it becomes clear that the main attraction is never the film you’re watching but the one you’re meant to watch next.

Captain Marvel — TWO STARS

Directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck

Rated PG-13

Marvel Studios

Walt Disney Studios 

124 min.

The Best Movies: 2018 Edition

As usual, house rules apply. I consider these year-end lists as acts of subjective curation rather than mathematical proofs. It’s simply a list of what I loved in 2018, in ranked order. Nothing about these lists makes much sense anyway. So enjoy the madness.

10. You Were Never Really Here

YWNRH is at once quiet and emphatic — an apt description of Lynne Ramsay’s work in general — a film that doesn’t rise or fall but simply simmers the whole way through, always seeming to be on the verge of something, then holding back… until. Ramsay bottles the oddball verve of Jaoquin Phoenix and sells its wholesale in this poetic and gloomy character sketch of a ruthless hitman who really is a nice guy deep down, you know? Only a filmmaker of Ramsay’s caliber could make this adaptation work. And it works wonders.

9. Unsane

Utterly unpretentious as ever, Steven Soderbergh has a blast with the plot of Unsane. You might walk away thinking you’ve experienced a gripping (if a bit silly at times) and taut thriller about identity, mental health, and the true nature of madness. But I think to Soderbergh, it’s just a genre romp, something fun to do. He shot it on an iPhone. Claire Foy registers the year’s most underappreciated lead performance, not to mention the most awesome character name of the year: “Sawyer Valentini.”

8. BlacKkKlansman

A morally serious deconstruction of hatred (as well as a hymn to competency in our institutions) shouldn’t be this funny, but Spike Lee’s film is one of the funniest of the year. (As well as one of the most harrowing, to be sure.) It’s probably all the dunking on racists that’s done just in the minor mannerisms of Topher Grace’s portrayal of David Duke. Or it could be John David Washington’s mannered pronunciation of the word “white” (he really hits that “wh-” sound). Lee is never subtle. But we don’t live in subtle times.

7. First Man

Damien Chazelle’s biopic of Neil Armstrong is extremely un-biopic-y. Like its star, Ryan Gosling, First Man is downbeat and morose and utterly mesmerizing. La La Land won the box office over. This, a far better and more humane film, did not. It’s the first Chazelle film about which I’ve been unequivocally enthusiastic. The guy can do endings, I’ll give him that.

6. First Reformed

Ethan Hawke and Paul Schrader have teamed for, at the very least, the best plot twists this year. At best, Schrader’s brooding film acts out his love of Bresson and Dreyer more than anything he’s ever done. The wayward and damn-near insane Reverend Toller has a heart too pure for mainstream religion, and bad habits that make him fit right in. What the ending signifies, much in the tradition of Schrader’s European heroes, is up to you.

5. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

I don’t know what I was expecting when I heard the pitch for the Coen brothers’ latest movie. A series of western short stories that, truth be told, looked fairly cartoonish in the trailer. It is cartoonish. The titular character (Tim Blake Nelson) ascends into heaven playing a harp the way Bugs Bunny used to. But the trailer sells the film short. What the Coens’ inimitable brand of alchemy has created here is easily one of their best films. (“The Gal who Got Rattled” is my favorite, if you care.) And the best dialogue of 2018 is found therein.

4. America to Me

After screening at some festivals, Steve James’ latest documentary aired on Starz earlier this year. America to Me is a ten-hour docuseries that takes us inside Oak Park River Forest High School just outside Chicago. The racially diverse student body and faculty allow themselves to be followed (and followed home) by James and his crew. Where Frederick Wiseman might hang back and capture, James probes, asks questions, delves into the lives of the students and adults as they live through questions of race, class, and justice. It’s amazing how James, who possesses such a soft touch, has social conscience that hits hard.

3. The Tale

Jennifer Fox’s autobiographical film about coming to terms with having been sexually exploited as a child veers toward magical realism but is at its best when closer to the ground. The plain old matter-of-fact realism Fox achieves with her actors — particularly Laura Dern and Elizabeth Debicki — is searing and intense. Fox doesn’t spare us the details, which makes for a most uncomfortable film. (The actual molestation scenes were achieved with deft editing and the use of an over-18-years-old body double for the child actor, Isabelle Nelisse.)

2. Madeline’s Madeline

I bristle when I see Josephine Decker’s Madeline’s Madeline described as “art house fare” or “experimental cinema.” It’s the most narratively coherent movie I saw in 2018. A teenage girl (the scary-good Helena Howard) is part of an adult’s acting troupe that specializes in experimental theater. Its director (Molly Parker) thinks it’d be a great idea for Madeline’s real-life personal turmoil to be material for the troupe’s art. Typical descriptions point out that the lines between the troupe’s art and Madeline’s inner world “begin to blur,” but what blurs is our ability to play favorites with the characters. People don’t behave logically in this film, but somehow their surprises are what one would expect. It’s not artsy so much as it’s about artsy.

1. The Mule

Clint Eastwood’s reputation as a conservative firebrand has to be in some kind of jeopardy at this point. This is a film about, among other things, white privilege, the futility of the war on drugs, and the ways in which economic pressures can disintegrate families. It’s also the funniest film of the year. Eastwood’s casualness as a director, the ease with which things play out and the low-key feel of the images, mirrors his own demeanor as an aged actor, one who still has the singular grit and grimace of The Man With No Name.

Creed II

Ryan Coogler’s Creed was a clever and ultimately satisfying resurrection of the Rocky franchise, one that updated the formula without monkeying with it very much at all. That easygoing reverence for the source material wasn’t precious and was all about moving forward with its new hero, Donnie, son of Rocky’s first foe and eventual friend, Apollo Creed (played with singular pizzazz by Carl Weathers).

Creed II, directed by Stephen Caple Jr. with a script co-written by Stallone himself, is, for my money, a better film, one that finds the series’ sea legs with Donnie as a protagonist. It also connects more firmly than its predecessor with the prevailing theme of Rocky films: fathers and sons.

One of the detriments of the first Creed film was the lack of a compelling opponent for Donnie (Michael B. Jordan). (Perhaps the plot of Creed II should have been the plot of Creed I?) This time they get it right. Somewhat ham-fisted dialogue lets us know that there’s been a six-fight time jump between films. This film begins with Donnie, with Bianca (Tessa Thompson) and Rocky (Stallone) at his side, now challenging for the heavyweight title (the champ is played by former light-heavyweight titlist Andre Ward).

Like Rocky before him, Donnie’s success in the ring is attended by ennui and familial strife. It’s revealed that the mighty Ivan Drago (Dolph Lundgren), who was defeated by Rocky only after killing Apollo Creed in the ring, lives in Ukraine with his son, Viktor (Florian Munteanu). Viktor is a young, inexperienced fighter. But he has the benefit of his father’s training and resentments. It is revealed that after losing to Rocky, Ivan’s country turned its back on him, and his statuesque wife (Brigette Nielsen), Viktor’s mother, left them in shame.

Viktor also has the benefit of being big and scary looking, winning all of his handful of fights via devastating knockouts. In keeping with Rocky movie tradition, a slick promoter named Buddy Marcelle (Russell Hornsby, who is excellent with what little dialogue he’s given) sees an opportunity to make a superfight.

Can the newly crowned champion avenge his father’s death by defeating the son of his father’s killer? Pretty straightforward. Interestingly, Creed II swaps the cold war conflict of Rocky IV for what is essentially a familial dispute.

In the prior film, Coogler brought some degree of bravura camera moves to the Rocky franchise, which had until that point been conventionally shot. Caple at times mimics the style but without Coogler’s eye for shots. The fight sequences this time are less convincing, more choreographed seeming where Coogler used more wide shots that better resembled two fighters actually going at it.

Caple, though, is not without his tricks. The fight sequences are well timed and reliably surprising in how they play out. Once Donnie enters the ring with Drago, we really do feel the momentousness of it all.

Rocky’s reluctance to be in Donnie’s corner for a fight with Drago’s son is borne of the fact that Rocky failed to throw in the towel back in the day, which would have saved Apollo’s life. He doesn’t want history to repeat itself. Donnie feels this is simply his trainer and surrogate father having a lack of faith.

What Creed II cleverly achieves is that very dynamic — Rocky’s fear of repeating history, and his refusal to participate in the fight, actually repeats Mickey’s history with Rocky. Two consecutive movies have managed to literally recreate story aspects of the original films without it feeling stale or lazy.

Still, there is much to criticize in Creed II. Where Coogler’s film took its time in establishing its characters, this sequel leaves much under-developed. Drago & Son are actually fascinating, and the baggage they carry is somewhat more interesting than Donnie’s and Rocky’s. (If you play the movie from Viktor Drago’s point-of-view, it’s still a Rocky movie.) The dialogue is on-the-nose (as it was in the original films, admittedly), and the complications that arise in Donnie and Bianca’s efforts to build a family are of questionable wisdom.

Moreover, Rocky himself, and his strained relationship with his biological son, is dealt with in cursory fashion, making a key ending moment feel somewhat unearned. And yet —  Creed II impressed me. It is a beautiful exposition of the main themes of the franchise that, refreshingly, doesn’t worship the franchise.

Creed II — FOUR STARS

Directed by Stephen Caple Jr.

Rated PG-13

Warner Bros.

MGM

New Line Cinema

130 min.

First Man

Downbeat and contemplative, Damien Chazelle’s First Man hits all the Great Man of History biopic beats, but then executes them in a way that’s surprising, resulting in a humane and emotionally nimble film that focuses all its energy inward. A standard studio biopic of Neil Armstrong would seek to answer the question “What made this great person great?” Chazelle and screenwriter Josh Singer, though, address themselves to the question “What made this great person so withdrawn.”

Consider the realities that would tend to hamstring an Armstrong biopic. The men selected for the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs in the 1960s were not selected for their charisma. And perhaps no astronaut exemplifies this better than Armstrong. Like every other early space program pioneer, Armstrong was something of a boy scout, a shirt-tucked-in company man — reliable, serious, a pilot and engineer who was able to stay rational under pressure.

Moreover, his reclusiveness later in life has rendered him more mythic than historical. Unlike some of the other astronauts, such as Buzz Aldrin, who were more willing to participate in documentaries and oral histories and the like, after Apollo 11 we hardly saw Neil Armstrong again. Other space program films, such as The Right Stuff and Apollo 13, have had to embellish personality conflicts and the like because, frankly, astronauts have even-keeled, boring personalities. That’s why they’re astronauts.

And so Chazelle enlists Ryan Gosling to play Armstrong. Gosling is kindred with Armstrong in the sense that they’re both eminently reliable — the script says “angrily,” and so Gosling plays it angrily; he’s not going to surprise you, but he’s not going to let you down either. Arguably Gosling is at his best when playing shut-down loners, emotionally closed off from the rest of the world (as in Drive). This is the portrait of Armstrong Chazelle renders, a man so competent and smart but can’t navigate a difficult conversation with his sons.

The film posits that the death of Armstrong’s young daughter, Karen, in the early sixties was the defining event of his life, not the Apollo 11 landing. The explanatory power of this choice seems as plausible as any to me. After a jostling, breaking-Earth’s-atmosphere test flight sequence, we begin not with Neil enclosed in a capsule but his daughter, receiving treatment for a childhood cancer as Neil and his wife Janet (Claire Foy) look on through a glass pane (panes, barriers, and doors are a motif). Armstrong’s engineering mind leads him to fill notebooks with equations concerning tumors and treatments. We cut from the treatment to the burial, the casket being lowered into the earth.

Alternating among 16-milimeter, 35-milimeter, and the IMAX film stocks, First Man is far more visually arresting than the lauded La La Land. The earthly scenes are well observed and downright impressionistic at times, with Chazelle even channeling Terence Malick’s domestic deftness in The Tree of Life. Televisions remind us that Vietnam and the social strife of 1968 are happening, and even as these touches feel more obligatory than necessary, Chazelle folds them into the background so casually they barely register.

Once we break the atmosphere, Chazelle juxtaposes the violence and vigor of space travel with the never-ending serenity of the inky void. Attention is paid to the tactile banality of the capsules, the rivets, the control panels. The film’s most exciting sequence is not Apollo 11’s landing but an earlier mission in which Armstrong manages to pilot a “rolling” (spinning) command module back into his control, saving the day. We rarely see master shots of the spacecrafts, rather, we’re in close on the faces and hands of the astronauts, noting each bead on sweat on their brows.

The movie’s idea that Armstrong’s single-minded focus is a function of his trauma of his having emotionally shut down after the loss of a child seems at once dubious and good enough to get by narratively. There is an appealing beauty to this construction. We see Armstrong’s first step, accompanied by the famous line, and we realize that when he’s exploring the moon “for all mankind” it was his daughter who was on his mind. The dramatic license that is taken here and there does seem to get at some larger truth about the man. Where something like Apollo 13 is a true Hollywood film about brilliant people overcoming adversity, First Man is about grief and pain. Its themes are entirely terrestrial.

For a work of popular storytelling that makes little effort to condense — the running time is roughly two-and-a-half hours — the actual climax, the Apollo 11 landing, is somewhat rushed, almost to the point of it being given short shrift. This may be by design. The idea is to depict relationships, which are back on Earth. Claire Foy’s performance as Janet Armstrong is centered in the narrative in a way that doesn’t quite correspond with the amount of depth the character has, making the film’s final shot, which is elegiac and gorgeous in its simplicity, seem almost like a cheat. But I suppose one of Chazelle’s strengths is making a certain kind of manipulativeness feel delightful.

First Man — FOUR STARS

Directed by Damien Chazelle

Rated PG-13

Universal

138 min.

BlacKkKlansman

Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman, a pro-law and order and anti-terrorism tract, is based on the true story of Ron Stallworth, a black Colorado Springs cop who figured out a novel way of infiltrating the Klan in the early 1970s. As is his wont, Lee immediately begins by mingling straightforward polemics with emphatic artistry. We begin on the famous Gone with the Wind crane shot, unaltered by Lee, before moving to a diegetic slide presentation by a racist (Alec Baldwin) that fixes that Klan’s point of view in a historical and cultural context.

Throughout the film, Lee (who co-wrote the screenplay with David Rabinowitz, Charlie Wachtel, and Kevin Willmott) breaks the fourth wall and speaks to the now. These moments are jarring and are meant to be jarring. BlacKkKlansman is a kind of essay in narrative that predictably perceives a continuity of circumstance between past and present. Yet it resists platitudes and easy moralizing. It may be Lee’s most contemplative non-documentary film.

Stallworth (John David Washington) is the first black officer on the Colorado Springs department. Before gaining any real experience, he finds himself being put to use in the Criminal Investigations Division as an undercover sent in to collect intel at a Stokely Carmichael speech. Carmichael’s speech and the crowd’s reaction are depicted with expressionistic zest, focusing on faces in the crowd as much as the words of the speaker, who encourages the blacks of Colorado Springs to fight back against their oppressors. Stallworth, who we’ve already learned is a proud man who takes absolutely no shit, seems moved by Carmichael even as Stallworth is there in his capacity as an undercover “pig.”

Stallworth’s dual allegiances — pride as a black man  and pride in his job — is not dumped on us over and over but rather is simply set forth at the outset as a necessary tension. Lee accepts Stallworth’s double-consciousness, the Du Boisian term that is explicitly debated later in the film, without suggesting he must choose a “side.” In fact, the film seems to be nostalgic for a time when law enforcement was more pro-active in its disruption of hate groups. Stallworth is on the right side by being on both sides.

BlacKkKlansman works its magic beautifully in its first half, where the nuts and bolts of the operation are as fascinating as they are absurd. Often we move from a laugh-out-loud moment of ridiculousness to a sobering reminder of just how sick the Klan is. Sometimes these moments are one in the same, as when a particularly simpleminded Klansman childishly asks if he can touch a live C-4 explosive. One hundred percent of the comedy is making virulent racism look silly, with near constant dunking on the Klan members.

On a whim, Ron phones the local KKK chapter after noticing an ad in the newspaper that suggests they’re organizing locally. The inexperienced rookie unwittingly uses his real name on the phone call in which he uses his voice skills to “pass” as a racist white man interested in Klan membership. When it dawns on him that a black officer will have a difficult time blending in at a Klan meeting, the CID task force determines that Detective “Flip” Zimmerman (Adam Driver) will be the one to go in, while Stallworth will handle the over-the-phone stuff. Interestingly, many of the white cops are portrayed as accepting of Stallworth, joshing him only for being a naive rookie and not for his race; although other cops on the force are clearly hateful, referring to black suspects as “toads” if not worse.

The police, the film seems to argue, are imperfect and set in their ways (particularly in how they shelter and protect bad officers), but are integral to disrupting terrorism. Stallworth and his task force use cleverness and audacity and a lot of luck to infiltrate the Klan. The most interesting relationship in the film is not the romantic entanglement between Ron and a young anti-racist organizer named Patrice (Laura Harrier) but the relationship between Washington and Driver. It is revealed that Flip is Jewish, which, as Ron admonishes him, gives him “Skin in the game.” In the same way Ron’s elocution skills allow him to pass for white over the phone, Flip’s estrangement from his Jewishness has allowed him to coast as an officer without thinking much about the kind of hate the undercover operation has now ensconced him in.

When it becomes clear the local Klan chapter is planning a terrorist attack upon local black activists, Stallworth and his men must scramble to thwart the attack. All the while, Stallworth has also had a phone relationship with none other than David Duke, who is played with exquisite clownishness by Topher Grace. Grace never goes over the top but gives Duke a kind of pencil-neck aplomb that amounts to as perfect a lampooning of racism I can recall in a motion picture. “You’re darned tootin’,” Duke says over the phone, as if he were some sort of even more reprehensible version of Jerry Lundegaard.

As Stallworth carries on his telephonic friendship with Duke, he finds that the former “Grand Wizard” has dubbed himself the “National Director” of the Klan to make himself seem more mainstream. A key plot point has to do with Driver’s undercover “white Ron Stallworth” waiting to receive his Klan membership card in the mail. The members, hilariously, are sticklers for this. One must have his membership card in hand before one may participate in cross burnings and the like. The real, black Ron makes a call to the clueless Duke, who helpfully expedites the card’s arrival. We realize then that the Klan’s entire bureaucracy consists only of the sad little man Duke sitting in his office. “I can always tell a white man’s voice from a black man’s” Duke says. It could be a Mel Brooks sketch.

Ironically, the closer BlacKkKlansman gets to its violent climax the less riveting it becomes. The first half, in which the logistics and subterfuge of Stallworth’s operation is laid out in detail, is as watchable as any stretch of film I’ve seen this year. Lee’s film leans into serious points about what real lawlessness looks like and what its consequences are. The moments in which Lee explicitly connects the narrative to contemporary concerns are at once seemingly unnecessary and, well, quintessentially Spike Lee. It’s difficult to blame a veteran filmmaker for being himself.

BlacKkKlansman‘s coda includes footage of last year’s Charlottesville riots, in which a white anti-racism activist, Heather Heyer, was killed. The film is, in effect, dedicated to her. Footage of David Duke, filmed around the same time, sees the man himself endorsing Trump, and in doing so, providing the most forceful rebuke possible to the idea that Spike Lee sometimes lays it on too thick.

BlacKkKlansman — FOUR STARS

Directed by Spike Lee

Rated R

Focus Features

135 min.

Sorry to Bother You

Even if somewhat heavy-handed in its sociopolitical intentions, Sorry to Bother You is ingenious and hilarious, an intense and focused first film by writer-director Boots Riley, who has heretofore made his living as a musician. The film takes the shape of what seems to be a slightly dystopic near-future in which corporations are encroaching upon the everyday lives of working people.

Cassius Green (Lakeith Stanfield) lives in Oakland. Already four months behind in his “rent” — he lives in his uncle’s garage — Cassius applies for a telemarketing job at a company called RegalView. Although he forges his application materials, the hiring manager admires the gumption and admits that all he needs is worker who’ll stick to the script. The immediate conceit is clear: what the system needs is enthusiastic automatons, preferably desperate ones.

The background radiation of the narrative establishes a crass and shallow media culture, planting flags for the narrative to pick up later. Media is saturated with inane cruelty dressed as entertainment, such as a reality show called I Got the S*#! Kicked Out of Me in which contestants accept beat-downs for cash prizes. A multinational called WorryFree allows people to live essentially as “worry free” prisoners in exchange for their labor. These shocks all come as well placed jokes, so outrageous and funny their darkness floats right by. In a deft comedic turn, Armie Hammer plays Steve Lift, the CEO of WorryFree, a hilarious amalgam of Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Jeff Spicoli.

As a leading man, Stanfield has an sweetness to his gaze that makes one viscerally feel the dilemmas he faces. We’re immediately sold on his plight. Likewise, Tessa Thompson is well cast as Detroit, Cassius’ performance artist fiance. Detroit pulls Cassius toward the world of anti-establishment rebellion even as he begins to climb the RegalView ladder, soon becoming a “Power Caller.”

As the RegalView workforce begins to organize, Cassius begins to learn the nefarious truth about his employer — just in time for them to make him rich. At bottom, Riley’s film is a Soylent Green What’s Really Going On Behind the Scenes story of the powers that be, but the comedy is so crisp and the commentary so cutting that one doesn’t notice the darkness. What gets Cassius his promotion is his ability to speak to clients with a “white guy voice” (supplied by the comedian David Cross). His ability to do this convincingly, a talent that creeps out Detroit, is the difference between sleeping in a garage and driving an extremely expensive car.

But in the second half of the film Riley leaves behind the straightforward satire of that circumstance and reaches for larger themes. Once Cassius becomes a Power Caller he is an elite, suit-wearing bigwig who now has a stake in keeping the corporate machine cranking. Armie Hammer’s seemingly benevolent company is literally engineering a horrific future for the human race. The deeper into the darkness Riley goes, the more he abandons conventional storytelling. The result is a surprisingly effortless (for a first film) story that filters Jose Saramago through Mad Magazine and Rod Serling, creating one of the more unforgettable comedies in recent memory.

Sorry to Bother You — FOUR STARS

Directed by Boots Riley

Rated R

Annapurna Pictures

105 min.

First Reformed

Reverend Toller, Ethan Hawke’s forlorn character in First Reformed, is terrible at his job. From the pulpit, Toller reads the scripture in a hesitant monotone, as if he’s reading the fine print for a credit card. The handful of attendees in the pews have only blank stares. We see Toller’s point-of-view. There’s a hopelessness to the way director/screenwriter Paul Schrader shoots these in-church scenes, the opposite of religious ecstasy.

From Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest, Schrader seems to take only the skeletal form of his story: a small town clergyman confronts the meaninglessness of daily suffering. (I found more interesting parallels with the John Updike novel A Month of Sundays.) But Schrader, frankly, is more mischievous than his hero Robert Bresson. Where Bresson searched for transcendence amid the banal harshness of existence, Schrader’s work seems to accept the harshness, finding transcendence in perversity.

Toller’s haunted past and deteriorating health manifest in the permanently wrinkled brow and dumbfounded gaze. Hawke’s performance, which is quiet and subtle, is of a man who is constantly made most uncomfortable by the familiar, the the things that should bring a preacher peace — scripture, prayer, so-called fellowship. He seems to always be being swallowed by the furniture in which he sits.

We learn that Toller’s son died in Iraq, which contributed to his divorce. We learn he likely is dying of cancer, and we watch the pink stream of his bloody urine. He drinks. He carries on a relationship with a church lady named Esther (Victoria Hill), whose heart he breaks.

Schrader’s story, which is slow, with many scenes playing out in real time, depicts despair leading to desperation leading to extremism. Hawke’s voiceover in which he reads brooding diary entries almost make it feel slower. Toller counsels one of the flock, the husband of Mary (Amanda Seyfried), Michael (Philip Ettinger). Michael is a zealous environmentalist with obvious psychiatric problems. He doesn’t want to bring a child into a dying planet. Mary is afraid he will kill their unborn child. Toller gives him some spiritual claptrap about having perspective amid “the darkness.” He says pretty much what you’d expect a man of the cloth to say and gets pretty much the results you’d expect.

Toller is a servant in the religious sense and in the literal sense. His tiny church is underwritten by a neighboring five-thousand-seat megachurch skippered by Reverend Jeffers (Cedric the Entertainer). That church is itself underwritten by a local industrial polluter named Ed Balq (Michael Gaston). The existential angst of feeling small and powerless amid the chaos is exacerbated by Toller being, in fact, small and powerless amid the chaos until the film’s stupefying conclusion.

First Reformed — FOUR STARS

Rated R

Directed by Paul Schrader

A24

Killer Films

Omeira Studio Partners

Fibonacci Films

Arclight Films

Big Indie Productions

113 min.