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It feels wrong to root for a suicide attempt to succeed. Otto Anderson tries via rope, gas, train, and rifle and fails each time. Since his beloved wife, Sonia, died from cancer six months back, Otto feels no reason to keep living. When not trying to off himself, he spends his days flying off the handle at neighbors who don’t follow his myriad but inchoate rules of decorum. Everyone’s an idiot, and nothing’s like it used to be. But what is this golden-hued past Otto longs to return to?

We’re forced to relive his glory days through copious flashbacks, but what’s clear to me, just as in every present-day scene, is that Otto is an emotionally stunted, possibly autistic man tolerated by loved ones and coworkers until they die or can no longer bear him. When a young family moves in across the street, Otto is distracted from his preparations for the afterlife and convinced via Hallmark-card-level emotional trickery to stick around. The movie is cringeworthy when not outright offensive in its broad-strokes handling of everything from aging to gentrification to racism to gender issues. It’s as if the filmmakers did a keyword search for hot-button cultural topics and sprinkled them in pell-mell without bothering to read past the bullet points.

I haven’t read the 2012 Swedish book or 2015 film that this is based on, but I can’t imagine either could be half as tone-deaf. Otto’s bloviating about the past is a close cousin to chants of “You will not replace us,” no matter the crudely applied multicultural makeover. Tom Hanks has practically trademarked likability, but his Otto is not only loathsome but wholly unbelievable. To begin with, no one with an engineering degree would ever fail to get a noose to work. PG-13, 126 min.

Wide release in theaters

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Edgar Allan Poe’s decadently cerebral approach to genre is an odd fit for Hollywood, which tends to tear into its pulp pleasures with a hearty trencherman’s aplomb, rather than sipping them delicately from paper-thin china. Sure enough, Scott Cooper’s The Pale Blue Eye is not very Poe-like, even if it features the poet as a character. Agatha Christie, with her twisty plots and straightforward examination of human evil, is a clearer literary antecedent than Poe’s layers of irony, intellectual play, and sensual embrace of the bizarre.

This isn’t exactly a criticism; Agatha Christie is also great, and this is a skillful variation on some of her most treasured tricks. A cadet is murdered at West Point, his heart cut from his corpse. A gruff detective with a painful past, Augustus Landor (Christian Bale) is called in to help with the investigation. He enlists cadet Poe (Harry Melling) to help him gather information from the other trainees. Their investigations lead them to a mysterious circle of devil worshippers, perhaps connected to the family of Dr. Daniel Marquis (Toby Jones). Daniel’s son Artemus (Harry Lawtey) is a cadet. His daughter Lea (Lucy Boynton) is an accomplished pianist and an epileptic; she and Poe inevitably and instantly fall for each other.

Melling, all long fingers and penetrating stares, is a fine Poe, and the movie is littered with references to the writer’s work. We get a close-up of a raven, the poem “Lenore” is connected to Lea, and Landor lives in a cottage, per Poe’s story “Landor’s Cottage.” These are all surface trifles, though. The center of the film is Bale’s performance—a frozen surface which cracks open to reveal icy, rushing depths—and the cold New York landscape, with swirls of snow and bare tree limbs against the stark sky. The Pale Blue Eye sees, in the end, with clarity; it is a movie about revealing and understanding hard truths. It’s a fine Hollywood film. But Poe’s mysteries aren’t so easy to pin down. R, 128 min.

Netflix

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This engrossing 2022 documentary chronicles the 50-year-and-counting collaboration between two literary lions: political biographer Robert Caro, who turned 87 on October 30, 2022, and his editor, Robert Gottlieb, who turned 91 on April 29, 2022. The dynamic duo firstteamed up for the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1974 bestseller The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York; at the time this film was shot, they were working on the fifth and final volume of Caro’s epic The Years of Lyndon Johnson, still unfinished at the time of the movie’s release. (Gottlieb’s track record as an editor also includes such novels as Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, as well as nonfiction landmarks like Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment and Jessica Mitford’s The American Way of Death.) 

The running theme in the Caro/Gottlieb canon—the uses and abuses of power in politics—seems especially urgent now, in a time when so many people feel disenfranchised in, and disengaged from, the American democratic system. To write about the controversial and complex careers of New York City public works czar Robert Moses and U.S. president Lyndon Johnson, Caro interviewed thousands of people and—with his wife and sole research assistant, historian Ina Caro—pored over countless documents. The movie’s title references the advice Caro says he got from his editor when he was a young investigative reporter at Long Island’s Newsday newspaper: “Turn every page. Never assume anything. Turn every goddamn page.”Directed by Lizzie Gottlieb—the daughter of Robert Gottlieb and his wife, actress Maria Tucci—Turn Every Page focuses on the partnership involved in putting a great book to bed, ranging from what to cut and how to set up a scene to when to use—and not use—a semicolon. “The great thing about Bob is also the maddening thing about him,” Gottlieb says about Caro. “Everything is of total importance. The first chapter of the book, and a semicolon—they’re of equal importance. . . . I’m like that too. It takes one to know one.” PG, 112 min.

Limited release in theaters

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There’s an unforgettable scene in writer/director Sam Mendes’s Thatcher-era (aka early 1980s) Empire of Light when Hilary (Olivia Colman)—a depressed, underemployed middle-aged woman—unwittingly invokes Ruth Bader Ginsburg arguing a 1973 court case. Or rather, Hilary invokes Ginsburg paraphrasing the 19th century abolitionist Sarah Moore Grimké.

It’s a moment of rage that every femme surely felt, if not over the fall of Roe, then over the fundamental misogyny of a world where gender determines everything from bodily autonomy to personal wealth.

The scene unfolds at a beach, where Hilary is enjoying a rare day off from sweeping up the sticky floors at a local cinema. Her work life is dictated by her boss, Donald (Colin Firth), including his routine expectation that she “pop by the office”—aka give him a blow job—after clocking out. Her personal life is dictated by her doctor, who barely makes eye contact as he fiddles with her lithium levels.

Hilary and her best friend, (consensual) lover, and much younger coworker, Stephen (a deeply affecting Micheal Ward), are giddily building sand castles when Stephen gently suggests she’s making the turrets wrong. Hilary’s sudden, volatile reaction contains a lifetime’s worth of intense, bitter resentment in a handful of concise, bitterly hurled words: Why, she mutters with increasing ferocity, can’t men just stop endlessly stepping on the necks of women? She lays waste to the castle with unforgiving violence, while Stephen looks on in confusion and alarm. A Black man in Thatcher’s deeply racist England, Stephen has his own indelible reasons for rage. Although his connection with Hilary softens the world’s crueler edges for both, Empire of Light is no sugary British rom-com.

The love story is seemingly doomed from the start, if not by differences in age and race, then by the fact that both Hilary and Stephen have been buffeted all their lives by the message that they are less-than, undeserving, unimportant. Empire of Light highlights the ineffable joy when both discover that none of that is true. There’s an empire of hope in that. R, 115 min.

Wide release in theaters

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Mr. Williams, played by Bill Nighy, is a brooding, austere bureaucrat reduced by countless days of quotidian office work, hollowed by midcentury, postwar London. He moves with a gentle melancholy that’s undoubtedly signaling an inner pain bubbling slightly beneath the surface. The lonely widower lives quietly with his son and his son’s wife, played by Barney Fishwick and Patsy Ferran, respectively. The film is solemn, moving steadily until Mr. Williams leaves work uncharacteristically for a doctor’s appointment—and, to disrupt his cyclical life, is given only months to live. Confronted by the end of his life, Mr. Williams grapples with his legacy, the potential of redemption, and a revived vigor to live with purpose for the time that remains. He finds inspiration in young, hopeful Margaret, an employee who nicknamed him Mr. Zombie, played wonderfully by Aimee Lou Wood. 

Mr. Williams abandons his office, embarking on a brief (but undignified) quest for debauchery with a disreputable writer, played by Tom Burke. However, Mr. Williams is infatuated platonically with Margaret, who quits her office job to experience something new. Mr. Williams pivots from existential debauchery to a small but impactful purpose: ensuring the construction of a playground abandoned to static bureaucracy. In this, Living rejects the futile and instead proposes that there is meaning to being alive hidden in small things. 

Living is the remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 film, Ikiru, but director Oliver Hermanus and novelist Kazuo Ishiguro managed to gracefully reimagine this sentimental film. Despite falling short of the poignancy and subtlety of Ikiru, Living delivers a beautiful glance at an attempt to live—even when life is terminal. Retold in London instead of Tokyo, Hermanus and Ishiguro parallel Ikiru,envisioning a story playing out side by side, positioned halfway across the world. Without Nighy’s refined performance as Mr. Williams, Living’s lasting impact would be fleeting, but his embodiment of revival, despite incurable limitations, gives this film an unlikely opening to redemption. PG-13, 102 min.

Limited release in theaters

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Few trailers from the past year have inspired as much anticipation in me as M3GAN’s did. Finally, I thought, a movie that answers the question on all our minds: what if Chucky was a girl boss? Imagined and written by the screenwriter and producer of Malignant, Akela Cooper and James Wan, respectively, it’s hard not to wonder if they’ve let the instant midnight movie canonization of their last collaboration go to their heads. Whereas Malignant was something genuinely weird and audacious that earned its word-of-mouth reputation, there’s nothing organic about the way M3GAN is precision engineered to achieve cult classic status, from the wink-nudge hamminess of supporting actors Ronny Chieng and Lori Dungey to the broad jokes with a 50/50 hit rate. And yet, in spite of its obvious shortcomings, when that little lady finally started going postal, I found myself struggling not to start hooting and hollering in the theater. The movie fully lives up to the promise of its ridiculous trailer whenever our star is indulging her hard-PG-13 homicidal instincts or performing vaguely threatening TikTok dances toward her enemies. This won’t pop up on any top ten lists by the end of the year, but for a genre film released in a month typically reserved as a dumping ground for studios, this is all you could hope for. I wouldn’t say no to two or three sequels (MEG4N? Or maybe a James Cameron Aliens route with M3GANS?) that take this premise to even greater extremes. What if we sent M3GAN to space? What would it look like if she took Manhattan? PG-13, 102 min.

Wide release in theaters

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It feels wrong to root for a suicide attempt to succeed. Otto Anderson tries via rope, gas, train, and rifle and fails each time. Since his beloved wife, Sonia, died from cancer six months back, Otto feels no reason to keep living. When not trying to off himself, he spends his days flying off the handle at neighbors who don’t follow his myriad but inchoate rules of decorum. Everyone’s an idiot, and nothing’s like it used to be. But what is this golden-hued past Otto longs to return to?

We’re forced to relive his glory days through copious flashbacks, but what’s clear to me, just as in every present-day scene, is that Otto is an emotionally stunted, possibly autistic man tolerated by loved ones and coworkers until they die or can no longer bear him. When a young family moves in across the street, Otto is distracted from his preparations for the afterlife and convinced via Hallmark-card-level emotional trickery to stick around. The movie is cringeworthy when not outright offensive in its broad-strokes handling of everything from aging to gentrification to racism to gender issues. It’s as if the filmmakers did a keyword search for hot-button cultural topics and sprinkled them in pell-mell without bothering to read past the bullet points.

I haven’t read the 2012 Swedish book or 2015 film that this is based on, but I can’t imagine either could be half as tone-deaf. Otto’s bloviating about the past is a close cousin to chants of “You will not replace us,” no matter the crudely applied multicultural makeover. Tom Hanks has practically trademarked likability, but his Otto is not only loathsome but wholly unbelievable. To begin with, no one with an engineering degree would ever fail to get a noose to work. PG-13, 126 min.

Wide release in theaters

Read More

Edgar Allan Poe’s decadently cerebral approach to genre is an odd fit for Hollywood, which tends to tear into its pulp pleasures with a hearty trencherman’s aplomb, rather than sipping them delicately from paper-thin china. Sure enough, Scott Cooper’s The Pale Blue Eye is not very Poe-like, even if it features the poet as a character. Agatha Christie, with her twisty plots and straightforward examination of human evil, is a clearer literary antecedent than Poe’s layers of irony, intellectual play, and sensual embrace of the bizarre.

This isn’t exactly a criticism; Agatha Christie is also great, and this is a skillful variation on some of her most treasured tricks. A cadet is murdered at West Point, his heart cut from his corpse. A gruff detective with a painful past, Augustus Landor (Christian Bale) is called in to help with the investigation. He enlists cadet Poe (Harry Melling) to help him gather information from the other trainees. Their investigations lead them to a mysterious circle of devil worshippers, perhaps connected to the family of Dr. Daniel Marquis (Toby Jones). Daniel’s son Artemus (Harry Lawtey) is a cadet. His daughter Lea (Lucy Boynton) is an accomplished pianist and an epileptic; she and Poe inevitably and instantly fall for each other.

Melling, all long fingers and penetrating stares, is a fine Poe, and the movie is littered with references to the writer’s work. We get a close-up of a raven, the poem “Lenore” is connected to Lea, and Landor lives in a cottage, per Poe’s story “Landor’s Cottage.” These are all surface trifles, though. The center of the film is Bale’s performance—a frozen surface which cracks open to reveal icy, rushing depths—and the cold New York landscape, with swirls of snow and bare tree limbs against the stark sky. The Pale Blue Eye sees, in the end, with clarity; it is a movie about revealing and understanding hard truths. It’s a fine Hollywood film. But Poe’s mysteries aren’t so easy to pin down. R, 128 min.

Netflix

Read More

This engrossing 2022 documentary chronicles the 50-year-and-counting collaboration between two literary lions: political biographer Robert Caro, who turned 87 on October 30, 2022, and his editor, Robert Gottlieb, who turned 91 on April 29, 2022. The dynamic duo firstteamed up for the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1974 bestseller The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York; at the time this film was shot, they were working on the fifth and final volume of Caro’s epic The Years of Lyndon Johnson, still unfinished at the time of the movie’s release. (Gottlieb’s track record as an editor also includes such novels as Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, as well as nonfiction landmarks like Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment and Jessica Mitford’s The American Way of Death.) 

The running theme in the Caro/Gottlieb canon—the uses and abuses of power in politics—seems especially urgent now, in a time when so many people feel disenfranchised in, and disengaged from, the American democratic system. To write about the controversial and complex careers of New York City public works czar Robert Moses and U.S. president Lyndon Johnson, Caro interviewed thousands of people and—with his wife and sole research assistant, historian Ina Caro—pored over countless documents. The movie’s title references the advice Caro says he got from his editor when he was a young investigative reporter at Long Island’s Newsday newspaper: “Turn every page. Never assume anything. Turn every goddamn page.”Directed by Lizzie Gottlieb—the daughter of Robert Gottlieb and his wife, actress Maria Tucci—Turn Every Page focuses on the partnership involved in putting a great book to bed, ranging from what to cut and how to set up a scene to when to use—and not use—a semicolon. “The great thing about Bob is also the maddening thing about him,” Gottlieb says about Caro. “Everything is of total importance. The first chapter of the book, and a semicolon—they’re of equal importance. . . . I’m like that too. It takes one to know one.” PG, 112 min.

Limited release in theaters

Read More

The Chicago Blackhawks defeated the Colorado Avalanche on Thursday night. They skated with the defending Stanley Cup champions on home ice and pulled out a victory which is not an easy thing to do.

Of course, the Avalanche are not the team they were last year right now. There is a clear Stanley Cup hangover that has been helped by injuries and inconsistent play. The Blackhawks found a way to take advantage of it on this one night.

It is good to win games but that is now three wins in a row for them. They like winning but it isn’t great for their odds of winning the number one overall pick. With how well we’ve seen Connor Bedard play recently, it is a little bit worrisome.

Now, on this three-game winning streak, they are getting ready to host the Seattle Kraken on Saturday night.

Patrick Kane Is Back

Patrick Kane left before the third period of last week’s game against the Tampa Bay Lightning. He hasn’t returned since and the team went 3-0 in his absence. Now, he is set to return for this game against the Seattle Kraken.

Patrick Kane is currently second on the Blackhawks in team scoring with 27 points. We will see how he plays from now until the trade deadline when he is expected to get dealt for things that will help the team in the future.

Lukas Reichel Is Sent Down

To make room for Patrick Kane, the Blackhawks decided to send Lukas Reichel down to the Rockford Ice Hogs. This is a strange decision because Reichel is clearly an NHL player that is getting better with each passing day.

The Blackhawks clearly have no interest in winning despite being on a three-game streak. There are plenty of other guys that could have come out of the lineup in favor of Kane but they would rather see Reichel continue to develop in Rockford.

He played just over 12 minutes against the Avalanche in the win so that doesn’t do much good for him anyway. Although this is a bad decision, it is one that will allow Reichel to go down there and dominate. He will be a full-time player soon enough.

Other NHL News:

The NHL All-Star vote is going strong in the league right now. We know who is each team’s representative as 32 initial players were named and one comes from each team. Seth Jones is the guy for the Hawks so it will be interesting to see if anyone else gets voted in.

Each division is voting in two more skaters and one more goalie. Patrick Kane or Max Domi is more deserving than Jones at this point but they will have to get voted in if they want to make it. As the season gets going in the second half, this is going to be a fun story to watch.

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