Best Actress winner Emma Stone stars in Yorgos Lanthimos' Kinds of Kindness. (Courtesy Searchlight Pictures)
There’s plenty of great stuff on the big screen in Memphis, so quit doomscrolling and go see a movie this weekend.
Kinds of Kindness
Best Actress winner Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, and director Yorgos Lanthimos reunite for another absurdist comedy after the triumph of 2023’s Poor Things. They are joined by Jesse Plemons (whose performance earned him a Best Actor nod at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival), Margaret Qualley, and Hong Chau for a triptych of intertwined stories about love, death, and healing.
A Quiet Place: Day One
The third film in the series goes back to the beginning, which is the end of civilization. Blind space monsters with extremely sensitive hearing land on Earth and start eating up all the tasty people. That’s not so yummy for Lupita Nyong’o, a New Yorker who witnesses the invasion, and must escape very quietly. But don’t worry, she’s got a plan.
Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1
Kevin Costner directs Kevin Costner in this epic tale — a saga if you will — of American expansion in the West during the pre- and post-Civil War period. Expect horses, hats, and guns from this highly punctuated title.
Inside Out 2
This brilliant sequel is the biggest box office hit of the year. Head emotion Joy (Amy Poehler) must keep her human Riley (Kensington Tallman) on track as the ravages of puberty take hold, and a new emotion named Anxiety (Maya Hawke) arrives at headquarters. Beautifully animated with stealthily profound screenplay, Inside Out 2 is a must-see. (Read my full review, which, spoiler alert, borders on the rapturous.)
Kalki 2898 AD
Malco has been getting a lot of Indian movies over the last couple of years. This one promises to be different. It’s not a Bollywood song-and-dance film, as much as we love them. Kalki 2898 is the most expensive film ever made in India, weighing in at an impressive $6 billion rupees (approximately $72 million). It’s a sci fi epic inspired by Hindu mythology which is intended to kick off a Marvel-style cinematic universe. And it looks pretty cool.
Leonardo diCaprio and Lily Gladstone in Killers of the Flower Moon.
When I asked Craig Brewer why people love Hustle & Flow, he attributed the film’s success to DJay, memorably portrayed by Terrence Howard. DJay is a pimp and low-level drug dealer, but he’s also an aspiring rapper who loves Shug (Taraji P. Henson). DJay veers back and forth between doing good — creating music, building community, and giving Shug hope — and doing bad — exploiting women and hurting people. The audience roots for DJay to do the right thing, and the drama is whether or not he will transcend his circumstances and emerge a more complete person.
Martin Scorsese’s new masterpiece, Killers of the Flower Moon, is animated by the same moral tug of war. Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a veteran returning to his hometown of Gray Horse, Oklahoma, after serving as a cook in the Army during World War I. The not-exactly-war-hero is taken in by his uncle, William Hale (Robert De Niro, in rare form), who insists on being called by his middle name, King. Things have changed since Ernest went away. Oil was discovered on land belonging to the Osage tribe, upending the racial hierarchy to which the white Oklahoma establishment was accustomed. Scorsese deftly demonstrates the new power dynamic in a sweeping tour of the town, ending with a white car dealer on his knees begging a well heeled Osage couple to buy one more luxury automobile so he could feed his family.
King Hale (Robert De Niro) advises his nephew Ernest (Leonardo DiCaprio) in Killers of the Flower Moon.
The exception to the ever-present racial tension is King Hale, who has earned the Osages’ admiration with his generosity and fair dealing. In public, he treats them like any other rich landowners. He even pushes Ernest into courting an Osage woman named Mollie (Lily Gladstone). Ernest, a simple man who just wants a woman who “smells good,” goes along with the plan, first becoming Mollie’s driver, then worming his way into her bed.
Ernest courts Mollie as her driver in Killers of the Flower Moon.
Onscreen chemistry is a delicate and elusive thing; I daresay there has never been an onscreen couple like Gladstone and DiCaprio. Mollie is impassive and reserved. Ernest is twitchy and clingy, always looking for the right lie to fit the situation. His come-ons to Mollie are transparently lame, but he eventually wears down her defenses. Gladstone reveals Mollie’s shifting, layered motivations with an uncanny subtlety. She and her sisters, like many of the newly flush Osage women, take trophy white guys for husbands. But while her family is rich on paper, she is in a state-ordered conservatorship, because she has been declared “incompetent” on the basis that she’s not a rich white guy, so why should she have money? Marrying a white man means that her children will be the masters of their own financial fates — assuming she and the family fortune live that long. For one thing, the Osage are plagued by diabetes, which Dr. James Shoun (Steve Whitting) tells Mollie is caused by trying to eat like white people. For another, the wealthy Osage are being murdered for their money and the mineral rights to their oil fields.
Mollie (Lilly Gladstone) and Ernest (Leonardo DiCaprio) are married by King Hale (Robert DeNiro) in Killers of the Flower Moon.
Scorsese spends the first part of this 206-minute epic methodically doling out the beats of Ernest and Mollie’s weird romance. He paints Ernest as a kind of thick schlub who lucked into a supportive family and the love of a good woman. Mollie thinks she can trust Ernest because his lies are so transparent. Then, the director casually reveals that Ernest is also a bushwhacker and bank robber. In fact, the man orchestrating the murder of the Osage is their biggest champion, King Hale. He’s methodically killing off Mollie’s sisters while waiting for her elderly mother Lizzie Q (Tantoo Cardinal) to join the ancestors. Once Mollie is the sole heir of the family fortune, Ernest will kill her with tainted insulin, thus bringing her oil rights under King’s control.
Cara Jade Myers, Lilly Gladstone, JaNae Collins, and Jillian Dion as the four wealthy Osage sisters targeted for murder in Killers of the Flower Moon.
Killers of the Flower Moon is based on a 2017 nonfiction book by David Gann, subtitled The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI. After the Osage organize a trip to Washington D.C. to plead their case to President Calvin Coolidge, the newly formed FBI shows up in the form of Agent Tom White (Jesse Plemons) and starts digging into the locals’ secrets. Scorsese brings all of his thematic threads together in a jaw-dropping scene where White meets with his investigators on a lonely Oklahoma hilltop. As they piece together King Hale’s genocidal plot, they see in the distance men fighting a grass fire, their forms shimmering through the heat and flame like souls condemned to hell.
Scorsese’s complete mastery of form allows him to shift tones and genres at will. At various times, Scorsese invokes the grandeur of Kurosawa and Lynch’s interior visions. What starts as a frontier epic becomes a period romance, then a howcatchem murder mystery. When John Lithgow shows up as a federal prosecutor, we’re in a courtroom drama. Many of Scorsese’s recurring themes are here — organized crime, toxic masculinity, mystic spirituality, polite society’s constant undertone of violence — but changing the setting from familiar environment of the Northeastern urban centers to the Oklahoma plains has provided new perspective, and a wider canvas. Killers of the Flower Moon is an exceedingly rare gem: A late-career breakthrough from one of America’s greatest artists.
Jessie Buckley and Jesse Plemons in I‘m Thinking of Ending Things.
I recently rewatched an old favorite: Being John Malkovich. The 1999 comedy, written by former sitcom scribe Charlie Kaufman and directed by Beastie Boys video maker Spike Jones, is a surrealist take on the corrosive effects of celebrity culture. It’s a comedy, sure, but that label is somehow too limiting. It’s the height of 90s indie weirdness as a kind of high art.
Kaufman and Jones would reunite for 2002’s Adaptation, which twisted Susan Orlean’s nonfiction bestseller The Orchid Thief into an unrecognizable pretzel. Then Kaufman wrote Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which, in the hands of Michael Gondry, became a film on the short list for best of the 21st century.
Awkward! Jake and Lucy meet the parents, Toni Collette and David Thewlis, in one of the most awkward dinner scenes imaginable.
But after the financial crisis of 2008, Kaufman-esque surreality seemed to go out the window. Arthouse and indie films became much more neo-realistic, in part because the mid-budget movie became an endangered species as studio dollars flowed towards megabudget “sure things” based on recognizable intellectual properties. You know, superheroes.
One of the great side-effects of the streaming era has been giving new life to strange voices like Kaufman, and allowing creativity to take flight. One of the earliest examples of this was Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq, a Greek comedy/musical about street violence, which was produced by Amazon. Now Netflix has made a film with Kaufman that simply couldn’t exist in the contemporary Hollywood studio system.
I’m Thinking of Ending Things is, like Adaptation, a loose adaptation of a book — this time, a 2016 novel by Iain Reed. Kaufman doesn’t insert himself into the story this time, but then again, Orleans inserted herself into her narrative of the eccentric Floridian swamp ranger, so it was only fair. That being said, there’s very little about this film that is conventional in any sense.
The story starts on a long car ride through a snowstorm. Lucy (Jessie Buckley) is staring out the window, contemplating how her young relationship with Jake (Jesse Plemons) is unsatisfying. They eventually arrive at his parents farmhouse, where she meets his mother (Toni Collette) and his father (David Thewlis), and the family shares an awkward dinner. Then, as it’s getting late and the snow is piling up outside, Jake and Lucy head back to the city. As they pass a small side road, Jake insists on a detour to see his old high school, over Lucy’s objections.
Ice cream? In a snowstorm?
And that’s pretty much the whole plot of I’m Thinking of Ending Things, but it tells you almost nothing about the film. It is dense, extremely wordy, and at times stubbornly elusive in meaning. Also, there’s a dance sequence.
Buckley excels in one of the most difficult parts you can imagine. Her character’s identity is elusive and ephemeral. Her name seemingly changes again and again. At one point, she does a full-throated impression of legendary film critic Pauline Kael, reciting passages from her review of A Woman Under The Influence. It’s a stunning technical performance.
Plemons’ performance is exceptional. His vacant Nazi enforcer is often overlooked in Breaking Bad, because it’s just another great performance on a screen crowded with them. Here, his gifts are on full display. He even sings songs from Oklahoma! (What is it with the Rogers and Hammerstein thing lately?)
Did I mention the animated sequence?
Kaufman, who also directed, has constructed one of his strangest scripts. It’s almost Becket-like in its mixture of mundane details and slippery symbology. At times it descends into pastiche, sampling texts as strangely disconnected as David Foster Wallace essays and A Beautiful Mind. I’m not going to attempt to explain its meaning. I suspect the writer(s) would insist the attempt to do it for yourself is the point of the exercise. Nor is it a puzzle movie that will click into clarity as soon as you discover and assemble all the clues, although it does have that aspect. The key question to ask if you’re looking at it from that perspective is, who is imagining whom? In that way, it’s about how we construct our identities, and how fragile our mental houses of cards really are.
As a director, Kaufman is a better than average composer of strange images, but his words do miss the visual flash of Gondry and Jones. Ultimately, I’m not sure I’m Thinking of Ending Things comes together in the way that Eternal Sunshine or Anomolisa does. But I have been thinking about it for a couple of days now. It’s a big, sprawling, uncompromising vision from one of our most talented writers. Just don’t go into it expecting to come out with easy answers.
I’m Thinking of Ending Things
I’m Thinking of Ending Things is streaming on Netflix.
Believe it or not, this is Christian Bale as Dick Cheney in Vice
What do you do about a problem like Dick Cheney?
The former Vice President of the United States sits at a pivot point in history. He’s the connecting link between the presidencies of Richard Nixon and George W. Bush. He led the team that led the United States into an ill-fated war in Iraq. He was the original architect of the War on Terror, now 17 years old and counting. How do you tell a story that huge, that complex, and that damning, to a popcorn audience in a couple of hours.
Writer/director Adam McKay starts by calling Cheney a “dirtbag,” then gets more specific from there. McKay, former head writer for Saturday Night Live and director of pop-comedy juggernauts like Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, is probably the best qualified person to make a movie like this. The Big Short, McKay’s blow-by-blow of the 2008 financial crash, is told with wit, sarcasm, and a whole lot of voice over. Even as a news nerd, I felt like I came out of that film feeling both entertained and like I understood the world better.
Amy Adams (left) as Lynne Cheney.
In Vice, McKay applies the same methodology to Cheney’s life story, but the results aren’t nearly as clean cut. The story opens with Cheney (Christian Bale) getting his second DUI for driving piss drunk in a swerving Studebaker on a rural Montana road. He’s flunked out of Yale for drinking and brawling, and now he’s a lineman, drinking and brawling his way through life as a flowering dirtbag. But his wife Lynne Cheney (Amy Adams) is having none of it. In a crucial scene that will echo throughout the film, she orders her mother out of the room and dresses him down. “Did I choose the wrong man?” she hisses.
Then we cut to 9:30 a.m. on September 11, 2001. It’s the first of many time jumps in this byzantine screenplay. Cheney is the senior official at the White House while George W. Bush (Sam Rockwell) is reading My Pet Goat to a room full of Florida school children. When he gives the authorization to Donald Rumsfeld (Steve Carell) to shoot down any civilian airliners in American airspace, he does so in the President’s name. It’s a clear usurpation of authority, but when Condoleezza Rice (LisaGay Hamilton) challenges him, all it takes is one guttural growl to shut her up.
The meat of the story is Cheney’s transformation from dirtbag drunk into the consummate power player. Narrated by Jesse Plemons, whose onscreen identity becomes the setup for one of the film’s most powerful visual gags, the screenplay is anything but subtle. Bale has already won a Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy Golden Globe, and his unlikely performance as one of the great villains of American history is worth the price of admission alone. He’s surrounded by A-listers giving pitch black performances. By the time Adams starts doing Shakespeare as Lynne Cheney, you’ve probably already identified her with Lady MacBeth. Carell and Bale recreate Cheney and Rumsfeld’s creepy chemistry. LisaGay Hamilton makes an uncanny Condi Rice; Tyler Perry doesn’t really resemble Colin Powell, but he does manage to embody the former general’s conflicted countenance when he was put in the position to lie to the United Nations on the eve of the Iraq War.
This has been a season of political films, ranging from Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You on the good end to Dinesh D’Douza’s Death of a Nation way down on the other end. Like Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman, Vice kind of flies apart at the end, as if the filmmaker just couldn’t quit while he was ahead. McKay’s fumble is the result of the basic problem with designing a polemic around an antihero — we’re hard wired to see the guy who gets the most close-ups as a heroic figure, even if he’s a war criminal who set his country on a path of ruin. For all his weight gain and intentional ugliness, Christian Bale is still an incredibly charismatic performer. Like Leonardo di Caprio in The Wolf of Wall Street, one might end up liking him, even though he’s clearly a monster.
But while having a charismatic leading man might be bad for the purposes of political rhetoric, it’s great if you’re trying to make entertaining cinema. Vice may be dense, divisive, flawed, and maddening, but it’s definitely entertaining.
Lesson number five in Yale history professor Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century is “Remember Professional Ethics.” Snyder writes, “When political leaders set a negative example, professional commitment to just practice becomes more important.”
Few people have ever accused Hollywood of having “professional ethics.” Long gone are the days when Dalton Trumbo would write a patriotic paean like Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo and then get hauled in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee for his troubles, or where John Sturges could condemn Japanese internment with Bad Day at Black Rock, or where Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford could star in All the President’s Men and make it one of the biggest movies of the year. Nope, these days it’s all $100 million toy commercials and fascist dreck like 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi. Do successful filmmakers have a duty to the Republic? Don’t make Michael Bay laugh into his Porsche collection.
This is why, even if The Post wasn’t a rip roaring great movie, it would still be a remarkable presence in the theaters of 2018. At age 71, with an estimated net worth of $3 billion, Steven Spielberg didn’t have to make this movie. Producer Amy Pascal, former head of Sony, didn’t have to pony up for a script by struggling screenwriter Liz Hannah about Katharine Graham, the legendary publisher of the Washington Post in the Watergate era. Who in their right mind would do such a thing when My Little Pony is just hanging there, ripe for transformation into a cinematic universe?
Maybe they did it because The Post is the movie that needs to be made right now. Maybe that’s the same reason Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks signed on, as Graham and Post editor Ben Bradlee, respectively.
Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep lead a star-studded cast in The Post, Steven Spielberg’s remarkable new film about the release of the Pentagon Papers
Hanks has another potential reason: He’s an obsessive typewriter collector, and the newsrooms of 1971 would be like Candyland for him. Dial-up phone fans will also be in heaven for the 116-minute running time. So will political junkies and actual patriots who value the First Amendment, the separation of powers, and representative democracy.
If you’re a fan of good film craft — as all right-thinking people should be — you will flip for The Post. Spielberg may be the best steward of old-school film grammar we have left, and all of the classic virtues are on display. The Post tells the story of the 1971 release of the Pentagon Papers, which explained in great detail that former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara (Bruce Greenwood) and the U.S. Government knew that the Vietnam War was unwinnable as early as 1965, a full decade and tens of thousands of casualties before it ignominiously ended. It is that most dreaded of script genres: People talking in rooms without brandishing guns. The practice of journalism is mostly people on telephones, or as film producers call it, slow box office death. There probably aren’t five people on the planet who could have pulled off this story with the same excitement and urgency as Spielberg. What most contemporary directors would take five cuts to accomplish, he can do with a focus pull, such as when Bradlee crashes Graham’s birthday party with urgent clandestine news, and Spielberg meticulously reveals McNamara, the one person who can’t know what’s going on, in the crowd. The director is in complete control of where your eyes are focused on the screen at all times, and it feels great, not intrusive or forced. Information is revealed at exactly the right pace, and dense exposition flows like drawn butter.
Hanks leads a murderer’s row of contemporary acting talent that includes Sarah Paulson as Bradlee’s wife Tony, Bob Odenkirk as reporter Ben Bagdikian, Matthew Rhys as leaker Daniel Ellsberg, Jesse Plemons as Post lawyer Roger Clark, and David Cross as reporter Howard Simons. But it’s Streep who shines brightest. Graham starts the film as a socialite and dilettante as interested in rubbing elbows with the rich and powerful as she is in running a paper. By the end, she walks determinedly out of the Supreme Court to be greeted by a silent phalanx of young women looking to her example of powerful, patriotic womanhood. Streep’s arc is one of the most finely shaded and complex of her storied career. The Post pursues the personal, the political, and professional spheres of life all at once, and its story of putting duty to country and humanity over personal loyalty and professional advancement couldn’t be more timely. I hope this group of artists’ example is seen far and wide in our troubled country.
