Film award season returns

This post jumps off from Metacritic’s film award scorecard for 2022, and I’ll continue to update it through the announcement of the year’s Academy Awards.
 
The Banshees of Inisherin (MC-87, HBO) is a folkloric parable of the Irish Civil War, played out between two old friends on a fictional island off the picturesque west coast of Ireland (partly filmed on Achill Island, a last-stop-before-Labrador locale I visited thirty years ago).  It’s written and directed by Martin McDonagh, whose tropism toward violence in his black comedies is a wavelength to which I am not attuned.  Nonetheless there’s a lot to like here, starting with extremely beautiful landscape cinematography, charming music, and excellent acting by Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, and Kelly Condon, among others, including a miniature donkey.  Farrell and Gleeson are the old friends who meet in the island’s one pub every afternoon for pints of Guinness, until one day out of the blue the latter says, “I just don’t like you no more,” and makes dire threats if the baffled former doesn’t leave him alone.  The director was matched with this pair of actors previously for In Bruges, so the escalating mayhem is part of his brand, but so is the witty dialogue.  One appeals to me, the other does not.
 
A kung-fu sci-fi movie is not normally my cup of Red Bull, but I took a chance on Everything Everywhere All at Once (MC-81) because a critics poll named it the best film of the year and because I came across the DVD on the shelves of a local library.  I began it derisively, but wound up quite involved with where all that Matrix-like ricocheting around the multiverse finally landed.  Written and directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (known collectively as The Daniels), this wild ride has heart and humor to go with hyperactive imagination.  Michelle Yeoh holds it altogether with a multifaceted performance, as a laundromat owner with many alternate lives, and many different relations to her husband and daughter (Ke Huy Quan and Stephanie Hsu).  The wit is both dry and fluid, with many humorous cinematic allusions.  For me the clinching highlight was the conversation between mother and daughter in the universe where they were two rocks perched on the edge of a canyon.  Like the movie itself, you won’t get it till you see it.
 
In Glass Onion (MC-81, NFX), Rian Johnson continues his update of the country house mystery genre, in which an all-star cast convenes at some deluxe remote location to enact a Clue-like scenario.  In this iteration it’s at a high-tech estate filled with pricey art on a private Greek island owned by an Elon Musk-type, played by Edward Norton.  Daniel Craig returns from Knives Out as the floridly Southern sleuth Benoit Blanc.  Among the guests are Kate Hudson and Kathryn Hahn, having fun with their caricatures, along with Leslie Odom Jr. and others.  Not there for fun is Janelle Monáe, as the tech billionaire’s ousted former partner.  There are many amusing twists in the tale, energetic scenes and bustling action, plus a wealth of satiric reference, but in the end the film is little more than the celebrity entertainment being enacted within.  I did, however, enjoy the parlor game of name-checking all the contemporary art on view, as well as celebrity cameos.  Contrariwise, I found the setting to be much less revealing, and the story less consequential, than the somewhat similar gatherings of The White Lotus.
 
Emily the Criminal (MC-75, NFX) is the debut feature of John Patton Ford, immeasurably enhanced by Aubrey Plaza’s performance as the title character.  She’s an art school dropout saddled with student debt, and a police record for assault that forecloses employment possibilities.  Gigging for a food delivery service, a coworker tells her about an opportunity to make $200 in an hour.  That gig involves credit card fraud and fencing of stolen objects.  She’s good at it, and moves up, more and more involved with her boss.  Less interested in crime suspense than the desperate travails of life outside the law, this film has sociological weight and substance rather than simple thrills, and Plaza at her best.
 
Indulgent of David O. Russell’s idiosyncrasies, I watched Amsterdam (MC-48, HBO) despite unfavorable reviews, and found it not exactly good, but not bad, perfect actually for watching over three sessions on a stationary bike.  Two soldiers wounded in WWI (Christian Bale and John David Washington) encounter in hospital a free-spirited nurse (Margot Robbie), and they roar into the Twenties in the eponymous city, and in homage to Jules et Jim.  Jump forward to the Thirties and they reunite in NYC, and dive into investigating the mysterious murder of their former general, which leads them into the historical Business Plot to overthrow FDR and install a popular general as president.  Sterling Clark, of Art Institute fame, was one of the actual plotters though not a character in the film, and the real-life general who disclosed the plot is played by Robert DeNiro, among a host of other familiar faces, too many to enumerate.  Antic and serious by turns, fast and loose in style and spirit, there's much to enjoy and admire here, but also to roll your eyes at.
 
I was less indulgent of Noah Baumbach’s White Noise (MC-66, NFX), an all-over-the-map adaptation of the Don DeLillo novel.  There’s much to like in this satirical movie, but not much that holds together.  The translation to screen is faithful but bumpy.  Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, and the rest of the cast are fine, but Baumbach takes a Spielbergian turn toward spectacle that is the wrong turn for him, and fidelity to the source material also deviates from what he’s best at.  Some moments shine, but much remains in obscurity.
 

The Wonder (MC-71, NFX) offered many appeals to me – the period and place (Ireland in 1862, a decade after the famine), the director and star (Sebastian Lelio and Florence Pugh), even bit players like Toby Jones and Ciaran Hinds.  Oddly engaging, never really clear where it’s going, what to believe and where the truth lies, this is the story of an eleven-year-old farm girl, who has piously refrained from eating for four months.  The local doctor and priest, from differing perspectives, along with other village leaders with an interest in the growing fame of the fasting girl, summon an English nurse (Crimean War “Nightingale”) to watch over the girl and verify the miracle of her survival.  The cinematography is spectacular, both of the Irish midlands and of the candlelit interiors of the isolated peat-farm.  Pugh is equally impressive, and the story is suspenseful without suspending belief or disbelief.

There’s plenty to admire in Empire of Light (MC-54, HBO), starting with the queenly presence of Olivia Colman (ably supported by newcomer Micheal Ward), and the setting of a grand but decaying movie theater on the south coast of England in 1980, immeasurably enhanced by the cinematography of Roger Deakins.  The film is smoothly directed but unevenly written by Sam Mendes, either too autobiographical or not enough.  Colman plays the manager of the theater, lonely and bipolar, just released from a mental hospital and going off her meds, reluctantly having an affair with the theater’s owner (Colin Firth).  Ward is a new employee, a second-generation Trinidadian immigrant who’d like to study architecture at university, but failing admission falls back on a job ushering.  Age and racial disparities notwithstanding, Colman and Ward develop a deepening relationship, against a Thatcherite backdrop of fading glamour and unleashed skinhead racism.  Even if the film has nothing particularly new or truthful to say, I found it quite watchable.

[To be continued . . . ]