Director: Henry Nelson
Writer: Henry Nelson
Stars: Tim Blake Nelson, Chloë Kerwin, Grant Harvey

Synopsis: Asleep in My Palm explores the nature of parenthood and class as a father and daughter live off the grid in rural Ohio where they must confront the challenges of her sexual awakening as he escapes a violent and conflicted past.

Henry Nelson’s Asleep in My Palm is almost as heartbreaking as Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace. The comparison is naturally going to be made between the two films as both feature a father and daughter duo living off grid because of the father’s intense military service-related PTSD. Granik’s film is a masterpiece and Nelson’s work will exist in its long shadow. However, Asleep in My Palm distinguishes itself by shifting the focus to the self-imposed predicament created by Tom (Tim Blake Nelson) as one based in uncontained rage at the world. His only balm is Beth Ann (Chloë Kerwin), now sixteen years old and beginning to find herself curious about the world beyond the one created by him.

The film begins with Tom giving Beth Ann his interpretation of Disney’s Chicken Little. Not the original short made for American wartime propaganda, but the panned 2005 movie. His version is a tale he’s telling about himself. A “bespectacled homunculus” chicken who no one believes or likes, who maybe lives in Paterson, New Jersey. One who is bullied and ostracized by the community and later forms a gang to take them down. He doesn’t have to because everything does go to shit. This Chicken Little “Looks up and he’s happy because he’s been dead for years, and the last thing he’s going to see is those fuckers eating shit.” Maybe he saw the crack and what others can’t see.

Beth Ann questions his story with a sleepy kindness and tells him to be safe as he leaves their tiny storage unit which doubles as their home. Despite the sodden and slushy Ohio snow, the storage unit is still a “home.” Whatever Tom is doing, and most of it is criminal, his focus is keeping Beth Ann wrapped warm and tight.

But how tight can someone like Tom really hold on to a young woman who is beginning to wonder about the world beyond the two of them? Tom has given her a better education than most college kids would get. They are living near the famous Oberlin College; a place where a month’s tuition would keep Tom and Beth Ann alive for years. Yet, Beth Ann has never been to a party. She’s committed crimes – she can break and enter like a professional, but she’s almost a total innocent.

Tom is used to the exhausting hustle. Along with Jose (a strange incel type played by Jared Abrahamson) he steals whatever he can from the college dorms. Jose believes that women liking Radiohead’s ‘Creep’ is an act of cultural appropriation. He’s an idiot Tom tolerates but seemingly doesn’t care about. His manic energy and ridiculous statements weary an already weary man. 

Tom is cynical and jaded about the modern world and has kept Beth Ann from it. No phones, no television, no computers. An itinerant life where they can just move on once a place no longer serves its purpose or gets “too hot” — if he was in a Michael Mann film he’d almost be considered urbane. But Asleep in My Palm is not Heat.

Tom is an enigma, perhaps even to himself. The audience knows he was in Desert Storm, but who was he before that? Who did he become afterwards? How is a man living hand to mouth able to debate metaphysics or give a quick lesson on the Stoics? When he meets a bunch of bored college kid “Satanists” he’s able to break down the philosophy of “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law,” as espoused by the Thelemites and Aleister Crowley.

Crafting an imaginative world filled with joy and small wonders for Beth Ann has filled his aching loneliness. Beth Ann’s mother is simply, “gone.” But Beth Ann can’t stay forever the urchin and waif — the Paper Moon lifestyle of modern-day panhandling and swindling has an end point. That end point is sexual maturity and adult curiosity.

Chloë Kerwin plays Beth Ann with vulnerability and curiosity. She adores Tom, she wants to protect him as much as he wants to protect her, but she meets people who show her that there is a world she’s been forbidden to explore. One that can be as ugly as Tom warned her, but one which also contains beautiful and enchanting women such as Gus Birney’s rich girl Millah, who likes the idea of slumming it with Grant Harvey’s ‘Dark Mortius.’ A single kiss from Millah and some time spent being seen by someone else and Beth Ann is smitten. 

Just as Tom (Thomasin McKenzie) says to Will (Ben Foster) in Leave No Trace, “The same thing that’s wrong with you isn’t wrong with me” Beth Ann has to tell her father “No one’s going to remember me. Just you. There are no pictures of me.” It’s not enough for her any longer to be invisible from the institutional monsters. She has the one thing Tom wishes she would never have, desire. Not a desire for the material, but for some form of autonomy — which ironically is what Tom was striving towards himself but can’t manage.

Henry Nelson captures life on the outskirts with humanity and sometimes almost absurd humor. He doesn’t pretend that it is a life anyone would truly desire unless they were broken by uncaring systems. When Millah tells Beth Ann that she is more adult at the age of sixteen than she will ever be, she means it. They have a shared envy of each other’s lives. But Millah eventually will just fall into a safety net of privilege. She will live a small life but a safe one. College is the time she gets before she ends up married and doing charity events.

Asleep in My Palm is a film which documents the small American tragedies. The world of poverty is still around the rust belt next to generational wealth. Asleep in My Palm is a lyrical film with extraordinary performances by Nelson and Kerwin. It is patiently and expertly shot which makes the interspersed violence all the more impactful. The only real criticism that can be leveled is an extraneous mystery and solution at the end of the film which brings up a question no one was asking. 

Asleep in My Palm is an outstanding debut by Henry Nelson, and he has the great fortune to be directing his father, who is one of America’s finest character actors. Love is complex and families even more so. Asleep in My Palm gives grace to two people just trying to find a place in the world — one who will never truly belong because he has never healed his trauma, and one who has a chance to fly higher and see if the sky really is falling in.

Grade: B+

Director: Luc Besson
Writer: Luc Besson
Stars: Caleb Landry Jones, Jojo T. Gibbs, Christopher Denham

Synopsis: A boy, bruised by life, finds his salvation through the love of his dogs.

Roger Ebert said of Nicolas Roeg’s Track 29, “Somebody asked me if I liked this movie, and I had to answer that I did not, but then I realized once again what an inadequate word “like” is. The reason I didn’t like it is that the film is unlikable – perhaps deliberately so. But that doesn’t make it a bad film, and it probably makes it a more interesting one… it is bad-tempered. But not every film is required to massage us with pleasure. Some are allowed to be abrasive and frustrating, to make us think.” Ebert’s quote would be germane to Luc Besson’s DogMan if the film was setting out to make the audience think. However, Besson decides on unlikeable, frustrating, and doing all the “thinking” for the audience. DogMan is blunt-force abrasive, but it is possible at least to find sections interesting.

Douglas (Caleb Landry Jones) is a man whose tortured existence means the only pack he can trust are his preternaturally clever “children” — a motley crew of smooth criminal canines. Brought up in a strangely timeless Newark by a violently dysfunctional family, Doug has more ‘anti-hero’ origin stories than a continually re-written comic book character. Was it the moment he was caught feeding scraps to the dogs his father bred for fighting? Was it when his slack-jawed ultra-religious brother had him locked in the cage with the dogs for most of his childhood? Was it when his beloved mother finally left the cradle of filth that was his home neglecting to let him out of the cage as she departed? Or was it when his father decided to shoot the puppies Doug was protecting but instead shot off one of Doug’s fingers and left a bullet lodged in his spine which will one day kill him?

Doug is arrested in full Marilyn Monroe drag trying to flee the scene of a gang war massacre with his beloved babies, and it is up to Doctor Evelyn Decker (Jojo T. Gibbs) to work out the enigma of the fluid and adapting Dog Man through his baroque narration of his life.

Doug is polite, educated, and so well versed in the Bard his history is Shakespearean. Is he Viola, Richard II, Falstaff, or Iago? Is he Hamlet or Juliet? Avenging angel or demon from the bowels of hell? Perhaps he is all three of Macbeth’s witches? The only thing that is certain is that he is weaving constant illusions to avoid being uncovered. That, and he regards humanity as a blight because they believe they have transcended their animal instincts. “The weak are killed in nature. But they survive in humanity. For a while. God always finds his own.”

A bizarre Bildungsroman, DogMan chronicles Doug’s life as an institutionalized child who falls in love with his guidance counselor and drama teacher Salma Bailey (Grace Palma) who takes the broken boy through the whirlwind of make believe which he first experienced reading his mother’s hidden ‘Women’s Magazines.’ Through Salma, he becomes a wheelchair using Richard Burbage, Will Kemp, and Margaret Hughes. Makeup and make-believe transport him from his isolation. He is seen and admired by his previously bullying peers, but not for being himself — for being someone else. Eventually, Salma heads to Broadway leaving a heartbroken boy who will eventually find his way back to the ones he cannot abandon, and will not abandon him, his dogs.

Doug’s journey through the callousness of reality is echoed by the strays he cares for. He has no home — they have no home. He doesn’t train his children to do tricks, they simply understand what he wants. Instead, he trains himself to perform. Unable to find a job despite having a degree, Doug holes himself up in an abandoned high school with his ever-expanding fur family and by chance becomes a drag artiste doing swirling renditions of Édith Piaf (an extraordinary scene) and Marlene Dietrich in “Lili Marlene” mode. Community supported by Annie Lennoxes, Madonnas and Chers, Douglas finds liberation behind illusion. He also has a successful side hustle in high end jewelry theft carried out by his crew. None of it is about the money – he just needs enough to keep his family fed.

Insurance investigators and Latino gang-bangers all try to take Doug down and meet a grisly end. It is Willard without the horror, or Doctor Dolittle as Duela Dent. Grisly, gritty, and stylishly captured, the essence of Besson’s cinema du look heightens the choreographed violence. Fetishistic in extremis, but also peculiarly sexless.

There is God’s law and dog’s law; Douglas is an adherent to both. God sent him dogs as a panacea to soothe his suffering. “Dogs only have one flaw, they love humans.” One suspects Besson decided to make the whole film in English and film it in “America” because chien spelled backwards means nothing.

Doug’s confession to Evelyn serves a purpose to prove his existence before it is erased and to alleviate her pain. An exhausted single mother with a violent father and similarly violent ex-husband, she can’t keep from her young child; Evelyn is also in need of protection. Hence the man behind a thousand curtains comes into the light to send her an angel before he meets his fate. 

DogMan should be, in some manner, entertaining. It is darkly funny, but Besson enjoys torturing the audience through Doug’s misfortunes too much. The philosophical and ethical discussions between Doug and Evelyn are exhaustingly exposition heavy. Besson shows and over tells, never getting the balance right. For example, we see Christopher Denham’s venal and sweaty insurance adjuster stalking Doug thinking he’s captured the femme fatale; but Doug has already told Evelyn (and shown in flashbacks) his knack for manipulation and dog-eat-man war. We know exactly what is coming.

If not for Caleb Landry Jones’ wounded but bravura performance, DogMan would be near insufferable. Jones is a compelling and beguiling presence. It’s not surprising he has been previously scooped up as a villain in Jordan Peele’s Get Out. He’s also a fragile romantic interest in Neil Jordan’s Byzantium. His best roles are the ones where he is an oddball outsider such as Brandon Cronenberg’s Antiviral. His best role to date has been the titular character in Justin Kurzel’s Nitram. There’s something indefinable about his screen charisma. He’s a less beautiful Cillian Murphy or Christopher Abbott but whatever those two have, he also has.

Besson has never opted for subtle nor is he beyond self-plagiarism. He’s made La Femme Nikita essentially three times (the original which spawned a two remakes and two television series), as evidenced by Lucy and Anna. His best loved science-fiction film The Fifth Element he cannibalized for Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. As for subtlety, although gorgeous, Les Aventures extraordinaires d’Adèle Blanc-Sec required two cuts. One to appeal to the younger aged adventure and Gaslamp enthusiasts, and one which had our fearless heroine very often unclothed just because she’s beautiful. An entire paragraph can be written just about the Taxi and Transporter franchises. Léon: The Professional is again a topic too large to be here within encompassed.

DogMan could be construed as mash-up of Le Dernier Combat and Subway. DogMan is low budget Besson off his leash after the massively expensive flop that was Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. It has style to burn but substance is either blatantly telegraphed or scant.

If you crave Luc Besson’s mysteriously religious, ultra-camp, and ferocious style with Caleb Landry Jones (and the junior version of Doug) being caked in mud, blood, or pancake makeup while devising schemes like an obsessive scrapbooker and master chef: then by all means DogMan is there for the taking. Also, there are the wonderful dogs working like a finely tuned orchestra. However, be warned, the antihero revenge wish fulfilment fantasy is often sickly and sloppy. It is more a tatty wig and obvious scars than genre hybrid genius. 

Grade: C

Director: Peter Farrelly
Writers: Jeffrey Bushell, Brian Jarvis, James Lee Freeman, Peter Farrelly, Pete Jones, Mike Cerrone
Stars: Zac Efron, John Cena, Jermaine Fowler, Andrew Santino

Synopsis: When three childhood best friends pull a prank that goes wrong, they invent the imaginary Ricky Stanicky to get them out of trouble. Twenty years later, they still use the nonexistent Ricky as a handy alibi for their immature behavior.

One of my bigger gripes with streamers unceremoniously dumping genre fare on their platforms with all the fanfare of a traffic jam is how well many of those films would play in a theater. Of course, many recent titles landed on streaming services partially due to the impact the COVID-19 pandemic had on the moviegoing experience (oh, how I wish I could have seen Palm Springs in a packed picturehouse). But even in the years since cinemas reopened en masse, movies of ostensible theatrical quality have fallen by the wayside in regards to the attention they should receive due a streaming release. 

Think about a film like 2022’s Prey, a fresh offering under the Predator umbrella; it was a sneaky hit on Hulu, yet I can’t help but think about the way it would’ve looked on the big screen. Bradley Cooper’s Maestro, a Netflix original, is a curious case study. It received plenty of acclaim, not to mention seven Academy Award nominations, but as someone who saw the film both in a theater and at home, I can confidently assert that it plays significantly better when projected rather than displayed on a television or laptop. I have serious fears for Richard Linklater’s Hit Man, a sexy, uproarious rom-com that premiered to much acclaim at festivals last fall, yet will land on Netflix on June 7 with no accompanying theatrical release, per usual. That film is simply so alive; it begs to be seen with a crowd.

Ricky Stanicky does not.

There’s a bit more to it than that. But perhaps the best way to summarize its potential for such status is by noting that a lot of what Ricky Stanicky feigns to be — not just be about, but be in substance — it screams “theatrical comedy”, provided that we’ve traveled back in time to 2007. I can envision a cast featuring Paul Rudd, Jason Segel, and Danny McBride, or actors of that ilk, playing a trio of successful jamokes who, in their youth, invented an imaginary scapegoat and have let him live on into the present. They have jobs, wives/partners, and adult responsibilities, all of which they are willing to abandon on the condition that they won’t be faulted for said abandonment. Of course, that’s because the blame always falls on Ricky Stanicky. I can see Judd Apatow or Adam McKay mining humor out of this premise, the aforementioned actors making lemonade out of the outwardly-lemonish dick jokes they’ve been served on a platter, and audiences eating it all up. 

Maybe these visions of mine carry more weight because that was the intention for the project back when it landed on the 2010 Black List, thus deeming it one of that year’s best unproduced screenplays. Since then, Jim Carrey, James Franco, and Joaquin Phoenix (?!) were all in line to play Ricky, a dubious honor that ultimately went to John Cena. And it’s even more evident that the script has gone through an incessant slew of revisions over time, to the point where it now has six credited writers, as well as two separate “story by” credits for David Occhino and Jason Decker. It’s a patchwork piece at best, which is too bad, considering how much fun Cena is clearly having (and willing to have), and the fact that, in better hands and at a different time, I can genuinely imagine it making just north of a nine-figure box office return. 

Instead, it’s 2024, so Ricky Stanicky is littered with stand-up comedians who don’t act so much as they play renamed versions of themselves, directed by Peter Farrelly, and plopped on Amazon Prime, right around the corner from the discount toilet plungers. (I can only assume that a poop joke was left out of Ricky Stanicky’s final cut, though a pee joke made it through the edit alive.) Its footprint, solely digital; its jokes a return to form for Farrelly, who made Green Book and The Greatest Beer Run Ever; and clearly felt he’d done his duty for sincere-ish storytelling and wished to retreat to his dick joke haven. 

Zac Efron (Dean) stars as a nothingburger of a hedge fund bro who, along with Andrew Santino (JT) and Jermaine Fowler (Wes), have a get-out-of-jail-free-card for just about anything in the form of the titular character. One of the first examples we see is Dean and JT itching to ditch  JT’s baby shower in favor of a Marc Rebillet concert in Atlantic City. How do  they get out of the shower? Ricky’s cancer is back; the boys have to head to Albany to be present when he gets out of surgery.

When the dudes are forced to leave their weekend getaway early when JT’s wife goes into labor — darn! — they return to an entourage of dubious family members, who called every hospital in Albany trying to get a hold of one of the guys (they turned their phones off so they couldn’t be tracked), and there was no record of any Ricky or Stanicky anywhere. So, in an effort to keep up appearances with their loved ones, Dean comes up with a bright idea: Why don’t they hire the alcoholic actor they met while at a bar in A.C.? His name is “Rock-Hard” Rod, and while he might not be the best bet at convincing their families of Ricky’s legitimacy, our main men aren’t exactly swimming in options.

Enter Rod, who is just as committed to the bit of being Ricky as Cena is to playing him, but the whole sham these morons cooked up is a disaster waiting to happen. Especially because Rod enjoys being Ricky so much that he won’t take the money and run. Once the gig is up, Rod’s method acting persists; he even gets hired by Dean and JT’s boss, and swiftly receives a title with higher status and pay than the aforementioned duo. Nevermind that Rod’s only true skills are finding ways to sexualize the lyrics to popular rock songs for his one man show — it didn’t make me laugh, but I’d kill to see Peter Frampton’s reaction to Rod singing, “Ooh baby, I masturbate, everyday yeah, yeah”, — because “Ricky” is a jack of all trades. The more Rod hams it up, the further into chaos Dean, JT, and Wes’ lives are thrown.

If only this chaos was handled with any sort of regard for real humor rather than a rapidly-unspooling thread of stale quips and gags. This is the sort of film that is more concerned with how a line reads than how it lands or even relates to the plot; I recall Wes mentioning, “Sometimes I feel like I’m in a gay Handmaid’s Tale”, but what that referenced is of less import to the script than the fact that Wes mentioned a recognizable streaming property. The point — both of this line and the movie as a whole — isn’t to reinvent the wheel, but you’d think it might at least try to split the difference between There’s Something About Mary and Hall Pass. 
All this is made infinitely worse by it being the Efron performance immediately following his outstanding turn in last year’s The Iron Claw, a prestige project that saw the otherwise-solid actor reach unforeseen dramatic heights. Not even he can support the movie-stealing work of Cena, an up-for-anything performer who grows as an actor every time he appears on screen. Yet despite his best efforts, the Academy Awards will go down as the funniest thing Cena appears in this month. Somehow, more work went into crafting a gag to accompany the presentation for achievement in Costume Design than into a new feature film from an Oscar winner. If only that was as much of a sham as this.

Grade: D

Director: Delphine Girard
Writer: Delphine Girard
Stars: Selma Alaoui, Veerle Baetens, Anne Dorval

Synopsis: One night, a woman in danger calls the police. Anna takes the call. A man is arrested. Weeks pass, justice is looking for evidence, and Aly, Anna and Dary face the echoes of that night that they can’t manage to leave behind.

Delphine Girard’s short film, A Sister, vehemently shook me to my core the first time I saw it in my screenwriting class, with the filmmaker in attendance, a year before the film ultimately got nominated for an Oscar. The script was airtight and masterfully built its tension through Aly’s (Selma Alaoui) exchanges with a police dispatcher (Veerle Baetens), pretending to talk with her sister over the phone, as her abuser, Dary (Guillaume Duhesme), holds her hostage in his car and drives to an undisclosed location.  

The context behind their relationship is missing, but everyone understands her pain as she is in desperate need of help before something far worse happens. When Dary is ultimately arrested, the film ends. This abrupt closure leaves the impression to the audience that justice has been served and that everything will go in Aly’s favor once Dary is put behind bars. Of course, the current justice system makes it very difficult for victims of sexual assault to see justice. If it does happen, it usually takes years, and it isn’t as clear-cut as other legal cases. 

In her feature-length expansion of A Sister in Through the Night (Quitter la nuit), Girard explores what happens after the events of the short film (after recreating it for the opening scene), as Aly files a complaint for rape and false imprisonment in the wake of Dary’s arrest. At first, she’s interrogated by the police, who believe her recollection of events as true, while Dary vehemently denies any wrongdoing. As legal procedures begin, he moves back with his mother (Anne Dorval), who Dary convinces there is nothing to worry about, as the exchange between him and Aly was consensual. 

Meanwhile, Aly has difficulty grappling with her assault, crying alone in her apartment as her daughter helplessly watches, and the police investigation takes (a lot of) time. The dispatcher, Anna, is also having difficulty moving on from the call, as Aly’s situation wasn’t a simple life-or-death phone call. She had to use codified language to get help, not to raise suspicions from Dary. It takes great skill to catch what Aly was saying to “her sister” on the phone, as most dispatchers would have likely hung up the phone, which is part of why Anna can’t bring herself to continue her work as normal. 

These moments of intense contemplation are the bulk of Through the Night’s suffocating first half as you watch these three individuals attempt to pretend their lives are normal after an event slowly consumes them. One of them won’t admit guilt, but his mind keeps replaying the night through fragments as if it doesn’t want to believe that he did commit rape, while Aly tries to recover from Dary’s psychological and physical abuse. 

Because of its release, the film will likely be compared to Molly Manning Walker’s How to Have Sex, which also dealt with a protagonist who grappled with her assault. While both movies focus on  similar themes, and Walker’s film is vastly superior from a visual perspective, Girard’s Through the Night is equally as effective, if not more, through careful screenwriting and editorial choices that elevate the character drama beyond surface-level observations on the characters picking up the pieces. 

Scenes where characters recollect events to the police are long but necessary in our understanding of the two protagonists. Alaoui gives a magisterial turn as Aly, whose petrified eyes will stick with me for a long time. It’s not so much emptiness as it is torment, attempting to recover from a harrowing, traumatizing event as life goes on with her child and family. The scene that perfectly represents her anguish happens a bit later in the film, in which she attempts to tell her ex-husband, Pierre (Gringe), what happened but can’t bring herself to do so. The longing in her facial expressions are clear, and the silences in between Pierre’s questions speak so much louder than her own words. 

When the movie eventually cuts to two years later, when the trial will take place, many may also compare it with Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall, where the prosecution team attempts to twist the phone recording between Aly and Dary during the trial. However, there’s no ambiguity here: the rape happened, and Dary physically assaulted Aly during the phone call when he suspected something. One film leaves the door open for multiple points of interpretation, while the other directly shows how the justice system never favors its victims, even when the crime itself is clear and the police believe them. 

When Girard ultimately shows the rape and directly cuts to Dary sitting in his car as his mind fully recollects what happened two years ago while his mother stares at her son point blank, the emotional impact is immensely upsetting. Dary lied not only to the police and judge to save face but also to his own mother  – it gets even worse when he tells her he did it without hesitation. It takes an expert like Dorval to react the way she did and make us feel for a loving, caring mother who took her son’s side, thinking he was innocent, only to realize that he is just as cruel, if not worse than Dary’s father (whose innate penchant for violence likely comes from him, though Girard doesn’t directly state to it). With it, she gives her greatest-ever dramatic performance, a layered and emotionally charged turn where her quiet composure is more effective at conveying raw feelings than the relationship she holds with her son. 

However, the next scene, in which Anna reveals herself to Aly, is when the emotional buildup of the film fully takes form. With one line, she describes the injustice she will likely face as Dary will live with the guilt he will literally and figuratively carry for the rest of his life. The emotional resonance is devastating and far more poignant than How to Have Sex’s ending, which teased a hopeful future incompletely. After Aly eventually confronts Dary, her life slowly begins to rebuild itself in a more hopeful direction. It’ll take time, but it will happen as the rest of the story belongs to her. 

Grade: A

Director: Juan Carlos Fresnadillo
Writer: Dan Mazeau
Stars: Millie Bobby Brown, Ray Winstone, Angela Bassett

Synopsis: A dutiful damsel agrees to marry a handsome prince, only to find the royal family has recruited her as a sacrifice to repay an ancient debt.

Netflix’s Damsel is an example of a rite of passage for rising talent. It used to be that a young female star would take the reins of a romantic comedy to cement their status as a Hollywood starlet. Soon, when the rom-rom left the public eye like the radio star, the young-adult romantic drama became the next big thing. While the YA film may never go away, youthful actors have yet to set their sights on a new kind of launching platform.

That would be the costume dark fantasy action film, proving that girls can be just as kick-ass as the rest. The Kissing Booth’s Joey King did one for Hulu in the summer of 2022 called The Princess, a fairly entertaining film that proved King could hold her own. Now, Stranger Things megastar Millie Bobby Brown has her John McClane moment as a young woman who finds herself as the damsel in distress who only needs to rely on herself. The result is that Brown holds her own in some gnarly action sequences, but the rest of the film fails to live up to its potential as a fun action diversion.

Brown stars as Eloise, the daughter of a king (Ray Winstone) who oversees a dying kingdom in the farthest point north. His people are poor, without adequate shelter and food. Eloise’s mother died many years ago, and her father married Lady Bayford (Angela Bassett), whose bloodline is anything but royal, being the daughter of a rope maker. The noblewoman has a younger sister, Floria (The Peripheral’s Brooke Carter), whom Eloise schools on leadership qualities.

Soon, the King is approached by a wealthy royal family with more gold than Eloise has ever seen. They are looking for a young lady to marry Prince Henry (Nick Robinson), the son of Queen Isabelle (Robin Wright). From the trailer, you know what happens next. They marry and soon whisk Eloise away to an ancient ceremony on the cliffs of the highest point of the kingdom. There, the Queen takes a dagger and draws blood from both happy couples’ hands so his royal blood can mix with hers. 

Oh, and then Henry tosses Eloise over a bridge as a ritual sacrifice.

Yeah, that took a turn. Damsel was directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo (28 Weeks Later) and written by Dan Mazeau (Fast X), who falls into the trap of what I call making a video game script. As soon as Brown’s Eloise is tossed off that bridge, her mission is to escape the caves where she was sacrificed to be killed by a fire-breathing dragon. The scenes are written and filmed in a way remarkably similar to narrative-driven gameplay on your Playstation or Xbox. 

For instance, each time the titular character escapes, she finds writing on the wall that provides her with clues, warnings, and directions on how to escape. As soon as you get the feel of it, this takes away much of the suspense because you know what will happen as quickly as they start. You even have Eloise running into a few potential saviors who give her just enough information on the “mystery” of why she was betrayed, which was evident, and more escape instructions.

These special effects drenched pictures are reasonably good for a UHD television, producing a certain amount of addictive energy. However, almost all the characters are underwritten, from the villains to the main character. Again, all the departments of a video game are involved. Wright fares reasonably well, even though she is rather a one-note villain. Winstone hams it up as much as he can with nothing to do. Bassett’s only job is to act concerned, and she is over-the-top helpless, which is strange to watch from an actress known for portraying such strong female characters. Then you have Nick Robinson, who is so good in Love, Simon has nothing to do but argue with his mother, without any backbone to make the audience care.

Damsel is built for Millie Bobby Brown, who showcases her ability to helm a special effects-laden film, yet the production forgets to build around the star. Even the dragon (voiced by Shohreh Aghdashloo) has no emotion and feels like you are listening to AI-generated dialogue and responses that do not resonate with the viewer. Neither does the subtext of feminist empowerment themes, which never go beyond the shallow narrative, which plays more like a marketing ploy to mirror today’s socially conscious times than have anything significant to say about the matter.

While Damsel will undoubtedly entertain fans of Brown and those who like their films consumed on autopilot, Damsel fails to generate enough interest to justify your most valuable asset—your time.

Grade: D+

Director: Michel Gondry
Writer: Michel Gondry
Stars: Pierre Niney, Blanche Gardin, Françoise Lebrun

Synopsis: Follows a man, a director who tries to vanquish his demons, which are oppressing his creativity.

Ever wanted to spend 102 minutes living inside Michel Gondry’s unfiltered mind? No? Then immediately avoid The Book of Solutions. If your answer is even a tentative yes, going through a fictionalized version of the director’s post Mood Indigo breakdown is still a lot to take in. If you are on the (fantastically inspired inventor) Gondry train already, The Book of Solutions is high-wire absurdity, and you’ll enjoy the constantly derailing ride.

Marc Becker (Pierre Niney) is a director presenting his unfinished film to his financiers. His working partner is doing what he can to run interference between Marc’s increasingly nebulous film (which will come together in the yet to be filmed fifth act) and the financiers who just want to take what there is and cut it into “something.” Marc refuses to relinquish his film and enacts an immediate heist along with his editor, Charlotte (Blanche Gardin) and producer Sylvia (Frankie Wallach) with some quick moves by the intern Gabrielle (Camilla Rutherford) to take all the hard drives to his Aunt’s house where they will finish the film in secret.

Marc is clearly having an extended nervous breakdown. His loving Aunt Denise (Françoise Lebrun and partially based on Gondry’s own aunt Suzette) takes in Marc and his team and patiently deals with his personality peccadilloes which have been exacerbated by his decision to suddenly cease taking his psychiatric medication. Marc is off the charts; his internal narration is almost consistently at odds with that is happening on screen. He’s selfish, temperamental, paranoid, anxious, and an egomaniac. He’s also avoiding actually finishing or even looking at the film. 

For all the farcicality, and there is more than most films could deal with even Gondry’s own, there is the recognition that any artist who wants control of whatever they are making has to fight not only the material roadblocks of the process, but also the creative roadblocks. What if the film just isn’t any good? What if the film is genius but can only be so if there is proper collaboration? What if there are too many ideas or worse, too few? You can’t just make something and assume people will show up — a metaphor Gondry uses with Marc’s animated film about a fox attempting to open a hair salon.

Every possible genre gets squeezed in somewhere. Imagined gangster film, a smidgen of science fiction, obviously some slapstick humor, a will they/won’t they romance, paranoid imaginings, some odd psychosexual stuff, angry office equipment, and whatever is happening in Marc’s seemingly never to be completed magnum opus, ‘Anyone, Everyone.’ Marc also somehow ends up as a real estate owner, the interim mayor of the town in the Cévennes where he grew up with his much beloved aunt. And a hairdresser for a day. Because of course he does.

There is method in Gondry’s madness. Through Niney’s hyper-energetic performance we see an astounding set piece in which he conducts an orchestra with no score — they have to play based solely on his body movements. His “Book of Solutions” a book of rules he keeps making and breaking to facilitate the perfect piece of art does contain some wisdom — although Marc can barely tie his own shoelaces. He spends two days observing a bug. Days making an editing suite for Charlotte which is devised from an old truck. He has Denise star in her own comedy cooking show. Eventually he even gets Sting to play on the soundtrack to the film (Marc tells Sting how to play and gets away with it). He observes the ‘second gear’ rule while driving just to annoy people. He constantly wakes Sylvia up with new and urgent requests. He takes a dislike to one of the crew, Carlos (Mourad Boudaoud) for coughing too often. He makes pinhole cameras out of leaves, cuts down tree branches which he happens to be sitting on… he is unbearable but endlessly charming too.

Once Marc moves back to Paris after the film is somewhat abandoned (but rescued by Charlotte and Sylvia) he becomes even worse than he was in the Cévennes. The depression which follows the creative mania sets in and he quietly rejects everyone who reaches out to him, including Denise. Yet he finds a kindred spirit in his dream girl Gabrielle (with whom he had a fantastical relationship with earlier in the film). Can two oddballs who recognize each other be the solution? Is his no longer completely autonomous ‘Anyone, Everyone’ a film he will finally watch?

Explaining the plot of The Book of Solutions is akin to using skywriting in a foreign language on a cloudy day. You might see part of it, but just as you think you’ve got a handle on it, it vanishes. The themes are key. Marc’s love for Denise (a stand in for Gondry’s own aunt, Suzette) without whom he would not have his most important audience. Overcompensation because artistic vision has been “vandalized” before. The terror of facing the work which has been done. And recognition that one can be a “genius” and a “arsehole director” simultaneously and you can only get away with it for as long as you are giving something to the world. Marc’s real gift has nothing to do with the movie. One of the gifts he contemplates proffering is, shall we say, not something anyone wants.

Michel Gondry made in conjunction with Charlie Kaufman a film so beloved that it propelled him to a kind of fame he could never again live up to. Despite being involved with dozens of smaller projects, music videos, animations, television series — Gondry is always The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind guy. The Book of Solutions finds Gondry reflecting on his own career — parts are so self-referential and metatextual they require a non-fictional Gondry Bible.

Michel Gondry has thrown everything at the wall and seemingly randomly lets the audience decide what sticks — which is the most apt way of describing a career which includes the Seth Rogen starring The Green Hornet next to The Science of Sleep. Or The We and the I next to Human Nature. Gondry after all these years is still figuring out his formula, and The Book of Solutions might just be the most fun you will have trying to unlock his puzzle box mind.

Grade: B-

Director: Teresa Sutherland
Writer: Teresa Sutherland
Stars: Georgina Campbell, Nick Blood, Wai Ching Ho

Synopsis: Lennon, a new back-country ranger, travels alone through the dangerous wilderness, hoping to uncover the origins of a tragedy that has haunted her since she was a child.

The first mistake Robert Frost made when he approached the infamous “two roads diverged in a yellow wood” was entering the woods in the first place. Nothing good happens in the woods. Those who disagree are either not of this world or superior beings to us normies. John Muir is one of those people; the naturalist author, who created the National Parks System, wrote a great deal about the beauty of nature and its mysteries. He once wrote, “And into the forest I go, to lose my mind and find my soul.”

That passage, which appears at the beginning of Teresa Sutherland’s directorial debut, Lovely, Dark, and Deep, is a common misquote — he actually wrote, “And into the forest I go, to lose myself and find my soul.” But the version Sutherland cites feels more fitting for a horror film these days, particularly one where the main character experiences most of their terror not just in the forest, but because of the forest. It might as well read, “And into the forest I go, to eventually die.”

Which isn’t quite how things unfold for Lennon (Barbarian’s Georgina Campbell), but just as well! We first meet our heroine, a newly-minted park ranger with a haunted past (Indie Horror Mad Libs, anyone?), as she drives to work in the dark, listening to a radio broadcast about missing persons, specifically those who have gone missing in the woods. Along the way, Lennon comes to a stop at the sight of a black deer in the middle of the road. It stares into her soul; she stares back. But her attentive gaze is interrupted by a screeching sound on the A.M. dial. She switches it off, exhales, and when she looks up, the deer is gone.

It’s a familiar opening sequence — a character, alone in a dark setting, is harshly disturbed by a frightening creature/object that doubles as a foreboding omen. Yet just because something is familiar doesn’t make it cheap. What follows may feel repetitive and safe at times, but this set piece lays the groundwork for a competent film about how we respond when old wounds reopen. 

Lovely, Dark, and Deep delivers beats you’ve seen before, but in distinctive ways. Deer, for instance, pop up in horror films all the time — they represent innocence and protection, often presenting themselves to others if you’ve been hurt and your heart needs tending, which makes the dead deer we see at the start of Jordan Peele’s Get Out all the more heartbreaking. But have you ever seen a deer with smoky, blackened fur? You’ve seen a deer in headlights before, but have you ever seen a character be more fearful of the deer than vice versa? 

In short, what follows is The Cabin in the Woods if the cabin was the woods, an imbalanced yet absorbing descent into madness and terror through the eyes of a tortured vessel. As has become a staple in the genre, the seeds of this terror were planted long ago: When Lennon was a child, her sister went missing in the woods, a loss she feels responsible for. Naturally, it’s what led her to becoming a park ranger: she who was once responsible for one person in the wilderness must now be responsible for all of its visitors. 

This sort of narrative decision does feel rather on the nose — no longer is it one’s fear that is the mind-killer in horror films, but one’s trauma — yet it doesn’t matter nearly as much as it otherwise might thanks to Campbell’s layered performance. The ascendant Scream Queen draws more out of her character than one imagines Lennon could have been in lesser hands. While Barbarian required Campbell to access terror on full-tilt, Lovely, Dark, and Deep sees her mining authentic hope out of a hopeless scenario. To instill even the slightest shred of optimism in an audience well aware that the backdrop to her terror is a vast, dangerous national park essentially defies the impossible. 

Not as impossible, yet still an impressive feat, is the ability to render real scares in broad daylight. And though Sutherland’s film does so with sharp orchestral strums and screams from those suffering, both common cues in the genre, it’s commendable that it even tries. Midsommar this is not, particularly because Lovely, Dark, and Deep does still spend a great deal of its time in the dark. Ari Aster’s second film did what no film had done before, drawing discomfort and dread out of increasingly bright landscapes littered with inviting bursts of color that made up its central Swedish cult’s design palette. 

But Lovely, Dark, and Deep still manages to create something fresh, tactfully keeping its reliance on recognizable, cult-adjacent themes that give a heftier weight to its chills to a reasonable minimum. What matters more to Sutherland is what we struggle to live with whether the lights are bright or have gone out completely, and how it impacts our mindset, for better or worse. In a horror film forest full of trauma-laden trees toppling silently, this is the rare sort that makes a sound.

Grade: B