It’s been hot in Locarno, Switzerland. So much so that every person introducing a film has joked about the respective theater’s air conditioning being a welcomed respite to accompany the movies. This being my first time covering Locarno Film Festival, where a leopard’s roar accompanies every screening — I can only concur that this 77th edition has reduced me to a puddle of sweat looking for the nearest gelato stand to provide the kind of cold goodness that’ll reanimate me. Thankfully, the air conditioning has been the perfect aperitif to movies offering a slower, more glacial pace.
Wang Bing, the king of long cinema, has returned with the second installment in his observational “Youth” trilogy. “Youth (Hard Times)” is a notable improvement over “Youth (Spring),” which premiered last year at the Cannes Film Festival — the third part, “Youth (Homecoming),” will premiere at this year’s Venice Film Festival. Running 227 minutes, “Hard Times” feels tighter, better conceived, with clearer ties and arcs that paint a better picture of a youthful generation trapped on the margins.
Shot between 2015 and 2019, Bing, along with several other camera operators, immersed himself in the textile workshops lining the town of Zhili in the Wuxing District of Huzhou. These privately owned shops are combined spaces, housing the workers in dormitories after they’ve worked from dawn to midnight. These can be called businesses only in the sense that they produce a product. But they don’t follow any guidelines, codes or laws. Lately, there’s been a rash of owners suddenly picking up sticks and leaving their workers high and dry. All the workers can do is find another shop, somewhere else in Zhili that maybe pays close to what they were earning. But as we see throughout Bing’s epic-length vérité documentary, even the rates that are promised by sweatshop owners are dangerously flexible.
Most of the workers we see on screen hail from Anhui province, a mostly rural area that contrasts greatly from the grimy concrete edifices that populate the blocks often doubling as landfills. Surrounded by garbage and humming machines, the subjects build out a life: joking, dating, debating, and fighting for extra wages from their penny-pinching shop owners. In makeshift unions they negotiate at what rate they’ll make the next fast fashion, and they struggle to recoup their wages when they lose their paybook. Each instance of exploitation builds on the other, creating a single unit with a shared story of survival until the new year when they can return home before the next season. With a promise of a new setting — these workers’ hometowns — on top of this beautifully captured slice of humanity, Bing makes it attractive for one to finish the journey he started.
This is admittedly a broad comparison, but if you can imagine “The Mosquito Coast” told from Reverend Spellgood’s perspective, you’d probably come somewhat close to “Transamazonia,” South African director Pia Marais’ quiet Amazon-set mood piece. Marais’ film similarly deconstructs godlike figures, questions the reality of miracles, and sees the wiser child learn that their father is all bunk.
It begins and thrives through ambiguity. The opening shot pushes in on two upturned seats in the middle of a humid, foggy jungle. An unconscious girl, the lone survivor of a plane crash, is covered in mud and blood. She is carried to safety by an Indigenous man of the Iruaté tribe, where she is claimed by her father: Lawrence Byrne (Jeremy Xido). Flash forward nine years, and Lawrence and his daughter Rebecca (a deceptively brilliant Helena Zengel) are operating a church for the locals under the promise that Rebecca, a literal miracle child, can heal the sick, wounded, and dispirited. They’ve got a profitable gig going until sawmill owner Artur Alves (Rômulo Braga) appears begging for help for his wife, who’s been in a coma for ages. If Rebecca can awaken his wife, he promises to depart the jungle, where his company is in a violent dispute with the displaced Iruaté people.
Lit in cool tones by D.P. Mathieu De Montgrand, this gorgeously mounted film prides itself on its sense of mystery: We never learn how Rebecca survived that plane crash or whether she performs miracles or is just the recipient of dumb luck. For a time, we don’t even know why Lawrence is so hellbent on pushing Rebecca to save Artur’s wife. Because of those fissures, Marais keeps one from simply labeling Rebecca a white savior. How can she fit the stereotype if we’re not actually sure she has saved anyone? When a nurse named Denise (Sabine Timoteo) arrives, the previously tranquil relationship between father and daughter is further imbalanced, causing the daughter, probably for the first time in her life, to question her faith in the godlike figure that is her father.
These wonderful components are sometimes undone by the outside gaze on the indigenous tribe and by the unconscionable decision by the Marais and her screenwriters to tie together every loose thread in the final ten minutes in a film that works because of its open-endedness. Despite those missteps, there’s enough mystique in “Transamazonia” to make it spellbinding and haunting.
There’s nothing worse than seeing a great film lurking underneath the tragically flawed result. Such is the case with “Moon,” the Austrian-Kurdish writer/director Kurdwin Ayub’s slow-burn Jordan-set thriller. While many films, particularly the low-budget action kind, have rendered the washed-up MMA fighter into a cliche — Ayub takes a different route. Having seemingly lost the will to fight, Sarah (Florentina Holzinger), is now training others. Most of her clients aren’t serious. They’re taking classes because MMA is trendy. The terse, monotone Sarah is also unwilling to play along. Very nearly broke, Sarah takes an odd offer: The son of a wealthy Jordanian family wants to hire Sarah to train his three younger sisters. In return, not only will she be handsomely compensated. She’ll also stay in a luxe fully paid hotel room complete with a personal driver, who will take her to the family’s far-flung compound.
When Sarah arrives, however, it’s not altogether clear that these three young women — Fatima (Celina Sarhan), Nour (Andria Tayeh), and Schaima (Nagham Abu Baker) — are actually interested in MMA. There are several other red flags: Sarah is required to sign an NDA, forbidden from venturing to the home’s second floor or going into the girls’ rooms, also cell phone use isn’t permitted for the girls, and the house lacks WiFi. Soon, Sarah begins to investigate and finds a woman yelling for help behind a locked door, the girls ask to use her phone for IG, disturbing videos arise and rumors about the family from the locals swirl. The appearance of violence creates a telling tension: Sarah is here to teach self-defense and empowerment but hesitates to defend or empower her pupils.
Ayub pulls those feelings of hopelessness, malaise, and regret tight, making them so taut she upends our expectations until she doesn’t. The Arab world here is projected as purely oppressive and by the final frame Sarah, the white outsider, is ultimately reimagined as a savior speeding to the rescue. It’s an unfortunate slip up by Ayub. In trying to land a sharp emotional gut punch on the audience, she squanders the provocative body blows that got us to this point.
“Jackpot!” is a trashy and repetitive action comedy about greed and bloodlust set in a world full of people who are proud to be awful. Directed by Paul Feig (“Spy”), it’s set in near-future Los Angeles, which begins to seem like a statement in itself as the movie goes along. There’s a statewide lottery. For some reason, the state government has decreed that citizens are permitted to hunt and kill winners to try and take their prize money. A handful of rules govern the hunt. One is, only those who’ve purchased a ticket and lost the draw can take part. Another rule is: no guns allowed. A third is: the hunt can only go on for 24 hours. If the original winner has survived at the end of that period, they get to keep their winnings.
Other than that, anything goes. Participants can use knives, clubs, broken bottles, bats, chains, rubber hoses, spears, curtain rods, mop handles, and presumably automobiles (though I don’t recall anyone trying to run anyone down deliberately, which seems like a strange omission in retrospect). They can hunt alone or in groups, even very large groups.
Awkwafina plays the target of the latest hunt, Katie Kim, a former actress who just returned home from many years spent visiting her dying mother in another state. Her dad died a while before. She didn’t have a good relationship with either parent. We get a bit of detail about her personal life to explain why she doesn’t know anything about the California state lottery turning into a murderous manhunt (she’s been spending time with her mom; no, really, that’s the reason) and also why she’s worthy of our sympathy (beyond the fact that, like other past lottery winners, she doesn’t deserve to be hunted like an animal; nobody does). Katie comes into her own winning ticket purely by accident and doesn’t realize she has it until her number comes up during an audition (which she doesn’t get) and everybody starts looking at her like a cartoon wolf staring at a sheep and imagining lamb chops.
An entire economy seems to have grown up around the lottery hunt, though the movie only zeros in on one part: the security experts who locate winners and offer them protection from harm in exchange for a cut of their fortune. John Cena plays one such security guard, a lovable bruiser named Noel. He used to work for a very successful lottery security company run by a snotty badass named Louie Lewis (Simu Liu). He saves Katie from death after the audition, when everyone in the building, including other actresses and a gymnasium full of karate students, have turned on her. She studied stage fighting but didn’t learn a lot. Her instincts are good, but she lacks the moves to survive. Without Noel, she’d be dead meat. And without Katie, Noel would be just another square-jawed he-man. (He’s got a backstory, of course, which Katie will gradually pry out of him.)
Written by Rob Yescombe, whose prior work was mainly on video games, “Jackpot!” doesn’t make a lick of real-world sense, and it’s not supposed to. It has a video game-like repetitiousness and gradual escalation, leading to a Big Boss showdown. There’s a lot of obviously improvised comedy that sometimes lands but more often feels like somebody filmed the exercises in a comedy performance workshop. It’s all in service of a movie that’s more half-baked goof than full-blown satire.
And it seems committed to not investigating the deeper implications of the scenario it’s presenting, in which the lottery hunt is the logical outgrowth of a society that seems to have completely given up on modeling decent values and has decided instead to monetize the worst human behavior. When Katie rents a tiny room from a website and realizes when she gets there that it doesn’t look anything like the pictures online, the young woman who rents it, appropriately named Shadi (Ayden Mayeri), chirps “we used fake photos, because who’s gonna stay here if we don’t?” Early in the movie, Katie sees a hateful stage dad loudly and profanely griping about his young daughter, who just failed an audition. “Sorry for all the bad words,” he tells the kid. “I only curse when your mom’s being a f—–g b—h.”
Ace character actress Becky Ann Baker gives us a glimpse of what the movie could’ve become in her brief performance as a lady who seems gentle and kind but is anything but. She captures the professional predator’s self-satisfied inward smirk at fooling somebody who trusts them, a marrow-deep rottenness that is expressed through fleeting glimmers in the eyes, and that is visible only to people who know what to look for.
But with a few exceptions, the movie’s way shallower than its best character moments. We don’t know what the state gets out of letting people hunt lottery winners–as in the “Purge” series, it seems on its face as if the cleanup required the next day would outweigh whatever value the exercise has in collectively permitting a society to let off some steam–but this is frankly not the kind of movie where you are supposed to think anything except, “that was a pretty funny line,” or “that looks like that must’ve hurt” or “cool stunt.”
There are seeds here that could’ve flowered into an audacious action comedy, perhaps in the vein of “Robocop” or “The Running Man” or “Battle Royale.” I kept thinking of that last one throughout “Jackpot!” because, unlike “Jackpot!,” it’s so cynical that it has moved beyond bitterness and into a kind of blase matter-of-factness, and also because it has an actual vision rather than a notion, and the action is imaginatively framed, lit, choreographed, and edited, an area of filmmaking that has never been Feig’s strength or, honestly, one of his main areas of interest (though “Spy” had its kickass moments, such as the kitchen fight).
The two stars have good chemistry – they seem to genuinely enjoy being around each other – but there’s nothing in the script that challenges either of them in the way that James Gunn challenged Cena in two genuinely special superhero projects, “The Suicide Squad” and “Peacemaker,” or that Lulu Wang challenged Awkwafina in “The Farewell.” For the most part, this is a lackadaisical project that is an example of the coarsened sensibilities it’s making fun of. As is often the case with improv-driven movies, the outtakes that play during the end credits are more natural and pleasurable than the movie.
“Good Bad Things” is an intimate, small story about the gigantic issue that challenges and terrifies us all: the collision between the desperate need to be seen and loved and the fear that what people might see will repel rather than attract them. Written by lifelong friends Shane D. Stanger (who also directed) and Danny Kurtzman (who also stars as a character named Danny), it is partly inspired by Kurtzman’s experiences as a person with muscular dystrophy.
The Danny of the movie runs a tiny advertising and marketing company with his best friend and roommate Jason (a very appealing Brett Dier, deftly balancing bro-ness with genuine friendship and loyalty). They are almost out of money and hoping to pitch a dating app called Rubi, a big client that could make all the difference for them. We have seen that Danny has a lot of very good, devoted friends and an ex named Bianca who really hurt him. The people who surround him are comfortable and inclusive. They notice when a venue is not accessible by scooter and carry him up and down stairs without making it into a big deal. But his friends drink a lot and are not always aware that his system cannot handle more than a couple of beers. More than that, he cannot help watching their casual and more romantic connections and with a sinking feeling that he will be relegated to the “friend zone” for life.
Danny creates an account on Rubi “for research,” not admitting to himself that somewhere deep inside, he might be hoping to find a girlfriend. He crops a photo showing him on his scooter to show him only from the shoulders up, posts his profile, and, he admits to Jason, he swipes on a few. He gets one response from a warm-hearted photographer named Madi (a heartfelt performance from Jessica Parker Kennedy). After discussing whether and how to share his disability, he mentions it in a response to Madi. He’s heartened when she seems undaunted and agrees to meet.
The core elements of the classic romantic story are heightened here because Danny’s disability is a physical manifestation of the dance of intimacy. It becomes very literal when Madi first invites him to join Jason and the two friends modeling for him in a ‘shroom-enhanced Palm Springs skinny dip that leads to Danny posing in the nude.
Kurtzman, who never acted or saw a movie set before Stanger invited him to collaborate, has a thoughtful screen presence. The Danny of the story is confident in his profession but often sensitive and unsure with people. Kurtzman, the performer, is able to show us all of those layers. Danny’s friends think they are very fond of him and very tuned in, but even Jason, who lifts, bathes, and encourages Danny (the friendship), never really sees Danny’s loneliness (the bro-ness) and the gulf he feels between himself and the abled world.
Stanger and Kurtzman were wise to make Madi a photographer. Her passion and her profession are to literally see what others do not. She’s almost a Psyche figure holding up a candle to see Cupid. She sees the beauty in a body most people would consider misshapen. She also sees Danny as a man, not a permanent friend zone. And as he begins to see himself through her eyes, his spirit expands. In the first part, he wears black throughout. But when he and Madi have a sweet moment, he uses his skill to help her, showing her that part of himself is wearing the color of life and renewal: green. The inversion of the sounds of their two names is also a subtle suggestion of their connection.
The script is not as strong as the performances, especially for the part often the weakest in films about love. The conversations between Danny and Madi do not do as much as they might hope to show us why they begin to feel tenderly toward one another. However, the link between Danny’s/Madi’s relationship and the meeting with Rubi is well handled, with Danny giving an excellent speech after Jason initially messes up the pitch. The scene that continues to resonate, though, is when Danny and Madi hit a rough patch, and Danny allows his deepest emotions to show, sobbing on his father’s chest (an excellent Gale Hansen). Danny admits he is terrified. “Things need to change for things to get better, and that’s so scary. What if this is one of those good bad things?” That’s a tough question to answer, but this movie is one of those good good things.
From an interview with “It Ends With Us” director and star Justin Baldoni to a smattering of four-star reviews, here is a sampling of the articles we know you won’t want to miss this week.
“That true-believer attitude starts at the top. Baldoni is nothing if not a man who has faith in his mission to create something new at Wayfarer, preaching a gospel of creating films and series of substance in an age of deadening social-media overkill. That philosophy is embedded in the company’s very moniker. “‘Wayfarer’ stands for the journey of the soul,” explains Baldoni. “It’s named after the Wayfarer in a book called The Seven Valleys and the Four Valleys, which comes from the Baha’i Faith, which is my faith. It’s the journey of the soul, trying to figure life out. Whether you are a believer in God or whether you’re spiritual—whatever you are—it’s that journey of just trying to understand the world around us and yourself in the process.””
“This story of love, trauma and abuse is wrapped up in the same amber-hued autumnal glow of Lively’s bestie Taylor Swift’s short film for her autobiographical song “All Too Well (10 Minute Version),” which itself is about an abusive relationship. Lily even has the same tousled strawberry blonde tresses as the short film’s star Sadie Sink. So naturally, the film’s most climatic moment of domestic abuse, like the short, takes place in the couple’s kitchen. Later, the moment where Lily comes into her own power as she attempts to rebuild her life is underscored by Swift’s “My Tears Ricochet” (which perhaps counts as a spoiler if you know the topic of the song. Swifties, I’m sorry.)”
“Many people get confused about the difference between empathy and sympathy. “Sometimes offering sympathy can seem like you feel sorry for another person,” Ebert says. “Sympathy can have a value judgment and come across as hierarchical like the person offering the sympathy feels superior.” She continues, “With empathy, you are putting yourself in someone else’s shoes. It doesn’t mean you are trying to fix or change them, but that you feel for what they are going through.””
“In service of all the tomfoolery and shenanigans that ensue, the movie turns subtext into text and bold-faces it. Wade revels in declaring himself a timeline Jesus. In one timeline-jumping mission we see Logan crucified on a giant X. The movie incrementally becomes the nine-figure-budgeted superhero action movie equivalent of a Chuck Jones-directed Looney Tunes touchstone like “Duck Amuck.” “Keep going,” Wade says when a character starts monologuing, “audiences are accustomed to long run times.” Wade narrates the entire thing, as he always does, and at one point seizes the camera and drags it into another part of the set to tell us something confidential.”
“”Good One” is intriguing in its disinterest in explanations. The film’s refusal to “satisfy” an audience with easy explanations or even cathartic moments pulls you into its atmosphere, dragging you into the weird dynamic which grows more claustrophobic by the moment. Sam has her period and keeps leaving the path to put in a tampon, as Chris and Sam wait in the background, completely oblivious to her extra burden. She’s got this whole world going on they have no idea about. The period is an intriguing detail (all the details are intriguing in this beautiful film, including its evocative title), highlighting the biological difference, but also highlighting her isolation. The only women in the movie are back home. Sam is on her own.”
“With a triad of personal avenues to unpack the reverb of influence – Noisecat’s relationship with his father, influenced by the latter’s lifelong struggle to cope with his origins (and his own mother’s pain in doing in the same), the religious and ancestral reckoning of the late Chief Rick Gilbert, and the overarching criminal research by investigators Whitney Spearing and Charlene Belleau – “Sugarcane” is deeply human, giving living, breathing faces and families to a history that, even when acknowledged, is too often rendered monolithic and impersonal. It begs the action of accountability, something so frequently symbolic rather than reparative, displayed through thin acknowledgments from Trudeau and a hollow offering of sympathy from Pope Francis (with no apology, compensation, or artifact returns to follow).”
Remember the guy in “Eastern Condors” with the camo green bucket hat, who never dropped his cigarette, not even after submerging his head underwater? That’s Judy Wu, aka Jack Wang or “Filter” in the English dubbed version of star/director Sammo Hung’s exuberant Namsploitation “Dirty Dozen” variant, a strong candidate for one of the best action movies of the 1980s. Judy Wu was played by Corey Yuen, a heavy smoker in real life who appeared in several milestone action movies throughout the ‘80s when he also started directing his own productions.
Yuen was action cinema’s Swiss Army Knife. His energizing fight choreography stood out in projects as varied as the epochal 1983 action-fantasy “Zu Warriors from the Magic Mountain,” for which Yuen received the Hong Kong Film Award for Best Choreography through “The Transporter” and its first two sequels. Yuen also served as an action director on everything from “Eastern Condors” to “Red Cliff,” John Woo’s two-part war epic.
In recent years, Yuen was best known as the martial arts choreographer for Jet Li movies like “Lethal Weapon 4” and “Kiss of the Dragon.” The great David Bordwell considered Yuen to be “one of the finest action directors”; Bordwell was being typically modest. Once you recognized Yuen’s work, you saw him everywhere, and if you cared about action movies, you paid closer attention. In a recent Weibo post, Jackie Chan revealed that Yuen died two years ago; his passing due to COVID-19 was kept private at his family’s request.
Yuen was one of the Seven Little Fortunes, a group of Peking Opera-trained performers whose members include Chan, Hung, and Yuen Biao. The troupe’s members were united in their talent, and Yu Jim-Yuen administered a merciless regime of training and corporal punishment. They all took Yuen’s last name as an honorific. In his autobiography (co-written by Jeff Yang), “I Am Jackie Chan,” Chan describes Corey Yuen as “one of my best friends when he wasn’t being a giant pain in the ass.” Yuen usually serves as an amiable irritant in the early chapters of Chan’s book. They talk about the differences between boys and girls, the latter of whom don’t have “little boys,” fight over comic books, and daydream about food and sex (“She’s anyone’s type”…).
Together, the Seven Little Fortunes began their movie careers as stuntmen, then bit players. Chan recalls working with Yuen and their schoolmates on early projects like “The Heroine,” a forgettable 1973 programmer that Chan simply calls “terrible”:
“Most of the movies we made back then were bad, and some of them were very bad. But all that mattered to me was the action, and for that, Yuen Biao and [Corey Yuen] and I did our best. And I loved it. I found myself enjoying the chance to make decisions and give orders, not because I liked to be the boss, but because I finally had the chance to shape the world around me[…]I’d always thought that being free meant no one telling me what to do; now I realized that it meant having the ability to control, to create, to make things happen.”
Yuen eventually stopped focusing on acting for the camera. “I never wanted to be a movie star,” he said in a 2003 LA Times profile. “I figured out right away that unless you are a really big star, it is always the director who’s in charge.” Yuen’s describing the creative freedom that Hong Kong directors were often granted by their producers, a sharp contrast to the way things were typically done on Yuen’s American and European productions. “In Hollywood, once you’ve had the meeting with the studio, everything is decided,” Yuen told the New York Times. “If you want to change anything, you have to have other meetings, and it will take a week. But the intuitions often come in the middle of doing something, so working in Hong Kong, where there’s an intuition, you can immediately incorporate it into the action.”
Yuen knew from first-hand experience that, in action movies, you lose something when actors don’t do their own stunts. That’s another unfortunate contrast between much of the Asian and US/European productions that Yuen worked on. He was never one to stand on principle and even admitted that computer graphics were “the future in action.” (From 2002, in conversation with Variety’s Wendy Kan: “Films are like clothes, you have to keep up with the trends.”)
Yuen could also make do with any genre or trend, from a “God of Gamblers” parody to a lightly horny video game adaptation. He worked with singers like Coco Lee (“So Close”), Carina Lau (“She Shoots Straight”), and Anita Mui (“The Top Bet”) and gave early starring roles to new talent like Cynthia Rothrock and Michelle Yeoh (“Yes, Madam”). Before that, Yuen made Jean-Claude Van Damme look good in his first major role as an Ivan Drago-esque villain in the 1983 martial arts trend-chaser “No Retreat, No Surrender.” Yuen also directed a young Stephen Chow in one of his first major hits, “All for the Winner,” and very literally made the Taiwanese sex bomb Shu Qi fly in “So Close.”
To be fair, Yuen’s creative decisions didn’t come out of nowhere and were rarely the exclusive result of his ingenuity. His collaborators valued his work, and while he wouldn’t have gotten far without the patronage of his fellow Fortunes, who produced some of Yuen’s best 1980s productions, they wouldn’t have continued working with him if he wasn’t so good.
For example, Cynthia Rothrock received her first big break in the Yuen-helmed 1985 buddy cop thriller “Yes, Madam,” which was so successful that it led to a three-picture deal with Golden Harvest and the start of what became known as the “Girls with Guns” genre of Hong Kong action. Rothrock credits Yuen with her discovery, though “Yes, Madam” producer Sammo Hung first sought her out after he saw her interviewed on “World News Tonight with Peter Jennings.” Working with Yuen was demanding, as were Rothrock’s successive Hong Kong productions. “It was much easier to do Western films than the Hong Kong ones,” Rothrock told The ActionElite’s Nathan Phillips. “The action was not as extreme, and I had a script to study something I never had in Hong Kong.” Rothrock also told Phillips, as recently as 2015, that “My wish is to still today get in an A-listed movie or work with Cory Yuen again on another production.”
Yuen was as inventive of an action director as Chan, Hung, or Yuen Biao, even if he was never as famous. His work spoke for him, even if his projects weren’t always great showcases of his talent. You could still see his knack for ingratiating, gonzo choreography as early as “Ninja in the Dragon’s Den,” his 1982 directorial debut, for which Bordwell praised Yuen’s “‘precisionist’ approach that elaborated the action in depth and in unusual widescreen compositions.” Yuen developed significantly as a filmmaker after that, though you couldn’t always tell given how needlessly over-edited some of his recent work became.
It’s not purely coincidental that many of Yuen’s best movies as a filmmaker were the ones that were also produced by fellow martial artists, like “Fong Sai Yuk,” aka: “The Legend,” Jet Li’s first hit for his short-lived production company and maybe his most purely pleasurable star vehicle after “Once Upon a Time in China.” “Fong Sai Yuk” was also one of a handful of Jet Li movies to be re-edited, redubbed, and retitled by Dimension Pictures in the 1990s, including “Bodyguard from Beijing” (“The Defender”) and “My Father is a Hero” (“The Enforcer”).
Li brought Yuen with him when he came to America for “Lethal Weapon 4” and continued working with him as a martial arts choreographer on movies that would not otherwise warrant your attention (Sorry, “The Expendables” fans). It didn’t matter what kind of project it was or how good its filmmakers’ were—Yuen’s contributions stood out, even when producers, editors, and/or directors didn’t know them well enough to turn him loose. Action fans still came to recognize his name and hail Yuen for his dynamic, playful work, some of which were higher-brow than others. I can’t think of a funnier or a more fitting compliment for Yuen’s ignoble genius than the opening lines of Jeannette Catsoulis’s review of “Dead or Alive: DOA,” his goofy but thrilling 2006 video game adaptation:
There was a time when movies like ‘DOA: Dead or Alive’ lurked sheepishly at schoolboy height on video store shelves, spines straining to accommodate the charms of their actresses. But the multiplex is a beast that needs constant feeding, and sometimes the meal has to be cheese.
Yuen was never better than cheese, and his accomplishments as an action filmmaker are all the more impressive for it. His movies aren’t uniformly good, but his talent often shone through them anyway. He wasn’t an unsung genius, nor was he just your favorite action star’s favorite choreographer—Corey Yuen made you sit up every time the stars aligned, and he was allowed to make things happen. He’ll be greatly missed.
When Ridley Scott released “Prometheus” and “Alien: Covenant,” the main criticism levied against them essentially boiled down to that they didn’t provide the same kind of sci-fi thrills as “Alien” and “Aliens,” two of the most beloved films of all time. Anyone who dislikes those films because they have too much philosophy and not enough acidic alien spit will be satisfied by Fede Alvarez’s “Alien: Romulus,” a movie with so many callbacks to the entire series (even both Fincher’s “Alien 3” and William Gibson’s unproduced script for that film have echoes here, as do the prequels) that they sometimes feel like extra weight on this movie spaceship. Luckily, Alvarez’s skill with pace and use of setting, along with his obvious love for this series, keep “Romulus” afloat. It’s fun, tense, and slimy. It’s also nowhere near as ambitious as some of the films in this series deemed failures. We can’t have everything.
There’s a definite sense that Alvarez is going back to the basics of Scott’s first film (which is a good thing). Once again, we’re introduced to a crew of interstellar blue-collar workers, led by a heroine who we know will be forced to mine veins of courage in herself that she didn’t know were there. In this case, it’s Rain Carradine (Cailee Spaeny of “Civil War”), a woman who believes that she’s reached her quota of hours in a mine on a planet that never gets sunshine, only to learn that the goalposts have been moved and she can’t get off of it for nearly another decade. While mourning her murdered future with her friends, she discovers that they have a plan to raid a space station that they’ve discovered floating above the planet. Get on board, take the cryo pods needed for the trip, and wake up in a new galaxy. What could go wrong? Weyland-Yutani always has a bad answer to that question.
Rain is joined closely on this journey by Andy (David Jonsson of “Rye Lane”), a synthetic whose objective is to care for Rain like a brother, and she cares for him as much in reverse. Most of the “Alien” films have used androids to ask some of their thorniest moral questions, and that’s the case again here in a number of twists that make Andy’s choices – the ones that should be guided by programming instead of human emotion – into some of the most interesting of the film. Without spoiling anything, Andy’s objective changes when the crew gets to the space station, and everyone discovers they’re not alone. Archie Renaux, Isabela Merced, Spike Fearn, and Aileen Wu star as the other travelers who will learn what a Facehugger is the hard way.
Eschewing the complex narratives of the prequels, “Romulus” has an almost charmingly direct plot: Five people and a synthetic find their way aboard a space station carrying some truly perfect killing machines and have to fight to escape. That’s about it. The thin plot allows Alvarez and co-writer Rodo Sayagues to focus on world-building and set pieces. The production design here by Naaman Marshall (who worked on “The Dark Knight” and “The Prestige“) is some of the best in a blockbuster sci-fi movie in a very long time. Like the original, there’s a sense that the space these characters occupy isn’t a sterile set but a place that has been lived – and died – in before. It’s hard to overstate the importance of that in a film like this. When we feel like the people in jeopardy are in real, three-dimensional places with histories of their own, we can feel like their plight is real too. Alvarez and his team have created a phenomenal setting on Romulus and Remus, the two halves of the space station on which almost all of this film takes place. It’s not quite as brilliantly claustrophobic as the first film, but it’s close enough, and indicative of how much Alvarez understands about why that film remains a masterpiece.
He also knows how to stage a sequence. It’s hard to pick a fave here, whether it’s the hallway run with an army of Facehuggers or the stunningly well-crafted elevator sequence, or the bonkers final scenes that are likely to be the most divisive aspect of this film. (For me, the “crazy twist,” without spoiling, fits in the legacy of a series that has always had elements of body horror embedded in it, and I wish the film took more of those kinds of big swings before the final fifteen minutes.) Editor Jake Roberts (“Hell or High Water”) does phenomenal work here, too, knowing exactly how to cut this film to amplify tension, and cinematographer Galo Olivares pays homage to past imagery from this series while also giving the film a sweaty, dark, foreboding visual palette of its own.
Performance has always been an essential aspect of this series, whether it’s Sigourney Weaver or Michael Fassbender, and Spaeny and Jonsson shine. The star of “Priscilla” gives a very physical turn, allowing us to feel Rain’s terror in subtle ways. She never resorts to histrionics, playing Rain like a person who has been forced to “get the job done” before and will do so again today. While Spaeny’s work is likely to be underrated, people will almost certainly respond to the excellent turn by Jonsson, an actor who knows how to use his expressive face to maximum effect. Again, Andy has arguably the most notable arc here, and Jonsson nails every turn in it.
With all of these great pieces of the “Romulus” puzzle, it’s disappointing how often Alvarez and company felt like they had to go back to what could be called fan service with lines and easter eggs that feel overly calculated for our referential culture of late. One major connection to the first film that I won’t spoil but will almost certainly be mocked on social media by the end of the weekend is a wild miscalculation: a bit of janky CGI that looks more like an AI-created character than anything tactile. In a film that so clearly values practical effects, it’s jarring to experience a central aspect of it that is so clearly animated. There’s no reason for this. The character could have been rendered differently or at least an animatronic without a level of CGI sheen that makes it look like something out of a Robert Zemeckis mo-cap movie.
The first “Alien” is notoriously known as a haunted house movie in space. It’s a single location with an alien instead of a ghost. At its best, “Alien: Romulus” understands this, seeking to replicate all of the ingredients that go into this time-tested formula. We want to feel as trapped as the characters in a haunted house or on a spaceship, wondering how they could possibly escape a nightmare that’s growing in intensity with each passing minute. And we do through most of the film. Honestly, it’s so artistically connected to the films that came before in terms of its top-notch production quality that I think that’s what makes the blatant callbacks more frustrating. It doesn’t need them to be an “Alien” movie, maybe even the one people have wanted for almost four decades.
The inspiring, heartfelt, and profound documentary “Daughters” swept this year’s Sundance Film Festival, winning both the Audience Award for U.S. Documentary and the overall Festival Favorite Award. Co-directed by Angela Patton and Natalie Rae, this beautiful film follows four girls and their incarcerated fathers as they prepare to attend a father-daughter dance held in Washington, D.C. Rae was inspired to reach out to Patton, CEO of Girls For A Change, after watching her TED Talk about their program Date With Dad Weekend. Together, they have created a film that is as touching and personal as it is informative and vital, shining a light on how programs like this can help heal family wounds caused by this separation. The film also shows the visceral impact of harmful policies, like the restriction and, in some cases, outright elimination of touch visits, on the well-being of both the girls and their fathers.
Based in Richmond, Virginia, Patton is a fierce activist and advocate for what she calls “at-promise” Black girls in her community, dedicating her life to making sure they feel not only seen and heard but also celebrated as they come of age. In fact, the Date With Dad Weekend came about directly due to requests from girls participating in other programs run by Girls For A Change. Originally from Vancouver but based in Los Angeles, co-director Rae got her start directing music videos. Her video for Serena Ryder’s ‘Stompa’ won Rock Video of the Year at the iHeartRadio Much Music Video Awards in 2013, and she has collaborated on visual works for a multitude of musical artists, including Leon Bridges and H.E.R. She has also directed brand spots for Adidas, Booking.com, and lululemon.
The first feature film from Patton and Rae, “Daughters,” is the culmination of eight years of collaboration and a shared cinematic vision for bringing these girls’ stories—and wisdom—to the world.
For this month’s Female Filmmakers in Focus column, RogerEbert.com spoke to Patton and Rae over Zoom about how their collaboration first began, the journeys they went on with these girls, working with them on how they will be presented in the film, and finding the right emotional ending for the documentary.
Angela, I read that you’d been approached several times to bring this story to the screen, and when you met Natalie, you knew you had the right partner. What was that meeting like, and how did you realize she was the right person to help bring this story to the screen?
Angela Patton: It was her email because her email was the only one I received and/or a conversation I had that wanted to center the girls, and that was important to me. I still did not decide or go, “Oh yes, I want to make a film about this.” I really was just like, “Let me just hear what people have to say.” Other film directors who reached out to me really wanted to tell a jail story and focus on the fathers. But because this actual initiative came from the hearts, the minds, and the souls of Black girls in our community, I needed to stay the course of that. I would do nothing to disrespect what the girls created or discontinue them being a part of this. That is not my story to tell alone. And then, if we were going to tell the story, we needed someone to be in sync with the journey of the girls creating this. And she understood it. Really listened to the TED Talk. She came to Richmond, Virginia, and met with me, came to my center, met with the sheriff who allowed us to do our first dance, and met with past participants in the Date With Dad program. So I was attracted to her tenacity, her willingness to learn, and also her commitment to the girls overall.
Natalie, what was your research as you were building this film project? What was that emotional journey like for you?
Natalie Rae: It was a lot of learning for me, and I was grateful that Angela and I connected on some deep core values about the wisdom of these girls. I was so moved by what she said about this idea. These girls had this idea to have a dance and knew what they needed, and ultimately that was going to impact and heal this relationship with their father. When I heard that, I wondered if these young Black girls could inspire me and rethink my relationship with my dad, even though he may not have been incarcerated, because we all have these fatherhood wounds, and we all need to feel family trauma sometimes. So I just felt like, if they could inspire me, they could inspire anyone , and more of these Black girls’ ideas in the world would make a beautiful change.
So I went to Richmond, and I just started going back and forth. I grew up in Canada, so I’d never been there before, and Angela introduced me to the sheriff. We did a two or three-hour chat interview with him where we learned about his background and about him being from the community. Then, I was able to meet some other fathers. So, my research was all in the field. I wasn’t really interested in what my own brain had to say, to be honest, like reading books and studying up on it and doing courses or whatever. It was really about being out there with Angela, going to DC, learning from the girls, and allowing the film to be their story and voice. Once we found our families, it was all about learning who these girls were and co-creating what their stories were going to look and be and feel like over the course of filming for about five years with them.
Was it in the edit that when you found the four you wanted to stick with, or did you decide to focus on them amid the filming?
NR: At the beginning, we were filming with six, and then a couple of the families couldn’t continue because the fathers got transferred to other facilities. So then, after the dance, it was really the four. It was organic how it came together. We were very lucky that the four families we connected with also wanted to be part of the film and the impact. These four represented a wonderful age range and different personality types and showed the different ways that these girls have relationships with their fathers. There are still many more. Every father-daughter relationship is different. The point in showing at least four was that everyone could have their own experience through this kind of program and enlarge their life with their father relationship,
I was particularly moved by Aubrey, who I know was very young during the dance sequence. You see her grow older and how that relationship really changed quite a bit. We see how those policy changes, like removing touch visits, made it so they couldn’t see each other in person and the effect that that can have as a girl grows up. After the film ended, I wondered if she had seen it and if it affected her at all being able to see what she was like at five.
NR: They all saw the footage as we went along, like if we had a twenty-minute edit or different things, and then last fall, we showed everyone the full film. So they were very involved in how their stories were being told and the information in the interviews. From what I’ve seen, I think that reliving the dance has been really emotional for the girls. Also, Aubrey is old enough now, and the ending was filmed a few years ago, so she’s like, “I was going through a hard time then, but I’m also older now, and I’m actually talking to my dad more, and I’m in another phase.” So it’s nice to see them always evolving.
It’s like one of the fathers says: every day, he’s learning; every day, he’s changing. I think that’s a refreshing perspective on growth just as a human being, period. This makes me want to ask about the therapy sessions: What were the men willing to share about their fears as fathers and just as people in general? Had you filmed several of those therapy sessions to get to a point where they felt comfortable?
NR: We captured all the sessions.
AP: I just want to clarify that they are not therapy sessions. Chad is not a therapist. He is a trained fatherhood coach and a family coach because those are two different things. It’s about mindfulness practices and ensuring that the fathers take on the ownership and accountability of doing the work. Just as we have said, the girls have what they need, and the fathers do too. They just haven’t been put in a position to be able to apply what they know that has hurt them. The fathers keep asking, “Why do I keep doing this when I know better?”
That’s because they didn’t have an opportunity to process and to be around other men, where they are all dealing with the ups and downs and the challenge, or even the rewards of being a father, because of the ill practices and experiences as Black men in our society. So Chad is in a position to be a trained fatherhood coach with the curriculum that we both use, and we have used this curriculum for years, to put that work back on the fathers. Because it’s about self-resiliency, you know? It’s about being self-reliant, being resilient, being accountable, and showing up for yourself first so that you can pour that back into your children.
But to answer the question, we allowed them not even to see us in that room. The fathers were, I believe, so comfortable they didn’t notice the cameras or didn’t even pay attention. Right before Chad even introduced me to share the dance with the fathers, I was in a corner the whole time, and they didn’t know that because they were so in tune with doing the necessary work and because we have someone in Chad who is brilliant and a real caregiver. The fathers are so comfortable in trusting Chad that naturally this work comes out and exudes all of them. And he’s always learning too.
He dropped some wonderful nuggets of truth that I think anyone can apply to their life.
AP: Absolutely.
The film’s visual language is so beautiful and evocative and has an almost gauzy cinematography. Were there any films, photography, or anything you studied to capture that look? Or was that just how the light was?
NR: We didn’t light anything. It was all natural light. Cambio, the cinematographer, was moved by the film’s premise because one of his parents was incarcerated for seven years when he was growing up, which was really important to him. When we started talking about how we wanted to film, we said we wanted to see these girls as powerful and as cinematic at the highest level that we could possibly show, but also the most natural and untouched. So, none of the locations were lit, and none of them were planned. It’s all just following these girls through their lives and understanding their energy, personality, and emotion. We do have camera movement or framing and pacing, but those are informed by the feeling we’re getting from them, and hopefully, the audience can then key into the emotional worlds of these girls. We were pinching ourselves in that first month of filming with the four girls and leading up to the dance because every day it was like an epic sunset or we’d be at this crazy building with all this yellow.
The girls were bringing us into these worlds that were so vivid and so beautiful. We thought it might even be too pretty. It felt like there was this beautiful force that was making everything so special. Like Santana showing us that she did this thing called BEST: body, energy, space, and time. We knew that she was articulate about her anger, and that had been the Santana we’d known for a few weeks. Then we went back another day, and we were hanging out with her, and she told us that when she gets angry, she has a thing called BEST, and she calms herself down, counting to ten. She uses dance and movement as a way of making herself feel better. These were some of the core themes in this film that were bubbling up in front of our eyes. So I wish I could say that we had a page of visual references or other films. But I think it was just Cambio and me being in the moment and the two of us aligning on what we got from the girls.
As you were working with your editors over the many years that you worked on this film, how did you know this was the moment we wanted to end the film on?
NR: I think there were many ways it could end. But, I remember one day in DC, Troy was reviewing footage, messaged us, and said, “Oh my God. This moment in the car with Aubrey.” I had been in the back seat, filming it on my lap and letting her have our conversation and drive home, and it was quite a long, silent car ride. So I hadn’t watched the footage. I just experienced it and went, “Okay, maybe it could work, but you look at it.” And he was like, “This is really powerful.” Once I went back and looked at the footage, we could just feel that that moment was the end, and that never wavered. Getting to the end, and all the things in between always changed, but that moment, that one shot uninterrupted of the truth that you see and how she responds to her father, and then she closes her eyes, and the sun comes across her face, and it stays calm like that. It was kind of magic, and it was always the film’s end.
AP: I think for me, when Natalie reached out to me and said, “I think we have enough for you to look at now,” from Troy and Adelina, our amazing editors, and we all spent three weeks in a small room looking at it again, I thought that we were ready. Because we didn’t have this bow wrapped around it with the dance. I really appreciated the coming-of-age story and how we were able to show many different lived experiences and show the audience that to create that family unit and continue to bond and strengthen and show love, you have to keep doing the work. So, the end of the film doesn’t leave you with a solution, but it leaves you wanting to see what you can do better. And it also makes you want to help someone else do better, right? I thought that if I was feeling this, and I’ve always felt like I was in a little box by myself seeing it, and now we captured it on film, then we knew it was time to submit the film to Sundance.
Are there any women who’ve made films or films that are directed by women that have inspired either of you in your life, or that you just really think people should seek out?
NR: There are filmmakers who do inspire me. I like the rawness of Andrea Arnold and Lynne Ramsay, who are more narrative filmmakers. Ava DuVernay makes real, true stories told in such powerful, cinematic ways. I’m drawn to that.
AP: Ava DuVernay inspires me because she makes sure Black stories are protected. That’s my numero uno. I appreciate how she not only protects our stories but tells the truth and is really honest. Also, not only is she speaking to a Black audience, she’s speaking to everyone, so we all can be aware, and we can all do differently. She tells untold stories. I think that is a message we all need to hear, but it’s also rare, and she does it with such a big heart. So, I appreciate her approach.
Fernando Mereilles and Katia Lund’s 2002 film “City of God” is a triumph. It earned four Academy Award nominations and wide praise by telling the story of a handful of young people growing up with and in one of Rio de Janeiro’s infamous favelas, the “City of God” (“Cidade de Deus” in its native Portuguese). It managed to mix its protagonists’ innocence with the mischief and danger of gang life to much effect while also portraying how Brazilian society has shuffled these young people out of site, refusing to invest in their futures.
This is all to say that the six-part HBO Original Series “City of God: The Fight Rages On” has a lot to live up to. It’s not as strong as the film that inspired it, but it’s still a smart series with insight into what life is like in its favela. It takes place twenty years after the events of the film, mixing many of the same elements. Most of the original cast returns (notably minus Alice Braga), and the series uses many of the same visual effects.
The setting is also back, the titular favela having grown up with its characters, now more crowded and decrepit. Drug dealers still rule the streets, their wars terrorizing the residents. While our hero Wilson, aka Rocket (Alexandre Rodrigues), smoked some joints and had some fun doing it in the original, the drugs are now mostly off-screen: spoken of, but no longer powering any party.
In fact, the party is largely absent in “The Fight Rages On.” Rocket is all grown up with a fifteen-year-old daughter (he did more than lose his virginity after all!), and he judges her for her taste in music. Leka (Luellem de Castro) is a singer, headlining the City of God’s local club by performing explicit sex-positive songs. That she has so much confidence and stage presence so young doesn’t seem to impress Rocket. He’s unable and unwilling to connect with her, having passed his parenting responsibilities to his mother.
So yeah, Rocket has gone from bopping in the DJ booth to shaking his head at the MC – he’s a killjoy, and “City of God: The Fight Rages On” has lost some of its joy alongside him. With its cast mostly in middle age, “The Fight Rages On” doesn’t have the same sense of exuberance as the original. It also lacks that languid quality that defined the film, depicting teens with too much time on their hands.
Instead, the first episode matches the pace of the film’s fight scenes – loud with a dizzying number of quick cuts and characters talking quickly. But in the series, they’re dropping exposition that feels bloated and hard to follow between all the competing elements. Eventually, the pace lessens, but, at least in the first two episodes available to critics to screen, there’s no relaxation—just a slight loosening of the frenzy.
Sometimes, when pieces of cinema get updated, their creators aim to fix issues with the original. See “And Just Like That…” adding all those women of color characters to balance the blinding whiteness of “Sex and the City.” And there’s a bit of that here. The 2002 film trucked in a soft, benevolent sexism, which the series tries to correct. Braga played an idealized, unattainable sex object in the film while her darker-skinned peers (Roberta Rodrigues as Berenice and Sabrina Rosa as Cinthia, both returning) were more attainable and so doomed to tragedy. In the series, they appear to be getting their own plotlines, although their characterizations are mostly just “saint.” So, it’s a step up from “sinner,” but still stuck in sexist tropes.
Worse is Andréia Horta as Jerusa, the worst kind of female character – she’s all sex and bad decisions, causing a gang war with her hot temper and lacking any sort of depth or back story. She’s a Jezebel and nothing more. There is hope in Eli Ferreira as Lígia, a reporter who might just teach Rocket something with her bravery and clear moral compass. He’s worried he’s been co-opted by the white power structure – he’s made it as a photographer, but one whose career is based on selling Black death to white readers.
Even the sex and drugs have lost their fun over two decades since the original, but that’s not to say that the series dishonors it. It echoes and advances many of the film’s arguments and even tries to build upon the original’s artistic imagery. While that 2002 film ends with shots through Rocket’s viewfinder, the series relies on that trick too much – we get it, he’s a voyeur – and the multitude of viewfinder shots overemphasizes the point. There’s nothing as strong as the film’s opening chicken-cooking montage in the series, either, but there’s an attempt at artistry (more chickens!), and it’s appreciated.
The series will have six episodes, so there’s hope that the ones to follow will surpass what it did in the first two. By aging up its characters and only offering a few new teen ones, it’s missing the optimism that comes with youth and instead appears stuck in a middle-aged malaise. Where to go next? How and if to change? “City of God: The Fight Rages On” isn’t sure, but it knows its characters deserve to live, to have their stories told, to grow. And that’s a pretty strong foundation.
Two episodes screened for review. Premieres on Sunday, August 25th on HBO Latino and Max.
“Mothers’ Instinct” gets by on its pulpy potential more than anything else. There’s something intrinsically appealing about watching two phenomenal actresses go head-to-head in an old-fashioned melodrama. Still, director Benoit Delhomme (the excellent cinematographer who shot “A Most Wanted Man,” “At Eternity’s Gate,” and many more) can’t quite figure out what movie he’s making. At its best, it feels like what used to be called a ‘women’s picture,’ a descendant of films like “Leave Her to Heaven” or “Gaslight.” But there’s a deep undercurrent of sadness in this film that hints at a more traditional modern grief drama, too, feeling particularly at odds with its ludicrous final act. Yet, in the middle of this tonally chaotic film, there are two riveting performances from two women likely attracted to all the things that “Mothers’ Instinct” could have been — provided a tighter directorial voice and a bit more narrative precision.
Based loosely on a French film called “Duelles,” “Mothers’ Instinct” unfolds in a Hollywood version of ‘60s suburban America. In this place, everyone gets dressed up for even the most minor occasions. The women are always gorgeously fashioned, and the men wear ties. Delhomme’s film, from a script by Sarah Conradt, takes place almost entirely in the homes of two women: Alice (Jessica Chastain) and Celine (Anne Hathaway). In the film’s rushed opening scenes, we meet the husbands, Simon (Anders Danielsen Lie) and Damian (Josh Charles). There are hints of a little tension in both marriages, and it’s revealed that Celine and Damian struggled to have their only child, Max (Baylen D. Bielitz). While Max plays with Alice & Simon’s son Theo (Eamon O’Connell), we learn that the latter is allergic to peanuts in a narrative move that would accurately be called “Chekhov’s Cookie.” (You don’t reveal an allergy in a film this tightly plotted if it’s not coming back later.)
One day, Alice looks out her window and sees Max on the railing of the family’s third-floor balcony, trying to hang a birdhouse he made at school. She breaks into a full panic, trying to run through a shortcut between the two houses that the kids had made, but she’s unable to get there before Max falls to his death as his mom vacuums inside. Of course, both women go into full-blown grief spirals. Celine’s mental break comes from the unimaginable loss of a child, while Alice struggles with the question of whether she tried hard enough to get to Max before he fell. There’s a powerfully emotional film buried under the noir twists of this one, a movie about how people are forced to move on after something has shattered their entire lives. How could you even get through the day, much less look at your neighbor the same way again?
Alice starts to think that Celine is moving on in a manner that has earned the film comparisons to Hitchcock. Without spoiling, Max isn’t the last member of these families to die, and Alice is the only one who suspects that Celine’s grief has turned to vengeance. The midsection of “Mothers’ Instinct” is its strongest, one in which we’re forced to question if Celine has turned to violence or if these are all coincidences. Couldn’t it just be Alice’s guilt that has led her to suspect the worst? Hathaway and Chastain are truly excellent in this midsection, including one of my favorite line readings of the former’s career. With her work in the superior “Eileen” and now this, Hathaway is proving how much she would have been totally at home in a different era of Hollywood, and I’m here for it. Both performers sometimes lean into histrionics, but they’re well-modulated when the script calls for it, truly holding the film together with each of their interesting choices as actresses.
However, a nagging struggle to figure out the kind of movie that “Mothers’ Instinct” wants to be turns into a serious detriment in the final third. It wants to be both Sirk and Hitch but doesn’t have the richness of the former or the teeth of the latter, which makes some of the truly insane decisions of the ending feel abruptly out of place. More time developing a sense of tension might have helped as it’s a film that too often feels rushed from plot twist to plot twist – it’s only 94 minutes – when giving its mysteries more time to breathe would have been more effective. Ultimately, it lacks a consistent atmosphere, leaving its flawless leading ladies stuck in a movie that can shine a spotlight on them without giving them enough emotional blocking to feel anything but confined by it.
Adapted from the 2013 Carl Hiaasen novel of the same name, Apple TV+’s “Bad Monkey” is a Florida-set dramedy that follows scorned detective Andrew Yancy (Vince Vaughn). Yancy was forced to transfer to Miami after he rammed his ex-girlfriend’s new beau’s golf cart into a lake; his tumultuous life continues to spiral until he’s kicked off the force for good and becomes a health inspector. But, when a tourist hooks a human arm on a fishing line, Yancy is drawn into a murder mystery that he believes is the key to reinstating himself back into the job he believes he’s destined for.
But, after meeting the widow of the deceased, Eve Stripling (Meredith Hagner), he becomes suspicious that there is more to this story than he initially thought. As the mystery slowly unfolds, “Bad Monkey” gets more and more outlandish, but it works perfectly for the world Bill Lawrence has created. Juxtaposed with the Florida-set portion is a coexisting story focusing on Neville Stafford (Ronald Peet), a young Bahamian fisherman, which adds a darker flair that the series desperately needed.
Neville, like Yancy, finds himself in over his head when his house is set up to be demolished by developers, and he attempts to do anything to stop it. Their stories don’t directly connect for more than half of the series, but despite this, the two characters work as mirrors for each other’s journeys. Unfortunately, it almost feels as if these two stories should have connected quicker than they did, and at times I found myself yearning for more screen time for Peet.
Like Lawrence’s other work, Yancy and Neville are surrounded by an ensemble cast of characters who at times steal the spotlight. There’s Yancy’s former partner and best friend Rogelio Burton (John Ortiz), who gets wrapped up in all his shenanigans, and Bonnie Witt (Michelle Monaghan), his ex-lover, who he can’t seem to shake. But, at the heart of both stories is Rosa Campesino (Natalie Martinez), a medical examiner from Miami, and Dragon Queen (Jodie Turner-Smith), an Obeah–practicing woman living in the Bahamas.
Though at first, it feels as if these two will simply be love interests or narrative foils for the series’ leading men, Martinez and Turner-Smith end up stealing the show. Rosa’s budding connection with Yancy leads her to join him on his unofficial police investigation, while Neville desperately seeks out Dragon Queen’s in an attempt to change his life. Both pairings are quite different from one another, but that’s what makes them work. There’s a magnetic push-and-pull happening in each of these relationships, and it’s what makes “Bad Monkey” worth watching. When Martinez and Vaughan and Turner-Smith and Peet are on screen together, respectively, the series is electric. The camera holds on their faces, close and almost suffocating in nature, allowing the admiration (and, at times, apprehension) these characters have for one another to shine.
Sometimes, though, these two storylines and all the characters that come with them clash, making “Bad Monkey” feel a bit amateur. But this isn’t the show’s most pressing grievance: the grating narration haunts the characters’ moves and the series’ narrative. As Neville and Yancy are chased through their respective neighborhoods, in comes a voice that shatters any sense of tension. It’s a hindrance to the story and its characters, both of which are smart enough to guide us along the Florida coast. The narration ultimately takes away the seriousness of the show’s emotional beats and the actors who easily sell them. It feels as if the series doesn’t trust its audience to understand the story, and with one so straightforward, I can’t help but wonder why.
However, with an acting ensemble that so easily blends into this wild world that Bill Lawrence has created, the characters make “Bad Monkey” as entertaining as it is. Without Turner-Smith and Hagner, this show would be missing the spark that allows it to become more than just a middling mystery. While this is true, the episodes sometimes drag, and “Bad Monkey” feels like proof that we need to bring back 30-minute comedies. Although it’s frustrating to watch at times and almost outstays its welcome, it’s clear that there is something special here. Unfortunately, it just takes too long to discover this spark.
Premieres on Apple TV+ on August 14th. Whole season screened for review.
