Roger Ebert

If you’re a distinguished older male actor in Hollywood, you’re typically cast as Batman’s sidekick or a WWII veteran who escapes from assisted living (Michael Caine), God or a grieving father (Morgan Freeman), a brilliant psychotherapist or Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford), an action hero (Tom Cruise), Sigmund Freud and a Roman emperor (Sir Anthony Hopkins), or a daring drug mule (Clint Eastwood). But distinguished older actresses get cast in simple-minded comedies about old friends having silly adventures that make the lightest-weight beach read seem like Remembrance of Things Past. “The Fabulous Four” follows in the unfortunate tradition of the “Book Club” movies, “Summer Camp,” and “80 for Brady,” with an EGOT-full of brilliant talents mired in antics that “The Golden Girls” would consider too ridiculous. 

The quartet in this film is Susan Sarandon as Lou, an uptight, humorless cat lady and cardiac surgeon; Bette Midler as Marilyn, a wealthy recent widow who impulsively decided to get married again two months after the death of her husband of 48 years; Megan Mullally as Alice, a popular singer who is perpetually tipsy, high on drugs, or having sex with randos, sometimes all at once; and Sheryl Lee Ralph as Kitty, a kind-hearted weed grower and mother of an adult daughter who has suddenly become rigidly religious. You can glimpse Midler’s real-life daughter, Sophie von Haselberg, playing Marilyn’s daughter early in the film.

Marilyn is staying in a gorgeous mansion in Key West, where Ernest Hemingway lived when he wrote two of his books, which we are told so often they could be getting paid by the mention. She invites Kitty and Alice to her wedding but does not invite Lou because they have been estranged for years. So Kitty and Alice tell Lou the kind of preposterous lie that only works in painfully contrived screenplays: they don’t mention Marilyn. They just say she has won a six-toed cat from the Hemingway House. 

When Lou finds out she’s been tricked, she agrees to stay. However, she is clearly still in pain over the sense of betrayal by Marilyn, for reasons telegraphed so unmistakably from her arrival in Key West that the ultimate reveal carries no weight. Throughout the trip, she keeps running into a group of 20-somethings she met on the plane and accidentally becomes their badass ideal. 

Marilyn is so excited about her over-the-top wedding plans she barely notices that her friends think she is over the top. For another one of those reasons that only works in painfully contrived screenplays, she does not introduce her fiancé to her friends until the night before the wedding so there can be a very predictable twist. But the four are too busy having wacky adventures. Lou uses a Kegel (pelvic floor) exercise ball Marilyn gave her as a slingshot to take out a bicycle thief!  Lou accidentally unties the rope to the parasail because she is hallucinating! Yes, it is supposed to be a funny prank that Lou’s closest friends dose her with weed without telling her. Another intended-to-be hilarious scene takes place in a strip club, where a star performer connected to one of the women is recognized when she sees the birthmark on his bare butt while he is grinding on the bride-to-be.  

The Internet Movie Database lists more than 40 producers for “The Fabulous Four,” most of them “executive producers,” which can mean anything. Three are Mullaly, Sarandon, and Ralph. These women know what they are capable of, and they know what a good script is. Was a silly comedy the only project they could get funded? Or did they just want an all-expenses-paid trip to Key West? It does look spectacularly beautiful, though there are too many shots of chickens. 

The stars do their best to bring warmth and charisma with criminally under-written characters engaging in silly antics. There are lovely moments when they sing, including a duet with Michael Bolton(!). It just makes us wish it was a concert film. Or, as Gene Siskel used to say, we would be better off watching a film of the four actresses sitting around, talking about their lives. Instead, we get tired “jokes” about powerful weed gummies, an older person sharing every minute of her life with ridiculous TikToks, characters tearing each other’s clothes off in a fight and then somehow making up, and a character unexpectedly becoming a hero to some young people even though they have never heard of Joan Didion. Like these other actresses-of-a-certain-age movies, the entire story is grounded on some notion of a deep and sustaining friendship. But it’s hard to believe these women have any genuine connection other than cashing a check for a film that is not fabulous but forgettable. 

Sharks, while undeniably lethal, are also, studies have shown, kind of dumb. And “The Last Breath” is a cheesy new thriller that is even dumber than a real shark. Not that it features any real sharks — the predatory creatures here are CGI, and hilariously enough, they move through the water faster than the “rage virus” zombies of “28 Days Later” roam over land.

They don’t show up until about halfway through the Joachim Heder-directed movie, which begins during World War II, and the shelling of a ship that results in a wreck that’s apparently legendary in the present day. That’s according to old salt Levi (Julian Sands) whose rickety boat is playing host to a group of self-proclaimed “certified divers” who are also kind of pushy, to say the least. At least the males in the group are. There’s peroxided wannabe Alpha Brett (Alexander Arnold) and entitled stoner Logan (Arlo Carter), who wonders aloud at the dock whether a local ten-year-old would sell him weed. Rarely have two characters been presented so immediately as those whose deaths you will actively root for. But I’ll refrain from spoilers.

The good, or not as bad, zoomers on the boat trip include Noah (Jack Parr), grizzled Levi’s younger mate and also the ex of good doctor Sam (as in Samantha, and played by Kim Spearman), who’s stuck in the lout party taking the boat out. Is a rapprochement in store? Again, no spoilers. While Levi, having discovered the aforementioned shipwreck, has resolved to report it to the authorities despite it having been his personal passion — “forty years I’ve been looking for her” — finance bro Brett has other ideas, and his money does some persuasive talking. So off Levis and company go to drop the wannabe adventurers in the drink. Where they find skeletons, claustrophobic settings, and eventually a snapped guideline. Did a barracuda do that? No, of course, a barracuda didn’t do it.

The arrival of multiple huge speed-of-light sharks coincides with everyone’s oxygen tanks getting dangerously low. While Levi mostly stays on deck knitting — a “dexterity exercise” to soothe his dive-damaged nerve — his reference early on to his old red scuba suit and the nickname it bestowed on him back in the day stands out like Chekhov’s proverbial first-act gun.

His work as Levi represents the final film appearance of Julian Sands, who died in 2023 while hiking in the San Gabriel Mountains of California, and he’s reliably wry as he first resists heroics and then goes for broke.

The movie’s lifts from “Jaws” are so blatant that they might as well be read as affectionate, aspirational homages. As goofy and unconvincing as it often is, “The Last Breath” is difficult to get exasperated over. It may go down easier still if you opt to see it in a very well-air-conditioned setting.

The suburbs are hell. That’s what the movies keep telling us. Perfect nuclear families living in their McMansions are often anything but perfect. It’s not exactly new cinematic territory, but it’s a well that gets tapped often because it’s just a lot of fun to watch rich families implode, often of their own doing. In that vein, the new suburban-set thriller “The Girl in the Pool,” from director Dakota Gorman and screenwriter Jackson Reid Williams, breaks no new ground. But with its many twists and turns, it is indeed a lot of fun. 

One-time teen idol Freddie Prinze Jr. plays the family patriarch Tom, a businessman, who, while still handsome, feels past his prime (at one point, Prinze Jr. splashes his face with water and the back of his balding head reflects in the mirror, and it struck me how rare it is to see any stars actually allow signs of their aging to show on screen). Tom is celebrating his birthday and is soon meant to meet his wife Kristen (Monica Potter) for dinner at a fancy restaurant. He’s left work early to get ready and is surprised by a visit from his much younger mistress Hannah (Gabrielle Haugh). 

Their tryst in the family pool quickly becomes a murder scene and the audience is at first led to believe Tom is the culprit as he attempts to both clean up the mess and hide her corpse from the guests attending a surprise party organized by his wife and their adult kids Alex (Tyler Lawrence Gray) and Rose (Brielle Barbusca). Although we’re firmly planted in Tom’s psyche as he re-hashes their afternoon delight and its grisly aftermath, the choppy flashbacks are careful not to reveal exactly who did the deed and why the woman was murdered. 

Pressure from the party mounts. Partygoers keep getting too close to where Tom has stashed away the body. He’s harassed by his father-in-law William (Kevin Pollak, charmingly acerbic), who makes it clear that Tom and Kristen’s marriage has been on the rocks for awhile. Another unexpected visitor pushes Tom to his limits. As Tom spirals into a frantic drug-induced paranoia state, the film adds twist after twist, until the entire family has blood on their hands. 

Gorman playfully switches perspective in one scene, pulling back from a claustrophobic ultra-close-up of Tom to a wide shot of Alex, Rose, and her boyfriend watching Tom as he pitifully stumbles around the backyard. It’s a refreshing reminder that not only are we watching a movie, but also Tom the character is so deep in his own world, that it’s like he’s in his own movie as well. It’s a pity, then, that Gorman’s direction isn’t always this razor sharp as there is a current of mordant humor throughout Williams’ script that could easily have made this whole affair a pitch-black comedy. 

The same goes for the uneven characterization of the women. Haugh’s Hannah seems to exist solely to look hot in a bikini and spout red herring-laden dialogue. The always solid Potter adds a steely gravitas to what mostly amounts to a stock character in Kristen. I kept waiting for her to get a great monologue moment like she does in the similarly lurid thriller “Along Came a Spider.” Alas, it never comes. Rosie is similarly underwritten, reduced to a pastiche of Gen-Z stereotypes, although Barbusca does her best to overcome the trite material with some hilarious line readings.

By design the son Alex remains an aloof presence, looming largely in the periphery until a third act twist places him squarely in the center of the action. For his part Gray goes all in, delivering one feeble excuse after another for his rancid behavior with a perfect mixture of derangement and vulnerability. A cookie-cutter copy of his equally ordinary, yet completely self-obsessed father. 

Not surprisingly, Prinze Jr., who served as an executive producer on the project, has the meatiest role, and he is truly fantastic as the desperate Tom. Unlike Burt Lancaster’s crestfallen suburban patriarch in “The Swimmer,” Tom is always presented as pathetic. In the opening sequence he asks his friend, “Am I a good man?” but it’s clear from the jump that he is absolutely not. The film never once props him up as aspirational, just sweaty and sad. Flustered, he’s always asking for five minutes so he can come up with a plan, but Tom’s the kind of zero who could be given a whole year and still wouldn’t come up with a good plan. 

Tom’s eventual journey towards something resembling redemption is played a little too straight. One final bad decision to cap off a film full of bad decisions should be laced with dramatic irony, especially since it is a damning indictment of how white men’s rage, at any age, is often coddled and protected by those with the most power. It’s a stinger that would have been better served on a more preposterously pulpy platter. Instead, the film ends with a limp whimper. What could have been a deliciously dark satire, instead remains in the liminal space known as aggressively average. 

Everyone from Shakespeare to Martin Luther to Pier Paolo Pasolini has taken a crack at retelling one or more tales from Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron. First published in 1353, the short story collection follows 10 noblemen and women as they flee Black Death-ridden Florence for a secluded villa in Fiesole. Over the course of a fortnight, the guests take turns telling stories, resulting in 100 tales, ranging from erotica, tragedy, comedy, and beyond. But just in case the viewer is led astray by the title, Netflix’s new limited series borrows only the title of Boccaccio’s book, and instead imagines how the guests behaved during their rural sojourn. Because it is merely inspired by and not based on the original stories, the series lacks nuance, its point of view is about as sharp as a daytime soap opera, and for the life of me I don’t know how these scripts made it into production. This is perhaps the worst series to hit the airwaves since HBO’s “The Time-Traveler’s Wife,” a feat I did not even think possible. 

The cast, as is usually the case in mid-TV aiming for a prestige rep, is not without merit. As Sirisco, the steward of Villa Santa, the location of the nobles’ country getaway, Tony Hale (“Veep,” “Arrested Development”) does his damnedest with meager material, fighting to find shades of grey in a portrayal of a proud but anxious servant who is on the verge of losing his mind. Hale’s partnership with Leila Farzad, who plays the no-nonsense cook Stratilia, feels like it takes place in a completely different series. Giampiero De Concilio truly shines as the messenger Andreoli; the actor’s light touch gives the part a necessary level of indifference, providing the series’ few true laughs. Zosia Mamet continues to corner the market on entitled, delusional brats as Pampinea, the wealthy fiancée to Visconte Leonardo, the owner of Villa Santa; she turns up for her holiday in the country with her handmaiden Misia (Saiorse-Monica Jackson of “Derry Girls”), who is struggling to define her identity outside of her unending loyalty to her mistress. 

Perhaps most impressive of all are Karan Gill and Amar Chadha-Patel. The former plays a kind but somewhat detached nobleman married to the aggravatingly pious Neifile (Lou Gala), and the latter plays Dioneo, an intelligent and alluring doctor who may or may not be preying on his nobleman friend/boss Tindaro’s (Douggie McMeekin) hypochondria. Rounding out the guests are Filomena (Jessica Plummer), a young noblewoman who has thus far survived the plague with the aid of her abused handmaiden Licisca (Tanya Reynolds). 

The original Decameron is, to me, an early literary version of what, in television, is known as a bottle episode: characters are held captive in a room by the writer, and what they say reveals something about them, the times in which they live, and the artist who pens them into existence. Excellent examples of this include “MILF Island” (“30 Rock”), “Cooperative Calligraphy” (“Community”), “Connor’s Wedding” (“Succession”), “The Suitcase” (“Mad Men”), and “Five Characters in Search of an Exit” from Rod Serling’s “Twilight Zone.” But nothing about the Netflix adaptation makes sense, much less creates commentary on the past or the present. Characters make decisions that they reverse within minutes; alliances are dissolved without any real explanation; toward the back half of the eight episodes a dozen new characters enter the narrative to serve no real purpose. The soundtrack hails from the 1980s and ’90s: New Order, Depeche Mode, Enya, The Pixies, Edwin Collins — the pop music needle drops of Peacock’s reality dating show “Love Island” are about as edgy. Even the women’s costumes do not resemble the historical record of 14th century Italian fashion; everything looks like a child’s half-hearted attempt at Ren Faire attire, lacking structure and detail. The production design was clearly inspired by Federico Fellini’s “Casanova,” which is set four centuries after the events of “The Decameron.” I suppose this is all par for the course for a new member of Netflix’s catalogue, much of which looks and sounds like a mid-budget Hollywood studio film penned in the early 2000s. 

In a New York Times puff piece about the making of “The Decameron,” director Andrew DeYoung (he helms two episodes out of eight) gushed that series creator Kathleen Jordan (“Teenage Bounty Hunters”) and the writers “did such a beautiful job of touching upon what we just went through without being didactic.” Perhaps he was on the set of a different series, because the eight episodes I saw were so heavy-handed I felt genuinely depressed. Yes, the wealthy abuse their servants, flee consequences while the working class suffers, and adversity does occasionally cause them to change for the better, but these broad strokes neither reveal anything new about human psychology to us, nor are they portrayed in a way that draws us in. And it’s not as though artistry and pandemics are mutually exclusive. “Station Eleven” was a vibrant take on an uncontrollable and catastrophic flu; it used Shakespeare, a brilliant color palette, humor, and science fiction to talk about love and loss. “The Last of Us” wielded stellar performances, horrifyingly realistic visual effects, and expansion of its video game origins to create something indelible. “The Decameron” is a failure on nearly every level and is a missed opportunity to show that humanity has never really changed. 

If Boccaccio’s wise observations about love, fidelity, wealth, morality, and class do not inform your narrative; if you are content to waste the talent of so many people on writing that wouldn’t pass muster in an introductory screenwriting class, may I suggest you rename your series “Florentine Flu: Electric Boogaloo.” Perhaps someone will immortalize the series in a low-effort Twitter meme: the real “Decameron,” after all, was the friends we made along the way. 

Whole series screened for review. Now on Netflix.

At the Art House Convergence’s recent independent film exhibition conference held in Chicago, Josh Frank, author and urban drive-in entrepreneur, announced his radical initiative for luring people back into theaters: Silent movies.

Hold on, hold on, hear him out. “Silents Synced,” scheduled to launch nationally Oct. 4, will present classic silent films synced to seminal albums and songs by iconic alternative rock bands of the late 1980s and ‘90s. First up is F.W. Murnau’s “Nosferatu” paired with Radiohead’s albums “Kid A” and “Amnesiac.”

The second release will be Buster Keaton’s “Sherlock, Jr.” paired with career-spanning songs by R.E.M. In a statement, Bertis Downs, the band’s manager, said, “The guys thought it seems like a good idea and they like the uncanny way their music and ‘Sherlock, Jr.’  match up — kind of perfect. What a great and unlikely way of presenting great art.”

“Silents Synced” will be distributed in partnership with CineLife Entertainment, a division of Spotlight Cinema Networks, which books exclusively to independent indoor and drive-in theaters.

“People look for what’s next and new,” Frank says. “My secret sauce is I look for what’s next in what was. I look at what was popular before my time and figure out how it is still valid today. I take what people liked about it and bring it back better.”

Inspiration for “Silents Synced” goes back more than 15 years. In 2006, Frank was invited to the premiere of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival’s presentation of Paul Wegener and Henrik Galeen’s 1915 horror film, “The Golem”” with a commissioned score by Black Francis, front man for the band The Pixies, whose oral history Frank co-wrote.

“It was incredible, and left a lasting impression,” Frank says.

Three years later, Frank opened the 12-car Blue Starlite drive-in in an alley in downtown Austin in 2009.  “It was more an art installation,” he jokes. The Blue Starlite focused on classics and revival house programming, not standard drive-in fare at the time, but one of his earliest programming experiments was to pair Fritz Lang’s visionary “Metropolis” with Nine Inch Nails’ “The Fragile” to show privately to a few friends. “I’ve never forgotten how cool that was to do,” he says.

The downtown location has moved out of the alley and onto a parking garage rooftop. A second five-screen location off of I-35 presents a mix of new indie releases (“Maxxine,” “Robot Dreams”) and contemporary classics and cult faves (“Jaws,” “Dirty Dancing”).

When the pandemic hit and drive-ins enjoyed an unexpected resurgence, Frank’s idea for “Silents Synced” further crystallized. “There was not a lot of new content,” he says, “which led to serious outside-the-box thinking. What new type of movie experience would give people a compelling reason to go out to a movie theater?”

Frank is no stranger to quixotic quests. He spent five years co-creating a graphic novel based on Salvador Dali’s 1937 14-page treatment for a proposed Marx Brothers film, which at the time, MGM deemed unfilmable. “Giraffes on Horseback Salad” was published in 2015.

He knew bringing “Silents Synced” to fruition would not be—wait for it—duck soup.

But “Silents Synced” may have been made for these times. Coupled with low attendance woes, theaters are grappling with the effects of last year’s six month’s writer’s strike, which wreaked havoc on Hollywood’s production pipeline. “Inside & Out 2” and “Despicable Me 4” may be doing boffo business, but efforts to get people to return to their pre-pandemic habit of regular outings to the movie theater have been seemingly a mission: impossible.

Frank drew on treasured movie and music memories from his Gen-X youth. “I grew up in the days of midnight movies,” he says. “Every weekend, you knew your people would be at ‘Rocky Horror Picture Show.’ There was also the Pink Floyd laser light show at our planetarium that synced Pink Floyd music to this trippy laser extravaganza.”

Frank envisions “Silents Synced” as a having the same repeatable potential that will appeal to film and music buffs, particularly fans of that particular band. Titles yet to bs announced for 2025 will be synced to They Might Be Giants, Pearl Jam, the Pixies and others.

Frank has spent the last two years, he says, negotiating with record labels. The films are in the public domain, but he is taking care to find  and negotiate for exceptional prints. such as Kino Lorber’s restoration of “Sherlock, Jr.”

But at the heart of “Silents Synced,” Frank says, beats the imperative that has endured for more than a century of film exhibition, from the first moving images, through such technical innovations as 3-D, Cinemascope and IMAX.

“It’s all about creating an experience you cannot get anywhere else,” he says.

Taika Waititi, Iain Morris, and Jemaine Clement putting their mark on Monty Python creator Terry Gilliam’s 1981 classic “Time Bandits” is an ambitious scheme in of itself. In recent times, Waititi and Clement’s brand of whimsical comedy, while frequently clever and funny, has become somewhat tiresome. Waititi’s “Next Goal Wins,” which he co-wrote with Morris, felt like Waititi was operating on autopilot. Nonetheless, “Time Bandits” utilizes their whimsy effectively by targeting a younger audience who will appreciate their dry witty humor. This 10-episode Apple TV+ adaptation proves that the team’s renowned comedic flair remains viable and valuable. 

11-year-old Kevin (Kal-El Tuck), a history buff, is a loner. At school, he’s the last one picked for their sports team. At home, his parents and younger sister Saffron (Kiera Thompson) mock him for being so nerdy and a chatterbox. One night, his wardrobe opens up a portal, but this isn’t Narnia calling. No, no. Instead, a motley crew of time-traveling thieves who don’t do anything called the Time Bandits — Penelope (Lisa Kudrow), Alto (Tadhg Murphy), Widgit (Roger Jean Nsengiyumva), Bittelig (Rune Temte), Judy (Charlyne Yi) — arrive in his bedroom. Instantly, he’s amazed and seizes the opportunity to join them in their history trotting quest — to Penelope’s dismay. 

When Kevin eventually joins the bandits, his entire home life is put in danger. His parents are turned into coal by a demonic overlord named Pure Evil (Clement) and his sister eventually goes on her own trek to find Kevin.

“Time Bandits” evokes a strong resemblance to a classic Jay Ward romp. I’m talking about the “Peabody and Sherman” segments of the “Rocky & Bullwinkle” show. Much like Wards’ sci-fi riff, Bandit gets to have its cake and eat it too by educating kids about different times in history and poking fun at the people from each time with lighthearted charm and clever wit. Much of “Time Bandits” thrives due to the distinctive comedic character interactions between the bandits and the episodic adventures they embark on throughout time. Lisa Kudrow is a delight as a lazy, moralless time pirate and her dynamic with charming newcomer Kal-El Tuck inspires plenty of laughs. 

There’s a lot of fun to be had with the downright animated silliness that comes from the humor, whether it’s from strong wordplay, hilarious misunderstandings, or whimsical over-the-top performances from its lively group. With every historical period they travel to, from Medieval times to 1929 Harlem during the prohibition era, fans of other Waititi-related work will be enthused to see his veterans pop up in several eras, such as Con O’Neill from “Our Flag Means Death” as a sheriff of Nottingham. Every Bandit has a fun set of gags, with the standout being Tadhg Murphy’s Alto, an aspiring actor who gets into mayhem at each destination. 

However, there is no way to avoid discussing the elephant in the room, being Charlene Yi’s ultimate departure from the series after the actor publicly addressed the physical and mental abuse they experienced on set earlier this year. And the final result is completely transparent, as they’re written out during the series’ midpoint. Their absence leaves a sour taste in one’s mouth, making “Time Bandits” less fun than it was before. 

Yet, given that this show is strictly intended for a family-oriented audience, (though there are weird instances of bloody violence that had me questioning the TV-PG rating at one point) I assume these kids wouldn’t care less. Unless one of them points out why the empath character just straight up left, inexplicably? 

If you’re looking for a fun, silly diversion and clever character-oriented comedy for the family, “Time Bandits” is a pleasant time to be had. This iteration stands well on its own as a delightful sci-fi romp that might actually make your kid want to crack open a history book for once. The Supreme Being knows I did that, having watched my fair share of “Peabody and Sherman” back then.

Whole season screened for review. 

Wonder what movies we’ll be talking about during this upcoming Oscar season? A handy cheat-sheet every year is the lineup of the Venice Film Festival, which starts August 28 and is the first of several high-profile fall festivals. Even the 2023 edition, which was hampered by a lack of stars due to the then-ongoing actors’ strike, debuted the likes of “Poor Things,” “Ferrari,” “Evil Does Not Exist” and “Green Border.” But now that the actors and writers have gotten new contracts, this year’s Venice will be filled with plenty of buzzy premieres. But which films, sight unseen, look the most intriguing?

Putting together a list of 10 promising festival movies is always a difficult task. You’re going on gut feelings and personal preference. For instance, maybe you’re someone who is waiting anxiously for the Venice opener “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.” Perhaps you’re excited about “Wolfs,” which reunites “Ocean’s Eleven” stars George Clooney and Brad Pitt. Kiyoshi Kurosawa fans will no doubt want to hear how his latest thriller “Clouds” is. Well, those movies, and many others, missed the cut, which just speaks to the amount of possible bangers Venice might have on tap. Listed alphabetically, here are the films that have most piqued my interest.

“Babygirl”

Dutch filmmaker Halina Reijn likes making audiences uncomfortable. Her feature debut, 2019’s “Instinct,” was about a prison therapist inexorably drawn to the dangerous rapist she’s meant to be treating. Then Reijn returned with “Bodies Bodies Bodies,” a horror-satire that was like an Agatha Christie murder-mystery combined with a commentary on Generation Z. I don’t think she’s pulling any punches for her third feature, an erotic thriller that, according to Variety, “examines power dynamics and sexuality in the workplace.” Nicole Kidman stars in “Babygirl” as a CEO who starts a highly inappropriate affair with a young intern at her company (Harris Dickinson). This isn’t the first time this year that Kidman has played a woman pursuing a younger love interest, although “Babygirl” looks to be much darker and more button-pushing than her Netflix rom-com “A Family Affair.”

“The Brutalist”

For those who love their arthouse fare to be epic in length, filmmaker Brady Corbet has excellent news for you. As the follow-up to his maximalist pop-star portrait “Vox Lux,” he will be unveiling “The Brutalist,” a three-and-a-half-hour (including intermission) drama, which, according to IndieWire, concerns “a Hungarian Jew [played by Adrien Brody] who survived Auschwitz before emigrating to America. On U.S. soil after years of poverty, he’s entrusted by a patron, Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), with a gigantic architectural project.” Expect comparisons to “The Fountainhead” for a film that also features Felicity Jones, Joe Alwyn and Alessandro Nivola. Corbet is known for pursuing challenging subject matter, and this ambitious undertaking sounds no different. 

“Harvest”

More than a decade ago, one of the hot regional film movements was the Greek Weird Wave, whose most famous member was Yorgos Lanthimos, who went on to worldwide success. But one of his friends and colleagues during that era was Athina Rachel Tsangari, who made a splash with her second feature, the Venice competition title “Attenberg,” a twisted, oddly touching coming-of-age tale. (Her lead, Ariane Labed, took home the festival’s Best Actress prize.) Sadly, Tsangari has only made one feature since then—the 2015 examination of masculinity, “Chevalier”—but at last, she returns with this adaptation of the Jim Crace novel about a tiny English village that starts experiencing unsettling occurrences. Caleb Landry Jones leads the cast of “Harvest,” which may not be as starry as many of the Venice premieres but could be a creepy stunner. 

“I’m Still Here”

Awards season loves a good comeback story. Sony Pictures Classics is certainly positioning Brazilian filmmaker Walter Salles as a candidate this year. He earned acclaim in the late 1990s and early 21st century thanks to delicate dramas like “Central Station” and “The Motorcycle Diaries,” but he hasn’t made a feature since 2012’s disappointing “On the Road.” Salles is back with “I’m Still Here,” based on the true story of Eunice Paiva, a housewife who took on the Brazilian military regime in the 1960s after her husband, a congressman, was disappeared. Based on Paiva’s son’s memoir, “I’m Still Here” will star Fernanda Torres, with “Central Station” Oscar nominee Fernanda Montenegro playing Eunice Paiva as an older woman. This has the potential to be the sort of emotional powerhouse that audiences and Academy voters flock to.  

“Joker: Folie à Deux”

The original “Joker” started its awards-season campaign at Venice in 2019, taking home the festival’s top prize, the Golden Lion, on the way to earning more than a billion dollars worldwide and winning two Oscars, including Best Actor for Joaquin Phoenix. Critically, though, the film received a wide range of reviews, with some praising “Joker’s” grownup tone and magnetic central performance while others despised its pseudo-Scorsese nihilism. I was a fan, so I’m intrigued by this much-hyped sequel, which like its predecessor will premiere in competition on the Lido. This time, Phoenix is joined by Lady Gaga, who plays the Joker’s equally troubled love interest Harley Quinn. “Joker: Folie à Deux” will be a musical, so no one can accuse this sequel of lacking in ambition. I’m expecting this follow-up film to be equally divisive—I can’t wait to see where I land.

“Maria”

Angelina Jolie will debut her latest directorial effort, “Without Blood,” which stars Salma Hayek and Demian Bichir, at the Toronto Film Festival. But before then, she’ll be in front of the camera at Venice for “Maria,” the newest biopic from Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín. Like his “Jackie” and “Spencer,” this will focus on a famous woman in the midst of crisis: acclaimed opera singer Maria Callas near the end of her tumultuous life. Both Natalie Portman and Kristen Stewart received Best Actress nominations for their portrayals in Larraín’s films, so Oscar prognosticators will be curious to see how Academy Award-winner Jolie comports herself as Callas. She hasn’t been nominated since 2008’s “Changeling” and this looks to be her most high-profile dramatic role since her poorly-received 2015 marital drama “By the Sea,” in which she co-starred alongside her now-ex-husband Brad Pitt.

“Pavements”

Pavement was one of the most important bands of the 1990s, a greatly influential indie-rock group whose epochal albums like “Slanted and Enchanted” dazzled with their shimmering guitar and quizzical/poetic lyrics. They were critics’ darlings, not multiplatinum sensations, so it’s probably not a surprise that a movie about them will also be pretty idiosyncratic. Filmmaker Alex Ross Perry, who previously made the scabrous, moving fictional rock portrait “Her Smell,” was approached by frontman Stephen Malkmus to do a sorta-documentary, sorta-love story narrative based around the group’s music. So what exactly is “Pavements”? According to Perry, “Legitimate, ridiculous, real, fake, idiotic, cliché, illogical. … You take the Todd Haynes Bob Dylan movie, the Scorsese documentary, the Pennebaker documentary, and the movie Dylan himself directed that everyone hates [‘Renaldo and Clara’] and put them all in a blender.” “Pavements” will feature footage from the band’s recent reunion tour, but also include actors like Jason Schwartzman, Tim Heidecker, Zoe Lister-Jones and Fred Hechinger. Like their terrific body of work, this movie sounds incredibly cool.

“Queer”

A year ago, Luca Guadagnino was supposed to debut “Challengers” at Venice. But because of the actors’ strike, the studio pulled the film from its opening-night slot, delaying its release until early 2024. The Oscar-nominated director is back on the Lido with another love story, this time based on William S. Burroughs’ novel, about an American war vet (Daniel Craig) living in Mexico pursuing a younger serviceman (Drew Starkey) in the 1940s. “Queer” reunites Guadagnino with several of his “Challengers” collaborators, including screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes and composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Few contemporary filmmakers do romance as beautifully as Guadagnino, and Craig is already building buzz for a possible first Oscar nomination. 

“The Room Next Door”

In recent times, decorated Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar has dipped his toe into English-language filmmaking with his shorts “The Human Voice” and “Strange Way of Life.” Now, he’s made his first feature in English, reuniting with “Human Voice” star Tilda Swinton for “The Room Next Door,” in which she plays a mother engaged in a contentious relationship with her daughter (Julianne Moore). For cinephiles, the team-up of those three luminaries—announced through a tantalizing Instagram post—was reason for excitement, but considering “The Room Next Door” was shot this spring, most of us assumed we wouldn’t see the film until next year. Instead, Almodóvar will be back in Venice, where he won Best Screenplay for “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” in 1988 and a Career Golden Lion in 2019.

“Separated”

Oscar-winning documentarian Errol Morris tends to make his best films when he’s angry or impassioned, whether exonerating falsely accused killer Randall Dale Adams in “The Thin Blue Line” or grilling former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara for “The Fog of War.” As Morris explained last year, his new film is “about the separation of families—including parents and children—on the Mexico-U.S. border by the Trump administration.” Called “Separated,” the documentary couldn’t be more timely at a moment when Trump is promising mass deportations if reelected president, and I expect it to be an enraging, sobering portrait. Morris has praised journalist Jacob Soboroff’s 2020 book on the topic, Separated: Inside an American Tragedy, so I wouldn’t be surprised if his film draws inspiration from Soboroff’s reporting. There are several intriguing documentaries at this year’s Venice—including the latest installment of Wang Bing’s “Youth” series about migrant workers in China—but I can imagine “Separated” might provoke major headlines.

The two-hander is an elegant structure for a lower-budget effort: Just plop two characters together, often in a single location, and let the actors’ performances and the innate tension of the scenario play itself out. It’s a very genre-flexible conceit, malleable enough to fit everything from murderous chamber piece to yakuza thriller to pitch-black tragicomedies starring middle-aged Michiganders. In that spirit, three films I’ve seen at this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival manage to use their reduced cast and focus on pairings to intriguing effect, even if not all of them completely hold together.

“Confession,” one of three films in the fest from director Nobuhiro Yamashita, starts with a leg injury. Two men — college friends Asai (Toma Ikuta) and Jiyong (Yang Ik-june) — are making their annual pilgrimage among the snowy mountains of Japan, a kind of tradition to honor their long-lost friend Sayuri (Nao), who disappeared on one of their treks years prior. As we meet them, Jiyong’s leg has been broken, and the whirling blizzard tells them he’s not gonna make it. So he makes a presumptively dying admission of guilt: he killed Sayuri all those years ago, out of jealousy for Asai’s relationship with her. Before Asai can really process that revelation, suddenly the snow clears enough to reveal a remote cabin in which they can seek shelter. Asai drags Jiyong inside, keeping them safe from the storm… but not this unearthed secret.

At a brisk 70 minutes, “Confession” is deliciously taut. Its early stretches build slow-burn tension as the two figure out how to reconcile this massive elephant thrown into the room. It’s Hitchcockian at first, Asai and Jiyong going through the niceties of friendship, patching up the latter’s leg, and trying to find supplies and contact the outside world. But it’s not that long before we see the lengths to which Jiyong will go to protect his crime, the two exhausted, altitude-sick friends turning to violence at the drop of a shovel. That’s where Yamashita’s direction comes alive, making elegant use of a well-established space (with food closets and cellar doors and an ominous wood-burning hearth) to find new ways to threaten and surprise Asai in his mad scramble for survival. It’s a bit Chan-wook Park in stretches, from its agonizing build of suspense to the way Yamashita’s camera keeps its grandest surprises just out of view.

Granted, it’s all in service of a story that’s a bit slight — its final act depends on a Russian nesting doll of twists that feel one or two too many to register — and the object of their animus, Nao’s Sayuri, doesn’t get much to do in flashbacks besides serve as said object. But as a slim, efficient genre exercise, its moment-by-moment mad scramble for survival, “Confession” is a fun time.

Okay, it’s maybe cheating to call Hiroshi Shuji’s yakuza thriller “Tatsumi” a two-hander, per se, but its central pair anchors what is otherwise a comparatively rote example of the genre. In a small Japanese fishing town, numerous yakuza gangs battle for control; in the middle is Tatsumi (Yuya Endo), a worn-down, cynical fisherman who disposes of bodies as a side hustle for each crime family. He’s the kind of world-weary guy who will, as we see in the opening minutes, oversee even his younger brother’s death by overdose and clean up the corpse afterward. But cracks form in his hard exterior when circumstances force him to protect Aoi (Kokoro Morita), a rebellious teenage girl, who finds herself in the mafia’s crosshairs after witnessing a power-play killing. Trapped in the middle, the two must work together to survive the various factions coming after them, and negotiate — or shoot — their way out of trouble.

“Tatsumi” is hardly a Beat Takeshi vehicle; it plays more as crime drama than shoot-em-up action, and the script lays thick its grand tragic ideas of cycles of violence and the death of humanity in the world of organized crime. It’s nothing new, but played with sufficient panache that it doesn’t get too boring — especially when Endo and Morita get to explore a brittle brother-sister dynamic as their characters become more accustomed to each other. Shoji makes efficient use of his presumably low budget, flitting between cramped gangland restaurants and sprawling car parks and fishing docks coated in an amber sheen to sell the griminess and grittiness of its setting. 

It’s dour but appropriately so: it’s a movie about the emptiness of this kind of life; after all, Tatsumi casually clips fingers and pulls teeth as if he were gutting a fish. But that also holds us back from getting to know many of the supporting cast, which can sometimes confuse the complex dynamics the pair try to navigate. (That said, Tomoyuki Kuramoto stands out as the wild-eyed Ryuji, a particularly psychopathic enforcer who becomes Tatsumi’s most ardent nemesis.) Even so, Shoji paints a picture of a tense, tragic world from which there’s seemingly no escape, and the emotional toll it takes on those lost in it.

“Vulcanizadora” has already made a modest splash out of Tribeca, but the latest from Michigan-based provocateur Joel Potrykus (“Relaxer“) mines ghastly existential pathos from middle-aged malaise. A followup of sorts to his 2014 “Buzzard,” “Vulcanizadora” plops its two loser leads from that film, Marty and Derek — played by Joshua Burge and Potrykus — into the Michigan forest for some seemingly aimless wandering. Now easily in their forties, wrinkles and grey hair disrupting their metal-fan attire and whoa-man vocal tics, the pair pal around, setting off fireworks, digging up old porno mags, and talking vaguely about some kind of ritual they plan to enact once they get to where they’re going. They’re pathetic, sad, washed-up manchildren, seemingly embracing their dead-end lives and trying to wrest some control back from the years that have been lost to idleness. That is, until you figure out what they’re really trying to pull off once they get to their beachside destination, which is where “Vulcanizadora” takes on a more hilariously tragic direction.

Shot with a kind of clandestine 16mm, “Vulcanizadora”‘s look feels as ramshackle as its protagonists: pitted, pockmarked, knotted. Long takes hold on Marty and Derek trudging idly through the woods, talking themselves up to whatever they’re doing, a desperate grasp for purpose in an aimless universe. Potrykus’ smartest move, frankly, is to let its metaphorical bomb go off halfway through, and in a cruelly funny twist of fate, leaving one of the losers left to sift through the wreckage. This latter half lends “Vulcanizadora” a perverse significance, morphing into a cautionary tale of how we can become alienated even from our own desire for accountability. It’s the cruelest thing of all to feel the guilt of doing something unforgivable; it’s even worse when the world dares to forgive (and forget) you anyway. 

“Deadpool & Wolverine” exists because Hugh Jackman, who has played Wolverine nine times and had supposedly retired the character after 2017’s “Logan,” loved the Deadpool series and was friends with star Ryan Reynolds. He wanted the mutant with the adamantium claws to team up with the Merc with the Mouth, preferably in a buddy movie modeled partly on R-rated 1980s action flicks like “48 Hrs.” The end product is true to the spirit of the franchise while pushing its self-aware humor and fourth wall-breaks until it all seems like the result of a dare: how big can we make the air quotes around “sincerity” while still tugging on heartstrings?

SPOILERS WILL FOLLOW

About half an hour into the movie, Wade gets sent on a multiverse-spanning mission that ends up teaming him with Wolverine (never mind the reasons; you’ll learn them anyway when you see the movie, which will make a billion dollars no matter what somebody like me has to say about it) and the duo ends up traversing a prison-like zone ruled by Cassandra Nova (Emma Corwin), a bald, skeletally slender twin sister of Charles Xavier. The place is filled with debris and monuments, all seemingly drawn from films released by Disney and 20th Century Fox (which was swallowed by Disney in 2019). 

I’m sure there’ll be a comprehensive bullet-pointed list on the film’s Wikipedia page by the time you read this, but among other things I believe I spotted a S.H.I.E.L.D. helicarrier, the spires of the Williamsburg bridge (site of an important Spider-Man battle) and the top of the Statue of Liberty’s torch (the original 1968 “Planet of the Apes” was a Fox production), all buried in the ground like the “two vast and legless trunks of stone” in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias.” This zone is referred to as a “metaphorical junkyard.” The phrase can be read two ways. I suspect Deadpool’s arched-eyebrow playfulness inclines it toward the second reading: a dumping ground for pop culture metaphors, especially the kind you encounter in comic books and movies based on them. 

Furthermore: every significant Marvel Comics character we encounter here, Deadpool and Wolverine included, were first brought to life in a big-budget, live-action film released by Fox, not Disney. Which means the metaphors in this junkyard include comic book characters who, in addition to being themselves, are walking metaphors for aspects of society, psychology, or some political or social condition. I won’t tell you which characters show up, even though (the Internet being what it is) you’ll have heard all of them by the time you read this. Suffice to say the movie resurrects not just Logan/Wolverine and Wade/Deadpool (many, many times!) but other commercially “dead” Fox superhero characters, not just from long-running film brands like the “X-Men” movies but ones that were unsuccessful.

Not for nothing does the first Deadpool-Wolverine fight happen around a giant stone-carved version of the 20th Century Fox logo that used to appear in front of Fox movies: a studio had to be sacrificed for this film to exist. Cinema history obsessives who can tolerate Ryan Reynolds’ mugging and pratfalling and verbal footnoting will appreciate that, among other things, “Deadpool & Wolverine” is a superhero version of a memorial service for a studio and the various franchises and undeveloped projects that were discarded or decommissioned when it was bought. Lazarus-styled IP tributes are handled with more wit and humor (not to mention basic decency) here than the AI whirlwind of rubber-faced DC characters trotted out in Warner Bros. “The Flash.” The movie’s wry awareness of the profit motive takes a bit of the sting out as well. “Fox killed him,” Wade says of Logan, “Disney brought him back. They’re gonna make him do this till he’s ninety.”

Also, not for nothing: the movie’s main story is about literal as well as figurative resurrections. When we meet Wade for the first time in six years, he’s been kicked to the curb by his girlfriend and rejected by the Avengers and has resigned himself to being a “loser” and is now selling used cars and wearing a bad hairpiece. He gets roped into service by Mr. Paradox (Matthew MacFayden), an agent for the Time Variance Authority (TVA) who has developed a “Time Ripper” that can mercy-kill timelines that have lost their “anchor being.” Again, there’s no point getting deep in the plot weeds in a review of a film like this, so let’s say that to head off apocalyptic problems in Wade’s own timeline, he has to capture a Wolverine from one of the other timelines and replace him in the one where he was a tragically deceased “anchor being” holding that strand together.

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 and relentlessly turns into the nine-figure-budgeted superhero action movie equivalent of a Chuck Jones-directed Looney Tunes touchstone like “Duck Amuck,” the punchline of which was that the unseen animator terrorizing Daffy Duck was Bugs Bunny. “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. 

The script is upfront about what Disney wouldn’t allow Reynolds and company to show. Cocaine is prominently mentioned but nobody does any; butt stuff is described but not depicted; there’s homoerotic horseplay and wordplay, but no actual sexual person-play. That being said, the writers get more latitude than I assumed they’d get when it comes to criticisms of Disney running the MCU into the ground and off in multiple, incompatible directions post “Endgame.” “Welcome to the MCU, by the way,” Wade tells Logan. “You’re joining at a low point.” 

At the same time, the film maintains the loose-verging-on-chaotic, sketch comedy-derived sensibility that links it to slapstick from the early sound era of motion pictures. Wolverine and Logan are nigh-invulnerable cousins of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby riffing their way through the long-running “Road” series, which regularly paused to bond with the audience over watching a movie. They’re also Moe and Curly in super-suits. Their eye-pokes go through the sockets and into the brain.

Somehow, despite the silly mayhem and hyper-meta goofing, I kinda did care about the characters, especially in the finale, which unspools a pathos firehose and blasts us with it. Jackman is moving as Wolverine – and always has been; arguably more so the older he gets. Here he plays, not the straight man, but the exasperated, cranky man. He yells not just because he’s had enough of this red-suited clown but also because he’s furious at himself for failing and now has a target at which to direct his accumulated negative energy. Reynolds, for all his blabber-mouthed, abrasive relentlessness, is touching as well, probably because in this version of the characters’ stories, they’re both broken, abandoned men: “losers,” Wade calls them. Their loser-ness connects to the idea of the Fox-Marvel characters ending up collateral damage in a long running corporate rivalry that concluded with one combatant annexing and pillaging the other. 

I wish the movie were more coherent and consistent. The visual effects are of variable quality. Some of the closeups are luminous and the colors radiant, particularly in night scenes, while other shots (particularly daylight panoramas in the limbo sequence) are so flat-looking and washed out and devoid of detail that they wouldn’t pass as a screensaver. Director Shawn Levy– a regular Reynolds collaborator who’s comfortable with CGI-driven, big-budget projects – handles the action competently but without jaw-on-the-floor inventiveness (though he does have a comedy storyteller’s knack for timing the verbal and visual gags, and there’s a nifty “Oldboy” tribute). The movie is tight by superhero standards (127 minutes) but still runs out of gas. Wade admits it, though, promising to wrap things up when you start to fidget. 

There are compensations, particularly in the casting. MacFayden serves tasty ham in the Shakespeare-trained Brit tradition. Corrin, who played Princess Diana in Netflix’s “The Crown,” makes a frightening villain, with her predatory stare, bird-boned arms and legs, and long, elegant fingers. The movie pushes some of Cassandra’s torturous or murderous acts to the point where they seem like spiritual as well as physical violations. When this woman gets in your head, it’s not a metaphor. (Between the profanity, the gore, and the sadomasochistic bent, this entry is as not-for-kids as the others.)

In its sketch comedy-adjacent way (there are five credited writers) “Deadpool & Wolverine” articulates something honest and true about the essence of comic book movies, more so than most “grimdark” adaptations: it’s all a riff anyway. Multiverse storytelling — like the comic books soap opera, and pro-wrestling tropes it evolved from — is infinitely malleable. No important character is irrevocably dead, nor are they locked into being exclusively a good or bad guy. That’s why big-name characters can be introduced with fanfare, then killed suddenly for a laugh or flipped from irredeemably evil to evil but redeemable. We go in knowing our suspension of disbelief will be flicked off and on like a light switch. This is part of the pact. And the dare.

We are pleased to offer an excerpt from the July 2024 issue of the online magazine Bright Wall/Dark Room. Their theme for July 2024 is “To the Sea,” and, in addition to Bryan Miller’s piece about “Crimson Tide” below, includes new essays “Finding Nemo,” “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou,” “The Lighthouse,” “The Navigator,” “My Love Awaits Me by the Sea,” “The Beaches of Agnes,” “Malni,” “When Marnie Was There,” and more.

You can read our previous excerpts from the magazine by clicking here. To subscribe to Bright Wall/Dark Room, or look at their most recent essays, click here.

The sea makes its own law.

There is a technical term for justice out among the waves—“maritime law”—but that’s just a wishful attempt to extend landlubber rules beyond the reach of the shore. The reality is, once a group of sailors ventures into open water, the vastness of the expanse around them creates a society in miniature—not a ship in a bottle, but a whole bottle city where law and order is revealed to be a fragile working agreement among the captain and crew. One man’s mutiny is another man’s revolution. Of course, it’s that way everywhere else, too. Out on the water, that truth just becomes more apparent.

“At sea a fellow comes out. Salt water is like wine, in that respect,” Herman Melville once wrote in a letter. He would know; Melville himself became a mutineer in 1842, aboard the Lucy Ann.

Movies have been hip to this truth for nearly as long as cinema has existed. Among the earliest notable examples of mutiny dramas include Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 silent classic The Battleship Potemkin and Frank Lloyd’s Mutiny On the Bounty, the latter of which became the highest-grossing American film of 1935. And that’s not even the earliest cinematic depiction of the infamous 1789 revolt aboard the HMS Bounty; that would be a silent 1916 Australian-New Zealand co-production, now considered lost, followed by a 1933 Australian version (In the Wake of the Bounty) starring a then-unknown Errol Flynn. The story would be prominently remade twice more, once in a dubious 1962 iteration (also entitled Mutiny on the Bounty) starring Marlon Brando as the malevolent Captain Bligh, and again in a handsome 1984 Roger Donaldson production (simply titled The Bounty) featuring a young Mel Gibson.

The apotheosis of mutiny movies also happens to be the rip-roaring coolest of the bunch, a piece of pure pop entertainment that—much like its director, Tony Scott—is due for reconsideration. Crimson Tide is a guiltless pleasure, a perfect Sunday afternoon cable rewatch. It’s more than that, but let’s not sail too quickly past the virtues of its shiny surface.

The central conflict is a battle of wills and worldviews fought between two men. In one corner is Ramsey (Gene Hackman), captain of the USS Alabama, an old war dog of a submariner who brags about the simplicity of his approach and his fidelity to the chain of command. His opposite, the executive officer Hunter (Denzel Washington), is a Harvard-educated man whose nuanced views about war in the nuclear age are greeted with skepticism around the officers’ table. This primal confrontation is endlessly reflected and refracted by their respective subordinates aboard the ship until the answers are anything but clear.

Ramsey and Hunter’s conflicting philosophies are put to the ultimate test under the direst possible circumstances. They’re already on high alert thanks to a Russian separatist group that has taken control of a nuclear missile battery. The Alabama is ordered to fire its nukes to stop the seemingly imminent attack. But this already-dire situation is further complicated by a second, partial message that is truncated when the sub’s communication lines are severed, a message that may—or may not—rescind the order to fire. When Ramsey refuses to wait to launch the Alabama’s payload, Hunter seizes control of the ship by reciting Navy code like Shakespearean verse. It’s the first of many instances in which the movie asks the audience to ponder the convoluted nexus of legality, morality, and ethics.

Over the course of their duel, each man’s most loyal friend winds up turning against him. And in the case of both Ramsey’s sidekick Cob (George Dzundza) and Hunter’s old shipmate Weps (Viggo Mortenson), their dissent is a begrudging choice that hinges on their own interpretation of the proper procedure. The question is never whether to follow the law, but rather what following the law means—and who gets to interpret it.

*

Scott and his crew are clearly aware of all the submarine-movie tropes. They are, so to speak, swimming in them. Early in the movie, Mortenson’s Weps passes the time by challenging another sailor, played by James Gandolfini, to a trivia game about the stars of classic submarine flicks. Quentin Tarantino did an uncredited rewrite on the script, and this is among the handful of scenes that obviously bears his fingerprints. It’s a classically Tarantino-esque nod to show that everyone involved is well aware of the mechanics of this sub-genre, including us, the audience—plus bonus points for anyone who knew Curd Jurgens played the villain in The Enemy Below.

And the film deploys many of these tropes: the tense silence of the crew as enemy ships pass whisper-close to one another, the bubbling wakes of torpedos slicing through the water, the concussion-rattle of nearby explosions, and the subsequent struggle to seal off flooding hulls. Despite these trappings, though, Crimson Tide less resembles underwater thrillers like Run Silent, Run Deep or procedure-steeped tragedies like Das Boot than it does the more philosophical mutiny dramas, like the many iterations of the tale of the HMS Bounty or, in particular, The Caine Mutiny, which is perhaps Crimson Tide’s most apropos counterpart.

The Caine Mutiny (1954) stars a late-period Humphrey Bogart as Captain Queeg, a battleship captain driven mad by paranoia, insecurity, and PTSD in the waning days of World War II. Queeg’s erratic, often capricious actions culminate in a breakdown during a storm at sea that causes a cabal of his crewmen to commandeer the vessel, which becomes the basis of a court martial trial that comprises the third act. During the trial, a Navy lawyer named Barney Greenwald (José Ferrer) reluctantly defends the uprising, publicly exonerating the sailors but privately castigating them for their reckless actions. “You’re either a fool or a mutineer,” he insists. “There is no third option.”

Crimson Tide shares that weary skepticism and is, in some surprising ways, perhaps the subtler movie, despite its blockbuster sheen and breathless hyperbole (the fate of the entire world hangs in the balance!). The Caine Mutiny makes a final-act push to garner some sympathy for the devilish captain, but Queeg is quite obviously deranged from the outset. Through stubbornness and cowardice, his actions repeatedly imperil the lives of his men and the crews of other ships for reasons almost entirely related to his own vanity.

That’s not the case with Crimson Tide’s Ramsey. Hawkish as he may be, Ramsey isn’t chasing glory. He’s doing what he believes to be his duty when the stakes are the highest. The same goes for Hunter, and all the conflicted men under their command. Of course, the movie must ultimately provide an answer to its Schrödinger’s cat quandary, and Hunter turns out to be correct. Ramsey eventually tilts into outright villainy when he holds a sailor hostage shortly before giving a speech to Hunter that brings the movie’s racial subtext way above periscope depth. (Speaking of scenes that sound like they were written by Tarantino…) But whereas Queeg’s behavior is deranged almost immediately, Crimson Tide makes space for the possibility that Ramsey may, unfortunately, be correct, and that Hunter’s moral principles could lead to practical disaster. That sentiment is reflected in Washington’s performance; he plays Hunter as a reluctant crusader forced to take decisive action, but in the final moments before the fateful message can be decoded, his expression is darkened with uncertainty.

Heady stuff for a movie generally more associated with Michael Bay action extravaganzas than an Oscar-nominated film based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel like The Caine Mutiny. If Crimson Tide is overlooked as a true-blue war movie classic, it’s likely because of the very stylistic flourishes that make its moral philosophizing go down so smoothly.

That’s the story of director Tony Scott’s too-short life. For too long, Scott was siloed with his fellow, often less-distinguished directors working in the Simpson/Bruckheimer blockbuster factory. Scott was regarded as a cinematic confectioner at best, and one of the horsemen of the attention-span apocalypse at worst. I was recently reading an old Film Comment interview with Tarantino where he brings up Scott’s quick-cut style, only to have journalist Gavin Smith dismiss Scott’s approach in three syllables: “Can’t stand that.”

In the wide angle of hindsight, Scott was a harbinger of inevitable change whose artistic eccentricities now look like visions of the future. When Crimson Tide was released in 1995, conflating a filmmaking approach to “MTV style” was a sick burn bordering on a slur. Almost 30 years later, the MTV aesthetic is a nostalgic touchstone. And over the course of those three decades, the broader culture caught up to Scott’s hyperkinetic pace, with the advent of social media and the Vine-ification of six-second mini-movies. Slandering Scott as an ADHD filmmaker isn’t just a neurotypical faux pas in 2024, it’s as quaintly retrograde as scolds of yore criticizing Martin Scorsese for using too much rock music in his soundtracks. Repent, harlequin, said the TikToker!

With fresh eyes we can see that Scott’s style is frenetic but also masterfully controlled, and Crimson Tide shows off that confidence as well as any movie in his filmography. Scott restrains himself in the movie’s prologue, sticking to longer takes and wider shots. He starts zooming the cameras around once the men are confined to the sub, lending incredible dynamism to what are often static scenes playing out in close quarters. The angles go all dutch, and Scott is increasingly garish in his painting of the characters in the multi-colored lights of the submarine’s glowing instruments. Yet whenever the characters begin to debate morality/authority, the frame straightens out so as not to tilt in either direction.

*

In the three decades since the movie’s release, political tides may have shifted, but fear of a hyper-aggressive, nuke-touting Russia is little diminished. Scott’s thrilling stylistic flourishes may seem a tad less audacious, although not significantly so. Yet in so many ways, the film’s concerns about the fragile nature of the social order and the tacit agreement that keeps systems and institutions functioning are actually more relevant than ever.

Let’s not drift too far into the choppy surf of politics. But it’s damned hard to watch Crimson Tide today as an American and not think of it in the context of Capitol-storming, election-denying, and the delegitimization of the justice system. Whichever way you may personally lean, port or starboard, you may have found yourself pondering the overthrow of The Guy In Charge at some point or another in the past eight years. You might have pined for it. You may yet find yourself on the other side of that debate again soon.

Crimson Tide isn’t a Conservative movie, which makes it fairly rare among war films, nor is it an anti-institutionalist polemic. The moral imperative of rejecting unchecked authority is the animating idea of the whole story, yet the film remains consistently skeptical of characters who are too eager to seize control. Crimson Tide doesn’t argue that the inevitable unintended consequences are reason enough to outright preclude drastic action; rather, it implies that they should give pause to even the most righteous warrior. The film’s ultimate warning is that even a proper mutiny is still a mutiny.

At one point Ramsey tells Hunter, “We’re here to preserve democracy, not to practice it.” There’s a bit of cognitive dissonance in this statement, but not more so than in the notion that one must seize authority to prevent authoritarianism. A ship in the midst of the ocean is in many ways a kind of laboratory of lawmaking—that’s what makes these films so fascinating—but, sooner or later, what happens at sea is bound to wash ashore.

Art credit: Tom Ralston.