A predictable story, beautifully animated. It has the most straightforward plot of the Celtic triology Which is to say The Secret of Kells, Song of the Sea, Wolfwalkers, and no I don’t think that’s the official title but that’s how I have it filed in my mind. but also the most complex imagery and a soundtrack that equals the two prior films, making it the perfect Oscar contender. And even the simple A to B to C storyline allows for many different interpretations. Is it about man versus nature, town versus country, old versus young, masculine versus feminine, blue eyes versus green? Probably all of the above.

Side note: Wolfwalkers came out on AppleTV+, pretty much sealing its status as the new HBO. Still, it would be nice to see the animation in a theater next year, if any are left.

Netflix has a knack for producing empty calories, and Enola Holmes is not an exception. Pretty visuals, female empowerment, and decent to above-average acting can’t hide the blandness of its storyline nor the absence of any reasoning, deductive or otherwise.

It is, by the way, hard to think of Enola’s character as particularly empowered when the next three women in screen time order are her mother the polymath rebel, her friend the black martial arts teacher, and an aristocratic evil mastermind. Not to mention the brief appearance of a coitery of female anarchist geniuses. In Victorian London!¹ A bit too on the nose, maybe? To paraphrase the Incredibles, when everyone’s special, no one is.

Things I found to be scarier than this movie:

• “Cabin in the Woods”
• “Coraline”
• “Toy Story 3”
• My father upgrading his Windows PC
• My 2-year-old’s diaper
• The thought that I have spent almost two hours watching this drek

That this was co-written and produced by Guillermo del Toro and directed by the same person who did The Autopsy of Jane Doe is not exactly mind-boggling, but certainly disappointing. I wonder what went wrong.

Directed by André Øvredal, 2019

There are so many wasted opportunities in this movie that I hesitate to recommend it. Here is the raw material in more-or-less chronological order: an atheist theoretical physicist studying time, black holes, and the beginning of the universe falls in love with a devout wife, develops a catastrophic neurological condition, gets married and has children, becomes world-famous, gets a tracheotomy and can’t talk any more, gets a robotic voice, falls out of love, divorces, marries his nurse, denies suspicions of domestic abuse by the said nurse, divorces the nurse, reconciles with the first wife, never wins a Nobel prize and never will because it will take too much time for his theories to be proven correct.

With so many intertwined plot lines and obsession with time you would think this would be non-linear story, or better yet a series of reverse-chronological set pieces that covers the highlights in depth. What we get instead is a shallow, lukewarm love story carried entirely by the walking-to-debilitated transformation of Eddie Redmayne whose best actor Oscar is one of the better deserved. If you want to tell such a complex life story beginning-to-end, make it into a mini-series and put it up on Netflix.

Directed by James Marsh, 2014

• Yes, I know I’m late to this.
• Comedy and horror both work by playing with your expectations, so that a comedian made the best horror movie in decades is not a complete surprise.
• A surprise is how good of a director Jordan Peel is: you could easily take 95% of the dialogue, and 80% of the acting, and make a comedy out of this. That it is so suspenseful and creepy is all from direction.
• Speaking of creepy: Catherine Keener. Yikes.
• Of course there was still some comedy gold — the surgery scene in particular (yes, I know it wasn’t meant to be funny).
• Watch it at least twice. The second time, pay attention to Rose (i.e. Allison Williams, i.e. Marnie).
• The 2018 best movie Oscar went to The Shape of Water. I thought it was a bad choice after watching Phantom Thread, but now it’s a travesty: Get Out was clearly the most deserving that year.

Directed by Jordan Peele, 2017

A cheap (estimated budget $5,000,000) sci-fi movie that doesn’t look cheap. Its looks are a blessing and a curse: yes, the camera work is good and the actors are photogenic but what are supposed to be gritty run-down inner cities of the utopian/dystopian near-future look instead like HD-bloomed props of a glossy magazine photoshoot.

The story features drones, self-driving cars, moments of gender ambiguity, and — the title gives it away — upgraded humans. It is timely, but also kind of lazy; I would have preferred more time dedicated to the huge inequalities between the different flesh-and-blood humans rather than the more obvious AI versus humanity plot line.

But I like where the movies are going much better than TV: the barrier to entry for both the makers (again, $5 mil) and consumers (90 minutes on the couch) is low, potential payoffs high (Upgrade’s gross was double its budget, a pretty good return on investment), and with word-of-mouth traveling more quickly and easily than ever before the good ones are more likely if not guaranteed to get awareness. Upgrade is not as good as it gets, but it’s pretty good.

Directed by Leigh Whannell, 2018

I’m late to this, seeing as it’s already gotten a bunch of awards including one from the Academy, but wow. Everyone involved in making this should be proud of the work they’ve done. Having said that…:

• Some action scenes (looking at you, final boss battle) are too fast-paced with too much unnecessary stuff going on in the background, just because they could.
• PP’s death was… banal. Is this how he died in the comic book? Sheesh.
• Auntie May should got over his death quickly too.
• That’s not how a linear accelerator looks like or works (not on this Earth, at least).
• But take note: I saw this on the back of an airplane seat during a red-eye flight with a sleeping offspring ramming her head into my flank every few minutes, and I still thought it was amazing. Five stars, will see again.

Directed by Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, Rodney Rothman, 2018

• H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror” makes an early appearance, foreshadowing some Cthulhu-inspired creatures our hero will first fight and then command. Sadly, the (very!) big baddie in Dunwich is Yog-Sothoth, not Cthulhu, so this also foreshadows a movie that has some good ideas but doesn’t quite get them all right.
• One thing it did get right was a spectacular chase scene on the rooftops of Sicily that reminded me of the best moments of Assassin’s Creed and Uncharted. This is also one of the few places where the setting wasn’t obviously CGI (because it wasn’t).
• Seriously, if your budget is $160,000,000 you should either just film a real sunset or have an obviously fake one as a statement. It looked like most above-ground scenes were shot in the Uncanny Valley.
• William Defoe is a lifelong resident of the Uncanny Valley, no matter the movie.
• Nicole Kidman has a good fight scene. The fight scenes in general were easy to follow and nicely choreographed.
• Dolph Lundgren, huh? Good casting there, but I was hoping he’d have a nice fight as well
• Jason Momoa can’t pull off the dumb muscle look they were going for at the beginning and the smartass one-liners don’t help. So his character’s arc is in costume more than psyche: shirtless, street clothes, Aquaman.
• Speaking of which, that Aquaman costume came fresh off a corpse that had been simmering in the deep sea for millennia. But we already established that Aquaman had bad b.o. so that made it fine I guess?
• The underwater villain was entirely predictable and boring. The human baddie was delightful and I look forward to seeing more of him and his equally delightful new companion in the sequel.
• Nutshell review: Predictable but delightfully over-the-top.

Directed by James Wan, 2018

So much wasted potential in this one. It could have been a great movie for both children and adults, a Labyrinth for the age of CGI and social justice. Instead, it’s a confused, hurried mess in which lots of Stuff happens for no good reason; a Michael Bay extravaganza for your middle-schooler. My daughter (6) liked it, but even she questioned a major plot point. “But, why did X become evil, daddy?” I’ve no idea, Honey, and I’m not sure the screenwriters gave it much thought either.

Such is the faith of many book adaptations; this one even more so, having had to pass through the Disney committee wringer. I haven’t read the book(s? That’s how much I know about the potential franchise) but I’ve read and watched enough fantasy to know that 1) your made-up world needs to have rules, and 2) if you break them, it better be for a good reason. The few week rules set in the Wrinkle’s first half are promptly broken at the half-time, with no explanation and nothing to replace them. Instead you get a holodeck of a planet, where anything can happen: hurricane in a haunted forest turns into a Stepford wives cul-de-sac turns into a crowded beach, and no there is nothing connecting those dots.

Which is too bad — each one of those scenes would’ve made a good episode for the second season of the unmade Wrinkle TV show, perfect for Disney’s new streaming service. Such a waste.

Directed by Ava DuVernay, 2018

An oncologist(?), a psychologist, and a surgeon give master classes on unprofessional behavior while treating JGL and his unfortunately named tumor. Even though only one of the three was meant to look bad in the movie, they each break a fundamental rule of the doctor-patient relationship: don’t be a douchebag, don’t sleep with the patient, don’t tell them everything will be fine when you have no clue. Cut out the profanities, and you’d have a semester’s worth of medical ethics discussions.

Cut out the profanities, though, and you’ll miss half the movie. Seth Rogen — a dirty old man trapped inside Fozzy the Bear — does what he’s been doing ever since Judd Apatow found him, heart of gold included. Fortunately, 50/50 has better timing than anything to come out from the Apatow cringe factory, and even has a point.

Medical miscellanea: was the diagnosing physician a medical oncologist, neurologist, neurosurgeon, or an orthopedic surgeon? Likely not the first, else he wouldn’t give neoadjuvant cytarabine for a sarcoma, and probably not the latter two since another, overoptimistic MD does the actual surgery. Can a psychologist perform interviews for what she admits will be her PhD thesis without getting informed consent? How can a surgeon say with any certainty that “everything will be fine” minutes after performing what she admitted to be a difficult operation for a tumor with a relapse rate north of 50%. You know, the 50% that gave the movie its name.

Still, thumbs up.

Directed by Jonathan Levine, 2011