After winning four Academy Awards for “Parasite” in 2020, including the first Best Picture statuette awarded to a non-English-language film, South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon Ho had a blank check in his pocket. Statistically, he will never be better situated to do whatever he wants. So, what has he chosen to do with that cultural cache? With his latest and most mainstream release, “Mickey 17,” he has blown over $100 million of Warner Brothers Discovery’s money on a quirky, meandering and unsellable sci-fi comedy with little chance of recouping its budget. And that’s pretty rad!

WBD studio head David Zaslav, in his tenure, has single-handedly devastated Warner’s history and legacy as an artist-friendly outfit, driving Christopher Nolan to the loving arms of Universal and shelving fan-favorite projects like “Batgirl” and “Coyote vs. Acme” for tax write-offs. You can then see why they would make the perfect target for an auteur looking for maximum creative freedom and minimal interest in fiduciary responsibility. What Joon Ho has helped execute here is one of the most amusing heists in recent memory. Whether or not his latest film’s charms will woo you depends entirely on how compelling you find Robert Pattinson doing pratfalls in space.

Pattinson stars as Mickey Barnes, a broke and not-too-bright loser living in a near future where late-stage capitalism has begun driving humans to the stars from a pillaged Earth further on its way to being inhabitable. On the run from an esoteric loan shark who enjoys filming the torture of his clientele more than he does being repaid, Mickey jumps the line onto a colony ship by signing up for the Expendable program. He skips the fine print that says they’re going to experiment on him and turn him into a clonable grunt whose sole existence is to straddle the line between human-size guinea pig and bottom-rung gofer. 

Every time Mickey goes on a suicide mission, future technology simply reprints his body and redownloads his memories and personality into new meat recycled from trash and feces. Each new Mickey receives a new number. His life in space is a thankless one, but he has love, at least, with security agent Nasha Barridge (Naomi Ackie), the epitome of the kind of woman who will fight for her mousy beau when they put pickles on his plain hamburger. (Theoretically, anyway. They live on a spaceship where everyone eats calorically rationed slop and paste.)

One day, Mickey, on his 17th iteration, survives being eaten by a “creeper,” the indigent life form on the ice planet Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo doing something akin to a Trump impression) is trying to colonize. The creepers save his life, only for him to make it back onto a ship to find Mickey 18 (also Pattinson) canoodling with Nasha. Multiples are illegal, so if the two are seen together, they both will be executed. There’s more at play with Marshall and his insane wife Ylfa (Toni Collette) and their mini-media presence on their tortuous journey to form a “pure” new civilization built on the backs of a diverse, poor workforce. 

But the picture’s heart is genuinely The Robert Pattinson Show. No other actor in Hollywood could have brought this much life, verve, and entertainment value to the twin portraits of dueling Mickies. 17, a nebbish who passively accepts all of life’s abuse because, deep down, he’s been conditioned to believe he deserves it. And 18, a more actualized self who, having seen from the outside how servile he has been his entire life, grows a backbone and becomes radicalized by his predicament rather than victim to it. Between the two performances, Pattinson has name-checked ’90s cartoon “Ren & Stimpy,” “Jackass” stars Johnny Knoxville and Steve-O, and most importantly, Jim Carrey in “Liar Liar,” as inspirations. It is, without a doubt, one of the most selfless and dynamic screen performances in recent memory. 

Pattinson’s elastic facial expressions and rubber-band body physics provide a Looney Tunes kind of energy to every moment but are tempered by a subtly tragic interiority. Within his turn lives perhaps the finest portrayal of the modern worker’s plight, which drives the larger picture in a believable and affecting way. But “Mickey 17” is also two and a half hours long. And as much fun as it is to watch Bong Joon Ho careen to and fro in a luxury car on an icy road, the longer the run time lasts, the less you’re enticed by the possibility he crashes it into a fiery crescendo and the more it begins to feel like dicking around for dicking around’s sake.

Ruffalo’s nowhere near as lively as he was the other year in “Poor Things” playing a similar scoundrel-type role, and he seems to be walking in Pedro Pascal’s “Wonder Woman 1984” steps. Such is the difficulty in sending up a figure like Trump, who is already the world’s most grotesque and perfect cartoon. Any real parody or impression will only pale. But Joon-ho’s vision, aided by cinematographer Darius Khondji’s sickly yellow- and green-tinted visuals, captures more of our present-day predicament’s essence in the images than showing Marshall’s supporters wearing red hats. 

Early in the film, there’s a harrowing composition as Mickey looks up at the long line to get onto a colony ship. It lopes around in off-kilter circles higher and higher above his vantage point while sandstorms outside threaten to overtake the entire structure. Individuals move forward a step, and the whole snake-like procession lurches so imperceptibly that they may as well all be standing still.

As fun as “Mickey 17” is, it’s in these fleeting moments of ecological despair that it rings the truest and in its brief bursts of justifiable rage at the state of the world around us. It may have been unintentional, but in letting his freak flag fly and doing whatever he wanted with this picture, Joon Ho has made a film whose structural weaknesses feel like purposeful recreations of the absurdity we all experience whenever we try to make sense of the news these days. 

Perhaps that’s why when Mickey 18 snaps at 17 telling him about how poorly a dinner with Marshall has gone, the camera is positioned so that his ranting about taking some action isn’t aimed at his fellow clone-in-arms but at the viewer themselves. Whether this film is seen in droves enough for audience members to walk out wanting to do what 18 ultimately does, well … that remains to be seen.

“Mickey 17” is currently playing exclusively in theaters, and a streaming release on Max is expected soon.

The post ‘Mickey 17’ is a freewheeling sci-fi satire appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

Live-action remakes of classic animated Disney projects are no new phenomena. Dating back to 1994’s “The Jungle Book,” the studio has attempted to, with mixed results, double dip into their history. But it wasn’t until 2016’s second attempt at remaking their beloved Kipling adaptation that the advances in CGI technology made it so that no project could be too ambitious to spin the block on. This reviewer distinctly remembers grumbling through a press screening of that Jon Favreau-directed “Jungle Book” and snarking to his plus one about how eager the House of Mouse must be to give this same treatment to “The Lion King.” Three years and one monkey’s paw curl later, 2019’s “The Lion King” felt like a colossal waste of time.

Sure, audiences got a new collection of Beyoncé songs (as well as her visual companion piece “Black is King”), but what did this latest telling of the beloved tale yield outside of $1.6 billion at the global box office? All of these remakes that folks call “live-action” are still primarily animated, albeit eerie, and photorealistic.

In every one of these outings, the exaggerated, cartoon approach to singing and talking animals anthropomorphized into relatable characters is replaced with the uncanny valley of watching a David Attenborough nature documentary with dubbed-over dialogue and musical numbers. 

Much craft and attention to detail are on display to make the animals feel as life-like as possible. 

But “real” or “believable” means nothing without emotional connection. Disney has made trillions off how easy it is for a child to form an emotional connection with a cartoon animal possessing enormous, unrealistic eyes. With this new approach, the result is always a financial success with fleeting cultural relevance. Everyone will take their families out to see a new, shiny, 8K-OLED-HDR-TV-in-the-display-section-of-the-Best-Buy version of the cartoon classics they loved as kids. But once they’ve been subjected to something twice as long and half as resonant, they forget the experience entirely…until there’s a new one.

Enter Barry Jenkins. The Academy Award-winning filmmaker responsible for “Moonlight” had used his newfound critical cache to adapt James Baldwin (“If Beale Street Could Talk”) and Colson Whitehead (Amazon’s excellent series “The Underground Railroad”) and had since reached that zenith all up-and-coming directors reach where they must take a meeting with Disney and get offered their obligatory Marvel or Star Wars project. For whatever unknowable reason, Jenkins chose to take on a sequel to “The Lion King” that would be pitched as “The Godfather Part II” with animals. 

The film was initially reported to split its runtime between continuing the story of Simba (voiced by Donald Glover) and flashbacks to a young Mufasa (Aaron Pierre taking over from the late James Earl Jones.) But after Jones’s passing, it seems that the story hewed closer to the prequel side of things, eschewing the Don/Michael Corleone split for a straightforward framing device where Simba’s daughter Keira (Blue Ivy Carter) is told about grandfather’s origins. This allows the narrative to center around the relationship between Mufasa and his brother Taka (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), who would grow up to be the villainous Scar.

There is something admirable in watching a filmmaker of Jenkins’s caliber try to will a worthwhile motion picture into existence within an otherwise lifeless paradigm. And there are small successes to be found for those with the patience to search for them. While still not particularly distinct, the character designs of the animals themselves allow for more emoting and subtlety. This is highlighted by Jenkins and cinematographer James Laxton’s propensity for portraiture within the fame, bringing the “camera” close enough to each lion’s face that the emotional distance between the subject and the viewer begins to melt away. 

This is best shown when exploring the precarious brotherhood between Mufasa and Taka. The show-stopping tunes penned by Lin-Manuel Miranda try hard to hammer home the more significant ideas and feelings, but Jenkins allows for quieter moments between these two cubs thrust together by tragedy to do the real heavy lifting. In the most touching moment in the picture, Taka, a young prince, tries to take Mufasa into his family after a flood separates him from his people. Taka’s father, Obasi (Lennie James) insists that Mufasa must race Taka for the opportunity. But as Mufasa falls behind, exhausted from traveling through this catastrophe, Taka modulates his pace, telling his new friend, “I’ve always wanted a brother.” 

There are other ideas at play here, with Mufasa unintentionally usurping Taka’s role in the pride and ultimately ascending to being a uniter of the various species. But much of that feels muddled by how big the cast grows and how tedious Timon and Pumba’s (Seth Rogen and Billy Eichner) interruptions feel. It becomes quite clear, in quick succession, that Jenkins’s ambition cannot combat the doomed nature of this endeavor. Despite being gifted young actors, Pierre and Harrison Jr. aren’t particularly strong voice performers. The most enticing element here, the idea of seeing Scar become Scar, is instantly nerfed when Harrison Jr. arbitrarily starts making a truly reprehensible Jeremy Irons impression the moment he’s done performing a song about betraying Mufasa, as if he had the idea to sound more villainous after crossing the chorus.

But even setting aside these gripes, “Mufasa: The Lion King” is a two-hour film that repeatedly devolves into an overactive desktop wallpaper. The sweeping vistas and majestic images of tenderly rendered animals ought to be something to behold, but it feels so repetitive and looks so inert that you would be hard-pressed to differentiate it from one of those new AI models that creates smooth enough video from paragraph-long prompts.

If someone of Jenkins’s pedigree can’t, with all this budgetary power behind him, best some poster on Elon Musk’s X typing “lions fight on mountaintop epic” into Sora, then Hollywood is truly cooked, and there’ll be nothing stopping the fools who think generative AI can usurp traditional filmmaking methods. At this rate, they’re already bent to the will of short-sighted studio groupthink to the point of obsolescence.

“Mufasa: The Lion King” is currently playing exclusively in theaters but will be available to rent or buy from video-on-demand services in February.

The post ‘Mufasa: The Lion King’ highlights the limits of the Disney remake appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

At first, the 1980s film “Personal Problems” appears to be a straightforward documentary. 

Johnnie Mae Brown, a nurse at Harlem Hospital Center, speaks to an interviewer off-camera about the rigors of her job, her relationship with her mother, and how her upbringing impacted her life. When she was a child, her mother was a maid who cleaned all day to pay the bills. When she came home to mess she would lash out, angry at having to continue the job for free in what ought to be her resting hours. 

But this isn’t a documentary. As Johnnie Mae speaks, imagery from outside this conversation intrudes on the talking head segment: a shot of an unhoused woman on a corner juxtaposed with Johnnie Mae, who is Black, referring to her mother as a mammy for being paid to care for white children. Then, what feels like a formal inquisition melds into a fictional dialogue scene set at a different location. Johnnie Mae isn’t an actual figure. She’s a character played by the poet, food writer, and sometimes-actress Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor. For the next two hours and forty-five minutes, the audience will become intimate with her on a level few films before or since have ever matched.

Originally conceived as a television drama and soap opera by “Ganja & Hess” director Bill Gunn alongside playwright and novelist Ishmael Reed, the shoe-string budgeted project proved too experimental for its intended medium. Eventually, it evolved and was split into a two-part feature film that remains one of Black cinema’s most singular and fascinating pieces. Heavily relying on improvisation and spontaneity, Gunn and his collaborators tell a melodramatic story about a nurse in a love triangle between her husband Charles (Walter Cotton) and Raymon, the singer she cheats on him with (Sam Waymon).

Gunn and his cinematographer Robert Polidori couldn’t afford to shoot on 35mm, so the picture was captured on a primordial digital video format that places the proceedings in a dreamy middle ground between the nostalgic haze of film grain and the exacting, vivid realism of modern high definition video. The capture media imbues everyday imagery with an impressionist aura. Waves in beach water possess a metallic, molten quality, with the frame rate’s smudgy motion resembling painterly canvas strokes. But the curious visuals work in concert with the off-the-cuff nature of the storytelling.

The only piece of the original project that ended up in its final state is a monologue Waymon aims at Smart-Grosvenor. He sings to her and, in his performance, inspires a stirring level of emotion that serves as the narrative’s guidepost. Johnnie Mae became the central focus and proved to be an extraordinarily compelling figure.

Despite relying on the sensational premise familiar to soap operas of the time, the story unfolds uniquely. Scenes run longer, light on plot but heavy on texture and detail.

Throughout the picture, we’re introduced to various supporting players, but the camera’s gaze, and thus our own, never peers as deeply into any of their lives as it does into Johnnie Mae’s. We see her fraught marriage and the stress of caring for her father-in-law (Jim Wright). We see the frivolous way she treats her fling with Raymon, a man who wants more from their pairing and can’t settle for being just a fleeting plaything. 

The experimental style is as much a hindrance as it is a boon. At nearly three hours length in one sitting rather than its original intended episodic shape, the film has prolonged segments and asides that bore, begging to have been excised to the cutting room floor. But between those unfortunate troughs, the film’s towering heights prove those valleys worth it. In perhaps the film’s most memorable sequence, Johnnie Mae fights for her life with her in-laws after a funeral, as her husband’s entire bloodline squabbles and blames her for their loss. 

A traditional narrative might build to a loud crescendo and then cut away to the next scene of quiet rumination, but Gunn sits us uncomfortably close to the entire outburst. First, its histrionic apex, then more disturbing, the endless grumbling in its wake. We see a level of intensity and sincerity in this portrait of Johnnie Mae because of the sheer time spent with her and how invasive the camera gets into her daily life. We’re not only witnesses to her life’s most dramatic screeds but also the tiresome ennui that exists between its more sensational highlights. 

“Personal Problems” gave form to a new paradigm that allowed for deeper resonance than its more scripted beginnings through necessity. Gunn and his team arrived at this aesthetic and this approach due to the financial realities of their production. Not dissimilarly, the dawn of reality TV was reliant on studios wanting cheaper programming than the increasingly pricy prospect of scripted shows. But in both cases, the results appealed to the nosy neighbor in all of us.

But where, say, “The Real Housewives of Atlanta” might provoke and entertain, every moment of artificially juiced conflict is always interrupted by confessional asides or passive-aggressive video editing. Often, these shows arrive at the contrivances of scripted fiction with extra steps feigning realism. Watching ‘Personal Problems,’ it feels like there was another, more nourishing way to scratch that itch for the audience. One that, with its raw and unfiltered portrayal of African American life, arouses more empathy than the sanctimony in modern ‘trashy’ TV’s ironic distance. 

One can’t help but wonder how modern storytelling might have evolved if “Personal Problems” had been a commercial and critical success rather than an enduring curiosity for art lovers and completionists.

“Personal Problems” can be streamed free using your library card on Kanopy or as part of Metrograph’s streaming service.

The post “Personal Problems” still feels ahead of its time appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

2024 wasn’t the banner year for film that 2023 was, or 2019 before it, or countless other years before a global pandemic altered the business, perhaps irreparably. Last year’s necessary labor actions from the Hollywood trade guilds led to significant gaps in this year’s calendar for mainstream releases, so there’s a tendency for people to categorize the year as an “off” one for the movies. 

But this year, like every year, there are great films worth taking the time to see. You have to look a little harder for them, or in the case of this year’s duds, work harder to save yourself from them.

The Best

“Rap World” / “Stand-Up Solutions” / “Coreys”

Comedian Conner O’Malley has produced transgressive, short-form digital content for several years. When he’s not pushing YouTube as a platform to its artistic limits, he’s turning to posting on social media as performance art. But this year, he released a trio of projects that are his most must-watch efforts yet. “Rap World” is a feature-length mockumentary about a trio of suburban white dudes in Pennsylvania trying to record a rap album over a single night in 2009. Shot on old-school, prosumer camcorders, it is both a hilarious distillation of a moment in time and a haunting time capsule for the beginning of the Obama years. 

O’Malley’s feature-length stand-up special, “Stand-Up Solutions,” follows that thematic line to the present day, performing the entire set as Richard Eagleton, a tech bro doing a TED Talk on how AI is the future of comedy. The jokes all kill, but it is such a stirring parody that it feels like a satirical knife to the gut at how profane consumerism has doomed us all.

But his latest short, “Coreys,” stands out the most. At only eleven minutes, this disturbing look at a suburban family man lured to Vegas when he sees a doppelganger on social media is the best horror film of the year. O’Malley stuffs this short full of more traumatic imagery than every other spooky flick released this year combined. 

“Let’s Start a Cult”

Baltimore’s Stavros Halkias (stand-up comedian, podcaster, and dedicated Ravens fan) has co-written and starred in his first feature film. Set in 2000, this micro-budgeted comedy centered around a botched cult is a major throwback to the 1990s. It’s a strange comparison and perhaps a backhanded compliment, but as the dumb but lovable protagonist, Stav calls to mind Pauly Shore in “Jury Duty.” There’s something so comforting about watching a movie made today that would have reliably replayed on Comedy Central thirty years ago, given how rare new comedies that aren’t also action blockbusters featuring Kevin Hart and The Rock are these days.

“The Apprentice”

Few cinematic prospects inspire less interest on face value than the “Donald Trump biopic,” but “The Apprentice” was the biggest surprise of the year in terms of underpromising and overdelivering.

Principally concerned with the relationship between Trump (Sebastian Stan) and his mentor, crooked lawyer Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), the film feels like watching the “Star Wars” prequels if you were a citizen of Alderaan, seeing how Darth Vader and The Emperor came to power in the first place.

Stan’s performance is impressive for its restraint, seeing the man slowly take on more of the conversational tics we’ve gotten all too used to. Visually, shifting from the 16mm graininess of the ’70s to the muddy digital video of the ’80s, we watch the Trump myth birthed into existence as two corrupt men come to realize that there is no limit to what you can gain if you commit to brute forcing your reality on others, no matter the consequences.

“Challengers” 

I have already reviewed this for the Beat, but all these months later, “Challengers” remains one of the year’s most thrilling and rewatchable moviegoing experiences. Prisoners of the moment may have felt this was a lucky hit coasting off the power of memes, a “brat summer” for tennis movies. But, no, it had the goods, and this three-way love story resonated for a reason: great performances and memorable moments.

“I Saw the TV Glow”

“I Saw the TV Glow” has grown more beloved to me since first seeing it. It’s a harrowing wake-up call, first and foremost, from the perspective of the trans experience, at a time when that demographic is more known to the public and thus more under fire than ever. But despite being dark and strange and, at times, terrifying, it is ultimately infused with so much love and compassion that it can speak to those outside of that specific experience. It will feel vital and nourishing to anyone stuck in their lives, unsure if the life they truly want will ever be anything more than a fleeting daydream.

The Worst

“Joker: Folie à Deux”

Todd Phillips’s first “Joker” film made a billion dollars selling a revenge fantasy to lonely incels but perhaps driven by a dissatisfaction with the audience he attracted, his highly anticipated sequel seems specifically designed to piss those same supporters off. Fans expecting to see Joaquin Phoenix in clown make-up living out their chaotic and violent fantasies were instead treated to a strange and often off-putting musical about accountability. 

Suppose the last movie was an easy and shortsighted call to arms aimed at the ever-growing demographic of disaffected young men longing to belong. In that case, this, in its finest moments, is begging them to take a look in the mirror and accept some personal responsibility for the craven and selfish ways they’ve acted out due to that pain. I might even respect the vindictive, hollow rug-pulling a little more if I thought Philips himself didn’t belong among the crowd he’s so gleefully dunking on. 

These films are gorgeous but so hollow and pointless because the man behind them has no ideas of his own.

“Madame Web”

It’s hard to put into words how disappointing this film was. Not because I or anyone else went into it thinking it might be good, but rather because it was touted as a masterpiece that might be entertaining for how galling in its terribleness it would be. 

Instead of something so bad it’s good, so awful it’s a riot, we’re treated to a movie that is so barely a movie as to be insulting. Sony will keep trying to make Spider-Man movies that don’t have Spider-Man in them, but this flat, lifeless, and confusing mess doesn’t even pass the low bar of being fun to laugh at with your friends.

“Bob Marley: One Love”

In the months since first seeing it, I’ve grown to loathe this film more and more whenever I see an ad for it streaming on VOD or am reminded of how Tyler Perry-ian Kingsley Ben-Adir’s Bob Marley locs look. In an era of hollow, consumerist cash grabs masquerading as meaningful portraits of historical figures, “One Love” is uniquely shortsighted and unambitious. 

It reduces Marley to the peace-loving, weed-smoking cipher college students who bought his poster from Spencer’s have always seen him as, and little else.

The post Best (and Worst) Films of 2024 appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

When “The Oath” was filmed, the 45th President of the United States had yet to complete his first year in office. The film centers around a contentious Thanksgiving dinner where a politically divided family attempts to keep the peace during a meal. Though rooted in the reality of the time, the film’s core dramatic departure surrounds the Patriotic Oath, a literal pledge of fealty to the (unnamed but Trump-coded) Commander-in-Chief. The core conceit of the film is that we, as a nation, were only seeing the tip of an Orwellian iceberg still to come. The 2018 film begins as an uncomfortable dark comedy, but slowly morphs into a dystopian thriller.

By the 2017 holiday season, we had witnessed innumerable lies made from the Oval Office, two Supreme Court justices chosen, and a disgraceful response to a trio of devastating hurricanes. But this was before COVID-19, George Floyd, and the January 6 riots. The seven years between this film’s production and this month’s election results may as well be a lifetime. Revisiting its main conflicts through fresh eyes, however, proves illuminating.

In the film, writer/director Ike Barinholtz stars as Chris, a run-of-the-mill lib guy who means well but is insufferable despite his “correct” moral views. After Trump was first elected, the resistance movement activated formerly casual voters into rabid keyboard warriors. Watching coverage on 24-hour news networks and maintaining perpetual connections to social media turned debating right wingers into an addictive sport. Chris captures this archetype with vivid specificity. In his office, he’s got a poster of George McGovern, 1972’s failed Democratic candidate for President. In justifying calling his brother’s conservative girlfriend the “c-word,” he imparts an anecdote about waiting in life for hours to have Roxane Gay sign a book for his wife.

It’s one of many times he uses Kai (Tiffany Haddish), his Black wife, as an impenetrable shield whenever anyone calls out what they consider to be his self-righteous virtue signaling. On a case-by-case basis, Chris isn’t wrong for his indignation, but all his wife wants is a peaceful three days without having to cool his jets as he jousts with her in-laws. Every attempt at casual socialization is a minefield for him to call out microaggressions excitedly.

But Chris doesn’t do anything. He refuses to sign the oath accurately and references a protest or two, but his crusade isn’t about any community building or mutual aid. It’s a literal addiction to digital pugilism. Even as he insists he can behave for the week, he scurries off to unoccupied rooms to sneak away and watch the news like it’s pornography. 

On Black Friday, two agents from an offshoot of the Department of Homeland Security get into the house without a warrant on suspicion that Chris is impeding his fellow citizens from signing the oath. Barber (John Cho) is more of a straightforward workman, but Mason (Billy Magnussen) is a believer. The “routine visit” quickly devolves into a violent hostage situation as everyone involved unravels and the stakes escalate at an alarming rate. 

When it was initially released, “The Oath” was well received, if minutely seen, as a mean and necessary respite from some of the toothless, resistance media of the time. But the film feels different upon rewatch. Its enjoyable skewering of its protagonist, though no less on the nose, feels less impactful. Instead, it’s Magnussen’s Mason who sticks out the most.

Usually typecast quite effectively as a ditzy himbo type, Magnussen delivers the most chilling performance of the year. He perfectly captures precisely the sort of disaffected white male who worships false idols and sees himself as a natural authority. In the end, he’s revealed to be hollow and performative in diametrically opposed ways to Barinholtz’s Chris. 

When it was originally delivered, it seemed like Magnussen based his performance on the Proud Boys and their tiki torch demonstrations in Charlottesville, Virginia. Revisiting it again, there’s this spiritual wrongness emanating off Magnussen in his depiction that reads like foreshadowing. His Mason now doubles as a stand-in for the younger, influencer-radicalized Trump supporters who made their way into the tent from video game streams and bodybuilding enthusiasts.

At the time, the film posited that some liberals insisted on breaking bread with their conservative cousins for the thrill of the fight. It was invigorating for guys like Chris to “take it outside,” or in this case, from the Facebook comment section to “irl.” It seems even the softest, most conciliatory Kamala voters aren’t taking the bait today. This year, it’s the Trumpers begging to have a nice, quiet meal with the relatives whose rights they just voted against.

Back then, though? “The Oath” presents a world of paranoia at how much worse things could get, and Thanksgiving feels like a microcosm of civic normalcy still within the individual citizen’s control. Soon, some felt that things would get bad in a way we could not, on our own, curtail. Instead of thinking about life beyond their home’s walls, they shut out the orange man’s rhetoric and stuffed their faces with turkey. They metaphorically surrounded the house with a circle of salt to keep the evil at bay. 

This year, everyone has seen more than enough to know that breaking bread with the enemy is a wasted effort.

“The Oath” is available to stream for free using your library card on Kanopy.

The post Black Friday appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

In its opening weekend, “Longlegs,” a breakout horror film effectively masquerading itself as a throwback police procedural, broke box office records for its distributor NEON. Using a largely memetic marketing campaign, it has followed in the footsteps of other recent horror flicks, presenting itself as the second coming of “The Exorcist” to a younger audience for whom the horror genre begins and ends with whatever A24 has released this year. So, is its success a fad? 

Well, with regard to maintaining a pervasive and discomfiting sense of dread through much of its runtime, “Longlegs” proves without peer among its contemporaries. But when the final act comes, and all its byzantine mythology must be made plain to the audience, it falls apart in a strangely poetic way. At the end of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 classic “Psycho,” viewers in that time were met with a lengthy exposition dump as a psychiatrist exhaustively cataloged the titular killer’s pathology. All the film’s tension and suspense melted away while the mystery surrounding Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) was directly spelled out.

Sixty years ago, mainstream audiences were not ready for the complex psychology at the film’s heart and needed their hands held lest they walk out of that auditorium bewildered for life. But “Longlegs,” written and directed by Anthony Perkins’ son Osgood, similarly pivots at the last minute to coddling an audience who, unlike the stuffy conservatives Hitchcock traumatized all those years ago, are more than game to put two and two together.

“Longlegs” opens with one of the strongest prologues in recent memory. Using a more confined, boxy aspect ratio, the film’s introductory sequence introduces us to Longlegs (Nicolas Cage), the pasty, androgynous, aging glam rock enthusiast at the heart of the film’s series of peculiar murders. Seen from the perspective of an unnamed little girl, Longlegs’ dusty, white appearance blends into the snowy environment and conjures a palpable fear. His lumbering frame, from the low height of a child, feels otherworldly and frightening, growing only more so when he hunches his body down to her level. For a nearly imperceptible flash, we see a glimpse of his face before a dramatic cut to the title sequence. 

That abstract terror permeates the quieter, more staid proceedings that follow. Jumping forward 20 years to 1993, we’re introduced to Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), a junior FBI agent. Harker possesses preternatural levels of intuition presented as a middle point between potential clairvoyance (should this film devolve into some measure of science fiction) and autistic-coded pattern recognition (far likelier). Her boss, Agent Carter (Blair Underwood), conscripts her into aiding on the long-unsolved “Longlegs” case. Over multiple decades, families are annihilated in unexplainable murder-suicides, where someone leaves letters with coded word puzzles signed only “Longlegs.” But it’s the families themselves combusting inward with bloodshed and torture, so how can an external entity be the culprit?

The investigation and its cinematic execution owe a lot to Jonathan Demme’s “The Silence of the Lambs,” with Monroe’s Harker channeling Jodie Foster’s Clarice Starling and Underwood’s Carter capturing a variation of Scott Glenn’s Jack Crawford (later played by Laurence Fishburne on the “Hannibal” television series). It’s easy to get caught up in the plaintive, patient way Perkins lets the narrative unfold. The camera holds carefully on these inviting wide shots where the periphery of the frame feels like an omnipresent threat. While Harker labors over crime scene photos, it constantly feels like the darkness of the case will swallow her whole or that something sinister is lurking from right beyond the reach of her gaze.

Perkins establishes this sense of inevitability as a slow burn, that the moody thriller we’re trudging through is going to collide with the occult-y horror picture Cage’s satanic figure shepherds along. But once the two halves meet, the film falls apart. Up to the final act, the film largely fixates on its mood and its dark energy. There are ideas at play around Satanist iconography, our nation’s history with serial killers, and the omnipresent sense that malice lurks behind the doors of even the most milquetoast, suburban dwellings. But the longer it all unravels, the less it feels likely to be building to a satisfying climax. 

When the film takes a left turn and does try to brute-force a killer ending, it flies in the face of all that’s come before it. The film’s die-hard fans and eagle-eyed Redditors will suggest that repeat viewings and slavish attention to blink-and-you’ll-miss-it easter eggs will reveal an ornate tapestry destined to withstand the test of time. (Perhaps they’re even right!)

But on the first watch, it’s difficult to shake the feeling that we’re watching both a celebratory coming-out party for Perkins as a director and empirical proof that his screenwriting requires more polish. Visually, he paints a compelling and engrossing picture, but the script that supports it has all the characteristics of a term paper rushed the night before a deadline. In another world, another rewrite or two might have brought the film’s many third-act revelations in line with the picture that precedes them.

Instead, we’re left with an intriguing effort with some solid performances from its cast that fails to end in a manner befitting its auspicious beginning.

“Longlegs” is currently playing exclusively in theaters.

The post ‘Longlegs’ is a strong effort held back from being an instant classic appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

Hit men do not exist. Or rather, the “retail”-level contract killer available to middle-class normies that is essentially a construct of movies and television does not exist. This is how the central, seemingly ridiculous premise of Richard Linklater’s new, loosely based-in-truth film “Hit Man” can function. 

In the film, Glen Powell plays Gary Johnson, a psych and philosophy professor who moonlights as a technician for the New Orleans police department. He assists in handling the surveillance side of sting operations where undercover cops pretend to be professional murderers to capture those who would hire them. Early in the film, Jasper (Austin Amelio), the hothead officer who usually plays the hit man role, is suspended after being filmed assaulting some teenagers in the line of duty. On short notice, Gary is called upon to stand in for him. 

Up to this point, Gary, through his voice-over narration and the sight of his bored students rolling their eyes during his lectures on ethics and the nature of the self, seems like the last person who should be doing a dangerous job like this. Aside from Powell’s chiseled good looks, Gary appears as milquetoast a protagonist as can be. In fact, the film’s general tone would also feel middling and unadventurous if one wasn’t already privy to Linklater’s unassuming gifts as a storyteller. But the second he walks into the sting, Gary and the film instantly come alive. He delivers a believably impressive and suitably fearsome performance as a man who makes his living ending lives. 

His police handlers Claudette (Retta) and Phil (Sanjay Rao) are blown away, and he begins to do the role more often in Jasper’s absence. Using his understanding of psychology, he puts an absurd level of effort into tailoring each fictional hit man he portrays to whomever they are trying to catch, allowing Gary a creative outlet to be any number of people more interesting than he seems to be. Perhaps the most entertaining section of the film is the series of stings that most viewers would have been comfortable watching for another hour, if not as a dedicated television series. Whether it’s the ginger Tilda Swinton wig he wears or the pitch-perfect Patrick Bateman impression he employs, Gary, and Powell in portraying him, have an absolute blast.

But the film hinges on one sting, where Gary as “Ron” has a surprising meet-cute with Madison (Adria Arjona), a woman trying to have her abusive husband killed. Taken by her vulnerability, Gary botches the sting and suggests she run away and start a new life. The easy chemistry between the two transcends the horrible predicament for their actual meeting, and “Hit Man” ascends into something special here. 

The film is loosely based on the real-life Gary Johnson who did this exact job, albeit less colorfully and less elaborately. Still, the secret to the movie’s special sauce is Linklater’s script that he co-wrote and developed with Powell. The key change they made from reality and the source material, a 2001 article from Texas Monthly magazine, is what happens after Gary lets an abused woman off the hook. In the film, they meet again and begin to date, with Madison knowingly courting a man she believes holds down a day job eradicating people and making their remains disappear. 

Powell and Arjona are magical together as the most toxic and foreboding romantic pairing on screen since Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike in “Gone Girl,” only Linklater’s vision is so much more laidback and less stylized than David Fincher’s. It becomes a tug of war over what’s worse, pretending to be someone you’re not while pursuing love or falling for someone you think is a literal monster, and what it says about both. The structure mirrors a romantic comedy. First, there’s tension about whether or not Madison will find out Gary’s truth and that “Ron” is a construct. Then, worse still, the real tension becomes about whether that construct is his true self.

In an overt move, much of the film’s drama and comedy are interspersed with scenes from Gary’s collegiate lectures, where he and his students have obvious debates about identity and morality meant to blast the film’s themes as loudly as possible. But that blatant device masks the more complex work being done between Powell and Arjona. In a romantic comedy, when one suitor pretends to be something he’s not, he can come clean, and the object of his affection affirms that all they ever wanted was the real him.

“Hit Man” goes in a much different direction. It suggests that whether or not fundamentally changing who you are is a good or a bad thing, it is, in fact, a possible thing. To achieve what you’ve never accomplished as you are, you may need to become someone you are not. But if you pretend long enough? If you genuinely fake it until you make it, what’s the difference?

“Hit Man” is currently streaming exclusively on Netflix.

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“The Pink Opaque,” the fictional mid-1990s television series at the center of “I Saw the TV Glow,“ will feel instantly recognizable on a visceral level. If you’re the target demographic for this film, you have had some parasocial connection to a piece of popular culture echoed in this effective pastiche. With the visual scanlines calling to mind VHS tapes of Nickelodeon’s “Are You Afraid of the Dark?“ and an opening credits font mirroring that of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,“ the show feels like a hazy memory of one’s youth. The outline of an immediately familiar shape, even if the details aren’t quite so clear.

The film centers around teenagers Owen (Justice Smith) and Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) and the friendship they form over their mutual obsession with “The Pink Opaque.“ The show follows Isabel (Helena Howard) and Tara (Lindsey Jordan), two friends who share a psychic connection they use to fight monsters, both in baddie-of-the-week stories and more profound mythology episodes surrounding the show’s big villain, Mr. Melancholy. For Owen, an isolated boy uncomfortable in his skin, and Maddy, a young lesbian with a toxic family life, the show’s protagonists represent strength and resolve neither can find within themselves in daily life.

As the two friends share VHS tapes and printed episode guides, the inner life of the show becomes inextricably bound with their real lives, to the point that Maddy’s eventual disappearance begins to feel as supernatural as the fiction emanating from the bright, striking pre-flat-screen-era televisions that feature in the film so prominently. How much TV is too much?

But there is a crucial moment in the film’s final act some folks seem to be placing too much emphasis on, causing them to miss the deeper portrait being painted. Late in the movie, an adult Owen finds himself revisiting the “The Pink Opaque” as a streaming show which is presented as looking sillier and more childish than it is through the rest of the picture. If earlier, to us, it mirrored “Buffy” and other more “mature” YA bait, here it feels decidedly “Sesame Street”-adjacent.

Out of context, it reads like a pointed, damning critique of the perpetually stunted millennial generation and our borderline concerning addiction to fictional media as a form of medicinal escapism. While this scene, within the context of the larger picture, is gesturing at the truth that there is a hard limit to the efficacy of media consumption as self-care, it is not the fulcrum on which the film’s story rests. For that, one must look much earlier in the film for a more nebulous but no less impactful sequence. 

When we first meet a younger Owen (Ian Foreman) in 7th-grade gym class, he is wandering under the umbrage of one of those giant parachutes teachers would use for easy group activities. While Yeule’s cover of Broken Social Scene’s “Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl” plays on the soundtrack, it’s difficult to overlook the parachute’s pattern, which is coded to match the colors of the transgender flag.

Writer/director Jane Schoenbrun is nonbinary (as is Lundy-Paine), but the film’s depiction of gender dysphoria seems to be going over some cis viewers’ heads mainly because the film artfully refrains from making its exploration of trans epiphany within the more explicit language viewers might expect from modern, queer cinema. Owen never comes out and claims any gender identity. The tells are sporadic, from the brief image of a repressed memory involving Owen presenting femme, to his stepfather (Fred Durst), refusing to let him stay up late to watch “The Pink Opaque,“ by asking if it’s for girls. But there’s no broadly telegraphed scene where he tearfully pours his guts out to a friend or loved one and spells it out.

“I Saw the TV Glow” is a heavy rumination on an element of being trans that ought to speak to plenty of cis folks, too: having the sense that something about your life is very wrong, but being trapped at the precipice of doing anything about it. 

Few films in recent memory house visuals that express this specific a sense of unsettling wrongness to the world it captures. Schoenbrun and cinematographer Eric K. Yue name-check “Batman Forever” as an aesthetic inspiration to present a haunted, neon-inflected mid-’90s, something that calls that era to mind, but diffused through disquieting layers of fog and implied malice. Coupled with a powerfully curated soundtrack full of original songs inspired by the film,

everything about this picture captures a unique vibe that feels entirely unto itself, despite the influences it shows freely on its sleeve. (The stars of Nickelodeon’s “The Adventures of Pete & Pete” both make cameos, as does Amber Benson from “Buffy.”)

The film’s emotional climax is one of the most startling and transgressive developments. After Maddy has reappeared into an adult Owen’s life, her explanation of where she has been is terrifying from a horror movie perspective but strangely comforting within the confines of this narrative and Owen’s predicament. Without spoiling the particulars, it poses a quandary that tickles the hero’s journey, which viewers will cry for throughout such an experimental and challengingly paced picture. In the moment, it collapses a film’s worth of difficult thematic ideas into a straightforward solution. But the “easy out” the film offers is anything but. In the film, as in life, real change has a cost, and the choices it requires can be too much for some. The final act trudges on as Owen and the audience have to wrestle with these revelations. At this point, a happy ending seems so unlikely that they’re left to ponder whether one is even possible.

Though the film ends on a down note, there is a lingering image that cuts through the dirge. It’s not coincidentally the first image in the film’s official trailer. It’s the chalk graffiti outside of Owen’s house, big and bold in bright pastel lettering: “there is still time.” 

“I Saw the TV Glow” plays exclusively in theaters but will be available onVOD next month.

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In the wake of “King Richard,” Will Smith’s heartwarming biopic about Serena and Venus Williams’ controversial patriarch, a new movie about tennis, even one framed as a romantic drama, seemed like it would inevitably be a pretty square affair. “Challengers,” starring Zendaya as the focal point of a years-long love triangle between tennis players, could have easily been that. But in director Luca Guadagnino’s hands, it is arguably the horniest, queerest picture to involve a tennis court since Alfred Hitchcock’s “Strangers on a Train.”

Luckily, no one gets murdered in this one, but it’s no less intense or thrilling for its lack of physical violence. All the damage here is emotional.

When the film begins, we’re watching the finals of a tennis tournament between Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) and Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor). Tashi Duncan (Zendaya) watches from the stands, initially focused entirely on Art, before shifting her gaze to the other side of the net when Patrick begins to take the upper hand. But this isn’t the climax of a prestigious event, but rather a “Challenger” in New Rochelle, the lower-level competitions professional players have to grind it out in to qualify on the grander stage. 

The film peels back the layers of these three figures’ histories together for the next two hours. Every successive flashback feels like a friend is telling you a story, but they keep forgetting crucial details and have to double back to fill in the blanks. Each new reveal drastically recontextualizes what we think we know about the fraught present-day tennis match we keep cutting back to. 

At various turns, the underlying themes are an extrapolation of different conflicts. First, we discover that Art and Tashi are married and that Art is one U.S. Open win away from a career Grand Slam. Patrick, his opponent, had to sleep in his car because his card was declined at a hotel the night before the tournament. So, perhaps we’re here to witness the importance of hunger in the world of sports, how the higher on the hog an athlete lives, the easier it is for them to lose their killer instinct. That is, until we discover that even deeper forces than the intersection of commerce and competition inexorably bind these three. 

Then the film flashes back far enough to see Art and Patrick as childhood best friends winning the junior doubles title at the U.S. Open. We see the duo meet a young Tashi, a significant prospect whose brilliance in the game suggests a career much more impressive than her eventual fate as the coach and business partner of someone as unexceptional as Art. 

As the trio flirt with one another, hearing Tashi talk about tennis and what tennis is sparks the film’s most effective through line: tennis is not about wins and losses but rather about the inherent intimacy between two opponents. The intensity the game requires and the amount of knowledge, both of self and of adversary, makes this sport indistinguishable from any other interpersonal relationship. The film repeatedly flips the dynamic amongst the trio of leads, with each protagonist taking turns as the odd one out. 

On the axis of friendship and love, of platonic and sexual connection, there are things more rewarding and more devastating than merely winning and losing.

Since its release, “Challengers” has been having a moment between its relative financial success and critical acclaim. But much of the film’s appeal seems wholly untethered to the sport it’s so principally concerned with unpacking. Instead, the film feels like the Bisexuality Industrial Complex funded it to cast the oft-maligned orientation in a more charming light. No more will bi folks be the butt of pithy indecision jokes. Following in the footsteps of excellent threesome fantasy bait pictures like François Truffaut’s 1962 “Jules et Jim,” Alfonso Cuarón’s 2001 “Y tu mamá también,” and Bernardo Bertolucci’s 2003 “The Dreamers,” Guadagnino’s gaze thwarts biphobia with several blows from the blunt edge of a tennis racket. Audience members walk out of the auditorium clumsily but excitedly, doing the cupid shuffle to the dead center on the Kinsey scale. 

But as much credit must be given to director Guadagnino’s eye, cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom’s verve, and the pulse-pounding thrill of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ clubby score, the picture lives or dies by the chemistry of its three leads. Both Faist and O’Connor jostle for dominance as the new White Boy of the Month, each showcasing a different side from their respective work in “West Side Story” and “The Crown.” They each flank Zendaya so effectively, with the actress pulling double duty as the film’s producer and a beloved star finally getting the lead role she truly deserves. “Euphoria” presents some of Zendaya’s finest work, but Rue is a limiting role. “Malcolm & Marie” was a step in the right direction, but the film’s script lacked the depth and complexity she’s truly capable of.

Here, three hot, young performers are given the right material and framing to punch their tickets to the big leagues. “Challengers” feels like a time machine back to an era where seeing a handful of talented and photogenic actors unravel interpersonal relationships was enough to get butts in seats at the multiplex. 

A lot of digital ink has been spilled about a concerning lack of legitimate movie stars in the post-MCU era, but with “Challengers” released so closely after “Dune: Part Two,” it feels like the kids are alright, and the best from this new generation is still to come.

“Challengers” is currently playing exclusively in theaters but will be available on VOD next month.

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This has been an exceptional year for film. For the first time post-Covid, the movie industry began to feel like it was back on something resembling the right track. The ‘Barbenheimer’ phenomenon signaled the possibility that theatrical releases not predicated upon superheroes or decades-old intellectual property could be critically and commercially successful again. 

But with the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, unfortunate truths about the creative and moral bankruptcy poisoning the studio system were hard to ignore. Problems with the industry also manifested in some of the films it produced, which were some of the most empty-headed releases in recent memory. 

As a “professional” who watches hundreds of films a year, please allow me to do my best to separate the wheat from the chaff and offer my thoughts on the year’s must-see and please-miss movies.

The Best

“Oppenheimer”

After the lackluster release of his last film “Tenet,” an indulgent but underrated sci-fi experiment that proved to be the lone failure in his storied career, the idea that Christopher Nolan was going to set the world on fire with a three-hour-long biopic about Robert Oppenheimer seemed incredibly unlikely. But with its dedication to big-screen spectacle and its massive cast of character actors, those hungry for something more nourishing at the box office were fed to the brim. Cillian Murphy’s central performance of a brilliant man cursed by his lack of convictions is haunting and tragic. Criticized for not exploring the specificity of the atomic bomb’s death toll or the psychological effect that devastation had on the Japanese people, “Oppenheimer” is instead a film about delayed consequences and the danger in not facing the potential aftereffects of one’s actions until it’s entirely too late.

“Killers of the Flower Moon”

Martin Scorsese has made a career painting portraits of villainy. All too often, his work is reduced to little more than the stylized glorification of horrible men when, in reality, he has been one of our foremost documenters of masculinity and this country’s history of malice and greed. To that end, “Killers of the Flower Moon” could be considered his magnum opus. It is an epic and horrifying tale of the murders that befell the Osage people in Oklahoma in the early 20th century, just up the road from the 1921 Tulsa race massacre. The film’s marketing exaggerates a love story between Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his wife Molly (Lily Gladstone in the year’s finest performance), but the film is instead an anti-mystery. Rather than a traditional police procedural trying to solve who is killing these people, the film asks the worst question: who isn’t? No other piece of mainstream filmmaking has better captured the insidiousness and banality of white supremacy’s omnipresent influence over America, a country Scorsese shows to be less of a nation and more an ever-enduring heist.

“The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial”

When William Friedkin passed away earlier this year, it seemed a shame that his last picture would be a Showtime-produced TV movie that would never see the big screen. But this film, based on the same Herman Wouk play whose original novel inspired the 1954 Humphrey Bogart classic “The Caine Mutiny,” far exceeds its standing as something made strictly for cable. The tightly coiled courtroom drama following the case of Officer Maryk (Jake Lacy) on trial for taking over a ship from his captain, Queeg (Kiefer Sutherland), houses some of the strongest acting and most thrilling interplay of anything released this year. What it lacks in Friedkin’s usually more edgy visual style it more than makes up for in sturdy film craft and an immaculate turn from character actor Jason Clarke as the conflicted man who has to represent someone he doesn’t believe. Clarke is especially fantastic in the film’s notorious twist ending, an epilogue that once affirmed the jingoistic status quo of post-WWII America. Instead, Friedkin transposes that setting to the present day, leaving a more complex final statement befitting a nation standing in the shadow of the forever wars.

“BlackBerry”

I went into this thinking it would be a mildly charming, B-movie approximation of Silicon Valley biopics like “The Social Network” and “Steve Jobs,” but was instead treated to a lean, mean, and menacing little picture about the once towering smartphone maker’s untimely demise. Anchored by two memorable turns from Jay Baruchel as Mike Lazaridis, the brains behind the BlackBerry, and Glenn Howerton as Jim Balsillie, the tyrant who turned the company into a global force through sheer will, director Matt Johnson’s film is both utterly hilarious and quietly tragic. Few film scenes this year have more impactful and deflating energy than the inevitable scene where everyone at RIM watches the announcement of the iPhone, foolishly unaware of how obsolete they had just become.

The Worst

“Ghosted”

I already wrote at length about how forgettable and middling this Apple-produced spy-fi rom-com was, but at the time, even I was wrong about how unmemorable it would be. When compiling this list, were it not for the diary I maintain on Letterboxd, I wouldn’t have remembered seeing this picture, much less reviewing it for this paper. Such is the danger in the kind of vaporware cinema these streaming platforms love to churn out.

“Heart of Stone”

Speaking of vaporware, Netflix spent an exorbitant amount of money on this mediocre action thriller with the hopes of launching a new franchise, with superspy Rachel Stone (Gal Gadot in one of her most inert performances) at the helm. Too bad for them, all the fine creatives behind the finished product, and anyone with the unique misfortune of having watched the damn thing, this movie seems to exist solely so “Ghosted” wouldn’t feel so lonely at the “worst movies about spies” table.

“Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania”

Earlier this month, “The Marvels,” the first MCU film to be helmed by a Black female director (Nia DaCosta), suffered the steepest second-weekend drop-off in superhero box office history, ensuring the film would not only be the first Marvel film to lose money definitively but the first to likely fail to cross the $100 million threshold domestically. But a significant portion of the blame for that financial reality can be placed squarely on this bloated, unimaginative mess of a film from earlier this year. Audiences went into “Quantumania” with the expectation that this new phase’s Big Bad (embattled star Jonathan Majors as Kang) would be introduced and the road toward the next climactic pair of “Avengers” films would begin in earnest. Instead, they were subjected to one of the driest, most underwhelming entries in this entire mega-franchise. The result is a film so awful it underperformed enough to turn the next, largely unconnected film with the Marvel logo into a massive bomb. Marvel’s brand has been in decline for a few years now, but when the dust clears, this ugly, boring, and mirthless film will have its place in history as the indisputable inflection point.

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