Movies
Part of what makes the Harry Potter books (and, by extension, movies) so warm and lived-in is that they are about 50 percent just hanging out with characters, which allows J. K. Rowling the opportunity to craft hugely endearing characters to foreground the mystery/epic qualities of the rest of the narrative. Fantastic Beasts allows itself no such breathing room, so it's not surprising that the characterizations suffer. This movie moves, and that's both good in that there's never a dull moment and bad in that it serves to highlight Rowling's weaknesses. Rowling's tendency to write only two dimensional characters is offset in her novels by the sheer amounts of charm she can bestow on them, but without the extended hangouts that lengthy novels allow, we're left with a stable of skilled and charismatic actors fleshing out what are otherwise thin people. That's the bad. The good is pretty much everything else. The movie is a marvel of the densely inventive world-building that made Hogwarts such a rewarding setting; the creature designs are appropriately fantastic and allow Rowling a great opportunity to imbue a rather dark story with some of her keen humor; the story is nuanced in a way that Harry Potter rarely was, even giving the prospective archvillain Grindelwald a coherent motivation beneath his evil schemes that feels much more human than Voldemort's "I'm evil, deal with it"; the plot's central metaphor of oppression, while obvious, is enormously affecting; and as much as I spent the first half of this review complaining about the characters, I'll be jiggered if the film doesn't still manage to find emotional resonance in every one of them, which I suppose sort of renders limp a lot of my earlier gripes about characterization. I suspect the few other minor gripes I have will strike fans as ineffectual, too—the seeds for the sequels feel a bit useless in this movie, for example, and I would have appreciated a sharper visual flair outside of the admittedly excellent creature designs. But on the whole, this is a promising and effective start to what looks to be a vital addition to the Potter franchise. Grade: B+
There have been good Jane Austen movies in the past, but Love & Friendship is the first I've seen since Clueless to have captured that precise combination of affection and bite that makes Austen so readable. It's of course laugh-out-loud funny (an extended sequence involving a misunderstanding of the number of Biblical Commandments [i.e. not ten] stands out) and in turns a vicious indictment of England's fatuous leisure class. But there's also genuine warmth within that indictment, and these characters, though we're asked to laugh at them mercilessly, are also ones you grow rather fond of. It's a trick that Austen managed in each of her novels, but it's one that's been much rarely achieved in film adaptations. As always, Jane Austen's plotting-by-summary makes for a slightly awkward transition into motion picture (as large chunks of exposition are grafted into the speech of the characters)—even a writer as talented as Whit Stillman hasn't found a way around that one. On the whole, though, it's a joy of a movie likely to please Austen fans for years. Grade: B+
Based on an elegant premise first debuted in a 2013 short of the same name (a monster that can only attack in the dark), Lights Out is a formal wonder. Its plot's emphasis on darkness gives the film an phenomenal attention to detail in both lighting and shot composition, as we viewers hunt for any little corner of the frame that may contain darkness and hence the monster. It's the most effective horror device I've seen since It Follows, and the movie is pretty much guaranteed a legendary status because of it. There's also subtext aplenty, though, and while I normally welcome some good old-fashioned subtext in horror (this one's very unsubtly about clinical depression), Lights Out takes this subtext to a frighteningly dark place that is exactly what the modern, social-justice use of the word "problematic" was created for. So that that as you will. Grade: B+
Some of the most drop-dead gorgeous animation I've ever seen is somewhat wasted bringing to life a dull (and, frankly, uncomfortable) plot. But at only 46 minutes, it's really not much plot to endure as the price for basking in that stunning animation. Grade: B
Did you know that women are too weak to withstand the magnetic attraction of cold, hard cash? Did you know that men—especially the men with the cold, hard cash—must rush in to save women from their weakness? Learn these facts and many more in the timelessly regressive That Touch of Mink. The most joyless Cary Grant performance I've ever seen anchors a slightly less joyless Doris Day for a solid 99 minutes of few laughs. I'll give it this much: the climactic chase sequence is pretty funny. Outside of that, though, it's not so great. Grade: C
I'm a sucker for ensemble movies in which the ensemble becomes an ad hoc family, and Stagecoach is a great one in that regard. The sheer warmth with which these characters are drawn is marvelous, and by the end, when these people start looking out for each other, the unironic optimism in human nature on display is, after decades of cynical revisionist westerns, a welcome reminder of the reasons general audiences fell in love with westerns to begin with. Grade: A-
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