To the extent that Strange World will be discussed at all, the movie’s actual qualities will not be considered. This is because Disney’s latest computer-animated story is also the newest piece of red meat for hysterical reactionaries flooding audience rating metrics to condemn its central portrayal of a young gay character (somehow an animated first for the mega-brand), though recently Lightyear featured a gay peripheral character, which in itself was enough to provoke the maddest freaks of the land to label it a woke disaster.

Strange World was curiously under-promoted, though and is likely bound for Disney+ sooner rather than later, inspiring shrunken discourse along with mystery about whether the world’s largest entertainment company cares about theaters anymore, but also about whether they really want a family movie with progressive representation to succeed. Maybe some important people over there agree with the bigoted zealots suppressing its public score on Rotten Tomatoes.

If it tastes so bad for the homophobes, that’s probably because the representation afoot is no stale tokenism and actually has flavor. But the teenage love story they’re so steamed about is just one strand in a larger, richer allegory about weirdness, gentleness, hubris, and Disney’s most classic themes: family and love. The historical features of the swashbuckler archetype are brought into tenderly revisionist scope—Dennis Quaid voices the reckless adventuring grandpa, Jake Gyllenhaal is his frustrated farmer son, and Chicago’s own Jaboukie Young-White is the pubescent grandson trying to show both of them what wonder really is.

Everyone is delightfully lost in a softly Lovecraftian Osmosis Jones labyrinth with climate change overtones and lovely faceless critters everywhere, trying to pantomime meaning to these stumbling humans. All comes together predictably in a neat and gorgeous less-than-two-hours, occasionally broken up by pulpy graphic novel interstitials. It’s a terrific ride.PG, 102 min.

Wide release in theaters

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Sr. is capable of softening even the hardest of hearts. Not everyone is a film buff, but most moviegoers know who Robert Downey Jr. is, whether as the affable and attractive Tony Stark or the lively and legendary Charlie Chaplin. His first roles, however, were in a handful of independent films directed by Robert Downey Sr., an absurdist, anti-establishment artist who set the standard for countercultural comedy in the 60s and 70s. He is also, of course, Jr.’s father. This is where it becomes easy to deploy cynicism. But to dismiss Sr. as a particular type of nepotism baby’s cash grab would be to forsake the film’s namesake, a man so steadfast in his artistic vision that he decides to “embark on his own concurrent and final film project” within Sr. And while those aforementioned film buffs could wax poetic about his legacy, it’s much more enjoyable to see Sr.’s career through the same lens that shot celebrated works like Greaser’s Palace (1972). Compiled with documentarian Chris Smith’s footage of Sr.’s final years battling Parkinson’s disease, the film also showcases how his love of creating is reflected in his familial relationships, making for a perfectly surreal, silly, and sentimental send-off. R, 89 min.

Netflix

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One doesn’t have to be a restaurant industry insider to enjoy director Rebecca Halpern’s documentary Love, Charlie. Instead, Chicago’s buzzing restaurant scene in the 90s serves as the pressure cooker that finally breaks a man who is fueled and blinded by his ambition. 

To tell the story of famed Chicago chef Charlie Trotter, Halpern has assembled a smorgasbord of superstar chefs from Wolfgang Puck to Emeril Lagasse, the latter a peer of Trotter’s at his height. The juiciest gossip comes from Trotter’s former staff, among them Alinea’s Grant Achatz, while his first wife and business partner, Lisa Ehrlich, elicits the documentary’s tear-jerking moments. Chef Reginald Watkins, who passed away in 2020 and was Trotter’s first hire, gives an unvarnished look at his former boss, recalling how he was so obsessed with his goals that he would sleep in the restaurant’s dining room.

Through these interviews and Trotter’s letters, Halpern compiles a portrait of a control freak. It’s a well-balanced characterization, showing both his culinary genius and cruelty. In a meta scene, Trotter spars with his former apprentice, Curtis Duffy, during the filming of Duffy’s documentary For Grace.

The epistolary structure, brought to life by Scott Grossman’s two-dimensional animations that are by turns playful and grotesque, is what elevates the film. Never one to shy away from controversy, Trotter did not hold back his opinions in interviews. In the opening shot of the foie gras wars, he once infamously suggested offering up a rival chef’s fatty liver in lieu of the duck’s. While those interviews showed off Trotter’s pugnacious side, the letters give viewers an honest look inside his mind. Beginning in his youth, we see a man who was determined and romantic. He writes in 1985, “I am just getting too antsy to open a restaurant of my own.” As Trotter ages, the dark humor he penned earlier in his life grows increasingly alarming.

Even after acrimonious battles with their former mentor, Trotter proteges like Achatz do not express any hint of schadenfreude at the once great chef’s downfall. They know they could easily be next, wandering drunk or just disillusioned outside their old establishment.

Perhaps Trotter’s tragic rise and fall were best summed up by one of the only chefs not interviewed in the film, the late Anthony Bourdain.

“Rest In Peace Charlie Trotter,” Bourdain tweeted in 2013. “A giant. A legend. Treated shabbily by a world he helped create. My thoughts go out to those who loved him.” 96 min.

Limited release in theaters and wide release on VOD

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D.H. Lawrence’s 1928 novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover doesn’t seem an especially propitious basis for a new Netflix movie. Sex scenes aren’t a scandal anymore, and neither is a relationship across class lines; the shock of the original has little power now. Add in Netflix’s egregiously wrong-headed effort to turn Jane Austen’s Persuasion into a vehicle for cutesy snark from earlier this year, and many viewers may approach Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre’s adaptation with caution.

That caution is, thankfully, not necessary. Lady Chatterley’s Lover may not have the power to shock that it once did, but in Clermont-Tonnerre’s hands it retains both romantic and social resonance. In the era of Donald Trump and Elon Musk, Sir Clifford Chatterley (Matthew Duckett) certainly seems familiar. Wounded in the war, his impotence is not, the film makes clear, due to his disability, but to his embrace of his class and his entitlement. He orders men to misery in his mines. He orders his wife Connie (Emma Corrin) to sleep with someone else to provide him with an heir. He thinks he has the right to demand production and reproduction. Duckett as Chatterley practically curdles in on himself, turning away from his marriage in favor of the safer emotional satisfactions of power.

Corrin as Connie Chatterley is the perfect actor to show love dying and love opening anew. Her face is so radiant in happiness that every moment of sadness and misery feels almost unendurable. Clermont-Tonnerre wisely keeps the focus of the film squarely on the lady as she traipses through ravishing wild landscapes in ravishing fashionable frocks, searching for her quietly smoldering gamekeeper Oliver Mellors (Jack O’Connell). The latter manages to convey with only the occasional look of wonder that he can’t believe the miracle he’s been given. Their sex scenes are plentiful and joyously, earthily sensuous. The old slang words “John Thomas” are never uttered, but I think Lawrence would still be pleased. R, 126 min.

Netflix

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The Fabelmans is a story of how the things we love the most can bring us the most pain but also drive us to find ourselves. It’s a semi-autobiographical love story to cinema in the truest sense, opening with the precise and logical engineer Burt (Paul Dano) and creative-driven former pianist Mitzi (Michelle Williams) taking a young Sammy (Gabriel LaBelle) to his first film The Greatest Show on Earth. Terrified but engrossed by the images he sees, Sammy begins his journey as a burgeoning filmmaker, enlisting his family and friends into his cinematic projects. Simultaneously, the Fabelman family undergoes a series of moves necessitated by Burt’s increasing success in his engineering career and at the expense of Mitzi’s emotional and social stability.

Steven Spielberg’s 33rd feature film is a marvel coming-of-age story and one of his most personal. Much of its charm comes from its ability to create robust internal lives for its secondary characters, eschewing the standard trope of the world through the eyes of a self-centered main character. There are typical growing pains and tensions for Sammy as he discovers that the world is more complicated and nuanced than he could imagine. The hopes, fears, and missed opportunities of his parents are also given ample time onscreen to allow for a fully composed vision of the rocky progression of a family that truly loves one another, but aren’t always able to move in the same direction.

The Fabelmans is a mesmerizing film, shot with typically expert skill and deftly utilizing Sammy’s films within films to convey joy, fear, and devastating pathos, with the script by Tony Kushner providing truly devastating moments of heartfelt emotion. It’s a fully orchestrated film that manages to maintain its relatability, eagerly shifting between embellishment and moments of truth without losing its potency. PG-13, 151 min.

Wide release in theaters and VOD

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Santa is on the prowl in Violent Night, and he’s packing heat, tattoos, and a surprising amount of heart. David Harbour is the grizzled-up Saint Nick, and he’s just a guy, still prone to tender sympathy with young believers, as well as vomiting from his sleigh during his holiday deliveries. But when he stumbles onto a band of mercenaries so dastardly you actually sympathize wholly with the wealthy family who owns the compound they’re attacking (and headed by a scene-stealing Beverly D’Angelo), he reluctantly decides to bring the Christmas cheer . . . by any hilariously violent means necessary.

Violent Night kicks cynicism to the curb as Santa rediscovers Christmas magic between bloodbaths, bonds with the young and wide-eyed Trudy (Leah Brady, the movie’s embodiment of innocence and belief), and battles John Leguizamo in one of his most twisted roles yet—a villain so committed he dubs himself Scrooge and eventually becomes determined to end Christmas itself. Their standoff is one of the most imaginatively grisly in a movie full of satisfying ends, no small task for audiences who have long since become acclimated to niche content. And even with the usual tropes that must be indulged, the cartoonish brutality is still worthy of the multiple Home Alone callbacks. 

Despite refusing to tip a few scales in the favor of those attempting to rob the rich to feed themselves, Violent Night still manages to conjure its own holiday miracle—the desire for a sequel in a market glutted with them. R, 112 min.

Wide release in theaters

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To the extent that Strange World will be discussed at all, the movie’s actual qualities will not be considered. This is because Disney’s latest computer-animated story is also the newest piece of red meat for hysterical reactionaries flooding audience rating metrics to condemn its central portrayal of a young gay character (somehow an animated first for the mega-brand), though recently Lightyear featured a gay peripheral character, which in itself was enough to provoke the maddest freaks of the land to label it a woke disaster.

Strange World was curiously under-promoted, though and is likely bound for Disney+ sooner rather than later, inspiring shrunken discourse along with mystery about whether the world’s largest entertainment company cares about theaters anymore, but also about whether they really want a family movie with progressive representation to succeed. Maybe some important people over there agree with the bigoted zealots suppressing its public score on Rotten Tomatoes.

If it tastes so bad for the homophobes, that’s probably because the representation afoot is no stale tokenism and actually has flavor. But the teenage love story they’re so steamed about is just one strand in a larger, richer allegory about weirdness, gentleness, hubris, and Disney’s most classic themes: family and love. The historical features of the swashbuckler archetype are brought into tenderly revisionist scope—Dennis Quaid voices the reckless adventuring grandpa, Jake Gyllenhaal is his frustrated farmer son, and Chicago’s own Jaboukie Young-White is the pubescent grandson trying to show both of them what wonder really is.

Everyone is delightfully lost in a softly Lovecraftian Osmosis Jones labyrinth with climate change overtones and lovely faceless critters everywhere, trying to pantomime meaning to these stumbling humans. All comes together predictably in a neat and gorgeous less-than-two-hours, occasionally broken up by pulpy graphic novel interstitials. It’s a terrific ride.PG, 102 min.

Wide release in theaters

Read More

Sr. is capable of softening even the hardest of hearts. Not everyone is a film buff, but most moviegoers know who Robert Downey Jr. is, whether as the affable and attractive Tony Stark or the lively and legendary Charlie Chaplin. His first roles, however, were in a handful of independent films directed by Robert Downey Sr., an absurdist, anti-establishment artist who set the standard for countercultural comedy in the 60s and 70s. He is also, of course, Jr.’s father. This is where it becomes easy to deploy cynicism. But to dismiss Sr. as a particular type of nepotism baby’s cash grab would be to forsake the film’s namesake, a man so steadfast in his artistic vision that he decides to “embark on his own concurrent and final film project” within Sr. And while those aforementioned film buffs could wax poetic about his legacy, it’s much more enjoyable to see Sr.’s career through the same lens that shot celebrated works like Greaser’s Palace (1972). Compiled with documentarian Chris Smith’s footage of Sr.’s final years battling Parkinson’s disease, the film also showcases how his love of creating is reflected in his familial relationships, making for a perfectly surreal, silly, and sentimental send-off. R, 89 min.

Netflix

Read More

One doesn’t have to be a restaurant industry insider to enjoy director Rebecca Halpern’s documentary Love, Charlie. Instead, Chicago’s buzzing restaurant scene in the 90s serves as the pressure cooker that finally breaks a man who is fueled and blinded by his ambition. 

To tell the story of famed Chicago chef Charlie Trotter, Halpern has assembled a smorgasbord of superstar chefs from Wolfgang Puck to Emeril Lagasse, the latter a peer of Trotter’s at his height. The juiciest gossip comes from Trotter’s former staff, among them Alinea’s Grant Achatz, while his first wife and business partner, Lisa Ehrlich, elicits the documentary’s tear-jerking moments. Chef Reginald Watkins, who passed away in 2020 and was Trotter’s first hire, gives an unvarnished look at his former boss, recalling how he was so obsessed with his goals that he would sleep in the restaurant’s dining room.

Through these interviews and Trotter’s letters, Halpern compiles a portrait of a control freak. It’s a well-balanced characterization, showing both his culinary genius and cruelty. In a meta scene, Trotter spars with his former apprentice, Curtis Duffy, during the filming of Duffy’s documentary For Grace.

The epistolary structure, brought to life by Scott Grossman’s two-dimensional animations that are by turns playful and grotesque, is what elevates the film. Never one to shy away from controversy, Trotter did not hold back his opinions in interviews. In the opening shot of the foie gras wars, he once infamously suggested offering up a rival chef’s fatty liver in lieu of the duck’s. While those interviews showed off Trotter’s pugnacious side, the letters give viewers an honest look inside his mind. Beginning in his youth, we see a man who was determined and romantic. He writes in 1985, “I am just getting too antsy to open a restaurant of my own.” As Trotter ages, the dark humor he penned earlier in his life grows increasingly alarming.

Even after acrimonious battles with their former mentor, Trotter proteges like Achatz do not express any hint of schadenfreude at the once great chef’s downfall. They know they could easily be next, wandering drunk or just disillusioned outside their old establishment.

Perhaps Trotter’s tragic rise and fall were best summed up by one of the only chefs not interviewed in the film, the late Anthony Bourdain.

“Rest In Peace Charlie Trotter,” Bourdain tweeted in 2013. “A giant. A legend. Treated shabbily by a world he helped create. My thoughts go out to those who loved him.” 96 min.

Limited release in theaters and wide release on VOD

Read More

D.H. Lawrence’s 1928 novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover doesn’t seem an especially propitious basis for a new Netflix movie. Sex scenes aren’t a scandal anymore, and neither is a relationship across class lines; the shock of the original has little power now. Add in Netflix’s egregiously wrong-headed effort to turn Jane Austen’s Persuasion into a vehicle for cutesy snark from earlier this year, and many viewers may approach Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre’s adaptation with caution.

That caution is, thankfully, not necessary. Lady Chatterley’s Lover may not have the power to shock that it once did, but in Clermont-Tonnerre’s hands it retains both romantic and social resonance. In the era of Donald Trump and Elon Musk, Sir Clifford Chatterley (Matthew Duckett) certainly seems familiar. Wounded in the war, his impotence is not, the film makes clear, due to his disability, but to his embrace of his class and his entitlement. He orders men to misery in his mines. He orders his wife Connie (Emma Corrin) to sleep with someone else to provide him with an heir. He thinks he has the right to demand production and reproduction. Duckett as Chatterley practically curdles in on himself, turning away from his marriage in favor of the safer emotional satisfactions of power.

Corrin as Connie Chatterley is the perfect actor to show love dying and love opening anew. Her face is so radiant in happiness that every moment of sadness and misery feels almost unendurable. Clermont-Tonnerre wisely keeps the focus of the film squarely on the lady as she traipses through ravishing wild landscapes in ravishing fashionable frocks, searching for her quietly smoldering gamekeeper Oliver Mellors (Jack O’Connell). The latter manages to convey with only the occasional look of wonder that he can’t believe the miracle he’s been given. Their sex scenes are plentiful and joyously, earthily sensuous. The old slang words “John Thomas” are never uttered, but I think Lawrence would still be pleased. R, 126 min.

Netflix

Read More