Category: Miguel’s Reviews

THE LEOPARD (Italy, 1963)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Luchino Visconti
CAST: Burt Lancaster, Claudia Cardinale, Alain Delon, Paolo Stoppa
MY RATING: 9/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 98% Certified Fresh

PLOT: The Prince of Salina, a noble aristocrat of impeccable integrity, tries to preserve his family and class amid the tumultuous social upheavals of 1860s Sicily.


Visconti’s intimate epic The Leopard evokes the spirit of so many other films, in all the best ways, that it’s hard to know where to begin.

It’s epic in scope and intimacy, like Doctor Zhivago.  The opulent costumes reminded me of Amadeus, and the lush scenery reminded of Barry Lyndon.  The final ballroom sequences must have influenced the wedding party in The Deer Hunter.  The literate screenplay refining tons of background exposition resurfaces in movies like JFK and Nixon.  The theme of a grizzled older man facing his own obsolescence is echoed in scores of Westerns from The Wild Bunch to Unforgiven to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

In short, The Leopard takes bits and pieces of many of my favorite films and consolidates them into an absorbing movie that held my interest from beginning to end, despite its esoteric setting: Italy during the tumultuous years of the “Risorgimento,” when the aristocratic ruling classes were faced with extinction as the middle classes rose up, rebelled, and created a democratic Italy.

We first meet Prince Don Fabrizio Salina (Burt Lancaster) as he and his extended family are attending vespers in an upstairs room of their palatial mansion.  Their ritual is interrupted by sounds of commotion and argument coming from outside the room; turns out the dead body of a soldier has been found in the garden.  (In retrospect, this seemed to me an elegant metaphor for the entire rest of the film: a family’s stability and comfort in ceremony and formality being interrupted by outside forces intent on tearing down the old order in favor of the new.)

The dead body is forgotten very shortly amid the return home of a beloved nephew, Tancredi Falconeri (the dashing Alain Delon).  His return is short-lived as he intends to leave and join the middle-class army under General Garibaldi.  Meanwhile, Prince Salina comprehends the way the wind is blowing in his country and befriends a man, Don Calogero Sedara (Paolo Stoppa), who USED to be in a lower class, but who is now on the same social footing as the Prince himself.  As the newly instated supervisor of elections, Sedara wields considerable power in the imminent new society on the horizon, and the Prince knows what must be done, despite his misgivings.

From there, The Leopard evolves into a vivid tapestry of life in the rustic Italian countryside, set among some of the most beautiful Tuscan/Sicilian backdrops I’ve ever seen.  Some of the exteriors, showing seas of wheat or olive groves with peasant workers in the foreground, looked like museum-quality oil paintings.  Some soapy material is introduced, but it never panders, never descends into schmaltz.  For example, Tancredi falls in love with Don Sedara’s daughter, the luscious Angelica (Italian knockout Claudia Cardinale), at the expense of breaking the heart of Concetta, one of Prince Salina’s daughters.  We watch as the Prince boldly strides into a seedy quarter of town to visit the rundown apartment of his mistress.  When his priest rebukes him for this transgression against his wife, the Prince explodes: “What do you want from me?  I’m a vigorous man.  I can’t be content with a woman who crosses herself before hugging me!  …I had seven kids with her.  You know what?  I never saw her navel!”

While this dialogue is both funny and not, it highlights the way the Prince has always viewed himself: as a man of noble birth whose behavior is no one’s business but his own, regardless of morality or social niceties.  But this same man is intelligent enough to know which way the wind is blowing and how to modify his behavior accordingly.

Everything concludes with a magnificent ball held by a neighboring nobleman, attended by “anybody who’s anybody” including the Prince, his family, Tancredi and Angelica, and literally hundreds of others, decked out in some of the greatest costumes I’ve ever seen on film.  During this lavish party, some final decisions are made, and the Prince contemplates what will happen to him and his family, and his entire class, after his death.  The live orchestra plays several waltzes and dances by the one and only Nino Rota, the scorer for Coppola’s The Godfather and numerous Fellini films.  As a result, yet another great film is evoked: as the celebrants dance in a line and weave their way throughout the great house, I was reminded of the famous ending of Fellini’s 8½ [1963] and its conga line of circus performers.

Some time ago I read Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer-prize winning novel The Goldfinch.  While it didn’t deliver breathless thrills like a Crichton technothriller, it was nevertheless engrossing.  The language of Tartt’s prose transported me into the world of her hero and his morally complex journey like few other books had before or since.  That’s exactly what happened with The Leopard.  I expected it to be a “spinach” movie [good for you, but yucky taste], so my expectations were a bit low, despite its massive reputation in film circles.  But, like the other Visconti film that I’ve seen [Rocco and His Brothers, 1960], it breaks free of the mold I had created for it and becomes something grand and operatic.  I have a slight issue with the very final scene (I was hoping for something a little less open-ended), but if you have the patience for it – and if you don’t mind watching Burt Lancaster overdubbed into Italian – The Leopard is a treasure worth digging for.

THE WILD ROBOT (2024)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Chris Sanders
CAST: Lupita Nyong’o, Pedro Pascal, Bill Nighy, Stephanie Hsu, Ving Rhames, Mark Hamill, Catherine O’Hara
MY RATING: 10/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 97% Certified Fresh

PLOT: An intelligent helper robot winds up stranded on an island populated only by wild animals.  To survive its new environment, it adjusts its programming, with unexpected results.


Just days after watching Flow [2024], a dialogue- and human-free animated film about animals struggling to survive after a cataclysmic flood, I watched The Wild Robot, also human-free, also starring mostly animals, and also about the struggle for survival, but it adds conventional dialogue and an intelligent robot in search of its purpose.  In broad, REALLY broad strokes, they are similar, but don’t bother asking me which one is better.  I give them both a ten-out-of-ten, each for different reasons from the other.  Flow may be literally unique, at least in my experience, but The Wild Robot tames its genre and bends it to its will, creating one of the most heart-tugging movie experiences since Wall*E [2008].  If you’re prone to crying during a movie, this is a three-hanky film, at least.  (Penni went through five, herself.)

On a dark and stormy night, a mysterious container washes up on the shores of an uninhabited island.  Inside is Rozzum 7134, an intelligent helper robot with exceptional physical capabilities and the speaking voice of Lupita Nyong’o.  Hope she gets her royalty checks.  Upon escaping her would-be watery coffin, Rozzum searches the island for the one thing that will give her existence meaning: a task to complete.  The opening scenes get us off to a hilarious start as she tries to complete tasks for various animals, to no avail.  In an intelligent bit of screenwriting, she powers down for a couple of days and, through passive listening, effectively learns the language of the animals around her.  In a lesser movie, this feat might have been handled with the push of a button.  I liked the fact the writers went for something a little easier to swallow, science-fiction-wise.

Through circumstances which I will not reveal, Rozzum winds up as the guardian for a newly-hatched gosling, and as the unlikely friend of a fox named Fink (Pedro Pascal, whose voice was utterly unrecognizable; I thought it was Matthew Broderick).  The gosling imprints on Rozzum, which she finds bothersome.  A helpful mom opossum, Pinktail (Catherine O’Hara), warns Rozzum that the gosling must learn to feed itself, swim, and fly by the next fall so he can migrate with the other goose; otherwise, it will starve during the harsh winter.  Presto…a task!

Eventually, Rozzum is shortened to Roz and she names the gosling Brightbill (Kit Connor).  As she undertakes her task of raising the gosling, Roz’s programming…evolves.  She starts to actually care for the little guy.  She starts asking questions that robots aren’t supposed to ask.  She exhibits all the early warning signs of helicopter-momism.  And all the while, she debates whether to activate the internal beacon that will let her makers know where she is…

Because the plot is so dependent on tugging those heartstrings, that’s all I’ll say about it.  Let me talk instead about Wild Robot’s visual style.  The backgrounds and characters are gorgeous, sumptuous, evocative of oil or acrylic paintings.  I could mention two or three specific shots right now that contain some of the most beautiful animated imagery I’ve seen since Pinocchio [1940], but I don’t want to give anything away.  (Hint: butterflies and geese.)  In this way, among others, it shares a lot of DNA with Flow, whose backgrounds and characters also resembled hand-painted objects.  I don’t even want to think about how long it took to create such a painterly style and make it look so effortless and organic.

I also liked the way Wild Robot used its story to make a pointed commentary, but not in the direction I thought it would go.  From the trailers, I assumed it would be yet another paint-by-numbers story about preserving nature or life, which was already covered as well as it possibly could be covered by Brad Bird’s The Iron Giant [1999].  Instead, Wild Robot makes some eloquent statements about the terrifying task of parenthood.  At one point, Roz, who is programmed to solve problems, discovers the task she’s undertaken – raising a gosling, i.e., being a parent – is a task that could potentially never end.  She experiences the fear of almost losing a child.  The joy of watching Brightbill learn to fly, while at the same time realizing that means he will one day migrate.  As I list the plot points here, it sounds like the movie is composed of cliches, but I can assure you, it’s not.  All of these nuances, and many more, are allowed to occur organically without the slightest hint of being nudged along by the screenplay.

DreamWorks has created possibly their best animated film since…gosh, I’ll go all the way back to The Prince of Egypt [1998].  It’s a crowd-pleasing adventure with a point, which is a hallmark of only the best science-fiction movies/stories.  There are real stakes on the line.  There are some actual deaths in the story, which surprised me for some reason, but there you are.  It looks sensational.  It’s smart.  I can’t say enough about it.  The Wild Robot was one of my most favorite films of 2024.

FLOW (Latvia, 2024)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Gints Zilbalodis
MY RATING: 10/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 97% Certified Fresh

PLOT: Somewhere deep in a forest wilderness, a solitary Cat barely survives a cataclysmic flood by clambering into a boat with an assortment of other animals; their survival will depend on their ability to help each other.


Nearly twenty-five years ago, Disney released an animated film called Dinosaur [2000] that was touted as being an industry game-changer.  The premise was revealed in a stunning, epic-length teaser trailer that fired my imagination.  Some of you may remember it.  Using state-of-the-art CG animation, and with no spoken dialogue, we watched as a dinosaur egg on prehistoric Earth was flipped out of its nest, carried away by scavengers, dropped into a river, swallowed and regurgitated by a fish, then plucked out of the water by a pterodactyl that soared over magnificent real-world vistas and plains before being dropped accidentally into a jungle canopy where the egg was discovered by a family of, I think, prehistoric lemurs.  A reminder: all with no spoken dialogue.

I remember thinking, wow, Disney is going to attempt the impossible: create a feature-length animated movie with no spoken words.  I was stoked.  What an experiment!  Hasn’t been done since Fantasia [1940]! And if anyone can pull it off, it’ll be Disney, right?  Imagine my disappointment when I went to see the movie, the opening scene plays out exactly as shown in the teaser, the lemurs peek through the foliage at the fallen egg, and one of the lemurs opens its mouth…and talks.  Not just human speech, but with a New York-Brooklyn-esque accent that almost sounded like Bugs Bunny.  Dreams shattered.

I mention that story because Flow, the recent winner of the Golden Globe for Best Animated Motion Picture, promised the same thing in its trailer: an animated film without words, starring only animals on a perilous journey.  I was skeptical.

Until I watched the movie today.  Not only does it deliver on its promise (making Dinosaur look shallow and childish by comparison), it sets some kind of crazy bar for mystical, awe-inspiring visuals that I would put on the same level as Avatar [2009] or Dune [2021].  Yes.  They’re that good.  And, according to IMDb, it was all created using only Blender, a free, open-source animation software tool.  Flow is a remarkable accomplishment.

The story opens with Cat wandering a forest.  None of the animals are named, of course, nor were they named by the animators.  They were all referred to simply by their species or breed: Cat, Whale, Bird, etc.  After being chased by some dogs, including a friendly Retriever, Cat curls up in the top floor of an abandoned, expensive-looking forest cabin with nary a human in sight.  Where are all the people?  No answer is given.

With ominous abruptness, a cataclysmic flood sweeps through the forest, leaving Cat and Retriever stranded at the cabin as the waters steadily rise.  Retriever hops into a passing rowboat occupied by the other dogs from an earlier scene, but Cat understandably passes on this opportunity and eventually finds itself sharing a second boat occupied by a grunting, monosyllabic Capybara.

…but this simple plot summary doesn’t begin to do justice to the experience of simply watching this film.  I am super glad I saw it on the big screen first, 3rd row back, so the screen filled my field of view.  The whole movie reminded me of the best oceanic scenes in Finding Nemo [2003], crammed with detail, lavishly rendered, so that you sort of fall into the world.  There are hints to indicate that the forest and the lands beyond, now flooded, were once populated by humans, but they have all disappeared.  Statues of animals.  Top floors of houses still untouched by water, but not for long.  And, on a distant hilltop, a massive statue of a cat, on which Cat must find refuge at one point.

The look of the film is something I’m not going to be able to describe very well.  Partnered with the smooth CG animation itself, the main animal characters nevertheless have a hand-painted quality to their coats and fur.  The virtual camera moves as if being held by a real cameraman, reminiscent of the best scenes in the first Avatar.  There is a magical, spiritual sequence towards the end of the film (you’ll know the one I mean) that took my breath away and rivals anything from Pixar or Studio Ghibli.  I may not know precisely what it means, but to be honest, I didn’t care then, and I don’t care now.  I just know that it is a spectacular scene.  There are subtle hints that this world may not even be Earth as we know it, or when we know it.  Mystery abounds!  I love it.

I must give special mention to the animation of the lead character.  Cat has moments of cat behavior so specific and real that, even if you’re not a cat person or watched umpteen cat videos on YouTube, you will recognize it as being 100% authentic.  For that matter, the same could be said of all the animals in the film.  I must be honest and report that there are times when, viewed through a lens of “is-this-realistic”, the animals behave in a way that does not compute with reality.  I highly doubt a capybara would be able to figure out how to work the rudder of a sailboat…and yet, in this movie, it does, and it’s fine.

Which brings me to the one problem I can imagine some folks might have with the film: the ending.  I can’t tell if the right descriptor is “elliptical” or “open-ended” or “inconclusive.”  Perhaps it’s a plea from the filmmakers for cooperation and teamwork in an age where uncontrollable outside forces are doing their best to prevent it; like these animals, we’re all in the same boat.  Or maybe that’s not the message.  The beauty of Flow is that the ending is subject to interpretation, thanks to the lack of dialogue simply telling us what it means.

Frankly, I’m not too fussed about extracting the message from Flow.  I am too grateful that a film like this even exists to lose sleep over its Deeper Meaning.  It is a film constructed out of wondrous sights that harken back to the days of Pinocchio and Fantasia [both 1940], when animators and filmmakers gave equal weight to story and visuals, and it’s one of the best animated films I’ve ever seen.

MAXXXINE (2024)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Ti West
CAST: Mia Goth, Elizabeth Debicki, Michelle Monaghan, Bobby Cannavale, Giancarlo Esposito, Kevin Bacon
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 72% Certified Fresh

PLOT: In 1985 Hollywood, adult film star and aspiring actress Maxine Minx finally gets her big break. But as a mysterious killer stalks the starlets of Hollywood, a trail of blood threatens to reveal her sinister past.


When I started posting my blissful reviews of X and Pearl [both 2022], I got one response more than any other: “Wait till you get to MaXXXine; it’s the weakest of the trilogy.”  Having just watched it, I would say that calling MaXXXine the weakest film in this trilogy is like calling Return of the Jedi [1983] the weakest film in the original Star Wars trilogy.  You may be technically correct, but it’s still a great ride and a better film than many others in this genre.

Six years after the bloody events of X, we pick up the story of Maxine Minx (Mia Goth) as she auditions for a film role in Los Angeles.  She’s been signed by a devoted but semi-skeevy agent, Teddy (Giancarlo Esposito in a fabulously bad hairpiece), and she has experienced modest success as a porn star.  But she longs to spread her wings in “legitimate” films, because as we all remember, Maxine craves fame more than anything in the world.  As she never tires of repeating: “I will not accept a life I do not deserve.”

Just as things start looking up for Maxine’s career, a package is left on her doorstep…a VHS tape labeled ominously, “For Maxine.”  When she pops it into her VCR, she’s treated to a shot from her filmed but unfinished porn movie from six years ago…evidence which would link her to those horrific murders and endanger her newfound success.  Meanwhile, the infamous real-life serial killer Richard Ramirez, aka “The Night Stalker”, terrorizes Los Angeles at night, not to mention a copycat killer who is branding his victims with pentagrams.  How these murders are linked to Maxine, and when and where John Labat (Kevin Bacon) comes into play, is not for me to divulge.  And one by one, Maxine’s friends and co-workers are turning up dead…

The plot of MaXXXine is nothing new, let’s face it.  What makes it sparkle is the wit and TLC provided by director Ti West and his collaborators.  For anyone who was alive in 1985, this film is like a stroll down memory lane.  I found myself thinking about Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood [2019], with its loving recreation of late-1960s Los Angeles and serial-killer-related plotline.  That’s not to say MaXXXine is ripping off Q.T.’s film, not at all.  Both films have an immense affection for their respective timeframes and have gone to great lengths to immerse us in that culture.

Another filmmaker that came to mind during MaXXXine was Jordan Peele, director of his own trio of horror neo-classics: Get Out [2017], Us [2019], and Nope [2022].  Ti West’s films share a lot of characteristics with Peele’s films.  The Maxine trilogy looks like a million bucks on screen, despite what must have been very limited budgets.  The plots and screenplays are airtight with one or two minor exceptions.  (Peele’s plots are more Twilight Zone than reality, so they get a bit of a pass on plausibility.)  And the characters are intelligent, sharply drawn, and rarely fall into cliched behavior.

If MaXXXine is not quite as terrifying as its predecessors, I’m prepared to forgive it.  Whatever it lacks, it makes up for in its besottedness with Hollywood.  There is a scene where one character chases another through a Universal backlot (oddly deserted, but whatever); they run through various movie sets, including the town square featured in Gremlins [1984] and Back to the Future [1985], winding up at – and I almost could not believe this – the Bates Motel and even inside the Bates house behind it.  Only a director/screenwriter deeply in love with the movies, and horror films specifically, would dare to write a scene like that into their script, and I loved it.  (Trivia note: they had to get permission from the Hitchcock estate first…awesome.)

I haven’t even mentioned the movie’s subtext.  The movie Maxine has gotten a part for is being directed by a woman, Elizabeth Bender (the pleasingly towering Elizabeth Debicki), who believes The Puritan II is her chance to prove that her voice is worth listening to in an industry dominated by male voices, especially in 1985.  If the only way to get people to listen is to make a B-list horror movie with A-list concepts/ideas, so be it.  Two of the best horror movies I’ve seen in recent years were directed by women: The Babadook [2014] and Saint Maud [2019].  And yet, out of over 1,850 movies in my personal collection, only 70 were directed by women.  I guess things haven’t changed that much in the movie industry in forty years.  Discuss.

MaXXXine begins with a quote from Bette Davis.  I won’t recite the quote here, but it implies that an actor isn’t a star until they’re considered a monster.  I hope that’s not true.  But for Maxine Minx…if that’s what it takes, well, then…that’s what it takes.

NIGHTBITCH (2024)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Marielle Heller
CAST: Amy Adams, Scoot McNairy, Jessica Harper
MY RATING: 7/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 59%

PLOT: A woman pauses her career as an artist to be a stay-at-home mom, but her domesticity takes a surreal turn.


[SPOILER ALERT…if you plan on seeing Nightbitch, avoid this review.  This movie, like most movies, works best on the viewer if they have no idea what’s happening or what’s about to happen.  Consider yourself Spoiler-warned.]

Nightbitch shoots out of the starting gate like a thoroughbred – or a greyhound, if you will – but about halfway through, it runs out of narrative steam.  I felt like a gambler watching a horse race, watching my horse lead the pack around the first turn, already spending the winnings in my head, and then my horse fades a bit, then a bit more, and by the time we get to the finish line, I’m tearing up my ticket in frustration.  I needed a WIN, not a PLACE.  There goes my trifecta.

Amy Adams plays an unnamed Mother who has put her promising career as an artist on pause to be a stay-at-home mom while her also-unnamed Husband (Scoot McNairy) pursues his career as a…um…well, whatever it is, he has to travel a lot, leaving Mother at home with, you guessed it, Son (played by adorable twins Arleigh and Emmett Snowden).  Referred to throughout the movie as “my guy” and “sport” and “little buddy,” Son is a typical toddler in the throes of the terrible twos: cute for long stretches, maddeningly frustrating for longer stretches.  [Ed. Note: the author is not a father, has no plans on becoming a father, and will never possess the immense dedication it takes to rear a child, so don’t expect him to embrace the chaos of toddler-hood because it ain’t gonna happen.]

Mother is going through an identity crisis, set up in a brilliant opening scene where Sally, the woman who assumed Mother’s job at an art gallery, asks her, “Do you just love getting to be home with him [Son] all the time?”  Mother answers the question with a little more honesty than Sally or anyone had a right to expect, including this tidbit: “I am deeply afraid that I am never going to be smart, or happy, or thin ever again.”  I am a straight Hispanic cisgender male, so I’m here to tell you, I will never understand that mindset, but I am reasonably certain there are untold millions of moms out there who, if they listened to Mother’s opening statement, would say, “AMEN, sister.”

A little later, Mother delivers an internal monologue where she reflects that, as a mother, you can squeeze someone into the world “who will one day pee in your face without blinking.”  Again, I’m not a parent, but I know that’s truth in cinema right there.

After a few more establishing scenes of Mother interacting with Son, who absolutely REFUSES to go to sleep at night or eat anything for breakfast except, apparently, hash brown patties fried in butter, some odd things start to happen.  At the playground, some stray (?) dogs approach her as if she’s their best friend.  Mother notices her sense of smell has become much more acute.  Son helpfully points out that her back is hairy.  And, in a creepy Cronenberg-y moment, she notices a lump growing at the base of her spine just above her rump.  Curiosity gets the best of her.  She heats a needle, lances the lump, and…well, if you remember the title of the film, you have an idea of what pops out of that lump.

This was all wonderfully thrilling stuff as a movie lover.  I’m thinking, “My god, this is a Spike Jonze movie told from a woman’s perspective!  I’ve never seen anything like this!  This is gonna be GREAT!”  Mother starts to enjoy eating a lot of meat.  She starts to play “doggie” with Son, growling and barking at each other like two puppies.  The two of them eat their lunch at a deli with no silverware…or hands, to the consternation of other diners.  Son doesn’t sleep at night, so Mother, in a genius parenting move, buys a dog bed and gets Son to play “doggie” and sleep in the dog bed at night.  Presto, problem solved!

And more and more dogs start showing up at her door, at night, sometimes bringing gifts: small dead animals.  One night she walks outside, starts digging around, and an astonishing transformation takes place…

I know, I know, SPOILERS, I get it.  But it’s important to get across just how brilliantly original the first act of the film is, because the second act is, alas, all downhill.  I am not saying that the film’s message is unimportant, not at all.  I admire the film because of its message, and because it was being delivered in such an original way.  But then we get into conflict with Husband, who is desperately trying to understand why their 2-year-old is now sleeping in a dog bed on the floor, or why their cat suddenly turned up dead on the front porch, or why his wife suddenly wants a separation.  It must be said, Nightbitch is remarkably even-handed with the Husband’s dialogue.  He is not reduced to a 2-dimensional sitcom husband.  When she lays into him for not supporting her career, he fires back with a well-reasoned argument.  Their dialogue could be turned into a first-rate play.

But instead of exploring the surreal nature of Mother’s new condition, the movie settles into soap-opera territory, with only the occasional nod to the mystical incidents in the first act.  I distinctly remember, in the middle of the second act, feeling as if a balloon had deflated in the plot.  I imagine defenders of the film might say, “Well, the second act is where the weird stuff has to take a back seat to deal with the real issues at hand.”  Okay, maybe that’s true from a real-world perspective, but to me, it felt as if the filmmakers were on the verge of showing us something mindboggling, then backed away from the precipice at the last minute.

Does that make me guilty of critiquing a movie for what I wanted as opposed to what I got?  I guess it does, as much as I dislike that tendency in myself.  I feel there are so many different ways the movie could have gone in act two, could have leapt gleefully over the edge of convention and truly broken the mold with this movie.  When it became clear what they were doing instead, my elation evaporated.

I give Nightbitch a generally favorable score, though, based on the mad inventiveness of the first act and the plot in broad strokes, and also on the incredibly brave performance from Amy Adams, who maybe has two scenes in the entire film where she seems to be wearing any makeup.  She also appears to have to put on some weight for the role, which is not something I can ever recall seeing a female actor do.  Male actors have turned that kind of thing into a cottage industry, but when was the last time you saw a woman do it?  That took guts.  Watch Nightbitch for Amy Adams’ performance and for the story, even if the movie doesn’t follow its own plot to a satisfying conclusion.

NOSFERATU (2024)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Robert Eggers
CAST: Lily-Rose Depp, Nicholas Hoult, Bill Skarsgård, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Willem Dafoe
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 85% Certified Fresh

PLOT: The true OG vampire movie gets a fresh coat of paint in this gothic tale of obsession between a haunted young woman and the terrifying vampire infatuated with her.


Allow me to begin, as so many great films do, with a couple of flashbacks.

2018: The indie band Weezer records and releases their polarizing cover of Toto’s stone-cold classic “Africa.”  While recorded and produced with all the modern techniques at their disposal, fans of both bands say, correctly, that this new version is virtually identical to the original…so what was the point?  Couldn’t they have put some kind of new spin on it, like (for better or worse) UB40 and their cover of “Can’t Help Falling in Love”?  Why bother?

1991: Orion Pictures releases The Silence of the Lambs, an adaptation of Thomas Harris’s terrifying psychological thriller.  It goes on to win the coveted “Big Five” at the Oscars: Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, and Screenplay (Adapted).  Having devoured the book during one summer vacation, I go to a screening expecting to be wowed.  But…because the filmmakers stuck SO closely to the book (with some minor exceptions), there is little to no suspense for me.  While I am genuinely floored by how well-made and well-acted the film is, I do not experience any of the thrills and chills felt by those viewers who had NOT read the book.  I knew ahead of time what they would find in the corpse’s throat in the funeral parlor, how Lecter would escape from the courthouse, and how Starling would stumble upon Buffalo Bill’s house.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s a stellar movie.  But it was never truly scary for me.

Which brings me to Robert Eggers’s long-gestating remake of THE original vampire movie, Nosferatu.  Based on the immortal silent classic of the same name from 1922, directed by F.W. Murnau, the story will be familiar to any serious film/horror buffs, especially since Murnau “borrowed” liberally from Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula, without first obtaining legal permission from Stoker’s estate.  How liberally?  Here’s a quote from IMDb: “All known prints and negatives were destroyed under the terms of settlement of a lawsuit by Bram Stoker’s widow.”  The only way the film survived was via 2nd-generation copies from other countries around the world.  Plagiarism?  Or homage?  I would normally say here, “You be the judge,” but the courts seem to have answered that question pretty definitively.

I mention this because every version of the Dracula mythology, starting with Nosferatu all the way through the semi-campy Hammer films to Coppola’s famous “low-tech” version and beyond – all of them tell the same story with only minor changes.  Consequently, the thing I look for in those films is not WHAT they’re telling me, but HOW they’re telling it.  Any student of pop culture knows Bruce Wayne’s origin story, so Batman Begins [2005] holds no surprises there, but the story is told extremely well, and so you roll with it, you know what I mean?

With Eggers’s Nosferatu, the production values on display are magnificent.  Eggers gets the mood and tone of a genuinely gothic horror story exactly right, as I knew he would, based on his previous films, especially The VVitch [2015].  The colors are muted to recreate the vibe of a black-and-white film, which paradoxically makes some of the scarier scenes even scarier.  The performances all around are top notch.  Poor Nicholas Hoult is saddled with the thankless Thomas Hutter role, stuck in straight-man mode the entire film; but Lily-Rose Depp had me thunderstruck with her performance as Ellen, Thomas’s wife, and the dependable Bill Skarsgård delivers the goods as Count Orlok, with a proper Transylvanian moustache (right out of the history books, haters) and an accent thick enough to tar ten miles of a country road with.

But let’s think about this for a second.  Those of you unfamiliar with the story of Nosferatu might be thinking to yourselves, “Who’s Thomas Hutter?  Who’s Ellen?  Don’t you mean Jonathan Harker and Mina?”  Well, naturally, those are the names the vast majority of filmgoers are going to be familiar with, not Thomas and Ellen and Count Orlok (which for my money is a much creepier name than “Dracula,” but I digress).

And therein lies part of the problem with this film.  I was so thoroughly familiar with the Dracula story that, even though this new film is a wonder to behold, it held very little suspense for me, since I knew exactly what was going to happen next, beat for beat.  There are, of course, cosmetic differences here and there: Thomas’s visit to a Romani village before he arrives at Orlok’s castle…Orlok’s straight-up possessions of Ellen…the highly effective jump-scares with the dogs here and there.  But I’ve seen it all before, MANY times.

(By contrast, I just recently watched one of the greatest slasher movies I’ve ever seen, X [2022], and it has virtually every slasher-movie-trope imaginable, and yet it somehow managed to transcend its own genre and become some kind of crazy masterpiece.)

In fact, in a very unexpected twist, there actually were two genuinely scary/creepy moments for me, and neither of them featured Count Orlok himself, at least not in the flesh.  They both involved Ellen, Thomas’s new wife, who becomes literally possessed by Orlok’s influence in scenes that legitimately give The Exorcist [1973] a run for its money.  Ellen thrashes about, rolls her eyes into the back of her head, speaks in an unnaturally guttural croak, bends backwards impossibly far – is Lily-Rose Depp a contortionist on the side? – and generally scares the bejeezus out of her husband and the audience.  On the strength of these two scenes alone, in addition to the general excellence of filmmaking craft on display, I would have no hesitation in recommending Nosferatu to moviegoers.

So, yes, despite my disappointments at the story level, given there were virtually no surprises plot-wise, I still give the movie a favorable rating just because it’s so well made.  If it had been created in a vacuum, if there had never been a vampire movie before this one, I believe I would have been creeped out to a much greater degree than I was, and this would have been hailed as an instant masterpiece.  But it is darkly beautiful to look at and wonderfully moody; there are many shots that are very nearly duplicates of shots from the original, which I enjoyed on a film-geek level.  I look forward to Robert Eggers tackling purely original material again.  He knows what he’s doing.

PEARL (2022)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Ti West
CAST: Mia Goth, David Corenswet, Tandi Wright, Emma Jenkins-Purro
MY RATING: 10/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 93% Certified Fresh

PLOT: In 1918, a young Texas woman on the brink of madness pursues stardom in a desperate attempt to escape the drudgery, isolation, and lovelessness of life on her parents’ farm.


I originally gave Pearl a rating of 9 out of 10 because it was not quite as terrifying as its predecessor, X [2022], but I have decided to amend that to a 10 out of 10 based solely on the performance by Mia Goth in the title role.  If her performance had appeared in anything other than an indie horror film, I firmly believe she would have been nominated for an Oscar, or at least a Golden Globe.  But I’ll get to that in a second.

Pearl is a prequel to the acclaimed horror flick X, in which most of a porno film crew is stalked and murdered by an insane old woman, Pearl, and her equally insane old husband, Howard, in Texas in 1979.  It starred Mia Goth as Maxine, a stripper who was convinced she was meant for bigger and better things.  This time, in the prequel, Goth plays Pearl as a young woman growing up in Texas, but this time it’s 1918.  World War I is on the verge of ending, but the Spanish Flu pandemic is in full swing; folks in town don’t go anywhere or do anything in town without wearing a cloth mask over their nose and mouth.  (Sound familiar?)

Pearl’s home life is not quite functional.  In her first scene, over a lush score that sounds as if it were imported from the 1940s, Pearl dances in the barn and talks to a cow and a goat and a horse, like Snow White, about how she’s going to become famous and leave town, and everyone will know her name.  Then a goose waddles in from outside and interrupts her conversation; Pearl gets an odd look in her eye, grabs a pitchfork, sidles up to the goose, aaaand you can probably guess the rest.  (The gator from X makes a nice cameo shortly thereafter.)  Meanwhile, that ‘40s musical score punctuates the action like a Disney movie.  The effect is profoundly odd, but compelling.

We learn more about Pearl’s home life with her invalid father and domineering mother, Ruth (Tandi Wright).  She married young, but her husband, Howard, was called off to war in Europe, leaving her alone with her less-than-ideal parents.  She dreams of fame, but Ruth, with her strong German accent, sternly reminds Pearl of her responsibilities to her father and the farm.  One day, Pearl rides her bicycle to town to buy medicine for her father (sounds like the beginning of a fairy tale) and decides to go to the movies, which were very different in 1918.  She meets the strikingly handsome projectionist (David Corenswet, aka the new Superman) who encourages her to take the time to live her own life before it’s too late.  On her way home, Pearl stops in a cornfield, finds a scarecrow, and engages in a charming little song and dance with him…until her mind plays tricks on her and the encounter turns into something altogether different.

The whole movie is like that.  Shot in vivid colors and featuring an evocative soundtrack, it alternates between The Wizard of Oz and Joker.  (In fact, IMDb trivia notes that female fans of this movie call it “the female Joker.”)  It keeps you off balance in all the best ways, threatening to fly apart, but Ti West’s direction and Mia Goth’s performance manage to hold everything together in a satisfying, but disturbing, whole.  As with X, I can acknowledge the achievement, but I’m damned if I can explain how it was done.

There are many highlights in Pearl: her audition for a traveling dance show.  Pearl wheeling her father to the edge of the lakeside dock.  The scarecrow.  The tipping point between Pearl and her mother.  The pig on the porch.  (Gross.)  The look on her father’s face when Pearl dresses him up for a gentleman caller.  But the pièce de résistance of the entire film is, without question, Pearl’s monologue.

In a movie in which Mia Goth teeters on overkill in several scenes, the screenplay (co-written by Goth and Ti West) provides Pearl with a heart-rending soliloquy that should be more famous than it is.  Pearl’s sister-in-law, Mitsi (Emma Jenkins-Purro), sensing that Pearl is troubled, encourages her to indulge in a little play-acting: “Pretend I’m Howard.  What do you want to say to me?”  What follows is a 7-minute speech, most of it captured in an unbroken 5-minute take that must be seen to be believed.  In it, Goth expresses virtually every emotion imaginable as she unburdens herself, purges herself of all her repressed rage at her husband for leaving her alone, at her mother for holding her back from her dreams, at her father for having the temerity to fall ill and causing her to remain home for his sake.

Does this speech excuse her violent behavior?  Not at all.  But it explains it as well as any other serial killer movie I’ve ever seen.  I was reminded a little bit of Charlize Theron in Monster [2003], who also played a woman who committed terrible crimes, yes, but who was pushed into making those choices by her family and a society who little noticed or cared about her situation.  That’s how stirring Goth’s performance is, that I would compare it to one of the greatest performances ever captured on film.  In a movie that flirts with parody a couple of times, this last speech grounds it and the main character firmly in the real world.  It’s truly astonishing.

I’m almost sorry I saw Pearl AFTER watching X.  Almost.  It kind of makes me want to go back and watch X again, armed with all this new information on Pearl’s backstory.  It also solidifies the psychic connection between Pearl and Maxine, which was touched on several times in X, and which I imagine will be revisited in some way in Maxxxine [2024]…but I’m just speculating.  Pearl is good enough to stand with any of the best serial-killer-origin stories ever made.

(P.S.  As with X, you’ll want to make sure you watch the credits, except this time you want to stay with it until the last image fades to black…you’ll know what I mean.  IMDb informs me this crazy, creepy moment happened because after the last line, director Ti West refused to yell “Cut” and just let the camera run, and the actor in question, being a professional, simply stayed in character.  It’s remarkably unsettling.)

X (2022)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Ti West
CAST: Mia Goth, Jenna Ortega, Brittany Snow, Kid Cudi
MY RATING: 10/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 94% Certified Fresh

PLOT: In 1979, a group of young filmmakers set out to make an adult film on a rural Texas farm, but when their elderly hosts catch them in the act, the crew find themselves fighting for their lives.


I like great horror, but I have never enjoyed slasher films, with the clear exceptions of Halloween [1978] and Psycho [1960].  They tend to fall too easily into the formulas lampooned in Scream [1996] and The Cabin in the Woods [2011] and lose all suspense when the stories cave in to ancient tropes and traditions.  You’ve seen one bloodthirsty masked strangler/slasher/axe-murderer jump from behind a tree at night, you’ve seen them all.

So, how do I explain my delight and gushing praise for X, the indie horror phenomenon that turned Mia Goth and director Ti West into industry darlings?  I can only report that, despite following timeworn traditions of the genre, this film somehow found a way to ratchet up the tension to almost unbearable levels.  I’m not exaggerating.  The night I finished watching it, I found it impossible to fall asleep right away.  My mind was racing and rehashing what I had just seen.  It is the creepiest, scariest horror film I’ve seen since Hereditary [2018], and I freaking LOVE Hereditary.

The plot is right out of Slasher Films 101.  The year is 1979.  An aspiring group of wannabe porn stars pile into a van and head to a rural Texas farm where the crusty owner has agreed to rent out his barn and guesthouse, ignorant of this motley crew’s true motives.  The composition of the group reads like the beginning of a dirty joke: a cowboy, a film school graduate, his mousy girlfriend, two strippers, and a black guy (Kid Cudi…yes, that Kid Cudi).

Upon their arrival on the farm, ominous music and occasional breathy noises on the soundtrack tip us off that something just ain’t right…not to mention the blood-soaked prologue.  The elderly farmer, Howard, has an elderly wife, Pearl, but we don’t see much of her at first.  There’s a magnificently tense scene when one of the strippers, Maxine (Mia Goth), skinny dips in the lake behind the farm, unaware of the gator eyeing her from the opposite bank.  It slithers into the lake just as Maxine starts to swim back to the dock.  An overhead shot shows Maxine swimming leisurely, and the gator getting closer and closer, and…I mean, I’ve seen scores, if not hundreds of movies with similar scenes, and very few of them evoked the kind of terror I felt as that gator closed in on Maxine.

Why?  This isn’t even a monster movie about a killer gator, it’s a – let’s be honest – formulaic movie with creepy old people and a slew of young people just waiting to be dispatched in hopefully creative ways.  But something about how Ti West directed this film got right under my skin, in a good way.  Even in the gloriously retro scenes when the ersatz film crew is shooting a sex scene, there is still an undercurrent of unease over the whole enterprise.  (And by the way, if I were to make a list of things I didn’t think I’d ever see in a movie, a topless Brittany Snow in a brief-but-raunchy sex scene would be really close to the top.)

It’s hard for me to describe the intensely creepy atmosphere in writing, especially because I want to preserve the film’s surprises for anyone who hasn’t seen it yet…and boy, I wish I could be there to watch it with you.  There’s the scene in the farmhouse between Maxine and the farmer’s elderly wife, Pearl, where you have absolutely every reason to believe it’s about to turn all Texas-Chainsaw, and then the scene abruptly pivots.  Pearl looks like your stereotypical crazy old lady; that’s the best way I can put it.  I seem to remember a few characters who looked like her in the background of Shutter Island [2010].  We learn a little bit about Pearl’s past, and we can see that she’s sharper than she looks…or maybe she’s just crazy.  I’m not sayin’.

When things heat up around the halfway mark, the tension factor skyrockets.  I learned a phrase a while ago that captures it perfectly: the film becomes a stress sandwich.  Situations arise that we’ve all seen before, but in this movie I was on the edge of my seat waiting to see what would happen next.  When Jackson (Cudi) searches the lake at night and makes a creepy discovery right out of Hitchcock.  When “Don’t Fear the Reaper” plays at a critical moment.  When Lorraine (Jenna Ortega…yes, that Jenna Ortega) goes to the cellar looking for a flashlight.  When a soundly sleeping Maxine gets some unwanted physical contact from a nocturnal visitor.  (That sound you just heard is me shuddering.)

I could write more about the plot, but I would give something away, I’m sure.  To call the film’s finale satisfying is a vast understatement, right down to the very last line that, in my book, is as perfect as “Nobody’s perfect!” or “Tomorrow is another day!”  Ti West has created a slasher movie for people who hate slasher movies, and it’s one of the best modern examples of the genre that has ever been made.

(P.S.  Don’t spoil this for yourself by Googling it or anything if you don’t already know, but make sure you watch the closing credits.  When I saw the name of the performer who plays “Pearl”, my jaw dropped.)

FORCE OF EVIL (1948)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Abraham Polonsky
CAST: John Garfield, Beatrice Pearson, Thomas Gomez, Marie Windsor
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 100% Fresh

PLOT: A crooked lawyer working for a numbers-running “combine” nevertheless tries to get his older brother to quit the racket himself when an even bigger combine tries to move in.


On the surface, Force of Evil looks and feels like a B-movie: low production values, populated by talented bit players elevated into larger roles [John Garfield being the exception, naturally], and looking like it was shot on the fly by a television crew.  Of course, reading that sentence back to myself, I realize I could also be describing Hitchcock’s Psycho [1960], but Force of Evil feels even more low rent than that.  There are shadows present in brightly lit rooms that could only be caused by stage lights behind the camera.  Oddly timed edits draw attention to themselves and threaten to take the viewer out of the movie.  The female roles are literal representations of the so-called “Madonna-Whore” complex, limited to expressions of fluttering tension or full-on seduction.  The dialogue, at least near the beginning, is filled with legal and financial jargon that had me rewinding a couple of scenes to try to digest what the characters were saying.

And yet, Force of Evil exudes a strange power through its unique use of language and the borderline-Shakespearean nature of its tragic story, involving a crooked lawyer (John Garfield) who works for a numbers racket, but nevertheless tries to convince his older brother to quit the business when a larger “combine” threatens to take over.

John Garfield, God love him, was no Brando or Bogart, but in this movie, the screenplay provides him and everyone else with dialogue that feels lifted out of a stage play that was translated into English from some foreign language.  Here’s a line from Leo Morse (Thomas Gomez) to his younger brother, Joe (Garfield):

“Do you know what that is, Joe?  Blackmail!  That’s what it is!  Blackmail!  You’re crazy!  You’re absolutely crazy mad!”

Another example:

“All right.  I am sensible.  I am calm.  I’ll give you my answer calmly and sensibly.  My final answer.  My final answer is finally NO.  The answer is no – absolutely and finally no, finally and positively no!  No, no, no!  N – O!”

To call that kind of language “stylized” is an understatement.  The repetitive words, the broken-up clauses…tilt your head and it could almost read as poetry.  In fact, in Martin Scorsese’s introduction on the Force of Evil Blu-ray, he relates a story where a critic watching a screening of the film exclaimed, “My god, it’s written in free verse!”

While I acknowledge the screenplay’s poetic form, I found an even more contemporary comparison: David Mamet.  I semi-recently watched his film Homicide [1991] and wrote in my review that “…Mamet’s signature word choices…suggest an almost Shakespearean construction, as if the words are being shoehorned into a buried structure or pattern that operates subconsciously…trying to create a mood reminiscent of Greek tragedy…”  Those words apply equally well to Force of Evil’s screenplay by director Abraham Polonsky and Ira Wolfert.  I got a distinctly Mamet-esque vibe from the dialogue in this 1948 film, with just a dash of Aaron Sorkin, perhaps.

(Ebert once said that Pulp Fiction [1994] is a movie that he could watch with the picture turned off, just so he could listen to the crackling dialogue.  Force of Evil could just as well fit that mold, in my opinion.)

There’s even a Mamet vibe to Garfield’s acting style, as he rarely cracks a smile or any other expression for the entire film; we only sense changes in tone by the volume of his voice, not by the expression on his face…much like the lead actors in Mamet’s House of Games [1987].  That stylization sets Force of Evil apart from many of its film-noir counterparts.  To be sure, other noirs have their share of stylized dialogue and characters, but this movie sets some kind of stylization bar that must be heard to be believed.

The story can be summarized easily (see the top of this review), but it is powerful in its simplicity, at least when it comes to the interplay between Joe and his older brother.  As for the female characters, they are sadly stuck in placeholder roles that are there either as eye candy (Marie Windsor, a film-noir regular in her first major role) or as the young woman, Doris (Beatrice Pearson), helpless before the wiles of a wicked smooth-talking man like Joe Morse.  No Ida Lupones or Barbara Stanwycks or Lauren Bacalls here.  However, there is an interesting conversation between Joe and Doris that gives us an interesting insight into Joe’s character, as well as hiding a discussion of moral relativism in plain sight.

Joe is doing the ‘40s film equivalent of “putting the moves” on Doris, telling her baldly that she WANTS him to be wicked to her, “because you’re wicked, really wicked…you’re squirming for me to do something wicked to you – make a pass for you, bowl you over, sweep you up, take the childishness out of you, and give you money and sin.  That’s real wickedness.”  In so many words, he’s telling her that she’s ASKING for it.  This is not a nice man.  He goes further.  He tells her:

“If I put my hand in my pocket and gave you a ruby, a million-dollar ruby for nothing, because you’re beautiful and a child with advantages and because I wanted to give it to you without taking anything for myself – would that be wicked?”

In Joe’s mind, charity isn’t just for suckers, it’s downright evil.  Doris mounts a good defense, telling Joe how she hasn’t been fooled by magicians or smooth-talking men since she was a little girl.  Joe keeps following his path of logic, but an interesting thing happens.  He incriminates himself, and at the end of the scene he seems to realize it:

“To go to great expense for something you want, that’s natural.  To reach out to take it, that’s human, that’s natural.  But to get your pleasure from not taking, from cheating yourself deliberately like my brother did today, from not getting, from not taking…don’t you see what a black thing that is for a man to do?  How it is to hate yourself and your brother, make him feel that he’s guilty, that…that I’m guilty?”

There’s that free verse in action again, with those repetitive phrases.  His own amoral code trips him up, and the camera lingers on Joe’s haunted face for a moment before we fade into the next scene.  I mention this exchange because it’s so atypical of even some of the greatest noirs, which are usually full of hard-boiled dialogue about heaters and button men and glamorous dames.  In Force of Evil, we’re invited to turn inwards with our anti-hero and compare our definition of evil with his, as Doris does later in the film.

The film ends with several scenes of shocking violence, including a murder that looks inspired by Battleship Potemkin [1925] and a three-way shootout in a darkened office.  There is a remarkably evocative shot as Joe hurries down a staircase, and it appears as if he is making his own descent into hell.  Force of Evil has recently been critically re-evaluated; after years of being dismissed as nothing more than an assembly-line noir thriller, it was recently restored by UCLA and the Film Foundation and was also selected to the National Film Registry.  It’s not the greatest film noir I’ve ever seen, but if you’re a fan of the genre, you owe it to yourself to hunt down a copy and give it a look…or more appropriately, a listen.

A COMPLETE UNKNOWN (2024)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: James Mangold
CAST: Timothée Chalamet, Edward Norton, Elle Fanning, Monica Barbaro, Boyd Holbrook
MY RATING: 9/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 79% Certified Fresh

PLOT: In 1961, Bob Dylan arrives in NYC for the first time.  Four years later, his groundbreaking performance in Newport changed the music world forever.


The 1994 documentary Hoop Dreams began as a small-scale, 30-minute project concentrating on two inner-city boys who dreamed of making it to the NBA.  It was supposed to cover only a few months in their lives, but as their stories progressed, the filmmakers just continued filming, and the sprawling documentary eventually covered five years and became an absorbing three-hour odyssey.

In a weird way, that’s how I felt about James Mangold’s Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown.  The movie opens with no backstory, no flashbacks, just a disheveled young Bobby Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) arriving in 1961 New York City with his guitar, determined to meet his idol, legendary folk singer Woody Guthrie, hospitalized at the time with Huntington’s disease and no longer able to sing or speak.  In Guthrie’s hospital room, Dylan also meets another folk legend, Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), in what must count as one of the greatest musical summit conferences of all time.

The way this scene is shot, it almost feels like, after it’s over, it could be the end of a marvelous short film about three legends bumping into each other.  But, like Hoop Dreams, this biopic remains focused on the unknown Bobby Dylan, with his nasal whine and preternatural gift for lyrics, for five years.  He eventually gets more and more exposure and cuts his first album.  Along the way, he meets two women who will be his emotional touchstones during the film: the celebrated Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), whom Dylan accuses of being and singing “too pretty,” and Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning), who becomes his girlfriend despite his flirtations with Ms. Baez.

But throughout the film – and this is one of the reasons I enjoyed it more than I thought I would – we remain focused almost exclusively on Dylan, the man and his music.  We are treated to countless scenes of Dylan performing live, Dylan recording in a studio, Dylan scratching out a new song note for note and word for word.  If a soundtrack album were ever compiled of the full-length versions of all the songs we hear in A Complete Unknown, I have to believe it would be between two to three hours long, if not more.

Why did I react so favorably to this kind of treatment?  My two favorite musical biopics of all time are Ray [2004] and Amadeus [1984].  Amadeus certainly contains a LOT of music, much like A Complete Unknown, but we are given a lot of background information into Mozart’s life, his relationship with his father, his childhood years, and so on, whereas the Dylan film presents him as a blank slate without a single flashback to his younger years.  Ray is much more in the vein of your “traditional” musical biopics like Walk the Line [2005, also directed by Mangold] or Bohemian Rhapsody [2018], containing the standard story beats of struggles in their personal lives, a haunting past, liberal-to-moderate use of flashbacks, you get the idea.

I suppose part of my enjoyment of A Complete Unknown stems from the fact that, even though I’m not a Dylan fan, or Fan with a capital F, I appreciate the songs themselves, with their intricate lyrics and folksy rhythms, so I thoroughly enjoyed the myriad musical breaks.  I also liked the way the movie did not spoon-feed me chunks of information it felt I needed to know.  Instead of the movie telling me how I should feel about a scene or a moment with clunky dialogue or exposition, it simply presents a situation and kind of stands back from it, allowing me to form my own emotional reactions to the material.  That’s a tricky storytelling method; one false step and you’re left with a story with no heart, no meat in the middle.  But A Complete Unknown pulls it off extremely well.  I’m sure there’s a way to explain how they did it, but I’m not the one to try.  I just know that it works, and that’s enough for me.

Any discussion of this movie must necessarily include Timothée Chalamet’s magnetic performance as Bob Dylan.  It is destined for an Oscar nomination.  I am reliably informed that Chalamet did all the singing himself (as did Norton and Barbaro as Seeger and Baez, and Boyd Holbrook as Johnny Cash), and he went to great lengths to mimic Dylan’s trademark sound.  Combined with the pitch-perfect hair and makeup, it really feels like the real Dylan onscreen, especially when the movie jumps forward to the Newport Music Festivals of ‘64 and ‘65.  Of course, I wasn’t alive back then, but I have seen pictures and documentary footage of the man himself, and Chalamet is utterly convincing.  Even if you’re not a Dylan fan, this movie is worth watching just to see Chalamet’s performance…he’s that good.

My colleague, Marc Sanders, mentions in his review how the production design of the film went to great lengths to recreate early-1960s New York City, and I second that statement.  It’s as utterly convincing as Chalamet himself, especially when it comes to the various “underground” music clubs Dylan performs in, clubs where the folk music revolution was born.  I get the feeling that anyone who watches this movie, who was also alive at the time, will be easily transported back to that era when Kennedy’s Camelot was in full swing, as was the hippie movement, the folk movement, the civil rights movement, the Cold War, the Beatles.  There are aspects of this film that I may never fully appreciate since I was born in the early ‘70s, but I get the gist.

I feel compelled to rebut a specific argument from my girlfriend, who did not like the movie because it did not give us any real background information about who Bob Dylan really is.  (We only get a single tantalizing glimpse when someone leafs through one of his old scrapbooks that had been delivered to a “Mr. Zimmerman.”)  All the movie does, so her argument goes, is present us with a performer singing his music, culminating in a pivotal big concert, of which the same could be said of many other biopics that came before.  A Complete Unknown could just as well have been about Richie Havens, or Jerry Lee Lewis, or Janis Joplin, or anyone else.  There is no real personal conflict presented in the film.

To which I have to say…that’s not quite true.  I acknowledge the absence of background story and flashbacks, but for me, as I said, that’s a strength, not a weakness.  It follows the theme set up by the film’s title, after all.  Also, there is a real conflict in the story, as Dylan, after becoming the figurehead for the folk music movement in America, takes the unprecedented step of recording an album and performing live songs that are (gasp!) non-acoustic.  He complains that his fans want him to sing “Blowin’ in the Wind” for the rest of his life. This generates shockwaves throughout the folk community, and at one of his concerts where he performs an electric set, the crowd jeers, throws trash at him, and even calls him “Judas.”  That pretty much counts as “conflict,” in my opinion.

A Complete Unknown goes down as one of the best films of 2024 that I’ve seen.  For Dylan fans, it is an absolute must-see.  For fans of great acting, it’s also a must-see.  If you’re not a Dylan fan at all, well, it’s not likely to change your mind, but do yourself a favor and give it a chance.  Not many musical biopics, or films of ANY kind, are made this well and with as much loving care as A Complete Unknown.