December Movies Part 3: Zootopia 2, Wake Up Dead Man, The Housemaid

Looking for something to watch over Christmas break? Well, I've got an animated romp, a twisty whodunit, and a sexy thriller to please all demographics!

Zootopia 2: What's not to love about this movie? The original was a great ride and this one, written by Jared Bush, who also co-directed with Byron Howard, continues the fun, with a pro-immigration, pro-diversity stance that the current US administration is sure to hate. What could be better! Our dynamic duo of Judy Hopps and Nick Wilde, a bunny and a fox voiced by Ginnifer Goodwin and Jason Bateman, are now officially rookie cops in the Zootopia Police Department and they are desperately trying to prove they aren't more than one-hit wonders. But of course, they are overeager and keep messing up big cases. The plot revolves around a snake who sabotages a gala event, except...is the snake actually the bad guy? Turns out maybe there has been some misinformation circulating in Zootopia.

I thoroughly enjoyed the plot, I loved all the fun little sight gags and puns (like the state of Gnu Jersey making an appearance), and the animation continues to be beautiful, with every shot of Judy Hopps making me want to reach out and pet that soft l'il bunny. It's high-quality entertainment for all ages, and this adult did not feel remotely bored during this purported kids movie, so give it a shot! It's Christmas, be merry!

Wake Up Dead Man: Fine, you don't want to be merry? Well then prepare to feel like you've fallen into the pages of a new Agatha Christie novel because writer-director Rian Johnson's latest installment in his Knives Out series is a devious little locked room mystery that is perfectly plotted and executed. Josh O'Connor plays Jud Duplenticy, the new priest at a rural church in upstate New York. When the old priest, Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin), dies in the middle of a service, Jud seems like the only possible suspect. But of course, our friend Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) aka Foghorn Leghorn, is helping the police and he thinks Jud is far too earnest to have committed this crime. 

This is a movie that involves many heated discussions of religion, with the young priest going toe-to-toe with the deeply atheist Blanc, and it also involves many examples of what it means to be morally good while having no faith and then morally bankrupt while professing to be the most faithful person of all. The supporting cast is a murderer's row (pun intended) including Glenn Close, Kerry Washington, Andrew Scott, Cailee Spaeny, Jeremy Renner, Mila Kunis, Thomas Haden Church, and Daryl McCormack, and they all put in excellent work, with red herrings and misdirects galore to throw you off the scent or lead you tantalizingly close to the solution. My husband and I had a grand ol' time pausing this movie at intervals while we theorized over motives and opportunity, and we almost got it right, but not quite. Which is the genius of this film - there are more than enough clues to help you solve the puzzle, but at the end of the day, you just can't be as smart as Benoit Blanc. Bah humbug.

The Housemaid: I loved the 2022 novel by Freida McFadden, so when I saw director Paul Feig was adapting this movie from a screenplay by Rebecca Sonnenshine, I was all for it. Starring Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried (excellent casting since they look very similar, which becomes increasingly important as the movie goes on), I was expecting A Simple Favor vibes and it certainly did not disappoint. There's no point in giving away any of the plot because it is very twisty and fun and Seyfried in particular seems to be having a fantastic time as a psychotic rich woman who seems determined to make her maid's life very, very difficult, while her patient husband (played by Brandon Sklenar) attends to her every whim and tries to keep the peace at home.

I imagine this movie would go down well with anyone who has no idea of the plot - reading the novel was a very satisfying experience, and watching the movie will be too. Since I already knew everything that was going to happen, I found myself focusing more on the filmmaking, and while I enjoyed Seyfried's performance, I found Sweeney to be a little lackluster. You will get to see a lot of her in this movie though, if that's something that floats your boat. I also appreciated all the shots of Sklenar's hands. Feig captures his physicality excellently in this movie which makes for good thrills as we get to the finale. This movie does get unexpectedly gory at times in a way I didn't totally appreciate, so be warned if you can't stand any body horror. But otherwise, this is a solid, fun thriller that is a good adaptation of a solid, fun book.

December Binges Part 1: All Her Fault, Mr. Scorsese, Down Cemetery Road

I have binged many shows this month, and the last two weeks of the year are prime couch potato season, so here are some recommendations. Plop down with the remote and get ready!

All Her Fault: What a terrifically weird show. Created by Megan Gallagher, based on the novel by Andrea Mara, the show stars Sarah Snook as Marissa, a woman who shows up to a strange woman's house one day, assuming that this is where her son went for a play date. Turns out, the boy is not there, and what follows is her worst nightmare as the police have to treat this as a kidnapping case and have no idea where her son might be. Dakota Fanning plays Jenny, a mom whose son attends the same school as Marissa's son, and when she discovers her nanny might be involved in the kidnapping, she is overcome with guilt and wants to help Marissa in any way she can. Meanwhile, Marissa's husband, Peter (Jake Lacy), is the typical straight husband, a man who thinks parenting has been Marissa's responsibility all along, and therefore everything that is now going wrong is...all her fault.

This show makes for a great drinking game. Just drink anytime a woman is annoyed at a man. Shots when someone literally goes "this is all my/your fault!" No spoilers, but my absolute favorite part of watching this show was in the final episode when a character literally screamed, "It was not my fault...it was YOUR fault!" This is not a good show, and yet I was genuinely surprised by twists and turns in the final episodes that finally brought every character's motivation to light. If you want a soapy, silly drama to while away the day, this is absolutely the show for you. But expect to be giggling a lot while you watch.

Mr. Scorsese: Are you a fan of Martin Scorsese? Then director Rebecca Miller has put together a 5-part documentary miniseries just for you. Chronicling the man's asthmatic childhood that led to him playing indoors a lot and thereby becoming enamored of filmmaking, to his exposure to the Italian mobsters in NYC that led to his many movies about them, as well as a certain bravery when it came to negotiating with studio heads. Watching this miniseries made me realize that I have no knowledge of early Scorsese movies - it was only in the fifth and final episode, when we get into his long collaboration with Leonardo DiCaprio, that I started nodding my head along. Of course, I've heard of all those early films, but gangster movies have never been my genre. And yet, I was fascinated all the same.

The series is an incisive portrait of a celebrated filmmaker, and it has a lot of access to people who knew him well and could speak candidly about all of his struggles as well as his incredible successes. His three daughters get to chime in about the extremely different fathers they had when growing up - his older daughters were used to never seeing him as he was too busy on set, while by the time he got around to having his youngest as an older man, he certainly made much more of an effort to be a family man. Miller is also keen to interrogate if Scorsese has a woman problem - Sharon Stone speaks about her experience struggling to get time with him in Casino, while Margot Robbie seems to have had a very collaborative time with him in The Wolf of Wall Street. This is a great series for any cinephile but also if you're just curious to go behind the scenes of some iconic and memorable movies and understand all the drama that was brewing beneath the surface. Merry Christmas!

Down Cemetery Road: Created by Morwenna Banks and based on the novel by Mick Herron, this show stars Emma Thompson as Zoe Boehm, a woman who teams up with Sarah Trafford (Ruth Wilson), after an unexpected gas explosion in Sarah's neighborhood kills a family and leads to a missing child. I won't give away more details than that, because this is one of those twisty mysteries where every single episode ends in a frantic cliffhanger where you suddenly suspect all the lead actors have died and you might have been following the wrong story all along. There's a very elaborate government conspiracy that starts coming apart at the seams, and it's all very British and dry.

Fans of Slow Horses (another Mick Herron series) would probably eat this show up with a spoon, but much like that show, I found myself unable to sustain my interest. The trouble is that the show is rather densely plotted, and in this day and age, unless I can binge it, I find myself flummoxed by watching week to week and completely forgetting everything by the time the next seven days roll around. There's also something about Herron's plots, where everything is always a little bit shadowy and high-stakes. I prefer an Agatha Christie-esque plot where humans have personal motivations for their evil deeds, as opposed to whole government agencies getting involved in criminal activity. But again, you do get to watch Emma Thompson and Ruth Wilson be a kick-ass duo, so that's worth the effort. Right?

December Movies Part 2: Jay Kelly, If I had Legs I'd Kick You, Fackham Hall, Ella McCay

Time for another round of rapid-fire movie reviews as I scramble to catch up on everything flooding the theaters and Netflix for the winter. We're gonna cover a slew of genres and a slew of opinions, so get ready!

Jay Kelly: Directed by Noah Baumbach, who co-wrote the screenplay with Emily Mortimer (who has a small role in the movie as well), this is a movie about an actor named Jay Kelly (played with classic Cary Grant charisma by George Clooney) who has had an enormously successful career but burned many bridges along the way with friends, family, and colleagues. He decides to go on an impromptu trip to Europe, ostensibly to receive a lifetime achievement-style tribute in Italy, but really to see if he can spend more time with his daughter, Daisy (Grace Edwards), who is travelling with her friends and has no interest in spending time with her absentee father. On this trip, he takes his entourage, including long-suffering manager Ron (Adam Sandler), who is constantly juggling his demanding clients with his demanding family, and publicist, Liz (Laura Dern), who is entirely too stressed out to be dealing with her client.

What follows is a lot of nostalgia and flashbacks to pivotal moments in young Jay's career, the important people who came in and out of his life, and the various ways in which he always chose his work over anything else. There's some pretty scenery, and Clooney does some lovely movie-star acting, managing to convey his sadness and resignation over his choices. But overall, the movie just feels like a big ball of nothing, a rumination on stardom that has nothing particularly revelatory to convey. I suppose it's a perfectly adequate "stream on the couch" movie, but there's not much else going on here.

If I Had Legs I'd Kick You: Written and directed by Mary Bronstein, this is a weird and trippy movie about a therapist named Linda (played magnificently by Rose Byrne) who is really struggling. She has a very sick daughter who must be fed through a feeding tube and needs constant care and supervision; her husband is a ship captain and away on an eight-week work trip; the ceiling in her apartment has collapsed so she and her daughter need to move to a shabby motel while repairs take place; she has increasingly needy and difficult patients to deal with at work; and her sessions with her own therapist (played wonderfully by Conan O'Brien) are getting increasingly adversarial.

As you can imagine, this is a very tense movie, and the psychological discomfort keeps ratcheting up as Linda's life continues to spiral out of control. It's essentially a horror film about being a woman who has to do it all with very little support, and who is being challenged in every possible sphere of her life. Byrne's performance is nail-bitingly excellent, but this is not a movie that I would ever want to watch again. Give it one essential viewing and then tune into a sitcom to cleanse the palate.

Fackham Hall: Directed by Jim O'Hanlon and written by the Dawson Bros., Jimmy Carr, and Patrick Carr, this is an extremely silly and very British movie. It is a satire of self-serious prestige British dramas like Downton Abbey or Gosford Park, so get ready for a lot of puns and absurdity in the style of The Naked Gun movies. Set in 1930s England, the film follows the Davenport family who live in the grand estate of Fackham Hall but do not have a male heir who could inherit it. The eldest daughter, Poppy (Emma Laird), is all set to marry her cousin Archibald (Tom Felton), as incest is a core family tenet to keep the bloodlines pure, but when that wedding is thwarted, hopes are set on the dreamy and idealistic younger daughter, Rose (Thomasin McKenzie) to save the family. Of course, Rose has fallen in love with a young servant named Eric Noone (Ben Radcliffe), so that's going to complicate matters.

Further complicating matters is the murder of her father (played by Damian Lewis), so then we get a classic murder mystery spoof, with Tom Goodman-Hill playing Inspector Watt (yes, we get a whole sequence of people being very confused as to WHAT his name is...Watt?). This movie is dumb but diverting, a perfectly pleasant way to while away 90 minutes when you have some time to kill or you just want to let your brain relax for a bit. If you love silly British comedy, this is exactly what you seek, but if you've never watched a British show in your life, this is not the movie for you.

Ella McCay: Written and directed by James L. Brooks, this is a deeply strange movie that features an all-star cast delivering amazing performances in service of a terrible script. Emma Mackey stars as the titular Ella, a 34-year-old woman who unexpectedly becomes the Governor of her state and is a passionate and principled politician. Unfortunately, she has a lot of challenging men in her life. Her estranged father (Woody Harrelson) is back in town and demanding forgiveness, she is increasingly worried about her anxious and agoraphobic brother (Spike Fearn) who isn't answering her messages, her husband (Jack Lowden) wants a bigger role at her side in government, and her old boss (Albert Brooks) is constantly nagging her about how she needs to be more charismatic and less idealistic if she wants to succeed as a politician. The only supportive people in her life are her bodyguard and driver (Kumail Nanjiani), her protective secretary (Julie Kavner, who is also the narrator of the movie, probably just because she has the most distinctive voice known to mankind?), and her Aunt Helen (Jamie Lee Curtis), who is the only functional family member she has had in her life, and who fiercely loves and champions her.

This movie is a hot mess - there are a lot of storylines, and it proceeds like a bunch of vignettes (perhaps hearkening to Brooks' success in writing and directing sitcoms), and the dialogue is astonishingly clunky. The actors are fantastic, particularly Mackey and Curtis who work beautifully off each other, and I can't wait to see Mackey be a superstar in other movies, but this movie is not it. Honestly, I would not have minded this movie as much if it wasn't for one particular storyline involving Ella's brother and his ex-girlfriend, played by Ayo Edebiri. As the only Black character in this film, it was particularly galling to see what this movie made her go through, and I was NOT here for it. I agreed with almost all of the moral values of this film, and the good people got to have a happy ending while the bad people got their just desserts. But boy oh boy does it get it very wrong with the brother. Don't bother suffering through this movie in a theater, but please do watch it on streaming and let me know what you thought. I still can't quite understand what point it was ever hoping to make.

December Movies Part 1: Rental Family & Hamnet

There are a lot of movies to watch this month so I'm slowly making my way through them all. Here are my reviews of a technically perfect movie that seems destined for Oscars, and a shaggier but extremely compelling movie that won me over. My reactions to these movies surprised me, maybe they will surprise you too!

Rental Family: Directed by Hikari, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Stephen Blahut, this is a movie about a struggling American actor named Phillip (Brendan Fraser), who has been living in Japan for seven years after he initially had success with a commercial, but now can never seem to get good work. When he meets Shinji (Takehiro Hira), the owner of a rental family agency, he overcomes his initial reservations and agrees to be a part of this company that offers up a uniquely Japanese service - actors for hire who can help people by pretending to be their family members or acquaintances, so they can live out some sort of make-believe scenario that better helps them cope with their life or get out of a sticky situation with a relative. Because there is so much stigma around mental health in Japan, this is what people usually resort to instead of going to a therapist to work through their problems.

I was initially worried that this movie was going down a white savior route. Phillip is constantly troubled by his conscience and wondering why these Japanese people keep bending themselves out of shape to please their families instead of acting on their own desires. But as the movie progresses, there is a great deal of back-and-forth between him and Aiko (Mari Yamamoto), his colleague who is passionate about this job and the good it can do, but who also starts to realize that maybe some of the services they offer are subject to more scrutiny. The very first job that Phillip takes on is so clearly helpful to his client, but the next two are much more morally ambiguous. Wrestling with that ambiguity over the course of this film makes it a truly engaging and thought-provoking experience.

Overall, I was delighted by this movie. There were moments when it got a bit maudlin, but I found myself moved and charmed and thoroughly swept away by all the performances, especially Fraser's quiet but powerful work, where he lets his eyes do most of the talking. It's also simply wonderful to be treated to an original story with fresh perspectives we don't ordinarily get to see in Hollywood movies. More please!

Hamnet: Directed by Chloe Zhao, who adapted the screenplay with Maggie O'Farrell (who wrote the 2020 novel), this is a story set in Elizabethan England that portrays William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) meeting and falling in love with his wife, Agnes (Jessie Buckley), starting a family, and then, grief-stricken from losing his son, Hamnet, eventually writing his tragic masterpiece, Hamlet.

This movie is a technical masterpiece. The production design by Fiona Crombie is unparalleled, capturing Shakespeare's England in vivid and striking detail alongside Malgosia Turzanska's beautiful costumes, while Zhao's direction manages to be both sweeping and intimate, full of gorgeous, dappled shots of nature, and then long close-up shots of her actors, who are delivering performances of a lifetime. Unsurprisingly, Mescal and Buckley are brilliant in this film, particularly Buckley who lets that marvelously mobile face of hers take us on an emotional rollercoaster. But even the child actors are superb, especially Jacobi Jupe as the young Hamnet, who has to convey rather deep and serious emotion over the course of this film. In a lovely bit of casting, his older brother, Noah Jupe, plays the character of Hamlet in the performance of the play that takes up the finale of the movie.

All that being said, this movie left me cold. It feels churlish to say so, but it was too perfect and polished. I loved the novel, but that meant I knew the story already, and again, while the movie is a perfect adaptation, nothing felt original or particularly fresh about it. There also was a rather unfortunate choice during the most powerful scene that completely took me out of the movie. There is a music cue that is not original - it's a beautiful piece of music that I recognized from another movie, and it has recently been deployed in other films and TV shows anytime the creators really want to tug at your heartstrings. That lack of originality, while still using a technically perfect piece of music for the scene, was the final straw for me. This is a great movie, and I don't begrudge it any awards, especially for Best Production Design or Best Actress, but I left the theater wishing it had touched my heart more.