That’s all well and good, but I still don’t like watching an elephant shit on a man. La La Land, the previous film written and directed by Chazelle, presented a version of Hollywood where the grind of the industry was worthwhile and romantic and full of endings sweet and bitter. It’s almost wholesome. I guess Chazelle spent the past six years reading all the backlash blogs who thought he was nothing but a cheap maudlin-monger. Babylon swings hard, too hard, in the opposite direction. It’s the most cynical movie I’ve seen in some time. Nearly every scene concludes with a cruel punchline.

The subject matter is the transition between silent cinema and sound cinema, and the impact that switch had on people in Hollywood, particularly those who thrived in the silent era. If this sounds like the premise of Singin’ in the Rain, that is not a mistake. Babylon is basically a black-hearted, Caligulan crypto-remake, and that classic musical gets multiple shout-outs. The ending is literally people watching Singin’ in the Rain.

There’s another film that Babylon matches even more closely than Singin’ in the Rain. That would be Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights. The films have strikingly similar structures, to the point that you can match up certain scenes and characters one to one. Both show decadence taken to excess, especially as the money dries up and one medium pivots to another. For Boogie Nights, it’s theater porno chic to home video smut; for Babylon, it’s the golden age of silent films to the awkward infancy of talkies. The big difference between the two is that Anderson’s film shows its characters as lovable and irreplaceable while the art they make is disposable junk. Chazelle’s film depicts the exact opposite.

Babylon has a large ensemble, but the three main players are Nellie LeRoy (Margot Robbie), Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), and Manny Torres (Diego Calva). The trio provides a lens on both the glamour and the nastiness of Hollywood. LeRoy is a hot young upstart, the it-girl, dripping with sex appeal in the pre-Hays Code Hollywood. Conrad is an alcoholic, narcissistic aging heartthrob who has perfected the art of turning “on” when the camera rolls and using his classic good looks to woo young women. Ramirez, a Mexican immigrant, is the relentlessly grinding, dirty-work helping hand who eventually gets involved in production.

All of this plays out in a series of some of the most fantastic scenes of recent years: There are something like six tour de force scenes that have the shape and rhythm of short films. The greatest of these is the montage of silent movies being shot on packed studio lots, the alchemical magic of creation infecting everything around it. The close runner up is the opposite, a scene of a stuffy early talkie where LeRoy has to mutter the words “hello, college!” take after take, ending with a jokey death.

The smaller scenes that hold the movie’s structure are great, too, though Chazelle seems more interested in burning through an endless list of ideas rather than assembling them into a cohesive story. The film pulls in a large stable of secondary characters: There’s a rising jazz star, Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo) — I mean, it’s a Chazelle film, so of course there’s a rising jazz star — who is subjected to a cruel racial irony. Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li) is a Chinese actress who plays “exotic” characters and hand-letters intertitle cards. She is a not-even-slightly closeted lesbian. Elinor St. John (Jean Smart) arbitrates the star power hierarchy as a vicious magazine columnist.

Many of the characters in Babylon are based on real-life people who churned through the early studio system. In fact, the film is partially inspired by the book Hollywood Babylon by Kenneth Anger, the underground bible of pre-Code Hollywood gossip. We get a version of the Fatty Arbuckle-Virginia Rappe scandal, a take on the tragic rise-and-fall of Clara Bow with LeRoy, and a bunch of other tabloid legends. (There are some crib sheets floating around online.)

The film is a big mess of characters and plot threads, but Chazelle’s mission statement across them all is that the peak of silent Hollywood was an incendiary time — bright, shining, but inevitably going to burn itself out and turn those in its proximity into ash. The output was magnificent, but the combustion required to get there was brutal.

As with all of Chazelle’s films, Justin Hurwitz returns as a composer, and he delivers another masterpiece. This time, he offers up an early-century smorgasbord: big band swing, cabaret, carnival music, torch songs. It’s all filtered through Hurwitz’s romantic use of character- and theme-based leitmotifs, and polished with a pleasing, modern sheen. The score is rich and interconnected across its various pieces. It’s a truly great soundtrack, one of the best of 2022 and decade so far. Even though Babylon is not really a musical, there are even a few original sung numbers, which are all quite good.

The craft in the film is universally outstanding. I love the editing despite the prodigious length; at least, I like the editing within scenes. It has a terrific, almost musical, cadence cutting between shots. Similarly, the cinematography is gorgeous and rich; soaking in deep, mahogany colors that amplify the decadence; the film’s coloring gradually curdles as its characters’ fortunes sour. It’s the fifth brilliant and unique use of color by Chazelle in as many films.

The acting is great, too, if occasionally just as eccentric and tonally confused as the film itself. Robbie, though not always a favorite of mine, is best in show: She embodies Nellie LeRoy’s combustible personality of spectacle personified. Calva has a quieter role, but has one particular responsibility that he perfects: reaction shots. It never gets old watching him soak in every batshit scene he encounters like he’s watching the smash film of the year with hungry, curious eyes. Meanwhile, Pitt is in his element as a selfish alcoholic riding on his charm, his face still etched with loneliness.

The supporting cast keeps up, too. Tobey Maguire turns into a gremlin in a single, drawn out scene that will give you the willies with equal parts fear and disgust. Smart, Adepo, and Li all leave outsized impressions in small roles, and they accompany an endless retinue of fun cameos and bit parts: Flea, Olivia Wilde, etc.

The film ends with a phantasmagoria of cinema that is one of the more astonishing achievements of montage in recent years. It also reaffirms one of my main hangups with the film: its thematic ambivalence. The conclusion of Babylon can’t decide if its art is sacred or vile, and whenever the film leans too hard towards the latter, it just feels dour.

Maybe five or ten years from now, I’ll revisit Babylon and its bleak enigma will seem appealing. Perhaps I’ll shake off all of Chazelle’s impishness and gross-out humor and cynicism and be able to appreciate Babylon for all the incredible things it does with form and beauty and music. Even amidst my state of cognitive dissonance, I still rank it as one of the year’s best films. But considering Chazelle’s last three films were Whiplash, La La Land, and First Man, it’s possible for Babylon to be genuinely great and still be a bit of a letdown.

I approach this film on the other side of the horizon. The critics drubbed the film as “dumb trash.” Imagine my surprise when I watched it and found that it is… well, okay, dumb trash. But it’s fun dumb trash — and that makes all the difference in the world.

Recently, we’ve been starved for enjoyably cheesy, faux-cerebral sci-fi epics. For example, the yawn-inducing 65 promised time-traveling astronauts battling dinosaurs but devolved into a generic escort mission movie in a jungle without any of the goofy brain-benders the opening fifteen minutes suggest. By contrast, I found myself savoring every absurd twist and turn offered by The Cloverfield Paradox.

Much like 10 Cloverfield Lane, this film’s narrative runs parallel to the original Cloverfield. However, Paradox ties more directly into the overarching kaiju alien conspiracy of the 2008 original. Like with 10 Cloverfield Lane, I think connecting it to the original Cloverfield premise does not improve the story: The weakest aspects of Paradox are those that insinuate a connection to the Cloverfield monster, never ultimately providing any interesting answers or even satisfying ambiguity. It’s abundantly clear that the Cloverfield franchise was appended in a late script revision, with little regard for the core narrative of the draft. Maybe “Cloverfield” should just be an anthology brand at this point.

The Cloverfield Paradox is set on a space station, where the crew attempts to carry out a sci-fi MacGuffin laser-blast operation, purportedly providing infinite energy to Earth via sci-fi babble quantum wizardry. The procedure, alas, risks the accidental opening of wormholes. No big deal. The crew, including our protagonist, the engineer Ava (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), flips on the switch and the operations appears to succeed until a power surge destabilizes the station. When the systems reboot, everything seems normal until they discover that… Earth has vanished! Holy shit, no more humanity! This is the first of the movie’s delightful and goofy alternate universe twists that take place within the confines of the space station.

The crew, portrayed by a diverse and talented cast, is a highlight of the film. Alongside Mbatha-Raw’s Ava, we’re introduced to physicist Ernst (Daniel Bruhl), medical doctor Monk (John Ortiz), ship captain Jason (David Oyelowo), and engineers Gordon (Chris O’Dowd), Ling (Zhang Ziyi), and Sasha (Aksel Hennie). All fun to hang with.

One of the film’s quirks is its shifting tones. Gordon, played by O’Dowd, offers some unexpected and abrupt comedy that I found charming rather than jarring, perfectly undercutting the intense multiverse ponderings. He is subject to some of the silliest and cruellest of the movie’s multiverse contrivances.

Beyond its sci-fi action cheese, the film also packs a surprising emotional punch. Amidst the alternate universe gimmick, Ava — mourning the loss of her children — grapples with a new and profound pain: She realizes, in an alternate universe, the accident that killed her children might be avoidable. Mbatha-Raw delivers the emotional material very well, such that it holds up despite the the busy sci-fi material and light comedy surrounding it.

The weakest of the film’s subplots features Ava’s husband Michael (Roger Davies). He is dealing with the Cloverfield disaster back on Earth. This narrative thread feels phoned-in and superficial, culminating in a stinger story beat that feels so much like a Lost episode cliffhanger that I might have guessed Abrams’ involvement even without prior knowledge.

The addition of an alternate universe layer also injects an intriguing layer of suspense that I have never seen rendered quite this way before. It asks how much characters might vary across different universes. For example, when we learn that a character sabotaged the team in one universe, it immediately raises questions whether that character will do the same in the “prime” universe. With the characters doubting each other and contained in a tight, isolated setting, these parts of the film evoke The Thing.

As fun and goofily scattershot as I found the movie, it is certainly on the shallow side. Ava is the only character with anything resembling depth or an arc. The majority of the cast exist solely to fall victim to the various reality-altering twists of the movie.

Nonetheless, I thoroughly enjoyed The Cloverfield Paradox. I smiled the whole time. It leans heavily on genre tropes, but its inventive and unhinged spirit offers some surprising entertainment. It lacks the seriousness of the previous Cloverfield films, and it may be disadvantaged by its connection to the franchise, but I view it as a success of stupid-fun sci-fi in its own right.

But as soon as you watch it, there’s no question that this is a motion picture directed by Damien Chazelle. The big giveaway is the central theme of the story: A person sacrifices something of their basic humanity in order to achieve some creatively fulfilling goal. In fact, First Man hits that theme on two levels. The first and obvious one is Armstrong (Ryan Gosling) himself. The aspiring astronaut confronts the loss of his daughter and subsequently disconnects from his family and his wife to obsess over his dream of walking on the moon.

Chazelle and his team also capture the theme on a second level. The collective people of the United States give up some of their own humanism in the name of the space program. Tragic, accidental deaths within NASA pile up with no major achievements to show for it, generating understandable bad headlines. People start wondering if the billions of dollars and world-class team of scientists and engineers might be better applied to challenges that will actually improve the day-to-day lives of Americans. This dilemma is not fictionalized: Chazelle includes real quotes from real politicians plus the Gil-Scott Heron beat poem “Whitey on the Moon.”

Thus, First Man, on the surface, is sort of what I expected: A movie in which Chazelle can flex his filmmaking chops for a story less personal and autobiographical than his other films. But it also isn’t that. It’s still Chazelle from top to bottom. There’s no question he sees a lot of himself in Armstrong, someone totally obsessed with his craft and elusive greatness.

Thankfully, Chazelle brings the film to life with tremendous fastidiousness and bracing direction. The film is anchored around three of Armstrong’s missions with ascending scope and visual power: a test flight of the X-15 that opens the film, the Gemini 8 near-disaster in the middle of the film, and, of course, the Apollo 11 mission that serves as the climax.

Chazelle shoots the first two missions in a brilliant piece of subjectivity bordering on impressionism. Everything takes place inside the cockpit, equipment rattling and lights flaring and noises blaring. It captures the disorientation and sheer chaos of something so powerful and dangerous and inhuman as space flight. It’s also wondrously gripping and beautiful as cinema; my heart was racing during these set pieces. Chazelle shows tremendous instincts for rattling your brain, and he’s aided by some terrific editing by Tom Cross timing and sequencing it for incredible gut-level impact. Any childhood notion I might have had of space flight as romantic and adventurous cratered as I watched First Man and understood just how jarring and displacing it would be.

In between the space scenes comes the domestic drama. As Armstrong grapples with more and more loss — first his daughter, and then the accumulating body count of his coworkers — he draws further away from his wife Janet (Claire Foy). Foy is terrific in the role, her huge eyes and expressive face capturing a storm of emotions, but always a presentation of maternal strength on the surface. She has excellent chemistry with Gosling: It’s easy to believe the couple were once deeply in love and lust with each other even as that spark has dwindled.

Chazelle shoots the scenes on earth in a way that seems bizarre at first but makes more sense the more time you spend with it and think about it. Much of it is shot in handheld, all in 16 mm with some slight gauziness to the look. It’s almost a Terence Malick tribute the way Chazelle soaks in the hazy suburban environments. Freshly-mowed lawns blowing in the breeze, beige drywall making the whole world feel cloudy.

It is at once a stark contrast to the spacefaring material, but also an echo of it: Americana as a distant, alienating force for a man who doesn’t quite feel at home anywhere. I also think Chazelle just loves handheld naturalism in his movies just as much as he loves big, colorful spectacle. His student film was a black-and-white mumblecore, after all, and he relishes the style here.

The movie is excellent throughout, but the ending is on a higher level. I think there’s a case to be made that First Man is a genuine masterpiece, and that rides on just how well the ending pays off on everything that leads to it, and ties the film’s various threads together.

It should be no shock that the movie climaxes with the Apollo 11 mission. But for the first time, Chazelle takes us outside of the subjectivity of Armstrong’s cockpit, and let us soak in the world-altering magnificence of the the trip to the moon. The shuttle launch is bone-rattling and fiery, yet majestic: Humanity breaking free of its earthly shackles through incredible acumen and sheer brute force. The bones of a million lifting up three pioneers.

There is a moment in this final act that makes me weep that I didn’t see this film in IMAX. The doors of the lander open on the surface of the moon, the noise completely cutting out, and the stock abruptly shifting from wide-screen 16 mm to full frame IMAX. It is unfortunately cropped on the DVD and Blu-ray release. I can only imagine the sense of awe seeing it on the Udvar-Hazy 86-foot IMAX screen. Alas.

There’s another part of the climax that makes me weep too, but this time for its emotional and dramatic content. It’s one of the few invented storytelling devices in a film otherwise quite historically accurate and evidence-based. Armstrong lays to rest his grief over the death of his young daughter, always just under the surface of his steely exterior, in a gesture that shattered my heart into a million pieces. Keep in mind I am the father of two young daughters, so an easy mark for this kind of material, but it’s a perfect moment of emotional storytelling.

And then the movie finally ends on an absolutely perfect image, Armstrong and his wife still worlds apart, but reaching out to each other and connecting for the first time in a long time after he “comes back to Earth” — literally and figuratively.

The only thing that holds First Man back is that which is unavoidable in the material. Armstrong is simply not that compelling or cinematic of a character. Yes, the movie maximizes the dramatic potential of somebody who is a consummate professional and reliable gentleman but who happens to be a bit icy in his domestic life. But that’s still pretty bland as far as protagonists go. I don’t think it’s a surprise that the brash but heroic Buzz Aldrin appears for all of three scenes and still leaves nearly as much of an impression as our protagonist.

The same goes for the climactic mission itself. Part of what’s remarkable about Apollo 11 is just how smooth it all went. The film finds one aspect of the mission to tease out some danger, a bit of drama about conserving fuel, but it’s still pretty clear that Apollo 11 was miraculously well-executed and according-to-plan. Compare, obviously, to the deeply cinematic story of Apollo 13 and all of the sudden Apollo 11 seems tame despite its historical significance.

The screenplay also leans a little too hard on viewers’ familiarity with the Apollo program. Characters and jargon pop in and out of the story with just enough clarity to function in a narrative sense, but clearly benefiting from someone who has some familiarity with the topics at hand. Then again, how many people are seeing this movie who don’t already know the broad strokes of how we landed on the moon?

That all feels a little bit like nitpicking, though it puts a slight ceiling on the film. Nonetheless, I think First Man is the best possible version of itself: An emotional and thrilling triumph and an affirmation that Chazelle is one of the most exciting filmmakers in Hollywood today.

It was the most surreal moment in the history of the Academy Awards. The entire Hollywood world collected under one roof had just declared La La Land the Best Picture of 2016, only for the award to be yanked away and handed to Moonlight.

What a bittersweet blend of tragedy and triumph for La La Land. The triumph: six Oscar wins, including a Best Director statuette for Damien Chazelle. The tragedy: a humiliating defeat three minutes after you’d climbed the stage assuming you’d just entered Hollywood’s annals alongside The Godfather, Casablanca, and Titanic.

The more times I’ve watched La La Land, the more poetry I’ve found in its Academy Awards fate. It echoes the movie’s bittersweet ending: A rise to glory tinged with the loss of the greatest prize of all. On February 26, 2017, it was a Best Picture statuette slipped away; in La La Land, it was true love.

Damien Chazelle, fresh off his buzzy, Oscar-winning sensation Whiplash, dove into his true passion project, the musical he’d been dreaming of making since he wrapped on Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench in 2009. Like all of Chazelle’s films to date, La La Land is about the cost of achieving artistic actualization, the sacrifices we make to create something great. A tug of war between personal and professional success.

This one is especially personal to Chazelle. He reckons with the moviemaking grind. Even though it ends with hits and acclaim, it’s a slanted and painful path there: Bad auditions and gigs, rejection over and over and over until there’s almost nothing left.

But even more than a manifesto on the pros and cons of grinding until you find your break, La La Land is a movie about how lovely movies are. It is intoxicated with the romantic allure of cinema, specifically musical cinema, “a Technicolor world made out of music and machine.” Colors and images, passions and heartbreaks, music and motion, dreams and stars. As such, it is full of homage: The most obvious inspiration is Jacques Demy, but to pigeonhole La La Land as a pastiche of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg would be to miss a feast of cinematic allusion. There are explicit cues from F.W. Murnau, Alfred Hitchcock, and David Lean; Grease, West Side Story, and Moulin Rouge. (Not to mention a major hat-tip to That Thing You Do!, my favorite film of all time; I learned from Chazelle’s commentary track that it’s one of his favorite movies and one of Emma Stone’s favorites, too.) The more movies I see, the more times I return to La La Land, the more infectious I find Chazelle and composer Justin Hurwitz’s voracious appetite for the glamorous but exhausting Hollywood myth and all its silver screen creations.

La La Land is framed around a pivotal year in the lives of Mia (Emma Stone) and Sebastian (Ryan Gosling). Mia is an aspiring actress running out of steam for failed auditions and dashed hope. Sebastian is a piano player who dreams of opening a vintage jazz club but is forced into performing humiliating Muzak at parties and restaurants to pay the bills. After brusquely crossing paths a few times, Mia and Sebastian discover in each other a shred of hope for a brighter, happier future. Personal love amidst the professional heartbreak. By the end of the film’s final act — a five year flash forward capped with a epilogue that revisits the movie’s pivotal moments with idealized wishes and stylized visuals — the script has flipped. Professional glory achieved, impossible without the support and inspiration of the other, but romance slipped through fingertips and lost to time. Triumph, tragedy, a bittersweet blend of both.

This is also a love(-or-is-it-hate) letter to the city of Los Angeles: A cuckoo world where sunsets look like matte paintings and Christmas is a balmy 72 degrees. The film’s opener, “Another Day of Sun” succinctly captures the double-sided nature of the city’s famous comfy weather and how it serves as a metaphor for the tireless dreamers who inhabit it: The sun is a sign of optimism but also a symbol of the depressing, repetitive grind (literally sung during a traffic jam). Every day, the same as the last — that’s how depressives often describe their condition. The film has a gag that lasts the entire runtime about how the actual season doesn’t really matter and most people don’t seem to notice despite it being plastered on the screen like a title card.

And buried under all of that is one more theme, perhaps the most introspective by Chazelle. Sebastian finds himself at a crossroads in the film: Does he embrace popular and forward-thinking jazz embodied by John Legend’s Keith, or does he cater to the niche, classical die-hards with his conservative brand of bop? This tension between looking back at the greats versus blazing a populist trail forward has defined Chazelle’s creative output so far. There is certainly some irony that the film that will likely be the most crowd-pleasing that he ever makes is so preoccupied with defining artistic authenticity and the drawbacks of making something so broadly popular.

La La Land is a magnificent showcase for its two leads: Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling. One of the biggest differences between La La Land and the classic musicals it homages is that neither Gosling nor Stone is a prodigy in vocals or dancing. Yet they more than make up for it with some of my favorite acting of the past decade: It’s hard not to get swept away in their romance or choked up while, e.g., Stone’s Mia pays tribute to her aunt the dreamer in a single live-recorded take of “Audition (The Fools Who Dream).” Stone and Gosling acquit themselves as singers and dancers better than expected. They’re no Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, but they carry the film wonderfully.

Stone and Gosling are outstanding at the Star is Born material — great in isolation as they dream big, and even better together as they lift each other up (and tear each other down). They have terrific chemistry and charisma, and serious sparks both romantic and tense when the moments call for it. Really outstanding performances by both.

Bonus points go to Gosling for actually learning to play the piano. When I first saw the movie and realized he was written as a piano player, I rolled my eyes — one of my movie pet peeves is actors playing supposed piano players who we only ever see play the piano with camera trickery like obfuscated hands and cuts to doubles. But Gosling is actually playing the music in the film — some of it, like the “City of Stars” duet, actually live during filming rather than added in post-production.

The two most memorable elements that Chazelle brings to the film’s visual profile are its colors and its long takes. The colors strongly evoke three-strip Technicolor, like a studio-era musical dating back to Wizard of Oz. (Demy in particular famously loved colors like this.) It’s a visual blowout — costumes and sets fully saturated in their hues. And it’s all grounded in terrific color theory: Mia and her cold reality are captured in blues, Sebastian and his romanticism captured in reds, their palate gradually merging to purple as they fall in love and chart a future together (then apart). Yellows mean we’re about to hit a turning point; greens foreshadow a growing distance between the pair; whites suggest some sort of void or hunger.

As the third of Chazelle’s writer-director projects, it’s the third innovative and thematic use of color by Chazelle: Guy and Madeline’s black-and-white suggest a detached blurriness and stumbling through young adulthood; Whiplash’s yellow-tinted tone suggests stage lights as its heroes obsess over performance in every aspect of their lives; for La La Land, the colors capture a big-hearted romanticism and love for dreamers.

Chazelle’s second big visual tool is long takes. He opens the movie with the biggest one of all: the highway-sprawling, cast-of-hundreds “Another Day of Sun.” Not only is it a virtuosic piece of direction and choreography, but it lays out the movie’s blurry edges of musical diegesis: normal life is punctuated by song and dance, reality and musical in an arm-wrestling match.

So many of the subsequent scenes are oners, too, and they always foster the sense of a sensuous, sprawling city of stars. One of Chazelle’s favorite techniques is a quick pan as a replacement for a cut. It’s a subtle thing — almost a cheat as it achieves approximately the same effect of a cut — but it also does so much to build a sense of space during the musical numbers.

Justin Hurwitz as the composer is just as much the architect of the film as Chazelle. This is one of the greatest soundtracks for any movie; at a minimum, it’s one of the great triumphs of film score composition since live-action musicals went out of style in the late 1960s. Hurwitz’s strength is in thematic and leitmotif work: Each of the movie’s major songs represents a new theme for the Hurwitz to toy with in the orchestral score as the film progresses. He also builds a lovely, transporting core theme: “Mia and Sebastian’s Theme” as it’s labeled on the soundtrack, the swelling and cascading 7-note riff first heard when Mia first overhears Seb playing the piano. It’s a miniature knockout, evocative of “Clair De Lune” but repurposed with a dozen different heart-tugging textures throughout the film.

The soundtrack’s coup de grace is the finale which pulls together every soundtrack theme used throughout the film in an audiovisual fantasia. It’s an outright masterpiece of a ten-minute scene anchored by the clever musical composition returning and evolving. It’s one of my favorite segments of any movie I’ve seen.

Hurwitz’s work on actual numbers, with lyrics penned by Pasek and Paul, is excellent as well, uniquely suited as a movie soundtrack. They don’t play as well in isolation or in a pop context as most movie soundtracks these days. That’s by design, of course — it’s a “classic” showtune score. A few of the numbers run together — the sequencing of “Another Day of Sun” and “Someone in the Crowd” within fifteen minutes of each other really makes the two songs seem same-ish in particular. “A Lovely Night” introduces a crucial leitmotif, but as an isolated tune is forgettable. But it really wasn’t meant to be isolated. It wasn’t written to be a radio-friendly single, but to accompany gorgeous, long-take sunset choreography in one of the prettiest scenes of the film.

“Audition (The Fools Who Dream),” another knockout, inverts “Another Day of Sun”: it’s a heartfelt, irony-free tribute to dreaming for more. It’s sung live by Stone, and you can hear the emotion overcoming her voice. The minimal black framing with a woozy, spinning camera is phenomenally evocative. It is, again, not the most memorable tune on its own, but as the climax to this particular movie, it’s heart-tugging and brilliant.

What really makes the numbers work is how well they integrate with the story: Hurwitz brilliantly repurposes motifs from each song throughout the film to enrich the emotional content of Mia and Seb’s journey. And each song is of course accompanied by the mise en scene that Chazelle builds for each tune. On screen, as opposed to Spotify, each tune is absolutely perfect, and I love them all.

The biggest problems with the film are writing-related: The script features some choppy plotting in the second act. I’ve always chalked the mid-story lurches up to an ambitious story with a lot of moving parts that got maybe a little in over its head and was smoothed over in the editing room in the name of pacing. Chazelle’s director’s commentary confirms this — a few transition scenes were cut, a few shots and lines of dialogue moved from one scene to another. The result is that the movie’s pivotal thematic shift — Seb becoming a successful but unfulfilled jazz piano player as Mia pauses her acting career to work on her self-discovery one-woman show — feels a bit rushed and awkward.

It ends up not mattering too much. The broad ideas are there, and they work. It’s a big, melodramatic story, the strokes clear and effective. And by the time you get to that finale, that momentary smile between Seb and Mia that closes the film, capturing a hundred different ideas and feelings — some triumphant and romantic, some tragic and weepy, all bittersweet — La La Land has pulled all of its ambitions together into a true masterpiece. It’s one of the great films of the century to date. The three-minute Best Picture reigns eternal in my heart if not the record books.

The contrasts between this film and its forebear run deep:

• Cloverfield is a found footage kaiju film; 10 Cloverfield Lane is an abduction thriller.
• Cloverfield takes place across a dozen different urban settings; 10 Cloverfield Lane takes place in three rooms for 90% of its runtime.
• Cloverfield has a clear stylistic mission, evoking 9/11; 10 Cloverfield Lane uses an absence of stylized horror elements, just a few boxy rooms, as its key aesthetic (for all but the last 20 minutes).
• Cloverfield uses characters merely as rails to get to the spectacle; 10 Cloverfield Lane is built entirely around its characters and their tense interactions.
• Cloverfield features one of my actress crushes (Lizzy Caplan); 10 Cloverfield Lane features one of my actress crushes (Mary Elizabeth Winstead).

Well, I guess they have at least one thing in common.

The movie opens with Michelle (Winstead) leaving her fiancé for some unspecified reason. As she’s driving down a country road, she has an abrupt car crash, knocking her unconscious. When she wakes up, she finds herself in what appears to be an underground prison cell, an IV hooked into her arm.

She tries to escape, but is confronted by Howard (John Goodman), who claims to have seen her crash and saved her life. Michelle tries to talk Howard into releasing her, but Howard insists that the world is undergoing a biological disaster, and she will die if she leaves his bunker. He’s protecting her, he insists. Shortly afterwards, a third person joins the bunker, Emmett (John Gallagher, Jr.) who largely corroborates Howard’s story.

Thus emerges the critical flaw in 10 Cloverfield Lane, at least for its first half. It’s the name. 10 Cloverfield Lane. Unless the movie is going doing a massive swerve on us, which I personally would have liked but would probably have pissed off most of the audience, we know that there is indeed some sort of alien apocalypse. Thus we’re in a state not of suspense but of dramatic irony, but the movie doesn’t act that way. It’s very odd.

(To dive a bit deeper into spoilers, here, the set-up also simply begs for a second twist to subvert audience expectation at least in some way. And we get that twist: Though there really is an apocalypse, Howard actually is a kidnapper.)

The movie lives by its acting. Winstead is excellent as the heroine, bringing out the best of each of Michelle’s roles: she has a strong rapport with Goodman and Gallagher, she nails the action scenes, and she thrives in the moments where she’s isolated, too. I suggested in my review of Live Free or Die Hard that she could carry her own action franchise some day, and I still definitely believe it.

Goodman is a highlight as well, possibly even better than Winstead. His version of an unhinged, paranoid captor right on the blurry edge of benevolent is terrific. I was most impressed when he ratcheted the bruising intimidation at the needed moments. He is legitimately scary, which he balances with some longing monologues about the people he cares for, like his daughter. It ultimately paints the picture of a dark but complicated human.

The script is written by Damien Chazelle. He was initially tapped to direct as well, but decided to make La La Land instead. The correct career decision, no doubt. Chazelle emerged from college as a “script guy,” and we see it in some of his unconventional work that was produced in the early- and mid-2010s. Grand Piano is a gripping high concept thriller; this and Last Exorcism Part II are reinventions of existing properties with new lenses. (I would say new, “clever” lenses, but not much in Last Exorcism Part II counts as clever.)

For 10 Cloverfield Lane, Chazelle didn’t write the initial spec of this film; that was Josh Campbell and Matt Stuecken. Chazelle reshaped it into its current form. Knowing what we do about Chazelle’s directorial talent, it’s hard not to wonder what this might have looked like with his vision.

Despite Chazelle’s touch — and he is a good writer — I think the script works much better on paper than on celluloid. The narrative is schematically compelling, whether or not you mark the spoiler of Cloverfield in the title against it, but not especially emotionally effective. I was never invested in the characters, including Michelle, except as a vessel for the next twist in the abduction saga. Unlike Cloverfield, which can ride on its production values, 10 Cloverfield Lane depends upon being a strong character piece, which isn’t fully there.

One wrinkle: This movie came out three years after the Ariel Castro kidnapping rescues made headlines, which gives some extra charge to the interactions between Howard and Michelle. Sexual predation is kept (mostly) as subtext, but there’s still some ooky nastiness rolled up with the film’s suspense.

Then there’s the matter of the climax, which turns 10 Cloverfield Lane an entirely new movie for 15 minutes. It definitely pays off on the Cloverfield name, but shifting from a human-centric thriller to a monster-centric, CGI-driven one so close to the conclusion is a bit baffling. It feels grafted on from a different film and had me scratching my head as the credits rolled.

Ultimately, 10 Cloverfield Lane film provides just enough thrilling suspense and well-acted characters to earn a recommendation. I just wished it was a little smarter and more heartfelt.

To be clear, even though it’s a bit shameless, arguably even exploitative, I think this is absolutely riveting and compelling. Transcendent horror-via-newsreel. It heightens and electrifies the film. The state of confusion, chaotic masses frantically running through the streets, dust and rubble coating clothes and sidewalks, flashes of violence and suffering that hint at the broad destruction of humanity, memories of innocence only days previous — Cloverfield taps into these 9/11 images and ideas and uses them to ratchet up tension and sense of danger and dread, up through its apocalyptic ending. The central monster is a Lovecraftian horror: insidious and impossible to comprehend. It is a lurking terror ready to inflict despair, just as four planes crushed our own sense of modern order.

The framework for Cloverfield is that it is a found footage film of an alien/monster attack of New York City from the eyes of twentysomethings holding a farewell party for Rob (Michael Stahl-David), who is headed to Japan. His brother Jason (Mike Vogel) and his brother’s girlfriend Lily (Jessica Lucas) have organized a surprise party. Their loser buddy Hud (TJ Miller) is filming the event. Rob is trying to sort out some unfinished romantic business with his on-off lover Beth (Odette Annable) before he leaves. Also hanging around is Hud’s crush, the sarcastic Marlena (Lizzy Caplan).

These characters are not especially interesting, which is a bit of a problem, but only a bit. Their main purpose is to be the rails for the viewer, a lens for the subsequent attack by a large, mostly unseen creature that occurs abruptly at about the 20 minute mark. So, in general, it doesn’t matter that we don’t care much about them because they are not the actual subject in any direct way. But they’re also the people we have to spend the duration of the film with and whose motivations drive when and where the camera takes us. They are thin sketches, enough to convey the beats that frame the story, but not enough to tug the heartstrings.

The worst character is Hud, because he’s played by TJ Miller as basically himself. Miller wore out his welcome in the fifteen years since Cloverfield debuted, and hearing his voice as cameraman narrating the entire film pretty grating, though it’s easily the most restrained I’ve ever seen (well, heard) him in a performance.

Many found footage films have the genre-specific problem of the implausibility of said footage actually existing. Pretty much any rational human would stop filming 20 minutes into Cloverfield. The cleverest in the genre manage to deflect this problem: For example, The Blair Witch Project are about the making of a documentary, so obviously cameras would be rolling by default (The Last Exorcism, too, but I don’t want to accidentally call that clever).

Cloverfield doesn’t have much mitigation for this issue — although Hud declares he wants to capture this footage for posterity, it becomes borderline ridiculous that he’s still holding a camera (with apparently eternal battery life) when, e.g., making a dangerous jump across high-rise rubble. This is far from movie-ruining, though. All it really does is increase the sense that we’re on-rails for a nightmare thrill ride. And I think the complaints about plausibility miss the point: The real appeal of found footage movies is not that they’re true facsimiles of amateur footage, but that they’re told in a first-person perspective with disarming naturalism. I’m personally pretty happy to ignore this oft-cited sin of the film.

More problematic is the movie’s repeated instances of horror character dumb-dumb syndrome. These characters make terrible decisions, one after the other. Some of this can be hand-waved as “chaos of the moment,” but it’s borderline hilarious when the characters all agree with minimal second-guessing to go deeper into the attack to save a person who’s most likely dead and crushed by a building. It allows us to see more angles and settings of the attack, but the second you start thinking about rational human behavior, Cloverfied falls apart fast.

Even purely as scenario and spectacle, I think the movie lags a little during parts of the second half. The giant leviathan monster also has a horde of child monsters that resemble the Xenomorphs in Aliens. They make for some fun pop-up scares and chase scenes, but lack the otherworldly sense of intimidation offered by the city-destroying titan that drives most of the plot. Their CGI is also notably mediocre. (The big monster doesn’t have great CGI either, but we don’t see it point-blank too often. It can’t look shitty if we can’t see it!)

The film is directed by Matt Reeves in his breakout film. He shows outstanding visual instincts throughout the film, with dozens of images that leave an impression: some original, some basically recreations of news footage. His work with the monster itself is less inspiring, but as a visceral thriller, it’s excellent work for a genre newbie. (Reeves’ only previous film was a David Schwimmer romcom.)

Perhaps my favorite touch in the film is that the footage of the night of the attack is intercut with some footage from a few weeks earlier that show two of the characters celebrating a romantic spring day in Coney Island. The quiet sense of peace of these scenes makes a blinding contrast to the chaotic monster attack.

Cloverfield is not especially dynamic as anything other than a thrill ride that evokes the seminal American event of the 21st century. But it is so astoundingly good and powerful at this objective that I still really love it. I can’t say whether that makes for an enduring classic or simply a bracing blast of energy after watching it one time, but it left me rattled in the best way possible.

Whiplash is Damien Chazelle’s first widely released film as director and second feature-length film overall, following the student film he made while enrolled in Harvard, Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench. It is an expansion of a short that premiered at the 2013 Sundance Festival and earned enough buzz to get Chazelle full funding to make a feature. It subsequently became a profitable indie hit for Blumhouse (earning almost $50 million against a $3 million budget), a critical darling, and an awards season favorite. Whiplash was nominated for 5 Oscars, including Best Picture, and won three of them — Editing, Sound Mixing, and Best Supporting Actor for JK Simmons.

But Whiplash casts a longer shadow than just picking up some hardware. It is to millennials what Reservoir Dogs and A Few Good Men were to the previous generation: an addictive, world-class, white-dudes-shouting chamber drama that becomes an infinitely-rewatched, word-of-mouth marker of movie fandom for all types. It announces Chazelle as a special talent and visionary — or perhaps “audio-visionary” is more appropriate. It is an acknowledgment of the cost of greatness in a creative pursuit. And while I don’t agree with the insinuation of its conclusion that a few select great ones can and must sacrifice their humanity to make great art — I’m not entirely convinced that Chazelle himself believes it, for that matter — it absolutely delivers its statement with the force of a mallet and the resonance of a gong.

Neiman is a student at an elite music college, and he dreams of joining the even-more-elite jazz band run by Terrence Fletcher (JK Simmons). He finally gets that chance, only to learn right away just how cruel and manipulative Fletcher is as a conductor and teacher. The scene of the first rehearsal — which is also the focus of the rough-draft short — is the best in the film, a knife in the gut that keeps twisting as Neiman is further and further humiliated.

It’s this first rehearsal scene that the movie’s true purpose emerges: A rage-a-thon act-off between Teller and Simmons, each one-upping the other time and again. Simmons is downright horrifying as a perfectionist task-master with sadistic tendencies. If you’ve ever had a nasty teacher, Whiplash will bring out the traumatizing discomfort of that experience from your deepest memory wells. His tongue is so dexterous, his presence so intimidating, his reflexes so sharp that his ferocity almost hops off the screen. Simmons won an Oscar for the role, and I do nut begrudge him for it a single iota.

Against all odds, I think Teller might be even better: For one, he is very plausibly a drumming-obsessed prodigy. And his blend of stubbornness and bubbling anxiety is terrific: He starts with a run-of-the-mill haughtiness that’s common among college freshmen; it slowly morphs into demonic possession exorcised on the drum kit. Neither Simmons nor Teller hold back on the physicality of their roles, but this is especially evident in Teller’s performance. The way he can, e.g. take a slap full-on to the face, or sweat and pant through a long-take drum solo, is visceral method shit.

The movie takes a turn at the break between the second and third act. I’m going to openly discuss the ending from here on out, so please click away now if you don’t want to read any spoilers.

Neiman continues his fraught success throughout the middle act of the film, but it’s curdled with toxicity. It’s almost the opposite of the classic inspiring teacher dramas like Stand and Deliver: Rather than the education unlocking some inner dignity for the students, Neiman’s success makes him more monstrous. The hunger for perfection, for musical transcendence, was always there as a seed, but Fletcher has grabbed hold of it and weeded out whatever kernels of empathy and compassion and balance lingered. (Fletcher and Mr. Burns would get get along, I think). Neiman turns against his family and his girlfriend and everything else in his life that made him human to pursue drumming — i.e. to please Fletcher.

That’s what makes the car crash around the 65-minute mark so powerful for me. It certainly pushes the film into the territory of fantasy, or at least metaphoric surreality (see Chazelle’s script for Grand Piano for an even more extreme example of a musician suffering an outlandish cruelty). It takes Neiman’s willingness to sacrifice everything, even his flesh and bones, and escalates it to its theoretical endpoint.

The final act of the film is the most fascinating part of the film, though the least cohesive. It is certainly the most narratively slack. Rather than the relentless energy of the opening two thirds, Chazelle pulls on the story reins to sort through his competing thoughts about the expensive self-sacrifice in achieving greatness. Neiman rats out Fletcher as an abuser but still seems, under the surface, to revere him as a deity. He curses and worships his master like a burdened disciple. When they bump into each other at a bar, Fletcher gives a monologue in which he narrates the themes of the film, at least from his own twisted perspective. Normally, I roll my eyes at this kind of writing, but it leads to such a fantastical (and fantastic) conclusion, that I barely care here.

The very final scene is an all-out bit of bravura from Chazelle. It would have been one thing to pay lip service to musical greatness and never depict it, but in the epochal drum solo of the finale, Chazelle actually convinces us that Neiman has transmuted the ordinary into the sublime. You’d think it would be boring to stare at a guy sitting in a drum kit for ten minutes, yet it’s the opposite. This final scene is masterpiece stuff, conveying as operatic drama and epic action, the drumming shot from all angles, sweat glaring off Neiman’s skin and the snare, lights flickering as if Neiman is Apollo carrying the sun with each beat. Neiman’s face grimaces in pain as Fletcher guides him to ecstasy. The movie cuts to credits at the perfect moment, too; before we hear the crowd’s reaction: Unlike most movies about performing artists, Whiplash is completely unconcerned with the notion of the audience’s rapturous reception. There’s an audience of one for all the musicians in this movie, and it’s Fletcher, the gatekeeper of immortality — equal parts St. Peter and Charon. It’s through him, not a cheering crowd, that musical divinity is achieved.

As much as I love the ending as a piece of spectacle and filmmaking, it’s a blatant a U-turn on the movie’s perspective. Up until that final scene the film had been, at least textually, critical of Fletcher’s “no pain no gain” bullshit, though Neiman’s lethargy after his car crash at least suggested he felt empty outside the pressure cooker. A cynical read of the film might see the finale as an endorsement of savage educational practices and self-immolation. Indeed, Fletcher’s enlightenment-via-torture seems to work in the long run as Neiman sheds his coil of “good job” and reaches a higher plane in that final scene.

Yet the overall feeling the conclusion captures is one of intense ambivalence: It accepts that there are masochistic weirdos like Neiman who have a void they can fill only with a grueling regimen and outrageous standards, and that there are indeed cruel leaders like Fletcher willing to exploit them in the hopes that they can squeeze out something miraculous. Accepting the existence of something is not an endorsement, and so much in the movie points out how destructive this is. Dynamite is dangerous, but there sure is something awe-inspiring about watching it blow, huh?

In other words, I view it similar to how I view the ending to The ‘Burbs: I don’t hate it because it refuses align with the arc and messaging that led it there. In fact, its perpendicular turn makes it that much more interesting and beguiling and chaotic.

My biggest actual complaint about the ending — and in this case I mean the entire third act — is that it doesn’t jolt into a new storytelling gear hard enough. If the point is that Neiman has received both a literal and metaphorical blow to the head in his car crash, including a subsequent implosion of his drumming career, then I wish the filmmaking would have been even more elliptical and hallucinatory. It’s a rattled coma rather than a delirious haze, when the latter would support the subjectivity of the final few scenes much more. (Put another way: Let me debate whether Neiman died during the car crash and the rest of the movie is his purgatory before crossing to Heaven/Hell with the “Caravan” solo, Chazelle!)

One important piece of Whiplash’s presentation is the terrific music. Many films centered around musicians do not contain anything that sounds even a little bit like actual live music. So often it is clearly piped in during post-production, and you can feel the absence of that spark that exists when real musicians are performing. But all of Chazelle’s films place an emphasis on real music that pops — it always feels like you’re sitting in a room watching one of the best jazz bands in the country. Whether the music was recorded live or touched up at all, I’m not sure, but the sense of immersion is incredible.

This is especially true of Teller’s performance as Neiman. I never doubted for a second that Neiman is a genuine talent. One thing I’ve always admired about Chazelle’s filmmaking is the way his talented cast seems invested in the music as the story and seem to be doing all the playing themselves. (See also: Seb in La La Land.)

Justin Hurwitz provides the music, as always in a Chazelle picture. He provides an excellent, jazzy score and composes a few numbers. But the film is dominated by two jazz standards more than any of Hurwitz’s compositions: Those two songs are the titular “Whiplash” by Hank Levy and “Caravan” by Duke Ellington, the latter which makes up the remarkable final scene.

The film is shot by Sharone Meir, whose career beyond Whiplash is rather undistinguished. But I think his work here is terrific: The yellow-gold hue of the performance scenes is both inviting and slightly acidic. Meir also adds a chilliness to the majority of the scenes off the stage as Neiman’s life plunges into icy obsession.

Whiplash is one of the best wide-release debut films of the century to date. (That excludes Chazelle’s student film, his short, and his two screenplays for this accounting.) It’s not only a gripping drama and an outstanding demonstration of technique, but a manifesto for the main theme that Chazelle is still exploring to this day: obsessive performance as the rope in an eternal tug of war between self-actualization and self-destruction.

Grand Piano, a film written by Chazelle and directed by Eugenio Mira, takes that to an extreme. It has an absolutely phenomenal (silly, ridiculous, great) hook: Classical pianist Tom Selznick (Elijah Wood) performs a piece with a literal gun to his head, an assassin (John Cusack) jotting threats onto his sheet music and reading them into an earpiece. If Selznick plays a single wrong note, the assassin will kill Selznick and his lovely wife in the audience, actress Emma (Kerry Bishe).

The premise of the film is ridiculous nonsense, but the type of nonsense that is deeply engaging. It is just the right amount of a terrific hook to make up a feature length film: Despite the slow, exposition-heavy opening, it barely cracks 90 minutes.

We meet Selznick during a phone call on his way to the performance. We learn (with some heavy-handed “yes, tell me your backstory again” dialogue) that he is a prodigy who trained under a great master named Patrick Godureaux, who recently died. We also learn that Selznick suffers from terrible stage fright and is about to perform for the first time in years; that he is the only living person with sufficient skill to play a legendary (fictional) piece entitled “La Cinquette”; and that he will be using Godureaux’s grand piano for the performance. I’m not sure there would have been a more efficient way to give us that background info than to dump it on us, but it gets the expository heavy-lifting out of the way so we can enjoy the promise of the presmise for the ensuing 75 minutes.

The rest of the film follows Selznick’s performance of the concerto to try and survive, and it is rapturous filmmaking that grows in silly and exciting ways. For scenes at a time, it’s a one-man-show for Wood, who is excellent, though the supporting actors have plenty of fun things to do, too. In a very Chazelle-like bit of attention to detail, Wood seems to be actually playing the piano himself most of the time; fake instrument playing is one of my cinematic pet peeves. And it seems like Wood is impossibly emotionally diverted from his performance, too distracted to play with feeling, but this distraction ironically allows Wood to escape some of his stage fright let loose.

Mira captures the simultaneous white-hot gaze of the audience and the alienation of being alone on stage, and each wacky escalation of the assassination plot dovetails nicely the tension of a performance on the brink of either brilliant success or fiery failure.

In fact, that might be what I love most about Grand Piano: The metaphoric context of the thriller narrative device. It is a tense corker of a scenario that works at face value, but also serves as a heightened literalization of the internal stakes that a performer feels in front of an audience: A wrong note or botched phrase might not mean literal life-or-death to most performers, but perhaps figurative life-or-death. When musical performance is your identity, a botched concert is a devastating disintegration of one’s self. Resounding success might not unlock a literal treasure in real life, but it might indeed reveal something profound and elusive. The threatening voice in a performer’s ears might be their own inner-critic, but it can be a dangerous whisper nonetheless.

Mira does an excellent job with the material, all glitz and kinetic energy. It’s a bit showy without sacrificing the tension, like a Brian De Palma film. The action sequences are unremarkable from a physical choreography perspective, with basic grappling and chasing, but they work well enough, and pay off with a terrific (literal and figurative) crash towards the end of the film.

Maybe I’m biased because I watched this as part of a Chazelle retrospective, but the most interesting thing about the film is the writing. It is always on the verge of ludicrous (the number of times that Selznick runs off-then-back-on stage grows silly), but it’s always escalating and trying something new to tease out its premise. And the very final payoff of an unlocked treasure is satisfying from both a narrative perspective and a character development perspective, even if it’s just a MacGuffin. The real treasure is not a monetary reward but a flawless execution of the impossible final bars of “La Cinquette,” even on a pile of rubble.

Unlike Chazelle’s previous writing work before his Whiplash breakout, The Last Exorcism: Part II, Grand Piano feels distinctly like a Chazelle work, only heightened to nearly-surreal stakes and proportions. (Then again, while Whiplash has no hidden assassin, is it really any less violent or terrifying?) Like Chazelle’s other films, it is at its core a consideration of the creative process in all its glory and risks, and how easy it is to lose something of yourself in the process.

Grand Piano is a bit slight and small to be an all-time great, but it’s compelling for the duration. It is, overall, a delight: a (slightly silly) forgotten gem of a thriller and a sneak peek at the emerging joy of Chazelle’s storytelling.

(It also has a really stupid name. How could there be another exorcism if the last one was the last one?)

You might be wondering why I even bothered hitting play, let alone suffering through to the ending. I probably wouldn’t have, but it marks an important milestone: This is the first widely-released feature-length film with Damien Chazelle in the credits. He’s listed as one of two writers as well as the story credit. I’ll speculate a bit on his involvement towards the end of this review.

This sequel picks up shortly after the outrageously stupid and batshit closing scene of The (First) Last Exorcism. Nell (Ashley Bell) is the only one to survive the previous film, and she moves to a home for girls and starts seeing a therapist. This flirts with an interesting idea then steers away from it: What, exactly, is the fine line between psychosis and possession? Is there any chance that the events of the first film were actually sexually-repressed hallucination in Nell’s head? But this concept is more quarter-baked than half-baked. But why would we be watching The Last Exorcism 2: This Time It’s Really Last if it was all imaginary?

Across 88 laborious minutes, we watch Nell alternately make progress at normalcy, e.g. get a job and flash some goo-goo eyes at a boy her age, then regress, e.g. have a nightmare where a demon tells her to kill everyone. The biggest setback Nell faces is also the most interesting idea that the movie has: The footage of her bizarre past life, which we recognize as clips from The Last Exorcism, leaks online, and everyone alienates her due to her demonic past.

How I wish that this concept had been the entirety of The Last Exorcism 2: A psychological drama of someone haunted by her demons, whether Satanic or psychotic left ambiguous. The film could have probed someone haunted by a troubling history that figuratively haunts her due to viral fame, blending the concept of demon possession and the inescapable cruelty of internet infamy. But the movie has no sooner introduced the concept of her past life leaking before the idea is trashed and we’ve moved in a totally different direction towards a climax involving… uh, a secret society of witch doctors. Sure, why not!

The only part of the movie that’s really fun is these last ten minutes. This time, when the movie gets loopy, it improves the film, as opposed to the film-torpedoing insanity of the first film’s conclusion. When the demon, Abalam, fully possesses Nell, she goes on a murderous rampage and kicks off a world-burning apocalypse with her evil mind powers. It’s a refreshing change after 85 minutes of unfocused boredom. But we only get about thirty seconds of this before the credits roll. I realize the budget for this wasn’t too high, but if you’re going to tease a super-devil kicking off the Armageddon, at least let us experience some of it!

Bell has a lot more to do as the lead of this film than as the inscrutable specimen of the last film, and she’s mediocre, but not outright bad. At a minimum, she’s never the main problem with the movie: She doesn’t have much coherent material to work with, but she gives it some interiority from moment to moment where I could believe she was a person. There are maybe, like, 4 total moments? When she’s not sure how to play a scene, she defaults back to her standard move: Doe eyed innocence with a half-confused grimace. But, again, it’s not the core of the film’s rot.

Along for the ride this time is Julia Garner, who I am always happy to see. Here she plays a roommate of Nell’s, and she might or might not be a cipher for Abalam. Garner is so much more charismatic and screen-commanding than anyone else here that they probably should have just recast her as Nell. Even if it wouldn’t have made continuity sense, I don’t think too many people would have minded from how much better the final product would be.

Alright, so how about that Chazelle credit? On the surface, it’s extremely bizarre and uncharacteristic of anything he would do in the future. His other non-self-directed writing credit from the same year, Grand Piano, is much more clearly in line with Chazelle’s usual fascination of musicians brought to the brink for the sake of art.

Here’s what we know for sure: Chazelle really doesn’t want to talk about it. Find any career retrospective interview, and he dodges questions on it. All he says is that he doesn’t see too much of what he wrote in the final product, and firmly suggests the reviewer to move to the next question. But this is somewhat incongruous with the actual attribution: Chazelle has both the writing credit and the story credit, meaning that he didn’t just work on a draft, he architected the thing himself.

I read two unsourced articles saying Chazelle sold the film on spec, which is neat if true, but adds even more questions. A spec script means that Chazelle wrote it unprompted and then sold it rather than writing it after being hired for the project. That would imply that this was not a mercenary job that went poorly, but something that he envisioned. One of the unsourced articles says that Chazelle’s reputation right out of school was as a writer first and a director second, and that studios had more interest in getting him to write or touch up scripts than helm a film himself. We see two Chazelle writing-only credits in 2013, so he certainly tested the waters there.

2013 was a busy year for Chazelle: In addition to Last Exorcism 2’s release, he also briefly signed on to direct 10 Cloverfield Lane and directed the Whiplash short film. He dropped out of the director’s chair of the former when the latter helped him find a budget from Blumhouse for his true passion project, the Whiplash feature. Thus, it’s clear that mercenary writing credits were never his endgame.

My generous speculation is that Chazelle wrote and sold a spec for The Last Exorcism: Part 2 which was handed off to a different creative team and totally reworked. Chazelle’s draft (which I’d love to read) might have focused on the more interesting ideas in the film, perhaps creating something more unconventional and non-horror that seemed compelling on paper but that wouldn’t fit as a safe sequel for a known property in actual production, so it was reworked to be more explicitly a horror property.

Whether the hackery is Chazelle’s fault or not, the script is indeed the root of most of the evil in this horrible sequel. If not for the occasional whiffs of creativity, a nice Garner performance, and a fun closing scene, I’d have it at the bottom of the barrel; and even with those, it’s close.

The short co-stars JK Simmons as Terence Fletcher the psychotic jazz teacher. Simmons would not only go on to co-star in the feature length version, he would win a whole bevy of awards for the performance, including an Academy Award. His performance as Fletcher in the short is fully formed, he’s every bit as harrowing and anxiety-inducing and prone to explosive anger as he is in the feature film. We don’t get the full portrait of the character’s psychologically destructive power in these eighteen minutes, but we get a lot of it.

While Fletcher’s casting (thankfully) didn’t change between the short and the feature, there’s a different actor in place as Andrew Neiman: Johnny Simmons (no relationship to JK) plays Neiman rather than Miles Teller. I adore Teller’s performance in the feature-length Whiplash, so I have no objections to this re-casting. Johnny Simmons doesn’t have much to do in the short, so it’s hard to pass too much judgment on the performance, but having seen Teller’s take, Simmons feels too much like a blank slate. However, he fits in just right as a drummer, much like Teller is convincing in in his performances.

The short is a single scene, about fifteen minutes plus an intro and credits, that copied almost verbatim in the feature film. It’s Neiman’s first rehearsal, and pretty much every memorable beat is there: the explosive anger at the wind player who thinks he’s out of tune and, especially, “dragging or rushing.” My skin crawls with tension a little bit just thinking about the face slap.

Beyond the imposing acting by JK Simmons and the thought-provoking dynamic of a tyrant in charge of creating joyful art, the music itself really pops off the film. I’m not sure exactly how Chazelle and his sound team recorded it, here or in the feature, but it sounds so crisp and professional yet authentically diegetic. When the group starts playing it really feels like you are sitting in a room with the best youth jazz band in the world.

It is obviously just a little taster, giving viewers just one of the many flavors that would be a whole buffet in the full film that came out just one year later, but it correctly suggests the potent power of the story and the creative team. If you’ve seen the feature film, there’s not much to see here — it is, again, just a scene that would be done in full, and better, in the complete movie — but it’s nonetheless an enjoyable glimpse into the development of a great film.