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.

That said, Tom Hanks is perhaps the most broadly accomplished actor of his generation, who almost always elevates the material he works with. I wondered if something as cloying as “old suicidal man who needs to discover the meaning of life via quirky neighbors” might be a phoned-in stinker for the actor, a rare L. But no, he pulls through, and with flying colors, in A Man Called Otto. His charismatic turn in the title role lifts the otherwise unremarkable film from the morass of “poignant indies,” transforming it into an enjoyable, even good, piece of cinema.

The premise of A Man Called Otto, adapted from the bestselling A Man Called Ove by Fredrick Backman (and a remake of a 2015 Swedish film I haven’t seen), is darker than you might expect from the “book club film adaptation” marketing. Hanks’ Otto is a curmudgeonly older man whom the audience will recognize as slightly autistic. The film’s opening scene is Otto purchasing a length of rope in a hardware store, arguing with the cashier about pedantic pricing issues. But the film takes a dark twist, quickly, when we see what the rope is for when he gets home: Otto intends to use it to hang himself.

His suicide attempt is disrupted by his new neighbors, a raucous yet endearing family led by their mother, Marisol (Mariana Treviño), a pregnant Mexican immigrant and mother of two. She asks for help settling into her new home, and Otto, somewhat reluctantly, steps in.

As the film unfolds, Otto and Marisol form a tenuous bond, offering both the audience and Marisol a deeper understanding of Otto’s complex character. In flashbacks, Hanks’s dough-faced son Truman plays a younger Otto, which is a nice touch. (Frankly, it was news to me that Hanks has a third son beyond Colin and Chet.) After being turned away from the military due to a heart condition, he meets the enchanting Sonya (Rachel Keller), a quintessential dead wife: stunning, noble, deeply kind, and devoted to our protagonist. Their relationship echoes the lovable couple from the opening of Up, as the pair fail to have a kid and the wife passes away, and so we witness Otto’s grief build in layers in these flashbacks.

The film progresses with Otto’s repeated suicide attempts constantly interrupted by some new call to action, compelling him to discover reserves of kindness or strength within himself as he helps out the community.

While this structure is kind of silly on the outside — constant perfectly-timed interruptions of Otto’s suicide attempts — it actually works pretty well metaphorically. Otto, teetering on the edge of despair and isolation, finds healing and a renewed sense of purpose through the community that surrounds him just when he’s on the brink of giving up.

I won’t deny that the film is occasionally saccharine, especially towards the ending. And it’s possible those with genuine suicidal ideation may not fully resonate with Otto’s experience, how he processes trauma and interacts with the world in a state of depression. But it’s touching and even funny from moment to moment, largely due to Hanks’s immense performance. The way he brings to life a character with thorny psychological dynamics, giving an air of both authenticity and compassion, overcoming the narrative contrivances, is a testament to his generational screen talent. He don’t miss often.

Sorry, I had to lead with the obvious joke.

Watcher is a suspenseful and small-scale thriller, directed and co-written by Chloe Okuno in her debut effort. And it is a satisfying and well-constructed film, a very promising career kick off for Okuno. If she goes on to have a productive career, I thoroughly expect completionists to rediscover this and say “You know what was pretty solid? Her first film Watcher.” That’s not the same as saying it’s a great film, and I don’t think it is, but for its modest ambition, it delivers.

Julia (Monroe), and Francis (Karl Glusman) are an American couple relocating to Romania, Francis’s parents’ home country, for a career opportunity for Francis. It’s never quite clear what Julia does professionally (one plot summary I read cites her as an actor; if this is true, it’s a trivial detail). Mostly she sits around their apartment and waits for her boyfriend to get home, like Scarlett Johansson in Lost in Translation.

Actually, Lost in Translation is not a bad point of comparison, because it illuminates one thing that I think Watcher is missing. We never really get the sense that Julia feels like she’s isolated in an alien world, exactly the mindset that would lead one to become paranoid, which would feed the movie’s themes and premise well.

Julia starts to notice a strange man, cloaked in shadows, constantly peering into her apartment at night. Meanwhile, Romanian headlines are filled with stories of a serial killer nicknamed “The Spider” who has a propensity for decapitating young women. While shopping one day, Julia suspects that she’s being stalked by a man whom she instantly detects as the same one staring at her from the windows. And, hey, The Spider is still on the prowl, so one’s mind will fill in some gaps.

From here the movie slowly and intensely builds along the question of whether Julia is truly in danger or whether she’s imagining her circumstances. Alongside this is the theme of trusting women who say they’re in danger. The theme is hammered but rarely too hard: Julia‘s boyfriend Francis is at least a little bit understanding and supportive, doing pretty much exactly what I would expect someone to do if their girlfriend said they were being stalked without any concrete evidence beyond her instinct to back it up. Most of the movie, he’s maybe a little too cold and skeptical, but it takes a sharp turn towards the end. In the film’s, climax, Francis all of the sudden becomes an asshole making abduction jokes at the expense of Julia to his coworkers. It seems Okuno decided the film must have a clear moral about the danger of not observing victims’ claims.

Given the film’s pitch and suspenseful tone, it should be little surprise that there is a physical altercation near the end of the film, and kudos to Okuno and crew: This is a white-knuckle final 15 minutes of film. It takes too long to get there, but it is an excellent payoff.

The film’s look is pretty excellent. I’m especially impressed with the mix of Okuno’s camera movement and the editing to put us in the headspace of Julia, especially when she is most frightened.

The acting is good, too. Monroe carries the film, playing her fear with a blend of terror and humanity. Glusman is solid as her boyfriend Francis, just charming enough to believable as a caring partner, just douchey enough to be a frustrating source of conflict. The other major highlight is Burn Gorman (hell of a name) as the alleged stalker, who casts an imposing and creepy figure such that we don’t blame Julia for her instinctive fear.

So, overall, Watcher is an enjoyable hour and a half with a terrific payoff. The whole thing feels a little too surface-level to approach greatness or best-of-the-year status, but if nothing else I’ll be following Okuno’s career to come.

But just be aware that this movie is really, really like How to Train Your Dragon. You can map most scenes and characters one-to-one between the two movies. The one exception is the ending, where The Sea Beast has as its big bad guy the military-industrial complex instead of a gnarly, giant dragon, but more on that in a bit.

The Sea Beast stars Maisie (Zaris-Angel Hator), an orphan who dreams of becoming a sea beast hunter like her parents were. Maisie narrates a five-minute introductory sequence that teaches us about the long war between sea beasts and hunters. This segment in particular suffers in comparison to the masterful opening minutes How to Train Your Dragon. But more strangely still, Maisie then complete disappears for nearly 20 minutes as we get another introductory segment. This one shows us the current state of affairs on a ship called the Inevitable. Its crew includes a grizzled sea dog named Captain Crow (Jared Harris), his adopted son and apprentice Jacob (Karl Urban), and first mate Sarah Sharpe (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) — the latter a particularly fun character, badass with some maternal instincts that will eventually come in handy.

But eventually — and it’s far too long of an “eventually,” almost 45 minutes — we meet the premise proper: Maisie, who stows away on the Inevitable, and Jacob get swallowed by a Red Bluster, the biggest and fiercest sea monster of all. I really like the scene that kicks this off and pretty much any segment that involves action on the seas. The effects animation in The Sea Beast, which was produced by Netflix but partially contracted to powerhouse Sony Pictures Imageworks, is absolutely outstanding. I might even get a little carried away and call this the best water has ever been rendered in a CGI kids animated feature. (I would call it the best water in CGI history, but I suspect Avatar 2, which I haven’t seen yet, surpasses it. And for hand-drawn animation, I’d obviously crown Ponyo or The Little Mermaid.)

The water isn’t the only thing that looks great in the film. The lighting is absolutely wonderful. It’s often sourced from glowing fires or dusty sunbeams or translucent, illuminated water. The sea battles also include various flamethrower weapons which don’t entirely fit in the universe, but are still a huge treat to look at.

Anyways, Maisie and Jacob get swallowed by the giant Night Fury Red Bluster, only for it to turn out that — *feigned surprise gasp* — the sea monster isn’t quite so mean as the hunters have made it out to be. Just a bit misunderstood. In fact, the Red Bluster saves Maisie and Jacob from the sea then gives them a ride to dry land. She lets them ride in… well, her nostril. For all the very good segments in this film, there really are a handful that are undercooked or just don’t make very much sense, and the nostril ride, so strange and unexplained presented as something glorious, is chief among them.

Maisie is the first to catch on that she should be befriending the sea monsters, not hunting them, and so she takes the initiative to name the Red Bluster creature that saved them. The name she lands on is — get this — Red.

What’s notable about the design of the creatures is not the look and shape itself, but the way the creatures’ massive scope is evoked. Red is huge and intimidating and awesome. Her texturing is too smooth and rubber ducky-looking in close-ups, but it hardly matters in most shots. She’s rendered as kaiju, an incomprehensibly large, world-swallowing force.

Though Red is much bigger than Toothless, The Sea Beast pulls one of my favorite visual touches from How to Train Your Dragon, which is capturing the eyes with vivid color and big, expressive movements to give the creature a sense of life. Deeply animalistic yet vibrant, those eyes are what make sure that we empathize with Red as much as Maisie does. This effective visual representation of Red makes it easy to ignore how little the script actually gives us to care about her as a character. I could’ve done with a few more scenes of Maisie and Red bonding, or still moments observing sea beast life in place of some of the human drama we end up with.

You know where this is all headed if you’ve seen How to Train Your Dragon. Big-scale culture clash of monster-lovers and monster-haters, plus a calamitous physical confrontation. But there’s a little more to it than I expected, and so I do want to briefly address the film’s finale, which falls slightly off-template. So I’ll warn you of ending spoilers for the next two paragraphs.

In the midst of the struggle for whether to hunt or befriend Red is some business about the king and the queen threatening to end the order of the private monster-killing Hunters, and instead use the royal military to slay beasts. At first, I thought that this was a way to heighten the stakes for the Hunters, whose perspective we share for most of the film, and nothing more than that. But as the film reaches its climax, it emerges as something more in a twist ending: Maisie deduces that the royalty have entirely manufactured the public perception that the sea beasts are “enemies” or “dangerous,” whereas they are actually peaceful and kind by nature.

Maisie reveals this to the public and kicks off her own revolution, a Kiddie World Order. This ending is big and silly and galaxy-brain stupid. I’m all about tearing down the upper class and eating the rich, but the way social revolution is depicted here makes absolutely no sense. First of all, it’s not even clear how the royalty benefits from this supposed conspiracy — it’s not as if the sea beasts provide food or resources the royals want to manipulate, and it’s not insinuated that they want to control the masses with fear.

Second of all, and more to the point of the film a storytelling object, Maisie makes one thirty-second speech to a crowd announcing what is essentially a wacky conspiracy theory with no evidence. And yet she immediately incites the fall of the kingdom? It’s outlandish and not supported well enough to overcome its implausibility.

In spite of the baffling conclusion (and to a small extent because of it), I really did like the Sea Beast for most of its runtime. The story is serious and ambitious, just lacking polish and innovation. Much of the animation is terrific. It’s no How to Train Your Dragon, but then again, not many movies are.

If it represents a coherent visual schema that enriches the film, I wasn’t able to detect it. My best guess is that director Sarah Polley, along with cinematographer Luc Montpellier, wanted to emphasize how suffocating the farm is, with only little bits of color to distract from the women’s awful lives. Certainly there are a few terrific shots that leverage this: a wide-open interior door is in frame, the visible exterior colorful (classic Searchers shot), but everything else dreary and boxed in (or boxed out, as the case may be). But even when Polley is providing some excellent compositions, the visual style is a tough pill to swallow. If you are being generous, you might call the visual style “audacious”; if you are being less so, you’d probably stick with “gimmicky.”

(If all of that sounds a quite ambivalent, I should warn you that will continue. I had a really hard time figuring out what to think of this film. It’s got a lot of good parts, a lot of bad parts. The bad parts are sometimes good, or at least interesting. The good parts are sometimes bad, or at least boring.

It’s like that one time I was bored and hungry at work and the snack basket was sparse, so I ate a banana with Sriracha sauce on it, and I actually kind of liked it. But I wouldn’t really go out of my way to start telling people to eat hot sauce bananas, and I certainly wouldn’t nominate a hot sauce banana for Best Picture.)

If nothing else, the bizarre visual style enhances the sense that we are watching a dreamy blend of fable and dark drama. A group of Mennonite women who have been repeatedly drugged and raped debate what to do while the men are out of town posting bail for the attackers: fight, forgive, or flee?

The resultant film is made up mostly of extended monologues and debates. The women’s plaintive way of speaking and use of religious philosophical language renders much of the screenplay imprecise and high-level. They debate, very directly, why man’s nature seems to be evil, in what situations forgiveness is unjust, and lots of other heavy ethical dilemmas. This is clearly designed to encourage the audience to project current events onto the topics at hand.

The movie, frankly, buckles under its own weight when it gets too far into its Big Ideas. It’s just too pedantic to hear characters explicitly and repeatedly state and deconstruct the movie’s themes.

On the other hand… (Here’s some more ambivalence for you.) The movie only indulges this conceit past the breaking point a few times, and the rest of the screenplay is actually pretty great. When the dialogue is clicking, it effectively uses broad concepts to illuminate specific character details — a much harder writing trick to pull than the converse. By the end of the film, each of the characters accumulates an acute and harrowing sense of suffering and burden despite the fact that we’ve mostly gotten to know them through quoted Bible teachings.

The acting has received countless accolades, but I found it a bit stagey. That’s not the same as bad — in fact, I quite enjoyed Rooney Mara, Ben Whishaw, Jessie Buckley, and a few others — but the emotions are right on the sleeves. And I never for a second believed these were real Mennonites, which only added to the sense that this film is as much an abstract fable as straightforward drama.

With all of its weird quirks — bizarre colors, low-action story, heavy script — Women Talking is a movie that will likely provoke strong reactions one way or the other. Indeed, I’ve read some lavish praise and some deeply skeptical scorn. For me the movie ultimately works, its good parts slightly outweighing its bad parts even as they jumble together. It’s not Best Picture material, but I’d still rank it as my favorite awards-bait drama of 2022 whose title describes women communicating: Sorry, She Said.

The film, based on a 1958 novel by Paul Gallico of nearly the same name (Mrs. ‘Arris Goes to Paris), follows a house cleaner who comes into a sum of money when she receives backpayments on a war-widow’s pension. She decides to spend this money on a fancy Dior dress and so travels to the fashion line’s HQ. Any guesses in which city that’s located?

Through a series of contrivances, Mrs. Harris gets wrapped up in the lives of various models and office workers at Dior while she waits for her fancy dress to be made. All along the way we have themes of rejecting pretentiousness and embracing workers’ rights. Things end cheerfully and upliftingly, some characters get together, yada yada, but there’s some strangeness on the fringes: Mrs. Harris briefly organizes a strike, and there’s a baffling runner about characters quoting Nietzsche.

The script isn’t strictly bad, I don’t think, but it’s operating in a very unhurried manner that just didn’t work for me. A bunch of little episodes drag on longer than expected throughout the film, always giving the sense that the plot should have advanced more than it has. She doesn’t even make it to Paris for over a half hour! The film clocks in at under two hours but felt a lot longer than that to me.

Most of the characters are pleasant people played by skilled actors, with the exception of Claudine (Isabelle Huppert), who is an unpleasant person played by a skilled actor. All of the characters hold just enough interest that I was never quite bored, but also rarely enthralled, while they were on screen.

A major appeal of the film is in its production. Nine times out of ten in 2022, a film with narrative ambitions like this would be a cheap streaming dump, but this looks a little bit better than that, in line with its theatrical release and $10 million budget. The fashion is a major focus, and sure enough the designer dresses are delicate and inspiring. The catwalk and dresses are shot by director Anthony Fabian with the tenderness of someone who genuinely loves fashion (or is a good faker). He even occasionally throws in some little flashes of style. (This movie has my favorite dolly zoom “Vertigo shot” of 2022, deployed on Lesley Manville’s face when she spots an amazing gown for the first time.)

Overall, though, I really can’t quite give Mrs. Harris a recommendation. It’s a bit too much of a lumbering slog; maybe if it was 85 minutes instead of 115. But, damn it, I really wanted to love it. Manville is just that good.

It’s undeniably worked from a commercial perspective: Like Scream 5 last year, M3GAN (just pronounced “Megan”) has broken the “January horror movie” curse, earned excellent reviews, and made a buttload of cash. In M3GAN’s case, it’s little bits of cash dripping off the relentless Avatar 2 behemoth, but still enough to be a certified smash.

M3GAN operates in a horror register I generally enjoy: It’s much more interested in being entertaining than it is in being scary. It’s still, by narrative and aesthetic, very much a horror movie rather than a dark comedy, but there’s all of two or three jump scares, and even those are coated with a sheen of silliness. When this movie is leaning into its unhinged stabby doll scenes, it’s so perversely fun that it’s hard not to be smiling at the bloodshed.

The real kicker of that clause is the “when,” though, because M3GAN takes a long time to boot up. Too long.

The story follows Cady (Violet McGraw), a tablet-obsessed tween whose parents die in a car accident. The collision itself is something of a punchline — their argument about Cady’s screentime leading a distracted life becomes a distraction itself, which they realize just in time to get wrecked by a snow plow.

The momentum slows quite a bit after the opening scenes, which also include a Furby parody commercial. Cady is adopted by her Aunt Gemma (Allison Williams), who is a cutting edge robotics engineer at a toy company. She’s working on a doll of the future, one that will render parenting irrelevant. You guessed it: M3GAN. At first, the invention works well, distracting Cady from her new-orphan grief. Then it works too well; Cady starts to resist anything in the world that isn’t her new playmate.

M3GAN is programmed to do whatever it takes to make Cady happy, and has apparently not been programmed with Asimov in mind, so she starts defending Cady with violence: First, it’s a nasty dog that bites her. Then it’s a cruel bully. And you can probably guess the rest.

It’s towards this stage of the movie that M3GAN becomes quite clever as satire. The movie’s obvious central thesis is that lazy parenting is destructive, especially using screens as substitutes for real child-parent bonding. We see Cady failing to cope with the real world as she’s glued to her tablet, Aunt Gemma fiddling away on M3GAN’s programming.

What struck me in the movie’s second half is that Johnstone, Wan, and co. snuck in a secondary parenting theme: don’t put so much pressure on your kids to do too much too fast. There is indeed a second “child” in the film, and it’s M3GAN herself. Gemma and her company advertise to the world that she is perfect and will solve your child’s needs. But M3GAN isn’t ready; she needs time to grow. Her arc is a standard serial killer descent-to-violence arc, and the movie lets us feel just a kernel of sympathy towards her… though, of course, “she” is not a “her” at all, but an “AI doll.

I was ready to proclaim M3GAN slightly underwhelming until its last half hour. It takes a long time to get to the payoff for a movie that needs to be zippy fun to work. But that final, vicious sequence really does make the drama leading up to it pretty worthwhile. There’s some outstanding kill scenes, but my favorite part of the climax is how much the movie references familiar creepy girl/creepy doll beats. The Ring’s screen demon gets a hat tip, as do The Shining and (of course) Child’s Play.

M3GAN herself/itself is an absolute triumph of production design. She’s played by a young actress named Amie Donald who is given some makeup and CGI to appear quasi-human. Donald does a great job of keeping her movements stiff and slightly alien, just enough that it’s always clear we’re looking at a doll. Jenna Davis provides the voice, a digitally-smoothed blend of comforting/creepy a la Amazon’s Alexa.

The film’s acting is a bit of a mixed bag. Williams is solid as the final girl and heroine, though I always remain distracted by just how damn beautiful she is. (She weaponized this trait of hers in Get Out. Here, it’s just incidental.) It’s never fun to pick on child actors, but I confess I found McGraw as Cady to be a major detriment to the film. She’s a bit of a blank slate, but not in an especially interesting or provocative way. Her occasional outbursts felt a bit unearned, and mostly she just stares blankly.

M3GAN never transcends its basic fun PG-13 horror framework the way that, e.g., Happy Death Day does, but the parts that work really do, especially near the end of the movie. I’d probably watch a sequel, and I’m not the only one: M3GAN 2.0 has already been greenlit for a 2025 release. Maybe Avatar 2 will be dethroned from the top of the box office by then.

Let’s talk through it: In 2000, Nickelodeon Films produced a modestly successful but critically panned live-action film called Snow Day. I caught it on cable shortly thereafter, and it became one of my favorite comfort-watches of my teenage years… then of my twenties… and now of my thirties. There are not all that many people on the planet who are bigger fans of Snow Day than me. It’s not a great movie in an objective sense, but it’s a great version of itself, if that makes sense. It captures the ineffable childhood magic of an unexpected snow day, of first love on the line and secret truths that crystallize when the natural order breaks down. It’s also got a bunch of farts. Nobody’s perfect.

And now 22 full years later Paramount+ has released a remake. Not just any remake: A musical remake. It’s a full-on teeny-bopper Disney Channel knock-off. I’m not sure if it’s intended to be a nostalgia play. Are there enough weirdos like me who latched onto Snow Day and never let go for that to be a profitable endeavor? I’d guess not — according to Letterboxd, the original is not even one of the 25 most popular family movies from the year 2000, bested by such titans as Mom’s Got a Date with a Vampire and The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas. It has an abysmal 2.4 out of 5 average on Letterboxd. So it’s not exactly a cult gem begging for a nostalgia reboot (and none of the original cast appear).

So it must be an attempt to pull in a fresh audience, right? Well, that one’s a head-scratcher too. The movie had almost no marketing. And it’s weirdly reverential of the original, pulling in dozens of references both big and small from the 2000 film — the kind that only Snow Day-heads like myself would even bother to notice. If this movie was made to pull in new eyes, why bother tying itself to the original so tightly?

So I ask again: Who was this movie made for? And the answer is apparently… me, specifically: Someone who loves the original enough to appreciate the connective tissue; someone who has a big appetite for cheesy tweener musicals; someone happy to forgive its flaws so long as the cast chemistry is good and the best friends fall in love.

And I think Paramount+ seems to have realized that there is not much of an audience for the film. The marketing appears to be miniscule, borderline nonexistent (had I not set a calendar reminder, I wouldn’t have even know it had released), thinning out the already narrow audience subscribed to Paramount+. In the month-or-so since Snow Day’s release, a whopping 276 people have logged the film on Letterboxd. It is currently ranked the 2,397th most popular movie of 2022 on the platform. Even if you factor in a shift based on a demographic mismatch between Letterboxd users and family movie audiences, that’s not great, Bob. My theory is that Discovery’s slash-and-burn approach to original programming meant this slipped through the cracks without much momentum, and it will forever remain a movie that essentially nobody on the planet has seen. Except me.

That’s a long introduction, but I have a lot of built up feelings. I watched Snow Day the day it came out, and now a second time a month later. And the verdict: It clears the exceptionally low bar I have placed for it, but no more. But it does indeed clear it, and for that I love it. I will be watching it a third time.

The film, as you might be familiar with, or might not be if you are a normal person who hasn’t committed Snow Day from 2000 to memory, follows siblings Hal (Ky Baldwin) and Natalie (Michaela Russell) across a surprise snow day. Natalie makes it her mission to get a second day off by ruining the efforts of Snow Plow Man (Jerry Trainor from iCarly/Drake and Josh), a delectably villainous character who finds joy in crushing kids’ dreams.

Hal, meanwhile, spends the day pursuing longtime crush Claire Bonner (Shelby Simmons) who recently broke up with her d-bag boyfriend Chuck Wheeler (Myles Erlick). Hal is backed up by his platonic best friend Lane (Fabi Aguirre). But maybe there’s more to the connection between Lane and Hal than meets the eye?

It’s all cartoonish, sitcom-type material, but heightened and cinematic: In fact, the strength of the original film is making it feel so big and adventurous and romantic in spite of the small narrative scope.

The most noticeable trait of the new Snow Day is that it is barely a movie at all. Stories tend to get longer when you start adding in musical numbers, but not this one. Even with an extended intro segment, Snow Day is a fleeting film: the credits start rolling around minute 71. Plot threads from the original have been mercilessly trimmed, some scrapped altogether: The thread about an underdog weatherman, played by Chevy Chase in the original, is completely absent minus a few seconds of an inarticulate weatherperson on TV. Rob Huebel and Laura Bell Bundy make tiny appearances as Natalie and Hal’s parents in a thread about work addiction that gets maybe 3 minutes of screentime (neither sing, despite Bundy’s Broadway background).

The cast is… what you expect. Pretty actively corny, but acceptably so for the material. I did not hate these characters, and I was happy when they were happy, so the bar is met. I think Russell, who plays younger sibling Natalie, could star in a Disney Channel sitcom — she’s got poise and good deliveries. She’s the strong point, but not the only one. Trainor is lots of fun as a campy villain, too.

One thing this movie gets right is the chemistry between the cast — it’s easy to believe that these could people could be friends or family or boyfriend-girlfriend, etc, even if their performances themselves aren’t always memorable. Aguirre, for example, who comes from a stage background and plays Hal’s best friend Lane, interprets almost every moment with mugging and snark, but in a sort of adorable way that feels authentically like a chipper 15 year old.

The budget on the project is clearly small — the production values are dollar-store level. Extremely rough. This is undeniably streaming fodder. The cheap look is disappointing, but not crippling: We at least get some snow that seems real, a must, plus a snow plow (albeit not one nearly as memorable as the original).

The music is mostly replacement-level TV movie musical numbers, with a couple highlights. None of the six numbers are actively bad, which is a low but essential bar to clear. But, again, only barely cleared: I don’t think I could hum a line from either of the ballads, “I Need a Sign” or “What If,” if you put a gun to my head.

By far the best track is “Cake”: It’s a legitimately catchy number. It also happens to have the best choreography, and it accompanies the best-looking scene in the movie: an argument in a diner lit and colored in high saturation, the camera well-directed and creating a sense of space. It’s the only time the movie visually pops. Incidentally, “Cake” is the least essential song in the film from a narrative or character perspective, illuminating the relationship between secondary characters Claire, Hal’s crush, and her dopey jackass boyfriend Chuck.

The other excellent number is “These Kids,” which I imagine is most people’s favorites, because it’s just a bunch of rowdy fun: The Snow Plan man talking about how “I hate, hate, hate, hate, hate these kids” and how he relishes destroying their snow day dreams. It’s a boisterous, Broadway-esque tune.

Lastly, there’s a nice, 30-second “snow dance” routine by Hal and Natalie which the movie inexplicably scores with some cloying strings that overpower the accompanying schoolyard chant rhyme.

By the time the movie reaches its disco-influenced closer, “The Best Is Yet to Come,” all threads have fairly rapidly come to a close with little chance to let the richest beats simmer. There’s no “The Wayne!” / “the bird!” runner, no kickass snowmobile chase, etc. All that stuff requires budget and runtime, and this Snow Day blitzes through its plot, making me appreciate even more the structure of the original.

So let’s cut to the chase. Is this a good movie? Man, you’re asking the wrong person. I’m not inclined to say a bad word about it. They took freaking Snow Day and they made it into a goofy musical! I’m over the dang moon! Rejoice with me that it exists! Inevitably, it is bound to its streaming budget and modest ambitions, but it did what I wanted it to do. I suspect most people reading this won’t really like it; some might hate it. But most people reading this aren’t me, the singular person this movie was apparently designed to please.

The Menu follows a fancy dinner run by the world-renowned Chef Slowik (Ralph Fiennes) that gradually turns into unhinged, violent insanity. Everyone in attendance is a disciple of Slowik’s culinary artistry except Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy), a last-minute addition to the exclusive outing. Much of the film’s fun is the scenario’s gradual slip to derangement — the exact tipping point of the meal is debatable, but one of the first dishes is a bread plate served without bread, so even at its best, the titular menu is some “avant garde deconstructed bullshit,” to quote Margot.

The satire in The Menu is so broad and surface-level that it would completely faceplant without a sense of fun, but it thankfully offers that in spades. It’s well-cast and terrific fun as a black comedy and breezy horror flick.

The supporting cast is filled with small but amusing turns of rich people trying to figure out if the stranger-and-stranger meal is an intellectual exercise or a prank. Margot’s date Tyler (Nicholas Hoult), a Slowik fanboy and amateur chef, gets repeatedly humiliated to hilarious effect. John Leguizamo plays a movie star who gets all of ten lines but slays every single one. The big ensemble is filled with sneaky-good comedy actors.

It definitely helps that the runtime is a brisk hundred minutes (the Internet cites 107, but that includes credits). This is the polar opposite of Triangle of Sadness’s blunt-force 2.5 hours. Even at this length, the premise starts to buckle in the final act, but any longer would have been movie-ruining.

Unfortunately, the movie takes a sharp southward dive in its final fifteen minutes, and you can pin the inflection point to a specific monologue in which Margot essentially states “here are the themes.” Whereas the movie leading up to that point painted most of the characters as human (minus the psychotic chef and staff), the conclusion discards basic human logic to emphasize its larger point, which was never ambiguous in the first place. The incendiary conclusion is symbolically effective, but narratively incoherent.

Fiennes is absolutely terrific as Slowik, funny and intimidating, and Taylor-Joy keeps up well enough, though without much depth. Taylor-Joy’s part was supposedly written for Emma Stone, who might have had more to contribute to the character than Taylor-Joy’s reading which is heavy on scowls and grimaces.

The production is a bit underwhelming. The setting is intriguing and boxed-in, but the film’s look overall is quite shallow and uncinematic. It’s never visually broken, and still better than nearly every direct-to-streaming movie, but unremarkable. It made me think of an episode of prestige TV — it could just as well be a super-sized episode of Black Mirror. Incidentally, director Mark Mylod’s background is in prestige TV (Succession, Shameless), but Alexander Payne was attached at one point, and I’m fascinated at what Payne’s take on this script would have been.

I can’t call it a “great” movie, but it’s some of the most fun I’ve had with a film this year thanks to its zippy dialogue, satirical genre stew, and brisk pace.

This version of the classic wooden-puppet-comes-to-life story opens with tragedy: Geppetto’s son Carlo is killed during a bombing of the Italian countryside. In his grief, Geppetto carves a wooden puppet who is imbued with life by a blue-eyed angel.

You probably know what happens from here, but del Toro introduces a few fun twists. The first is the reaction of the townspeople — if you ever wondered why so many people in these adaptations accepted a living doll without question, seeing it perhaps as a whimsical treat to brighten their day, then you’ll get a big kick out of the what the villagers have to say Pinocchio. Even better is the punchline about what a government agent says when he sees the living doll.

Among the fresh ideas in this Pinocchio is the thematic focus on fascism. The story takes place Mussolini’s reign, and Pleasure Island is replaced by a youth soldier training camp. This is probably the biggest individual complaint I have with the film: The classic Pinocchio tale is so intrinsically tied to coming-of-age that adding an extra layer on top of that — i.e. an exploration of fascism dehumanizing its population, especially its most innocent — makes for a narrative cacophony.

More successful is the contrast of life and death. GDT’s Pinocchio actually confronts the question that inevitably comes up when discussing Toy Story: When material things come to life, what does it say about mortality and the soul? There’s a purgatorial afterlife gimmick used for both laughs and pathos. Even beyond that, there’s a sense of mourning to the story — Geppetto’s coping with his grief for his dead son drives his and Pinocchio’s character arcs.

To the movie’s credit, it knows that this story has been done before, and it skewers some of the tropes. My favorite recurring gag is when the Jiminy Cricket stand-in voiced by Ewan McGregor starts to burst into song only to be unceremoniously cut off in some way, usually via some sort of injury. (Incidentally, this was the only thing I liked about the cricket character, who doesn’t fit into the story’s tone at all.)

This adaptation is also a musical, and the fact that I waited until the seventh paragraph to mention that should probably tell you something. The score by Alexandre Desplat has a light, forgettable touch, with one major exception, the film’s signature number about the film’s two father-son relationships, “Ciao Papa.” It, too, has a light touch, but the sonic gentleness in contrast with its tearjerking placement in the story makes it a sledgehammer. I can’t think of too many other songs more worthy of the “Best Original Song” Oscar this year.

GDT’s Pinocchio doesn’t end with the jubilation of the Disney classic. It’s a more pensive take on what it means to be “real,” and it definitely generates the waterworks. I found the story touching in whole, so remarkably thought through and well-crafted that I was happy to forgive its flaws.