Don’t Make Me Go is the third feature film directed by Hannah Marks following After Everything (which I liked) and Mark, Mary, and Some Other People (which I didn’t). But this is the first of her directing efforts featuring a script she didn’t write, and it nullifies some of the strengths of her previous films: Specifically, her savvy, bold writing that cuts out chunks of exposition and on-screen action for an unusual but pleasing rhythm. Don’t Make Me Go is a bit more conventional in structure and pace, though it’s clear that Marks sees some of her own style in the script: Like her previous films, it features a prickly relationship forged during times of trial with an uncertain future at its core. Also, like After Everything, it’s a cancer story.

Max (John Cho) is the single father of teenager Wally (Mia Isaac). They have a relationship that’s about as good as you could expect: Max is involved, caring, and kind towards Wally. He respects her boundaries, but still nervously keeps tabs on her social life. Wally, meanwhile, loves her dad, but feels a bit stonewalled, as he’s never quite known how to talk about Wally’s mother, his ex-wife Nicole (Jen Van Epps), who ran off when she was little. Max has finally started dating again, connecting with the younger Annie (Kaya Scodelario), but he feels the need to keep it secret from Wally.

After a checkup on some headaches he’s been having, Max learns he has a particularly devastating bone cancer located near his brain. He has two options: undergo a risky surgery with a 20% success rate or be assigned a life expectancy of one year. Max opts for the latter. Rather than immediately reveal his terminal diagnosis to Wally, who is prone to panic attacks and fainting, he opts to take her on a road trip to find the right moment to share the bad news. The ostensible purpose of the journey is a college reunion for Max; the real reason is to find the estranged Nicole, Wally’s mother, so Wally has someone when Max dies in the not-too-distant future.

What ensues is fairly typical of the road trip genre: Lots of shenanigans; friction and heart-to-hearts; revelations about loving each other and embracing the moment; memories to last a lifetime (even a short lifetime). And there’s the weepy undercurrent of Max living out some last moments of glory as a dad, his dreams of going on adventures with Wally no longer deferrable. It all comes to a head in the anticipated confrontations, including a couple of four-hankie tearjerker scenes.

It is a rather excellent specimen of a life-ain’t-fair, laughs-and-tears dramedy, buoyed by both the cast and by Marks. Marks’ control of the tone is terrific, ebbing and flowing in the right amounts, always cutting the sentimentality with some pepper in Max and Wally’s banter. The sweet moments are touching and life-affirming but never unctuous. And the cast is more than up to the challenge. Cho is most famous as one half of Harold & Kumar, but he’s emerged as a real actor, conveying the nuance of a stoic dad cracking at the edges, always sympathetic.

Isaac is even better. She was the most emotive and human element of the uneven satire Not Okay, and I’m delighted to see her get a proper showcase. She’s riveting on screen, perfectly believable as a tempestuous teen, her sadness and confusion blending together. She sells the big moments without overselling them.

And then we hit the final ten minutes.

I’m going to discuss the film’s conclusion from here on out, so be warned of spoilers. But I almost want you to know what you’re getting into when you turn this film on.

I fully expected a gut punch finale. I strongly suspected Marks would have no interest in directing a traditional happily ever after; it’s just not her style. So after Wally  convinces Max to take a risk with the cancer surgery, even if it means an 80% chance of a life cut even shorter, I started trying to guess what the crowbar to the heart would be: Would Max’s surgery simply fail? Would he abruptly die before he could even have the surgery? Would the surgery succeed, but with Max irreparably disabled? Oh, if only.

With about ten minutes left in the runtime, there’s a happy-tears scene of Max singing karaoke of “The Passenger” by Iggy Pop to Wally, which had been their road trip theme song. Then the screen goes blurry and wobbly, the soundscape mixed with a high whining sound — the motif we’d seen throughout the film whenever Max’s headaches were kicking in. And so I was braced — here it was — Max would die mere moments after embracing some optimism and happiness in his short life. It’s a bummer, but almost cheery compared to what I was fearing.

Smash cut to a funeral. Programs handed out to crying attendees clad in black. The camera zooms in on one of the printed programs. On the front is a picture… of Wally? Wait, what? The daughter died? What the ever-living fuck is going on? Remember when I described Wally as “prone to panic attacks and fainting”? It turns out she was suffering from a heart condition that triggered those, and she had a premature heart attack as a teenager in the middle of their road trip. She’s the one who dies at the end of this film. Max, meanwhile, has his surgery and survives.

Umm???????????

One of my least favorite narrative devices is when a story builds its entire narrative towards something dramatic happening to one character, only for that exact event to abruptly happen to another character in the climax due to coincidence. This kind of twist can work, but its hit rate is very low. To list a few of my least favorite examples in stories I otherwise like would spoil them, so I’ll abstain, but this kind of twist has tarnished some excellent films and books.

And it absolutely, very much, does not work in Don’t Make Me Go. It’s insanely bad. It induces no viewer sadness. It’s too idiotic for that. I was too dumbfounded at what I was watching to really feel anything. I genuinely couldn’t believe this story about a dad getting cancer ended with the teenage daughter having a surprise heart attack. Just writing it out that way makes it sound like a gag or a fake movie. But it’s not. It’s real, and it’s ridiculous, and it ruins an otherwise rock-solid cancer road trip drama.

I still have faith in Hannah Marks because her overall directorial style and control is so good for the types of comedies and light dramas I really enjoy. She has an admirable fearlessness in storytelling, and she typically brings out strong performances from her leads. But she’s now one-for-three on selling me on her unexpectedly downbeat endings. I’m optimistic about this year’s Turtles All the Way Down, her adaptation of a very good book by John Green, and I will check out her writing debut, Banana Split, which she didn’t direct, as well. But she’s getting close to three-strikes-you’re-out territory.

This is just as much of a problem in books as it is in movies. Back when I read a lot more novels in the mid 2010s, I faced this problem as well; it is, in fact, even more of a problem in the lit business, where “romance novels” form an entire industry that is deeply bound to tropes and tightly-enforced subgenre expectations. Finding a book that is smart yet still cozy and breezy and familiar is tough!

But I learned I could always rely on Jennifer E. Smith: her adorable teen romcoms are always well-fleshed and terrifically crafted, with enough brains and minor variations on cliches to make the experience fresh rather than phoned in. I read her This is What Happy Looks Like, You Are Here, and The Geography of You and Me, and loved each one: comfort reads that don’t talk down to you.

Thus, I’ve always been surprised that Hollywood never managed to release a film based on her books: Her style is perfect for screenplay adaptation, neither too interior or literary to make for a tough transition to screen, nor too pat and streamlined to feel uncinematic. As a seasoned author, she has repeatedly solved the aforementioned “romcom struggle” and put it on a platter if only Hollywood would come asking.

It took more than a decade since I first sat down with one of her books, but 2022 and 2023 finally delivered: We’ve been gifted two Jennifer E. Smith adaptations in consecutive years that prove my exact point. No one will accuse either this film or Love at First Sight of being groundbreaking cinema, yet both offer more charms and robust storytelling than your typical streaming teen romcom fare.

Hello, Goodbye, and Everything in Between is based on a 2015 book of the same name by Smith. Clare (Talia Ryder) is the daughter of former high school sweethearts who split acrimoniously after graduation and her birth, and thus she vows to leave high school with no strings attached, lest she recreate her parents’ sad romantic life. Before senior year, though, she meets Aidan (Jordan Fisher), and the two quickly connect. But before they get together, Clare makes them vow they break up before she leaves for college so she can have a clean break from high school.

After this prelude, the film jumps ahead to graduation, nearly a year later. The rest of the film covers Clare and Aidan’s “breakup date” — the last outing together before they fulfill their promise to split before college. Aidan, a big-hearted romantic with a predilection for grand gestures in contrast to Clare’s pragmatic streak, plans a perfect final date that pulls together memories from their year together.

Thus, we witness not only the climactic date itself, but flashbacks to important moments in their relationship arc: first kisses and “I love yous” and fights and all that jazz. These memories run parallel to the tension of whether Clare and Aidan will follow through on their breakup promise, or decide to stick it out in the name of love.

It’s a terrific narrative structure because it allows us to witness the important moments of the relationship in quick snapshots, while still providing a backbone for cohesive romantic conflict. The story moves quickly: we fill in the blanks by seeing how Clare and Aidan interact in the present day with the payoff of their fully-formed relationship. (The film clocks in at 82 minutes, so it wasn’t going to be particularly draggy either way.)

The film, alas, leans on this structure as a storytelling mechanism perhaps too much. In place of proper character development we have a bunch of sweet vignettes. These build a lot of chemistry — and boy do Ryder and Fisher seem believable as a couple — but not much in the way of character depth. This makes it a sweet romantic tone poem more than a rich story: A solid percentage of the film is made up of montages of the couple falling in love, the whole film so over-scored with indie pop that it sometimes feels like a string of music videos.

There’s also some depth lost in the translation from book to screen: The leads’ personalities are not quite sharp enough for them to leave a strong impression. Both are described as over-planners in different ways, but the writing isn’t quite rich enough for this nuance to click, and the characters end up a bit fuzzy. Side characters, meanwhile, aren’t defined enough for their small side plots to have much meat. (At one point one side character hooks up with the sister of another side character, and I was clueless whether we’d even met the sister before that scene.)

Nonetheless, Hello, Goodbye, and Everything in Between left me with a huge smile and warm fuzzies. I just love the leads and their chemistry so much. And the story brilliantly captures the complex emotions and contradictions of high school graduation: the beginning of adulthood and the end of childhood intersecting, our identities made up of everything in between.

This culminates in a truly brutal scene in which an afterlife encounter goes too far and someone suffers a grisly accident: In a normal teen drama, the corresponding incident would be a drunk driving accident or a drug overdose by a first-time user who doesn’t know what he’s getting into. But it’s truly skin-crawling to see it happen in Talk to Me, an act of abrupt supernatural violence in a setting that blends real-life teen troubles with horror elements.

Talk to Me uses this as a springboard for a more run-of-the-mill possession story that has only a few connective threads back to the teen indulgence metaphor the film opens with. And so the film takes a sharp turn for the worse as its one clever idea gets exhausted and we’re back into very familiar haunting-or-maybe-mental-illness-or-could-it-be-both stock plotting. Just a dash of unresolved-trauma-conveyed-as-horror in there, too.

That one horrifying party scene that ends the first act is the film’s only real set piece: The remaining hour of the story feels like a constant buildup to a payoff that never really comes. Even the semi-twist ending, which could have been an explosive catharsis, feels like a little wink rather than a payoff. Talk to Me desperately wants to be an Ari Aster mood-horror–drama piece, but in tone and content it’s really just another generic horror-thriller, and thus becomes deeply boring very quickly.

There’s some weird undertones to the film, too. Talk to Me has a baffling aversion towards sex. Unlike horror classics like Halloween where the teens are horny and boning left and right, the teens here are fully chaste. The grown-ups seem to suspect otherwise, but every innuendo from a parent is met with an uncomfortable eye roll as if they’re talking about eating raw octopus. I guess zoomers are having less sex than any other post-pill generation, but it still feels strangely neutered and puritanical with no obvious thematic purpose.

So Talk to Me is a bit uneven, with a couple incredible thrills matched equally with long stretches of empty, mid-tier tension. You won’t be missing much if you turn it off after the first act. But, to its credit, I will definitely be thinking about the premise and its one great blast of violence for a long time yet.

The Blackening works differently than that. It has a lot of “you’ll only understand this if you are Black”-type humor. The characters spend a lot of time talking about their visions of their own Blackness and how that relates to the others’ Black identities. They debate, for example: Are you “less Black” if you marry someone white? If you voted for Trump? If you don’t like playing spades? And is it inherently racist to even make those claims about someone else’s Blackness relative to your own?

These are (to varying degrees) interesting questions, but not exactly aimed at me. That’s fine, and it’s healthy for audiences to engage with films that present worldviews different from their own, but it also means the film doesn’t quite work on me the way it wants to. I’m too much at a distance.

So, I’m not the ideal audience… but, on the other hand, I also am the ideal audience in most other ways. I like slashers, including and especially PG-13 novelty-slashers; I think that Happy Death Day is one of the best movies of 2017 (incidentally, I like it more than Get Out of the same year). I give a wide latitude to a horror-comedy movie so long as it’s splashing in one of those two ponds pretty well.

And The Blackening just isn’t that good. Three or four punchlines made me laugh — the exasperated group response to “we should split up” in particular is terrific. But the movie isn’t remotely scary or tense except for a couple of moments. Compare that to Scream which is just a deliciously thrilling movie at its core, its horror bonafides established in the brutal opening scene. The Blackening has its own standalone intro in a similar vein, but director Tim Story fails to convey any suspense or dread to tease us into the rest of the film.

The story is a run-of-the-mill cabin in the woods survival plot: A group of college friends reunite for a weekend, only for its various characters to be hunted down by a wacko in a mask with a crossbow. The added wrinkle here is that the group plays a cursed, racist board game that seems to be controlled by the mysterious villain.

The acting is inconsistent: Dewayne Perkins is very funny and charismatic as Dwayne, the high-strung gay friend in the group. I’d love to see him in some more movies. (Perkins also has a writing credit.) On the opposite end of the spectrum, Jermaine Fowler is a trainwreck as Clifton, playing the character like this is a sketch from Scary Movie; it’s a mugging, exaggerated caricature.

I think the underlying problem is that the movie doesn’t ever get around to making us care about the characters due to the tonal whiplash of its components; nor is it fun or tense enough as a thriller to be a pure piece of horror-craft. Thus none of the conflicts or ideas really pop off the screen, instead transporting us from one scenario to the next and hoping something within sticks. It rarely does.

So the sum of it all is a couple funny gags, a couple decent slasher scenes, a couple nice performances, and not much else. Whether or not you’re the target demographic, that’s not much of a movie.

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.

The film is a realistic and disturbing portrayal of teenage grooming, following 17-year-old Lea (Lily McInerny) as she falls prey to the charms and manipulations of 34-year-old Tom (Jonathan Tucker). The film is a linear and relentless escalation of red flags and coercion, until it reaches a brutal point of no return.

Director and writer Jamie Dack does an impressive job of putting us in Lea’s shoes, making us feel her confusion, loneliness, and desperation. The film never feels exploitative or sensationalized, but rather honest and raw. The performances by McInerny and Tucker are quite good, making the characters feel real even as they’re fairly flat.

But the film is also a one-note exercise in dread. It offers no surprises, no insights, no relief. It’s a predictable and depressing journey into a real-life horror. It’s so relentless in its narrative focus it verges into the didactic. Tom, in particular, is less of a character and more of a plot device: this is what real predators look like.

I understand that the film’s intention is to raise awareness and empathy for the victims of grooming, and I respect Dack’s skill and vision in executing this. But it’s just a slog of misery. I don’t mind challenging films, but Palm Trees and Powerlines is a chore to watch rather than an eye-opening experience. (And maybe being a father of two girls primed me to be extra susceptible to the film’s manipulation, but I don’t think that’s the only reason.)

So, while I admire Palm Trees and Power Lines for its craft and its clear-eyed depiction of its content, I can’t recommend it. It’s a film that sacrifices a sense of complex humanity or ambiguity in favor of drilling its point.

I want to repeat, though, that it’s a well-assembled film. My negative reaction is in part because it’s well-made. It has a strong sense of realism and naturalism, particularly teenage alienation. It also has a striking visual style, using the contrast between the sunny and idyllic setting of southern California and the dark and sinister undercurrents of the story. Dack perfectly straddles the line of showing us the horror without glorifying or eroticizing it, especially the absolutely gut-wrenching hotel scene.

But there’s a fine line between cinema that’s admirably constructed and cinema that’s actually admirable. Palm Trees and Power Lines falls on the wrong side of the line.

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.

He does so in a uniquely-flavored and memorable coming-of-age story. The film centers around Ziggy (Finn Wolfhard) and his mother, Evelyn (Julianne Moore). Ziggy is a high school student and a modestly successful musician who builds his audience by performing live streams for international audiences. Every week, he performs live for fans in remote countries who are drawn to his authentic style.

Meanwhile, Evelyn is a social worker, and by all accounts a very good one, protecting the lives of dozens of domestic abuse victims. She runs a busy shelter yet she clearly has a hard time connecting on a personal and conversational level with the people around her.

But Evelyn and Ziggy, despite both being accomplished and respected from the outside, feel a missing piece. It quickly becomes obvious to the viewers that what they need is each other: Ziggy is searching for some purpose beyond his music, or rather some way to grow his music into something more purposeful. Ziggy hilariously keeps using the word “political” to describe his desire for his actions to resonate beyond his tiny sphere. Evelyn, on the other hand, wants a soul to nurture, a more personal mentorship than the ones she provides in her day-to-day job.

Each of them spend most of the movie chasing after the wrong person to fill those missing pieces. Whenever they get close to realizing that the other might be able to provide some happiness in their lives, they start bickering and withdrawing from each other. The mother-son love is buried very deeply, but it’s very much there, with only some combination of maturity and distance likely to reveal it. In this way, it actually reminded me of Lady Bird, another film about a fraught child-mother relationship that’s built around a core of inextinguishable love manifesting itself as resentment.

For Ziggy, the path to enlightenment and happiness runs through his crush, Lila (Alisha Boe), whom he is attracted to because she is brilliant and beautiful, but even moreso because she is socially conscious and driven. She writes a poem about the colonization of the Marshall Islands, and — in one of the movie’s most bizarre and memorable scenes, the one I’ve seen referenced most often in social media and reviews of this film — he masturbates while reading the poem over and over to himself.

Evelyn, on the other hand, finds herself drawn to Kyle (Billy Bryk), a boy staying at her shelter with his battered mother. Kyle is empathetic and humble, but also quite gifted. After high school, Kyle plans to become an auto mechanic, but Evelyn makes it her mission to convince Kyle to go to college and pursue social work like her. The film is well aware of the creepy, lustful undertones of Evelyn’s pursuit of Kyle, even though it is a platonic and supportive affection. Eisenberg and Moore get some squirmy laughs out of this tension.

When You Finish Saving the World is a comedy, but an intense and cringe-inducing one. Like Funny Pages from earlier in the year, it will undoubtedly alienate significant portions of its potential audience by presenting oblivious and unlikeable characters with unflinching directness. It also puts a cap on how much I can look forward to re-watching this one: It’s one thing to admire and appreciate the characterization of obnoxious dingbats; it’s another to actually enjoy the time spent with them. But the movie, overall, works thanks to the crisp writing and acting.

Wolfhard and Moore are both doing strong and idiosyncratic character work. I haven’t seen enough of Wolfhard’s other performances to know if he this is just the way he carries himself, or if he is indeed an excellent actor, but he’s quite convincing and memorable as the aloof Ziggy. Moore, unsurprisingly, crushes the role, making Evelyn her own, neurotic creation. She’s absolutely terrific, quite possibly the best in the world right now at capturing “difficult” but kind-hearted women.

When You Finish the World is overstuffed with clever narrative ironies. I really got a kick out of Eisenberg’s writing and storytelling. For example, Ziggy, the oblivious goober singing songs about teen love, is actually connecting more deeply with people in other countries than his socially conscious, pro-justice peers talking in echo chambers. And Evelyn treats her nurturing of Kyle like she would an affair; making up lies to leave the house for a few hours, growing desperate when she’s “discovered” by Kyle’s mom, etc.

As a director, it’s harder to make too much of an evaluation of Eisenberg. Just like Lady Bird resulted in Greta Gerwig getting a bit overhyped when most of that movie’s success came in acting, writing, and production design, so I’m hesitant to assign Eisenberg too much hype as a “next big thing.” But there’s no question he holds the film together quite well, and I’d love to see him take a few more stabs at dramedies like this. I suspect it’s not a coincidence that this movie is the kind he has often been cast in — Eisenberg would have been the top candidate to play Ziggy if this had been made ten years ago.

It’s not to all tastes, but When You Finish Saving the World is fresh, acerbic, and one of the better debut films of the past year.

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.