With Here, Zemeckis is once again getting pensive, but this time he revisits and expands the themes of one of his films in particular, Forrest Gump, the work that is Zemeckis’s biggest legacy in enduring popularity and cultural cachet. For Here, Zemeckis got the whole gang back together: stars Robin Wright and Tom Hanks, screenwriter Eric Roth, composer Alan Silvestri, cinematographer Don Burgess, and more. Granted, Silvestri and Burgess are among Zemeckis’s regulars, so their appearance is hardly a special occasion, but the para-text of Forrest Gump is palpable in almost every respect throughout Here.

Here is a bold experiment, an exercise in simultaneously embracing a hyper-focused constriction and a cosmic sprawl, a single-shot Cloud Atlas of sorts. I won’t describe all the specifics of the storytelling and formal exercise here, as there is a lot of pleasure in discovering its mechanics in real time. But it is a wild experiment. The much-discussed AI de-aging is maybe the fourth most-interesting filmmaking gambit.

The film offers a story that reflects its radical construction. It’s an outside-in take on Gump’s wide cultural embrace. The Best Picture winner explored the broad geography of the United States, using the nation’s post-WW2 cultural and historical events the very backbone and content of the story. By contrast, Here shows those crucial American events of the past 70 years (and beyond) in periphery and subtext only. In holding the steadiest of gazes on a single point and small group of people, Zemeckis revisits the Baby Boomer cultural arc and finds it not an uplifting, bittersweet tale of exceptionalism and sturdy glory, like he did in Forrest Gump, but an echo of eons of mundane suffering. The human cycle will repeat, Here contends, and life itself will remain as it always has been: a noisy cataclysm of interrupted happiness and inevitable decline.

This is an existentially bleak film for much of its duration. In the final scene, a character proclaims “I love it here” — the “here” of the sentence meaning any of a dozen different things depending on your reading — and it is one of the most bitterly ironic closings of any film I can recall, a sentimental aphorism clouded in layers of cruelty. But it is more complicated than that, too; because the “I love it here” line does reflect the happiness of a fleeting instant. Zemeckis is challenging the audience to consider some tough questions he’s working through himself about the meaning and value of human existence: Is it authentic to shape your life story around blips of happiness, or is the truth something more dire and mundane? The happy moments are surrounded by bitter ones: failed dreams and loss and long roads to obsolescence.

The film is brimming with oceans of subtext and heartache, of class and racial consciousness, but on the surface Here still has a broadly nostalgic texture. One Letterboxd review cites the film (pejoratively) as a “Boomer diorama.” Amidst his existential contemplation, Zemeckis still devotes significant effort to capturing the evolving American aesthetics and kitsch of the second half of the 20th century, where the way citizens feel is defined by our pastimes: what music we listen to, what fashion is in style, what furniture style is trendy, etc.

And so Here is a film of complicated, contradictory ideas, both shallow and heavy depending on the perspective we take. Zemeckis really hammers home the ambivalent, subjective viewpoint with a barrage of frames, and the way those frames tell stories. There is, of course, the frame of film itself, rock steady throughout the runtime. Zemeckis cuts between timelines with smaller, inner frames, partial slices of our viewpoint warping the time-space continuum. And the characters use frames, too: Most striking is Richard’s (Hanks) love of painting; he captures the world the way he sees it in his own rectangular canvas; for him, the world is more heartfelt and personal than the audience’s immobile gaze. The story is saturated with frames-within-frames of screens and cameras and TVs; reality further compressed and refracted in the eyes of the beholder.

I ought to reflect on the presentation of the film before I wrap here. There’s no getting around the fact that this is an ugly film. It is almost harmonically ugly — the slightly-glossy CGI look, cleaned up with AI, pervading the entirety of the runtime. It is a visual mess that feels one with the gaudy intensity of its themes. The AI de-aging of actors is very bad; fake-young Tom Hanks is the most successful operation, overall looking like his young self, but a little squashed like somebody sat on the model. Robin Wright gets the worst of it; the woman who William Goldman once said was so beautiful at age 20 that crew members would stop what they were doing to watch her walk by has merely had some of her age-58 wrinkles sanded away. The voice de-aging is even worse; Paul Bettany plays Tom Hanks’ father but always sounds like a baby, even when he’s scolding teenage Hanks whose voice remains raspy despite whatever processing it’s received.

And Here is a clunky late-era Zemeckis so it should be little surprise there is some astringent and ineffective stabs of humor. The worst offender is a runner about Benjamin Franklin and his illegitimate son. I genuinely have no idea what Zemeckis and Roth were aiming for, or if the gag is just a poorly conceived transplant from the graphic novel from which this film was loosely adapted.

But as messy and unhinged and strange and occasionally incoherent as Here is, I also think it is great. Full on, capital-G great, one of Zemeckis’s most provocative films (if not quite one of his best overall — I’ve updated my ranking). I have rarely been so engaged and befuddled this year, so deeply curious to tease apart exactly what the story in front of me was and why it was being told this way. Robert Zemeckis remains a technical craftsman first and foremost, always trying out new gizmos like AI algorithms. But I think critics and audiences have not appreciated how he has charged some of the films in his later career with a vulnerable, melancholic voice, and it’s rarely been more potent or audacious than in Here. The result is deeply flawed and very messy but one of my favorite films of the year.

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.

It’s a damn tragedy of cinema Shanley disappeared, because Joe Versus the Volcano is something special. It’s hard to categorize: a screwball romantic comedy tinged with fantasy and spiritualism, perhaps; a true sui generis triumph. It’s the first of the three legendary pairings of Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, romcom juggernauts, though even in that manner it’s a surprise: Ryan plays three different characters who serve as romantic partners to Hanks during different phases of his journey, her identity metamorphizing as Joe comes closer to death and enlightenment.

The film opens with Joe Banks (Hanks) entering his soul-sucking, factory-like office and encountering some truly dreary working conditions. This opening is absolutely magnificent; if you had told me Shanley was a playwright who had never directed a film before, I wouldn’t have believed you for an instant. It’s so cinematic.

We follow the employees like worker ants scuttling into a hole. It’s Tati-esque, and almost Expressionistic, crafting a heightened and mutated reality that is borderline dystopian, the sounds and sights grating and dulling Joe’s soul like a high-torque drill stripping a screw. Joe, you see, is always sick and always tired, so he goes to see a doctor to try and find a quick fix.

Instead, the condition is terminal. Banks is diagnosed with “brain cloud” and given six months to live. This terrible news is the catalyst Joe needs. He has a liberating meltdown, quitting his job and accepting a modest proposal from a billionaire (Lloyd Bridges): Become a human sacrifice for the natives of a tiny tropical island filled with valuable minerals so that they will welcome outsiders; and, in exchange, the billionaire will fund his travel and luxurious final days. He’ll be a hero and capitalistic chum, incinerated by volcanic commerce and plumes of dreams.

Joe Versus the Volcano walks a razor’s edge: It is anarchic and exaggerated, but more earnest than wacky, at least until the final half hour where it teeters maybe an inch too far into silliness; just a tiny bit, though. The Waponis, natives of the volcanic island, would not be entirely out of place in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in terms of questionable caricature. I can’t really resent it too much, though: Shanley keeps the damn thing flowing and exciting and introspective.

In spite of the playful, lightly absurdist tone of the film, its central preoccupation is the composition of Joe’s character. It’s a story of a “soul sickness,” the biblical battling with the consumerist: Samson visits a salon to cut his “delicate tangles” yet gains strength; Jonah prays and dances in the belly of a steamer trunk; at a wedding, water is turned to orange soda. It’s all silly and all profound.

Shanley is a playwright by profession, so of course his script is absolutely terrific. The dialogue has a joyful, piercing cadence to it: It’s rat-a-tat, with phrases and words cycling, occasionally pausing for verbal flourishes on unexpected topics. My favorite might be a poetic tribute to luggage by a salesman (Barry McGovern): “If I had the need and the wherewithal, Mr. Banks, this would be my trunk of choice.” After Joe buys four of them, the salesman says farewell: “May you live to be a thousand years, sir.” There’s no better goodbye in the history of the English language.

Shanley’s direction is the equal to his writing, though: The middle act never quite matches the surrealistic heights of the opening and closing, but the camera always places us in unique, oddly-shaped spaces, filled with unexpected people and props. There’s a lamp at Joe’s office that I desperately want to place in my own home office. The aforementioned luggage are things of crystalline beauty despite being so geometrically simple, and they get tremendous play throughout the story.

Shanley occasionally indulges in larger-than-life images that look they come from a picture book or an album cover or a Méliès short: There’s one shot (really two) of the moon that rightfully gets used in all of the marketing, a hazy green pre-storm sky that portends doom and euphoria like the curtains in Vertigo, and a shipwreck straight out of a Looney Tunes gag.

The cast does some terrific work bringing life to the material. Hanks is great as Joe, modulating his neurosis and idealism in a way that fits the material perfectly. It’s no surprise, but still a delight, that he makes the big swings of the story feel plausible so that the fantasy never disrupts the cinematic magic. Ryan is great, too: Even when she talks in a funny voice as meek secretary DeDe, she brings electric chemistry to the screen with Hanks, and pitches her lines exactly on the level of the material. The supporters are grand all around; the one I’ll remember best is Ossie Davis as sage chauffeur Marshall.

What I love most of all about Joe Versus the Volcano is that it never leaves any doubt that Shanley believes in his material, that the only way to make sense of this messed up world is to treat it as equal parts nonsensical and sacred. Pavement mud and sea water and magma run through our human veins. Despite its heightened reality, it is genuinely inspiring. It is great art, the kind of movie that can motivate you to quit your brain-clouding 9-to-5 and pursue your innermost dreams, even if they’re as ludicrous as diving into a volcano.

And just to be clear, I don’t necessarily object to the live action remakes of the Walt Disney Animation Studio out fealty to the originals the way that some do. (Side note: Calling them “live action” remakes has often felt like a misnomer given the prevalence of shitty CGI). I do think Disney’s best animated films are masterpieces, but Hollywood is not a sacrosanct industry. They are welcome to chop up and reboot and remake to their hearts’ (and stakeholders’) content. As long as I can still watch the original, I won’t be angry, just bored.

But anyways, I watched the new Pinocchio, and it is indeed trash. And it’s the kind of trash that gets less interesting and more broken the longer you stare at it. I found the first fifteen minutes borderline intriguing. The next half hour is vaguely watchable but unpleasant. The remaining hour absolutely flounders. It’s a descent to Hell.

Disney recruited Robert Zemeckis and Tom Hanks, presumably by driving Brinks trucks with the GDP of a small nation to their Beverly Hills mansions, to helm the remake of the film most commonly cited as the most beautiful in the history of American hand-drawn animation. I rewatched the 1940 classic in preparation for this remake, and there are no words to adequately capture the detail and beauty of that film. There are also no words to describe how ugly the 2022 film is by comparison, but if those words did exist they would be swear words. (Speaking of swear words, one of the most annoying runners in the remake is the ghastly Jiminy Cricket going out of his way to almost swear. “H-E-double hockey sticks” type stuff.)

Zemeckis also gets a screenwriting credit, and I’m not sure if his direction or his writing is more of a film-ruining piece of butchery. You can almost feel him losing interest in the screenplay as he works through it. The opening five minutes hint at a more nuanced and human Gepetto as a cornerstone of the film. Throughout the first two acts, Zemeckis tries really hard to smooth out some of the choppy storytelling decisions of the original; for example, Honest John and Gideon don’t coincidentally bump into Pinocchio a second time after he escapes Stromboli. By the last half hour, we’re strictly in “stuff happening because it needs to” mode, with corners cut every scene. And the last few minutes don’t even get that far; the actual “stuff happening” is hand-waved. Where there should be a proper conclusion after Pinocchio and Gepetto survive Monstro, Jiminy Cricket turns to the camera and says “maybe Pinocchio became a real boy, and maybe he didn’t, but Gepetto loved him either way.” Seriously. What a load of crock.

(The single worst writing sin of the film is a gag where Honest John ponders what a wooden boy’s name might be, and the punchline is when he suggests “Chris Pine” shortly after calling Pinocchio an “influencer.” I wish I was making that up.)

Visually, the closest Zemeckis gets to anything that’s even a little bit interesting is when he tries to channel his hacky mo-cap energy and construct a couple of elaborate thrill ride segments with whooshing cameras. In fact, a few of these sequences feel like they were designed for a 3D theater. But, to my knowledge, this is a Disney+-only release, so I’m not sure why they’re here. Maybe Zemeckis initially thought it was going to be a theater release including 3D and just never got around to making new storyboards. That would be in line with the laziness on display here.

The music is downright horrible. The songs you remember are butchered, but that’s expected. (There’s a horrible cry-sung reprise of “When You Wish Upon a Star” that emulates the ending of Tangled, life-restoring magic tears and all.) Less expected are the disposable new songs that are terribly bland. There’s a new Pleasure Island number that sounds like a Greatest Showman reject.

I feel like I haven’t emphasized enough just how ugly this movie is. The character designs are nightmares. Is CGI getting worse? Pinocchio is a putty abomination (albeit well-textured), but Jiminy Cricket is the real crime against retinas. Zemeckis has kept the approximate humanoid shape of the 1940 character design, but added more bug details, and it just looks so bad. Some of the other characters fare slightly better, and Monstro is moderately intimidating. But he’s really the only thing that even approaches a fear factor in this film. The unnerving edges have been sanded off. The donkey transformation in particular is neutered to nothing. (Also there are smoke demon monsters on Pleasure Island for no established reason.)

There are exactly two things in the new Pinocchio that are even remotely interesting. Maybe more like one and a half things. Let’s start with the smaller of those: I really enjoyed Keegan-Michael Key’s vocal performance as Honest John (credited just as “The Fox”). He’s funny and hammy in a way that feels like it actually belongs in a cartoon. The reason I only mark it as half of a good thing is that Honest John’s role has been drastically reduced from the original, approximately halved, so it feels like a missed opportunity.

And now we get to the one thing about the movie that I actually enjoyed, and that is Tom Hanks’ performance as Geppetto. It feels like Hanks is the only one who showed up to work on this production. He’s imagined and inhabited Geppetto as this wounded but hopeful soul who has disconnected from the outside world and lost a screw or two, but never given up hope. (A dark backstory and obsession with clocks is hinted at but never dwelled upon.) His spark connecting with Pinocchio is infectious. I’m not sure exactly what the voice he’s using is supposed to be; he sounds like he wants a spicy meat-ah-ball but forgot to take dementia meds. But he still fills the screen with some heart, and it’s literally the only thing here that has heart. He deserved better; the movie deserved less than what he gave it. This isn’t the worst movie of his career only because Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close still exists. And even then, I’m going to need to think about it.

Sometimes I wonder about my life. I lead a small life – well, valuable, but small – and sometimes I wonder, do I do it because I like it or because I haven’t been brave? So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, when shouldn’t it be the other way around? I don’t really want an answer. I just want to send this cosmic question out into the void. So good night, dear void. – Shopgirl

You’ve Got Mail is one of the best romantic comedies of the past 25 years. It does pretty much everything I hope a romantic comedy will do when I watch it. I fall in love with the characters, and I fall in love with their falling in love, and my heart soars as high as that schmaltzy Harry Nilsson cover of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” when they finally kiss.

Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan bring 1927 Yankees-tier charm and chemistry. Every scene they share is a dinger. More than that, they make the moments they’re not on screen together count. Some of the movie’s best scenes are strictly an actor staring at a computer screen, somehow commanding the camera despite performing the most sedentary task of modern life. Their faces are so good. Each can freeze and thaw fifteen times in a single shot, bringing us deep into their internal lives.

Yet what I find just as enduring about You’ve Got Mail is how much it is a writer’s movie as much as it is an actor’s movie. The script here is not perfect, in fact quite messy, but it is immensely thoughtful and observant. Co-writer and director Nora Ephron fills the film with deep currents of characters contending with the changing world. Nostalgia clashes with modernity; what’s business and personal bleed together in a world where our professions are our identities; language becomes a commodity, reduced by too many to a transaction and status symbol rather than a vessel of enlightenment and human connection. These ideas collide in the many relationships in the film, nearly all of which are built around the written word in some way.

You’ve Got Mail is a story about two competing bookshop owners who meet online and fall in love as anonymous email pen pals even as they professionally clash. It is a remake of the 1940 Ernst Lubitsch film The Shop Around the Corner, which is the title given to one of the film’s bookshops. (Technically, it’s not a remake, but adapted from the same source play. I haven’t seen The Shop Around the Corner, but I’m really eager to see how it shapes the plot in a slower-paced society.) Joe Fox (Hanks) runs a Barnes and Noble-type superstore that uses dirt cheap prices and a coffee bar to strangle Kathleen Kelly’s (Ryan) bespoke children’s bookstore out of business.

It is, of course, an adorably quaint premise in 2022. It’s almost humorous how powerful and merciless the chain bookstore is depicted: Within ten or fifteen years, Amazon and e-commerce would be devouring both of these brick-and-mortar institutions. All of the relentlessly 1998 fashion and technology details, not to mention the product placement, give the movie a temporal specificity that has retroactively made it a period piece. It’s a time capsule of a lost age, giving an extra layer to the film’s retrospective tone.

The movie’s biggest problem is that it doesn’t stick the landing on the plot thread about Fox and Kelly’s professional rivalry. There’s a point to be made about how nostalgia in and of itself isn’t a virtue, but the underlying things that we typically treasure when we remember the good-old-days can and should be adapted to modern life. The way we consume stories changes with time, just as the way we send mail does. And You’ve Got Mail does make that point, but you have to squint a bit to see it in the subtext. Just one more scene pondering the future of small, passionate businesses in a connected world would have gone a long way. Instead, we get Kelly’s career change hand-waved in a few lines as a conclusion that requires the viewer put the pieces together themselves. (Which I suppose is only necessary if any viewers are even thinking about these topics as they swoon through those last few romantic scenes. Nobody’s thinking about the future of the publishing industry when Meg Ryan mutters “we would never” the way she does in the scene before she goes to meet NY152.)

There’s also the slight problem that bugged me in the other Hanks-Ryan-Ephron pairing, Sleepless in Seattle, which is that a lot of the comedy and character dynamics rely upon the crutch of gender stereotype jokes (though much less here than there). The man likes The Godfather; the woman adores Pride and Prejudice. The other just doesn’t get it! What a cliche. (Though it must be noted that You’ve Got Mail is also a retelling of Pride and Prejudice, with some Bennett-Darcy-style dynamics between Kelly and Fox.) Also off-putting: Hanks is tilted a hair too far towards the manipulative side once he pieces together Shopgirl’s identity.

The weaknesses and slightly ragged edges end up not really mattering all that much because everything hums so smoothly. The side characters are a bit of a mixed bag, but in a good way. Everybody brings their own feisty energy and quirks. Parker Posey and Steve Zahn make every movie better, including this one. The movie’s nearly two hours could possibly have been trimmed just a hair, but not much; it zooms by.

It may be, in the scheme of cinema, a small movie, but nothing that is valuable is truly small, and no shout is to the void if there’s someone waiting for the email ping on the other side.

In case that opening paragraph wasn’t enough warning, let me make it clear: I’m about to spoil what happens at the end of The ‘Burbs. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend you do so. It’s really damn good, and a lot of the pleasure is the way the anarchic rhythm and timbre of the comedy ratchets so steadily you don’t notice any individual increments, but you sure as hell know you’re watching a different movie than fifteen minutes ago.

Alright, so, the ending. The subject of the neighborhood’s investigation is, as suspected by the characters, a serial killer, not just an introverted weirdo. A more conventional ending would have Tom Hanks and his crew become the bad guys, hoisted on their own paranoia and nosiness. Here, their fear is validated. Almost everyone I’ve talked to seems to hate this ending, but I don’t.

This is not a bad twist, unless you equate “messy” or “challenging” with “bad.” And even if it’s a misguided finale, the ending is certainly not a movie-torpedoing catastrophe, a claim I’ve heard repeated more than once. The twist cuts against the grain of the satire built by the film, but doesn’t tear it into shreds. Everything leading to those last ten minutes was already self-evidently and hysterically a crowbar to the shins of middle-class close-mindedness. Missing that little bow at the end doesn’t negate the entire movie leading up to it.

I can certainly see that hitting the nail on the “tolerate others, lest ye become the monsters” theme would have made a tighter story, but I enjoy Joe Dante instead leaning into the “fuck it, we’re all crazy” vibes. It matches the film’s heightened reality and Looney Tunes spirit, the suppressed anarchy in supposedly dull suburbia.

Beyond even its satirical elements, The ‘Burbs shines as a sitcom episode constructed and shot like a horror-comedy. 85% of the movie is a domestic comedy of misunderstandings and bad judgement, but in Dante’s expert hands, it always bubbles tension and unease. The suburban hijinks set against the arch horror texture make for terrific and bracing contrast. Danny Elfman’s slightly campy score adds a lot of flavor, too, creepy splashes of music jolting the film to life. Dante is tremendous at carefully modulating the film’s energy so its genre touches and comic mania never overtake its sense of place or humanity, but it also never lets you relax. The houses are shot like Gothic mansions, elevating the sense of an upended or sinister domestic order, making plenty of space for visual jokes like ratty wigs and piles of trash.

Of course, having Tom Hanks in the lead helps. Hanks is just about perfect in the role. Though he never quite captures the Tim Allen every-dad persona he’s written with in the opening minutes, he certainly grounds the character and has both the comic skills and the acting chops necessary to make a believable descent to wacky hysteria. His singed march out of a recently-exploded house near the finale is one of the funniest things I’ve seen in months, not just because of Hanks’ shell-shocked expression and gait (though they are great), but because it’s a payoff on 90 minutes of his great work teetering at the edge of sanity as buildup.

I quite like most of the acting, actually. There’s such an oddball set of energies to the cast: Bruce Dern is hilarious as the gung-ho Nam vet, and Corey Feldman is a pitch-perfect snotty teen slash Greek chorus. Carrie Fisher is solid as the level-headed wife, but not given nearly enough to do beyond nagging. The biggest disappointment — and it’s a doozy — is Rick Ducommun as Art, who I find shrill and unfunny. One friend of mine observed that Art’s character seems like it was written for Hanks’s semi-frequent collaborator John Candy, and it kind of ruined the movie for me imagining how much better The ‘Burbs would be with Candy in the role.

Nonetheless, The ‘Burbs thrives. It careens. It sparks and ignites. It is damn close to a masterpiece, perhaps Hanks’ funniest performance and funniest movie, and just so watchable and tonally daring.

Then some boats shoot each other for 80 minutes!

It’s probably not a good sign that I was more interested in the stakes-setting intro than the rest of the movie, or maybe it just means that I haven’t fully evolved into the kind of father who embraces a no-holds-barred Dad Movie like this. But, whatever the case, my gaze upon this film was steely and disinterested, despite the considerable craft within.

The bulk of the movie’s story traces a convoy of Allied ships across the Atlantic into dark, spooky waters that are typically harmless, but every now and again, house evil subs that pop up and sink friendly boats. Do you, intrepid reader, have any predictions as to whether Tom Hanks will get lucky in his travels this one time, or perhaps something will go afoul?

After his boat, with a callsign of “Greyhound,” spots some German U-boats, and sinks one, Krause’s crew wastes almost all of their munitions on a decoy signal, leaving them to fend off a “wolfpack” of U-boats until they get back safely into Allied waters. There are a series of minor victories each subsequently followed by another exchange of fire with the evil boats, until at last the requisite 85 minutes are complete and Hanks can lie down for a well-deserved nap.

Despite my flippancy, Greyhound has pretty terrific production values. The battle scenes represent far and away the most advanced naval combat I’ve ever seen on film, though I don’t think it should be a surprise based on what I’ve written so far that this is not a genre of film I frequently seek out. The sound in particular is daunting, a good reminder that violence is loud. (Greyhound’s lone Oscar nod was for sound design.) It’s impressive how well director Aaron Schneider captures the spatial logistics of the various ships. The action is always easy to comprehend even if you don’t know much about torpedoes and whatnot.

If you scroll through Rotten Tomatoes, you’ll see lots of words like “solid” and “sturdy” and “taught” and “craftsmanship.” These indicate, correctly, a competent film. Competence is by no means a low bar to clear, but is it really what we aspire to see when the lights dim and we’re transported to a different world? “Man, that film was really serviceable!”

There’s a cold lack of humanity, let alone character, in Greyhound: ships are reduced to callsigns, dots on a map, statistics. For World War 2 geeks, I am sure this will be compelling. And there’s no doubt that Hanks is the perfect type of guy to cast as a burdened, dignified, quietly strong everyman hero. See: Captain Phillips or Sully or Captain Miller from Saving Private Ryan.

But I kept thinking back to our three minutes with Elisabeth Shue in a hotel lobby and wishing I was watching that movie instead.

“Hey, he made a big doofy robot who takes care of him. It’s Baymax from Big Hero 6!” “Big apocalypse that’s a metaphor for climate change with a junk collecting robot rolling around? Wall-E!” “Oh an ambush as he’s collecting supplies. That’s I Am Legend!” Etc.

And given that Tom Hanks stars, I was pulling in connections to his previous films, too. “Okay, he’s by himself, befriending inanimate objects, trying to survive a harsh environment. It’s Cast Away.” “Hanks playing with a dog? Turner and Hooch throwback!” “Now that the robot is talking, this is kind of a mismatched buddy comedy like Dragnet.” And so on.

I know it’s lazy criticism to just list off other movies as comparisons. But that’s just the kind of movie Finch is: so formulaic and pleasantly watchable that it’s unlikely to inspire anything but the most basic intellectual engagement.

That’s not to say it’s bad! In fact, if you’re going to tell a story this by-the-numbers, you could do a lot worse than casting Hanks in the lead. That alone raises both the floor and ceiling for how good this movie can be.

The film’s premise is that the world has suffered an apocalypse via a solar flare destroying the atmosphere, rendering the daytime uninhabitable due to extreme temperatures and UV poisoning. Finch (Hanks), a robotics engineer, wanders around with his dog, Goodyear, looking for scraps to survive.

Finch is dying of UV radiation poisoning (which I would consider a spoiler, except Hanks gets a nosebleed in the first ten minutes, so you know something bad is afoot), and wants Goodyear to have a guardian when he passes. So he builds a sentient humanoid robot named Jeff and teaches him the basics of his apocalyptic life in St. Louis.

Things get hairy when a super-storm threatens to destroy their HQ, so Finch and his dog and his robot head out for the west coast or else face oblivion. Oh yeah, this is a road trip movie, too. Add Road to Perdition to the list.

Although this is grim stuff on the surface, Finch is surprisingly breezy. It’s jammed with needle drops and fun gags about Jeff the robot learning the rules of human life with the innocence of a child (The Iron Giant: check). The movie is content to ride the wave of Hanks’ prodigious charm.

Finch saves its best material for its final act. And, if nothing else, I’ll give credit to Finch for refusing to pull any punches. (This is a dog movie, after all; you think no tears would be shed?) After almost 90 minutes of emotional detachment, I was a bit surprised to feel the gut punches on a few of the final twists.

Visually, the movie is perfectly competent. It’s got that professional digital video sheen to it where you know that it had at least a little budget. The highlight is Jeff the humanoid robot: I believe he’s 100% mo-cap CGI, but he fits seamlessly into the film universe.

My one nitpick on the film’s visual profile is that the color grading towards blues and oranges is a bit zealous; I got some late 2000s/early 2010s vibes.

As much as I don’t have any strong opinions, positive or negative, about the generic and somewhat disposable Finch, I’m glad that Hanks is still taking a wide variety of roles for movies both big and small, commanding and elevating films just as much as he did during his imperial reign of the ‘90s and ‘00s. I just hope his next selection gives me more to think about than what movies it’s ripping off.

Thankfully, Elvis is no ordinary biopic. It is a piece of myth-making rock-and-roll opera. There’s a slight irony that it took an Australian to tell this quintessentially American story right: Baz Luhrmann dials his maximalist instincts up to 11. He finds in rock and roll a series of contradictions at which Elvis is the fulcrum: It’s Black music made for white people; it’s pure sex and an expression of the divine; it’s calculated presentation and raw instincts; it’s a carnival act and a higher calling. Rock and roll is everything, everywhere, all at once, ready to be exploited by the Colonel Tom Parkers of the world.

Luhrmann is fully up to the task of tackling these ideas in huge strokes. In some ways, this feels like a Zack Snyder superhero movie, but instead of Superman, we have The King. Luhrmann frames Austin Butler like a Greek statue, an Adonis from Memphis, in sharp poses and compositions. All of Luhrmann’s long-standing visual fascinations linger here: fast cuts and zooms, swooping cameras, glittering lights and swishing fabrics, color tints, embellishments like captions and mattes, intercutting between semi-related topics for dramatic impact, etc. These tools are put to great use: the larger-than-life American legend meets the larger-than-life filmmaker.

Musically, too, this is pure Luhrmann: Remixed, glossy versions of Elvis’s recordings accompany a dramatic score as well as plenty of anachronistic modern tracks for flavor.

Of particular potency are the montages early in the film: Impressionistically, Luhrmann explores the birth of rock and roll and the birth of an icon, framed from the eyes of the eager exploiter, Parker (Tom Hanks). And, since the movie addresses the viewer directly via narration and places us in Parker’s shoes, the implication is that we, the masses and the consumers, are the real makers and destroyers of Elvis.

Butler is terrific and receiving well-deserved laurels for a transformed performance. He captures the tics and the voice and the look; more essentially, he assembles it into a rich portrait of someone jittery and uncertain offstage but a refraction of God onstage.

Yet, I think Hanks might be even better. He certainly understands the assignment better than anyone else on cast, creating a barely-human villain of mythic proportions. Hanks’s Colonel Tom Parker is a drawling carnivore in a fat suit with a thousand hungry, capitalistic impulses gleaming from his eyes. His performance is just as much of a cornerstone of the film as Butler’s, one perfectly attuned to Luhrmann’s vision.

The downside is the hit-or-miss script, which includes too many of the expected, overdone beats of the genre: the first girlfriend/wife, the drug spiral, the public backlash, the infidelity, the new manager who tempts the talent away from the old manager, etc. If you’ve seen Walk Hard, you know what to expect. Biopics gonna biopic.

It’s also an exhaustingly long film. Luhrmann does his best to keep the momentum rolling for 159 minutes and, frankly, does an admirable job. The movie never runs out of ideas or images, but it does drag on, and I did check my watch a few times by the end. Had the movie concluded with his comeback special rather than his death, I don’t think it would be any less rich or complex, and it would have saved everyone an hour.

But what we do have is a monolith to Americana and celebrity, a portrait of a man and a generation all in one. It’s a perfect pairing of topic and filmmaker, and even if I desperately wish Luhrmann had sanded down the edges, Elvis is one hell of a film.