Diving into the screener pile: 'Kiss of the Spider Woman,' 'Left-Handed Girl,' 'Alpha,' 'Tron: Ares,' 'M3GAN 2.0,' 'Reflection in a Dead Diamond,' 'A Little Prayer' and 'Waltzing With Brando.'
Thoughts on some movies I've caught up with recently.
It’s year-end screener season, when we movie critics dive into the movies we missed earlier in the year and catch up on them for awards viewing.
This results in a lot of movie-watching in a short period of time. And while none of these are movies that I reviewed upon their releases, I thought I’d provide some belated thoughts on eight of those films now.
It’s worth noting that this is not the “bottom” of the screener pile; we’re still a couple of weeks from there, and I’ll probably be doing another roundup once we get to that point.
Here we go:
Kiss of the Spider Woman
This film, directed by Bill Condon, is an adaptation of the Broadway musical from 1992, which was itself adapted from a 1976 novel; it was previously made into a movie, in non-musical form, in the 1980s, winning William Hurt an Oscar.
The setup is that two men — one a gay window dresser (Tonatiuh), the other a political dissident (Diego Luna) – are in prison together in 1970s Argentina, and the window dresser passes the time by telling the story of his favorite old Technicolor Hollywood movie, also called Kiss of the Spider Woman, in which the two actors play male characters, and Jennifer Lopez plays both the star and the actress playing her.
According to a trades story I read months ago, this movie owes its existence to Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez’s brief remarriage, as Affleck’s production company greenlit it as a star vehicle for her, and they had already split up by the time the movie came out. The film came and went in the fall without much fanfare and has gotten no awards attention.
But while Ben and Jen’s initial coupling led to the infamous movie Gigli, Kiss of the Spider Woman is actually very enjoyable. It looks amazing, the musical numbers pop, and all three lead performances are quite good.
Left-Handed Girl
Directed by Shih-Ching Tsou and co-written and edited by Sean Baker, this Taiwan-set coming-of-age drama is, like Baker’s The Florida Project, the child’s-eye-view story of a little girl in a unique location, trying to live amongst the chaos wrought by the adults around her. Also, it’s shot mostly using an iPhone, much like Baker’s Tangerine.
The film, now on Netflix, stars Nina Ze as I-Jing, a five-year-old who spends her nights treating a gorgeously lit Taipei market as her personal playground. While her mother and sister struggle with more adult problems, I-Jing internalizes her grandfather’s fear that being left-handed, as she is, is the devil’s work.
It’s a sweet drama that goes to some seriously dark places, especially near the end, but I liked it a lot.
A Little Prayer
This movie debuted at Sundance in 2023, almost three years ago, and sat on the shelf for an uncommonly long time, even getting dumped by at least one distributor, before it finally landed with little fanfare in August.
I kept occasionally hearing from critic friends that it was a hidden gem, and those friends were right.
Set in a small North Carolina town, the film stars David Strathairn as Bill, the patriarch of a family, a businessman whose Iraq war veteran son (Will Pullen) works for him. Bill soon starts to suspect that his son is cheating on his wife (Jane Levy) with a co-worker (Dascha Polanco). Meanwhile, Bill’s hot mess of a daughter (Anna Camp) blows back into their house after leaving her husband for the umpteenth time.
The plot makes this sound like a salacious drama, but that’s the furthest thing in the world from what it really is, an understated character study, about the sort of people not often visited by the movies. A true gem.
Alpha
Speaking of festival films that took a weird route to screens… Julia Ducournau’s follow-up to Titane, one of the bugfuck-insane movies of recent years, debuted at Cannes this spring and was acquired by NEON. But the reception at Cannes was muted, and Alpha didn’t get any type of big fall release, amid NEON’s extremely stacked fall slate.
Instead, it got a brief Oscar-qualifying run in October, at an AMC theater in the Bronx, to which quite a few NYC-based Film Twitter types made pilgrimages; critics later received the disc, as part of this year’s edition of The Booklet. It’s set for a proper release on March 27.
Alpha is fine, I guess, but nowhere nearly as outstanding as Titane. It’s another body-horror story, this time about a teenage girl suffering a blood-borne disease, and I can’t quite figure out if the story is an allegory for HIV/AIDS or for COVID.
Tron: Ares
I’ve always been in the camp that says Tron: Legacy was underrated, although I’m still not entirely sure why anyone saw it fit to make a third movie, 15 years later, much less from the director of Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, and I’m not surprised that it didn’t do well.
Now that I’ve finally seen it… the film sports awesome music — credited to Nine Inch Nails, and not “Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross” — cool visuals, and not much else; the visual and plot conceit seemed to owe way more to the Matrix films than to the Tron ones. And I’m already sick of movie plots featuring feuding tech CEOs, and I can tell that’s going to happen for many more years.
I liked that it had Jared Leto delivering Patrick Bateman-style pretentious monologues about ‘80s pop music, but I didn’t like any other aspect of Jared Leto. Greta Lee, though, should get a lot more starring roles.
M3GAN 2.0
M3GAN, about the dancing-robot little girl who kills people, was a sleeper hit a few years ago, so now we have a sequel. Which, like the Tron one, felt the need to be almost entirely about A.I.
The new M3GAN movie, though, has an extremely convoluted script and storyline, which keeps changing the mission every five minutes, while also repeatedly giving the robot girl sassy catchphrases, as if the filmmakers were trying really hard to force a gay camp classic into existence.
It’s streaming on Peacock.
Reflection in a Dead Diamond
A super-stylish James Bond homage from Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, the Belgian filmmakers behind Let the Corpses Tan. And like that film (Laissez bronzer les cadavres), this one has an even better title in French (Reflet dans un diamant mort).
It’s a tribute to the early Bond films, and also to the movies in the ’60s and ‘70s that ripped off the Bond films. The title even sounds like a 007 title.
Fabio Testi stars as a retired, Bond-like spy, living on the French Riviera, whose past comes back to haunt him.
A Philadelphia Film Festival film this fall, Reflection in a Dead Diamond, is now streaming on Shudder.
Waltzing With Brando
When someone attempts a “Marlon Brando impression,” nine times out of ten, they’re doing either Don Corleone or Stanley Kowalski or Colonel Kurtz, as opposed to trying to capture Brando’s actual real-life persona.
Billy Zane, in Waltzing With Brando, attempts the latter, portraying the actual Brando in the 1970s and looking and sounding remarkably like him. It’s just a shame that the movie tells one of the least interesting possible stories about his life.
The film is based on a memoir by Bernard Judge, the renowned architect who, in the early ‘70s, was hired by Brando to design an island paradise in Tahiti, and found himself out of place amid Brando’s eccentric movie star life. Jon Heder — Napoleon Dynamite! — who at age 48 looks very different but sounds the same, plays Judge, while familiar faces like Richard Dreyfuss and Tia Carrere show up as well.
The Tahiti project, had it been a huge disaster, might have been a fascinating story to tell, but it actually went pretty well, and the main takeaway from the film is that Brando, for all his weirdness, was a great, earnest humanitarian.
The biggest mystery might be what year this film is from.
Waltzing With Brando debuted in 2024 at the Torino Film Festival, and strangely, the film was named to the Oscars shortlist last year, in the Best Makeup category, one of those moments when a nomination (or shortlisting) marked the first time I was aware of a film’s existence. However, the film was released this past September and has been submitted for FYC consideration in this year’s awards, so I’m treating it as a 2025 release.