Reviews: 'All of Us Strangers,' 'Ferrari,' 'The Boys in the Boat' and 'Rebel Moon: Part I'
My final four movie reviews of the year
My reviews of four movies that are out on (or around) Christmas. All but Rebel Moon (Netflix) are out now in theaters.
All of Us Strangers
Andrew Haigh, the director of Weekend and 45 Years, has made an emotionally powerful film that represents a contemporary queer take on Field of Dreams. After all, it isn’t only heterosexual boomer farmers from Iowa who would love the chance to interact and settle all their issues, with their long-dead parents.
Based on a Japanese novel called Strangers, the film stars Andrew Scott (from Fleabag) as a lonely writer named Adam who lives in a gleaming but mysteriously empty apartment complex in London. One day he meets a neighbor named Harry (Paul Mescal) and they fall into a passionate affair. At the same time, Adam suddenly gains the ability to visit his childhood home and interact with the ghosts of his parents (Jamie Bell and Claire Foy), who were killed in a crash when he was 12 years old.
He essentially speed-runs the experience of connecting with them and coming out to them — while explaining that life for gay people has changed a lot since they died in the late 1980s. He eventually comes to terms with their deaths- only doing so as an adult rather than as a child. It’s all very affecting and beautifully rendered- and, I gather, Haigh shot the scenes in his own childhood home.
It’s yet another Searchlight Pictures movie that feels like an A24 movie, and fans of last year’s Aftersun will be gladdened to know that Paul Mescal dancing in a club is once again an important part of the film.
And then… there’s that ending.
There are going to be many, many arguments about the ending, both what it means and whether or not it “ruins” the movie. I think it works, but the arguments it’s going to start are half the fun.
Ferrari
Michael Mann has returned with his first film since Blackhat eight years ago. It’s a tightly focused biopic of Italian car impresario Enzo Ferrari, played this time by Adam Driver.
It’s a compelling movie, certainly, Mann’s best since Miami Vice back in 2006, although (pardon the pun) it never finds that extra gear. Ford v. Ferrari, from back in 2019 but set a decade after this film’s events — but also featuring a Big Race at the End — was a better version of a similar idea.
The film is set in 1957 and focuses on a specific moment: Still grieving his recently deceased son, Enzo Ferrari is presiding over the Mille Miglia race, while also considering selling a stake in his company. He’s also juggling his wife Laura (Penelope Cruz) and a mistress Lina (Shailene Woodley). Laura, at least nominally, is all right with the mistresses, both less all right with her husband having a secret son.
Yes, this is the second movie in the past three years in which Adam Driver plays the head of a famous Italian corporation and has sex with a woman on a table. It recalls Driver’s 2019 parlay of Marriage Story and The Report, both of which featured scenes in which a lawyer tells Driver’s character he has to pay a retainer that he’ll never be able to afford.
I had no trouble buying Driver as an Italian but had a bit more trouble buying the 40-year-old actor as a man who was about 20 years older than that at the time. And while Cruz can do anything, I had much more trouble buying Woodley as an Italian.
While I’m glad Mann is back, Ferrari fails to crack the top half of his filmography.
The Boys in the Boat
George Clooney, as a director, made an above-average movie right out of the gate with Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and followed it up with a near-masterpiece in Good Night and Good Luck. Since then, it’s been nothing but duds. It’s almost impressive, honestly.
No, it’s not as bad as Suburbicon or Leatherheads, but Clooney’s latest film, The Boys in the Boat, is a completely perfunctory underdog sports movie that embraces every single cliche of the genre.
Based on a popular book of the same name, The Boys in the Boat is about a rowing team from the University of Washington, in the 1930s, who got to compete at the Olympics in 1936- you know, the ones in Berlin that were presided over by Hitler.
The story is just told in the most uninteresting way possible, with the rowers all played by Generic Handsome Actors. When the characters meet Jesse Owens, it made me wish I was watching a movie about him, instead.
I can think of three different movies off the top of my head that were set at the 1936 Olympics and were better than this one- even the one directed by Leni Riefenstahl that was pure Nazi propaganda.
Rebel Moon: Part I: A Child of Fire
I’m kind of getting sick of “it’ll all make sense once you see the forthcoming director’s cut that’s an hour longer” being used as a defense of movies that I didn’t like. I didn’t buy that when it was about Napoleon, either.
That’s the case here with Zack Snyder’s latest spectacle, now on Netflix. which lifts all sorts of aspects of Star Wars, from its stated Kurosawa influence to actual red light sabers. It’s so Star Wars-inspired that it even officially began life as a Star Wars movie that Snyder wanted to make at one point.
I made my peace with the Snyder Cut and even kind of liked it, though I’m not about to justify that fanboy toxicity that went on for several years. Snyder has clear passion and talent, but this one is a dud- way too plagued by mumbo jumbo. Part II is coming in April, but I don’t expect to remember much about Part I a week from now, much less in four months.