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The Pope's Exorcist

The Pope’s Exorcist

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When you really need a doctor, who do you choose?  The young, baby-faced one who’s only been a resident for a couple of years, or the older doctor who has fought countless battles with sickness and death and won most of them?  Experience matters, so I take the older doctor whenever I can.  Same would go for an exorcist.  I don’t want the young whippersnapper, I want the grizzled veteran who cracks jokes while in the presence of a demon just because it pisses it off.  That is exactly the kind of priest Father Amorth (Russell Crowe) is.  He’s been involved in more possessions than he can count.  He’s so savvy he can tell within a matter of minutes whether a man is actually possessed or faking it.  And if the afflicted is faking it, then Amorth is happy to oblige with a little of his own.

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Air

Air

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Once upon a time, in the land known as America in the Go-Go Eighties, there lived a man named Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon).  He worked for Nike as a talent scout, searching far and wide for talent to sign up to promote basketball shoes.  Though he toiled day and night, his efforts proved fruitless.  Then, in 1984, the answer to his prayers emerged.  A young collegiate basketball player named Michael Jordan had risen to national prominence by helping North Carolina win the NCAA championship with an amazing shot in the closing seconds.  He was subsequently drafted by the Chicago Bulls and tasked with not only leading them out of obscurity, but to NBA championship glory.  Even though he was only eighteen years old, this didn’t phase him in the least.  Everyone agreed it was only a matter of when he achieved greatness, not if.  No, the biggest question surrounding Jordan was which company he would choose for a highly-lucrative shoe marketing contract.

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Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

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The life of Edgin (Chris Pine) is a tale of misfortune and woe, sung in a pleasing tenor.  In the fantasy realm where Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves takes place, he formerly was a member of a peacekeeping group known as the Harpers.  The Harpers worked with the Red Wizards to keep things orderly.  One day, he became disenchanted with his role and turned to thievery.  For reasons I don’t want to divulge here, his wife was killed by Red Wizards.  Edgin turned into a drunk and all-around lousy father, but fortunately for him, a warrior named Holga (Michelle Rodriguez) took pity on him.  She decides to help him raise his daughter Kira (Chloe Coleman) for reasons never really made clear.  The two are not romantically linked, even though that probably would be the case in any other movie they appeared in.  (I also suspect this was done to remain true to the spirit of the D&D game, a favorite of nerds who probably avoid mushy romantic stuff at all costs.)

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A Good Person

A Good Person

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Like many movies about drug addiction that have come before, A Good Person asks for our sympathy.  To my surprise, it got it without a struggle.  It tells the story of Allison (Florence Pugh), a young woman who became addicted to prescription painkillers after a fatal traffic accident.  Physically, she seems fine.  Allison moves about normally when she chooses to and has no visible scars.  Mentally, she’s in an entirely different place.  She spends her days in her house with the curtains drawn, lounging around, conspiring ways to obtain a refill of her expired prescription.  Her mother Diane (Molly Shannon) pops over unannounced, throws open the curtains and shrilly demands that her daughter get her act together.  Nobody ever told Diane that the last thing a drug addict wants is a high-energy pep talk.

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The Fabelmans

The Fabelmans

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Once upon a time, in a quiet suburb in New Jersey, Burt (Paul Dano) and Mitzi Fabelman (Michelle Williams) take their son Sammy to see his first movie.  He’s apprehensive about the experience, so they do their best to explain it to him.  For an engineer like Burt, movies are nothing more than a magic trick the   projector plays on your brain.  Mitzi, a classically trained pianist, says that movies are dreams that you remember.  Their views on movies, while worlds apart, are both correct.  Sammy didn’t realize it then, but he will spend the rest of his life reconciling the perspectives of his parents on his journey to becoming a Hollywood film director.

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65 Adam Driver

65

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65 billion years ago, a spaceship piloted by Mills (Adam Driver) crash-lands on Earth after crossing paths with an unexpected group of asteroids.  His cargo, twelve people in cryosleep, are all killed except one, a young girl named Koa (Ariana Greenblatt).  Mills needs to get both of them to the remaining escape pod before the asteroids hit.  Their journey is complicated by two problems.  First, the two speak different languages.  Mills’ home planet has managed to develop interplanetary space travel but not a universal translator.  Second, the environment is filled with Cretaceous period dinosaurs who want to eat them.  Over the next twenty-four hours, Mills and the only other remaining survivor Koa do their best to navigate all manner of dangerous beasties, big and small, in their desperate journey to their only means of escape before an extinction-level event happens.

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Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania

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Life is good for Scott Lang (Paul Rudd).  After helping the Avengers undo The Blip and defeat Thanos, everyone loves Ant-Man.  The movie’s funniest bit is when it shows Lang walking carefree around San Francisco to the chorus of “Welcome Back” graciously accepting free coffee and meals because people confuse him with Spider-Man.  (I would have chosen “Believe It or Not”, the theme song from “Greatest American Hero”.)  Aside from his heroic exploits, Scott  is just an all around good guy.  Problem is, he doesn’t know what to do with himself in this post-Endgame world.  As his daughter Cassie helpfully points out, he’s been content to rest on his laurels instead of choosing to engage with the world’s numerous problems.  Fortunately (or unfortunately) for Scott, he lives in the MCU.  Defeating one existential threat only means that an even bigger and badder one is on the way.

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Tár

Tár

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Describing classical music composer and conductor Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) as an overachiever is an understatement.  Having already achieved EGOT, she is also the lead conductor for the Berlin Philharmonic, a guest lecturer at Juilliard and the head of a foundation that provides opportunities for female conductors.  She’s also working on an autobiography and has begun practice for a live recording of Mahler’s Fifth symphony.  When the latter is complete, Lydia will have recorded all nine of Mahler’s symphonies with the same orchestra, equaling an achievement by her mentor Leonard Bernstein.

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The Banshees of Inisherin

The Banshees of Inisherin

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Whenever I see shots of a beautiful part of the world, I think to myself, “How amazing would it be to live there!  It wouldn’t matter what I was doing, so long as I had this incredible landscape to look at and appreciate every day.”  The Irish countryside, as depicted in Banshees, would definitely be one of those places where a person could see themselves living without a care in the world.  Pádraic (Colin Farrell), the anti-hero of the story, certainly fits that description.  He’s a happy-go-lucky sort who spends each day enjoying what life has given him and wanting nothing more.  He cares for the animals on his farm, which he loves very much.  He shares a quaint cottage with his sister Siobhán (Kerry Condon), who also loves him.  Every day at 2:00 PM he gathers his best friend Colm (Brendan Gleeson) for a drink and a smoke at the pub.  Until one day Colm refuses to open his door to Pádraic or even acknowledge him.  When the two later cross paths, Colm states that he doesn’t like Pádraic anymore and doesn’t want to be friends with him.

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Knock at the Cabin

Knock at the Cabin

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One fine day, a young girl named Wen collects grasshoppers in a sun-dappled forest near a cabin in the woods.  She’s soon joined by Leonard (David Bautista), a hulk of a man with arms covered in tattoos.  Despite his threatening appearance, Leonard is a gentle giant who helps Wen with her task.  To her credit, Wen remains calm as Leonard’s enormous hands gently envelops a grasshopper.  When he casually states that he and his friends will soon meet Wen’s parents, she notices several people emerging from the trees holding scary weapons.  This finally triggers Wen’s “stranger danger” reflex and she runs to the cabin to alert her parents.

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