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Companion

Companion

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Science fiction often tells us that robots want to be human.  The twist in Companion is that Iris (Sophie Thatcher), the robot at the center of this story, believed she was human right until her owner threatened to shut her off.  In an instant, she not only learns that she’s not alive, but that her boyfriend is a total creep.  Considering how humans behave towards her throughout the movie, it makes perfect sense that she embraces her robot existence in the end.  It certainly beats the vastly inferior alternative.

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Presence

Presence

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Presence is an atypical ghost story, in that it’s a first-person narrative told exclusively from the perspective of the ghost.  As such, the movie camera doubles as the ghost’s “eyes”, zooming around the suburban home setting like a hyperactive drone.  That’s because the camera actually is a drone, operated by Academy Award-winning director Stephen Soderbergh.

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The Straight Story

The Straight Story

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In what may be cinema’s most perplexing title card sequence ever, The Straight Story begins with “Walt Disney Pictures Presents…A Film By David Lynch”.  No, this isn’t a joke on Lynch’s behalf.  This movie really was released by Disney in 1999.  It was also Lynch’s only “G” rated film, which makes the odd juxtaposition easier to comprehend.  If you’re a Lynch devotee like myself, I want to assure you that although the movie is for general audiences, it does includes many of Lynch’s signature artistic touches that his fans will recognize immediately.  In other words, The Straight Story is just as  “Lynchian” as Blue Velvet or Mulholland Drive, two of his most highly regarded films.

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Juror #2

Juror #2

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Juror #2 is a movie about difficult choices and how our moral compass tends to shift when our circumstances change.  What we believe in the abstract suddenly becomes untenable when the things we value are at risk.  The difficulties involved with making the right choice despite the consequences has been a reliable subject for drama films, including several of director Clint Eastwood’s best (Unforgiven, Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby, and American Sniper).  It also happens to be the theme of Juror #2, which is what I imagine attracted Eastwood to the material.  The movie places the protagonist in an increasingly stressful situation and asks him to be an upstanding, law-abiding citizen.  However, doing so puts him directly at odds with being a good husband and father, which makes “the right choice” not so clear-cut.

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A Complete Unknown

A Complete Unknown

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As a biopic, A Complete Unknown is obligated to show us its subject’s humble origins.  Accordingly, the movie opens with a twenty year-old Bob Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) in the back of a station wagon.  He’s hitching his way from New Jersey to Greenwich Village to see his folk music hero, Woody Guthrie.  Dylan works on a song during the ride, scratching out lyrics in a notebook while refining the melody on his guitar.  Dylan’s workmanlike qualities, specifically how he was always working on his music at all times, is a theme the movie returns to again and again.

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Nosferatu 2024

Nosferatu

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Instead of trying to find a new approach to the 127 year-old tale of Dracula, writer-director Robert Eggers has based his movie on director WF Murnau’s unauthorized adaptation from 1922, Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror.  Murnau famously altered Stoker’s story in a failed attempt to circumvent copyright protections.  What he produced was a film that is both very  similar to Dracula and while diverging from it in very distinct ways.  In using Murnau’s film as his starting point, Eggers’ reimagining of the Dracula legend is the most compelling version of the vampire I’ve seen since Coppola’s Bran Stoker’s Dracula.

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Flow

Flow

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Although never explicitly stated, Flow is about climate change.  Even if you don’t believe in it, I think you can still enjoy the movie, but its underlying message will elude you.  There is a reason why an unassuming grey cat is forced to deal with a sudden environmental catastrophe, and it’s not so that we can see how well it can steer a boat.  (It steers surprisingly well, by the way.)

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Moana 2

Moana 2

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Moana has a restless spirit.  When we first met her in the eponymous movie from 2016, Moana was the only one on her island of Motunui who wasn’t happy with the status quo.  She didn’t want to just exist, she wanted to go places.  Simply put, she lives for adventure.  When she’s warned by her father not to venture beyond the reef, that’s exactly what she tries to do.  Moana fails, but that setback doesn’t stop her from trying again because she’s an explorer at heart, a feeling she conveys perfectly when she sings “How Far I’ll Go”.  (See the line where the sky meets the sea?  It calls me.)

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