The latest film releases are Megalopolis, Wolfs, The Wild Robot, and Saturday Night. Weighing in are Christy Lemire, film critic for RogerEbert.com and co-host of the YouTube channel Breakfast All Day, and Tim Grierson, senior U.S. critic for Screen International and the author of This Is How You Make a Movie.
Megalopolis
Francis Ford Coppola has been working on this passion project since the early 1980s. It got a four-minute standing ovation when it debuted at the Cannes Film Festival. In the sci-fi thriller, Adam Driver plays a visionary architect who takes on a corrupt mayor played by Giancarlo Esposito. The story takes place in a futuristic metropolis trying to rebuild after a natural disaster.
Lemire: “[Coppola] reportedly sold a bunch of his … big wine business to raise the $120 million to get it made, which is always the first mistake in making movies, right? You don't use your own money. But he meant to do this for so long. It was so meaningful to him.
It is this two and a half hour, ambitious, big swing with this giant cast. … Adam Driver is this brilliant and visionary architect named Cesar Catilina. He has this image of New Rome, which is essentially New York City as this gleaming metropolis. And he lives inside the top of the Chrysler Building, and that's his apartment/workspace. He has the ability to stop time, which is a thing that they don't really use all that effectively. He is clashing with the mayor … Giancarlo Esposito. And the woman in between them is the mayor's daughter, played by Nathalie Emmanuel. She is drawn to both of these men for their ideas about how the world should be.
There's a lot of speechifying here. Adam Driver is saddled with big, chunky blocks of exposition and hammering us over the head with Coppola's philosophy. So it's very talky, but it's also dazzlingly beautiful at times, it's intentionally heightened in its artificiality. But it's all different kinds of movies slammed together and made these wild tonal shifts. So I was never bored, but it's a total mess.”
Grierson: “I don't take any pleasure in saying I don't think the movie works very much at all. You can feel Coppola's passion and his sadness. Obviously, this movie is supposed to be a metaphor for America, and a dying America, and a dying democracy. And you can feel the decades of anguish that went into this film in terms of how he feels about America, and how America is essentially the modern Roman Empire that's losing its way, and is collapsing into hedonism and sensationalism.
But that passion that Coppola feels, I don't think translates into a very compelling story. I don't think it translates into many compelling performances. I think Adam Driver is okay in the film. … Characters are representing different ideas in the movie. They're symbols. They're not really people in this movie. And I think that's a big problem.
… I don't think people are going to come back and say, ‘No, this is an amazing movie.’ I don't want to recommend people see the movie because I don't think it's good. But it does remind me of those 1970s movies, where American auteurs really just put their heart and souls into their movies. There's a part of me that's like, if you want to support adventurous, doing-it-your-way cinema, give it a try. But I think most people will be disappointed in the experience.”
Wolfs
Brad Pitt and George Clooney play fixers who typically work alone, and now they’re hired as a team to cover up a high-profile crime.
Grierson: “If you are a fan of the Oceans 11 series that Steven Soderbergh directed, I think that you will like Wolfs, though it is not to that level. It's written in directed by Jon Watts, who most recently has been doing the Spider-Man movies. … It's a very light-hearted crime thriller comedy where the two main characters bicker back and forth. They don't like each other, they don't have partners. They work alone, but eventually have a begrudging respect for each other as they realize that they have to work together to figure out what the heck is going on. … It definitely feels like a movie that you can watch at home and enjoy.”
Lemire: “This is not even a thing you need to watch on your couch. … I would say this is exactly what airplane movies are for — is to have just the light distraction of attractive A-list stars bantering with each other. There is some visual flair to it. The cinematographer also shot Everything Everywhere All At Once, and so there is some high-end sheen to it. It looks pretty great. And these guys look pretty great for being early mid-60s. They are well preserved. And of course, the camera loves them, but they are very much phoning this in. They're not doing any heavy lifting. They're not lifting anything. They are showing up and being charming.”
The Wild Robot
This animated feature is from Dreamworks, based on the 2016 novel of the same name. Lupita Nyong’o voices a robot who gets shipwrecked on a remote island, where she develops relationships with the native animals.
Lemire: “It is breathtakingly beautiful. … It feels like hands touched it. There is a tactile quality to the colors and the animation. It feels like you're looking at fresh strokes. It's gorgeous over and over again.
… It's meant for adults and also for little kids, and it works well on both levels, in that way. And it's a lot of fun, and surprisingly, a little twisted and weird and dark. I really loved a lot of the humor from the beginning, and then it gets super heavy-handed and treacly in the third act, and it spells everything out.”
Grierson: “Chris Sanders, who wrote and directed this, who had done the first How to Train Your Dragon, he has talked about the fact that Hayao Miyazaki was a real influence on the film, especially Miyazaki’s depictions of the natural world. … And you can feel that in The Wild Robot.
One of the real pleasures … is the robot, Roz, is trying to figure out: How did I get on this island, how do I adapt with all of these animals? And the movie actually reveals these things in really interesting ways.
… The third act, my only reservation was more that I think it gets more actiony. The emotional stuff didn't bother me because I think I was very much on the wavelength of the film. And it's a movie really … about motherhood. But it's also a movie about de facto families, the families that you create, as opposed to the ones that you were born in to. And that's really very touching and really closely observed. So in terms of recent, mainstream animated movies, I think this is one of the better ones that have come along. … I actually saw this in IMAX, if you can do it that way, absolutely do it … because the animation is gorgeous. And also Chris Bowers’ score is really wonderful in this film.”
Saturday Night
Director Jason Reitman’s comedy-drama shows what happens when young comedians, writers, and a producer get ready for the first broadcast of Saturday Night Live on Oct. 11, 1975. It is not a documentary.
Grierson: “This is an Aaron Sorkin, like everybody-walk-around-and-talk-fast kind of thing. It's almost done as if it's in real time. … It's the last 90 minutes before the very first episode of Saturday Night Live … is going to hit the air. And we're watching as Lorne Michaels, played by Gabriel LaBelle … is desperately trying to put out 10,000 fires; in one case, a literal fire. … And there's also the superficial nostalgic pleasure of watching actors, for the most part, really do dead-on impressions of the comedy stars that we know so well. Cory Michael Smith is a stunning Chevy Chase, Dylan O'Brien is really good as Dan Aykroyd.
My reservations about the movie are just — I think that beyond the superficial pleasures, there's nothing much deeper going on, though. I think Jason Reitman wants us to feel like something deeper is going on, but I think the movie is a little too superficial, a little too glib. It never really digs into its characters.”
Lemire: “What's interesting about … how incredible the casting is and how dead on the performances are, they're playing our ideas of the personas of these people, right? So there's fun to be had in that, the recognition to be had in that. … It is empty, rollicking fun.”