The holiday season has everything: peace, joy, and the soul-crushing pressure associated with gift-giving and the litany of obligatory seasonal social engagements. More than the first two, that last one explains why you are once again getting a brief roundup of my reaction to films notable enough to tell you about but insignificant enough to not merit a full stand-alone review.
It’s all I got you, and I don’t have the receipt.
F1 (Apple TV)
More like FU, am I right? First off, you can dress it up all you want to, but a movie about car racing has exactly two shots. One is the “vroom vroom” external view of a car going by in a circle (or a squiggly circle, as is the case here). The other is a close up of an actor grimacing and shaking back and forth like they’re on the set of the original Star Trek series. Neither are “exciting” or “good.”
Worse yet is that this works as a duology (please God, no trilogy) with writer/director Joseph Kosinski’s last film, Top Gun 2: There’s Still Lead in This Pencil! I thought that movie was the most egregious massaging of the aging white male ego, but I stand corrected. Criminal misuse of Javier Bardem and Kerry Condon sinks the grade even further. It may be full of pit stops, but it’s just the pits! Aren’t you glad there wasn’t a full review for this one?
Grade = D-
Relay (Netflix)
Now we’re talking! Riz Ahmed and Lily James star in this crackerjack thriller laden with heavy 1970s cinema vibes. A whistleblower wants to abandon said whistleblowing and return documents showing corporate malfeasance to a biopharma monstrosity. She enlists the help of a “fixer” who leverages the relay phone service used by deaf individuals to keep conversations private. It is a gimmicky conceit that absolutely slaps.
Ahmed says maybe one or two lines of dialogue in the first hour, as the tension slowly ticks up. It leads to a well-earned surprise or two and a deeply satisfying final third. I am a full-throated advocate for seeing movies in theaters, but this also plays phenomenally at home. It is something you can spin with your dad, and it’s that or discussing tariffs.
Grade = B+
Oh. What. Fun. (Amazon Prime)
No genre is as heavily populated by garbage as Christmas movies. It will be a warm day at the North Pole before you see one that sniffs “all-time classic,” at this point. This is not an all-time classic. But it feels over-hated simply because it is explicitly about how moms get hosed during the holidays (and frequently neglected throughout the year). This is all to say, the ceiling for this was always “mildly pleasant,” and it bumps its head right up against that.
Michelle Pfieffer is a mom with an inexplicable Southern accent. She was clearly bored. Her children Felicity Jones, Dominic Sessa, and Chloë Grace Moretz, are different forms of obnoxious, and her husband is Dennis Leary. Jason Schwartzman is also there. He’s probably playing a character, it’s hard to say. When Michelle Pfieffer gets accidentally left behind for an event she planned, she goes on a remarkably tame road trip. It is sometimes almost funny! It is seasonally appropriate! It is in the upper tier of recent schlocky Christmas movies, and I’d watch it again next December.
Grade = B-
Frankenstein (Netflix)
I like Guillermo del Toro so much as a person that I frequently find myself wishing his movies were just a little better… At this point, with as many adaptations and incarnations have been launched, maybe there’s no fully fresh way to Frankenstein. We can probably leave it alone for a few hundred years, right? I say this, but someone in a café somewhere is pounding out a script draft where the monster Frankenstein creates is an AI program…
Oscar Isaac is always good, but I also always seem to wish the things happening around him were more interesting. I’m told Jacob Elordi is very interesting to many of you but do not get it. Mia Goth is always fun. But it can’t do anything that hasn’t already been done, even if it frequently looks gorgeous and doesn’t have any major missteps. You get why I didn’t review this one in full: I have very little of consequence to say!
Grade = C
The Roses (Hulu/Disney+)
The chances of not at least mildly enjoying a film with this cast was zero. And yet, it certainly feels like the kind of movie that should have done better at the box office, right? It’s a remake of the Michael Douglas/Kathleen Turner 1989 comedy War of the Roses, which sees a couple having a hyperbolic split that devolves into epic violence. Hilarious right? Domestic violence is largely renowned as a comedic goldmine!
This time out, Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Coleman are feuding. But first they flirt and fornicate, which is far more fun. Their friends are played by Kate McKinnon and Andy Sandberg. Ncuti Gatwa pops up. It’s generally a delight! The message isn’t necessarily the best, although all parties seem fairly evenly skewered here. Mostly, this one is getting the “quick review” treatment because I don’t want to parse out what it means that the film is so watchable and funny while having an inherently problematic premise. No space! Sorry!
Grade = B
Hedda (Amazon Prime)
Writer/director Nia DaCosta takes Henrik Ibsen’s play and turns everything up to 11. Subtext gets screamed, Tessa Thompson chews scenes, and loveless marriages get exploded. If you could imagine both the best and worst dinner parties of all time unfolding simultaneously, you get some sense of what’s at work here.
If you’re up for a “modern imagining of a theatrical classic” or even, you know, immediately knew that Hedda was referring to Hedda Gabler, you should probably watch this one. If you read the Cliff’s Notes in college, you may be okay. If you don’t know what a Henrik Ibsen is, I hope you got a Christmas present that needs putting together! F
Grade = A-