I’ve been watching a whole lot of Westerns for a long-form essay I’m working on (stay tuned for that) but in the meantime, I caught some random end-of-summer new releases. What do these films—about weary problem-solvers in Italy who are dragged out of early retirement by a hunger for justice that will lead them to this third cinematized chapter, about how actually you can do an action film while mostly sitting down, and about how cool it is to be gay and fight—have in common? Read on to find out!
Bottoms, Emma Seligman (in theaters)
Closer to the freewheeling style of a Wet Hot American Summer than a narrative teen comedy like Clueless or Mean Girls, Bottoms is Seligman’s return to the big screen after her breakout hit, Shiva Baby. In this spiky send-up of high school movies, best friends and lesbian outcasts PJ (Rachel Sennott) and Josie (Ayo Edibiri) accidentally start a fight club under the guise of feminist self-determination.
Bottoms is punchlines over plot, and I laughed nearly the entire time. PJ and Josie’s escapades take place in the archetypical high school movie landscape, where football players exclusively wear their uniforms, there’s a single teacher who seems to cover all subjects, teenagers are played by mid-twenties adults, and classes last just long enough for a few significant lines of narrative foreshadowing. I do think it offers a little more transcendence in its glee than a sneeze of hijinx, as Richard Brody put it, but also: not every movie needs to have consequences.
They Cloned Tyrone, Juel Taylor (streaming on Netflix)
An Undercover Brother for the post-Get Out era. They Cloned Tyrone is a 70s-splashed mystery about a drug dealer (John Boyega) who uncovers the truth behind some strange goings-ons in his neighborhood.
A good Netflix original? It’s more likely than you think. Stylish and genuinely funny, the film succeeds thanks to three strong leads and a great supporting cast. I hope there’s some deleted scenes between Jamie Foxx’s chatterbox pimp and David Alan Grier’s charismatic, cavorting preacher. There are a lot of choices I wish were made more elegantly—the faux-film grain is particularly obstinate, to the point where certain scenes are difficult to see, and some nimbler storytelling could’ve cut out twenty minutes and unnecessary exposition—but it’s a strong directorial debut for Creed II screenwriter Taylor.
The Equalizer 3, Antoine Fuqua (in theaters)
The first of this issue’s weary Italian vacationers, Denzel Washington returns as Robert McCall, vigilante and the titular Equalizer (I assume, I haven’t seen the other ones). When McCall is injured in a siege on a Sicilian winery, he makes a recovery in a sleepy seaside village, only to find that there’s a vicious criminal conspiracy afoot that only he can solve. Brutal violence follows along with a totally unnecessary but still heartwarming team-up between Denzel and his Man on Fire (2004) co-star, Dakota Fanning.
Denzel is fully in what I call the “sitting down phase” of his career. He will agree to do your little movie but he’s going to need to be sitting in a comfortable chair and he’s probably going to wear his clothes from home. It will perennially be odd to me that, in real life, Denzel is always a half-second away from delivering a lecture about how you should pull up your pants but has zero qualms with glorifying absurd levels of physical cruelty in his films, but honestly the dichotomy makes for a better movie.
Retribution, Nimród Antal (in theaters)
If it wasn’t obvious from the title, this is a Liam Neeson movie. Existing somewhere between Speed and the Scrooge McDuck cartoons, Retribution stars Neeson as a successful financier who, while driving his two children to school, receives a phone call from a stranger who tells him there is a bomb under his car that will detonate if he doesn’t follow a series of instructions.
Despite featuring Succession’s own certified star-quality-haver, Arian Moayed, Retribution is a far less successful sitting-down action movie than The Equalizer 3. To get bogged down in the why would just be a waste of time: nothing works, the twist is comically obvious just based on the names in the credits, and Neeson’s dad fantasy schtick has rapidly lost its potency after nearly two decades of the same thing.
Cassandro, Roger Ross Williams (in select theaters and on Amazon Prime)
The true-ish story of Saúl Armendáriz, better known as the famous luchador Cassandro, who transformed modern lucha libre in the 1980s with his take on the “exótico,” or a flamboyant wrestling persona that traditionally served as a heel.
Cassandro suffers from the problems of most biopics: it’s a dull hagiography of a person who is far more interesting than that format. A story as large as Cassandro’s seems like an obvious fit for something formally experimental: instead we get cloying dialogue about redemption and fatherhood (which I already got in Retribution). The film is tremendously unworthy of Gael García Bernal’s joyous, mischievous performance and agile physicality. Unfortunately, Cassandro seems unwilling to put confidence in his performance, and instead slows down to explain all the things that Bernal has already conveyed in a single flick of the hand.
A Haunting in Venice, Kenneth Branagh, (in theaters)
Rejoice, for I have found your next airplane watch. Kenneth Branagh returns as Hercule Poirot in his third adaptation of an Agatha Christie mystery. This time Poirot is in Venice, retired after a difficult previous case (again, I assume, I have not seen the other ones) only to get sucked back in by a supernatural mystery.
I respect Branagh’s continued dedication to a series that redefines the term “vanity project.” Perhaps that vanity is what led him to cast almost uniformly dreadful performers: Branagh gets a shine you normally only see when a children’s theater gets an actual adult to act alongside a bunch of kids reading off of print-outs. If you can get past Tina Fey doing a bad impression of what I have to guess is Dorothy Parker, the mystery itself works pretty well, with enough twists and atmosphere that you can definitely watch this one on a plane or recommend to the boring adults in your life.
The Iron Giant, Brad Bird - 1999 (streaming on Max, Amazon Prime, and Sling)
I have not seen this animated classic since I was a child and was deathly scared of the giant. Based on a novel by Ted Hughes, Brad Bird’s debut is about Hogarth, an unbearably lonely boy who finally makes a friend in the enormous robot that crash lands in his sleepy Maine town. It is beautiful in every way, and all the more stunning when you realize how rare movies like this are now: a movie about death and grief that never uses those words.
We get an extremely brief glimpse of a photograph of an Air Force pilot on Hogarth’s bedside table that I assume is his deceased father. Perhaps this is why Hogarth is obsessed with flying and is so desperate for male companionship, though the movie never says that. I doubt I picked up on it in such clear terms as a child but I remember very clearly how disturbing it was to experience the movie’s unspoken but deep melancholy.
Now, you can’t make it through an American adult movie, much less a children’s picture, without a character turning to the camera to monologue about how they haven’t processed their trauma (aka why I couldn’t get through season two of The Bear). I don’t know when studios decided that we needed the cinematic version of a reader’s group guide inserted into a film’s climax, but The Iron Giant is a lovely reminder of how gorgeous a movie can be when it trusts its audience.