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TAYLOR SWIFT: THE ERAS TOUR
**** An elusive goddess leaping into a sea of light. A swaggering showwoman in a sparkly jacket. A soulful yearner seated at a flower-painted piano. In just under three fleeting hours, the filmed version of Taylor Swift’s career-defining tour captures her countless artistic identities and the boundless sincerity that unites them. Culled from three August shows at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, Calif., The Eras Tour is at once intimate and galactic. Holding illuminated phones aloft, the audience becomes a starry screen onto which Swift seemingly projects her every feeling—defiance, joy, regret, belief. It’s exhilarating to watch her revel in her power (especially when she kisses one of her own biceps before belting out “The Man”), but she doesn’t beat us into submission with her fame. While the performance requires a truckload of props (bicycles! Umbrellas!), it always comes back to Swift on a dark and gleaming stage, baring her heart in tender songs like “My Tears Ricochet” and “All Too Well.” For what it’s worth, coming from a non-Swiftie, I think what makes her cool is her steadfast uncoolness. She is to music what James Cameron is to movies—an irony-immune entertainer whose unbowed earnestness stifles the cynical noise of pop culture. Sam Wrench (Billie Eilish: Live at the O2) directed The Eras Tour, but Swift plans to direct a film of her own for Searchlight Pictures, which feels inevitable and necessary. Cinema—like the world itself—needs her. NR. BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. Bagdad, Cedar Hills, Clackamas, Division, Eastport, Empirical Theater, Fox Tower, Joy Cinema, Living Room, Lloyd Center, Pioneer Place, St. Johns Twin, Studio One, Wunderland Milwaukie.
SHE CAME TO ME
**** There’s no way to describe the plot of She Came to Me—moody opera composer (Peter Dinklage) falls for lusty tugboat captain (Marissa Tomei)—without it sounding like a joke. Yet somehow, writer-director Rebecca Miller finds earnest emotion amid joyous absurdity, fashioning a tender romantic drama with a few acidic flourishes. Looking dapper beneath a mountainous goatee, Dinklage stars as Steven, whose in-the-works opus is marred by a “temporary blockage.” The cure? Capt. Karina Trento, whose fearsome sexual powers inspire him to write an opera about a murderous, ax-wielding siren of the high seas. Weaving a web of mythic coincidences, Miller intertwines Katrina and Steven’s affair—he’s married to Patricia (Anne Hathaway), a therapist—with a subplot about two young lovers (Evan Ellison and Harlow Jane) forced apart by a statutory rape allegation from a racist stenographer (Brian d’Arcy James). Parts of She Came to Me are as uproarious as Miller’s Maggie’s Plan (2015), not least of all Patricia’s funny, moving quest to become a nun. Plan, however, was merry and mocking, whereas She Came to Me is a purehearted paean to true love, be it vibrant and youthful or weathered and real. A climactic elopement aboard Katrina’s tugboat is like something out of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and like the Bard, Miller (yes, she’s Arthur’s daughter) reveals humanity through flights of fancy. Are we all just composers and captains looking for love? If so, the joke’s beautifully on us. R. BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. Fox Tower.
REPTILE
*** Music video director Grant Singer makes his feature debut with Reptile, a crime thriller he wrote with Benjamin Brewer and Benicio del Toro. After a real estate agent is brutally murdered, veteran detective Tom Nichols (del Toro) is thrown into an investigation involving the realtor’s sleazy boyfriend, her mysterious husband, and other nefarious types. Reptile is a bit long and languid at 136 minutes, but Singer unfolds the story with confidence and a David Fincher-esque atmosphere. All of the roles are well cast, from Justin Timberlake as a smug real estate agent to Michael Pitt as a creepy suspect who is obviously a red herring. Yet it’s del Toro who rises above the film’s more familiar aspects with an expertly understated performance. He and Alicia Silverstone (who plays Tom’s wife, Judy) make for a believable couple, and Tom’s little quirks allow del Toro to be playful at times (one running joke about Tom wanting a new kitchen sink is a great touch). Eventually, Reptile becomes tangled and leaves some of its subplots as loose ends, but Singer’s film is an impressively solid and slimy procedural. R. DANIEL RESTER. Netflix.
THE ROYAL HOTEL
*** Director Kitty Green’s follow-up to her acclaimed #MeToo office drama The Assistant (2020) fully arrives during its first bartending scene. Two young women—American tourists who say they’re Canadian—are slinging drinks on their first night temping at a remote Australian mining bar. In Green’s hyper-observant style, it’s a disquieting ecosystem: leathery men yelling dirty jokes, fighting, leering, shouting for swill from all 270 degrees of the bartop. Hanna and Liv (Julia Garner and Jessica Henwick) also live above this pub. They are truly not in Kansas, uh, Canada anymore. As subsequent scenes showcase the local charm and the desert’s vastness, Green plays with genre as much as her audience. Is this about to be The Australian Chainsaw Massacre? Or wait, no…Eat Pray Love? That spectrum, though, is dependent on Hanna’s and Liv’s fluctuating feelings of safety, and The Royal Hotel is constantly noting how the bar owner (Hugo Weaving) does and doesn’t contribute to his employees’ security. One drunken night’s ally is the next night’s enabler—and Liv might enjoy a 24/7 rager while Hanna’s discomfort coils ever tighter. In the end, there’s no chain saw, but the onslaught of threat—tangible, perceived, what’s the difference at a certain point?—fries your every last nerve ending into red Outback dust. R. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. Bridgeport, City Center, Lake Theater, Living Room.
SCRAPPER
*** Georgie (Lola Campbell) gets along OK by herself. Secretly living alone after her mother’s death, the 12-year-old cleans her suburban London flat, hauls out the trash, and nicks bicycles to make the rent. It’s a sad state made nearly adorable by zippy filmmaking and Georgie’s precocious yet hard-bitten energy. In Scrapper, Campbell channels the soul of a grifter in ways not seen since teenage Kaitlyn Dever on Justified, but before neighbors and teachers detect that Georgie lives unsupervised, her long-lost father Jason (Harris Dickinson of Triangle of Sadness fame) surfaces after years of partying in Ibiza. In her dad, Georgie finds her reflection—sometimes identical, sometimes inverse. He may look like a soccer hooligan, but he shares Georgie’s industriousness and has a child’s kooky sense of humor, bringing out the dubious adult in his daughter. Scrapper director Charlotte Regan, who hails from this working-class London milieu, effortlessly captures how the community wildly crisscrosses in the shared spaces around their pastel, candy-colored flats. While sudden detours into mockumentary, magical realism, and surveillance aesthetics make it seem like she’s emptying a bag of styles in her feature debut, Regan still manages to succeed by empowering her actors—whether they’re the star of last year’s Palme d’Or winner or 12 years old. NR. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. Living Room.
STRANGE WAY OF LIFE
*** At just over a half-hour, it’s tempting to consider Strange Way of Life an episode of an old Western quasi-anthology broadcast from an infinitely queerer universe. Made under commission from Saint Laurent, Pedro Almodóvar’s soulful, frothy amuse bouche could’ve easily glided along familiar tropes with the droll grace of seafoam suede-bedecked Silva (Pedro Pascal), who crosses paths with Sheriff Jake (Ethan Hawke) for the first time since their extended south of the border fling decades ago. Though Almodóvar famously opted against helming Brokeback Mountain two decades ago, echoes of that film swirl about SWoL’s tale of the aging gunslingers’ heated reunion. Blessedly, customary dithering over social stigma and repressive barriers are blithely evaded in favor of true mano a mano passions fueling climactic duels. At its Cannes premiere, Almodóvar teased that SWoL could be a prelude to an eventual feature, but however charming the protagonists, extending the narrative further would almost certainly engender diminishing returns. As Jake foresaw all those years ago, even the most alluring entanglements between intrinsically mismatched partners can prove over time all too easy to quit. R. JAY HORTON. Cinema 21.
THE BURIAL
** The Burial wants to be many things: a David-vs.-Goliath narrative reworked into a legal drama that’s also a buddy comedy, a commentary on the use of showmanship as a courtroom tactic, and a meditation on America’s terse history with its own racist roots. Unfortunately, it doesn’t commit to any one idea enough to make for a satisfying watch. Based on the story of how flashy personal injury lawyer Willie Gary (Jamie Foxx) stepped outside his expertise to take on the case of Mississippi funeral home owner Jeremiah O’Keefe (Tommy Lee Jones) against a corporation trying to throttle him into bankruptcy, The Burial is peppered with only fleeting moments of greatness. Foxx can proclamate and speechify with the best of them, and there’s strong supporting turns from Mamoudou Athie, Jurnee Smollett and Bill Camp, but Jones seems to get lost in the shuffle (his good-ol’-boy affectation is so subdued it robs him of his charm). The script by Doug Wright and director Maggie Betts, meanwhile, never rises above passable—and its attempts at being anti-racist, while noble, can’t change the fact that the story should have focused more intensely on the predatory nature of capitalism and the value of community and solidarity above profit and power. The Burial is earnest and emotional enough to please many a crowd, but it ends up being a stale, stilted, and clichéd trip down South. R. MORGAN SHAUNETTE. Amazon Prime.
DON’T LOOK AWAY
** The core concept of Don’t Look Away is simple enough: A killer mannequin murders anyone who breaks eye contact, apparently incapable of moving as long as someone is looking at it. The Michaels (Bafaro and Mitton) directed, produced and wrote the film, their best work being in the first category. At its finest, Don’t Look Away is genuinely creepy and scary; the mannequin at its most frightening when it’s farthest away, yet still unpleasant enough that our grad school characters struggle with the urge to ignore it. Unfortunately, the mannequin is most interesting mechanically, and Don’t Look Away doesn’t really get into that at all, implying that its powers can be undermined with mirrors but never clearly explaining how or why. Much of the movie is about lead character Frankie, played by Kelly Bastard, having an unfulfilling relationship with her boyfriend that almost, but doesn’t quite, becomes interesting when he becomes self-centeredly convinced that the whole mannequin ordeal is about her passive-aggressively trying to leave him. The other characters are, unfortunately, too boring to leave much of an emotional impact when they’re inevitably killed. NR. WILLIAM SCHWARTZ. On demand.