The Media Tourist

Angelina Jolie is magnificent as the late, great grand dame of opera in her faltering later years

Maria
Starring Angelina Jolie
Directed by Pablo LarraÍn
Rated PG-13

In theaters Wednesday, Nov. 27 (and on Netflix Dec. 8)

Angelina Jolie gives a committed, center-stage, Oscar-bait performance as temperamental diva Maria Callas, a 20^th century singing superstar who thrilled audiences all over the world. But by the 1970s, Callas’ voice and body were fading and faltering, and the distant applause of the opera houses—and the adulation in which she once basked—were becoming lost in a swirl of hallucinatory memories.

Jolie, whose multi-faceted career includes playing a rock-em, sock-em spy (Salt), a slam-bang videogame heroine (Lara Croft) and a regal Disney villainess (Maleficent), adds another bright plume to her cap as the once-heralded soprano, basking in glorious fantasy in the final weeks of her life in the 1970s. In the kind of sympathetic, deep-dish performance that tends to get awards attention, Jolie—as gorgeous as ever—reportedly prepared for the role for more than six months, learning the physicality and bold body mechanics of singing opera to realistically lip-sync to Callas’ actual vocals throughout the film. She gets a big bravo from me.

Kodi Smit-McPhee (The Power of the Dog, Let Me In) has a recurring role as a filmmaker—a figment of her imagination—interviewing Callas for a documentary about her. (Tellingly, the filmmaker’s name, Mandrax, comes from the sedative Callas has squirrelled away through her ornate Paris apartment.) The dreamscape documentary becomes central to the film, as it allows for numerous flashbacks illuminating Callas’ tumultuous life, including the traumas of her childhood (her mom, who told her she was “fat and unlovable,” and pimped her and her sister out to Nazis), her highly publicized affair with gazillionaire Greek tycoon Aristotle Onassis (Turkish actor Haluk Bilginer), and her encounters in the 1960s with a handsome young JFK (Caspar Phillipson). And how Callas found herself in the middle of a scandal when Onassis began having extramarital affairs with both Callas and JFK’s wife, Jackie; yes, he was a lecherous filthy-rich asshole who loved ancient art, his luxury yacht and leggy brunettes.

Callas’ housekeeper (Alba Rohrwacher) and manservant (Pierfrancesco Favino) are big parts of the story, trying to keep their boss grounded, anchored and safe as she drifts off, in more ways than one. “What’s real and unreal,” Callas says at one point, “is my business.”

Director Pablo LarraÍn utilizes a variety of techniques—mimicking cinéma verité, old newsreels and flights of sprawling psychological fantasy—to bring the story to immersive, vibrant life. Maria nowcompletes the Chilean director’s masterful trilogy of biopics about famous females, including Jackie (with Natalie Portman as Jacqueline Kennedy) and Spencer (Kristin Stewart played Princess Diana).  

It’s all a mad, magnificent swirl, with Jolie in the middle as the tragic diva whose escape—from harsh reality and the woes of her world—was her voice, her music…and then, her inner space. In a subtle grace-note touch, the film depicts Callas’ expired body, on the floor of her apartment filled with sculpted relics and fine art…where the whelps, whimpering and howls of her two little poodles become a sort of eulogy for the sublime high notes of her now-silent voice.

Fitting, that even dogs would want to continue her song, for a woman who once filled the cavernous spaces of the world with music. And Maria picks up her songful story again, hopefully for a new generation to discover one of the greatest, most acclaimed and sublimely troubled vocalists to ever grace an opera stage.

—Neil Pond

Biopic about German minister who openly opposed Hitler reverberates anew today

Bonhoeffer
Starring Jonas Dassler, August Diehl and Flula Borg
Directed by Todd Komarnicki
Rated PG-13

In theaters Friday, Nov. 22

It’s impossible to miss the parallels to today’s fractured politics in the new biopic about the German theologian who stridently opposed the Nazi takeover of his country. The film’s warnings about fascism, dictatorship, authoritarianism, Christian nationalism and antisemitism are at the heart of the story, then, as now.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a pastor and author whose “radical” interpretations of Christianity became theological building blocks for generations to come. But his outspokenness about Hitler—and his association with a failed attempt on Dur Fuhrer’s life—sealed his fate.

There have been almost 10 movies already about Bonhoeffer, and this one mostly soft-pedals through its story about the firebrand man of the cloth who infiltrated the Nazis as a spy, became implicated in an assassination attempt, and spent the last days of his life as a prisoner of war. Bonhoeffer believed that his faith obligated him to take decisive action against Hitler and his genocidal movement against Jews, in the same way that he’d feel obligated to stop a madman driver intentionally trying to kill other motorists on the road. There’s a lot of “action” around the movie’s edges, but onscreen it’s largely a lot of talking—about what’s happening, what happened, what might happen, and what should happen as Germany slides into the dark abyss of the Third Reich. I wish the filmmakers had taken a cue from Elvis for “A Little Less Conversation” (and “a little more action, please.”)

It’s a modest production with no recognizable names attached, at least for American audiences.  Jonas Dassler, who plays Bonhoeffer as an adult, is a young German actor likely a bit better known in Deutschland, and maybe—maybe—you’ll recognize another German actor, August Diehl, from his role in Inglourious Basterds, as the Gestapo officer who horns himself into a tavern guessing game. Germany’s Fuela Borg was Javelin in The Suicide Squad, had a small role in one of the Pitch Perfect movies and appeared in an episode of TV’s Ghosts. Irish actor Muiris Crowley, who plays a sneering Nazi, popped up (as the “Third Saxon noble”) in a couple of episodes of Vikings.

The film shows Bonhoffer as a young lad frolicking in lederhosen, spending time in seminary, getting exposure to Black church services, jazz music and stinging American racism, and finally enduring his incarceration (where he serves communion to his fellow inmates—12 of them—in a scene obviously modeled on The Last Supper.) Winston Churchill (Tim Hudson) and Louis Armstrong (John Akunmu) get cameos. But I kept thinking the movie’s roving eye, hop-skipping across time and place and people, should settle down and sharpen its focus.

But it’s certainly a movie for thinkers, as well as doers, and it offers a lot to think about.

You might recall that a certain 2024 presidential candidate—now the president-elect—made no secret of his admiration for dictators and Hitler’s military prowess, and was supported by white nationalist extremists waving Nazi swastikas. Well, you don’t have to squint to see the movie’s connective tissue between past and present. (Not to mention the film’s pointed reference to Hitler replacing Holy Bibles in German churches with his own version, along with a copy of Mein Kompf—shades of the so-called Trump Bible, which contained copies of the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights…and a snippet of Lee Greenwood’s song “God Bless the U.S.A.”) The movie’s an echo from the past with a resounding relevance today, about a man with bedrock beliefs remembered for taking on Nazi Germany, for confronting the menace and calling out its evil—and warning about the dangers of dragging the church into a political fray, kowtowing to government and getting trampled by jackboots. His life, and his words, ring true anew.

—Neil Pond

This screeching Christmas turkey is a bombastic holiday-flick misfire

Red One
Starring Dwayne Johnson, Chris Evans & J.K. Simmons
Directed by Jake Kasden
Rated PG-13

In theaters Friday, Nov. 15

Ah, the heartwarming glow of classic Christmas movies! Jimmy Stewart hugging his family and thankful for his friends as Clarence the angel gets his wings… Buddy the Elf convincing New Yorkers to believe as Santa’s sleigh zooms over Central Park… The awesomeness of Miracle on 34^th Street.

And then there’s this, the muck-fest that is Red One, a bombastic holiday-flick misfire that looks like the big-screen equivalent of an especially hideous ugly Christmas sweater, garishly pieced together with a barrage of CGI, forced “buddy comedy” banter and a bizarro collection of frightening sights. It’s a big ho-ho-ho no thanks, a grossly overstuffed Christmas stocking of charmless Yule-adjacent mayhem with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson fighting a giant hag, slamming around hulking snowmen brutes, and getting into a slapping contest with a sneering, goat-faced Nordic Krampus. Oh yeah, and there’s also Santa, ripped from pumping iron, counting carbs, hydrating and running the North Pole like a five-star-general and superstar CEO in charge of a global toy-centric military-industrial complex.  

When Santa, code-named Red One, gets kidnapped, his chief of security, Callum Drift (Johnson) swings into action to find him before a beautiful witch (Mad Men’s Kiernan Shipka) can sap his St. Nick life force, using it to imprison and punish everyone who’s ever been on the fabled “naughty list.” Somehow J.K. Simmons got hauled in to play Santa; I kept wishing he’d bark “Not my tempo!” to some hapless kid tapping on his Christmas drum kit. Chris Evans (Captain America in the Marvel-verse) is a mercenary hacker whose shady connections are to blame for the abduction—and who, of course, becomes essential to the Santa search, after, that is, he’s done swiping lollipops from kids, leering at bikini babes on a beach and lusting for a Wonder Woman toy that can be zapped life-size by Drift’s do-dad wrist thingy.

How awful is it all? There are toothless ogres, snarling hellhounds, unsightly elves, heaving steampunk machines, a haunted piano and a dismal Gothic castle where rowdy revelers look like grotesque, rubber-masked drunken rejects from the Star Wars cantina. A snowman’s face gets melted when it’s smushed onto a sizzling grill, like something you might expect to see in a movie like Goodfellas. There’s a smattering of swearing, including an f-bomb that gets diffused at the last millisecond. The whole movie takes place in a kind of alt universe where storybook creatures really exist, which is why the Headless Horseman is rounded up as one of the “usual suspects” after Santa goes missing. If you want to give your little one a nightmare for Christmas, here you go.

Bonnie Hunt seems like she’s in another movie entirely as Mrs. Claus. Lucy Liu practically phones it in in for her scenes as the head of mythological creatures. (So, hey, where’s Bigfoot and the Abominable Snowman when you really need ‘em?) Actor/comedian Nick Kroll is a crime-syndicate middleman who gets possessed, Exorcist-style.  Ah, that cozy Christmas charm.

Red One is an Amazon production, originally intended as first of a franchise (oh, dear). Amazon, you know, where you order stuff—like Hot Wheels toy cars, a Monopoly board game and Mattel’s Rock Em Sock Em Robots, which all feature prominently in the plot. Director Jake Kasden’s previous movies include Sex Tape, Bad Teacher and a pair of Jumanji remakes. Screenwriter and producer Chris Morgan was behind the Fast & Furious franchise, Bird Box and Shazam! Fury of the Gods. It’s like they siphoned off glops of those flicks to pour into this one, slopped in a dash of expired eggnog, ran up the production price tag to a gollywhopping $250 million, and then bid all a good night.

The sentimentality is forced, the action muddled and the whole affair grim, void of mirth, bereft of comfort and joy, and with only the slightest smudgy smidge of anything you might even loosely call the spirit of Christmas.  “Haven’t you had enough?” asks one character in the middle of yet another CGI smackdown. After two hours of watching this screeching Christmas turkey flop and flounder around on an IMAX screen, I certainly had.

—Neil Pond

Hooligan kids show a small town the real meaning of Christmas in this holiday yarn with a Sunday School spin

The Best Christmas Pageant Ever
Starring Judy Greer and Pete Holmes
Directed by Dallas Jenkins
Rated PG

In theaters Friday, Nov. 9

Based on a Christmas yarn first published in McCall’s magazine in the ‘70s—and later made into a novel—this holiday tale is about a group of unruly, wrong-side-of-the-tracks kids who infiltrate their small town’s nativity play, ultimately showing everyone the real reason for the season.

The ever-versatile Judy Greer is the mom who steps into the fray to direct the wobbly production; standup comedian and actor Pete Holmes plays her helpful husband. The disruptive kids are six scrappy little-rascal siblings regarded as the local bullies, troublemakers and fire-starters. They may not know all the details of Mary, Joseph and baby Jesus, but they dive into the play anyway, motivated by finding out the church provides snacks.

The result: A unique spin on a familiar old story.

Director Dallas Jenkins—whose crowd-funded life-of-Jesus series, The Chosen, is in its fourth season—puts a Sunday School spin on the shenanigans, blending kid-zone humor with a more serious theme about how Christmas is for everyone, including bullies and troublemakers, and how Jesus was all about the poor, the outcast and the marginalized. The movie tells us the town’s longstanding Christmas pageant, now celebrating its 75^th year, had become overly familiar and cookie-cutter predictable, in need of a shakeup and a makeover—suggesting that even faithful churchgoers can sometimes get stuck in a rut and would benefit from a good goosing.

In a couple of scenes we see where the wayward siblings live, in a scrappy house that’s basically a shack, pretty much raising themselves. It’s a not-so-subtle reminder of the humble circumstances described the familiar story of the birth of the Christ child—away in a manger, no crib for a bed, indeed.

The film’s marketing campaign is clearly targeting traditional Christian believers…and any adolescents who might think hearing someone say “butt” or “pussy willow” is tee-hee hilarious. It’s an earnest, sermonizing B-movie that so wants to be another Christmas “classic,” specifically A Christmas Story—from which it borrows some of its retro mojo, including its narration by the now-grown-up version of one of the kids (in this case, former Gilmore Girl Lauren Graham). And maybe it’s just coincidence, but one of the li’l disruptors (Matthew Lamb) looks a lot like bespectacled, fair-haired Ralphie from A Christmas Story.

So, it’s a Christmas story that wants to be A Christmas Story. But it’s more straightforward about the meaning of Christmas—to Christians, anyway—and not Bumpis hounds, leg lamps, turkey leftovers or the risks of shooting an eye out with a BB gun. And it does prod viewers to re-think the origin story central to the Christian faith by seeing it unfold from a new perspective—with a shrieking angel, wise men lugging a cooked ham and a cigar-smoking teenage Mary back-slapping her babydoll, in case infant Jesu is a bit gassy.  

Joy (burp!) to the world, y’all!

—Neil Pond

Hugh Grant is terrifying in his horror-movie debut as a religion-obsessed nutjob

Heretic
Starring Hugh Grant, Chloe East & Sophie Thatcher
Directed by Scott Black & Bryan Woods
Rated R

In theaters Friday, Nov. 8

A pair of earnest young Mormon missionaries gets converted to terror when they come across a strange man who tries to malevolently dismantle their faith. Hugh Grant is a horror-show hoot as the suave psychopath who traps them in a fateful game of choices, setting up a series of diabolical challenges and methodically deconstructing almost everything they once believed as truth.

A24, the studio that brought us such superb freakouts as Men, Lamb, Hereditary, Midsommar and The Witch, delivers another mind-warping detour into something unfathomably unsettling as Grant’s character—known as Mr. Reed—reveals himself as a culturally literate, religion-obsessed psychopath, trying to lead the women to “the one true religion.” And those two missionaries clearly aren’t the first to get caught in his lair…

The unsuspecting proselytizers—both of whom turn out to be more resourceful that they initially seem— are aptly played by Chole East (she was the teen crush in The Fablemans) and Sophie Thatcher (from TV’s Yellowjackets). Grant, of course, is British romcom royalty (Four Weddings and a Funeral, Sense and Sensibility, Bridget Jones’ Diary, Notting Hill), and now a new ringmaster of creepiness.  This is his first bona fide horror flick (no, I’m not counting The Lair of the White Worm, back in 1988), and he kills it as Reed’s suave, smooth, mild-mannered monstrousness unfolds with stabs of highly erudite Brit-wit humor.

Heretic is an intellectually prickly maze of a movie; its tagline is “Question Everything”— like the wooden tabletop puzzle box that hints that what we’re witnessing might be, indeed, manipulation and trickery on an even cosmic scale. The word itself stems from heresy, which means opinions contrary to orthodox religious thought. Organized religion has always looked unfavorably on heresy and heretics, which undermine the “truths” and tenets on which cathedrals, temples and mosques—and empires—are built.

The film not only dissects and dissembles religion, but takes on human existence itself, mixing in ponderables about time, prayer, prophecy, polygamy, psychology, afterlife, miracles, choices, control, board games, hope and how ideas, ideologies and even music are all just “iterations” of things that came before. (Radiohead, Lana Del Rey and Air Supply, here’s looking at you.) How do condoms, porn, Mormon “magic underwear,” butterflies and blueberry pie all figure into the plot?

You’ll find out in this impressively heady “haunted house” movie, which nods to some classic tropes while shaping everything into its own psychologically twisty Mobius Strip, where knowledge only leads to more questions. “The more you know, the less you know” Reed tells the missionaries—and believe me, that’s no comfort for them to hear.

I don’t want to spoil the surprises of Heretic, so maybe the less you know is the way to go. It’s a hellishly wild plunge into raging, slow-burn craziness—and a parable for our current age of misinformation, mistruths and outright lies in high places. There’s some spurting blood and a bit of viscera, yes, but it’s certainly no Saw; it’s smarter and more deviously disturbing than that. A white-knuckle ride that ratchets up the tension with every scene, minute by minute, it’s like a theology master class taught by a madman. It will get under your skin and into your head and stay there after it’s over.

And now, if you ever knock on a door and Hugh Grant answers, with the scent of blueberry pie wafting through the house, you might want to think twice about coming inside.

—Neil Pond

A brutal Mexican cartel boss wants to leave his old life behind—and become a trans woman—in this vibrantly saucy movie musical.

Émilia Perez
Starring  Zoe Saldaña, Karla Sofia Gascón & Selena Gomez
Directed by Jacques Audiard
R

In limited theaters Friday, Nov. 1 (streaming on Netflix Nov. 13)

A fearsome Mexican cartel leader secretly longs to become a woman. A lawyer is stuck in a dead-end job prosecuting mobsters in a system totally rigged to get them off the hook. How can they help each other out?

In this vibrantly bold tale of self-identity, change, atonement and family, Zoe Saldaña (taking a break from the sky-high sci-fi worlds of Avatar and Guardians of the Galaxy) is a hardworking junior attorney who gets an offer she can’t refuse, promised unfathomable riches to help the notorious kingpin find his “real life” and leave the old one behind. Soon the legal eagle is flying all over the world to find a surgeon who’ll do the job, keep his mouth shut, and keep everything hidden from Manitas Del Monte’s wife and kids—and his old enemies.

In a bravura performance that’s already getting Oscar Best Actress buzz, real-life openly trans Spanish actress Karla Sofia Gascón plays the cartel boss as well as the transgendered woman, Émilia Perez, he exuberantly becomes. The lawyer spreads the coverup, that that the crime lord is dead. Of course, that’s not much of a stretch, in his line of work, and his wife, Jessi (Selena Gomez, below, sizzling with secrets and hidden desires of her own, gets shuttled off for her “safety” to snowy Switzerland.

But the violence of Emilia’s former life comes home to roost when Emilia reenters the world of his wife and kids, who have no idea who she really is (and used to be), and Emilia begins to shelter Jessi and raise their children in the ruse of being their aunt.

Mexican cartels, a she who was a he, a horny kinda-ex-wife and a lawyer caught in the middle…and it’s a musical! In Spanish! Characters burst into song on the streets, in their homes, everywhere. Movie musicals, of course, are nothing new. But I’d wager a Swiss bank account full of ill-gained pesos (if I had one) that next month’s big-screen Wicked adaptation won’t have a number set in a gleaming sex-change clinic, with surgeons and patients merrily crooning about chondrolaryngoplasty—Adam’s apple reduction—and the process of turning a penis into a vagina. And you won’t hear Selena Gomez, on Only Murders in the Building, purring into a phone about an intimate part of her body that, ahem, still “aches” for a former lover. (Hint: It’s not her heart.)

It’s a boldly original, invigoratingly saucy spin on a dramatically charged story with a trio of superlative leads, intermingling elements that don’t often come together on a screen—kinda like Sicario meets Mrs. Doubtfire by way of La La Land. And as Emilia becomes an advocate for victims of cartel violence—that his male counterpart certainly helped perpetuate—the movie’s tone shifts into one of heroics and reparation, signaling another kind of “transition” entirely.

When the streets of Mexico fill with people proclaiming Emilia as a sort of national icon, you can understand why—even if you don’t break into song about Adam’s apples, penises and vaginas.  

—Neil Pond

Fright-film followup expands its finely crafted creepiness into the world of a traumatized pop superstar

Smile 2
Starring Naomi Scott, Rosemarie Dewitt, Lukas Gage & Dylan Gelula
Directed by Parker Finn
Rated R

In theaters Friday, Oct. 18

A pop superstar begins having terrifying visions as she mounts an ambitious concert tour. Is she losing her mind, having alarming flashbacks from a troubled time in her life? Or is she infected by a vile demonic entity that feeds on human trauma?

If you saw the first Smile in 2022, you already know the answer. This masterfully nasty little house of horrors takes the premise of the first flick and lets it play out through a nightmarish new scenario with a troubling subtext about the high pressures—and high personal price—of fame.

As the singing superstar Skye Riley (Naomi Scott) tries to hold onto her sanity, she’s haunted by jarring memories of a horrific car crash—and freaked out by seeing people staring at her with crazed, malicious grins. Terrible things start happening around her, like the cokehead drug dealer (Euphoria’s Lukas Gage) who smashes his smiling face to a bloody pulp with a barbell weight.

It turns out the evil entity “replicates” people you know, and people you don’t, making you question reality before giving you a lethal “smile” of your own.

You never know what’s going to happen next, what’s lurking in the darkness, or when that evil grin is going to reappear. But when it does, it’s bad news. The movie mixes bloody shocks and “body horror” with the idea that witnessing, or experiencing, awful things can leave lasting impressions in your grey matter. It’s no wonder one of Skye’s hit songs is “I Want a New Brain.”

Returning director Parker Finn does another fine job of diving into the crazy swirl of this shock-filled disturbia spiked with jolting violence, jarring jump scares and the constant low hum of unbridled dread. More than once, we hear a character say, “This is f*cked up!” Indeed it is, in the way that well-crafted scary movies can really get under your skin.

Veteran actress Rosemary DeWitt plays Skye’s drill-sergeant stage mom, setting the stage for Scream 2’s return to the monstrous “mommy issues” of its predecessor. Drew Barrymore’s cameo, as the host of her real-life TV show on which Skye appears as a guest, might make you remember her breakthrough role in Scream in 1996, which is credited with revitalizing the horror-movie genre. Dylan Gelula had a freaky nocturnal encounter with Nicholas Cage in the mind-bending Dream Scenario.

But it’s Naomi Scott who channels all the horror in the mad, mad world in which her character finds herself trapped, dealing with her own toxic traumas. You may have seen the British actress singing and co-starring as Princess Jasmine alongside Will Smith in the Disney live-action remake of Aladdin back in 2019. She totally crushes her role here as a another kind of princess, a pop idol, playing stadium shows and trying to hold it together while her world tips upside down, inside out and out of control. (The movie does a great job of adding an even higher level of queasy creepiness to the often-uncomfortable encounters celebrities have with deep-dish fans.)

The movie kinda jumps the shark at the end, when it goes all-out for gross-out. But it introduces us to a new scream queen, once a Disney princess, and it reminds me of a song—the Temptations’ hit of 1971, “Smiling Faces,” in which the Motown group cautions listeners that smiling faces can mask lies. But the group probably didn’t know that, a half century later, unnerving grins can also mess you up for life…or what’s about to be left of it.

—Neil Pond