When it rains, it pours.
After a January and February that more than lived up to their reputations (derogatory), March arrived with later sunsets and better movies just when a weary public needed them most. Fall is when the preordained awards contenders are released, but early spring is when under-the-radar gems start finding their way into theaters. Rather than wait until the end of the year to catch up on them, avail yourself of them at your earliest convenience and be glad that you did.
George Woodhouse’s worldview can be distilled into four words: “I don’t like liars.” That’s a problem, given that he’s a spy at a secretive government agency in the UK and the traitor he’s been tasked with rooting out might be his wife. The title of Steven Soderbergh’s latest, a term used to describe clandestine operations about which the less said the better, could also apply to the married couple at its center. George (Michael Fassbender) and Kathryn (Cate Blanchett) love one another deeply, but each is fully aware that a collision of their personal and professional lives is not only likely but inevitable — she freely admits she’d kill for him, but is cagey when asked if she’d lie to him. We’ve seen similar premises before in movies like Mr. and Mrs. Smith and Allied, but, well, this is better. As with Presence, the other great Soderbergh movie released so far this year, Black Bag appears to have been made with such ease by its ultra-prolific director that it’s tempting to dismiss it as slight. A more apropos way of thinking about it might be to say that, like a good spy, it’s in and out before you’ve had a chance to notice. The stars are attractive, the accents are sophisticated, the runtime is 94 minutes. What else do you need to know?
“People always talk about happy endings,” a woman dressed in a clown costume says to an amnesiac early in The Actor. “I think beginnings are much happier — you still have the whole movie in front of you.” She’s right, especially when the movie in question is as dreamily strange as this one. Played by Gemma Chan and André Holland, respectively, the two have little in common beyond mutual attraction and the fact that neither knows who he is. They’re drawn together by the same forces propelling countless other noir-inflected mysteries, with Anomalisa co-director Duke Johnson’s debut feature residing somewhere between Memento and Pleasantville. At its best — namely the first and third acts, when our wayward thespian finds himself in a small Ohio town trying to piece together the puzzle of his identity — The Actor is a Kafkaesque reverie with a dash of fairytale whimsy thrown in for good measure. Actors like Toby Jones and Tracy Ullman play several roles each, with Paul seemingly oblivious to the fact that he’s seen them before as he descends deeper into his subconscious. Hearing the movie’s plot summary might not be much more interesting than hearing someone recount a dream they had, but actually experiencing it will make you want to stay asleep a while longer.
The first time we meet Killian, his court-mandated therapist is asking him whether it’s true that he threatened to split two nurses’ skulls and drink their brains like soup. Though we never see the alleged incident, the fact that he later makes the same threat — and seems fully capable of carrying it out — gives us our answer. Two years after wowing Sundance and all but guaranteeing Jonathan Majors an Oscar nomination, Magazine Dreams arrives in theaters much diminished. Pulled from the release calendar by Disney following Majors’ assault conviction, the bodybuilding drama’s rights were returned to the filmmakers early last year and eventually picked up by a smaller distributor that specializes in “canceled” movies. The results are mixed.
Most unwell protagonists are fairly easy for armchair psychologists to diagnose, but Killian’s issues are so all-encompassing that you aren’t even sure where to begin. (Well, probably the steroids.) To say that Magazine Dreams is about an aspiring bodybuilder isn’t not true, but it’s also like saying that Taxi Driver is about a guy who drives a cab. Unlike its protagonist, though, the movie isn’t all muscle. There’s much here that could have been excised to leave behind a leaner, more sinewy narrative. Magazine Dreams remains an astonishing showcase for Majors, whose powerhouse performance and offscreen troubles you can’t help but think of when Killian opines that “the only thing that matters in a man’s life is how he’s remembered.”
By the time Darkest Miriam is over, its namesake remains as much a mystery as she was when it started. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Miriam is reticent in nearly every action she takes, including starting a love affair with a man she sees whenever she eats her lunch in a nearby park, but Britt Lower’s performance is remarkably assured. Among the patrons of the Toronto library where she works are Fainting Man, whose name tells you all you need to know about him; a former pianist; and Unusually Pale Female Patron, who steals a pair of unclaimed dentures. We see each of these patrons in closeup as though they’re posing for a photograph while Miriam narrates, first about them and then about herself. While filling out an incident report about the theft, she fills out the “action taken” box thusly: “none.” This description, we’ll soon see, just as accurately summarizes how she responds to the more important events in her life. Best known for her role as Severance’s Helly, Lower is as home here as she is refining macrodata at Lumon. Naomi Jaye’s direction, adapting The Incident Report by Martha Baillie, is likewise subtle to the point of withholding — Darkest Miriam succeeds in leaving us wanting more.
It doesn’t take long to realize the sinister implication of the title. Julie (Tessa Van den Broeck), a talented player at an elite youth academy hoping to be accepted by the Belgian Tennis Federation, finds it hard to concentrate on her serve in the wake of a fellow player’s suicide and her coach’s suspension. Any suspicions that information instills are implicitly confirmed when Julie goes against orders to meet with said instructor, who, in addition to asking after her swing, says something you’ll feel in the pit of your stomach: “When you told me to stop, I stopped.” No scene goes on too long, and many end before you expect them to — a fragmentary approach that adds tension, and even a bit of dread, to otherwise normal proceedings. The abruptness with which scenes end makes you wonder if and when the other tennis shoe will drop. Julie Keeps Quiet is nearly as taciturn as its heroine, with a grainy look and youthful setting vaguely reminiscent of Elephant, but Leonardo Van Dijl’s feature debut isn’t quite as stressful to watch. What it is is an insightful look at the mounting pressure placed on teenagers, much of it self-imposed by developing minds who haven’t learned one of life’s most important truths: little of what you obsess about as an adolescent will matter in five years.
