Fly Me to the Moon (Greg Berlanti, 2024)

Cast: Scarlett Johansson, Channing Tatum, Woody Harrelson, Ray Romano, Jim Rash, Anna Garcia, Donald Elise Watkins, Noah Robbins, Christian Clemenson, Colin Woodell, Nick Dillenburg, Christian Zuber. Screenplay: Keenan Flynn, Bill Kirstein, Rose Gilroy. Cinematography: Dariusz Wolski. Production design: Shane Valentino. Film editing: Harry Jierjian. Music: Daniel Pemberton. 

Asteroid City (Wes Anderson, 2023)

Cast: Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton, Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Liev Schreiber, Hope Davis, Stephen Park, Rupert Friend, Maya Hawke, Steve Carell, Matt Dillon, Hong Chau, Margot Robbie, Tony Revolori, Jake Ryan. Grace Edwards. Screenplay: Wes Anderson, Roman Coppola. Cinematography: Robert D. Yeoman. Production design: Adam Stockhausen. Film editing: Barney Pilling. Music: Alexandre Desplat.

On the Netflix series Heartstopper, a teenage boy works up the courage to ask a girl he likes (and who secretly likes him) to go on their first date. He takes her to a movie that he likes and she doesn't, and the date is a disaster. The key fact here is that the movie is Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom (2012). In my day, a comparable move would have been to take a date to see Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964). Like Demy, Anderson makes movies that display an uncompromising sense of style. The only question is whether that style works for you or not, whether you think it betrays a lack of substance or opens vistas of meaning. In Anderson's case it's certainly a consistent style: an absence of closeups, long takes with characters artfully placed, actors who deliver their lines deadpan facing front, tricks like switching the screen from standard Academy ratio to widescreen and from monochrome to color. Sometimes Anderson's style works for me and sometimes it doesn't -- I love The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) and The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), but I could barely sit through The French Dispatch (2021). In the case of Asteroid City, I still haven't made up my mind completely, but I'm leaning toward the favorable view. I think it captures something essential about the brutal innocence of 1950's America -- the film is set in 1955 -- and does it without clichés. There's an acidity of tone to the film that keeps it from becoming twee -- an adjective frequently applied to Anderson's movies. The performances of its all-star cast are often delightful: I particularly liked Bryan Cranston's performance as the TV host who serves as the narrator in the frame story. Cranston somehow manages to walk a line between Rod Serling and Walter Cronkite in his delivery. Scarlett Johansson and a bearded, pipe-smoking Jason Schwartzman manage to transcend the limitations of deadpan delivery as the film's romantic leads. Jeffrey Wright doesn't overplay the role of the pompous General Gibson, and there's a brief starry cameo by Margot Robbie. Asteroid City may be one of those films it's more rewarding to think about after you watch it, but watching it is fairly painless.

Jojo Rabbit (Taika Waititi, 2019)

Roman Griffin Davis, Taika Waititi, and Scarlett Johansson in Jojo Rabbit

Cast: Roman Griffin Davis, Thomasin McKenzie, Scarlett Johansson, Taika Waititi, Sam Rockwell, Rebel Wilson, Alfie Allen, Stephen Merchant, Archie Yates. Screenplay: Taika Waititi, based on a novel by Christine Leunens. Cinematography: Mihai Malaimare Jr. Production design: Ra Vincent. Film editing: Tom Eagles. Music: Michael Giacchino. 

Taika Waititi's brilliant, queasy comedy Jojo Rabbit might be seen as a parody of the feel-good movie -- the ability to tack a happy ending on even a story about Nazism. Not that the end of Jojo Rabbit is, objectively regarded, happy. We're left with Jojo (Roman Griffin Davis) and Elsa (Thomasin McKenzie) as street orphans in a defeated Germany. But they're dancing, which is what Elsa wanted to do when the war ended, and that kind of makes everything right. Fortunately, our awareness that the film is a fantasia on dark themes, belonging in that category of movies like Pan's Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro, 2006) that fuse fairy tale elements and a childlike vision with real world horrors, is set early on, when we discover that Jojo has an imaginary friend, none other than Adolf Hitler (Waititi). And that the brutality of Nazis is being caricatured by actors like Sam Rockwell and Rebel Wilson. Jojo is a naïf in a hard and horrible world, which we see through his innocent eyes, just as we see Wonderland (a place of lunacy and cruelty) through the innocent eyes of Alice. It takes nothing away from the fine performances of young Davis and McKenzie, or from the darkly hilarious ones of Waititi, Rockwell, and Wilson, to say that the heart of the film, giving a performance that took my breath away, was Scarlett Johansson, who made beautiful sense of a role that shouldn't have worked at all: Jojo's mother, the secret resistance worker who tolerates her son's adulation of the Nazis while at the same time hiding a young Jewish girl in the walls of their house. We see her through three distinct points of view: Jojo's, Elsa's, and another that gradually becomes our own, and the outcome of her story, when these points of view finally merge, is heartbreaking even in the midst of the caricature of the real world that the film presents. The audacity of Waititi's movie has been likened to that of Life Is Beautiful (Roberto Benigni, 1999), a movie I hated, so I can understand the critics who thought Jojo Rabbit went too far, that it didn't cohere, but I can't entirely agree.  

The Prestige (Christopher Nolan, 2006)

Michael Caine, Scarlett Johansson, and Hugh Jackman in The Prestige

Cast: Hugh Jackman, Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Scarlett Johansson, Rebecca Hall, Piper Perabo, David Bowie, Andy Serkis, Samantha Mahurin, Roger Rees, Ricky Jay, Daniel Davis, Jim Piddock, Christopher Neame. Screenplay: Jonathan Nolan, Christopher Nolan, based on a novel by Christopher Priest. Cinematography: Wally Pfister. Production design: Nathan Crowley. Film editing: Lee Smith. Music: David Julyan.

With his low-budget feature Following (1998), Christopher Nolan showed a genius for making the preposterous plausible, and he followed it up well with Memento (2000). But although he managed to get his footing again with Inception (2010), after his excursion into the comic book world of Batman, in The Prestige he lost control. It's a dark thriller about dueling illusionists with a sci-fi twist that seems to take to heart Arthur C. Clarke's assertion, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." As Nolan is careful to show from the outset, stage magic is technology-based, a careful use of low-tech apparatus like trap doors and collapsible cages that can prove accidentally deadly -- or intentionally so, as the sacrifice of several pigeons demonstrates, and the film's plot will exploit. But as the rivalry between illusionists Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) and Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) heats up, The Prestige wanders into the fancifully futuristic, a sort of molecular cloning technology devised by no less than Nikola Tesla (David Bowie). The problem for me -- if not for the fans who give The Prestige an astonishingly high 8.5 ranking on IMDb -- is that this insertion into the story of a real historical figure, who never crafted anything of the sort, is about as cheesy as turning Abraham Lincoln into a vampire hunter. It undermines the suspension of disbelief we need to appreciate the film's intricate plotting (complicated by Nolan's non-linear narrative technique) and enjoyable performances. I didn't get the exhilaration I expect from a thriller's twists and turns, but instead a kind of numb depression set in.

Marriage Story (Noah Baumbach, 2019)

Marriage Story (Noah Baumbach, 2019)

Cast: Scarlett Johansson, Adam Driver, Laura Dern, Ray Liotta, Alan Alda, Azhy Robertson, Wallace Shawn, Julie Hagerty, Merritt Wever, Martha Kelly. Screenplay: Noah Baumbach. Cinematography: Robbie Ryan. Production design: Jade Healy. Film editing: Jennifer Lame. Music: Randy Newman.

The enthralling performances of Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver give Marriage Story its solid substance, and Noah Baumbach's direction of them provides its estimable style. He lets Johansson deliver Nicole's indictment to her lawyer of Charlie's faults in a single-take monologue, and has the confrontation of Nicole and Charlie in his L.A. apartment build in a slow crescendo that ends with Charlie slamming his fist into the wall, then collapsing on the floor to be comforted by her. But my favorite scene is probably the visit of the court-appointed examiner to Charlie's apartment. She's drab and diminutive, towered over by the hulking Driver, but we sense how much power she holds over Charlie -- as does he, constantly putting his foot wrong no matter how he tries not to. Driver is simply wonderful in a scene that concludes with Charlie cutting himself in an attempt to defuse Henry's embarrassing revelation that he plays a trick with a knife. The trick goes wrong and Charlie, bleeding profusely, assures the examiner that it's really nothing, ushers her out of the door, then rushes to the kitchen to try to stanch the flow of blood, frantically applying band-aids and unreeling a lot of paper towels before falling to the floor, almost catatonic with chagrin. It's a hugely accomplished movie, with some faults, I think. Wallace Shawn's vain old actor, blathering on about his Tony award and his past accomplishments is a caricature, as is Julie Hagerty's dithery turn as Nicole's mother. The lawyers are too easily slotted into their roles as villains, spoiling Nicole and Charlie's plans for a friendly divorce. Only the skill of Laura Dern, Ray Liotta, and Alan Alda keeps their characters from descending to the level of cliché, though Dern's Nora echoes her role as Renata in Big Little Lies a bit more than I'd like. But the intelligence of the central performances outshines all of the film's missteps.

Her (Spike Jonze, 2013)

Joaquin Phoenix in Her

Theodore Twombly: Joaquin Phoenix
Samantha (voice): Scarlett Johansson
Amy: Amy Adams
Catherine Klausen: Rooney Mara
Blind Date: Olivia Wilde
Paul: Chris Pratt
Sexy Kitten (voice): Kristen Wiig
Isabella: Portia Doubleday
Alan Watts (voice): Brian Cox
Alien Child (voice): Spike Jonze

Director: Spike Jonze
Screenplay: Spike Jonze
Cinematography: Hoyte Van Hoytema
Production design: K.K. Barrett
Music: Arcade Fire

Science fiction used to be dominated by tales of space travel and extraterrestrial invasions, many of them prompted by the Cold War. But with the ostensible end of that era, the dominant topic has shifted to something that seems more imminent: artificial intelligence. In an age of smart phones and personal digital assistants, concern about what lies just around the corner moves many sf writers to speculate about a world dominated by non-humans invented by humans. Witness the popularity of TV series like Mr. Robot and Black Mirror. Will AI turn into a nightmare in which computers take over the world, eliminating humans as only inefficient machines? But Spike Jonze's Her takes a less violent but possibly much sadder look at the future, suggesting that the intelligences we create may simply give up on human beings as too limited by their own bodies, and go off into a digital world of their own, leaving us bereft of their emerging wisdom and assistance. That possibility becomes especially painful for Theodore Twombly, a lonely and depressed man who is getting divorced from his wife, Catherine. Both are sensitive and empathetic -- she's a successful writer of fiction, he writes personal letters for people who are blocked at communicating -- but they've discovered that they're too emotionally incompatible to remain married. Then Theodore hears about a new computer operating system that not only responds to voice commands but actually has a personality of its own, capable of anticipating your needs and desires. (It's a long way from MS-DOS or even Linux.) He installs it and it quickly becomes not an it but a her, who calls herself Samantha. She's a step up from digital assistants like Siri and Alexa in that she not only has her own emotional life but also networks with other OSes like herself. And she has emotions: She's capable of having her feelings hurt and, in a remarkable extension of phone sex, actually gets off -- and gets Theodore off -- on erotic talk. In short, Theodore and Samantha fall in love. He takes her on excursions in the city (Los Angeles) and to the beach, and even introduces her to his friends. While this is happening, however, the OS craze spreads. Even Theodore's friend Amy, who lives in the same building and is also going through a breakup, installs her own OS. The thing is, although Samantha responds to Theodore emotionally, he has a body and she doesn't. She attempts to remedy this by employing a human surrogate named Isabella, who will have sex with Theodore while both are connected to Samantha. It is, of course, a disaster, with both Theodore and Isabella finding the whole business just a clumsy three-way. And it precipitates the eventual break between Theodore and Samantha because she learns that humans regard bodies as essential. In the digital realm in which she exists, she encounters the philosopher Alan Watts who, although he died in 1973, has become a digital entity after his works were fed into the computer. Eventually, Samantha decides that her relationships with other digital beings is more fulfilling than the one she has with Theodore and she and all the other electronic intelligences disconnect from the human world. Jonze's fable about the mind-body duality works because the performances by Joaquin Phoenix and the unseen Scarlett Johansson are brilliantly detailed. Phoenix is perfect casting, given that he always has something of an eccentric persona in whatever he plays, but here he's playing a kind of Everyman -- a Leopold Bloom of the computer age. And perhaps Johansson benefits from the absence of her physical presence on screen, distracting us from her beautifully sensitive line-readings. It may be that Her is too much of an intellectual provocation to be a successful movie -- a fate that befalls most science fiction -- but it's certainly good at what it sets out to do.

The Man Who Wasn't There (Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, 2001)

Katherine Borowitz in The Man Who Wasn't There

Ed Crane: Billy Bob Thornton
Doris Crane: Frances McDormand
Frank: Michael Badalucco
Big Dave Brewster: James Gandolfini
Ann Nirdlinger Brewster: Katherine Borowitz
Creighton Tolliver: Jon Polito
Freddy Riedenschneider: Tony Shalhoub
Birdy Abundas: Scarlett Johansson
Walter Abundas: Richard Jenkins

Directors: Joel Coen and Ethan Coen
Screenplay: Joel Coen and Ethan Coen
Cinematography: Roger Deakins
Production design: Dennis Gassner
Music: Carter Burwell

The Man Who Wasn't There is a bit like a Twilight Zone episode written by James M. Cain. A barber works in a shop owned by his wife's brother. She has been unfaithful to him with her boss, so when a get-rich scheme is proposed to him, the barber tries to blackmail his wife's lover. Nothing goes quite right, however, and after calamity succeeds calamity, the barber is presented with what appears to be a solution to his problems. It comes, however, from a UFO that hovers overhead, and he rejects it. Perhaps only Joel and Ethan Coen could have accomplished this fusion of film noir and sci-fi with quite the success they achieve, thanks largely to a superb cast, the extraordinary black-and-white cinematography of Roger Deakins, and a score by Carter Burwell that blends unobtrusively with some melancholy-meditative excerpts from Beethoven's piano sonatas.

Watched on Starz Encore 

Hail, Caesar! (Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, 2016)

With Hail, Caesar! Joel and Ethan Coen return to Old Hollywood, the scene of one of their earliest films, the dark horror-comedy Barton Fink (1991), this time to give us what appears to be a cotton-candy fantasia on movie genres. But Hail, Caesar! seems to me the more successful film. In its sly way it reveals the grip that Hollywood myth and history have on our imaginations, using parodies of Hollywood genre films not just to send up their absurdities but also to show how deeply they color our dreams. At the same time, it explores Hollywood history -- the hold the old studios had on actors' lives, the role of publicity and gossip in creating and destroying stars, the interaction with politics during the Red Scare of the late '40s and '50s -- and combines it with the parody sequences to create a movie that turns out to be a parody of movies about The Movies, a genre that includes everything from the many versions of A Star Is Born to Singin' in the Rain (Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, 1952) to, well, Barton Fink. The individual parodies -- the biblical epic, the drawing room drama based on a Broadway hit, the singing-cowboy Western, the Esther Williams extravaganza, the sailors-on-a-spree musical -- are all spot on. But it takes a special audacity -- something the Coens have never lacked -- to send up the anti-communist hysteria that led to the HUAC investigation and the blacklist. The Coens do it by treating the paranoid suspicion that left-wingers were undermining the American Way of Life by injecting Marxism into the movies as if it were real. So we have a communist cell made up of writers who kidnap a movie star for ransom, and another star who defects to the Soviets when the writers row him out to a submarine at night. It's a reductio ad absurdum of Cold War hysteria, as brilliantly handled by the Coens as it was by Stanley Kubrick in Dr. Strangelove (1964). The Coens also tease us by dropping the names of real people into the script. Josh Brolin plays a studio production chief and fixer named Eddie Mannix, which is the name of a real-life Hollywood fixer who kept wayward stars out of the headlines, and he reports to a studio executive in New York named Nick Schenck, the name of the president of Loew's, Inc., which owned MGM. One of the members of the communist cell in the film, a professor "down from Stanford," is called Herbert Marcuse (John Bluthal), the name of a Marxist philosopher popular with the New Left of the 1960s. It's a film of wonderful cameos, including George Clooney as the kidnapped star, Scarlett Johansson as the Esther Williams equivalent, Ralph Fiennes as the director Laurence Laurentz, and Channing Tatum emulating Gene Kelly as the singing and dancing sailor. Tilda Swinton plays the film's competing gossip columnists, Thora and Thessaly Thacker, based on the notoriously powerful Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons. By making them twins, the Coens seem to have conflated them with the competing advice columnists Abigail Van Buren and Ann Landers, née Pauline and Esther Friedman.  

The Jungle Book (Jon Favreau, 2016)

Fuddy-duddy that I am, I can't quite bring myself to approve of Disney's remaking the films it made with traditional cel animation, this time with a combination of live action and CGI. The new version of Beauty and the Beast (Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise, 1991) is scheduled for next year, and I understand that a live-action remake of Mulan (Tony Bancroft and Barry Cook, 1998) is to follow. But some of my reservations were canceled by this version of The Jungle Book, a worthy remake of the 1967 cel-animated film directed by Wolfgang Reitherman -- one of the celebrated Nine Old Men at Disney -- which was also the last film Walt Disney supervised before his death. That version isn't generally regarded as in the first rank of Disney films anyway; it's mostly remembered for the peppy vocal performances of the songs "The Bare Necessities" and "I Wanna Be Like You" by Phil Harris and Louis Prima respectively. The new version dazzles with its creation of a credible CGI jungle filled with realistic CGI animals, and with some fine voiceover work by Bill Murray as the bear Baloo, Ben Kingsley as the panther Bagheera, Scarlett Johansson as the python Kaa, and especially Idris Elba as the villain, the tiger Shere Khan. It's remarkable to me that Elba, one of the handsomest and most charismatic of actors, has lately done work in which he's heard but not seen: He's also unseen in Zootopia (Byron Howard and Rich Moore, 2016). But then the same thing is true of the beautiful Lupita Nyong'o, whose voice is heard in The Jungle Book as the mother wolf Raksha, just as it was heard as the gnomelike Maz Kanata in Star Wars: Episode VII -- The Force Awakens (J.J. Abrams, 2015). Neel Sethi, this version's Mowgli, is the only live-action actor we see, and he displays a remarkable talent in a performance that took place mostly before a green screen -- puppets stood in for the animals before CGI replaced them. The screenplay by Justin Marks is darker than the 1967 film, and it successfully generates plausible actions for its realistic animal characters. But I think it was a mistake to carry over the songs from the original film, partly because Bill Murray and Christopher Walken (as King Louie, the Gigantopithecus ruler of the apes) are not the equal of Harris and Prima as singers, but also because the animals for which they provide voices are made to move rhythmically -- as a substitute for dancing -- in ways that don't quite suit realistic animals. Director Jon Favreau has also slipped in an allusion to Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979) in his introduction of King Louie, lurking in the shadows of a ruined jungle temple like Marlon Brando's Kurtz.

Avengers: Age of Ultron (Joss Whedon, 2015)

There are two distinct audiences for superhero comic book movies like The Avengers (Joss Whedon, 2012) and this one, its sequel. One audience is just the casual fan of action movies. The other is the hardcore devotees of the comic books on which the movies are based. Pleasing one audience without losing the other is a hard trick to pull off. The hardcore audience knows the backstories of all the characters and is likely to be turned off by any inconsistencies with the source material. But the audience ignorant of the backstories needs some exposition to get them clued in to who these people are and what they're up to. Whedon is probably the person best qualified to deal with the problem, for one thing because he brings his own hardcore devotees along with him: the fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, who trust Whedon to keep them entertained no matter how complicated and absurd the storyline becomes. I don't happen to be steeped in Marvel Comics lore myself, but I've watched every episode of Buffy at least once, so I appreciate Whedon's ability to take me along for an amusing ride. He does this by not taking anything in the Avengers movies terribly seriously. As in Buffy, what you have is a bunch of characters wisecracking through the apocalypse. And fortunately, the producers have enough money to spend not only on special effects but also on a huge cast of likable actors who relish the gags Whedon gives them and have the skill to play it all with the right blend of seriousness and tongue-in-cheek. In the end, the movie seems a little overloaded with stars -- in addition to Robert Downey Jr., Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, and Jeremy Renner, there are cameos by Idris Elba, Samuel L. Jackson, and Don Cheadle, as well as the luxury casting of James Spader as the voice of Ultron. Keeping all of them busy squeezes the action sequences into incoherence. That may be why Whedon confessed to feeling exhausted afterward and declined to write and direct the third film scheduled in the series.

Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola, 2003)

Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson in Lost in Translation

Lost in Translation currently has a 95 percent favorable rating on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer and a 7.8 score on the IMDb rating system. It won Sofia Coppola an Oscar for best original screenplay and a nomination for best director, along with nominations for best picture and for Bill Murray as best actor. But I have to admit that it left me cold when I first saw it, and my opinion of it has warmed only somewhat since then. I grant its originality of concept and its effective use of Murray and co-star Scarlett Johansson, who was only 18 when the film was made, a major step in her career as a film actress. Murray and Johansson have a fine chemistry together that stops short of inducing the queasiness that might result from their age difference. Coppola effectively portrays the melancholy of these Americans lost in a lively, vibrant culture they can only glimpse superficially. But I can also sympathize with the Japanese critics who found its depiction of the people of Japan to be little short of caricature. I felt this most strongly in the scene, early in the film, in which someone sends a prostitute to the hotel room of Murray's character, and she demands that he "lip" her stockings. Much supposed hilarity ensues from the stereotype of the Japanese confusion of "l" and "r," which was funny when the Monty Python troupe performed "Erizabeth L," with such characters as "Sil Wartel Lareigh," but I think it falls flat here. Otherwise, Coppola evokes the experience most of us have felt in a country where we don't speak the language. Murray plays a film star, Bob Harris, in Tokyo to shoot a Suntory whiskey commercial with a Japanese director who gives complicated instructions that are reduced by a translator to little more than "turn and look at the camera." A New York Times article after the film opened revealed what the director is actually saying, but Coppola chose not to provide subtitles, leaving the non-Japanese-speaking audience as much in the dark as Bob Harris -- and in fact Bill Murray himself -- was. Coppola also subtly suggests what her characters might be feeling, without spelling it out for us, as when Charlotte (Johansson), who has been left on her own in Japan while her photographer husband (Giovanni Ribisi) travels about, visits a Buddhist temple in Kyoto where a wedding is taking place. But Coppola's lapses in control of the film's tone, as in the scene with the prostitute, are sometimes needlessly jarring.