The latest film releases are The Zone of Interest, American Fiction, Wonka, and Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget. Weighing in are Tim Grierson, senior U.S. critic for Screen International and the author of This Is How You Make a Movie, and Alison Willmore, film critic for NY Magazine and Vulture.
The Zone of Interest
In this war/crime drama, a Nazi officer and his wife (Sandra Hüller) try building a dream life in a house and garden adjacent to the Auschwitz concentration camp.
Willmore: “I do think it is one of the best movies of the year, but it is also an incredibly difficult movie to watch, which I think is surprising and not necessarily for the reasons you might expect. The Zone of Interest never goes into Auschwitz to show us what's happening there. Instead, we just hear it because the camp is literally backing onto the garden of this dream house. … It is a movie about the banality of evil, sure. You've got these two people going about their marriage and their lives. But it is also about this compartmentalization that is so outlandish that even other people who come to visit struggle with it. I think it's easy for us sometimes to think of historical atrocities as distant and unimaginable. And instead, it really grounds it in these petty little ambitions and bourgeois aspirations.”
Grierson: “[Sandra Hüller] plays a woman who, essentially, is disappointed in her husband because he is going to be transferred to another department, and they're going to have to move. And she doesn't want to move because she likes their house so much. This is not a question of a woman who has any moral problem with what her husband does for a living. Her unhappiness in the film is, ‘Well, we've built this beautiful house and I've made this great garden for myself. Can't you talk to Hitler? Maybe you can talk to Hitler and you can stay here?’ It's not a movie that's very violent or graphic. It's more about creating a sense of how do we all compartmentalize and rationalize the things that we do?”
American Fiction
Jeffrey Wright plays Monk, a frustrated Black novelist who struggles to stay relevant in literary circles — because he resists writing about more tragic aspects of the Black experience. The film stars Issa Rae, Erika Alexander, and Sterling K. Brown. It’s written and directed by Cord Jefferson, and adapted from a book by LA-based novelist Percival Everett.
Grierson: “It starts really strongly. I don't know if it connects all the things it wants to do. It's a pretty ambitious first feature from Cord Jefferson. … [Monk] feels like the books that are selling well are very exploitive, and also peddle a poverty porn depiction of a certain type of Black life. So to prove a point, he writes a novel that is the most offensive in that way in terms of the themes that bother him. … Joke ends up being on him because that book that he writes under a pseudonym becomes super, super, super successful. The other strand in this movie is that he goes back home to Boston to take care [of] … his mother who is older and ailing. … I actually like the more domestic drama, romantic drama that develops once he gets back to Boston.”
Willmore: “I'm a little fonder of the satirical aspects. … I would say this is also a film that is a satire about white liberalism, particularly in the publishing industry. But also beyond that, it has some good and I think very accurate jokes about what it means to be in a world that is controlled by people who mean very well, but also are nevertheless the ones in charge and nevertheless feel comfortable with putting their ideas about your own identity on you.”
Wonka
This Roald Dahl adaptation is a prequel of Willy Wonka’s life before he became a chocolate tycoon. It stars Timothee Chalamet and Hugh Grant.
Willmore: “I was mostly won over by the fact that this is a film that was directed by Paul King, who made the Paddington films, which are … widely beloved, I think for good reason. It also has an incredible cast of character actors and comedians. Hugh Grant, in particular, I think is delightful as an Oompa Loompa. But as improbable as that casting is, he's just so grumpy, straight-faced. So I do think Timothee Chalamet is maybe the weakest part of the film … he can't quite commit to the abandon that is required of a fantasy musical.”
Grierson: “At least it's not a dark, gritty origin story reboot. … Wonka, as played by Timothee Chalamet, is very Paddington-esque in terms of him being this indomitable optimist who believes in the goodness of people, and I like Chalamet in this. … It is a film that essentially positions Wonka as the scrappy underdog with a dream, going up against the mean, evil corporations that don't want Wonka muscling in on their chocolate territory.”
Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget
This is a sequel to the first Chicken Run from 2000, which was a huge hit for the stop-motion animation studio Aardman.
Grierson: “It brings me no joy to say that I think this movie is not nearly as good as the first one. I find that kind of disappointing. I think that the jokes just aren't as consistently clever in this movie. I think the animation by Aardman — which I've always loved their stop motion, handmade animation — is still very charming. ... But I just feel like … the idea of them breaking into a factory farm to rescue [the character] Rocky's daughter, as opposed to the original film — which is a spoof on The Great Escape and those POW war films — I thought that concept was better executed in the first film.”
Willmore: “It's not as good as the first one but I still enjoyed it. I think even if you're running through some of the same gags as before, they're pretty good gags. I love the general handcrafted newness of this animation and just the wild Britishness sensibility of Aardman. … I appreciated … that [the film] … tries to deal with what happens when you have a child [and] you're intent on giving her a safer, better life than the one you had — and how you balance that with … maybe you are … sealing your child off from the world instead.”