The latest film releases include F1, M3GAN 2.0, Sorry, Baby, and Familiar Touch. Weighing in are Christy Lemire, writer for RogerEbert.com and co-host of the podcast Breakfast All Day, and Tim Grierson, senior U.S. critic for Screen International and author of This Is How You Make a Movie.
F1
A washed-up Formula 1 driver exits retirement to mentor a brash young racer. This is directed by Joseph Kosinski (Top Gun: Maverick) and stars Brad Pitt, Damson Idris, Kerry Condon, and Javier Bardem.
Grierson: “It feels very Maverick-y. It's also about an aging best-of-the-best who is trying to prove himself/mentor, a young hotshot. … I enjoy this movie enough. I think the race sequences are really terrific. This is the type of movie that when you leave the theater, you're gonna have to be very careful when you drive home. … Kosinski does such a great job of making the action chase car moments so propulsive and so fun and so dynamic. When they are off the track, the movie is a lot more formulaic, every cliche of both the sports movie and the car racing movie are contained safely in F1.
Brad Pitt is so good in this role. I mean, he's 61 now, and this is like his working Moneyball and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, in terms of him playing an aging, former golden child understanding that maybe there's more in the rear view mirror than ahead of him at this point.”
Lemire: “This reportedly has a budget of $300 million, and you can feel that in the auto racing scenes, in the immediacy of it. … The sound design is very effective in that regard too. But it is so overlong. Also, you have this really annoying, overbearing narrative device of the British announcers telling you everything that you can already see on the screen.”
M3GAN 2.0
The original M3GAN was destroyed after her rampage in the first movie. Here, she’s rebooted to fight a new AI robot named Amelia.
Grierson: “The first film was more of a horror comedy. This one is more of a sci-fi action film in a lot of ways. Maybe one of the best comparisons is Terminator 2. I think what hurts M3GAN 2.0 is that what was novel about the first film … oh, it's this very sassy doll who's not putting up with Allison Williams’ stuff and is insulting her all the time, and it became a metaphor for all of our reliance on our smartphones, all of that stuff was interesting in the first movie. But the second movie, there's not much new to say about any of that. So thematically, it's a pretty barren movie. And so what they do instead is fall back on a self-aware, self-mocking sense of humor, but the second time through, it's not quite as satisfying.”
Sorry, Baby
A college professor tries to recover from sexual assault. Eva Victor writes, directs, and stars as Agnes.
Lemire: “It's gonna end up being one of my favorite movies of the year, and it's just brilliant in terms of the writing and the tone. The story is told out of order. … We get pieces along the way of what life was like for her at this small liberal arts college in New England, and her best friendship with Naomi Ackie’s character, and what that life is like in that competitive and intense and passive-aggressive academic setting. There is just a delicacy and a deadpan quality to the humor here. … There is trauma that it presents to us here and explores very candidly, but there's such a self-deprecating, sly sense of humor here that it's very, very funny. … And there's just a grounded realism to the world that Eva Victor presents here. And it's just a beautiful film and really, really surprising over and over again, and incredibly poignant, but also hilarious.”
Grierson: “Victor, I think, is very, very smart about exploring how certain types of trauma — everybody around a person who goes through something traumatic does not know how to handle it, and some of Sorry, Baby's best and funniest moments involve people just not knowing what to do. … I also want to say that Naomi Ackie, I think, is really incredible in this film. Naomi Ackee plays Agnes’ best friend, and this is the type of best friend that anybody would be lucky to have. The last thing I'll say is I think Sorry, Baby does a really beautiful job of speaking to this idea that when … something truly traumatic happens in a person's life, there is no sense of ‘getting over it.’ … It's a gradual, ongoing process. And this movie, because it's not told in chronological order, I think it explores the idea in such a smart, beautiful way.”
Familiar Touch
This is primarily a character study, as a woman with dementia moves into an assisted living facility. To make this movie, the director collaborated with seniors from a Pasadena assisted living facility where the movie was filmed, and they hosted a five-week filmmaking workshop here before their shoot.
Lemire: “It's how dementia can be such a fleeting and elusive thing in terms of the memories that stick with you forever, like you hear her reciting her childhood address in Brooklyn, but then does not recognize her own son. And you see the transformation of how she deals with that over time, and how she relates to people, and how she learns to be who she truly is by different senses. … It's a really lovely, gentle film, and is a beautiful example of showing and not telling. …It's a towering performance from this woman whose life is in decay.”
Grierson: “One of the things that I really respect about Familiar Touch is that the movie does nothing to try to make the older characters seem adorable, to seem cute and sweet. The movie allows Ruth and the characters around her to have the dignity of being elderly, and not knowing what they're doing sometimes, and being confused sometimes, and then being incredibly lucid to such a point where you're like, ‘Well, maybe Ruth doesn't need to actually be here,’ and then she has another lapse. … I think the movie also does a very good job of talking about something that's almost never talked about in terms of elderly characters, which is that they still have sexual desires, they still have romantic longings. … It's a very, very delicate movie. It's a very lovely movie.”