Critic's Notebook

Mr. Robot

Tribeca Festival

MOVIE REVIEW
Sophia (2022)

By TIM HAYES

Documentaries about tech entrepreneurs take off when the visionary spins a convincing vision, or bump along the runway when the vision is more myopic than they realize. “Sophia,” by Jon Kasbe and Crystal Moselle, finds a not entirely comfortable third path by following David Hanson and the humanoid female robot he and Hanson Robotics are developing, which lends its name to the film. When Mr. Hanson speaks of his creation as a marker on the path to true artificial intelligence his earnestness speaks for itself; but the film doesn’t put Sophia into any context as a point on the arc from here to there, not least since a lot of the running time is taken up by Sophia not actually working very well. The android’s body is not much more than functional anyway, but what its brain is capable of and the seismic impact that its creator predicts can’t really cohere while the company pit crew are under the hood with the jump leads.

About a Goy

Søren Kirkegaard

MOVIE REVIEW
Attachment (2022)

By TIM HAYES

Incongruous openings win immediate bonus points, and “Attachment” starts with a chance encounter between an elf princess and a mysterious commoner who perhaps has a curse on her while an uptempo synth beat bounces on the soundtrack, as if the film was about to be the hit meet-cute queer comedy of 1985. Since the setting is clearly a library in present-day Denmark and the elf princess is an actor in costume recreating her TV character for some kids who are bored horizontal, the hidden layers of the set-up are left for you to register later, while “Attachment” skips deftly on into a serious supernatural drama about religion and tradition, lesbian love and culture clash.

Death Wish

Carole Bethuel/Curzon Film

MOVIE REVIEW
Everything Went Fine (2022)

By SARAH MANVEL

Broadly speaking, François Ozon directs two kinds of movies. The first are about young gay men getting themselves into a situation that ends with somebody dying. The second kind are about women in some sort of family-themed trap, to which they learn they must submit. The traps vary (a crappy marriage in “5x2,” a slutty houseguest in “Swimming Pool,” a parasitic twin in “Double Lover”) but they cannot be escaped, and writhing in the net only draws the knots tighter. The daughters in “Everything Went Fine” learned their lessons about their gilded cage in childhood, and tell anyone who asks that it’s impossible to deny their father anything. Mr Ozon must have been thrilled to option the memoir by Emmanuèle Bernheim, the late screenwriter of “5x2” and “Swimming Pool,” on which this movie is based. This is a family in which the ties do significantly more than bind.

Highway to the Comfort Zone

Scott Garfield/Paramount Pictures

MOVIE REVIEW
Top Gun: Maverick (2022)

By SARAH MANVEL

An aircraft carrier is 90,000 tons of diplomacy (as they say on the T-shirts) and its smell is hard to describe. It’s an enveloping sensation that permeates the entire world around you, especially when the carrier is out at sea and a floating city for thousands of people. Below decks the air is heavy with the weight of the ship, metal and body odors, recycled air and watertight doors. The flight deck smells like salt air and overheated tarmac, wind and jet fuel. It gets under your skin like very little else.

“Top Gun: Maverick” is all about what it’s like to chase a sensation. It begins with old-school renegade expert Maverick (Tom Cruise) taking an experimental plane for a test flight before its program is shut down by an admiral so tough (Ed Harris in a delightful cameo) he doesn’t even flinch as the plane passes so low overhead it knocks the roof of a guard hut. It transpires that Maverick is needed urgently at the flight school outside San Diego, where a secret mission – think the targeting of the Death Star in “Star Wars,” only more convoluted – requires training only Maverick can provide. The training is overseen by Cyclone (Jon Hamm), a by-the-rules admiral who dislikes Maverick, personally and professionally. One of the trainee pilots is Rooster (Miles Teller, phenomenally cast and with a superb mustache, and otherwise serviceable), whose late father was Maverick’s wingman and who has daddy issues galore. Maverick’s daddy issues from the original are forgotten. As the world turns, eh? The rest of the plot is pretty standard blockbuster stuff.

True Bromance

DVV Entertainment

MOVIE REVIEW
RRR (2022)

By MARTIN TSAI

Gatekeeping is and has been a serious problem plaguing international film culture. Even those most deeply immersed are often blissfully ignorant of this fact. A tiny, overwhelmingly white group of tastemakers ­­– programmers, critics, editors, distributors – essentially dictate what is fit for Western consumption. For the past year, nary a week has gone by without at least one new Indian release surfacing at multiplexes across the U.S. thanks to the pandemic-related short supply of Hollywood products. Yet major outlets and critics have deemed these films unworthy of any attention. They would of course never do this with a French film, even one without stars or festival credentials. “RRR,” a Telugu-language Indian film which has so far grossed in excess of $10 million in the U.S. – more than four times what “Drive My Car” made in its theatrical run – did not land a review in The New York Times until 12 days after opening, yet that was better than what most films from that country could get.

When the Saints Go Marching In

The Kennedy/Marshall Company/Sony Pictures Classics

MOVIE REVIEW
Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story (2022)

By MARTIN TSAI

In a way, “Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story” feels like “Summer of Soul ( . . . Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)” with melanin vastly depleted. Directors Ryan Suffern and Frank Marshall seem oblivious at best, ignorant at worst, glossing over glaring questions so as to not hold anyone accountable for apparent inequities on display, making the proceedings as pleasant and inoffensive as possible to make nice with white upper-middle-class boomers who presumably make up their target audience.

Game Boy

Paramount Pictures and Sega of America

MOVIE REVIEW
Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (2022)

By MARTIN TSAI

It’s easy to get cynical about “Sonic the Hedgehog 2,” sequel to a live-action movie based on a Sega video game character (voiced by Ben Schwartz) that travels at supersonic speeds. You may recall the original’s disastrous, universally loathed first trailer, which prompted the studio to postpone the release many months to overhaul the CGI, finally delivering it just before the global pandemic hit in 2020. Yet it’s already getting the sequel treatment, and ahead of 2019’s “Detective Pikachu,” the live-action movie based on a more contemporary Nintendo video game character.

Final Frontier

Sundance Institute

MOVIE REVIEW
The Territory (2022)

By MARTIN TSAI

The Uru-eu-wau-wau people, indigenous to Brazil’s rainforest, have seen their land and their population decimated since the 1980s when miners made first contact in the region. Now farmers brazenly show up with chainsaws and tractors to engage in a free-for-all land grab with no governmental oversight or interference, and they are not above resorting to violence and even murder. Worse, far-right politicians such as President Jair Bolsonaro run on platforms promising a legal path to the encroachment. This fight between the Uru-eu-wau-wau and intruding farmers is the subject of “The Territory,” 2022 Sundance winner of the Audience Award for World Cinema Documentary and Special Jury Award for Documentary Craft.

Space Oddity

SXSW

MOVIE REVIEW
Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood (2022)

By SARAH MANVEL

Memory is a funny thing, isn’t it. Looking back, especially at your own family, often you remember only the best parts, and certainly you focus on what you want to see. In the summer of 1969, while the future Kenneth Branagh was in Belfast going to the cinema to admire Raquel Welch with his family, the future Richard Linklater was in a suburb of Houston also going to the cinema to admire Raquel Welch with his brothers, but more often to watch movies about space. Practically everyone in the Houston area was involved in the space race, including young Stan (voiced by Milo Coy). Believe it or not, his kickball skills brought him to NASA’s attention, since – due to a minor math mishap – one of the space modules had been built at half size. So while his family thought he had a summer camp scholarship, Stan endured months of training to become the first boy to walk on the moon.

Breaking Awaits

Beth Garrabrant/Sundance Institute

MOVIE REVIEW
When You Finish Saving the World (2022)

By MARTIN TSAI

With “When You Finish Saving the World,” it feels as though actor-turned-filmmaker Jesse Eisenberg has created what seems like an entire universe populated with Mark Zuckerbergs – at least his own take on the tech titan memorialized for posterity in “The Social Network.”