SEE, OBVIOUSLY: Moonlight
The best film of the year is also the most quietly rewarding cinematic gift you can give yourself this week. Directed by Barry Jenkins (Medicine for Melancholy) and adapted from the work of playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney, Moonlight tracks three crucial periods in the life of a gay African-American man growing up in the neon decay of the Miami projects. Three actors share the role, each lending the character their own aching sensitivity: Alex Hibbert plays him as the shy and withdrawn child Little, who finds a surrogate family in a local drug dealer (the excellent, Oscar-bound Mahershala Ali and singer Janelle Monae); Ashton Sanders plays him as a bullied teenager, Chiron, who is paralyzed by his burgeoning feelings for a classmate and teetering on the edge of despair living with a crack addict mother (Naomie Harris); and Trevante Rhodes plays him as the older, reinvented Black, still grappling with his sexuality as he reaches out to the only person his age who ever truly saw him. Moonlight is exquisite and powerful, a special window into an utterly human experience both vividly heartbreaking and alive, and too rarely portrayed onscreen. – Jen Yamato
SKIP: Rules Don’t Apply
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Any excitement to be had in witnessing screen icon Warren Beatty’s first directorial effort since 1998’s prescient political satire Bulworth was immediately tempered by the project’s tired premise: Howard Hughes, whose eccentricities were already explored to Oscar-worthy effect in Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator. Beatty’s tale of a pair of pretty young things (Alden Ehrenreich and Lily Collins) who find love in a hopeless place—under Hughes’s employ—has its tiny delights, from its retro mise-en-scène to a smattering of ‘50s-era charm to some long-overdue Beatty scenery-chewing as Hughes, but is ultimately less than the sum of its parts. And the Howard Hughes biopic people are really dying to see—Christopher Nolan’s take starring Jim Carrey, which he’s said is “the best script I’ve ever written”—isn’t likely to ever see the light of day. For shame. – Marlow Stern
SEE: Moana
Disney’s latest princess, a 16-year-old Polynesian chieftain’s daughter, is the feminist heroine we’ve waited nearly a century for. The spunky Moana (voiced by Hawaiian teen actress Auil’i Cravalho), raised her entire life to lead her people, sets out beyond her island reef on a quest to find the demigod Maui (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, singing and sporting a miniature magical tattoo sidekick) and make him restore life to the dying ecosphere. Part Little Mermaid and part Mulan, Moana rouses thanks to a stirring message of girl empowerment and songs by Hamilton genius Lin-Manuel Miranda. And its message of balancing family tradition while forging your own path forward is one worth embracing as you spend another holiday season wondering how you’re possibly related to the kooks arguing across the dinner table. But best of all, Moana is a huge win for inclusive representation in studio moviemaking, and the first Disney Princess in history who doesn’t waste a single minute worrying about boys, romance, or marriage. – Jen Yamato
SKIP: Nocturnal Animals
The latest from fashion designer turned filmmaker Tom Ford, who helmed the seductive 2009 saga A Single Man, is a strange mélange of eye-catching design, toxic masculinity, and pangs of guilt. While the cast is first-rate, from Amy Adams’s chic art world diva to Jake Gyllenhaal’s castrated wordsmith, the plot, pacing, and tone are all over the map—vacillating between gritty West Texas rape-revenge saga (an overcooked story-within-a-story, also starring Gyllenhaal) to the fabulously opulent present. Taken as a whole, this narrative experiment comes off like Fordian psychoanalysis, with the filmmaker reconciling the fashion world and his Texas roots. The film does, however, boast the cameo of the year: Laura Linney as Adams’s Texan tyrant of a mother. With her big hair and even bigger mouth, she is truly a sight to behold. – Marlow Stern
SEE: Allied
Much of this period piece will seem like déjà vu, from Brad Pitt starring in his third World War II movie to its Casablanca-meets-Mr. and Mrs. Smith premise, and an air of tabloid intrigue looms over it all. But director Robert Zemeckis’s (Back to the Future) story of a Canadian spy (Brad Pitt) who falls for a member of the French resistance (Marion Cotillard), only to be tasked with taking her out when she’s suspected of being a German spy, is buoyed by the brilliance of Marion Cotillard, who conveys more in a single glance than most actresses do during entire scenes. She is not only—along with Naomi Watts—one of the two best actresses in Hollywood right, but also a paragon of glamour. Behold: this generation’s Garbo. – Marlow Stern
SKIP: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
J.K. Rowling tapped her magical ATM again when she penned a 2001 spin-off prequel to her finished Harry Potter books—a textbook of all the magical creatures in her wizarding empire, as detailed by a magical zookeeper named Newt Scamander. Harry Potter completists have probably already seen Eddie Redmayne twitch his way through Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them as Scamander, who loses a suitcase filled with supernatural creatures in 1920s New York City and finds himself leading a band of witches and proto-Muggles into a jumbled plot pickle involving his missing animals, traumatic wizard child abuse, and fascistic government forces who seek to suppress the true expression of magic. Interesting themes are buried somewhere in the rubble of this mess, whose abundant CGI effects are embarrassingly shabby. Was Fantastic Beasts just a cash-grab attempt to capitalize on Pottermania by churning out yet another movie megahit? Surely not! Find out in the next four installments! And spend your holiday watching something else, anything else, this week. – Jen Yamato
SEE: Manchester by the Sea
This devastating drama from writer-director Kenneth Lonergan (You Can Count on Me) stars the embattled Casey Affleck as a Massachusetts man who becomes the legal guardian of his nephew (Lucas Hedges) following the death of his brother (Kyle Chandler). This forces him to return to his hometown of Manchester-by-the-Sea and confront his ex-wife (Michelle Williams), and his dark past. As I wrote of the film at Sundance, “Another towering turn looms over Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea, and it comes courtesy of Casey Affleck, who is at his best playing a font of suffering and simmering rage. The film presents a harrowing portrait of two lost souls, young and old, trying their damnedest to overcome death and loneliness. This is Lonergan’s magnum opus.” There will be Oscars. – Marlow Stern
POSS: Bad Santa 2
Billy Bob Thornton is back as the world’s most miserable misanthrope in a Santa suit—and somehow, 13 years after the first Bad Santa whipped out its naughty R-rated comedy for eager Thanksgiving audiences, he’s not even the most rowdy, raucous, uncouth lowlife in this sequel. That honor instead goes to Oscar-winning actress Kathy Bates, who unleashes the beast as Willie Soke’s shifty criminal mother Sunny, a biker in grandma’s clothing even less trustworthy than her son. That makes for a surprisingly family-oriented plot as the pair team up with Willie’s diminutive ex-partner (Tony Cox) to rip off a Christmas charity. The return of Thurman Merman, now a 21-year-old virgin whose appearance adds plenty of autism gags, is as angelic as it gets. But in the post-Trump era, with a pussy-grabber-in-chief entering the White House and tensions higher at those cramped family gatherings with relatives parroting Fox News, your mileage—and sensitivity to jokes about women’s lady parts, seasonal depression, suicide, and extreme child abuse—will vary. – Jen Yamato
SEE: Elle
Isabelle Huppert puts on a one-woman acting masterclass in this latest subversive gem from Dutch provocateur Paul Verhoeven, a sly thriller that seeks to redefine victimhood, female power, and where sexual agency comes into play when those thorny concepts collide. French icon Huppert is Michelle, a fifty-something CEO of a video game company that’s making a misogynist game rife with sexual violence toward women. One day at home, she is raped by a masked intruder. Emotionless, she carries on her daily life as if nothing has happened. Where Elle subsequently goes as Michelle wrestles with her darkest impulses and even darker past are secrets that dance in Huppert’s twinkling glances, the Mona Lisa of rape and revenge cinema. Her Michelle is hands-down the most complicated woman you’ll meet at the movies this year. Hopefully critical acclaim and art house box office returns will make it the first of many intensely interesting characters that materialize for our most gifted female stars in the near future. – Jen Yamato
