March has been a fairly middling month for movies — at least heading into the final weekend. Don’t get me wrong, there have been a couple of solid offerings, but those have felt more like aberrations than the norm. This week I watched five new movies hoping for some magic (I found some), but mostly what I discovered was something a bit more cynical and a lot less worth our collective time. Let’s take a look.
The Electric State
The massive amount of hype I had for this was unsustainable. Based on the captivating illustrated novel by one of my favorite artists alive, Simon Stålenhag, and directed by the Russo Bros. (both of whom have been adrift as filmmakers since Avengers: Endgame), I’d hoped at the very least the film would capture something tangibly beautiful from the novel. But I should have guessed Stålenhag’s lightning is too ephemeral for that.
The film (one of the most expensive ever made with a reported budget of $320 million) has seamless special effects in service of a screenplay that strips all the exquisite melancholy from the book and instead shoves a flop-sweaty Chris Pratt (clinging desperately to some dream of playing Han Solo one day) and Millie Bobby Brown (still unable to craft a believable character outside of Stranger Things) into a garish, unfunny, Netflix original dumpster fire.
Grade: D-
The Penguin Lessons
The concept of a sad and cynical Steve Coogan becoming best friends with a penguin he rescues in 1970s Argentina sounds like a winner, and in many ways it is, but the tone might miss more people than it hits. Set during the Dirty War, we have a whimsical true story about a prep school teacher whose heart grows three sizes while protecting his penguin friend during a time when close to 30,000 people disappeared. To say that the film gives you tonal whiplash is an understatement.
Still, even as the film veers wildly between goofball sentimentality and heart-breaking war crimes, I found myself deeply moved by the story and Coogan’s brilliant ability to weaponize his charming gruffness while creating believable, sympathetic and deeply flawed men. All my issues with this movie don’t take away from the fact that it will be hugely crowd pleasing for audiences in search of that rare combination of a cute animal and a moving story.
Grade: B
The Assessment
A great Elizabeth Olson and Himesh Patel play a married couple living in a futuristic society where resources are profoundly limited. They want to have a child, which means the state sends an assessor to spend one week in their house, at the end of which they will be judged as suitable or unsuitable parents. Once the decision is made, there is no reapplying. Alicia Vikander plays the assessor in what is not only her finest performance in a career filled with them, but easily one of the most multi-layered and dynamically written characters of the year.
While on the surface The Assessment is a speculative fiction deconstruction of parenthood, there are so many themes fighting for attention under the hood that it feels like debut filmmaker Fleur Fortuné might have been overly ambitious. But by the film’s breathtaking final frame, we realize she has known exactly what buttons she was pushing the entire time. From the score to the performances to the cinematography, script, and direction, The Assessment is a singular work I won’t soon forget and Fortuné crafts some imagery here unlike anything that has come before in cinema.
Grade: A-
The Alto Knights
This is one of those movies where all the pieces are there for something special, but then you look at it all put together and it falls apart completely. We’ve got a screenplay from Nicholas Pileggi (Goodfellas and Casino), direction from Barry Levinson (Rain Man and Wag the Dog) and Robert De Niro playing legendary gangsters Frank Costello and Vito Genovese. These guys together making a mobster movie… it should be a classic. Instead, we have something so forgettable that I’m struggling to remember why it even exists.
I don’t know the story and I’m not going to look it up, but I could almost guarantee that the reason De Niro plays both characters is because they offered Genovese to Joe Pesci and he turned it down. De Niro is definitely doing a Pesci impression and it’s not bad at all. De Niro puts in the work here, but the uninteresting script, dull direction, and hammy supporting performances really let him down. This feels like a Netflix mini-series edited down to two sleepy, derivative hours.
When you have someone like De Niro (the star of at least four of the greatest gangster movies of all time) in your movie, it will immediately be spoken of in comparison with those other, greater gangster pictures. It’s not a good look when the comparison is immediately laughable. I don’t know that The Alto Knights ever had a chance.
Grade: C-
Snow White
Speaking of never having a chance… The new live-action Snow White was always doomed. Conservatives hate it because it’s woke (it’s not) and because Snow White herself, Rachel Zegler, is anti-Trump, and liberals hate it because Gal Gadot supports Israel in the current genocide. Racists hate it because Zegler is Latina and they want to Make Disney White Again. Peter Dinklage doesn’t like Snow White because it treats dwarfism like a stereotype, while many other actors with dwarfism are mad because Disney didn’t hire enough actors with dwarfism after (while trying to avoid controversy) making the Seven Dwarves computer generated.
Do I hate Snow White? Not really. Zegler is luminous and showstopping as Snow White, giving the film an injection of magic whenever she’s on screen. Also, seeing the Seven Dwarves cottage come to life made me feel like a little kid again. Everything else is pretty bad. Gadot delivers some hilariously terrible line readings that might eventually turn this movie into a camp cult classic. The Dwarves fail to cross the uncanny valley and look pulled from a fever dream you had one time when you mixed malt liquor and cough medicine. The new songs are unmemorable and one of them is outright awful (Princess Problems). I could go on, but Snow White has been bullied enough.
Grade D+
