Review: 'American Fiction' is a lacerating and funny satire of publishing and Black identity, with Jeffrey Wright soaring in a rare leading-man role

Satire doesn’t get more pointed, or more perfectly pitched, than in “American Fiction,” in which first-time director Cord Jefferson launches an important conversation about Black identity and white expectations with wit, humor and soul.

Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, played by Jeffrey Wright, is a novelist who’s in a low point in his career. His confrontational teaching gets him suspended from his college, and his agent Arthur (John Ortiz) tells him his latest novel isn’t getting offers because publishers want “a Black book.” Monk replies, “It is a Black book — I’m Black, and it’s my book.” 

But Arthur’s message is clear: The publishers want stories that conform to their expectations who Black characters are. Monk runs into an example of this when he encounters Sintara Golden (Issa Rae), an author reading her new bestseller, which is chock-full of Black street language and racial stereotypes. 

Monk’s not in the best mental space when this realization hits. His supportive sister, Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross), dies early in the film, leaving Monk to move back to his family’s oceanside neighborhood and tend to his Alzheimer’s-afflicted mom (Leslie Uggams). He doesn’t much help from his brother, Clifford (Sterling K. Brown), who lives in Tucson, has recently gone through a divorce and is in the process of coming out. 

One night, with all this boiling inside him, Monk gets on his computer, and as a joke writes a story about a deadbeat dad and a drug-dealing son, calls it “My Pafology” and gives himself the alias Stagg R. Leigh (after the folk song about a murder, popularized by Lloyd Price). He sends it to Arthur, who soon calls back with the news that publishers want to buy it.

Jefferson, whose TV career includes writing for “Watchmen” and “The Good Place,” makes a spectacular debut as feature film director and screenwriter. He adapts Percival Everett’s novel, “Erasure,” into a sharply drawn and scathingly funny satire of publishing, academia and the many ways white people blithely dictate how Black people are supposed to look, sound, behave and be represented in culture. 

Wright, so solid as a supporting player in everything from “The Hunger Games” to “The French Dispatch,” takes this rare opportunity at leading-man status and is delightful as Monk. He shifts from anger to impish cynicism to soulful romance (there’s a subplot where Monk meets a charming neighbor played by Erika Alexander) with grace and an underlying exasperation at what his joke has revealed about publishers and their unthinking biases.

As the credits rolled on “American Fiction,” I was a bit bothered by the ending, which suggests a multitude of outcomes without seemingly settling on one. As I thought about it, though, I started to think that I was the problem — that, as a white guy, I expect the ending that makes me feel good as a viewer, not what is best for Monk. Jefferson demonstrates brilliantly how impossible it is to please the white viewers and still stay true to himself and his fascinating, complex, entirely human characters.

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‘American Fiction’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, January 12, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for language throughout, some drug use, sexual references and brief violence. Running time: 117 minutes.

Review: A musical 'Mean Girls' hits the high notes when Reneé Rapp enters as queen bee Regina George

The new iteration of “Mean Girls” — a movie adaptation of the Broadway musical based on the 2004 movie, all with words written by Tina Fey — bubbles along nicely as it begins, hitting its marks pleasantly but unspectacularly.

Then Reneé Rapp, reprising her role from Broadway, makes her entrance, declaring her character’s name and status — “My name is Regina George, and I’m a massive deal — and this musical kicks into a higher gear.

Regina, the leader of a dominating high school clique known as the Plastics, is the hottest girl in school and knows it — and is aptly described in one of the songs (music by Jeff Richmond, lyrics by Nell Benjamin) as a “apex predator.” When Rapp makes her entrance, the new girl, Cady Heron (Angourie Rice), stares and gawks, and the audience does the same.

Rapp commands this rendition of the story, which Fey based on Rosalind Wiseman’s “Queen Bees and Wannabes,” dissecting the social structure of fictional North Shore High School. Cady, having lived in Kenya with her scientist mom (Jenna Fischer), studies the system as an outsider, like a biologist looking at the animals on the savanna. 

Cady is first treated as an outsider, shunned by everyone except the school’s outcasts, Janis ‘Imi’ike (played by “Moana” star Auli’i Cravalho) and Damian Hubbard (Jaquel Spivey, in his first movie role). It’s Janis who warns Cady about Regina’s double-crossing ways, and engineers a revenge plot in which Cady infiltrates the Plastics, befriending its beta members — insecure Gretchen Wieners (Bebe Wood) and not-too-bright Karen Shetty (Avantika) — and reporting back on what secrets she learns. The hitch in the plan comes when Cady starts to crush a hot boy, Aaron Samuels (Christopher Briney), and learns too late that Aaron is Regina’s ex.

The directing team of Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr. create some neon-bright musical sequences to push along Fey’s story. And Fey, who reprises her role as the no-nonsense teacher Ms. Norbury, brings along some of her regulars — Tim Meadows returning as the school’s principal, Busy Phillips as Regina’s trying-to-be-cool mom, Ashley Park as the school’s French teacher, and Jon Hamm as a boorish health teacher — for some undeniable laughs.

Besides Rapp, the standout among the young cast is Cravalho, who imbues the prickly Janis with a strong sense of outrage and vengeance over slights dating back to elementary school.

As good as some moments of this “Mean Girls” are, one wishes it didn’t stick too close to the original’s template in other areas — such as the iconic Christmas talent show scene, or the way Regina deploys the famous “Burn Book.” Even set to music, there’s not much happening in those passages that outshines the original.

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‘Mean Girls’

★★★

Opens Friday, January 12, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for sexual material, strong language and teen drinking. Running time: 112 minutes.

Review: 'Night Swim' is a less-than-exciting horror movie with actors delivering more than expected

Even with a couple of good actors in the lead — including a recent Oscar nominee — there’s not much to get excited about with “Night Swim,” the latest thriller from the powerhouse horror producers Jason Blum and James Wan.

The Waller family is house-hunting, and seems to find a good one: Roomy, nice neighborhood, and even a pool in the backyard. The dad, Ray (Wyatt Russell), tells his wife, Eve (Kerry Condon, an Academy Award nominee for “The Banshees of Inisherin”), that the pool could be therapeutic — as he deals with a degenerative muscular disease that has derailed his career as a third baseman for the Milwaukee Brewers.

The Waller kids like the idea. The younger one, Elliot (Gavin Warren) sees the pool as a place to bond with his dad, diving for quarters at the bottom. His teen sister, Izzy (Amélia Hoeferle), finds an opportunity to invite a hot boy, Ronin (Elijah Roberts), over for some after-hours water play.

It doesn’t take long, though, for the kids and Eve to notice something’s off about the pool, besides the flickering lights and the fact that the cat has gone missing. Thanks to the prologue director Bryce McGuire and his co-screenwriter Rod Blackhurst devise, the audience already knows what’s wrong — when, in the 1990s, a little girl (Ayazhan Dalabayeva) gets in the water and disappears.

McGuire tries to goose the audience periodically with the requisite jump scares, but ultimately there’s not much to “Night Swim” other than some mild shocks and a lot of references to other movies, such as “It” and “Psycho.” (The strangest homage may be to that well-known not-horror movie, “The Natural.”)

There are flashes, here and there, of where “Night Swim” might have mined richer veins of entertainment. There’s an early scene with a slightly off-kilter pool technician (played by “High Maintenance” creator Ben Sinclair) that promises weirdness that never materializes, and there’s a chilling moment between Condon’s Eve and the missing ‘90s girl’s mother (Jodi Long). The rest of the movie is too watered down, literally, to generate much suspense.

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‘Night Swim’

★★

Opens Friday, January 5, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for terror, some violent content and language. Running time: 98 minutes.

Review: 'Society of the Snow' is a harrowing, yet sensitive, telling of the 1972 Andes flight disaster that finds meaning in the details

With the true-life “Society of the Snow,” director J.A. Bayona starts with a harrowing tragedy that people think they know about — and digs deep into the human stories within it to find something that’s ultimately an examination of the soul.

On Oct. 13, 1972, a plane carrying 40 people — including members of a Uruguayan rugby team — and five crew members took off from Montevideo for Santiago, Chile. Traversing a narrow pass in the Andes, the plane crashed in the snowy mountains. According to the records, only 33 people survived the crash.

Bayona — whose track record with disasters includes “The Impossible” (2012), about the 2004 Phuket tsunami, and 2018’s “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom” — deploys a special-effects crew that captures the chaos and violence of the initial plane crash with brutal clarity. The sequence stands as one of the most watch-through-your-fingers moments in recent movies, next to the race crash near the end of “Ferrari.”

Those who survive the crash, and the first night of freezing weather that killed another five, get organized in a hurry. They move the dead out of the fuselage, set up the wounded inside, and start scavenging through luggage to find any scraps of food available. That food lasts a couple of days, and then they have to start talking about alternatives.

This aspect of the story is the part people probably remember — either from hearing about it on a podcast, or maybe seeing Ethan Hawke and Vincent Spano re-creating the events in the 1993 movie “Alive.” The movie doesn’t shy away from the topic of cannibalism, but handles it with sensitivity, centering on the conversations among the survivors, about the necessity to survive against the legality and morality of eating their deceased compatriots. 

In the end, Bayona and his co-writers (Bernal Vilaplana, Jaime Marques and Nicolás Casariego) present the cannibalism issue as one element among many in the narrative. Those elements include desperate hikes in the snow to seek help, and philosophical conversations about the deeper meaning — if there is one — of enduring this ordeal.

The cast, largely unknown to American audiences, is a stellar ensemble. Among the standouts are Enzo Vogrincic as Numa, seen as one of the most respected of the rugby players; Matias Recalls as Roberto Canesa, a medical student who presents the cold logic of their odds of survival; and Agustin Pardella as Nando Parrado, who transforms from shell-shocked madman to perhaps the sanest person on the plane.

“Society of the Snow” captures the details of this survival story, finding tests of faith and friendship at each turn. It’s an object lesson for Hollywood, that true-life stories can actually be true to life, and pack an emotional punch without ridiculous amounts of embellishment. 

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‘Society of the Snow’

★★★1/2

Starts streaming Thursday, January 4, on Netflix. Rated R for violent/disturbing material and brief graphic nudity. Running time: 144 minutes; in Spanish, with subtitles. 

Review: 'Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom' lets the old DC universe go out on a positive note, with a hunky and jokey Jason Momoa

Ten years and 15 movies later (16 if you count Zack Snyder’s re-edit of “Justice League”), the DC Extended Universe arrives at its apparent endpoint with “Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom” — and at least we’re going out with a laugh.

Director James Wan, who helmed 2018’s “Aquaman,” creates a fairly rousing spectacle, full of big action moments and serviceable special effects. But the biggest, most watchable effect of them all is Jason Momoa, a frat-boy comedian in the body of an undersea god.

In the five years since the last movie, Aquaman, aka Arthur Curry, has had some changes in his life. One is that he’s now the king of Atlantis, and finding the job is pretty boring — all greeting royal visitors and attending endless sessions with the Council of Atlantis, which won’t let him do any of the kingly things he wants to do, such as establish diplomatic relations with the surface dwellers who don’t know of Atlantis’ existence.

Even more important, though, is that Aquaman is a dad. He and his queen, Mera (Amber Heard), have a baby boy, Arthur Jr., who’s living on land — in part so Arthur’s landlocked dad (Temuera Morrison) can be called upon as a live-in babysitter while Aquaman is beating up pirates and being king.

Arthur learns that an old enemy has returned: David Kane, aka Black Manta (again played by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II). Kane is in search of an ancient Atlantean power that will restore his energy suit. He’s enlisted Dr. Stephen Shin (Randall Park), the hapless marine biologist who’s been searching for Atlantis, to help find this power source in Antarctica. Kane’s plan is to power up so he can take revenge on Aquaman, who allowed Kane’s father to die in the first movie.

Shin helps Kane find that power source: The Black Trident, a weapon of Atlantean myth. When Kane touches the trident, he becomes possessed by an ancient monster bent on reclaiming global power — using a long-banned Atlantean fuel that produces enough greenhouse gases to make global warming happen even faster. (Yes, Momoa — who shares story credit on the movie — is a not-so-secret eco-warrior. So that’s another reason to like him.)

After Kane’s first attack on Atlantis, using some stolen ancient Atlantean tech Shin found in Antarctica, Aquaman realizes the only way to beat Kane is to team up with the last person on Earth he wants to see again: His half-brother, Orm Marius (Patrick Wilson), with whom Aquaman battled for the throne in the first movie. Aquaman must bust Orm out of a desert prison — the first of many set pieces on the way to the big all-the-marbles battle at the movie’s conclusion.

The “we ain’t brothers and we ain’t friends” banter between Aquaman and Orm is pretty good, as action movies go, and Momoa and Wilson have some good buddy-comedy rapport. And it’s fun to see the gang back together, including Dolph Lundgren as King Nereus, Nicole Kidman as the retired queen Atlanna, and even Heard (whose role feels truncated here, possibly focus-grouped out of some big scenes). The weak spot here is the villain — Kane’s revenge motivation is dull, and the backstory to explain the ancient baddie who takes Kane over comes too late and is too sketchy to be interesting. 

Watching “Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom” nearly made me wish director James Gunn and producer Peter Safran, who are now tasked with rebuilding DC’s movie fortunes from the ground up, would consider keeping Momoa around for future installments. He’s got the looks, the muscles and the charm of a happy-go-lucky superhero — it would be cool if somebody would just let him keep doing that.

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‘Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom’

★★★

Opens Friday, December 22, in theaters. Rated PG-13 for sci-fi violence and some language. Running time: 124 minutes.

Review: With the first installment of 'Rebel Moon,' director Zack Snyder pulls out his old visual tricks in a space epic cobbled together from spare parts

With the ungainly title “Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child of Fire,” director Zack Snyder’s new monster-sized science-fiction franchise for Netflix launches with a lot of bombast and big action — but for several reasons, not just the ones hinted at by the title, it feels like an unfinished work.

The movie starts on a bucolic planet, Veldt, and a young woman, Kora (Sofia Boutella), pushing a plow behind a horse-like creature. She’s a resident of a peaceful village — peaceful until a ship from the ruling Motherworld descends, led by the movie’s main villain, Admiral Atticus Noble (Ed Skrein). Atticus demands the village sell most of its grain harvest to his army, and even kills the village’s leader (an unbilled Corey Stoll) to put fear in the other villagers.

Kora is not afraid, and we learn of her backstory that she’s not from this village — but a war-hardened former officer in the Motherworld’s army. The opening narration (by Anthony Hopkins, voicing an enigmatic android) explains that the king of the Motherworld was assassinated, and the power struggle that followed left the nasty Regent Balisarius (Fra Fee) in charge, prompting a rebellion in the outer fringes of the empire.

Gee, plucky rebels going up against a powerful evil empire, fighting wars among the stars — where do Snyder and his co-writers, Shay Hatten (who worked on Snyder’s “Army of the Dead”) and Kurt Johnstad (who worked on Snyder’s “300”), get their ideas? (Yes, the legend is that Snyder pitched himself to direct a “Star Wars” movie, and when Lucasfilm turned him down, he recycled his ideas into this.)

Kora — who takes down the occupation force Atticus left in the village in one of Snyder’s familiar slow-motion action sequences — teams with Gunnar (Michiel Huisman), a villager who has sold surplus grain to the rebel side, to start assembling rebel fighters to fight against Atticus’ main forces when they return. Thus, Snyder engages in some universe-building, as we hop from one thoroughly production-designed planet after another. 

Among those Kora and Gunnar pick up are: A homeless former general (Djimon Hounsou), a vengeful assassin (Doona Bae), a hunky prince (Staz Nair), a rebel leader (Ray Fisher, aka Cyborg from Snyder’s “Justice League”) and a roguish thief and space pilot, Kai (Charlie Hunnam). 

Some of the action sequences Snyder devises are propulsive — my favorite is when Bae goes up against a spider-like creature with a head and thorax (played by Jena Malone) that resembles the Borg Queen from the “Star Trek” franchise. But, too often, Snyder falls into his regular habits, creating empty spectacle that’s quite violent, though bloodless enough to get its PG-13 rating. 

The world-building is all in the visuals, with no attempt to guide viewers from planet to planet — and the character development is much the same, with only Boutella’s Kora provided much depth or explanation of who she is and how she got here. The audience is forced to fill in the gaps, using the clues of other movies Snyder references. And, perhaps the greatest crime of all for an action franchise, there’s absolutely no humor to lighten the heavy material.

As the title tells us, this is the first installment of what has been announced as a two-part epic — the second part, with the subtitle “The Scargiver,” is scheduled for an April release on Netflix. And Snyder has recently said in interviews that this movie, which is two hours and 13 minutes long and carries a PG-13 rating, will have a three-hour, R-rated “director’s cut” released sometime next year. Yes, Snyder himself has succumbed to the allure of “the Snyder cut” that his legion of fans demanded after “Justice League.”

The problem with announcing a “director’s cut” for “Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child of Fire” is that it tells us Snyder was so disenchanted with his movie that he started editing a different version as a distraction. If the director can’t be bothered to pay attention, why should the rest of us?

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‘Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child of Fire’

★★

Starts streaming Friday, December 22, on Netflix. Rated PG-13 for sequences of strong violence, sexual assault, bloody images, language, sexual material and partial nudity. Running time: 133 minutes.

Review: 'The Color Purple' is as difficult to translate to the screen as a musical as it was in 1985

Maybe it’s the case that Alice Walker’s acclaimed novel “The Color Purple,” like Laurence Sterne’s “Tristram Shandy” or Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow,” is actually unfilmable — and neither Steven Spielberg’s achingly earnest 1985 adaptation nor this new musical version can fully convey the pain and resilience of the story’s protagonist, Celie Harris.

The story spans some 40 years, starting in 1909, with two sisters — Celie (played by Phylicia Pearl Mpasi in the early going) and Nettie (Halle Bailey, recently of “The Little Mermaid”) — living with their father (Deon Cole), who frequently abuses and rapes Celie, and has fathered two babies by her. Early on in this film, Celie gives birth to the second one (Whoopi Goldberg, who played Celie in the Spielberg version, makes her cameo as the midwife), and the father takes the baby away while Celie is still recovering.

Soon after, their father arranges for Celie to be married off to a widower who goes by Mister (played by Colman Domingo). Mister orders Celie — played as an adult by Fantasia Barrino (the one-time “American Idol” champ) — to cook and clean, and take even more abuse than her father gave out. The ultimate act of horror comes when Mister banishes Nettie at the point of a shotgun, separating the sisters apparently forever.

Celie has so internalized her abuse that when Mister’s adult son, Harpo (Corey Hawkins), brings home his confident, headstrong girlfriend, Sofia (Danielle Brooks), Celie tells Harpo that to keep Sofia in line, he should beat her — an idea that makes Sofia furious at Celie. (Those who saw the Spielberg version will remember that Sofia was played, in her movie debut, by Oprah Winfrey, who’s a producer of the new movie.)

Harpo decides to start a juke joint, a place by the river to serve booze and book music acts — and the first act he lures in is the Memphis soul singer Shug Avery (played by Taraji P. Henson). Shug has been Mister’s longtime mistress, and her framed photo has become an object of fascination for Celie over the years. When Shug and Celie finally meet, there is an instant bond, whether sisterly or something else.

What I haven’t mentioned yet – and not because the studio marketing is trying to hide it — is that this version of “The Color Purple” is a full-on Broadway musical, adapted from Marsha Norman’s book of the stage play by screenwriter Marcus Gardley. 

Being a musical exacerbates the difficulty an actor would have portraying Celie, a passive and meek character for so much of the movie’s running time, who finally gets to show her resolve and unbreakable spirit in the final few minutes. It was hard for Spielberg to have Goldberg perform that arc; it’s even harder when you also must give the character songs to sing. 

What director Blitz Bazawule (who worked on part of Beyoncé’s “Black Is King” video album) and the script do is stage elaborate dream sequences to show Celie’s inner thoughts — including a Busby Berkeley-style old Hollywood number when Celie and Shug first meet. Only in the later going, when Barrino gets to belt out the declaration “I’m Here,” does the actor and character finally get to show her fire.

So much of this rendition of “The Color Purple” feels hemmed in by conventions — trying to get across the quiet, nuanced emotions of Walker’s book in a format that demands big, loud declarative moments of showing one’s heart. In spite of the abundant talent onscreen and behind the camera, that emotional gap proves insurmountable.

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‘The Color Purple’

★★1/2

‘Opens Monday, December 25, Christmas Day. Rated PG-13 for mature thematic content, sexual content, violence and language. Running time: 140 minutes.

Review: 'Poor Things' is an absurd masterpiece of a growing mind, centered by a stunning performance by Emma Stone

It’s no small thing to call “Poor Things” the most audacious movie the the Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos has made in the English language — not when that includes such swing-for-the-fences titles as “The Favourite,” “The Killing of a Sacred Deer” and “The Lobster.”

But “Poor Things,” a science-fiction movie in the “Frankenstein” vein that’s also a bawdy sex farce and a satirical journey of feminine self-discovery, tops all of Lanthimos’ past Hollywood work for its audacity and  wit. It’s also a movie that boasts a new level of acting from Emma Stone — someone we loved already, and are thrilled to find has found new mountains to conquer.

When we meet Stone’s Bella, she has the mind of a child. Quite literally. She’s the ward of Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), a scientist with radical notions (for this unspecified but vaguely Victorian era) about how to maintain and prolong life, as evidenced by the odd hybrid animals walking around his London courtyard.

As Dr. Baxter tells his student, Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef), Bella was found floating in the Thames, a would-be suicide. She was dead, but the nearly born fetus inside her was alive. So Dr. Baxter transferred the baby’s brain into Bella’s skull, and has been raising her in the Baxter house. Max, who is soon hired as an assistant, chronicles how Bella goes from baby talk to primitive English in short order. 

Bella learns so quickly that she soon wants more than what Dr. Baxter and Max can teach her cooped up in the house. Bella wants to see the world, so she runs off with Dr. Baxter’s lawyer, Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo). Duncan takes Bella to Lisbon to experience the pleasures of good food and sexual intercourse — she calls it “furious jumping” — both of which Bella discovers she likes to do frequently.

Eventually, though, Bella develops even deeper levels of thinking — through which she discovers such things as poor people, money and morality. She also realizes that Duncan is a rake and a cad, and doesn’t like that she continues to improve her mind through books. When they are dumped off a cruise ship because Duncan has run out of funds, Bella seeks her own adventure in Paris.

Lanthimos and screenwriter Tony McNamara (who co-wrote “The Favourite”), adapting the novel by Alasdair Gray, create a fully realized and quite magical world, which opens in wonder in direct proportion to Bella’s ability to take it all in. It’s a clever trick Lanthimos and cinematographer Robbie Ryan (another alum of “The Favourite”) pull, using black and white, a boxy screen ratio and constricting fish-eye lens when Bella has a baby’s brain, then expanding the vista and the palette as her mind grows. The production design shows equal leaps in creativity, from the wrought-iron machinery of Dr. Baxter’s lab to the luxury of Lisbon.

Lanthimos also surrounds Stone with a colorful supporting cast. Dafoe and Ruffalo are both superb as the extreme personalities in Bella’s life, and Youssef’s calm as the wide-eyed Max balances them well. Other fascinating faces — in roles I won’t divulge here, so you can learn their surprises in turn — belong to Kathryn Hunter (from Joel Coen’s “The Tragedy of Macbeth”), the comedian Jerrod Carmichael, Margaret Qualley, Christopher Abbott and the German legend Hanna Schygulla.

It’s Stone’s performance, though, that brings the wonder of “Poor Things” into focus. She channels all the steps of Bella’s mental progression — from babbling babyhood to sublime intelligence — with precision and wit, but also with warmth and tenderness. Stone finds both the humor and the heartache of Bella’s unique perspective on the world and its people, and creates a performance that is in the stratosphere of acting. It’s a master class in the middle of a masterpiece.

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‘Poor Things’

★★★★

Opens Friday, December 22, in theaters. Rated R for strong and pervasive sexual content, graphic nudity, disturbing material, gore, and language. Running time: 141 minutes.