Nope - Directed by Jordan Peele
Shifting gently from horror to science fiction, Jordan Peele’s latest evokes the work of Steven Spielberg and M. Night Shyamalan with must-see spectacle whose dots don’t all connect around its biggest ideas.
Peele’s Get Out leading man Daniel Kaluuya plays OJ Haywood, a rancher attempting to shepherd his family’s Hollywood legacy as horse wranglers into a new era when his father, Otis Sr. (Keith David), unexpectedly dies. Despite recruiting his self-promoting sister Emerald (Keke Palmer) as a mouthpiece to keep their business going, the Haywoods soon face the prospect of selling their ranch to their neighbor Ricky “Jupe” Park, a former child actor who already acquired several of their horses for his Western reenactment village. But when OJ confesses that he saw some kind of alien object in the sky, Emerald becomes determined to capture it on film—whatever it is—in order to earn enough money to save the ranch and burnish their fortunes. Purchasing a truckload of surveillance equipment at a local electronics store, OJ and Emerald recruit their salesperson, Angel (Brandon Perea), to install it around the ranch. But after Angel learns of their plans, he joins their ragtag team of supposed UFO-hunting documentarians—only for the three of them to make a discovery that confirms their suspicions, but also wildly exceeds their expectations, and threatens to risk their very lives in the process.
To say much more about Nope would be to spoil the slow-burn reveals that writer/director Peele keeps tucked in his back pocket. Within this sprawling conceit, he comments on the marginalization of Black talent and history in Hollywood, our obsession with celebrity, and, most pointedly, how we process human catastrophe as entertainment. In this film Peele’s ambition is on full display and his hands are steady.
Nope is now streaming on Peacock
The Fabelmans - Directed by Steven Spielberg
Because it’s directly inspired by the events of his adolescence, The Fabelmans is indisputably the most personal film of Steven Spielberg’s career—but only by a matter of degrees. The Fabelmans is a measured and incredibly intimate look at Spielberg’s upbringing as he developed his aptitude for storytelling through a medium that mesmerized him since the night he went to see The Greatest Show On Earth as a child.
From that fateful movie screening he was almost too afraid to attend, Sammy Fabelman (Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord as a 7-year-old, Gabriel LaBelle at 16) is obsessed with moviemaking. He recreates Greatest Show’s crash with his Hannukah gift of a train set, and quickly graduates to amateur productions starring his younger sisters Reggie (Julia Butters), Natalie (Keeley Karsten), and Lisa (Sophia Kopera) in a variety of genres. His mother Mitzi (Michelle Williams), a concert pianist-turned-housewife, nurtures his gifts and loves his films, while his father Burt (Paul Dano), a computer engineer, politely tolerates them as a hobby before expecting him to move on to more serious endeavors. When Burt asks him to edit together a film about a family trip to alleviate Mitzi’s grief over the loss of a loved one, Sammy discovers details about his mother that shatters his already-uneven sense of comfort in the dysfunctional Fabelman household.
There’s a scene in which young Sammy, after being bullied at his new school for being Jewish, valorizes his athletic, popular classmate, Logan (Sam Rechner) in a student film about a senior class trip. The young man should be thrilled—his friends and fellow students justifiably look at him like a hero—but he’s unsettled enough to confront Sammy about it afterwards, almost feeling bad for the hagriographic depiction. Sammy can’t explain why he cut the film that way, but the fact that he turned a triumphant moment into a mirror reflecting Logan’s own insecurities speaks to how Spielberg, and film itself, can capture the essence of a character or a moment, and cut into it further than a critique. The Fabelmans is a nostalgic depiction of his family that unearths pain and discomfort, and a refashioning of real events to extract more profound truths. We should all be so lucky, and fearless, to be able to look at our lives in the same way, but until then Spielberg is thankfully here to do it for us.
The Fabelmans is is available to rent now.
This Much I Know To Be True - Directed by Andrew Dominik
More than a mere concert movie, the excellent This Much I Know to Be True is a collaboration between three artists—Nick Cave, Warren Ellis, and filmmaker Andrew Dominik. The director worked with Cave before on the stunning One More Time with Feeling and continues what feels more like an artistic union than simply a musical document. Once again, he captures how Cave and Ellis almost seem like they’re channeling something bigger than themselves. Cave always felt like an old-fashioned conjurer, someone who allowed the spirit to move him on his early albums with the Bad Seeds. Since the tragic death of his son in 2015, his music has found a different register, something that seems to be grappling with existence and meaning in ways that musicians rarely do. His most recent albums with The Bad Seeds (the masterpiece Ghosteen) and just Ellis (Carnage) come to life in this film, shot on location in London and Brighton.
Some of the best moments in “This Much I Know to Be True” reveal the organic nature of Cave & Ellis’ process, in which they work on songs in a way that's more like pulling them out of the air instead of it being put on the page. More than the previous Cave films, “This Much I Know to Be True” clarifies the dynamic between Cave & Ellis, and how essential the latter is to these songs.
There are carefully considered interludes between the songs of “This Much I Know to Be True.” In one, Cave discusses his work with The Red Hand Files, a way that he communicates with his fans about his work, his grief, and the meaning of life. Cave says that the project has made him a better man, and one can see that in his work. For Cave, and a lot of artists and other sensitive souls, life is a search for truth. I read the title of this film as a reflection of that endeavor. All Nick Cave knows to be true is in his art, the music that digs deep into emotional reservoirs for both the performer and the listener to find something that can’t be expressed any other way. That’s a special kind of truth.
This Much I Know to Be True is streaming on MUBI
Top Gun: Maverick - Directed by Joseph Kosinski
By accident or design, a significant part of Tom Cruise’s early career was dominated by roles in which he was fighting to achieve self-actualization or independence from the reputation of his father or a father figure. Top Gun: Maverick gives Tom Cruise the biggest full-circle moment of his career, and not just because it tells the ultimate story of a student becoming the teacher: as the film’s lead and its producer, he shepherds a new generation of actors through their early steps towards stardom while burnishing his own legacy in the process.
Top Gun: Maverick exceeds the original technically, while circumventing naked jingoism in an era when depictions of the military can (or maybe should) no longer be unambiguously celebratory. Joe Kosinski (Tron: Legacy) matches his well-established architectural precision with suitably nostalgic but never pandering emotionality, while Cruise commands the screen in a performance that leverages his multimillion-dollar star wattage to brighten the entire film.
Cruise reprises his role as Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, the hot Top Gun graduate who burned out as a teacher two months after the end of the first film and spent the next three and a half decades repeatedly sabotaging his career with one act of rule-breaking aerial rebellion after another. When his gig as a test pilot ends with record speed and a crashed plane, Maverick receives orders to return to Top Gun and train a group of overconfident aviators for a mission to destroy a heavily defended weapons factory.
Maverick agrees, in lieu of a dishonorable discharge, but soon discovers that Rooster (Miles Teller), the disgruntled son of his former co-pilot Goose, is among the trainees. Unsure how best to prepare the reticent young pilot for a mission that requires absolute self-assurance, Maverick attempts to mend fences with Rooster while watching him compete with classmates like Hangman (Glen Powell), who shows none of Rooster’s hesitation—nor his compassion, a different kind of weakness. As the deadline for the mission nears, Maverick trains Rooster, Hangman, and the other pilots with increasing urgency, hoping they will rise to his unconventional challenges, while taking a hard look at his own accomplishments as reflected through his students’ failures and successes.
Top Gun: Maverick finally and fully immortalizes the titular character and Tom Cruise himself as the best among equals, but not just because there’s seemingly nothing he can’t do in an airplane. Rather, the real lesson he imparts is that the best talent to cultivate—in the military or anywhere else—is becoming a good wingman, and even more than his character, Tom Cruise does that better than just about anyone.
Top Gun: Maverick is available to stream on Paramount +