Buzz Blog

Bones and All **1/2
The central conceit in director Luca Guadagnino’s film—adapted by David Kajganich from Camille DeAngelis’s 2015 novel—is clearly an allegory for something; the question of what that something might be keeps this tale from being truly effective. Maren Yearly (Taylor Russell), a teenager living with her single father (André Holland), has a secret: She has an appetite for human flesh. And when her father finally abandons her, unable to deal with that secret, she heads out into the world to find there are others like her, including an older potential mentor (Mark Rylance) and a potential friend-and-maybe-more named Lee (Timothée Chalamet). Guadagnino proves himself to be a more adept director of suspense and body horror here than he did in his 2018 Suspiria remake, and gets the most out of all of his central performers (particularly a deeply unsettling Rylance). There’s also an interesting choice to set the story specifically in Reagan-era 1980s America, which should make it even clearer that Maren’s “aberration” might represent a queer identity, particularly given the bedroom eyes Maren gives to a female classmate at a sleepover before noshing on her finger. Yet it doesn’t quite seem to work to equate homosexuality with a behavior that literally kills other people, even taking into account the time frame’s connection to the early AIDS epidemic. And the quest for Maren’s mother feels like it’s more about understanding a family history of mental illness, which tracks less neatly with finding a community of others like yourself. The result is a movie that’s tense, moment-to-moment compelling and also kind of thematically frustrating. Available Nov. 23 in theaters. (R)

Devotion ***
A drama about U.S. Navy aviators featuring Glen Powell? No, you’re not experiencing Top Gun: Maverick dejá vu; this fact-based story is its own thing, with its own pleasures and flaws. In 1950, Navy pilot Lt. Tom Hudner (Powell) reports to a new assignment in Rhode Island. There among his new colleagues he finds Ens. Jesse Brown (Jonathan Majors), one of the U.S. military’s few Black pilots, who’s still proving himself in a freshly integrated field. The film’s biggest sigh of relief comes from the fact that this isn’t a narrative about Hudner learning Very Important Lessons about racism from Brown; indeed, Powell gets an entirely separate arc related to the FOMO experienced by those who missed out on WWII service, and feel somehow emasculated as a result. That’s an interesting angle, but one that doesn’t feel particularly well connected to Brown’s own intense commitment to justifying his presence among the other pilots. Devotion is undeniably strongest when focused on Brown’s story, whether it’s his relationship with his wife (Christina Jackson) or his sessions repeating into the mirror the slurs he’s endured as a self-motivation tool. Airborne action certainly plays a significant role as well—both as the pilots train, and once the Cold War heats up in Korea—and director J.D. Dillard delivers the meat-and-potatoes for those who want a sturdy war movie. And fortunately, despite the bumpy interaction between the two protagonists’ stories, Majors and Powell have the buddy chemistry to carry the movie along when the jets aren’t on their highway to the danger zone. Available Nov. 23 in theaters. (PG-13)

The Fabelmans ***
Autobiographical drama is precarious territory for any filmmaker, but Steven Spielberg manages to re-create the formative experiences of his childhood and youth in a way that’s generally satisfying, and only occasionally self-indulgent. Working with frequent collaborator Tony Kushner as co-screenwriter, Spielberg fictionalizes himself as Sam Fabelman (Mateo Zoryon Francis DeFord as a child, Gabriel LaBelle as a teenager), following him over more than a decade navigating the complex relationship between his parents Burt (Paul Dano) and Mitzi (Michelle Williams), moving across several states and his growing fascination with making movies. As entertaining as the scenes of teen Sam creating cinema with his buddies might be, and as much as the legendary Spielberg might have earned a little mythologizing of himself, it’s hard for them not feel a little “check me out creating special effects when I was 16” humblebrag-y. The narrative also proves, perhaps inevitably, to be a bit fragmented, including Judd Hirsch appearing for one showy scene as Sam’s flamboyant circus performer great-uncle, and a first romance with a Christian classmate played for odd laughs. It is, however, generally effective coming-of-age material, with Williams navigating her performance gracefully through Mitzi’s mental-health issues and Spielberg finding an intriguing through-line of Sam’s filmmaking as a way to exert control over the things that scare him—plus a great finale with one famous director in a cameo as another famous director. Spielberg has earned his “portrait of the artist as a young man,” and delivers it with plenty of charm. Available Nov. 23 in theaters. (PG-13)

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery ***1/2
See feature review. Available Nov. 23 in theaters; Dec. 23 via Netflix. (PG-13)

Strange World **1/2
Attaching a big, challenging message to a kid-friendly animated feature is a worthy notion in principle, but things get stickier when that message feels disconnected from the more conventional elements. This one is set in an isolated society called Avalonia, where a mysterious plant—discovered by Searcher Clade (Jake Gyllenhaal)—provides all the energy. When that plant begins dying off, Searcher joins a quest along with his own son Ethan (Jaboukie Young-White) to find the cause of the blight, discovering an underground world and his own long-missing explorer father Yeager (Dennis Quaid). It’s ultimately clear that there’s an environmental message in the story from director Don Hall (Big Hero 6) and co-director/writer Qui Nguyen (Raya and the Last Dragon), along with an intriguing idea about the seeming inevitability of fathers wanting their sons to be like them. But while both of those ideas are tenuously linked by the concept of needing to break out of narrow ways of thinking, that doesn’t feel particularly consistent with how matter-of-factly everyone deals with Ethan being gay. And the conclusion feels like a scramble to pull it all together after a story much more focused on the fantastical environments and creatures the Clades encounter, like the marketing-friendly cute blue blob Ethan befriends. As an adventure, it’s brightly colored, bold and generally entertaining; the part where it’s supposed to make you think just made me think about how it could have been done better. Available Nov. 23 in theaters. (PG)