
Aaron Taylor-Johnson in Kraven the Hunter
KRAVEN THE HUNTER
Having sat through, and stayed awake for, Madame Web, Morbius, and three Venoms, I'd be among the first to cheer the death of Sony's Spider-Man(-free) Universe series. But I'm not sure that Kraven the Hunter should be the thing that kills it. Like its five SSU predecessors, director J.C. Chandor's action adventure is bad – sometimes stupefyingly so, as when our chief antagonist bellows “KRA-VEEEENNNNN!!!” in frustrated rage and doesn't have the decency to also shake his fist at the heavens. Still, there's just enough deranged eccentricity on display to suggest a plausible way forward if Sony could work out its many, many storytelling issues. I can't admit that Kraven the Hunter is the best comic-book flick of 2024 without gagging … yet I may be able to live with myself if I instead say that, given the competition, it might be the least terrible.
Even if you have no earthly idea who the titular Marvel figure is, it probably won't surprise you to learn that the guy has spent the last 60 years as a Spider-Man adversary, because turning print villains into movie heroes is just one of those things Sony does. And because most audiences are presumably unfamiliar with the character, I guess it makes sense that Kraven the Hunter would so fully drown itself in exposition that it practically forgets to include a narrative. As we discover in a 20-minute (!) flashback near the film's start, Kraven was initially Sergei, a nice boy whose half-brother was the equally nice Dmitri and whose father was the sadistic drug lord Nikolai. (In originating this clan, comic-book creators Stan Lee and Steve Ditko evidently opened a Russian baby-name book and stopped after the three most popular choices.) Mauled by a charging lion while on safari, teen Sergei would likely have died were it not for a magical potion given to him by the African native Calypso, a nice girl whose name we can't forget because her grandmother addresses her as “Calypso” about 10 times in the span of a minute. The potion not only heals Sergei but gives him extraordinary strength and agility, intensely acute hearing and vision, and an ability, à la Dr. Doolittle, to effectively talk to the animals. It also instills in him a feverish desire to rid the world of poachers, particularly if they remind Sergei/Kraven of his viciously domineering father.
But even though Nikolai is played by that reliably uncured ham Russell Crowe, whose growling Moose-and-Squvirrel readings are sources of endless amusement, he apparently isn't enough bad guy for two-hours-and-change of cinematic spectacle. So Kraven the Hunter's trio of screenwriters provide a couple of additional nemeses besides – and thank God for that. One of them is an assassin known as the Foreigner, whose questionable powers find him able to immobilize people with his eyes … for a full three seconds. When you include the Foreigner's wardrobe of sleek, fitted turtlenecks and his habit of never speaking above a stage whisper, a Thanos he ain't. Christopher Abbott, however, plays this suave loon with understated charisma and unquantifiable weirdness; you wish he were around more often. His opposite number comes in the form of Alessandro Nivola's Rhino, who, as you might expect, has the ability to morph into a bulletproof human-rhinoceros hybrid. His accent (when he remembers to incorporate one) as thick as Crowe's, Nivola goes so over the top that he leaves you slack-jawed, at one point unleashing a strangled shriek that makes him resemble a more ferocious version of Munch's The Scream. I've never seen or heard anything like it, and if Chandor's film were nothing but Nivola, Crowe, and Abbott going to town on their nutball characterizations, it's hard to imagine anyone leaving the SSU's latest at all disappointed.
Alas, there's also a hero to contend with, and an especially dreary one at that. Aaron Taylor-Johnson rarely exudes much in the way of screen personality, but he appears utterly lost as Kraven, largely because no one seems to have figured out who this dude is. Portraying a sardonic wiseacre who's also a feral beast who's also a low-key charmer who's also a brutal killer who's also a raging egomaniac who's also a noble protector of animals, Taylor-Johnson is forced to play so many warring attributes that he never succeeds – he can't succeed – at creating a whole, believable person. Consequently, when Kraven's life is at stake, nothing is at stake, and the actor is only truly engaging when in voiceless motion or, as you sense he prefers, lack of motion. (It's a good thing that Kraven keeps his shirt on for most of the movie's length, or patrons would be tempted to ignore the goings-on completely and spend all their time counting Taylor-Johnson's abs.)
As half-brother Dmitri, an eerily convincing mimic who will apparently become the villainous Chameleon, Fred Hechinger does what he can to tease out some playfulness in his co-star, but it's a losing battle, and the guy has enough on his plate just trying to make Dmitri less of a simpering dolt. (Much of the nominal storyline is devoted to the character's kidnapping, but as with the fate of Kraven himself, your only reasonable response to the crisis is “Whatever.”) Meanwhile, don't get me started on what Ariana DeBose doesn't bring to the party. As the adult Calypso, the West Side Story Oscar winner reads her lines as if from a faraway teleprompter for the very first time, and at no point is she convincing as the high-powered attorney in shoulder pads she's meant to be. DeBose does, though, get to deliver the biggest howler in Kraven the Hunter's entire script – one ranking right up there with Madame Web's mom-researching-spiders-in-the-Amazon classic – when she ends a tribute to her grandma by saying, “She died not long after that, and I never saw her again.” Ummm … yeah. That's kinda the way it works, sweetie.
A few of the action sequences here are legitimately entertaining, and one of them – an extended chase that finds barefoot Kraven keeping up with a speeding vehicle when he's not scaling, descending, and leaping from skyscrapers – might've been a genre classic if its visuals were stronger. But even when Kraven the Hunter is resolutely not-awful, more often than not, it's still laughably crummy … though I do give it credit for at least making me laugh. I couldn't have been the only viewer who audibly giggled when mean ol' Nikolai pulled Sergei from his boarding school because “America has made you soft,” only to take him to that alpha-male epicenter known as the English countryside. And it took all my will not to roar when Sergei told Calypso that “Kraven” is a moniker he came up with himself, stressing that it was spelled with a “k,” and not the “c” that would make his name synonymous with “cowardly.” It's hard to tell if there's an intentional joke in there. It was Kraven's reveal, though, that really tickled me: He gave himself a nickname. People who do that have imposed names of their own. They're called “losers.”
NIGHTBITCH, MARIA, QUEER, and FLOW
In a few short days, whichever area auditoriums aren't still housing Moana 2 and Wicked will mostly be filled with a pair of additional titles boasting recognizable IP: Mufasa: The Lion King and Sonic the Hedgehog 3. Considering that they're targeting the same demographic, I'm mildly surprised that the two are opening against one another, but regardless – that's gonna be a lo-o-o-o-ot of big-budgeted family-friendliness in release. We haven't been overrun quite yet, however, and over the past five days, I caught a quartet of smaller-scale movies – all of them recently Golden Globe-nominated – designed with adult audiences in mind. Even the animated one about a heroic feline seemed geared more toward grownups than kids … which, at the screening I attended, was probably quite a shock to the kids, to say nothing of the grownups who brought them.
Not that all of these films necessarily worked for me, although the one that didn't quite work the most – writer/director Marielle Heller's Nightbitch – was frequently the most endearing of the bunch. An adaptation of Rachel Yoder's acclaimed 2019 novel, this provocatively titled piece of magical realism casts Amy Adams as its unnamed Mother, a formerly daring visual artist trying in vain to accept her new life as a suburban stay-at-home mom to a precocious boy toddler. Though she has given plenty of frank, fierce performances over the years, casting Adams in anything inherently ups its adorability, and the cuteness is blasted into the stratosphere by twin siblings Arleigh and Emmett Snowden, who trade acting duties as the similarly unnamed Son. Even when this tyke is making unholy messes around the house and refusing to let his mother have a moment's rest, you can't help but find his every action and (largely) unscripted utterance a total delight. Happily, Adams clearly feels the same way. While much of the narrative concerns Mother's soul-killing misery over her parental obligations – anguish that begins to manifest itself when she (maybe?) starts turning into a dog – Adams still reflexively giggles and beams whenever one of the Snowdens does something unexpected and joyous, as any loving parent would. Despite her fundamental sadness and frustration, Mother is obviously over-the-moon crazy about her child, and wouldn't take back his birth for an instant. Unfortunately, as a movie experience, that doesn't leave many places for Nightbitch to go.
In truth, and without having read Yoder's novel, Heller's latest (currently playing at Davenport's The Last Picture House) doesn't even feel like a movie so much as a visualized replication of a book – much like what Wes Anderson was up to in last year's Roald Dahl adaptations for Netflix, but with less in the way of structure. There's certainly a lot of incident: Mother befriends a group of fellow moms in a library's Book Babies club; she expresses quiet hostility around her kindly yet obtuse husband (Scoot McNairy's Husband); she grows errant hairs and fangs and a sextet of extra nipples. But there's no real story, and long segments are devoted to Mother, either in voice-over or in the flesh, expounding on complicated facets of womanhood and motherhood – lovely, beautifully written and acted passages that still don't do much to further the narrative, or even suggest a narrative. Although quite a bit of Heller's dark comedy is intentionally repetitive, rife as it is with montages of Mother and Son repeating the same domestic rituals day after day after day, Nightbitch also begins to feel redundant as Mother becomes more animalistic. We realize fairly early on that her growing transformation into a dog is merely metaphorical, so the film is copiously devoid of threat, and all we can really do is wait for the pressure on Mother to reach its breaking point and for her to realize what even we childless viewers intrinsically get: This woman needs to take time for self-care.
There's a lot that I liked about the film, most essentially Adams. Because the role of Mother seems so custom-built for her talents and presence – her exterior sunniness and friendliness camouflaging deep intelligence and hints of dissatisfaction – it would be easy to take her first-rate portrayal for granted. Yet she's unerringly fine despite not playing a character so much as a series of eloquent talking points, and I loved seeing the great, sorely underemployed Jessica Harper in the minor role of a town librarian whose interior life proves as rich as her countenance is brittle. After an incredibly promising opening half-hour, though, Nightbitch becomes more and more stagnant, and you could feel the collective enthusiasm of the Last Picture House viewers diminishing as the movie progressed. By the time the closing credits rolled, I found myself slightly annoyed that this almost literal shaggy-dog saga needed to be two hours long. Then I looked at my phone, and realized I had overestimated the running length by nearly 30 minutes. Woof.
Unlike Nightbitch, director Pablo Larraín's and screenwriter Steven Knight's bio-drama Maria, which debuted on Netflix last Wednesday, wasn't a film that didn't quite work for me. It didn't work at all – not as biography, not as drama, not as historical “What if?” in the manner of Larraín's Jackie and Spencer, and definitely not as a return to serious-actor grandeur for its star Angelina Jolie. As in those aforementioned, largely fictitious explorations into the psyches of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy and Princess Diana of Wales, it's Maria Callas who's put under the microscope here, the film taking place in the days before her fatal 1977 heart attack (at age 53), and after illness, pills, and a sadness more accurately resembling ennui effectively ended her career. Knight's conceit finds Callas enduring the pushy, mumbly questions of Kodi Smit-McPhee's intrepid journalist, and as soon as you realize that this man has the same name – Mandrax – as Maria's favored sedative (the drug's brand name was Quaalude), it becomes depressingly obvious what we're in for: a hallucination-fueled traipse through the life and times of the 20th century's most admired and feared operatic diva. If only we learned something! Or if any of it were the least bit engaging!
A number of people I know were deeply off-put by both Jackie and Spencer, particularly with Larraín's effrontery in turning tragic episodes from these broadly worshiped figures' lives into edgy psychological thrillers. (They also routinely had horror-flick undertones; I still haven't recovered from the sight of Kristen Stewart, as Lady Di, forced to swallow the oversize pearls submerged in her soup.) Those folks might well enjoy Maria, because hallucinatory images aside, it is nothing if not a stodgy, formulaic bio-pic boasting the sort of blatantly prosaic dialogue that eschews subtlety in favor of scripted fraudulence. (“What did you take?” asks Maria's butler, referring to her drug consumption. “I took liberties, all my life,” she snaps back, dodging the question with characteristic insufferability.) But Larraín's latest manages the unhappy trick of being both poorly written and unilluminating, as we never learn what beyond money might have conceivably drawn Callas to either her husband Giovanni (Alessandro Bressanello) or her lover Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer), or what her vocal practice was like, or how it felt to be so revered, Jolie's mannequin-like performance a case of one imperious untouchable impersonating another. It's like a cinematic take on a People magazine photo essay. The production design is gorgeous, the costumes exquisite, Callas' singing – which Jolie lip-syncs decently enough – divine, and I couldn't freaking wait for the turgid drudgery of Maria to end.
Far stranger and more satisfying is Queer, director Luca Guadagnino's adaptation of a William S. Burroughs novel that absolutely suggests a blend of the former's Call Me by Your Name and the latter's Naked Lunch. Because it's a Guadagnino (and one with a script by his Challengers screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes), you know from the start that the movie will be stylish, horny, and determinedly Not for Everyone. Because it's a Burroughs, you know it'll be also be grubby, druggy, and determinedly Not for Everyone. Yet while this wild, impassioned fever dream about unrequited love may not be an unqualified success, it's easily more adventurous and exciting than 90 percent of what 2024 has offered us, and it lets star Daniel Craig continue to distance himself from James Bond in ways that feel fresh and deliriously unexpected.
Here, Craig plays American expatriate William Lee, a debauched smoothie whose life of easy sex and copious drug and alcohol consumption in 1950s Mexico City is disrupted by the arrival of Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey, alluring and opaque), a young, Southern GI and fellow expat who quickly becomes William's entire reason for living. After he finally musters the courage to proposition the man, William and Eugene become lovers … at least until the latter abruptly cuts things off, resulting in an obsession that the older man can shake no easier than heroin. What follows is a tale of obsession as William pines for (and occasionally beds) Eugene in Mexico City before convincing the GI to join him on a drug-seeking expedition in South America, where, even for a Burroughs, things start getting really freaky.
Last week, for about the zillionth time, I re-watched Sidney Lumet's Deathtrap – that 1982 mystery comedy most famous/notorious for Michael Caine sharing a romantic kiss with a bare-chested Christopher Reeve. At the time, and still today, it looked like no one was having more fun ditching the shackles of his heroic alter ego more than Reeve, who appeared thunderously happy to trade Superman's tights for a gay lip-lock, homicidal tendencies, and form-fitting sweaters. In the Knives Out films and random detours such as Steven Soderbergh's Logan Lucky, it seems as though Daniel Craig is having an equally epic blast shucking off 007 – and the great time continues with Queer. Sweaty and stumbling in his rumpled linen suits, and boasting a pitch-perfect American accent that sounds regionally accurate without your gleaning precisely which region, Craig's William is a loquacious kick, his words tumbling out of the wannabe novelist's mouth before, it seems, he's had time to think them through. He's all desperate need and pathetic scheming, and as such, tragicomically irresistible. As embarrassed as Eugene oftentimes is by William, you understand why he keeps returning to the guy, and for reasons that extend beyond the sex and opportune meal ticket. William, for all of his failings, is genuinely enjoyable company, and so is his portrayer, from whom no failings are apparent.
As with many a Burroughs, the wheels eventually fall off the wagon, and Guadagnino's latest gets a bit lost in its rambling travelogue that, in the manner of so many druggy projects, appears to want to say something significant without knowing exactly what that might be … and taking a long time doing so. Much as I fought the impulse, I got a bit bored. But Queer's director still delivers a feast of ravishing imagery – one South American encounter between William and Eugene is like witnessing sexual alignment in the form of body horror – and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross supply ones of their signature evocative scores, this one augmented by wonderfully anachronistic song selections by the likes of Nirvana and Prince. Plus, after treating us to a wholly unrecognizable Tilda Swinton in his 2018 remake of Suspiria, Guadignino doubles down this time, not merely giving us a “What happened to him?!” Jason Schwartzman, but a Lesley Manville whom I only recognized because I knew in advance that she was in the film. Good lord, though, does the traditionally elegant Brit look a mess as a backwoods shaman, and you'd feel bad about her many hours spent in the makeup chair if Manville's performance, like Craig's, didn't indicate that she was having the disreputable time of her life.
After seeing and adoring The Wild Robot a few months ago, I couldn't conceive that any other title might nab the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, much as I didn't after Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse debuted in 2023. But we remember what eventually happened, right? Hayao Miyazaki's Japanese The Boy & the Heron came along to knock the wind out of Spidey's sails and deprive it the prize … and a similar result might now occur with director/co-writer Gints Zilbalodis' Flow, a Latvian adventure that's currently racking up film-critics accolades right and left. For now, I'm thinking The Wild Robot still has this one in the bag; Miyazaki's movie, after all, was a considerable box-office hit, and Zilbalodis' is still mostly consigned to specialty houses. (Both Flow and Queer are currently playing at Iowa City's twinned FilmScene venues – though ironically, I actually caught both in a weekend double feature at one AMC in Barrington, Illinois.) Yet the possibility of a Flow upset looms, and it would be a deserved one, because this thing is truly one of a kind.
In Zilbalodis' and co-writer Matïss Kaža's epic in miniature, we're never informed precisely when or where we are. All we know is that whatever world we're in, there are human imprints even though no humans are ever seen, and the landscape is flooded – for either the first or thousandth time – so that animals are the only visible signs of flesh-and-blood life. Enter our unnamed protagonist, a canny black cat who, for the film's 85 minutes, attempts to survive the biblical flooding and related turmoils with the assistance of a growing assemblage of fellow creatures: a feisty Labrador retriever, a possessive lemur, a wounded secretary bird, and a sleepy capybara. Without a word of dialogue spoken, and with the animals and bird behaving almost precisely how actual animals and birds do, that's the whole movie. I cannot begin to tell you how close to tears I was practically throughout.
Although the critters are rendered with a refreshing, old-school artificiality that makes the 3D CGI effects appear hand-drawn, their landscapes are almost stunningly realistic, and the “camera” appears to function as a real-world hand-held the way it does in particularly high-quality video games. You could place human actors in front of these vistas and be completely fooled by the ruse. Technical marvels aside, though, Flow is wholly gripping on an emotional level. Deprived of conversation, and with only a few examples of anthropomorphism – as when the bird steers a sailboat and the cat coughs up a hairball in obvious disgust with a fellow traveler – we come to know our brave, industrious quintet solely through naturalistic action and response, as well as the beautiful sounds they make (taken from recordings of actual animals). We are, in short, laser-focused on every minute change in timbre and bearing, and consequently know in our bones how it feels when, say, the lemur loses his cherished heirloom, or when a group of dickish canines greedily devour the fish that our cat spent hours procuring.
Even at under an hour-and-a-half, I'd argue that Zilbalodis' film is still a trifle too long; there's a bit of dramatic lethargy in the midsection, and while events on the sailboat are meant to be somewhat tedious, I'm not sure that necessitated that the movie itself needed to briefly turn tedious. Yet taken overall, Flow is a sublime experiment in non-verbal storytelling, one that boasts a tremendously expressive score by the director and co-composer Rihards Zalupe, and one that also might provide more for thoughtful adults than their young charges. While I empathized with the nearby boy at my screening who reacted to the film's perfect yet sudden and rather painful finale with “What happened?!”, I had a ready-made response for him. “Melancholy happened, kid. You'll understand it soon enough.”