Anthony Mackie in Captain America: Brave New World
CAPTAIN AMERICA: BRAVE NEW WORLD
I don't necessarily mind that, more often than not, new Marvel Studios movies require me to do homework. What bothers me is how often they make me do homework twice.
Because I don't want to enter these things completely clueless (and because I'm a weekly TV guest expected to offer plot synopses of debuting releases), I always do some preliminary Wikipedia rummaging, trying my best to re-acquaint myself with characters and narrative threads and words such as “adamantium” and “tesseract.” Yet it's amazing how often my screenings lead to me racing back to my laptop to comprehend precisely what I saw. And even though the storyline in Captain America: Brave New World, as these things go, is fairly easy to follow, I did leave director Julius Onah's superhero action-adventure with my usual bunch of questions. Among the queries this time were “Is Samuel Sterns someone I'm supposed to remember from a previous installment?”, “What's Liv Tyler doing here?”, and “If the Captain America and Falcon costumes both have wings attached, why are these guys spending a whole day driving to West Virginia?”
My guess is you'll have more fun with Brave New World if you saw the Disney+ series The Falcon & the Winter Soldier, which I didn't, and if you remember 2008's The Incredible Hulk, which I don't. As I refuse to add Disney+ to my streaming menu, I'll take the heat for that first lapse. But considering that the Hulk flick was only the second MCU film and we're now on number 35, won't most non-obsessives be similarly in the dark regarding that sophomore entry's salient details? Not for nothing, but wasn't the casting switch from Edward Norton to Mark Ruffalo also a sign that Marvel wanted us to forget about The Incredible Hulk? No matter. Tim Blake Nelson's Samuel Sterns, a puke-green baddie with his brains on the outside, was evidently an antagonist in that one, and is back to cause mind-control mayhem here. Liv Tyler was Bruce Banner's ex-girlfriend Betty Ross in '08, but she only shows up for one scene this time around, so there's little point in recalling her. As for the driving-rather-than-flying thing, you're on your own. Let's presume it's for the same reason that Tom Cruise characters park their cars far away from danger so we can watch him run toward his destinations really, really fast: It passes the time.
All told, Onah's movie is a moderately diverting time-passer. And happily, events never get more perplexing than in the opening sequence, an assault of incomprehensible special-ops noise involving either the stealing or reclaiming of classified materials in Mexico, and one in which Giancarlo Esposito pops up – seemingly just to confuse me about whether his Sidewinder was another Marvel figure I was expected to remember. (To my relief, this was Esposito's/Sidewinder's MCU debut, though we're definitely seen this villain before … on Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul.) Yet even the headache of the prelude gives us the eternally amusing sight of our good Captain's shield causing patriotic havoc as it zips through the air, and most of Brave New World's most entertaining elements boast similar zing.
Not having watched him on Disney+, I greatly enjoyed my first exposure to Danny Ramirez as the new Falcon; the eager, endearing Ramirez has sharp comic timing and plays beautifully off Anthony Mackie's newly recruited Captain America Sam Wilson. When his hero isn't burdened by an abundance of soul-searching, Mackie himself brings an elegant cool to his role, while Carl Lumbley (also from TF&tWS) exudes a grave, hard-won authority as super-strong Korean War vet Isaiah Bradley. And even though the visuals are rather sketchy, Onah comes through with a moderately exciting aerial assault, although the director's staging choices are far less commendable on land. When there's an attempt on the president's life and Bradley appears to be the chief perpetrator, I didn't realize until several scenes later that he was merely one of several would-be killers – the compositions in the assassination attempt were so muddled I thought those other guys were simply firing at Bradley.
Speaking of the film's president, you probably know that he's played by Harrison Ford, and might also know that his character Thaddeus Ross was the MCU's former Army general and Secretary of State portrayed by the late William Hurt. In Ross' early scenes, Ford brings his usual gruff, growly nonchalance to the part, and despite the man spending too much time reiterating bland pronouncements about an impending treaty, it's nice to have him around. But despite his traditional ease, Ford isn't exactly subtle – it's hard not to dwell on what the more nuanced Hurt might've done with Ross' duties here – and because he's enacted variants on “increasingly enraged” a million times before, there's neither pathos nor even much interest when the actor goes full Red Hulk. All we can do is witness the dully inevitable destruction and wait for Ross' inner softie to stop and smell the cherry blossoms, an anticipated bit of eye-rolling sentimentality that turns into a comic misdirection before the schmaltz proves to be genuine. Captain America: Brave New World is by no means top-tier Marvel, yet it'll do until the 36th offering rolls around in (checks watch …) 74 days, If I start my Wikipedia research now, that should give me just enough time to prepare.
PADDINGTON IN PERU
Second sequels are notoriously tough to pull off, so it's little surprise that Paddington in Peru isn't the unreserved kick that the 2014 and 2017 films are, especially considering writer/director Paul King isn't back this time (though he retains a “story by” co-credit), and neither is Sally Hawkins, who provided invaluable eccentricity, wistfulness, and warmth as our heroic bear's adoptive mother Mary Brown. The role is filled here by Emily Mortimer, who's certainly genial enough. But in no way is she as singularly inspired as her predecessor, and although Hawkins reportedly left the series on nothing but good terms, it was a little heartbreaking to see her scrubbed from all the family photos in the Brown home. The filmmakers can pretend that Mortimer was there the whole time, but we fans know better.
Paddington, too, is his own kind of mild bummer. Though we do see him wrestle with a hammock and engage in a goofy photo-booth session, the added years have mellowed our raincoat-wearing cub, and he's no longer the consistent slapstick pleasure of adventures past. He is, dare I say, responsible now, with the legal British citizenship to prove it, and although Ben Whishaw's vocals remain things of indisputable calm and beauty, it's more than a little odd to see Paddington cast as the grounded, sensible straight man in one of his joyously buffoonish adventures. For the expected lunacy, we instead have to turn to Antonio Banderas and Olivia Colman – and thankfully, they deliver more than enough zeal to make director Dougal Wilson's followup, despite its occasional disappointments, a thorough delight.
The plot sends the Brown clan – Paddington, Mary, Henry (Hugh Bonneville), now-teenage Judy and Jonathan (Madeleine Harris and Samuel Joslin), and housekeeper Mrs. Bird (Julie Walters) – to Peru initially to cheer up the cub's depressed Aunt Lucy (Imelda Staunton), and then to find her when she's reported missing from the Home for Retired Bears. Unlike the series' predecessors that overflowed with wonderfully random verbal and visual gags, Paddington in Peru is a full-scale comedic adventure, this one in the vein of Indiana Jones. There's even an oversize rolling boulder that our hero, twice, has to evade, and we're also treated to rolling rapids and magical bracelets and a search for the lost city of gold El Dorado. It's all perfectly acceptable and not terribly imaginative. But we do get Banderas as swarthy riverboat captain Hunter Cabot, and as added treats, Banderas as the ghosts of numerous ancestral Cabots, a collection of charmingly accented treasure-seekers who act as ever-present devils on Hunter's shoulder. Though he's also stuck with an unfortunately winsome subplot involving Hunter's daughter Gina (Carla Tous), Banderas is clearly having a blast as these ne'er-do-wells, and keeps the energy chugging along even during the movie's lulls.
What Colman offers, however, is almost beyond description. Some of us were already chomping at the bit to see the Oscar winner in full nun regalia as the Reverend Mother of Aunt Lucy's retirement home, a guitar in her hand, a song in her heart, and an expression of manic cheerfulness on her mug. You might think Colman's comic electricity would reach its apex in the Sound of Music-esque number that finds her twirling in the Peruvian Andes, throwing her guitar in the air, and singing for an inordinately long time before the instrument finally makes a safe landing. But Colman's portrayal grows funnier and more hysterically unsettling with her every appearance, her popping eyes and freakishly taut smile not conveying joy so much as batshit-crazy intensity, and I think I laughed for a full 30 seconds when Reverend Mother claimed not to be acting suspicious by acting like the most suspicious human on earth. Undeniably sweet and watchable as it is, Paddington in Peru isn't the consistent high of entries past. But whenever Olivia Colman is around, it's at least as divinely hilarious as it was when Hugh Grant's Phoenix Buchanan was stealing scenes right and left, making you hope, pray, that these two off-the-leash talents (and Wonka veterans!) will find each other in a future Paddington tale with their loons at the center. The bear can come along if he wants.
2025 OSCAR-NOMINATED SHORT FILMS: ANIMATED AND LIVE ACTION
For the second year running, the kind proprietors at Davenport venue The Last Picture House hosted screenings of the five Academy Award nominees for Best Animated Short and Best Live-Action Short (with the nominees for Documentary Short, currently unseen by me, presently playing alongside the other Oscar hopefuls at Iowa City's FilmScene at the Chauncey). As per usual with these things, they present a grab bag of the sublime, the terrific, the decent, and the questionable. As opposed to last year, however, I'm relieved to say there isn't an all-out dud to be found. With any luck, 2024's animated winner War Is Over: Inspired by the Music of John & Yoko will have taken care of us for the foreseeable future.
Unlike a year ago, when the Animated Shorts program opened with what was perhaps the weakest consideration of the bunch – though, as John & Yoko proved, not the weakest film of the bunch – the 2025 presentation begins with director Daisuke Nishio's Japanese-language Magic Candies. It may be the least of this year's Academy crop, but it's in no way unworthy. Nishio's charming fantasy follows a young, introverted boy who, in his quest for new marbles, secures a half-dozen facsimiles from his local candy vendor and finds that, by sucking on them, he can enjoy conversations with the previously uncommunicable: his father, his dog, his sofa. Despite the solid fart jokes, it's all rather obvious and annoyingly shrieky. But Nishio's impressively rendered 21-minute outing is also offhandedly sweet, especially when the titular treats lead to our protagonist Dong-Dong hugging his strict yet loving dad from behind and deciding what to do in face of the rare flavorless candy. It's the most forgettable of this year's contenders – proving just how good the 2024 field really is.
For more than half its 20-minute length, I was worried that directors Hossein Molayemi's and Shirin Sohani's Iranian entry In the Shadow of the Cypress wouldn't even match the pretty-good-ness of Magic Candies. Despite the lovely hand-drawn visuals that occasionally engage in magical realism, this dialogue-free short remains frustratingly cagey about the relationship between its tormented former sea captain and the unappreciated, occasionally abused woman he lives with – a far more sympathetic soul who tends to a suffering, beached whale. (It actually took Wikipedia to learn that the old man's companion was his daughter, not his wife.) Yet the puzzle pieces gradually fall into place, and Molayemi's and Sohani's film ends on a beautiful climactic image that underlines the hugeness of PTSD while demonstrating a gentle, if difficult, way forward. I didn't love this short throughout, but by the end, I was undeniably moved.
It's tempting to call the program's third entry, writer/director Loïc Espuche's French-language Yuck!, a nonstop smile, but that wouldn't be entirely accurate. This 13-minute winner is more like a nonstop mile-wide grin. Set in a vacation trailer park where a quintet of tykes spend their time “Ewwww!”-ing over the kissing, or near-kissing, of everyone from their parents to nearby senior citizens, our young hero Léo finds himself drawn to a cute neighbor girl whose lips, like those of all of the romantics he encounters, glow with a shiny pink hue. (Léo is so cognizant of romantic attraction that he even sees it in a couple of teen boys bonding over YouTube sports videos.) Yuck! may be a slight and predictable thing, but it's lovingly executed, and should elicit a truckload of memories for anyone who ever knew, in the depths of their soul, that their unspoken, unbridled affection for someone else was clearly visible on their face.
Following the presentation of Yuck!, a title card informed us that the two animated shorts ahead would feature nudity, and probably shouldn't be viewed by anyone under the age of 14. (My mind instantly went to Meryl Streep's Death Becomes Her reaction after Isabella Rossellini alerted her to the serum's side effects: “Now a warning?!”) My easy favorite of this year's Animated Short nominees, Wander to Wonder is director Nina Gantz's stop-motion-animated saga of three six-inch-tall humanoids who, in the 1980s, spent their careers as costumed playthings in a cheesy TV series for preschoolers. Now the program host (an actual human played by Neil Salvage) has died, and his stiff corpse is lying on the workshop floor drawing flies, and his three half-foot co-stars don't know what the hell to do, or how to get the hell out. If the late, great David Lynch were to fashion an unauthorized sequel to Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, it would no doubt look something like this.
I can't begin to detail how funny and upsetting Gantz's 14-minute short is. Well, maybe I can suggest the funny, at least, by saying that my fellow Last Picture House patrons chuckled every time one of the mini-men showed up naked, demonstrating that animated penises, just like real ones, are abjectly hilarious. The upsetting part lies in the presentation. Obviously unmoored and clearly starving, our minute protagonists while away the time making new VHS tapes they hope, hopelessly, will reach other eyeballs. And what results in Wander to Wonder is a tragicomic and almost viscerally aching blend of found (animated) footage, industriousness, and desperate self-preservation, topped off with the smallest modicum of hope. I deeply want this thing, which just won its category at the British Academy of Film & Television Awards, to nab the Oscar. Were I a voter, I'd be tempted to make it my write-in choice for Best Picture.
Then again, if program finale Beautiful Men won Best Animated Short instead, I'd be hard-pressed to bitch. Writer/director Nicolas Keppens' comically melancholic tale concerns a trio of balding or fully bald middle-aged brothers who travel to Turkey in the hopes of securing hair transplants, with previously unacknowledged sibling rivalry, a scheduling mishap, and the densest of Turkish fogs eventually getting in the way. My Last Picture House compatriots giggled at the stop-motion-animated dicks in this one, too. As opposed to the Lynch vibes of Wander to Wonder, though, this one offers significant echoes of Charlie Kaufman – not only his animated elegy Anomalisa, but also Adaptation, in which one of Nicolas Cage's myriad middle-aged neuroses involved the gradual loss of his hair. Running 19 minutes, Keppens' short is narratively engaging, visually stimulating, and, with its unusually perceptive view of the give-and-take among aging brothers, quietly profound. Beautiful Men is also exceptionally touching, its finale like that of the Sebastian Stan comedy A Different Man in miniature – evidence that a gorgeous exterior can never fully compensate for an unsatisfied interior.
As the first of the presented Live-Action Short Oscar nominees, writer/director Nebojša Slijepčević's The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent ran a mere 13 minutes, so I naturally presumed it would be a mere apéritif – a hint at the lengthier awesomeness of shorts yet to come. Little did I know that, despite much tastiness ahead, it would be the fullest meal on the menu. Based on a true story, the film assumes the perspective of Goran Bogdan's train traveler Dragan, who, en route from Serbia to Montenegro, witnesses uniformed military men “escorting” Muslim passengers off the train, and watches as one stalwart car passenger (Dragan Mićanović's retired Army office Tomo Buzov) stands up to the fascist takeover. Although Buzov is a celebrated real-life hero, he's almost peripheral in Slijepčević's Palme d'Or-winning short at last year's Cannes Film Festival, whose focus instead rests on the chain-smoking soul sickness of Dragan – the man who Saw Something yet didn't Say Something. The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent is an absolutely stupendous example of narrative economy, as well as a first-rate showcase of performance, compositional, and editing finesse. Comparatively speaking, it's a definite underdog, but I hope it wins the Oscar.
I'm a little worried, however, that writer/director Adam J. Graves' Anuja might snag the gold instead. Telling of a pair of underprivileged Indian sisters – the nine-year-old of whom is some kind of math whiz – forced to toil at a seedy garment factory in Delhi, Graves' short features lovely rapport between Sajda Pathan and Ananya Shanbhag. It's also distractingly overacted in the other two key roles and narratively contrived besides, and features maybe the most manipulative end-credits tag of any 2024 movie of any length: documentary footage of other displaced youths (including young Pathan herself) watching the film and offering their grinning, applauding seals of approval. Nothing about the actual film's presentation really affected me. Yet I welled up during the end credits and immediately hated Anuja for it, pissed that Graves took this easiest of all possible routes to elicit tears. Look at the suffering kids whose circumstances I couldn't effectively demonstrate myself! Despite its good intentions, these 22 minutes left a bad taste in my mouth, and if only one Oscar-winning movie this year gets to boast a five-letter title that begins and ends with “a,” I'd much rather it was Anora.
Had I first seen it three weeks ago, I might've considered writer/director Victoria Warmerdam's Dutch-language I'm Not a Robot a minor masterpiece. Either way, it opens spectacularly well, with music producer Lara (the excellent Ellen Parren) continually stymied by one of those computerized CAPTCHA tests that prevent your online entry before you prove that you're human and not a robot. Her PC's irrational refusal to let her surf the Web suggests that Lara may indeed be a robot. In the early scenes, this is all incredibly unsettling and a queasy riot. But if you, too, viewed the recent horror comedy Companion, you'll quickly realize that you just saw this movie, only with the same ground covered – and many of the same punchlines delivered – in feature-length form. That shouldn't be a knock on Warmerdam's otherwise first-rate work which, technically, did come first. Personally speaking, though, I was engulfed in this same material really recently, and dishearteningly for me, the moment at which Companion is just getting started is the moment at which the 22-minute I'm Not a Robot ends.
None of this year's live-action-short inclusions made me quite so glad it was a short more than writing/directing brothers David and Sam Cutler-Kreutz's A Lien, a 15-minute exercise in real-world urgency and terror that would've been unbearable if sustained for a feature-length presentation. With their six-year-old daughter in tow, all that loving marrieds Oscar and Sophia Gomez (William Martinez and Victroia Ratermanis) want is to secure legal immigration for the man after years of waiting, not realizing that immigration centers are where ICE routinely sets up sting operations to deport illegals. Feverishly edited by Caitlin Carr, the Cutler-Kreutzes' bite-size panic attack immediately plants the tension at 11 and never for an instant wavers, the rushed car ride to the immigration office matched by the beat-the-clock anxiety in seeing an agent matched by the horrifying desperation of Sophia needing legal ID to prevent ICE from taking her U.S.-citizen child. The painful subject matter is undeniably timely, which can always be a boon for an Oscars victory, and I was wiped out by this fervently acted, emotionally wrenching work. As much as I admired it, though, I was also thrilled it didn't last a single second longer.
Every once in a while, a live-action short will lead to a feature-length version of the same material, and sometimes even an Oscar-winning one; the abbreviated versions of Sling Blade and Whiplash come immediately to mind. Meanwhile, no Academy-approved short this year, live-action or animated, made me anticipate an inevitably longer take on its tale more than director Cindy Lee's The Last Ranger. Cinematographer James Adey's photography is Academy-ready, Grammy and Oscar nominee John Powell provides the score, and the adult lead seems like the precise role to net Lupita Nyong'o her second Oscar after she was rudely bypassed for Us. The short itself is fine.
Its story concerns the poaching of rhinos for their horns, and the attempts of South African ranger Khuselwa (fiercely played by Avumile Qongigo) to halt an attack with an unintended young ally (Liyabona Mroqoka's Litha) in tow. Without belaboring the obvious, this thing appears made for feature-film expansion: noble subject matter; heroic women; stunning nature photography; gentle laughs; an easily hissable villain (David S. Lee in a role I imagine Jason Isaacs eventually playing); a mid-film plot twist rather obviously telegraphed. If I can't build up much overall enthusiasm for The Last Ranger, though, it's precisely because it feels like a warm-up act. The documentary footage that runs alongside the end credits suggests there's way more to Khuselwa's story – to all of the rangers' stories – than what we get in these 28 minutes. And although the touching newcomer Mroqoka winds up weeping buckets of tears, they would've meant more if we had an extra hour-plus to fully appreciate the bone-deep ache behind them. As presented, I remained dry-eyed at Cindy Lee's film because I didn't feel wholly connected to the source of Litha's pain, either for reasons of brevity or Hollywood-esque contrivance. Give it an extra hour and a starring role for Nyong'o, though, and I'm there.
