Keke Palmer and SZA in One of Them Days
ONE OF THEM DAYS
More than halfway through 2025's first month, there are plenty of reasons not to feel cheery; my phone alerting me that we were in negative temperatures this morning was barely the tip of the (seemingly literal) iceberg. I found reason to smile, though, when checking the weekend's domestic box-office tallies, because despite the presences of CGI lions and a lycan from Blumhouse, topping the Friday-to-Sunday chart were the sharp-toothed comic talents of One of Them Days, a freewheeling farce with more bite than Mufasa and Wolf Man combined. This ticking-clock slapstick is an inarguably slight, inconsequential thing. But it routinely delivers enormous pleasure, as well as continued evidence that Keke Palmer would be a massive big-screen star if Hollywood was still in the business of making funny, fast-paced, inherently meaningless comedies that left you feeling great. Whatever happened to those? Weren't they, like, the only movies we all collectively agreed were awesome?
Emmy winner Palmer and Grammy winner SZA, the latter in her film debut, star as best friends and roommates struggling to get by in Southern California, and with the events of One of Them Days transpiring over a single 18-hour period, they both have plans for financial betterment. Palmer's Dreux, Employee of the Month at her all-night diner, is hoping to get into upper management, with a make-or-break interview scheduled for that afternoon. The strategy employed by SZA's Alyssa, meanwhile, basically involves sending optimistic vibes into the universe – though she's also a gifted painter whose works, Dreux maintains, would sell to high bidders. But Dreux's interview and Alyssa's chi are threatened when it's discovered that Alyssa's sponging beau Keshawn (Joshua Neal) has invested their crap apartment's $1,500 rent money in a T-shirt line, leaving the young women with roughly nine hours to procure the dough or face eviction. By night's end, the pals' circumstances will have worsened, and they'll need to raise $5,000 or face certain death.
For two broke girls, these are undeniably high stakes, and one of the chief joys of One of Them Days is that they're also as low as could be. Because of how likable Dreux and Alyssa are, and how much fun Palmer and SZA appear to be having together, we naturally want to see them triumph. Nothing about director Lawrence Lamont's cheeky, irrepressible tone, however, suggests that our leads are ever in legitimate danger of losing either their home or their lives, so we're free to enjoy his film solely for the silly, knockabout lark it is – and isn't that refreshing? Considering that even the best comedies from last year – Anora, Hit Man, Didi, A Different Man, Thelma … hell, even Snack Shack – tended to leave viewers feeling lightly melancholic if not downright pained, it's a delight to again find one that has nothing but our continued good time in mind. And even though the gags here, as with most any slapstick, are hit or miss, Lamont's steady stream of inspired performers ensures that you're at least smiling throughout. Offhand, I can't think of a single cast member who didn't crack me up at least once. Even the guy who played the masked, non-speaking role of a drive-thru burglar made me laugh.
Also sorely lacking in movies these days are large casts of quick-witted comedians who establish solid, frequently eccentric characters before passing the batons to others. (Beyond accompanying wife Jamie Lee Curtis to awards shows, where is Christopher Guest when we really need him?) One of Them Days happily reverses that trend. Picking a favorite second banana in Lamont's breezy outing is practically impossible, given the options of Janelle James as a harried blood-bank nurse on her first day at work, Keyla Monterroso Mejia as an easy-loan administrator as loud as she is cruel, Katt Williams as a powerfully unlucky loan-scheme sucker named Lucky, and a fire-breathing Aziza Scott as an unapologetic homewrecker whose posterior, we learn, should be a registered weapon. But we're also treated to Neal's mealymouthed himbo, and Maude Apatow's sweetly dizzy gentrification threat, and Patrick Cage's chivalrous, mysteriously named Maniac, and Rizi Timane's uncompromising landlord, and Lil Rel Howery as a prone-to-tears Air Jordans aficionado … . Each of them gets you grinning, as do a number of screenwriter Syreeta Singleton's fresher conceits, such as the lower-floor apartment that's been refashioned, brilliantly, into the complex's on-site convenience store.
Obviously, the film's intentional de-emphasis on drama, and even basic surprise, means that we're occasionally left simply waiting for the inevitable to happen, and I didn't quite buy the pressed-upon idea that Dreux and Alyssa were equally to blame for their day's dire condition. (Wasn't it Alyssa who gave Keshawn the rent money to lose? Wasn't it she whose actions ultimately put a bounty on their heads?) But the sweet-and-salty One of Them Days is so charming that my complaints tended to vanish within seconds of registering them, and with SZA exuding confidence and snap in her first-rate movie debut, I wouldn't have missed watching Keke Palmer own the screen for anything. Her breathless, seemingly off-the-cuff rants about the unfair ridiculousness of her situation are divine. Yet Palmer's timing is also so assured that she can slay you with a perfectly calibrated pause, such as the one that accompanies Dreux when she quizzically watches a ball of hair lazily roll down the street. “Hmm,” she finally says. “Tumble-weave.”
WOLF MAN
Director/co-writer Leigh Whannell's Wolf Man is the scariest movie of the year … for about seven minutes. (And you thought “of the year,” in mid-January, was faint praise enough.) As he proved masterfully in his 2020 take on The Invisible Man, frequent Blumhouse participant Whannell – his credits include writing four of the five Insidious flicks – knows how to frighten us with what we can't see, and his prelude here involving a stern, survivalist hunter (Sam Jaeger) and his young son (Zac Chandler) is a thoroughly excellent tease. With his characters on the lookout for deer while being pursued by a snarling something in the woods, Wolf Man's helmer keeps the tension high and makes the imagery memorable; there's a particularly haunting shot in which father and son, crouched in an elevated hunting blind, hear the beast scale the ladder while only seeing wafts of its breath. Sadly, however, nothing that happens after this segment ends and a “30 years later” title card appears comes close to matching the queasy power of Whannell's opener, partly because there's only so much that can happen when a horror film's only humans are a nuclear family of three and a sacrificial lamb. Granted, that wasn't an impediment in The Shining, but you know … . They can't all be Kubrick.
Whannell's and co-screenwriter Corbett Tuck's clan includes the grown son from that prologue, Blake Lovell (Christopher Abbott), who now has a wife (Julia Garner's Charlotte) and a child of his own (Matilda Firth's Ginger). Blake is an unemployed writer and current stay-at-home dad, Charlotte is a work-obsessed, big-city executive also married to her phone, and things between them aren't going great. What might rekindle their relationship, Blake suggests, are a couple months spent at the cottage of his upbringing: a woodland domicile left to Blake after his long-missing father was finally pronounced dead. So with that snarling-beast scare clearly behind him, the three Lovells traipse off to Oregon, where we presume encounters with the titular monster will take place at a genre-approved Cabin in the Woods. To Whannell's and Tuck's credit, that's not precisely what happens, as the wolf creature, in the movie's most visually inventive sequence, attacks the Lovells and an unanticipated guest before they get to the cabin. Once there, though, we're in for a long and oddly uneventful haul. Because for the next hour, and until the closing credits, our investment solely resides with Blake, Charlotte, and Ginger fearing the monster outside the house – and with Dad grazed by the lycan's claw during that initial siege, also the monster inside the house.
As Abbott's patriarch gradually morphs into an unusually domesticated werewolf, Whannell does pull off some neat tricks that allow us to view the transformation strictly from Blake's perspective. His wife and child, now with glowing eyes, become upsetting presences whose utterances are no longer intelligible, and a spider's slow crawl up a wall becomes more deafening with every inch traveled. Yet cumulatively, and definitely thematically, Blake's transformation doesn't mean much. There are vague “sins of the father” echoes in the man not wanting to turn into the beast his own parent was. But we don't really feel them, given that the one time Blake lashes out at anyone is when his daughter goofs around next to speeding midtown traffic – a situation that clearly requires some stern words of warning. (Unlike The Shining's Danny Torrance, Ginger is never afraid of her dad, even after he gets all hairy and toothy.) And because, despite no longer registering what they're saying, Blake-wolf is evidently adept at reading emotional and tonal cues, we quickly sense that Charlotte and Ginger are in no grave danger inside the house. The one laugh I got from the movie, and it was a wholly unintended one, came when Charlotte gave her barely recognizable husband a teary talking-to, and before morosely leaving the room, the werewolf-in-progress turned to impart one of those brave, silent “I'm sorry, honey” looks familiar from every soap opera you've ever seen.
You may be wondering if Abbott's ultimate transformation is at least cool. Honestly, it was hard to tell. Rick Baker and the American Werewolf in London effects team sure set a high standard in 1981, when the Oscar-winning coup de grâce not only looked incredibly painful (and had the added benefit of being grossly funny), but took place in a brightly lit room in which we weren't deprived any bone-cracking minutiae. Here, though, cinematographer Stefan Duscio's lighting is so incessantly dark that it's often difficult to see images even in closeup, meaning we have to take a lot of the coolness on faith. It's also a measure of our increasingly squeamish times that instead of David Naughton's full-monty change, Abbott's Blake never loses his jeans; it's like watching the guy turn into Michael J. Fox's Teen Wolf. The performances are decent and the compositions (when visible) are professionally rendered. Wolf Man, however, is a generally tired, disappointing experience – and would've been infinitely more fun had it ditched its serious aspirations and decided instead to be an all-out howl.
NICKEL BOYS, THE ROOM NEXT DOOR, and HARD TRUTHS
Arriving like a delayed gift from Movie Santa, Iowa City's twinned FilmScene venues, this past weekend, debuted a trio of Oscars hopefuls that I was beginning to think we wouldn't see in our area prior to the reveal of this season's Academy Awards nominations, (And wouldn't have seen had the twice-delayed announcement of nominees, due to the continued tragedy of the Southern California fires, not been moved from January 17 to January 19 to January 23.) Consequently, I've rarely been more stoked to spend seven continuous hours – with mere minutes of reprieve in between – at FilmScene's Chauncey Hotel and Ped Mall locations, even if a rather downbeat time was promised by the films themselves: Nickel Boys, about a murderously abusive reformatory school in the Jim Crow South; The Room Next Door, about a middle-aged woman who enlists a friend to assistant in her euthanasia plan; and Hard Truths, about a British suburbanite suffering a feature-length crap mood (and no doubt worse). Despite those synopses, my collective experience on Saturday wasn't nearly as grim as you might expect.
Given the audaciousness and soul-grabbing emotionalism of its presentation, Nickel Boys was my easy favorite of the three. Adapted from Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel from 2019, a work inspired by the atrocities committed at Florida's now-defunct Dozier School for Boys, director/co-writer RaMell Ross' primarily '60s-set drama follows two Black teens as they suffer the injustices and cruelties of the Nickel Academy reform school, and we see what they see. Literally. From the movie's first seconds, when we get fleeting looks at our chief protagonist Elwood Curtis (Ethan Cole Sharp as a boy, Ethen Herisse as a young man) seemingly by accident – his face only appearing in stainless-steel or window reflections – genius cinematographer Jomo Fray restricts our point-of-view solely to what Elwood himself witnesses: a man's hands shuffling playing cards; a spray of tinsel as his grandmother (the transcendent Aunjaunue Ellis-Taylor) decorates the Christmas tree. With photographer and documentarian Ross' narrative debut shot in a boxy 1:33:1 aspect ratio suggesting a big-screen home movie, everything we absorb, from Elwood's happy times as a youth to his burgeoning investment in Civil Rights activism to his unfortunate decision to hitchhike with the wrong driver, is shown through his eyes.
The perspective only changes after Elwood enters the Nickel cafeteria one day and finds a kind kindred spirit in fellow student/inmate Turner (Brandon Wilson). At first, as we've grown accustomed to, we're introduced to Turner solely through Elwood's frame of reference, having just enough time to gauge the teen's hunched-over deference, friendly countenance, and evident sensitivity. Roughly three minutes later, we witness the exact same scene transpire, though this time through Turner's POV, giving us our first actual look at the handsome, empathetic Elwood more than a half-hour into Ross' film. The effect is overpowering; I can't remember the last time I reflexively welled up at a movie moment entirely void of manipulation.
From then on, Nickel Boys vacillates between first-person witnessing of events from either Elwood's or Turner's viewpoint, with occasional glimpses of an adult Elwood (Daveed Diggs) contending with the Nickel Academy legacy years into the future. (The first-person-POV approach almost applies to Diggs' screen time, in which we do see Elwood in the frame … but only the back of his head.) And in all honestly, I get why some critics have found Ross' approach to the material alienating, because it can't help but call attention to the ballsy filmmaking stunt, and also leads to less naturalistic portrayals than would've likely resulted from actors sharing visible camaraderie. We only get one scene of Elwood and Turner truly together here – and that bit actually has less impact than it should, considering it's given away in the Nickel Boys poster.
Still, that necessary-evil lack of performance rapport is easily made up for in Ross' and co-screenwriter Joslyn Barnes' thunderously moving script that never over-explains Nickel's harrowing conditions and leaves the most heinous offenses to our imaginations. (That's hardly a blessing, though, when Elwood is taken to a de facto torture chamber where our only reprieve comes from Elwood closing his eyes – or perhaps falling unconscious.) And as a director, Ross never loses sight of the astonishing beauty that the ever-hopeful Elwood is able to find in the world, demonstrated through Fray's gorgeously sunlit photography and the helmer's superb capturing of emotional nuance; Nickel is Hell, but via Ross' outlook, at least it's a Hell with angels of mercy floating about. For two hours and 20 minutes, I was utterly enraptured by Nickel Boys, and can't wait to see what its filmmaker does next.
That's how I generally feel about Pedro Almodóvar movies, too. But in the case of The Room Next Door, I was kind of looking forward to the Spanish auteur's next endeavor a mere 10 minutes into his current one. Much has been made in the press about this adaptation of Sigrid Nunez's 2020 novel What Are You Going Through – Almodóvar's Golden Lion winner for Best Film at last year's Venice Film Festival – being the writer/director's first feature-length offering performed (and apparently written) entirely in English after a career that began more than a half-century ago. I'd consider it a more noteworthy accomplishment if his latest script didn't suggest a really bad American play: overabundant in declarative sentences and labored exposition; miserly in terms of subtlety and subtext.
When you watch one of Almodóvar's Spanish melodramas, either a masterwork such as Talk to Her or a juicy potboiler à la 2021's Parallel Mothers, it's easy to imagine the overtly on-the-nose subtitled dialogue merely being the result of remedial translation – either that, or the intentionally overripe verbiage simply sounds more natural and believable in its native Spanish. But when you've got Tilda Swinton, boasting a regionally unspecific American dialect, and Julianne Moore espousing on life and death without benefit of conversational nuance, it just sounds like two incredibly proficient actors doing their best to find shading in sentences that are the enemy of shading. There are nouns and verbs and adjectives, but nothing being said resembles the way humans actually speak, and when characters here go on lengthy diatribes about the climate crisis and the dark Web, you feel like hiding your face in embarrassment.
Happily, this being an Almodóvar, there's a lot to turn to even when the dialogue and its unconvincing recitation is making you want to cower from their prosaic bluntness. Diagnosed with inoperable cancer, Swinton's former war journalist Martha convinces her decades-ago bestie, Moore's bestselling author Ingrid, to stay with her at a rented woodland home during the weeks prior to her suicide – for Ingrid to be “in the room next door” when Martha ends her life. I can't say I've ever seriously contemplated suicide myself. But I might consider it if I knew I could perish in a lavish, expansive home two hours outside of New York with floor-to-ceiling windows and an infinity pool and a refrigerator that magically disappears into the woodwork; this place is like a center-spread in Martha Stewart's Dying magazine. Everything here looks unspeakably beautiful: the color-coded outfits and décor; the artful arrays of fruits and vegetables; the freaking lipstick. Death is traditionally messy. But not in Pedro's world it's not. Martha and Ingrid while away the hours lounging on the deck, shopping for enjoyable beach reads, watching Buster Keaton (and, more pointedly, John Huston's The Dead) on DVD … . It's all lush and sensuous and delectable. I didn't buy it for an instant.
I might have had Almodóvar's baldly, and badly, Americanized script not rung so eternally false, or if Swinton and Moore had more avenues to avoid that falseness than the inherent ones – Tilda's no-bullshit astringency, Julianne's deeply genuine laugh – they traditionally employ to boost material either weak or strong. I hardly hated The Room Next Door. It looks like a zillion bucks. Its leads are intensely appealing and appear to share considerable chemistry when they're not asked to converse. And while John Turturro is largely regrettable as the wettest of blankets, there is a bizarre, unforeseen role for Alessandro Nivola that gives the film a shot in the arm when it most needs one. Plus, bless him, Almodóvar reserves his more purely Almodóvar-ian grace note for the final 10 minutes, long after you've started wondering whether his picture is merely running on fumes. I admire the writer/director for, despite his movie's somewhat morbid subject matter, not presenting us with – or even being interested in – any kind of sob-fest. Your eyes will almost surely remain dry. I still wish I'd spent less time silently, inappropriately giggling.
Minutes before my third Iowa City screening on Saturday, a woman in our auditorium tripped over a stair heading downward, and although she was fine, her partner did say to those of us who witnessed her stumble, “It's all right – someone always gets hurt at a Mike Leigh movie.” He wasn't wrong, nor was his companion when she amended his statement by saying “hurt emotionally.” This is why I love going to FilmScene: Where else in our area are you gonna hear patrons making spontaneous Mike Leigh jokes? And like many of his works over a career that, similar to Almodóvar's, has spanned more than 50 years, Hard Truths is a prolonged invitation to laugh by its writer/director … if, as per usual, also a film whose laughs routinely die in your throat.
Portraying British suburbanite Pansy Deacon, whose unrivaled dyspepsia has made everyone in her periphery – family, friends, every poor doctor, sales clerk, and fellow customer she encounters – ready to strangle her or be forced to kowtow to her bullying, Marianne Jean-Baptise is a sublime monster in Leigh's first feature since 2019. It's never expressly stated what malady Pansy may be suffering, or if, in truth, her verbalized physical and emotional pains are merely psychosomatic. Whatever the problem, she's made life miserable for her working-class husband Curtley (David Webber) and 22-year-old, unemployed, hulking-wallflower son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett), both of whom tiptoe through the house fearful of her next explosion. With even her high-spirited, adult nieces Kayla (Ani Nelson) and Aleisha (Sophia Brown) dreading every reunion with their aunt, only Pansy's inherently joyful hairdresser sister Chantelle (the magnificent Michele Austin) can stand the woman anymore, and even she is reaching her breaking point. Hard Truths consequently follows this extended clan as they prepare for, endure, and contend with the repercussions of the five-year anniversary of the passing of Pansy's and Chantelle's mother, their individual and group experiences making Leigh's mostly plotless narrative feel staggeringly rich in detail.
Truth be told, plot would likely just get in the way, and aside from infrequent works such as 1999's Topsy-Turvy and 2019's Waterloo, Leigh has never shown much interest in plot. Instead, he's laser-focused on behavior, and if you're unused to the British master's style, you could easily be driven to distraction here. Why the lengthy scenes of Chantelle aimlessly chatting with her beauty-shop customers when we never see these clients again? Why the detours into Kayla's and Aleisha's work crises when nothing ever comes from their introductions? It's because what's happening with the three women is immaterial compared to our understanding of the means through which they deal with these events: how Chantelle offers easy emotional support to people she probably only sees a few times a year; how Kayla and Aleisha can giggle over wine at lunch and assure one another – though we know different – that everything in their professional lives is hunky-dory. Hard Truths' creator is fascinated by internals, and has such a marvelous ear (his scripts written after several weeks of improvisation with his actors) that Leigh characters simply being is generally more intriguing, more arresting, than most other movie characters doing.
Although such scenes add little to the “story” beyond reaffirming what we already know, I would've happily spent hours watching Pansy mercilessly, uproariously demean frustrated grocery shoppers and helpful furniture-store clerks and the the makers of infantwear. (“What's a baby got pockets for? What's it gonna keep in its pocket? A knife?!”) While they have little in the way of dialogue, I could've stared at the demolished, ghost-like faces of Webber and Barrett all day, my heart breaking as we're shown all the things they want to say whose impact, they know, would mean nothing. (Webber's beleaguered spouse made me gasp with a cold, impromptu gesture that demonstrated the extent of his misery.) And I have no idea how she did it, but Jean-Baptiste somehow crafted a figure who's an endless pain in the ass yet whose company you're never remotely tired of, even if everyone surrounding Pansy certainly is. There were loads of performance miracles in the films of '24, and nothing I saw devastated me quite as much as Jean-Baptise's Pansy uncharacteristically roaring with laughter, for far longer than you thought possible, before collapsing into sobs and uttering a barely croaked-out “Thank you.” As much as I love Hard Truths, though, I'll admit to sympathizing with a nearby FilmScene patron who greeted the film's final blackout with a quiet yet unmistakably firm “Don't you do it.” But yep – Mike Leigh did it. For a filmmaker of such bottomless heart, he sure can be a hurtful bastard.
