For the week of February 4th, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment is bringing the dark thriller The Girl in the Spider's Web to Blu-ray. Think about this: there is some glorious alternate reality where David Fincher's 2011 Girl with the Dragon Tattoo kicked off a whole R-rated, $100-million-a-pop Lisbeth Salander franchise. We'd get to follow the continuing adventures of Rooney Mara's disturbed hacker Salander and Daniel Craig's rumpled journalist Mikael Blomkvist - the great screenwriter Steven Zaillian already had a draft of The Girl Who Played with Fire that improved on pretty much everything in the original Stieg Larsson novel as well as in Daniel Alfredson's 2009 film adaptation. But alas, when Fincher's take on the material underperformed, Sony refused to commit to a nine-figure budget, so Fincher and his team walked, all of which led to this bargain-scaled (at only $43 million) reboot of the Salander story, this time from a story David Lagercrantz penned after Larsson's death. And it's with the story that I take issue. I have not read the book version of The Girl in the Spider's Web, and for all I know, the film offers a faithful gloss on the material. Still, regardless of whether or not we're blaming Lagercrantz or screenwriters Jay Basu, Fede Álvarez (who also directed), & Steven Knight, somebody should have known better than to plug Salander (here played by The Queen's Claire Foy) into a Nordic noir version of Spectre, of all things. Just as in that most misbegotten of James Bond pictures, Salander starts investigating a shadowy government technology (it's a surveillance program in Spectre; it's a nuclear-codes program here; it's a dumb MacGuffin no matter where you go) that leads her to an evil criminal syndicate run by her long-lost sibling. Swap out Blofeld for Sylvia Hoeks' sociopathic twin sister, and call it a day. Both films even have extended, elaborate torture sequences where the bad siblings take out years of frustration on the good ones. These beats didn't work in Spectre, and they definitely don't work in The Girl in the Spider's Web, not least because Salander's comparatively low-scale noir heroine shouldn't be slugging her way through car chases and shootouts protecting the safety of the free world. I'd be a bit more generous if the film offered more in the way of style, but Álvarez is content to ape Fincher's aesthetic at half the price. Look, I'll admit I'm being harsher than the movie maybe deserves - it functions as a movie, and you'll probably tolerate it if you have no stake in this franchise (I also really like Lakeith Stanfield as Salander's NSA counterpart). However, as a recipient of the baton that Fincher and his team unwittingly passed, it just can't compare.
Also from Sony comes two catalog reissues: the John Singleton features Poetic Justice and Higher Learning. Singleton has so thoroughly reinvented himself as a gun-for-hire on populist thrillers (like Four Brothers, Shaft, and 2 Fast 2 Furious, which is one of that franchise's most important features in terms of how it pushed the comparatively more grounded tone of The Fast and the Furious towards live-action cartoon) that it's easy to forget he first emerged as one of the most significant voices in contemporary African-American cinema. His 1991 debut film Boyz n the Hood presented as nuanced and unsparing a look at South Central as mainstream audiences had seen up to that point, and Singleton continues the mission that Boyz started with both Poetic Justice and Higher Learning. If Boyz n the Hood examined urban life, Poetic Justice branches out into the art that can emerge from such a lifestyle, while Higher Learning finds Singleton in polemic mode: he presents college life as a volatile concoction of different cultural energies that might never cohere. Nowadays, someone like Barry Jenkins has to fight and scrap to get something like Moonlight financed, so it's all the more remarkable that Sony gave Singleton reasonably healthy budgets (around $15 million per movie) to support his ambitious social agendas. Of the two, Poetic Justice has aged the strongest. It's the sweetest, most sensitive movie Singleton has ever made, a romance between Janet Jackson's struggling poet and Tupac Shakur's kind mailman that unfolds against the backdrop of some gorgeous Maya Angelou poetry. Singleton shows such patience in developing his leads' attraction to one another, and Shakur is just a revelation: he was becoming an actor of such depth and feeling. Higher Learning, by comparison, is a far more messy, sprawling movie, although some of that is by design - you can see Singleton tossing in one controversial cultural totem after another, from the struggle of black athletes to the influence of neo-Nazi movements to the emergence of the LGTBQ+ community, so of course his film is going to feel a little unwieldy. What I'm less keen on are some of the more melodramatic elements. In particular, Cole Hauser is practically twirling a nonexistent mustache as a manipulative JV Nazi who's responsible for the violent shootout that concludes the film, and this shootout feels less like an organic story component than it does a concession to studio notes. That said, we lost a lot when we lost this John Singleton, and I hope he finds a way back to this kind of large-scale social commentary.
From 20th Century Fox comes Jacques Audiard's The Sisters Brothers. Nothing about this postmodern western works the way you expect. It has one of the most deeply misleading trailers I've ever seen; the marketers are selling this as a jokey action comedy pitting the titular assassins (a great Joaquin Phoenix and an even better John C. Reilly) against their former scout (Jake Gyllenhaal, nicely understated) who's protecting an excitable chemist (Gyllenhaal's Nightcrawler scene partner Riz Ahmed, who's wonderful here) with a million-dollar secret. That said, the Sisters brothers are in no rush to find their targets, and when they do, the resolution couldn't be further away from what you're expecting. What humor exists is of the Jim Jarmusch varietal - dry, deadpan, entirely performance-based - and while there are a fair amount of shootouts, most unfold just off camera or in total darkness, with Audiard emphasizing the frightening sound of revolvers and rifles over clear geography or graphic violence. Benoît Debie's handheld camerawork is deliberately underlit and murky; Alexandre Desplat's jangly, anachronistic score recalls Damon Albarn and Michael Nyman's bizarre compositions for the revisionist western Ravenous. There's an inherent irony that with his first English-language picture, Audiard has made the least accessible movie of his career. Yet the movie held me in thrall. If The Sisters Brothers is about anything, it's the dangers of irony, and how the only hope any one of us has is to ditch it for authentic human connection. We laugh, initially, at Reilly's near-constant befuddlement at technology sweeping through the land: watching Reilly struggle to brush his teeth with a newfangled toothbrush lets the actor tap into some of that alien oddity he brings to Dr. Steve Brule. Except we soon realize Audiard isn't laughing at Reilly. Far from it - in the film's best scene, Reilly giggles with delight at an indoor water closet, and Audiard presents the moment as sweet and more-than-a-little admirable. Reilly is still open to wonder in this violent land, and this capacity may be the only thing that can save his life and Phoenix's lives. The film isn't perfect. While it announces its episodic nature fairly quickly, I would have appreciated a version that was ten-to-twenty minutes shorter. And the film's structure is as weird as any of its filmic devices. It's a four-act movie with a coda, and Act Four - which occurs entirely after the resolution of the Gyllenhaal/Ahmed storyline - loses some steam. Yet Phoenix finds touching new colors to play, and without it, we wouldn't get the beautiful coda, which features a perfectly timed cameo from the most surprising actor possible (for a western, that is) and a genuine moment of grace.
By comparison, the most surprising thing about Steve McQueen's auteur-driven genre vehicle Widows is how disappointing it is. Barring a few (ham-fisted, if we're being honest) attempts at eking out some social commentary, director Steve McQueen couldn't be further away from the chilly, avant-garde remove of his Hunger / Shame / 12 Years a Slave trifecta; here, he serves up a nice, pulpy slice of red meat. We used to make glib entertainments for adults, and at its best, Widows reminds me of F. Gary Gray's Set It Off and Michael Mann's Heat. We're barely into the film before a team of career criminals (played briefly by Coburn Goss, Jon Bernthal, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, and Liam Neeson) gets killed on a heist-gone-south. Problem is, they died with $2 million stolen from a political candidate (the great Brian Tyree Henry) and his psychotic brother (Daniel Kaluuya, who's the best thing in the movie - he's almost hilariously terrifying), both of whom decide to seek financial restitution from the team's spouses (Carrie Coon, Elizabeth Debicki, Michelle Rodriguez, and Viola Davis). So the widows throw a curveball and plan their own heist. Yes, McQueen and screenwriter Gillian Flynn filigree the proceedings with some Wire-esque sideplots pitting Henry's brash upstart against Colin Farrell's legacy Chicago politician, but ultimately, they're making a soufflé. And then McQueen and Flynn drop a major bombshell at the halfway mark. We assume it'll throw the narrative into upheaval, given the potential impact on plot/character. Only Widows all-but-abandons this major twist and proceeds as before. It abandons a lot of other stuff, too. McQueen and Flynn developed this film from the twelve-part British miniseries of the same name, and if the first hour suggests its predecessor through its richness of character and detail (we even get a great Kevin J. O'Connor performance occupying its own small universe), the second hour suggests the pitfalls that can occur when condensing twelve hours into two. Henry, who makes such a huge impact in the first half, all-but-vanishes, as does Coon, who basically just holds a baby in her four scenes. And the less said about the awful, hammy Robert Duvall performance, the better. As for the heist itself, it plays like an afterthought, building to a series of reversals so improbable and dumb (I hate what it does to cheapen Kaluuya's menace) that I first assumed I'd missed something before admitting that the film had let me down. Widows finally culminates in a vague non-ending so inconclusive I thought we were missing part of the movie, and no: this isn't like Limbo wherein ambiguity is purposeful. You feel Widows straining - against its ambitions, against the miniseries, against all its genre goals - and it's never more noticeable than when it can't turn that effort into something either substantial or silly.