KEITH UHLICH
Deep Water
film roundup
After Yang (Dir. Kogonada). Starring: Colin Farrell, Jodie Turner-Smith, Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja, Justin H. Min. An android dreams of more than electric sheep in writerdirector Kogonada’s gentle-to-a-fault speculative drama. After their family’s robot companion Yang (Justin H. Min) malfunctions, teashop-owning patriarch Jake (Colin Farrell) delves into the mechanical man’s memories, which hint at a much deeper life lived among humanity. In actuality, Yang’s recollections resemble nothing less than Instagram Stories or Tik Toks given a benignly derivative gloss (reflections in mirrors; windswept grass; a woman waking from a nap). The profundity is all hand-me-down, which won’t surprise those familiar with Kogonada’s previous efforts as a video essayist specializing in the Criterion Collection canon. (Malick and Ozu, in this case, are the most purloined influences.) Farrell is expectedly better than the material, bringing genuine pathos to a movie of pretty, placid surfaces and little else. [PG] HH 12
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The Batman (Dir. Matt Reeves). Starring: Robert Pattinson, Zoë Kravitz, Jeffrey Wright. The cape and cowl passes to Robert Pattinson for the latest riff on the Batman mythos, helmed and cowritten by Matt Reeves (War for the Planet of the Apes). It’s a campily depressive doozy that follows orphaned billionaire Bruce Wayne in the second year of his Gotham City crime-fighting efforts as a QAnon-like terrorist named the Riddler upends the city. You know what kind of movie you’re in for when Nirvana’s funereal “Something in the Way” is needle-dropped early on. (Should we miss the point, it’s reprised toward the end of the near-three-hour runtime.) Reeves has some talent for spectacle, and his PG-13 gloominess is certainly preferable to the pretentious Bat-bludgeoning of Christopher Nolan. Only a few of the supporting actors (Colin Farrell as a goombah version of the Penguin; John Turturro as gangland majordomo Carmine Falcone) manage to truly impress. And Zoë Kravitz’s Catwoman, it should
not surprise, doesn’t hold a candle to Michelle Pfieffer’s stitched-leather dominatrix version of same in Batman Returns (1992). [PG-13] HH Deep Water (Dir. Adrian Lyne). Starring: Ben Affleck, Ana de Armas, Tracy Letts. The world could use a good erotic thriller right about now, and who better than Fatal Attraction and Indecent Proposal sleazemeister Adrian Lyne to direct? It’s been twenty years since his last feature, the marital-discord melodrama Unfaithful, and the best parts of Deep Water (adapted from a novel by Patricia Highsmith and updated to the present day) feel very much out of our own time, especially whenever Lyne leans hard into shameless sordidness. Much of the entertaining disreputableness comes from the interactions between Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas as a couple with their own sadistic version of wedded bliss: She trolls for nubile male flesh. He acts the cuck and C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 2 2
