Penny Lane’s latest documentary takes a look at the Satanist movement, specifically the Satanic Temple, an organization that popped up in 2013. Led by Lucien Greaves, this community is dedicated to fighting back against Christian encroachment on the separation of church and state.

Hail Satan?, like the organization at its heart, seems to be taking an easy route; by covering a subject so inherently controversial, it’s elevated to a certain level of attention. This is not to say the film is poorly made but, rather, it coasts by invoking a certain kind of playful deviance.

With documentaries, it’s important to question what the filmmaker gains from choosing their specific subject matter. Penny Lane appears to have a proclivity for oddities, her previous film covering an obvious bunk doctor from the early 20th century who implanted goat testicles into human patients as a cure for impotence. Hail Satan is a suitable, modernized follow-up, but only on the surface – these people have better intentions than Dr. John Brinkley, carrying a certain savviness about what to do to garner media attention.

This film feels as politically charged as any Michael Moore film; Penny Lane has a very clear statement. This film falls too easily on the side of Lucien, seemingly advocating for his beliefs. The Satanic Temple is rarely questioned over the course of this film; the one internal conflict we see is a woman who goes too far with a ritual and gets kicked out. She jokes about somehow being too much for Satanism.

How is that possible? Well, the Satanic Temple seems to be more of a political movement than any real religion; they simply use the Satanic imagery to highlight what they view as illegal activities in the name of religion. There’s a satirical edge to their acts, to suggest a Christian monument needs a Satanic monument to match. As surface level as this movement seems, they appear to get the results they want.

But does this really work? Would these Christian monuments not have been taken down on their own, or without a standard legal challenge? These are the questions that need to be asked, but the film never does. At one point, an older Christian woman is asked about the Satanists, and she’s not convinced these are true beliefs; they are, essentially, trolling for attention.

This could be an interesting question: what exactly constitutes a religion? Several members of the Temple seem open about the fact there’s no real association with Satan, or any other theistic systems. What happens to the Satanic Temple when everyone is aware their use of ‘Satan’ is purely performative?

Penny Lane seems to simply capture what she observes. There are a few key moments where the film reflects on the past, such as clearing up the difference between the Satanic Temple and the Church of Satan while also contextualizing the rise of Christianity in American culture and the Satanic Panic of the 1980s. She justifies this organization’s existence but never digs into whether they are truly effective; we take their word for it.

In the end, Hail Satan? is a story of political activists going to extremes to prove a point; it’s a fun ride to enter their unusual approach to life. It rides on the back of its subject matter, not offering many complexities nor doing much to make it engaging as a film – in fact, some talking head shots linger to the point of awkwardness. But, ultimately, the subject matter is neat enough that you might as well check it out.

3.5 Stars Out of 5

Few films have put up as many red flags before release as Dark Phoenix – a fact that seems doubly sad when you consider the fact there’s yet another movie in this franchise giving off more. This film was plagued by production issues and was repeatedly pushed back, all while being carried by a man who had no business being in the director chair. Add on that it revisits a story that the series already dabbled in (and failed) while again neglecting to set it up properly, and Dark Phoenix has all the makings of a Hollywood disaster.

Conceptually, the Phoenix story line is hard to capture in a single film; that force works better as a building threat than an immediate antagonist, yet both films just spring it upon us. Though we’ve had twelve X-Men related films at this point, we don’t necessarily have a meaningful attachment to these specific versions of the characters; Phoenix as an invasive force doesn’t land when we don’t really care about this Jean Grey yet. Even if every other part of this movie was handled well, the impact would have still been muted by a lack of attachment.

Of course, this film isn’t handled well. You don’t need to get further than the opening flashback to get a taste. “You’re not like the other doctors,” young Jean has the nerve to say as she meets Professor X, who responds with an even more laughable “And you’re not like the other patients.” Cliche statements such as these plague the dialogue.

So much of this film feels like actors going through the motions, a simulacrum of a legitimate X-Men adaptation. Characters are burdened with dull motivation, earnestly pursuing goals they should be too smart to follow. It’s so painfully melodramatic; can the supposedly super-intelligent Professor X and Hank McCoy not think through their emotions? Every action is rash, serving the sole purpose of delivering our characters to the next set piece.

One particularly egregious scene has Jean meet up with Magneto in the hopes of asking for help – but she decides to show up in a blood-covered shirt. I’m not quite sure how the blood ended up there considering the incident that happened, but even ignoring that, can she not think through this enough to hide the blood or change her shirt first? Especially when she knows it belongs to someone important to Magneto that will likely set him off? Even if she didn’t have time to change, it’s established she can make people see her differently than she physically appears.

Jean is written as if driven by raw emotion, but I’d still expect her to have some sort of self-awareness here. It’s not like she somehow missed the blood, as an earlier scene shows her desperately trying to wash it out. This is a classic idiot plot, characters making stupid decisions that only make sense in the context of a writer trying to move a plot forward with no logical reason behind most of what happens.

Jessica Chastain’s Vuk and her alien associates are about as generic as superhero movie villains can be; I understand that they’re mainly a backdrop for Jean’s internal struggle with the Phoenix Force, but that doesn’t excuse how surface-level evil they are. They’re genocidal maniacs, the type that adds no moral complexities to the idea of watching our heroes slaughter them.

As a franchise, X-Men has always been a bit morose compared to other superhero stories; this is a series that tends to tackle prejudice and its surrounding violence. Dark Phoenix is dreary to the point of lifelessness, all while lacking any real moral relevance. There’s little here beyond poorly written character drama. Why make a blockbuster-style movie so consistently bleak while not bothering to say anything? It’s a relief this film has such cheesy dialogue, as it would otherwise be dominated by ineffective melancholy.

There are so many minor distractions that dot this film. This is set 30 years after First Class and features many of the same characters, yet none seem to have aged. I can understand Mystique due to her shape-shifting abilities, but why does Sophie Turner’s Jean Grey look just a few years younger than Nicholas Hoult’s Hank McCoy? Could they not have added some makeup to show some aging? There’s really no reason to have had so much time pass between these movies; all it does is muddle our understanding of the supposed timeline.

Dark Phoenix fumbles as expected, mishandling established characters with poor dialogue and worse motivation. The story is entirely structured around a few concepts and set pieces without finding a believable way to get from one to the next. The worst thing about this experience is that, after so many films, a lot of the people involved still know how to make an X-Men film on the surface; this is a semi-polished Hollywood production. None of these details drag the movie down into the truly awful territory. Instead, it’s joylessly bland.

2 Stars Out of 5

The biopic is familiar territory, a genre with a tendency to fall into a disappointingly mundane sense of realism. These are stories of supposedly great people, and one would hope a film dedicated to their life would attempt to capture some sense of their spirit, especially when covering people of certain aesthetic sensibilities. Yet so many of these movies instead fixate on the supposed ‘truth’ of their story, sacrificing style to do so.

Here comes Dexter Fletcher’s Rocketman, hot on the heels of the divisive Bohemian Rhapsody, on which he served as replacement director halfway through production – it’s clear this latter work has benefited from his total control. This is a film that kicks off with its protagonist barging into an AA session while decked out in a flamboyant devil costume, his first words leading into a childhood musical number.

Elton John has always been bigger than life, and Rocketman does so much to capture his grandiosity. Turning his life into a stylized musical that slips in and out of time lends his story a surprising energy; even if the plot beats seem familiar, what really matters is how they’re handled. This film rarely misses a beat, seamlessly stringing together elements of his life through musical numbers.

Taron Egerton kills it here as Elton. It’s difficult to match the real Elton on a vocal level, but Egerton does enough justice to lend these songs a distinct form; Rocketman is thoroughly a musical, not just a biography that happens to feature music, and part of that distinction is by giving the numbers a new shape. Egerton likewise captures the outward exuberance underlined by a familiar anxiety; the tortured artist is a common story, but again, it’s captured well here. Rocketman is a work that does little new, but it excels at the familiar.

Part of this strength stems from its subject; Elton John is one of the world’s biggest stars, but his personal life has always been shrouded by a prominent persona and his music. Most of his modern coverage, the stuff I’ve experienced, is dedicated to his now happy love life.

Part of what sets Rocketman apart is the fact it’s a story of a gay man that doesn’t end tragically. It largely avoids the common tropes of mainstream LGBT films, especially historical ones, while still diving into the more personally devastating elements of the experience. This is a story of living in a lonely world, where it’s easy to fall for people who are simply incapable of returning that feeling, where the options sometimes seem limited enough it’s easy to settle for someone less than alright. Most importantly, this is just one aspect of Elton’s grand life.

The film is surprisingly heavy throughout; though Elton obviously finds great success, everything is tinted with addiction and that crushing loneliness. We expect these stories to hit the highs and lows, but Rocketman actually tends to gloss over many of those high points as they get shrouded in turmoil. What’s strange about this film is the distance; musical numbers perhaps summarize certain eras too quickly, but this lends a certain affectation when combined with the framing device of Elton in counseling. The “Rocket Man” number begins with Elton perhaps at his lowest point and abruptly transforms into a surreal stage performance; how slyly but flamboyantly Fletcher captures someone trying to overlook their issues by focusing on the successes that in no way negate their problems.

Some of the musical numbers work better than others, but those that work are fantastic. The film starts off with “The Bitch is Back,” a perfectly campy choice for child Elton to sing in his innocent youth. The movie really gets rolling with the “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting” sequence, which is loaded with stellar visual design while aging Elton from a child to young adult. This film is a visual treat, a key point that assists in setting this apart from most biopics.

Rocketman is about as good as Hollywood biopics can be, mixing the rather dark details of Elton John’s personal life with the extravagant styling of his public image. Taking a step back from realism really sells the actual story here, and hopefully future musician-based biopics take inspiration. Just as important, this is a mainstream LGBT film that really explores sexual identity as an aspect of the subject’s life without becoming fixated. Elton John has always stood as a definitive gay icon; Rocketman reminds us that he too struggled along the way while offering hope for a brighter future.

4 Stars Out of 5

Godzilla: King of the Monsters follows a group of really boring people as monsters sometimes fight in the background or, in rare moments where the filmmakers suddenly realize why we’re there, the foreground. This is a film that negates its own power in several ways. The title and advertising suggests epic battles among giant, world-threatening creatures, and it fails at so many of these concepts.

After Godzilla 2014 spent a bit too much time to reach the monster, this new one is eager to jump right in. However, that doesn’t stop the film from having several extended sequences where not much is happening. The human characters are really dull and sometimes infuriatingly dumb, causing every scene that focuses on them to be a total slog.

You’d hope this would be balanced by the creatures, but Dougherty seems resistant to let us linger. We get a few magnificent wide shots of these titans, but these mostly act as establishment. So many of the battles devolve into repetitive light shows, creatures firing beams of energy at each other; there isn’t nearly as much direct physical impact as there should be. These shots are rarely framed to capture both creatures at once, and most shots simply add up to a CGI creature framed against an empty sky. Unfortunately, many of the action scenes are as sluggish as the drama.

Being a Godzilla film, this goes beyond action and drama and belongs to the more specific monster/Kaiju movie category. The highlights of this genre largely stem from creatures threatening population centers. King of the Monsters has a few scared civilians scattered about, but so much of the human plot involves preparing enough to lure the threat elsewhere. Additionally, it’s mainly framed through people who are comparatively prepared for the attacks, reducing the tension.

As such, I’m not sure who this film is for; there are better stories about surviving a monster attack from the ground level, films that have truly dynamic battles battles between titans, and films that capture the terror of a city under attack. King of the Monsters really offers nothing exceptional.

Everything about this suggests an American studio afraid to tackle actual catastrophes. This gets highlighted by the structure of the final act; they completely undermine King Ghidorah by having him struggle to hunt down single human characters while in a seemingly empty city.

I really can’t emphasize enough how bad the human characters are. Dr. Emma Russell (Vera Farmiga) is among the most misguided characters I’ve encountered, coming up with the brilliant plan to awaken the creatures to…save the world from humanity’s environmental destruction? The film presents this as if she put legitimate thought behind her actions and isn’t just a genocidal maniac; she’s essentially a poor version of Thanos. The fact her decisions drive most of the plot might explain why the stakes are so consistently fumbled; I can’t attach meaning to the battles when what causes them is so very, very dumb. Her actions only make sense in the context of a studio desperate to explain why all these creatures are waking at the same time. Why can’t “just because” ever be enough?

Godzilla: King of the Monsters is a generic summer blockbuster, an action film that tries to emphasize visual effects while failing on most other technical grounds, all while telling a poorly conceived story. There’s no real reason to check this out unless you can’t get enough monster movies in your life.

2 Stars Out of 5

Maggie Thompson (Diana Silvers, a young actress I only just encountered in last week’s Booksmart) moves to a new town with her mother and immediately gets invited to hang with the cool kids. While dredging around to get someone to buy them alcohol, she meets Sue Ann (Octavia Spencer), an apparently kind older woman who invites them to party in her basement after they’re busted. What no one realizes is that Sue Ann is the one who informed on them, the first of her many manipulations.

Ma is a surprisingly strong concept; there’s so much room here for subtle engineering on the part of Sue Ann, a woman who can piece together the group’s social fears while exploiting the fact they’re unlikely to tell their parents. Such a premise allows for a truly unique horror villain, one who is otherwise an ordinary person. Unfortunately, such a concept would require a certain subtlety to the actions of the antogonist – Ma seems to skip a necessary middle step in getting from light paranoia to full-on insanity.

The problems here largely fall back on the writing (as it does with many films that sell themselves purely off concept). The dialogue is supremely shallow; we spend so much of this movie operating as a teen drama, but these teenagers don’t seem to have real character beyond their narrative function. Story progression is similarly lacking.

Several scenes feel unnecessary. When the group first invites Maggie to join in, she tells them her mother is taking her to a music festival. The very next scene finds her mother saying she has to cover someone’s shift that night, therefore freeing Maggie up. Why present the music festival as an obstacle and then immediately negate it? Moments like these add little more than a minute to the movie’s length.

When we finally get to Sue Ann as a central focus, we start getting short flashbacks to her own time in high school, implying something must have happened to cause her current actions. These moments really don’t work for me – they feel like a cheap tactic to garner sympathy, but I think it would have been more effective as mere implication. The movie makes it very clear she’s targeting the children of her childhood tormentors; why not let us fill in the blanks? Knowing exactly what happens really adds nothing and might even detract; it carries some unfortunate implications about how the writers view trauma.

All of this adds up to a film that seems unsure of its own purpose; it devotes so much time to characters it isn’t really establishing and seems to undermine the presentation of its villain. The average horror film doesn’t necessarily need the most well-defined characters; the problem here is that the concept is based around social connections and communication failures. Even the final horrors seem directly tied into how the characters present themselves, but their lack of definition means it really doesn’t earn those moments.

The big highlight here is, naturally, watching Octavia Spencer play so hard against type. She completely hams it up; if Ma is an unsuccessful film, it has just enough camp to potentially linger as a minor cult hit.

Another nice detail here is that this is a rare horror film that largely lets the protagonists guide the narrative. Maggie and her friends are choosing to be present, even as the stakes keep rising. Unfortunately, this also highlights what’s lacking, since this would be so much more engaging if they were better defined.

In the end, I had fun with Ma, but it’s a film that could have been so much more in either direction. It’s not quite absurd enough to be a truly joyous midnight movie while too poorly structured to be a legitimate horror. It’s shapelessly mundane.

2.5 Stars Out of 5

At this point, reviewing the Disney remakes and reboots feels as repetitive as the films being discussed; despite their narrative differences, they all follow the same design philosophy, largely falling back on simple film techniques as if they’re mere products instead of artistic productions. They ride off the success of their source material and rarely aspire to anything more, never exploring the possibilities provided by putting these stories in a new medium.

Aladdin does a good job sticking to its source material – Dumbo strayed and was worse for doing so, but a good writer could do something more. These remakes will never supplant the originals, so there needs to be some attempt to add a unique flavor; give a reason for these films to exist alongside the originals. Instead, Aladdin acts as an attempted replacement, which does no favor to either the original or this remake.

There’s plenty about this film that looks nice; it just doesn’t look as nice as the original. What could give these films an extra edge to coexist with the originals is seeing the world in a live action form; the sets and costumes are all nice enough. But because these remakes are so quick to fall into the routine of medium close-ups and shot-reverse shot editing, we rarely get a chance to just digest the visual design. There are a few moments where Aladdin attempts a longer take, especially during musical numbers, but they’re largely reduced by obvious reliance on CGI.

For whatever reason, Aladdin seems to have chosen Will Smith for an extra bit of star power to sell the film – I don’t think this film needed any recognizable star to sell. Is anyone going to see this movie due to his presence that otherwise wouldn’t? He’s passable, sometimes funny in his antics but really lacking when it comes to the musical numbers. Someone with a louder screen personality could have added an extra bit of flavor, but Disney appears resistant to anyone who might push these works past the familiarly pleasant.

It’s difficult to believe this is the same company that produced the originals; Disney has a history of playing it safe on a narrative level, being a company specializing in family films, but their films are marked by unique designs, distinct use of colors, and musical numbers that would sometimes fall into the surreal. These remakes are overly concerned with a sense of ‘realism’ that doesn’t match the tone or lend anything particularly charming to the experience. Everything appears muted compared to the original, similar enough to lack purpose and bland enough to lack inspiration.

One of the few notable changes between films is Jafar; like most classic Disney villains, the original is larger than life. The Jafar here is a lot quieter in his presence, and while this does work within the film, it also doesn’t particularly add anything. The original Jafar is striking and threatening; Disney doesn’t benefit by acting restrained. There’s also a notable new number by Princess Jasmine titled “Speechless,” which, again, is fine enough but doesn’t have the weight of any of the songs from the original.

Aladdin is acceptably average; nothing it does is particularly impressive or egregious. However, it will always be weighed down by the fact there’s an indisputably better version. This offers no reason to check it out instead of just revisiting the original, which has a tighter narrative and stronger presentation. I can mention that I did have fun with it, but that’s not worth much when I would have had more fun with the original. There are movies of lower quality this year that at least carry a sense of purpose, something unique to themselves.

Aladdin is exactly what we all knew it would be, Disney exploiting its own properties because they know it will make bank. The source material is good enough that this remake still carries many pleasant (if comparatively muted) moments. Disney knows how to make a functional film, but movies should do more than just function.

2.5 Stars Out of 5