Definition Please (2022)

Direction: Sujata Day
Country: USA

Sujata Day stars in her directorial debut, Definition Please, a comedy-drama engaged in pertinent topics such as family, reconciliation, personal accomplishment, and mental illness. However, it feels too measured and tempered to embrace anything truly startling or unexpected, either stylistically or narratively. 

Day is Monica Chowdry, a former National Spelling Bee champion of Indian descent who got stuck in Greensberg, Pennsylvania, where she looks after her ailing mother (Anna Khaja). The unexpected arrival of her brother, Sonny (Ritesh Rajan), who has been struggling with severe bipolar disorder and occasional violent behavior, puts her in a state of restlessness. The torpid development of the story makes the weight of their situation feel casual, in such a way that I couldn’t care less about the characters’ dilemmas. Real joys and sorrows must be bigger and deeper than what is depicted here.  

So intent on being dramatic on one side and cool on the other, the film forgets to be entertaining, serving more as TV fodder than as something really worthy of the big screen. The scene in which the siblings perform a play for their mother is the last nail in the coffin. There are plenty of words to describe trivial things. Now, we also have a film: Definition Please.

Belle (2022)

Direction: Mamoru Hosoda
Country: Japan

The Japanese director Mamoru Hosoda (Mirai, 2018) teams up for the first time with fellow animator Jin Kim (Moana, 2016; Raya and the Last Dragon, 2021) in Belle, an animated dramatic effort that stresses tyrannical societies, both real and virtual. Despite incorporating topics such as loss, trauma, identity, fame, and abusive parental conduct, the film is a let-down, plot-wise. Its artistry, even demonstrating quality, isn’t especially stirring, and the pop music is off-putting. It was hard to be emotionally involved in this densely brewed Beauty-and-The-Beast universe pulled up from our social media era.

Hosoda tells the story of Suzu (voice of Kaho Nakamura), a shy, motherless 17-year-old high school student who enters the gigantic virtual world of U and rises to stardom as a singer. In this cyber world, she can lead a new life and be who she really is, but her popularity as Belle becomes secondary when she meets a destructive Dragon. From that moment on, she only wants to find out the identity of the person behind this avatar. Meanwhile, in the physical world, she counts on the support of Shinobu, an admired sports guy and childhood friend who protects her since her mother died, as well as her best friend Hiro and the popular Ruka. 

More humdrum than fascinating, the film is nothing more than a soppy teen-pleaser that, growing dull (the way they unveil and  locate the Dragon in the real world is so naive), is liable to strain the patience of adults. I found myself yawning way before the ending.

Black Bear (2021)

Direction: Lawrence Michael Levine
Country: USA 

Divided into two equally gripping parts, Black Bear lives from a cynical script, which hooks us into a story of artistic deception and jealousy. Alternating between the cerebral and the experimental, this is a successful exercise in meta-cinema styled with the uneasy flair of Cassavettes by the writer-director Lawrence Michael Levine (Wild Canaries, 2014). 

Aubrey Plaza, the star of Safety Not Guaranteed (2012) and Ingrid Goes West (2017), is Allison, an insecure actor turned filmmaker who arrives by herself at a remote lake house in the Adirondack Mountains. In a desperate attempt to overcome writer’s block, she seeks inspiration from the sinister surroundings, a big black bear, and the pugnacious couple of hosts who welcomes her - Gabe (Christopher Abbott) and Blair (Sarah Gadon). She then writes about two different realities, both with wildly tumultuous endings. 

The mordant dialogues, apt score, and non-linear narrative render both tense and embarrassing situations, which are frequently fueled by substance intoxication and lust. There are no stall moments, but the manipulation is undeniable. Curious statements about the falsehoods of the cinema world are also memorable - “movies aren’t everything” or a candid wish to revert to the normal people they were before the movies. A provocative film that holds our interest.

France (2021)

Direction: Bruno Dumont 
Country: France 

Crisis - whether in its emotional, spiritual or self-confidence forms - was always a favorite topic of French filmmaker Bruno Dumont. After making interesting statements with Humanity (1999), Hadewijch (2009) and Camille Claudel (2013), he became more and more playful and eccentric yet less shocking with titles such as Slack Bay (2016) and the TV mini series L’il Quinquin (2014, 2018).

His new lurid and lugubrious satire, France, digs at the manipulative circus of modern journalism with biting sarcasm, and can be nearly deadly serious in some observations. Despite having Lea Seydoux spreading charm all over as France de Meurs, a celebrated TV journalist who quickly goes from disguised cynicism to tearful melancholy, Dumont unmanaged a few aspects in the last third of the film, which is so giddy, it verges on ennui.

This cynical portrait entertainingly stabs the media, the country, and, in part, itself by walking a line that often blurs good and evil. It never takes a clear position either, just like its protagonist refuses to answer if she’s left or right wing. And how her empowerment suddenly crumbles with a trivial incident! Seydoux has never cried so much in her entire career. The war scenes are often risible, and despite using archive footage of president Emmanuel Macron to its advantage, a good editing would only make it better. France is a bold move but hardly a successful one.

Playground (2022)

Direction: Laura Wandel
Country: Belgium 

Laura Wandel’s debut feature, Playground, is an interesting drama that explores the brutal psychological effects of bullying. Over the course of its simple, carefully calibrated 72 minutes, we follow the seven-year-old Nora (Maya Vanderbeque), an anguished and vigilante first grader with big sad eyes, who worries about the boys’ fights. This is because her older brother, Abel (Günter Duret), is invariably picked on by bullies in the playground.

Wandel places the camera too close to the subjects, and the pace dangerously slows down to a crawl in certain scenes, especially those not including the playground. She captures moments that seem either irrelevant or stretched, meaning that the film could be further shortened with no loss of information. Still, it’s a dramatization that invites us to see beyond the appearances, bringing attention to a relevant topic while showing the deep concern of parents and the blatant inability of school committees to effectively take care of the problem. 

While the result is not earth-shattering, there's something emotionally and compassionately connective underneath. There’s no external characterization of the kids - we don’t have access to their home environments or relationships with parents. Hence, you’re stuck in the miniature context of a playground where the adults' supervision is deficient. Both kid actors are strong.

Gagarine (2021)

Direction: Fanny Liatard, Jérémy Trouilh
Country: France 

The French filmmaking duo of Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh streamlined the narrative of Gagarine, the refreshing metaphorical drama that signals their feature directorial debut, with carefully sculpted movements and spaces. Starring Alseni Bathily and Lyna Khoudri, the film draws an observant, if uncomfortable, parallelism between a youngster abandoned by his mother and a housing estate discarded by the government. 

Cité Gagarine, a red-brick housing project in Ivry-sur-Seine, was built by the French Communist Party in the early 1960s and inaugurated by the Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin in 1963. Its demolition began in 2019 and lasted for 16 months, and this fictional account starts shortly before that. Like most of his neighbors, Youri (Bathily), a conscientious 16-year-old fascinated with the outer space, doesn’t stand the idea of losing his home. Considering that his mother simply abandoned him and went to live with her new boyfriend, Youri relies on his best friend Houssam (Jamil McCraven) and his crush Diana (Khoudri) to save the place and keep living. 

We have a broad sense of community and solidarity between neighbors in this powerful and imaginative urban tale that cleverly undermines the sad reality of gentrification with moments of magical fantasy. The visuals match the bracing nature of the story, and like Youri, we gravitate with hope, adhering to his universe yet haunted by the desolated corridors, boarded walls, and surprisingly hidden interiors of this ghostly massive structure. Not one single scene goes on for a beat longer than it should; performances and production values are excellent.

Lingui (2022)

Direction: Mahamat-Saleh Haroun
Country: Chad 

Mahamat-Saleh Haroun (Dry Season, 2006; A Screaming Man, 2010) shoots beautifully in a pleasantly aesthetic film that makes a clear and pertinent statement about the Chadian community, underscoring its authoritarian religious practices, intolerance, hypocrisy, and misogyny. This is a chilling, sober story that depicts the sacrifices of a single mother as well as the adversity and discrimination she is forced to endure in the suburbs of N’djamena.

Amina (Achouackh Abakar Souleymane) has been a hard-working woman since she was repudiated by her family. Suddenly, she sees the curse that affected being replicated when her only 15-year-old daughter, Maria (Rihane Khalil Alio), becomes pregnant from rape. This leads her to another problem; the abortion is illegal in her Muslim country and punished with severe penalties. 

The economical script builds reasonable tension, and the film moves assuredly from incident to incident with a simplicity in the storytelling that makes it seem old-fashioned, but winsomely so. It’s comforting to see women helping one another in a constant fight against the patriarchal system. Yet, some scenes are in need of revision and re-staging as the acting fluctuates. Nonetheless, the message is so strong that it’s nearly impossible to ignore it. You don’t have a cheery film in Lingui but one that gives us hope.

The Fallout (2022)

Direction: Megan Park
Country: USA 

Canadian actress Megan Park makes an assured debut as both writer and director with The Fallout, a handsome fictional drama film about teen fear and trauma caused by a tragic high school shooting. During the incident, the 16-year-old protagonist, Vada Cavell (Jenna Ortega), locks herself up in a bathroom stall with two other terror-stricken students, Mia ('Dance Moms' star Maddie Ziegler) and Quinton (Niles Fitch). Her life and behavior change instantly from that moment on; she gets closer to these colleagues while silently growing apart from her family. Therapy sessions and the pressure to return to school are not helping, neither do the arguments with her activist best friend, Nick (Will Ropp). How to deal with this whirlwind of emotions in an already complex phase of life?

The story is rooted in real world concerns and describes the youth universe with insight. Park maintains a firm control of the narrative and no detail is too minor to escape her attention. The only quibble I found was a cliched scene between father and daughter, a moment of trust and liberation seen too many times before. Also not my cup of tea is the soundtrack, which, nonetheless, feels adequate to better portray the current youth culture. Acting-wise, this was the most demanding role given to Ortega, and she nailed it convincingly. The 19-year-old actor also stars in the latest installment of the Scream film series. 

The Fallout is a bracing work, which treats the teens in question piercingly and hurtfully. The sensitivity demonstrated to the specifics of each character’s experience is remarkable.

Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché (2021)

Direction: Celeste Bell, Paul Sng 
Country: USA

This revelatory documentary about the Londoner punk icon Poly Styrene, the first woman of color to lead a successful rock band in the UK and a strong influence on the riot grrrl and afropunk movements of the late 1970s, was co-directed by her daughter, Celeste Bell, and Paul Sng. With the Ethiopian-Irish actress Ruth Negga narrating excerpts of Poly’s personal diaries, the film also counts on Bell’s emotionally charged words, archival footage, and a few interviews with members of her one-studio-album band, X-Ray Spex (Paul Dean and Lora Logic) and family.

Styrene, who was born to a Somalian father and a British mother, had a difficult time dealing with identity. She was a staunch defendant of women liberation and became a counter-culture figure who also got exposure as an alternative fashion designer. Misdiagnosed with schizophrenia and told she would never work again, Poly ended up in a psychiatric ward before joining the Hare Krishna movement and set her own solo career. She had been negatively affected by the superficial lifestyle of New York and heavy drug consumption while living there.

According to Bell, she wasn’t always a good mother, but the film, besides serving the purpose of telling the musician’s story while providing some insight into the British social climate at the time, is elevated by a more affirmative mother-daughter relationship. The only quibble here is the repetition of the footage, but the film flows well, avoiding panegyric artificialities.

Flee (2021)

Direction: Jonas Poher Rasmussen
Country: Denmark

Directed by Jonas Poher Rasmussen, Flee embraces a documentary-animation hybridity that strikes with heartfelt intimacy. It tells the haunting true story of Amin Nawabi, a 36-year-old gay Afghan who once established himself in Denmark as an unaccompanied minor. He's about to get married to his long-time boyfriend, Kaspar, but first he needs to go over his distressing past by telling his story.

Like in a therapy session, Amin harks back to his earliest memories of a war-torn Kabul in the mid 1980s. He explains how he and his family were forced to flee to Moscow, then put in an abandoned building with inhumane conditions in Estonia after a traumatic attempt to reach Sweden by boat, and then sent back to Russia again, where they stayed illegally after paying the corrupt authorities. Following those tough times, he arrives in Copenhagen with a false passport and is given asylum as a refugee who had lost all his family, a lie he had been keeping for years. He also opens up about his sexual awakening. 

The particular care given to the images is preponderant in this poignant, profound and touching account of a life marked by fear, trauma, loss, bias, a quest for identity, and an urge for integration. It’s hard not to be scared or overwhelmed during the description of these hard-hitting events, but the film seduces by the stylized realism with which it’s presented. The rhythm of the storytelling is stable, increasing our interest in an emotional story that many will relate to.

Under the Open Sky (2021)

Direction: Miwa Nishikawa
Country: Japan 

Japanese writer-director Miwa Nishikawa (The Long Excuse, 2016) worked for three years on the script of Under the Open Sky, an adaptation of a novel by Ryûzô Saki, the author of Vengeance is Mine, made into a cult film by Shohei Imamura in 1979. However, and despite an interesting premise, the object of this review fails to satisfy as Nishikawa’s inspiration dwindles with time. The film periodically descends into cloying while the tough and sweet sides of the protagonist come to the fore. 

Speaking of protagonist, the multifaceted actor Koji Yakusho (13 Assassins, 2010; Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai, 2011) is the underlying cause for most of the film’s appeal. He plays a short-tempered former yakuza who, released from prison after 13 years, has trouble integrating the society. This man, abandoned by his geisha mother at the age of four, spent his childhood in an orphanage and worked for crime families since his teens. Now, in his fifties, he’s determined to get a decent job despite being seen as an outcast. Some old and new friends are his hope. 

Mired in forced sentimentality, the film never really builds up a great deal of steam but infuses some bursts of anger and humor here and there, leaving a meaningful message to the community and a glimpse of hope for the ones looking for an opportunity to change. Anyway, it’s all too patchy to be classified as a prime work.

The Innocents (2021)

Direction: Eskil Vogt
Country: Norway

The Norwegian Eskil Vogt is best known for his writing partnership with director Joachim Trier, with whom he created gems such as Oslo August 31st (2011) and the recently released The Worst Person in the World (2021). On the other hand, he is also a competent if infrequent director. Following the 2014-released Blind,  The Innocents is a psychological horror thriller that confirms his penchant for mood, inspired storytelling, and attention to detail.

In this eerily atmospheric tale, four teenagers - Ida (Rakel Lenora Fløttum) and her autistic sister Anna (Alva Brynsmo Ramstad), Benjamin (Sam Ashraf), and Aisha (Mina Yasmin Bremseth Asheim) - forge a strange and intimate connection on a psyche and spiritual levels. They first use their unfathomable mental powers to play innocent games, but soon, one of them opts for harming the people who vex him. 

Fortunately, Vogt is more interested in being genuinely creepy in a subtle way than piling up showoff scenes with technical pyrotechnics. What we have here isn’t mere style over substance but rather a perfect balance between the two. The film holds our attention, staging the events with nuanced, compelling dynamics as the story sneaks under our skins, suggestively portraying something sinister. 

The haunting camerawork, apt score, and flawless acting by the four young debutant leads are vital elements in the bewitchery. The Innocents is a chilling slow burn worth seeking out.

Old Henry (2021)

Direction: Potsy Ponciroli
Country: USA

Tim Blake Nelson (O Brother Where Art Though?, 2000; The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, 2018) stars in Old Henry, a gripping western that, combining action and character, stands as the most noticeable work by director Potsy Ponciroli. Probing the genre for the first time in his career, the latter shows efficiency and simplicity in the screenplay and courage in the execution, filling the atmosphere with a slow-building tension that leaves no room for relaxation.

The story takes us to the Oklahoma Territory in the early 1900s, where Henry (Nelson), a widowed farmer with guts, lives with his adolescent son, Wyatt (Gavin Lewis). Their peaceful lives change abruptly when Henry decides to take home a severely injured man (Scott Haze), who had been chased by the inquisitive, ruthless Ketchum (Stephen Dorff) and his partners. The latter claims to be a sheriff, but his intention has nothing to do with law enforcement. The courage and determination shown by Henry make the others see him as a crazy man or a fool. What they don’t know is that this apparently meek farmer has an unmatched talent for shooting and is linked to a tumultuous past of violence.

Crisply told, the tale traditionally leads to a life-and-death shootout, but reserves a bitter twist for the end. Gauging from the acting qualities of Nelson, especially in the above mentioned motion pictures by the Coen brothers, there is little to worry regarding Old Henry. It’s solid entertainment, signaling that westerns are better when made simple.

The Tsugua Diaries (2021)

Direction: Miguel Gomes, Maureen Fazendeiro
Country: Portugal 

Shot in 16mm in Portugal, between August and September 2020, The Tsugua Diaries was born out of the impossibility for directors Miguel Gomes (Tabu, 2012; Arabian Nights, 2015) and Maureen Fazendeiro to complete the projects they were working on due to the coronavirus pandemic. Blurring the line between reality and fiction, the filmmakers conceived a leisurely, minimalistic tour de farce, freely narrated with reverse chronology (note that Tsugua is August spelled backwards) and presenting both cast and crew playing themselves while shooting a film on a mosquito-infested farm in Sintra during lockdown. 

It’s an open exercise with an interesting idyllic backdrop, comedic tones, literary references, a small amount of dramatic tension, and efficient editing. The actors Crista Alfaiate, Carloto Cotta and João Nunes Monteiro make it hard for us to know where the performers end and the personas begin; what you get is what you see and hear,  in an experimental line that suggests a mix of Godard and Assayas. By giving free rein to the actors, the directors successfully entangle viewers in their scheme. It’s all very risky and directionless, but delightful nonetheless. 

With the power of the images overstepping the dialogues, The Tsugua Diaries gives a wonderful example of artistic freedom, off-the-cuff creativity, microcosmic detail, and mood-induced emotion. This is an audacious reinvention of what a movie can be in times of strict restrictions.

Only the Animals (2021)

Direction: Dominik Moll
Country: France 

Working with his regular collaborator Gilles Marchand on the script, the German-born French director Dominik Moll (With a Friend Like Harry, 2000) adapts Colin Niel’s novel into a film noir that stamps its feet on the snow before jumping up to the Internet cloud. Taking advantage of the serviceable acting of the cast, the intermittently vibrant Only the Animals is in equal parts satisfactory and frustrating, making salty observations on loneliness, infidelity, cyber-scams and power. 

The story is told in chapters and takes an elliptical trajectory that, in the end, connects each and every character. It takes us to two contrasting worlds, opposing the snowy, desolated landscapes of the Causses in France to the colorful, populous Abidjan in Ivory Cost.

The plot starts with Alice (Laure Calamy), an unhappily married social worker who is in love with a lonely, morbid farmer tormented by noises, Joseph (Damien Bonnard). Her husband, Michel (Denis Ménochet), gets lured into an Internet sex scheme rooted in West Africa and carried out by Armand (Guy Roger N'Drin), a penniless scammer urgently seeking wealth. Yet, the main link is a missing woman, Evelyne Ducat (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi), the wife of a known financier with projects in Africa. In his absence, and before vanishing without a trace, she embraced a lesbian relationship with a clingy young woman named Marion (Nadia Tereszkiewicz). 

The understated indeterminacy of the story makes us minimally interested, while the surprises, far from jaw-dropping, make it a passable, calibrated crime thriller.

In Front of Your Face (2021)

Direction: Hong Sangsoo
Country: South Korea 

Beautifully crafted, naturally flowing, and full of surprises, In Front of Your Face, the 26th feature from prolific South Korean director director Hong Sangsoo, is about a former actress (Lee Hye-yeong) who returns to Seoul after years living in the US. During her stay, she embraces the present moments, reconnects with her estranged sister (Yunhee Cho), visits the house of her childhood, and agrees to a lunch appointment with a director (Kwon Hae-hyo) who, admiring her past work, offers her an opportunity to star in his upcoming film. 

Sangsoo keeps you engrossed by churning out active dialogues and a delicious lyricism. Yet, on this occasion, and despite the lightness of the storytelling, the core is heavyhearted, and there’s even room for doubt and ambiguity as well as dream and illusion. The most crucial aspect is the honesty with which Sangsoo enriches the emotional spectrum of his cerebral filmmaking style. Even if he decides to warp it, like it was the case here, his work always carries a sensorially alluring pleasure. 

Themes like loneliness, reintegration, openness, and compassion are common, but this one brings more, starting off vividly casual before becoming unnervingly earnest, then plaintive and disconcerting, and ultimately mischievous. It’s a bittersweet work from a visionary director who, for the first time since 2017, picks an actress other than his muse, Kim Min-hee, to play the central character. Instead, the latter is credited as a co-producer. Under these circumstances, In Front of Your Face is another distinctive Sangsoo hit.

Procession (2021)

Direction: Robert Greene
Country: USA

The American documentarian Robert Greene (Kate Plays Christine, 2016; Bisbee ’17, 2018) turns his look at the child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. Procession, his seventh film, documents the painful therapeutic process endured by six men who have been struggling with trauma all their lives. 

What’s interesting here is the different forms found by the victims in order to deal with the problem. Some are angrier than others, some are more anguished and less talkative, and some simply decided to forget most of the details. In all cases, the wounds are too deep to recover in full, a fact aggravated by the incredible lack of justice that normally involves these cases.

Greene’s documentary might have done a nice job in helping these traumatized men, but the film itself flows heavily, and our attention almost succumbs to its aimless structure and narrative fragmentation. It wasn’t bad, but the way it was presented was a bit of a letdown. With that said, the film still serves the purpose of exposing the evil kept hidden for so long and the debilitating consequences for those who fell into the hands of predatory clergy.

A Hero (2021)

Direction: Asghar Farhadi
Country: Iran 

A simple and efficient storytelling opposes to shifting complex emotions in this new drama film by the celebrated Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi (A Separation, 2011; The Salesman, 2016). His ninth feature won the prestigious Palme D’Or in Cannes, marking a return to top form and to his Iran after an unimpressive experience in Spain with Everybody Knows (2018).

The protagonist here is Rahim Soltani (Amir Jadidi), an honest sign painter and calligrapher who was imprisoned for debt after being double-crossed by a business partner. During a two-day leave, he becomes in possession of a lost bag with gold coins that can easily pay his debt and free him from prison. But Rahim is too honest for that, and decides to return the bag to the owner. Through this pure act of selflessness, he expects to be forgiven and start a new life with the woman he loves, Farkhondeh (Sahar Goldoost). Lamentably, nothing goes as planned. 

While following Rahim’s dramatic journey, we are plunged into a personal meditation on morality and psychological societal mechanisms permeated by fake news and conspiration. Farhadi's style is direct, realist and sympathetic, and the film, bolstered by an instinctively fluid camerawork, is acted with rigor and intelligence. In his first collaboration with the distinguished director, Jadidi was able to convey the controlled panic of a person who lost face in a society that is implacably quick to judge. All in all, it's so easy to turn honesty into humiliation. 

As a shattering experience that doesn't stint on uncomfortable scenes, A Hero is another impeccable entry in Farhadi’s rich catalogue of timeless contemporary classics.

Memoria (2021)

Direction: Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Country: Colombia / Thailand / other

In Memoria, the most recent film by Thai writer-director Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Uncle Boonmee Who Recalls His Past Lives, 2010; Cemetery of Splendor, 2015), Tilda Swinton plays Jessica Holland, a Scottish woman in search for the meaning of hearing a particular sound in Bogotá, Colombia. She left Medellin, where she lives, to visit her sister Karen (Agnes Brekke), who is in the hospital with an unidentified illness. One night she wakes up in the middle of the night due to a sudden, intense bang that repeats the following days. Insomniac, she decides to go after it.

At once sensory and spiritual, this contemplative mystery of a movie plays like a journey filled with uncanny signs, philosophical quests, and revealing encounters. No one can guess where it leads. The spoken language may have changed but Weerasthekul’s cinematic attributes remain strangely hypnotic. Although uncreepy, the film probes otherworldly interactions and references past lives with a perceptive lyrical sense. It’s about life and death; past and present; animism and trauma; about how humans connect with each other and the multiple mysteries of the universe.

More than mind-blowing, Memoria is an original piece of cinema that, keenly shot and oddly paced, rewards patient viewers with an openness to the intangible. If cinema is about being transported to another realm and dimension, Weerasethakul is unrivaled as a helmsman.

Cyrano (2021)

Direction: Joe Wright
Country: USA

It’s great to see Peter Dinklage (Game of Thrones, 2011-2019; The Station Agent, 2003) playing Cyrano de Bergerac in this new adaptation of the Edmond Rostand’s widely popular play by the hand of English filmmaker Joe Wright (Atonement, 2007; Darkest Hour, 2017). However, and considering the potential of the story, this tragedy turned stiff musical is surprisingly pedestrian, aiming big but leaving us with crumbs.

Originally written for off Broadway by Dinklage’s wife, Erica Schmidt, and appropriately photographed by Wright’s regular collaborator, Seamus McGarvey, the film never packs nearly as much of a wallop as the version of Jean-Paul Rappeneau, who directed Gerard Depardieu to critical acclaim in 1990.

The story revolves around the complex relationship between a brave, eloquent army officer named Cyrano (Dinklage), a radiant woman named Roxanne (Haley Bennett), and a handsome new cadet named Christian (Kelvin Harrison Jr.). Bennett and Harrison Jr. don’t deliver, but Dinklage cannot be made responsible for the yawning. His performance reaches satisfactory levels. 

Sadly, the film is never as good as it should be, lacking energy to thrive and being stretched out by these terrible musical moments put together by the brothers Aaron and Bryce Dessler. This is the second miss in a row by Wright, following last year’s The Woman in the Window.