The latest film releases include A Complete Unknown, Babygirl, Nosferatu, and Better Man. Weighing in are William Bibbiani, film critic for the Wrap and co-host of the Critically Acclaimed Network, and Amy Nicholson, host of the podcast Unspooled and film reviewer for Los Angeles Times.
A Complete Unknown
Timothée Chalamet plays a young Bob Dylan, Monica Barbaro is Joan Baez, and Boyd Holbrook is Johnny Cash in this biopic set in the 1960s. It follows the start of Dylan’s career until he made the controversial move to “go electric” at the Newport Folk Festival. Director James Mangold also worked on the Johnny Cash film Walk the Line.
Bibbiani: “You know how it's called A Complete Unknown? That was a mission statement — we're not gonna actually find out anything about Bob Dylan or explore him or have any insight. It's basically — he's going to be inscrutable and cool. … This is a movie about observing Bob Dylan, not knowing him. And I guess if you don't know anything about Bob Dylan, this might give you an introduction to his mystique. But if you do know something about Bob Dylan, I think you're gonna be disappointed. … I found this movie deeply annoying in how just uninterested it was in getting under Bob Dylan's skin, and how absolutely in love it was with watching other people watch Bob Dylan.”
Nicholson: “A lot of the women in [Dylan’s] life think he's incredibly talented, but also have intense problems with him as a human being. They just keep calling him on his behavior, which you need. And really the emotional center of this movie, even though it's about Bob Dylan, isn't Bob Dylan at all. It's like Edward Norton playing Pete Seeger. And Pete Seeger comes into this movie as a guy who's really convinced that folk music can save the world. And so it's trying to build up to that moment where you understand why it was such a betrayal that Bob Dylan went electric. … It seems a little melodramatic, but you’re like, ‘No guys, you're betraying humanity.’ And you believe that at least Pete Seeger believes it.”
Babygirl
Nicole Kidman stars in this thriller as a CEO who risks her career and family when she has an affair with a much younger intern, played by Harris Dickinson.
Nicholson: “It's not quite the erotic thriller that it's selling itself as. It's definitely not a romance. It's really a provocation. How do we feel about a movie where the CEO of a robotics company, that's Nicole Kidman, has this affair with her intern, and this dilemma over who's really in power in a post-MeToo era. … The movie's trafficking in getting a rise out of us … while also being the story about a woman who really does need to be dominated. … It's really about them exploring consent and what they mutually want. And if you see it as a movie about consent and not about morality, it becomes really interesting.”
Bibbiani: “I've seen a lot of people say, ‘Oh, the one thing I can't believe about this movie is that Nicole Kidman isn't sexually satisfied by Antonio Banderas.’ But that's how kink works. You can have seemingly everything, but you have a very specific need that is not being fulfilled. And this is what it's like to live an entire life without that, and then all of a sudden, it comes flooding out at once, and that can be very reckless.”
Nosferatu
This is a remake of the 1922 silent German film, which was adapted from Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula. It is directed by Robert Eggers (The Witch, The Lighthouse), and stars Lily-Rose Depp, Bill Skarsgård, and Nicholas Hoult.
Bibbiani: “Robert Eggers is very big on being period accurate. And here he's working with a remake of a 1922 silent film, and he's got a very interesting approach to it. In many respects, he's doing the same story, but in the second half, we realize he's up to something different. And what I think is exciting about his version is that it's actually not that different a vibe from Babygirl. It's actually also about sexual repression in a marriage. And here's a woman who is married to Nicholas Hoult. And it's like, ‘Ah, you know who's only kind of okay at sex? Nicholas Hoult.’ And I'm in the audience going, ‘Wow.’ And ‘Yeah, you know who I'm actually more tempted by? Giant, decaying rat monster.’ And I'm watching the movie, and I'm like, ‘I get it actually.’
Lily-Rose Depp plays the lead here as the woman who's torn between Nicholas Hoult and decaying rat monster played by Bill Skarsgård. I'm starting to really admire her as an actor. She's proven that she's really willing to throw herself into a role and go to weird places.
… If you've seen Bram Stoker's Dracula in any form, if you've read the book, you're going to be familiar with the basic gist of the tale. And what we're really seeing is: What would Robert Eggers do with it? … He made something gorgeous, and weirdly sensual, and funny, and really scary. And I admire it. I think it's an excellent version."
Nicholson: “The element of the film that really registered in this retelling of it — is the sense of here's a bad thing coming, and everybody knows about it. ... This movie just captures a sense of dread. I have tended to be a little underwhelmed by Robert Eggers’ films. So here, when he's doing a movie that's just clearly not original in the slightest, the story everybody knows, I liked it the best out of all of his work. I was able to sink in, appreciate his style, appreciate his flair. I mean, the inky blots that he uses. The way he uses shadows to do scene transitions.
… If I have a couple dings on it, it's that some of the minor characters, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, he's in the movie a lot, and his character doesn't add that much to the story. And then Willem Dafoe, just because it's Willem Dafoe, every time he shows up onscreen, people just start giggling, which is funny in the moment, but it just seems to take place in a totally different movie than whatever Lily-Rose Depp is doing. There's nothing funny in her performance at all. It's just raw, raw, raw power, and she's incredible.”
Better Man
The rise, fall, and comeback of British pop star Robbie Williams is at the center of this biopic. However, he is portrayed as a chimpanzee.
Nicholson: “Robbie Williams is a guy who leans all the way into making fun of himself as a narcissist, which is something he does in the first moment. And because he came to fame in the band Take That, he has always had this conception of himself as a performing monkey, and that is why, for the entire movie, he's played as a chimpanzee, and all the other characters are human beings. … My big regret is that I did not put this movie on my top 10 list because the director, Michael Gracey, he has this way of making movies. He did The Greatest Showman, where you go see it once, and you're like, ‘What a great spectacle. I had a blast. How cheesy, how fun.’ And then you watch it again and you think, ‘Oh, this is incredibly skillfully put together.’ And when I watched Better Man again, I thought, wow, this is a filmmaker making just beautiful, expressionistic, hilarious work of art where there's a joke every minute, and also musical numbers interspersed throughout it that are just staged, wonderfully, expressionistically, larger than life, that say so much about who Robbie Williams is.”
Bibbiani: “I've been a fan of Robbie Williams for many years. He just can't stop writing bangers. It's always been weird to me that he was never bigger in America. This is a fun introduction to his work. … There's a handful of musical numbers in this movie that I think are absolutely phenomenal. The version of Rock DJ that they do might be the best filmed musical number of this century so far, and I'm not even kidding about that. In the middle of a musical number, he is literally in this huge CGI action sequence fighting off the versions of himself that represents suicidal ideation. And I'm like, ‘Wow, you did not need to go this hard, Better Man, but they did, and it's so good.”