William McNulty

This movie is a disaster. Daniel Craig’s and Edward Norton’s talents are wasted amidst a cast of lesser actors and a plot which is at turns inscrutable and tedious. Even if you actually cared about any of these poorly defined, unappealing characters there would be little suspense to support your interest. In general it seems to be mostly an attempt to advance Janelle Monae’s acting career. She is, at best, adequate. If you’re among her fans you might enjoy it like Elvis fans loved Blue Hawaii. Like so many Netflix productions it is far longer than it deserves to be and not worth the effort to figure out what is going on.

Billed as a “time travel thriller”, it is neither thrilling nor worth your time.

The first three episodes were amazing. Suspense, psychological complexity, great action sequences. Not to mention tremendously gifted canine actors. But episode 4 lands with a dull thud. The writers seem to have fallen in love with an emphasis on psychological complexity. There are interminable scenes in which characters discuss the intricacies of their relationships, revealing secret identities, conflicted emotions, and Byzantine histories that would leave Bergman shaking his head. And, OMG, they got rid of the dogs! The actors are fine, but there is only so much they can do with endless monologues of melancholic exposition that does little to advance the plot. These writers should spend some time streaming Homeland. I’m hoping that this episode was just an anomaly, and the writers came back to their senses by episode 5, which I have yet to see, so I’ll give it one more shot, but if 5 is as tedious as 4, I can’t invest any more of my time.

This is about a game of Life and Death that two men are engaged in. The question is posed from the beginning, what do you want when you have everything you want. The Writer ventures off into the desert seeking to define himself amidst harsh elements. The Psycho Killer appears out of nowhere as if in answer to the Writer’s needs. There seems to be an almost immediate recognition between the two that one will be the hunter and the other the hunted. The only sense one can make of some of the choices each man makes is that they need to play out this primal drama. Certainly for The Writer who is fabulously wealthy, there was plenty of time for him to surround himself with protection. But that would be cheating and it would leave him back where he started. There can be only one winner and the loser must die at the winner’s hands. The Psycho Killer has numerous opportunities to kill his prey, but to satisfy his own aesthetic sensibilities, he needs to bring things back to the desert for the final showdown. At least that’s as much as I could make of it. But on another level it’s just kind of preposterous with a lot of unjustified action. The other possibility is that none of it really happened at all, and was just a screenplay forming in the mind of The Writer. Excellent acting by both men. Some very good writing. Worth seeing.

I found Reminiscence forgettable.

The acting is the best thing about this film. It is quite believable and naturalistic. Often it seems like the actors are improvising. It would be nice if we could actually make what they are saying in many instances, since part of the realistic style involves a good deal of mumbling and frequent overwhelming background noise. There is a certain style of film making which seems to regard tedium as a characteristic of high art. Often the scenes in this film seem almost arbitrarily thrown together without serving any real narrative purpose. But for such films conventional narrative form is a cop out to be avoided at all costs. Clarity would be a betrayal of artistic integrity. There are a number of conversations on the subject of film making within the film, some of which take place in film school. Surprisingly, in one such discussion Alfred Hitchcock is mentioned with great veneration. The irony, of course is that Hitchcock was a master story teller and, I believe would be appalled by this particular film. But it is the sort of thing that your film school classmates find bold and deeply moving because it is so personal. They and many critics will tell you how brilliant you are, and your film will fail miserably at the box office, which, of course will be further proof of its excellence. If Hitchcock had made films like this we never would have heard of him.

I'm very sensitive to writing that preaches and presents characters that are mere devices to express the author's feelings. Certainly this film could invite that criticism. But Rudnick's writing is so strong and the performances are so convincing that what we see our five people from very different backgrounds struggling to deal with these extraordinary times. They are authentically expressing their own feelings rather than telling us what we should feel. They are not pontificating; they are sometimes revealing their own flaws and their inabilities to cope with all that's going on.I I found it both moving and, in places, hysterically funny. Bette Midler will, no doubt, be up for an Emmy. She hasn't had a vehicle like this in a long time, and it's a delight to watch her make the most of every opportunity the writing provides. But all five performances are exceptional. This is essentially a theatre piece filmed for tv, and, as such, allows the actors the rare opportunity to show off their chops in ways that screen work does not often allow.