Tony McNamara

The Roses (2025)

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When we went to see Superman while I was in New Orleans in July, Brandon & I mentioned a couple of trailers that we were both sick of seeing and expressed our lack of interest in the films that they were promoting. One of them was Freakier Friday, which I ended up loving, and the other was The Roses. With apologies to my viewing companions who loved this, unlike with Freakier Friday, this one was just as awful as the trailer made it out to be. 

Theo (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Ivy Rose (Olivia Colman) are at an inflection point in their marriage. It’s been ten years since they first met, when Theo escaped into the kitchen of a restaurant to cool off when another person took credit for his designs at a work dinner, meeting chef Ivy. The two moved to the U.S., where Theo’s just landed a major contract to design and build a maritime museum, and he uses the advance from the project to open Ivy’s dream restaurant, called “We’ve Got Crabs.” Unfortunately, the museum collapses during a storm as a result of his poor handiwork, but the same storm ends up stranding a huge crowd of people at Ivy’s usually-empty restaurant, including a notable film critic. As Theo’s career essentially comes to an end (not helped by his filmed reaction to the collapsing building going viral), Ivy’s suddenly explodes, and the two decide to let her be the breadwinner for a time while he raises their two children, Hattie and Roy. A few years later, the kids have transformed from fun-loving little moppets who ate sugar until they threw up to preteen athletes obsessed with performance and fitness, while Ivy’s empire has expanded through franchising of her restaurant. Although Theo was mollified for a time by Ivy’s funding of his design and construction of their (read: his) dream house, now that he’s done with that and ready to re-enter the workforce, their resentments toward one another eventually bubble over and the two start the process of a divorce, as acrimoniously as possible. 

This film was directed by Jay Roach, whose early-career comedy success with the Austin Powers and Meet the Parents franchises eventually devolved into making things like the poorly received American remake of Le Dîner de Cons in 2010’s Dinner for Schmucks and the toothless political satire The Campaign starring Will Ferrell and Zach Galafianakis. Screenwriter Tony McNamara has a better reputation around these parts, having written Poor Things (and having a hand in writing The Favourite), but while this script is serviceable, it’s not up to par with either of those works. In McNamara’s defense, this feels like a film in which the attitude toward adlibbing was a bit too lenient, although given how clunkily some of the film’s supposed zingers thud to the ground it’s hard to believe that this was the best that this cast could come up with. Andy Samberg doesn’t pull out any of his trademark charm as he sleepwalks through his lines with an identical and static “Can you believe this?” smirking energy, but at least he’s not as out of place as Kate McKinnon’s portrayal of his wife, an oddball whose desire to get into Theo Rose’s pants is as obvious as it is offputting. She does deliver the film’s best line, however, when she admits that she’s thrown caution to the wind because she’s old, her face is melting, and she knows her body’s “working up a stage 4 something” so she might as well live a little. 

Both Samberg and McKinnon’s performances have the air of something that would have worked well if the film had been edited with a little more oomph. Their failure isn’t in the performance (at least not entirely) as much as it is in the pacing and the way that the camera lingers on them a little too long after they do a bit. The same cannot be said for Zoë Chao and Jamie Demetriou, who are bafflingly unfunny in ways that I didn’t imagine possible. If you don’t recognize Chao from her voice work on Creature Commandos or know Jamie Demetriou from Fleabag, you’ll know them from the trailer as the couple doing the “We love your witty banter” bit, which is even less funny in the film than it was in the marketing material. Ncuti Gatwa, who plays Ivy’s head waiter, has a couple of good lines, but he’s also playing his character a bit broad; as I’m currently catching up on Doctor Who after losing interest around 2019 and was just coming to the end of Jodie Whittaker’s run, I was a bit concerned that this would bode poorly for his turn as the title character (having since watched his premier in “The Giggle,” I can say that I’m very looking forward to his time as the Doctor). 

I’ve never seen the Danny DeVito-directed original adaptation of this under the same name as the novel, The War of the Roses, but I can’t imagine that this improves on that one. For one thing, that film features DeVito as both a character (he’s a divorce lawyer) and narrator, and it also seems like that one gets into the actual conflict between the couple a lot earlier in the narrative than this one does. I suppose the omission of “war” from the title was actually a declaration that this movie wasn’t terribly interested in that conflict and would instead be a longer portrait of what is, for the first two acts, a fairly ordinary marriage. By the time Ivy’s making deepfakes of her husband confessing to intentionally botching the maritime museum in order to put the final nail in the coffin and Theo’s bashing the actual stove that belonged to Julia Child to pieces, there’s barely any runtime left. The film’s final moment is the most interesting and novel element, but it’s far too little and comes far too late to save this. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Poor Things (2023)

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“We are a fucked species; know it.”
“We are all cruel beasts – born that way, die that way.”
“Polite society is fucking boring.”
“Polite society will destroy you.”
“All sexuality is basically immoral.”

Poor Things is the kind of movie about the total scope of life as a human being that allows characters to voice those kinds of abstract philosophical statements, often with immediate dismissive pushback from the poor souls hearing them.  In that way, it’s the culmination of everything provoc-auteur Yorgos Lanthimos has been working towards since early antisocial provocations like Dogtooth & Alps.  He’s always had a coldly detached fascination with basic human behavior & relationships, but he has yet to dissect & catalog them all in a single text the way he does here.  Every new Lanthimos movie feels like it’s poking at some assumed social norm as if it were a corpse he found in the woods.  Poor Things finds that naive interrogation at its most scientifically thorough & perversely fun, to the point where he articulates the entire human experience through repurposed dead flesh.  In doing so, he’s clearly made The Movie of the Year, and so far the movie of his career.

Emma Stone stars as the repurposed corpse in question: a suicide victim who has been reborn as a Frankenstein-style brain transplant experiment in a mad scientist’s Turn-of-the-Century laboratory.  Her monstrous “Daddy God” creator—played with pitiable Elephant Man anguish by Willem Dafoe—initially keeps his experiment on a short leash, confining her entire life to his grotesque but lavish home.  She eventually breaks free, though, as all Frankenstein monsters do, and ventures into the world as an adult-bodied woman with the mind of a rapidly developing child.  Her resulting interrogation of the world outside her home is intensely violent, as anyone who can picture an adult-sized toddler throwing a temper tantrum would expect.  It’s also intensely sexual, as she can find no joy more immediately self-fulfilling than orgasmic bliss but lacks basic understanding of that joy’s socially appropriate boundaries: assumed monogamy, acceptable dinner conversation, the stigma of sex work, when & where it’s permissible to masturbate, etc.  If she is meant to represent humanity at its most basic & untouched by learned social restrictions, she represents us as insatiably horny, violent beasts who have to consciously strive to learn empathy for each other because it is not innate in our souls.  It’s a hilarious, uncomfortably accurate assessment of the species.

If there’s any one particular social norm that Lanthimos naively interrogates here, it’s a gendered one.  Much of the reanimated monster’s exploration of Life is limited by the men who wish to control her.  First, her Daddy God confines her as a domestic prisoner, the same way all fathers of young women fear their freedom as autonomous adults.  Once she’s loose, a small succession of selfish bachelors aim to trap her again in the domestic prison of marriage: Ramy Youssef as an ineffectual Nice Guy, Mark Ruffalo as a dastardly fuckboy fop, and Christopher Abbott as a sociopathic abuser.  All the men in the monster’s life seek to control her in ways that stifle her self-development.  It’s a movie about male possessiveness just as much as it’s about the absurdities of Life & societal decorum in that way, and the heroic triumph at the center is mostly in watching the creature fuck & read her way out of her patriarchal bonds to become her own person.  At times, that sentiment is expressed through philosophical assessment of what it means to live as an ethical person in modern society.  More often, it’s a crass celebration of women being annoying & gross in public despite the men around them demanding they calm it down.  It’s oddly uplifting in either case.

Yorgos Lanthimos’s films have become more recognizably comedic since he broke through to a wider audience with The Lobster, and they’re all the better for it.  There’s a sense of playful collaboration here where the director allows each contributor freedom to run wild: Stone & Ruffalo in their sketch comedy acting choices, cinematographer Robbie Ryan in his fish-eye lens fantasia, screenwriter Tony McNamara in his violent perversions of vintage humorist quips.  It’s telling that the only work that’s directly alluded to onscreen (besides, arguably, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and its James Whale mutations) is Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, another prankishly prurient comedy of manners.  Lanthimos has always morbidly poked at social norms & decorum with this same curious outsider’s perspective, but never before while taking so much obvious glee in the act, nor on this wide of a scope.  I rarely have this much fun thinking about how we’re “a fucked species” of “cruel beasts,” and how our rules of appropriate social interaction are so, so very “fucking boring.”

-Brandon Ledet