The Week USA - 13.03.2020

24 ARTS Review of reviews: Film & Music

Sophie Allison’s lei-
surely paced, guitar-
based songs are “as
intimate as journal
entries,” said Mark
Richardson in The Wall
Street Journal. On her
second album, the
young songwriter who records as Soccer
Mommy often makes anxiety, depression,
and her mother’s illness her subjects, yet
“her unerring ear for melody makes each
track feel like an open door that invites
listeners in.” Clean, her 2018 debut, wound
up on many critics’ Top 10 lists; this record
is “even stronger.” As a lyricist, Allison
“has a skill for following winding syntax
to a sharp point,” said Jayson Greene in
Pitchfork.com. But here her music, though
brighter and fuller, lacks the surprising
strum patterns and one-to-one immediacy
of Clean. The songs feel anthematic, except
that they lack a voice shouting from the raf-
ters. The penultimate track, “Stain,” conveys
the old urgency. Elsewhere, “she has yet to
locate this power within the glossy peaks
of the new sound she has churned up.”

Dan Snaith, the

Canadian-born, London-

based dance-music

guru who records as

Caribou and Daphni,

“has spent 20 years

now mixing festival-tent

ecstasy with heartfelt

interiority,” said Rob Harvilla in TheRinger

.com. Still, his first Caribou album in five

years feels like his most personal yet. It’s

also “extravagantly rewarding whether

you think about it way too hard or hardly

think about it at all.” It provides close listen-

ers with magician-like cuts between piano

arpeggios and thundering EDM, yet it’s also

loaded with pop earworms. The album’s

signature move is a sudden warping of the

music, said Alexis Petridis in TheGuardian

.com. But Snaith has also pushed his “frag-

ile, unshowy” vocals to the forefront, and

doing so “turns out remarkably impactful.”

His unpredictable career has ended up in an

exciting niche —a place “where electronic

auteur meets singer-songwriter, where an

innate feel for pop music and the dance

floor co-exists with experimentation.”

Grimes’ latest “sounds

like a pulled punch

from an artist whose

superpower used to

be her sonic and con-

ceptual fearlessness,”

said Judy Berman in

Time. “By no means a

bad album,” Miss Anthropocene presents

itself as a deliberately perverse celebra-

tion of global warming, and it contains

several strong tracks of arty electronic pop

that again prove the 31-year-old singer-

producer who records as Grimes “could

bend and meld genres in her sleep.” Still,

the 10-song set doesn’t hang together “as

tightly as a concept record should,” and the

lyrics don’t meet the concept’s ambition.

“Even if it’s not always as vivid as some of

her earlier albums,” said Heather Phares

in AllMusic.com, “Miss Anthropocene is

often fascinating.” Its opening track “begins

by rolling in like a blanket of smog,” and

much of what follows is “a murky mix of

ethereal, nu-metal, and industrial-inspired

sounds that call to mind a thoroughly pol-

luted world.”

Soccer Mommy
Color Theory

++++

Caribou

Suddenly

++++

Grimes

Miss Anthropocene

++++

Pixar’s first original feature

since 2017’s Coco is a “touch-

ing, lovingly crafted oddity,”

said Justin Chang in the Los

Angeles Times. An unlikely

mashup of “an ancient

storybook quest, a rowdy

’80s- flavored buddy comedy,

and an out-and-out male

weepie,” it finds “glimmers of

real enchantment and honest

feeling” in its tale of two brothers trying to recon-

nect with their dead father. In a contemporary

suburban landscape populated by trolls and other

mythic creatures, Ian, an awkward teenage elf, and

his goofy older brother are bequeathed an enchant-

er’s staff that they use to restore their father to

life—but wind up getting only

his bottom half. In search of a

fix, they set off on an adventure.

Though Tom Holland and Chris

Pratt handle the voicework

admirably, the movie “never

really takes flight,” said A.A.

Dowd in AVClub.com. It “keeps

veering off into mild detours,”

and Ian’s story arc feels sche-

matic. But if parts “come close

to Pixar on autopilot,” the ending is “transcen-

dent,” said Kevin Maher in The Times (U.K.).

Writer-director Dan Scanlon, who based the movie

on memories of his own father’s premature death,

hits an emotional bull’s-eye that makes for painful

viewing—“but in the best way.”

Yes, that’s Mick Jagger in a

supporting role. But this new

art-fraud thriller “works best

as a kind of screen test” for its

paired co-stars, said Guy Lodge

in Variety. Claes Bang plays a

Milan-based art critic who toys

with tourists to pay the bills;

Elizabeth Debicki follows him

home and into bed one day

and proves his equal in clever

banter. Indeed, when this film darkens halfway in,

“you may wish Bang and Debicki had been around

to make elegant little mystery capers with Alfred

Hitchcock.” Jagger plays an art collector who

invites the couple to his Lake Como estate, and his

Cassidy is “an extraordinary

figure—wicked, wrinkled, flute-

thin, with a smile too big for his

head,” said Anthony Lane in

The New Yorker. “There’s not a

weak link in the cast,” because

the reliably sonorous Donald

Sutherland plays the hermit

artist at the center of Cassidy’s

scam. Then the twists begin

piling up in a way that alters

the tone and makes a sacrifice of Debicki’s obvious

intelligence, said Boyd van Hoeij in The Hollywood

Reporter. The “somewhat underwhelming” close

doesn’t ruin the movie, though. It’s “a mutt of sorts

but no less a pleasure to spend some time with.”

Onward

Two elf brothers learn to

move past regret.

++++

Directed by Dan Scanlon

(PG)

The Burnt

Orange Heresy

An art collector enlists a

critic in a silk-glove crime.

++++

Directed by

Giuseppe Capotondi

(R)

Ian, Barley, and Dad’s better half

Jagger’s timeless seducer

Disney, Sony Pictures Classics