Verity: There's a serious conundrum that exists at the core of Verity that largely dictated how I ended up feeling about it: It's committed enough to its trashiness to go down as a competent wine mom psychological thriller but restrained enough to make you wonder why they refused to crank up the volume of the camp. Who is the main culprit behind Verity's miscalculated timid streak? Well, it's definitely not the cast. Dakota Johnson and Josh Hartnett do a pretty good job of selling the slowly escalating flirtation that turns into a tryst that really puts their characters into a jam that they're going to have a hard time wiggling out of while Anne Hathaway relishes the opportunity to chew up some scenery as the titular author who brings all these crazy kids together whenever she's liberated from the catatonic state she spends most of the film in. Screenwriter Nick Antosca also deserves to be (mostly) exonerated. While his script definitely runs into some roadblocks as it lays out its absurd plot that's reverse engineered to inspire debate about the reality of what transpired in the film once the big twist is revealed, but the blueprint for fun trash never falls out of sight and it even becomes pretty fully realized when the temperature finally rises from slightly simmering to a decent boil in the final act. This narrows the suspect list down to one person and he is indeed the guilty party: director Michael Showwalter. Unlike his fellow comedy vet Paul Feig-who pretty seamlessly adapted to this world with his efforts on A Simple Favor and The Housemaid, Showalter has no feel for composing the twisty, trashy rhythms a film like this requires to thrive. His direction is far too icy and distant for such an in-your-face story, and his low energy approach bogs the movie down until the sheer ridiculousness of the material becomes so powerful that it drags his overmatched ass across the finish line despite his best efforts to halt the momentum. Seeing his name pop up in the end credits felt like watching Landry Shamet celebrate on the floor when the Knicks won the title back in June: He may have been on the floor a lot, but he didn't ultimately contribute much of anything to the winning effort. If Showalter has any interest in coming back to direct something like again, he's going to need get back in the gym and work on his jumper (and by jumper, I of course mean not being afraid to go for broke when making a movie that's designed to be a larger-than-life carnival of unapologetically silly excess).
Grade: B-
Other Mommy: Rob Savage has made a movie that is so breathless that there's basically no time to think about its underwritten story, goofy CGI or predictable scare patterns. I'm not being hyperbolic when I say that Other Mommy takes maybe five minutes to introduce its shape-shifting demonic entity that takes the form of a lonely, unhappy seven-year-old girl's (Arabella Olivia Clark) mother (Jessica Chastain) and never takes its foot off the gas until the credits roll roughly 85 minutes later. The sheer relentlessness of the entire affair paired with the solid performances from Chastain and Clark and Savage's inspired stylized shot compositions that features plenty of playful camerawork made this a nice October diversion.
Grade: B-
The Social Reckoning: Drawing constant comparisons to The Social Network was the inevitable fate that Aaron Sorkin created for himself when he elected to revisit the impact Mark Zuckerberg has made on our society for The Social Reckoning. Having to live in the shadow of a beloved, era-defining piece of cinema is a frankly a no-win game, especially when this new film that has been accurately described as more of a companion piece than an actual sequel is a telling a much drier, less cinematic story and sees Sorkin himself taking over for David Fincher in the director's chair. Despite these albatrosses looming large over the project, Sorkin is able to forge ahead and make something worthwhile.
Underneath all of the tech jargon and creative liberties Sorkin takes to push forth this narrative centered around Facebook data engineer's Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison) unexpected journey to becoming a reluctant whistleblower after she contacts Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White) upon discovering how the company's changes to its algorithm that were aimed to increase time spent on the platform led to a significant jump in the spread of misinformation, hate speech, etc, The Social Reckoning paints a pretty damning picture of how much social media companies have helped erode the concept of truth in our world. While the revelations in The Social Reckoning aren't overly surprising to anyone who uses the internet and/or has experience talking to people who've been radicalized by reading fabricated ragebait/fearmongering stories masquerading as fact-based reporting online , it's still chilling to watch a movie that lays out how the people running these platforms knowingly sold out the well-being of the world just to collect bigger checks and endear themselves to politicians who would support the further deregulation of their industry. There was part of me that was concerned that Sorkin was going to paint Haugen's whistleblowing efforts as a bigger triumph than they actually were once she finally decides to go on the record late in the movie. To my surprise, he instead decided to soberly acknowledges that while she did inflict some financial/PR damage to Zuckerberg's empire, she failed to topple the behemoth of unchecked toxicity and lies that serve as the main drivers of his platforms. Framing Haugen and Horwitz's work on the story that became known as The Facebook Files as merely a small victory in a larger war that may or may not be able to be won strengthened everything that came before it and confirmed that Sorkin is much less naive about what truth actually means in today's society than some other of the AARP-aged filmmakers out there today. A solid, well-acted (in addition to Madison and White's strong work in the lead roles, Jeremy Strong's fragile, deeply pathetic take on Zuckerberg is kind of mesmerizing and Betty Glipin threatens to steal the show in her limited screen time as Horwitz's snarky hardass editor at The Wall Street Journal) journalism movie was the best-case scenario for this project and I hope that this won't be the last time that Sorkin gets the chance to sit in the director's chair.
Grade: B
