Alien: Covenant

Alien: Covenant would probably be considered a better movie if it weren't part of the Alien series, if it were not being judged against insurmountable odds: being worthy of the original Alien (1979), the masterpiece of this franchise, or even the 1986 sequel, Aliens, which is junky yet consistently entertaining. Judged on its own merit, Alien: Covenant (the first Alien sequel to be helmed by Ridley Scott, who directed the original) is passable science fiction. This time around, the crew of a spaceship, bound for some outlying planet, is awakened after a malfunction kills 47 embryos. (Their ship is carrying over 1000 human embryos which will be harvested to populate this earth-like planet, a new colony.) When the crew receives unknown transmissions from another planet in their path (one that also may be habitable), they decide to investigate. We as the audience know exactly what's going on: This is a ruse to get them into harm's way. The movie unfolds rather predictably after that, as various crew members wander into dangerous situations and are picked off in ghastly ways by the alien creatures. Michael Fassbender, reprising his role as an android from Prometheus (the 2012 Alien prequel), figures prominently here; he's as cold and inhuman as you would expect an android to be, and he figures into a rather ingenious plot twist. And even though the ending is bold for a big budget thriller, ultimately, one grows weary of Alien: Covenant, and of its the idiotic characters, very quickly.

With Katherine Waterston, Danny McBride, Carmen Ejogo, and Billy Crudup.

Steve Jobs

Maybe there’s something vain about making three Steve Jobs movies in two years. In fact, this over-saturation is in keeping with the man himself. According to the new film, Steve Jobs, directed by Danny Boyle, the pugnacious CEO of Apple Computers esteemed himself higher than anyone else. When we meet him in 1984, he’s about to unveil his latest gadget: the Mackintosh computer. In 1984, Apple products looked like every other clunky, ugly device (vaguely futuristic in the way of 2001: A Space Odyssey), and this may be the filmmakers’ greatest joke on a company known for its beautiful electronics. Sure, they’re beautiful now. But Steve Jobs never makes it past 1998, and the original iMac is so ugly that Lisa Jobs (Steve’s daughter) quips, “It looks like Judy Jetson’s EasyBake Oven.”

If we have to sit through another movie about this arrogant bastard—whose company created a lot of amazing devices that I love—at least we get a somewhat unconventional movie, with some truly good performances. Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin structures the film like a three-act play, not a traditional biopic. Every time I sit down in front of one of those biographical dramas—even a good one—a little part of me dies of boredom. I went in expecting that same tired formula: Steve Jobs the kid who couldn’t relate to the other, normal children, Steve Jobs the kid who couldn’t resist taking things apart and putting them back together, Steve Jobs the smartest, ballsiest guy in the room. Then we would eventually get to Jobs's fall from grace and resurrection, the most interesting parts of his career. The structure frees director Danny Boyle, too. He doesn't have to honor the constraints of a traditional bio. What we have here is a stripped down drama that puts its actors under the microscope to see what they can do. It's immensely entertaining. 

Aaron Sorkin treats us to a highly concentrated airing of grievances, where we learn how justified was our disdain for Steve Jobs (but please, take more of my money!), but where we also learn that Steve Jobs was a human being. Michael Fassbender, the automaton of Great Acting, turns in a surprisingly lively and funny performance as the Master himself. Fassbender doesn’t chew up the scenery; He approaches this character as a flawed human being, and he controls our need to hate him with precision. By the end, that hatred has simmered to mild dislike with a touch of fondness.

Like The Social Network, Steve Jobs has a weight to it that feels slightly out of proportion with its subject matter. I think that’s because we still don’t fully understand how radically these technological gurus have reshaped our culture. And, perhaps, these two men in particular won’t be the ones we remember one hundred years from now. (It seems especially likely with Zuckerburg, as teenagers increasingly abandon the Facebook ship for other hipper social media sites.) But these movies put their fingers on the culture in an interesting and bold way: They force us to confront the reality that we’ve given our lives over to companies run by men who aren’t always very good human beings. And yet, these men are more human—not less—by the end.

Kate Winslet, who plays Steve Jobs’s right hand, Joanna Hoffman, gives an equally strong performance. Hoffman seems always trying to save Jobs from himself. In the many instances when Jobs deliberately shatters the relationship between himself and any number of his coterie, it’s Joanna who’s desperately picking up the pieces, who’s appealing to a version of Steve Jobs that she loves and respects. It’s through her that we feel any connection to Jobs at all. Winslet’s best accomplishment in this film is that she makes Joanna strong and appealing, not weak and slovenly. You feel that she could walk away at any moment, but chooses loyalty.

The electric force of the drama in this movie is reason enough to see it. I think that’s why Sorkin opted not to give us the grand sweep of this man’s life. A grand narrative would have deified him and taken all the excitement out of the story. This movie shows Steve Jobs—as far as I can tell—as he was: arrogant, myopic, cowardly, brazen, sharp, funny, and flawed. 

With Seth Rogen (as Steve Wozniak, Jobs’s partner and the man who did much of the brain-work of Apple), Jeff Daniels, Katherine Waterston (as Steve’s troubled girlfriend), Michael Stuhlberg, and playing Lisa Jobs at different ages, Perla Haney-Jardine, Ripley Sobo, and Mackenzie Moss. 

ELIZABETH MOSS CHANNELS CATHERINE DENEUVE AND THE HEROINES OF SHIRLEY JACKSON IN 'QUEEN OF EARTH'

As a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown, Elizabeth Moss channels Catherine Deneuve’s character in Repulsion, that unsettling 1965 psychological horror film from Roman Polanski. Moss, playing a woman who’s recently been dumped by her boyfriend, stars in Queen of Earth, the latest concoction from writer-director Alex Ross Perry. Moss and her co-star Katherine Waterston play best friends Katherine and Virginia. Katharine (the character, not the actress) has not only suffered the traumatic end of a romance, but also the painful loss of her father, a celebrated artist who battled severe depression. (And what's more, Katherine lives in the shadow of his reputation as an artist, accused of being the product of nepotism than an actual talent herself.) Virginia has enticed Katherine to her family’s lake house—which is apparently an annual trip for the two of them—ostensibly to help her best friend grieve in peace and maybe just find a way to breathe.

Alex Ross Perry points his camera directly at Moss (or, occasionally, the other actors) most of the time, and zooms in. Her face becomes the canvass for his story of psychological crisis. It’s good that Moss is such an expressive actor, a woman who is absolutely in touch with herself, with her emotions, and has a real command of that canvass. Her wide eyes, her running eye-liner, her lips seemingly inflated by the bubblegum-pink lipstick that she sloppily applied without regard to coloring between the lines, all of these cosmetic and exterior details show us a person at an emotional and psychological crossroads.

What’s perhaps more disturbing, however, than watching a woman go mad (which would seem exploitive on its own), is the way Queen of Earth smartly depicts the power play at the heart of the friendship between Katherine and Virginia. We see flashbacks of the previous summer trip to the lake house, when Virginia was going through her own painful breakup, and when things were pretty much okay for Katherine, who had that year brought along her then-boyfriend, stifling any chance for a good girl-time session between friends. Now, in the current year, Virginia has returned the favor so-to-speak, inviting a local beau named Rich (Patrick Fugit) over all the time, using him to feel superior to Katherine. It helps a lot that Rich likes getting under Katherine’s skin, and Virginia, although she doesn’t want to admit it, is starting to lose faith in her friendship with Katharine. Secretly, she’s already done, but she can’t quite admit it to herself, and, moreover, she’s still bristling from Katherine’s own abuse of their friendship the year before. Like Nancy Allen's character in the 1976 Carrie biting her lip just before dumping the pig's blood on the bemused Carrie, Virginia wants to enact some pain. She's just not as honest or openly depraved about it. 

This is a film about getting even while still displaying a smile and a few looks of concern. And the thing is, neither Katherine nor Virginia is the villain of Queen of Earth. The real villain is the lies we tell ourselves, or our own very human need to be with other people, to find validation of ourselves in others, that sets us up not simply for disappointment, but for the throes of despair, once the people we love have failed us, lied to us, used us, rejected us, laughed at us. It’s all there: in every relationship there is love and hate, truth and deception, friend and foe.

While Queen of Earth will surely be a hard sell for some—it’s a tough movie to sit through even at 90 minutes, because there’s nothing pleasurable about what it wants to show us—it does showcase some strong performances, and even though I don’t think I ever need to sit through this movie again, I appreciate what it’s trying to say about relationships. Katherine is very much a Shirley Jackson kind of character. Shirley Jackson, who wrote such novels as The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, was adept at entering into the then-mostly-uncharted minds of young women who lived in secrets (the mid-20th century in American lit celebrated the liberated male, not the imprisoned female just trying to understand herself). 

In a Shirley Jackson story, there's almost always a woman who's shut off from the rest of the world, usually because of the hostility that world holds for her. Like Eleanor Vance in Hill House, Katherine has come to an isolated place to find something, and it's there that a kind of haunted inner-struggle wages on and burns itself into our minds as we watch. But Jackson, I think, did it better: Her fiction manages to be both true and compelling, where Queen of Earth is often just true. 

As powerful as Elizabeth Moss’s performance is, and as fascinating a study of her breakdown as Alex Ross Perry has created, the movie feels somewhat lifeless. This may be the point: Katherine’s been drained of a kind of vitality. Something about Queen of Earth feels incomplete. It's as though we've never quite been given a risen to care about this character, as sympathetic as she seems. Perhaps it would have worked better as a kind of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? experience. Perry has put Katherine up on the screen like a camp goddess and then made it impossible for us to laugh.