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A. S. Hamrah

Summer movies 2024

September 13, 2024

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Deadpool & Wolverine

The summer’s movie headlines were dominated by the box office success of Deadpool & Wolverine, with the Penske-owned trade magazines proclaiming that the superhero team-up had broken twenty-two distinct and individual records. That was a funny number to wave around, similar to inane superlatives like “biggest R-rated Tuesday ever at the domestic box office” and “second-highest opening weekend of all time for a third installment.”

Along with the trades, semi-pro fanboy websites with aggressive names like Bam Smack Pow trumpeted how Deadpool & Wolverine “had done the unthinkable, managing to outperform none other than the face of the MCU franchise himself Iron Man. Yes, that’s right; the 2024 movie has now out-grossed Iron Man 3 at the box office, sailing past its impressive numbers,” as if anyone knew Iron Man 3’s exact tally, or even remembered anything that happened in that movie from 2013.

Because Deadpool & Wolverine is a meta-lesson in industrial practices and their history, Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) must get viewers up to speed right off: “Welcome to the MCU. You’re joining at a bit of a low point.” The actor then performs an expensive magic trick: with no gain in quality, he revitalizes the Marvel Cinematic Universe by treating Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) like an aging power hitter brought in late-season to get the franchise into the Series, justifying the stats that become the whole point.

The film also invents another sporty concept, the “anchor being.” The notion there is that a piece of intellectual property (Wolverine, for instance) is essential to the survival of some random timeline in the Marvel multiverse. Already understood as characters who can’t be killed because they have special regenerative powers, they have now been inducted into the multiverse, allowing them to be doubled, then tripled, quadrupled.

Wolverine’s tiredness in the film makes sense in this repetitive regime of endlessness and its accompanying exhaustion of ideas. The lesson of the film is that things are not going to get better, only continue on. Reynolds/Deadpool jokes that the film is guaranteed to be such a success that Jackman will have to come back to play Wolverine again and again, doing it until he’s 90. He doesn’t joke about how eventually Jackman will just be replaced with some digital post-life version of himself, billed as Hugh Jackman in his complete absence.

Deadpool & Wolverine, by acknowledging this new low point, admits that as superhero movies decline, they should be seen as high-budget TV specials with lots of celebrity guest stars. Here, Jennifer Garner, Wesley Snipes, Channing Tatum, and Chris Evans ham it up like they’re on an all-star roast of Kevin Feige. At last, the obvious burnout of this strategy has been exposed, flaunted by a zany, abusive jester-mascot-host. Now the MCU’s core audience can enjoy it again, out in the open, with a sigh of relief.

The film is a business manual for boys, illustrated with cartoon violence. It teaches them how to crush the competition and then spit in its face. “Dishonoring memory” is an important part of that, so past Marvel failures are included in the fun. Instructions include how to be sarcastic in a job interview. As the human resources director Happy Hogan, Jon Favreau, once an important Marvel filmmaker, is now merely a functionary standing in the way of Deadpool’s will to power.

The job interview scene exists at the intersection of the film’s two levels of adolescent satire. The second belittles the fans themselves, who are portrayed as idiotic, tractable pornhounds jerking off to CGI violence. (“Get your special sock out, nerds. It’s gonna get good!”) The violence is scored to the left-behind pop music of their childhoods, which they are now self-aware enough to enjoy for its corny or melodramatic qualities. NSYNC, Madonna, Fergie, and Avril Lavigne are enlisted to deliver pleasure as items of ironic kitsch sentimentality, dated entertainment, the way the droog Alex performed “Singin’ in the Rain” in A Clockwork Orange, minus any of Kubrick’s analysis.

In this homosocial milieu, like in a prison, the biggest fears are rape and dying alone. Family has to be mentioned, but also kidded as ad hoc, a bunch of weirdos, not the mom and dad who are out of the picture now that we have our driver’s license. The only real nuclear family here is Reynolds’s own. He and his wife, cookie-cutter North Americans, are depicted in the media as the Tsar and Tsarina of 2024’s new crap AI Hollywood, with Blake Lively represented in this movie by her voice and a big blonde ponytail stuck on the head of someone else’s body. Their children are here, too, in superfluous cameos as tot Deadpools.

While Reynolds and Jackman are the Bob Hope and Bing Crosby of this particular Road movie, ribbing Marvel and Disney the way Hope and Crosby used to make fun of Paramount in the 1940s, their destination is not some exotic locale of colonial expansion, but a place called “the Void,” an imaginary desert where old IP goes to die. The Void is a holding pen, a zone where the audience is mocked for having had even the slightest interest in second-rate, go-nowhere IP like the surplus superhero Gambit (Tatum). Reynolds and company flourish at the expense of the dummies they ridicule. A joke in the film sums it up. Told he has shit himself while unconscious, Deadpool offers a correction: “I wasn’t unconscious.”

Twisters

Right away, Lee Isaac Chung’s Twisters won me over with a twist I did not expect: it killed off almost its entire cast of young STEM jerks in the first big scene. I’m so sick of these chipper teams of Spielbergian science kids in everything. Read a real book for a change. “Five years later,” they’ve been replaced by an alternative group of gnarly storm-chasing tornado wranglers—older STEM kids in disguise, but a slight improvement.

The film borrows heavily from the classic Only Angels Have Wings playbook, in which an experience-hardened daredevil (Glen Powell/Cary Grant) tutors a skittish female newcomer (Daisy Edgar-Jones/Jean Arthur) in the ways of danger and adventure (filming tornadoes in Oklahoma/delivering airmail in the Andes). Powell as Hawksian man works fine, but Edgar-Jones, a Brit playing a New Yorkified Southerner who sounds like Anne Hathaway, never quite rises to the challenge of having a personality.

The book somebody read here is How to Blow Up a Pipeline, by which I mean they saw Daniel Goldhaber’s 2022 movie of it, which also features Sasha Lane in the cast, in the exact same role as of the rebel wranglers. A pipeline and a refinery do get blown up in Twisters, but these storm chasers have substituted politics for meteorology, ironic since the real Weathermen were bomb-making radicals.

The wranglers here are trying to stop things from blowing up, and they sell T-shirts for charity like good philanthropist-capitalists. Their project is really just making a belated sequel more rad by blowing out the back wall of the movie theater, in a re-creation of a photo that went viral in 2021, the one a US Marine took of the interior of a Kentucky movie theater after a tornado hit, with the screen gone and the post-storm wreckage visible where the movie should be.

Just add someone yelling “This theater wasn’t built to withstand what’s coming!” and you’ve got a movie—and a prophetic cry about the cinema, which wasn’t built to withstand the AI demolition now slicing through it. The use of diaper gel to stop tornadoes is like a joke out of Deadpool, but in the end the view of climate change here is real, because one aspect of it is certain: at the end of the world, wranglers with video cameras will be there, wranglin’ (trying to upload video to YouTube without a signal).

The Linguini Incident

In Twisters, Maura Tierney plays Edgar-Jones’s mother, a plainspoken Oklahoma woman who can’t quite bring herself to say climate change but who knows things are getting worse. Thirty-three years ago, dressed in a silver lamé New Wave outfit, Tierney had a small part as a waitress at a restaurant named Dali in a forgotten movie called The Linguini Incident. The film’s co-writer and director, Richard Shepard, who went on to direct other features, documentaries, and episodes of Girls, restored the film last year, as best he could. This summer it played in very select theaters.

The Linguini Incident is something of an East Coast version of another 1991 movie, Steve Martin’s L.A. Story, similarly a romp on the cusp of a disappearing zeitgeist, a last expression of the previous decade just after it ended.

Rosanna Arquette stars as Lucy, Dali waitress and fledgling escape artist on the downtown performance scene, frequently tied up and wriggling to free herself; David Bowie plays Monte, Dali bartender and gambler on the run; and Eszter Balint is Vivian, Lucy’s best friend, a designer of fetishy women’s lingerie. The duo who own Dali are a pair of sub-Wildean wits in colorful suits played by Andre Gregory and Buck Henry, encouraged by Shepard to deliver lines like this week’s guest stars on Mr. Belvedere. Their obnoxiousness makes them easier to take as marks when Monte involves Lucy and Vivian in a scheme to rob the restaurant on a night when it’s at its busiest.

Arquette in Desperately Seeking Susan (1985) and Balint in Stranger Than Paradise (1984) were defining women of the cinematic New York 1980s, one starry-eyed, goofy, and yearning, the other deadpan and blasé. In casting them alongside Bowie, Shepard had the makings of a classic, but he didn’t know it. This could have been the Design for Living (1933) of its day, a hipster screwball comedy about three thieves in love.

Instead, it’s more like an enjoyable second-tier pre-Code Hollywood programmer, although one filmed in color by Robert Yeoman, who went on to shoot Wes Anderson’s movies. Arquette, Bowie, and Balint hang out and walk around downtown, go to restaurants and bars, travel by half-broken bicycle, live in a crummy apartments. A Busby Berkeley feeling takes over near the end, in the water tank straitjacket escape routine that Lucy is fooled into performing despite her inability to extricate herself when bound.

Bowie, with his two differently colored eyes, was never quite a leading man. As a movie star he was always a character actor (a “Cracked Actor”). Trying to be semi-normal, a basic dashing cad, he becomes a touch bland and Ronald Colman-ish. A missed opportunity, the film did have a happy ending off-screen. The model Iman has a bit in The Linguini Incident as a guest at Dali. That’s where Bowie met her. The rest is history, but not quite film history.

Close Your Eyes

Víctor Erice’s fourth and probably last feature film begins as a film-within-film, one with the same basic set-up of The Big Sleep or Mr. Arkadin: an older man summons a younger private detective and gives him a mission to dig into his past. The scene refers explicitly to another film of that era, The Shanghai Gesture, but the gesture isn’t complete. That’s because Close Your Eyes, though clearly a late work and a cinema valedictory, never rises to the level of the classic. It comes across as work done in frustration, not recollected in tranquility.

There is something choked off and inaccessible about Close Your Eyes. It holds back even as it perseverates about its one situation: years ago a famous actor (José Coronado) abandoned the film-within-a-film in the middle of shooting, and ever since then the film’s director (Manolo Solo) has been living with the ruins of his abandoned movie and his aborted career, searching for his lead actor, who has disappeared.

The film never hums or vibrates. The best scenes are the ones set at the director’s beach shack, with the multigenerational residents of his threatened seaside community sitting around a table, drinking after dinner, and singing “My Rifle, My Pony, and Me” from Hawks’s Rio Bravo, a gesture toward a lost world that for the time being they still inhabit. Too much of the rest of the film is old men whining about cinema’s decline. Although I feel this sense of loss as acutely as anyone, I’m tired of this attitude in the older generation. Just go to the movies.

La Chimera

It’s not like good movies are not being made and not playing in theaters. It’s that men like the ones in Erice’s film refuse to acknowledge they exist. Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera, for instance, a film that’s pretty casual about its brilliance and originality, also presents a lost soul. Josh O’Connor’s Arthur, just out of prison and sick with a cough, returns to a small town in Italy. He’s a disgraced British archaeologist with a sixth sense for buried antiquities, which he’d been incarcerated for looting. Young and handsome in a dirty linen suit, he is also reeling from the disappearance of his girlfriend, Beniamina (Yile Vianello), whom he sees in his dreams, pulling on the end of the film’s literalized fil rouge.

All the vibrations absent from Close Your Eyes travel on this thread in Rohrwacher’s movie, humming past gorgeous, decaying buildings in the Etrurian countryside. If there is one director who doesn’t flinch before admonishments against so-called poverty porn, it’s Alice Rohrwacher. She has a totally new way of filming, encompassing cities and nature, and she is especially good with wind on bodies of water at night. The way she tells a story is elliptical, satisfying, and makes the viewer feel in on things. Her characters never seem acted, no matter how weird or flamboyant. We want to know who these tombaroli are, how they exist.

O’Connor and the film are as fragile as the paintings on the tomb walls that fade the minute they are exposed to new air (as in Fellini’s Roma). The revelation by flashlight, then candlelight, of a statue in shadow is the film’s emotional peak. The statue—a young goddess holding a fish, with a panther at her feet, unseen for millennia—replaces the missing Beniamina of Arthur’s dreams and is immediately beheaded so it can be removed from its tomb and sold on the black market, buried for transport in a crate of cheap toy soccer balls the colors of the Italian flag.

Substitutes for Beniamina proliferate and taunt Arthur. “Finally you can see my face,” says Spartaco (Alba Rohrwacher), a glamorous art auctioneer heretofore only known to Arthur and his fellow thieves as a male voice. The headless body of “The Sibyl of Etruria” (as the statue is christened) is projected on Spartaco’s dress as she explains to her wealthy audience that this ancient prophetess can be “the goddess of anyone.” She can be “any one of us” because “she hasn’t a face,” not knowing Arthur has the Sibyl’s marble head in a bag, that he and the other scroungy tomb raiders plan to extort her with it.

Arthur’s tragedy is that this head, this face, will become as lost and buried as the missing Beniamina. In Close Your Eyes, a statue of the twin-faced Roman god Janus sits locked in a garden, and Erice cuts back to it several times to make a point about his lost actor. Rohrwacher brings her statue out into the open, into the light of day. She turns it into a better metaphor: the search for a close-up. La Chimera is the simpler, wiser, and newer film, with a more intimate connection to a larger, deeper past.

Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World

One day in the life of a production assistant in the Romanian film biz, shot in black and white, it starts at 5:50 AM when “Angela Raducanu from Forbidden Planet” (Ilinca Manolache)—blonde, thirties, not making it, working herself to death twenty hours a day—gets up so she can drive a Fiat Doblo van to the homes of injured workers, auditioning them for a part in a PSA in which they will have to tell lies for the company that maimed them. Angela wears the same sparkly 1990s-style club dress throughout the movie, not changing it after it’s stained during a tryst with her boyfriend in the van. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World is the anti-Frances Ha, a vulgar blast of contemporary political outrage and anger shot into the miasma of contemporary image production.

Angela’s only breaks come when she adopts the persona of a sleaze named Bobiţă, her TikTok alter ego, seen in color, a bald, perverted dirtbag with a dark brown beard and mustache. An avowed Andrew Tate worshipper, Bobiţă broadcasts misogynist jokes during Angela’s brief bursts of free time, spewing obscenities as a maker of short-form content for post-communist Romanian domestic consumption. Radu Jude, the film’s director, contrasts her day with scenes from a 1982 Romanian movie about a woman cabbie, a communist film produced before the Ceaușescu Palace was built, a surviving document of better labor practices in a demolished neighborhood.

There is so much in this film, which is open to anything. In its 163 minutes, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World encompasses both a silent color sequence comprised of 115 shots of roadside crosses and an unbroken, thirty-five-minute take, from a fixed camera position, of the workplace safety video being filmed (also in color). A fearless, intelligent, and generous filmmaker, Jude stops the film at its exact midpoint so Angela can interview the German filmmaker Uwe Boll—notorious director of the world’s most interesting terrible movies—and make a Bobiţă clip with him. I’d rather see ten movies by Uwe Boll telling everybody to fuck off than even one film by Edward Berger.

Angela and Boll briefly discuss face changes in the work of Robert Louis Stevenson, and later a producer, debasing the words of Samuel Fuller in Pierrot le fou, tells the PSA crew that there’s only one word for what he wants in his corrupt production: emotion. A woman from the marketing department with the Godardian name Doris Goethe (Nina Hoss) explains that all he really means is he wants a close-up. It reminds me of something the film scholar Tag Gallagher once said. There is no such thing as a generic close-up—there are only close-ups made by individual filmmakers, and they mean entirely different things depending on who makes them.

Janet Planet

There are kits you can buy to add faces to your trees, and in playwright Annie Baker’s first film, Janet Planet, we see a tree that’s been faced. I think it’s the first time I’ve ever seen one in a movie, though my neighbor down the road has one on a tree in his yard that I walk by all the time. Baker is supremely attentive to details like that, and in this film she and her cinematographer, Maria von Hausswolf, have captured the faded greenness of long-ago summers with a rare, delicate precision.

Janet Planet is also a movie for people who aren’t crazy about summer, and it gets at the sometimes annoying quality New Englanders have of trying to figure everything out. The prime annoyance here is 11-year-old Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) a strange, matter-of-fact, friendless girl who says things to her mother, Janet (Julianne Nicholson), like “You know what’s funny? Every moment of my life is hell.” Janet (“I’m pretty unhappy too”) seems tired of her daughter, but she’s kind because she’s distracted by her own life.

Lacy is a Baker stand-in, I have to assume, organizing the world by arranging her salt-and-pepper shaker collection in her dollhouse, moving through a summer of Bread-and-Puppet performances in fields. The film quotes Rilke’s “Elegy IV”: “Now at last there is a play,” but the play is about her mother. We see Nicholson’s Shirley MacLaine profile and watch as she goes through a couple of dicey relationships with men, played by Will Patton and Elias Koteas. Janet has bad taste in boyfriends, but Baker has excellent taste in character actors. Janet goes through friends, too, and I thought it was great that Baker allows the main one, Regina, to be played by Sophie Okonedo in her own British accent instead of trying to make her sound American. In fact, Baker forces no one to sound regional. That’s a significant development for a New England movie, a throwback to a time when filmmakers weren’t such maniacs for literalism and just cast people correctly in the first place, an easier and saner kind of perfection to achieve.

In addition to making the best use of a New England setting since Michael Roemer’s Vengeance Is Mine in 1984, Janet Planet is also the best evocation of the early 1990s since Kalman and Horn’s 2014 movie L for Leisure, another lost classic. Of course it ends as fall begins, with every sane person’s “favorite smell in the whole world,” the first sensory evidence that we’ve survived another hot one.

Longlegs

In Longlegs, Nicolas Cage plays a Satanist trans woman as a piggy bank–faced high school cafeteria lunch lady who is so clearly and dangerously off her rocker from the moment we first glimpse her that no child would spend more than a second in her presence, much less stand around listening to her lunatic phrase-making, as happens in this movie. Cage of course commits to the whole bit as only he can. He wears the shabby middle-aged homemaker outfit, red lipstick, and prosthetic makeup like it’s something he does every day, playing this outrageous character with some subtlety and restraint, which means that when he repeatedly slams his head into a table, nothing explodes. “Dale Kobble” (a character name only Christopher Nolan could love), we learn, is an instrument of the Devil who causes fathers to murder their families just by speaking.

Osgood Perkins’s horror film is artier than any other new movie I saw this summer. It’s much more of an art film than, for instance, Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast. Divided into chapters like Janet Planet, Longlegs takes place in the 1970s and the 1990s in rural and semi-suburban Oregon in winter, so everything is faded and stark. Perkins toggles the film’s aspect ratio and presents images as color-drained slides while playing Marc Bolan songs on the soundtrack. He’s a Wes Anderson who has reached the end of his spiritual journey and decided to get into Anton LaVey. A lot of “evidence” and historical records are tacked up as creep gallery exhibits. Ordinary things like birthday cards can start to feel off when they’re handled by Satan’s prop department.

Trap

Josh Hartnett is far less mannered as a serial killer in M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap, and Shyamalan cuts out the middleman by making the good-looking nice-guy dad a villain who doesn’t require a nudge from Satan. Trap is ingenious as a genre film, but it doesn’t go much farther than that. It comes off as more of an exercise than one of the director’s metaphysical outings. I preferred last year’s Knock at the Cabin, which was more audacious if less fun. Like Twisters, which took the opening of Brian De Palma’s Mission: Impossible (1996), Trap is also indebted to Nineties De Palma, setting the action in an entertainment arena as in Snake Eyes (1998).

Trap was defended as a film of rare smarts that could only be truly understood by embracing its lapses and flaws. The message to Shyamalan was clear: don’t try too hard, provide entertainment that works, twists will do. Here, Shyamalan sets up various spatial tricks in a huge arena where a pop star (Saleka Shyamalan) is playing to a packed house as the FBI hunts the killer, who has brought his daughter (Ariel Donoghue) to the show. The film moves through all of the arena’s levels one by one, then relocates to a suburban house, finally limiting itself to a half-bath where Hartnett and Lady Raven, the pop star, struggle over her smartphone. Caught in this tiny space, Lady Raven’s audience is even bigger than in the arena because she’s livestreaming their fight.

Shyamalan has cast his singer daughter in the film, directing her to imagine what Tori Spelling would have done in the 1990s if she’d been told to guess what a pop diva might be like in 2024. He has also cast Hayley Mills as the FBI profiler trying to catch Hartnett. When she was 14, this British actress starred in the original 1961 version of The Parent Trap. Is her presence here the first example of casting by pun? In the end, plopped by the Feds in the backseat of an SUV, picking the lock on his handcuffs with a bicycle spoke, even Hartnett has to laugh it off.

The Becomers

Zach Clark has alarming ideas he turns into well-written screenplays and then directs on a tight budget, and he’s great with actors. His 2016 film Little Sister was one of the best of the past decade, yet he is at a disadvantage, despite his talent, because there are no producers like Roger Corman anymore. If there were, one of them would bring Clark to Hollywood instead of Joe Swanberg bringing him to Chicago to make The Becomers for $100,000. There’s no reason Clark isn’t the next Jonathan Demme, besides a general, society-wide incompetence that can always find the money for anything as long as it isn’t good.

Clark is one of the few American filmmakers at this level who shows no influence from Kelly Reichardt or Sean Baker. He’s his own man. His new movie is a low-budget version of already low-budget movies, a version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers or Not of This Earth. It’s also the first original, insightful film about Covid and the Covid years—and the best film of this type since Amy Seimetz’s She Dies Tomorrow, a neglected, misunderstood movie that came out to indifference during the first summer of the pandemic, which it had predicted by some kind of psychic osmosis. The premise of The Becomers is that the alien overlords who will take over our bodies deserve our sympathy. The film presents a circle of life in which identity and gender are totally fungible and homelessness is just around the corner.

The story starts out rather grisly, moving from actor to actor as bodies become inhabited and discarded, its purple-pink, green-blue palette giving way to the interior of a Motel 6 and the parking lot of a Home Depot. The movie’s unexpected, poignantly low-key ending is inevitable here, and its ensemble is excellent, especially Isabel Alamin and Molly Plunk as the first two alien-ated women. The narration, read by Russell Mael of Sparks, is both banal and evocative, a witty report from the aliens’ home planet. The narrator mentions that at one time he had been “accepted into graduate school for Vacuum Studies,” a line that floated over my entire disembodied summer.

Green Border

The first shot of Agnieszka Holland’s Green Border turns the green forest that separates Poland and Belarus black and white to let us know we are in the Europe of neorealism. The film’s harrowing first half presents the refugee crisis there as both an intimate and large-scale tragedy, in which Syrian, Afghan, and African families are torn apart and people die in the woods, their bodies sometimes thrown over the high border fence like volleyballs or dead animals. Neither country wants these refugees, so soldiers at the border sic dogs on them and entice them to drink out of thermoses filled with broken glass. The soldiers steal their money and beat them as they huddle in tents in the snow.

This section of the film, the Rossellinian half, is harsh and unrelenting, presenting the families in full, detailed portraits. The plight of an unmarried, middle-aged Afghan teacher (Behi Djanati Atai) reflects the impossibility of understanding what’s right in an extreme situation like this, in which people are treated without respect or dignity by armed bullies. She commits a series of tragic mistakes, each of which seemed like the best thing to do at the time.

Holland has made dozens of films in Poland and the US, starting in 1970, and she’s directed episodes of The Wire and Treme. Her most well-known film remains 1990’s Europa, Europa, but she also made the adaptations of The Secret Garden (1993) and the underrated Washington Square (1997), with Jennifer Jason Leigh. This side of Holland’s work takes over in the second half of Green Border, in which a border guard (Tomasz Wlosok) with a pregnant wife at home (Malwina Buss) ditches his job, a psychologist (Agata Kulesza) living in a house in the woods joins a group of young activists, and an average Polish family takes in a group of teenage African refugees and integrates them with their own kids.

None of this is exactly phony, but it does put a positive spin on things, which Holland insists is more real than concentrating only on the anguish and atrocities that happen on the border. She may be right about that, but unfortunately it doesn’t work, and instead of Green Border remaining a hard-edged film in which the depredations of an unfair, destructive system are exposed, it becomes something that makes viewers feel a little bit better about the agony she brought to life in the first half.

Reagan

Let me be the first and only critic to point out that Reagan, a three-year-old biopic on the life of the fortieth president of the United States that’s just getting released now—a film directed by a man whose other movies include Casper Meets Wendy, Bratz, and Field of Lost Shoes—is a better movie than Deadpool & Wolverine. It’s based on a book called The Crusader and tells Reagan’s entire life story, I mean all of it, solely through the lens of his anticommunism. It should have kept the title The Crusader, because Sean McNamara’s Reagan is the last great epic of heroic Soviet socialist realism that the movies will see. In it, Dennis Quaid, whose performance as the Great Communicator is brilliant in its loopy detail and in its uncanny re-creation, totally eclipses anyone who played Stalin or Lenin in Soviet movies from the 1940s, when the USSR was a going concern.

The brazen worship of Reagan on display here, with all his little flaws intact and made lovable, befits an international order that is not supposed to think about him any other way. McNamara goes so far as to bring up Reagan’s dismissal of the AIDS crisis, turning it into an unfortunate factoid that’s part of Reagan’s greater glory. Somehow, we are led to believe, if Reagan had done something about AIDS, maybe the Berlin Wall wouldn’t have fallen. Penelope Ann Miller’s Nancy is similarly perfect, recognizably Nancy, her hard-assed, conniving qualities only there to benefit Ron.

These two actors are not fooling around. Theirs is a grim job and they nail it with joy. So do the many other familiar actors here, a right-wing lineup done Oliver Stone–style, in which every important person Reagan met from boyhood to Hollywood, from Washington to Moscow, gets a bit. That includes the singer Pat Boone, who appears in the film as the Reverend George Otis while an actor (Chris Massoglia) plays him, a meta-fictional move as daring as anything Stone ever tried.

You do not have to be Jello Biafra to recognize that Ronnie always seemed like a sexless Howdy Doody, and the film makes room for that, too, by playing the Genesis song “Land of Confusion” and clips from its accompanying music video, which featured the hideous-looking Reagan marionette from the British comedy show Spitting Image. No criticism, we learn, can affect this man who survived an assassin’s bullet and brought Gorbachev (a frowsy-looking Olek Krupa) to heel through the greatest charm offensive the world has ever known. Reagan, in effect, becomes in this movie the Soviet Union’s last premier, the man who history tasked with bringing the whole thing down and who, as a child, identified its undoing as an historically inevitable process.

Reagan harps on the phrase “clarity is power,” and it is clarity as a visual storytelling value more than patriotism or reason that makes this film into the most effective kind of propaganda. Its version of history is, in fact, the official one, and it hammers that point home Reagan-style, through folksy wisdom, fake niceness, and incredulity that any of it could have happened any other way. The cherry on top comes after Reagan’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis and his death. Twin poles of radicality and reaction meet in their shared showbiz realm. As the credits roll, Bob Dylan sings “Don’t Fence Me In,” recorded especially for the movie, cementing an era.