REVIEWED: 'Materialists', 'The Phoenician Scheme', and 'The Life of Chuck'
AMC Artisan Films Summer starts NOW
The world is once again on fire, and I have very little to offer by means of putting it out. This makes me feel stupid, and small, but I suppose in times of crisis we should lean into the ways we can be of any kind of service. For me, and I’m not being sarcastic, that might have something to do with telling you
which movies to see and
which ones to avoid
Individually we may not be able to stem the tides of authoritarianism, genocide, or war, but we can stop ourselves from going to see ‘The Life of Chuck’. On that note!
‘The Life of Chuck’
In times of crisis, there’s no point mincing words: ‘Chuck’ is the worst movie I’ve seen all year, and possibly the worst movie I’ve seen in a good long while. Did I suspect this would be the case the moment I saw the trailer, proudly announcing a film from Stephen King
Yes. Dyed-in-the-wool hater though I may be, vanity plates for any director who’s not Martin Scorsese level is tacky as shit! You are setting yourself up for failure, loudly announcing your tonal intentions and demanding — before I even set foot in the AMC Americana, or Century City — that I feel about your movie the way you do. Then again, ‘Chuck’ did win the People’s Choice award at TIFF last fall. Maybe 250 critics and movie-loving Canadians knew something I didn’t?
Brother, there must have been a GAS LEAK in that theater because I cannot for the life of me understand how you sit through this 90 minute Live Laugh Love poster and delude yourself into thinking you’ve seen something profound, let alone human. Not a moment of this thing rings with anything less than synthetic sentimentality. Oh, should we remember that everyone is fighting their own battle? That every person is a universe unto themselves? It’s the same gripes I have with ‘Ted Lasso’ (I know, I know): I disagree with none of its messages, just wish they weren’t delivered to me with all the edge of an after-school special.
At least ‘Lasso’ has memorable characters! ‘Chuck’ has… well, Chuck, whose entire personality seems to revolve around “being nice” and “dancing.” My Chucko loves to dance, which is — I say this quite literally — all Tom Hiddleston gets to do before the persona, nay concept of “Chuck” gets passed off to Benjamin Pajak and eventually Jacob Tremblay, saddled with the most unmemorable coming-of-age story you’ve ever seen that makes all the time in the world for Mark Hamill to deliver monologues about accounting, or neighborhood kids who died.
“Aw, Henning, be more gentle, this just isn’t your kind of movie, and that’s okay!” NO. ‘Chuck’ trades on ideas I have found powerful in no shortage of other work (‘Cloud Atlas’ springs immediately to mind) and mashes them into a kind of… HomeGoods slurry, devoid of any narrative nutrition. Who is Chuck? Why deploy the twist so early, rendering everything we just saw worthless and everything to follow obvious? How come, in a movie ostensibly meant to celebrate the boundless beauty of human imagination, Chuck seems unable to imagine anything outside his hometown? Yes, I’m tiptoeing around the “events” of the movie, but to even call it a movie is generous. I was genuinely surprised to learn this wasn’t an Angel Studios Christian recruitment effort.
‘The Phoenician Scheme’
Wes 🤪. Wes, Wes, Wes, Wes, Wes. What exactly is there to say about Wes Anderson in 2025? The man has been making movies for nearly thirty years. Some of them are stone cold masterpieces. Some of them are fine. He’s sort of like ‘The Simpsons’ in that I don’t believe he’s ever made anything bad. Even his worst film still buries ‘The Life of Chuck’, and no shortage of Oscar winners.
So like ranking ‘SNL’ eras, or James Bonds, we arrive at a matter of personal taste. Where you place any given Wes Anderson movie is entirely a product of your own history, your own evolving interests, and to pretend like there’s been a definitive list since ‘Royal Tenenbaums’ (in which the correct order was ‘Tenenbaums’, then ‘Rushmore’, then ‘Bottle Rocket’) is to be like, well, a character in a Wes Anderson movie: desperate for logic and control in a world that eschews both!
As you can see, ‘The Phoenician Scheme’ falls somewhere toward the bottom of the pack for me. I hardly disliked it!1 There’s a refreshing straightforwardness to this very mission-oriented story, one with a clear main character (Benicio del Toro) slowly realizing he’d like to be less of an asshole — to his daughter (Mia Threapleton, solid) and, well, the world. Production design is typically exquisite. Alexandre Desplat’s score lends the proceedings a real sense of danger, and mortality.
But there’s a moment not far into the movie where you understand that the next hour is going to be a series of quick episodes checking in on all the Wes Anderson Players (Tom Hanks, ScarJo, Jeffrey Wright, etc.) and seeing who they’re playing in this one, what funny accents they’re using, how intricate their costuming. It’s not unenjoyable — nor is it even new for Wes — but the check-listing feels especially check-listy in a movie that lacks the depth of something like ‘Asteroid City’ or ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’.
This one works best when it forgets about Marseille Bob and just leans into the father-daughter dynamic of Del Toro and Threapleton, channeling Royal and Margot Tenenbaum by way of madcap industrial espionage. They’re both more than capable of holding ‘Phoenician’ together, emotionally! You just wish Wes would let them.
‘Materialists’
Contrary to what A24 marketing would have you believe… ‘Materialists’ is not a rom-com. I offer this not as editorial but as categorical fact! Do not expect to laugh; do not expect anything zippy here, any tonal continuity with Ephron or Meyers. This is a romantic DRAMA2. And a mostly good one, with some caveats.
Elephant in the room: does Dakota Johnson come to play? I’ve always considered her if not misunderstood (I think she makes her acting intentions very clear, always), then misused. She’s not an energetic performer. She doesn’t convey great emotion. I know this sounds like a ding, but in the right project — say ‘Cha Cha Real Smooth’, or here — that looks more like controlled calculation, which absolutely works for a character who spends the whole movie doing romantic math.
If I was worried about Pedro Pascal’s… I’ll just say it, believability as a heterosexual romantic partner, I shouldn’t have been, because Song weaponizes that, too. He’s impossibly handsome, impossibly charming, impossibly put-together. Simply put he’s not real, and it’s to the character’s (and actor’s credit) that I don’t fully believe his chemistry with Johnson, that it always feels like he’s trying to prove something to himself, and her. I’m sorry to hitch so much of this analysis to an actor’s rumored sexual orientation but, idk, public perception has always informed our connection to romantic avatars. Not saying Pascal can’t play straight (he has, obviously! And will do so again next month), just that it works to ‘Materialists’’ advantage that there’s even a question.
Chris Evans is fine! The fact I didn’t think about Captain America once means he was doing something right.
If there’s a true standout, however divisive I know her plot function in the movie has already become, it’s Logan Roy’s secretary aka Zoë Winters.
Winters delivers a knockout performance in a challenging role — in two big scenes, she has to epitomize the movie’s thesis, and undermine it entirely. She is to ‘Materialists’ as that guy monologuing about self-worth through refrigerator condiments (and finally breaking Don in two) is to the ‘Mad Men’ finale. She’s got it!
Once I stopped thinking of ‘Materialists’ as a crowd-pleaser and more as a thoughtful, frequently cold rumination on modern dating/relationships, I was able to appreciate its rhythms a lot more. As in her previous film, ‘Past Lives’, Celine Song plays with restraint so effectively, edging you for 90+ minutes until finally hitting you with a moment of emotional release. It worked for me, and I have to imagine it worked for the third member of her throuple with Justin Kuritzkes!
Okay, maybe I disliked Michael Cera (for the first half of the movie, especially), the casting of whom would’ve tickled me 15 years ago, but today just feels obvious to the point of caricature
Honestly, how A24 SHOULD have marketed this was Madame Webb caught in a love triangle between two members of the Fantastic Four